The text for our talk today, the third in a monthly series, is based on my modernized translation of the Genjo Koan, from my book ...
Other translations of of the Genjo can be found here for comparison: (LINK)
This time, we will be looking at these passages in light of our Jukai (Undertaking the Precepts) and Ango (Peaceful Abiding) Season ...
~ ~ ~
When you first seek the Buddha’s truth, you imagine you
are far away from its locale. However, Buddha’s truth is
already correctly transmitted right here; realizing so, you
are immediately your original self.
When you sail in a boat and look out at the shore, you
might feel that the shore is moving. But when you turn
your eyes toward the boat, you may then feel that the boat
is moving. In the same way, if you observe the myriad
things of the world with confused ideas of body and mind
you might assume that your mind and nature are enduring
and stand separate from things. But when you intimately
practice and turn within, it will become clear that nothing
at all has a fixed, individual self.
In another part of Shobogenzo, Zenki (the "Whole Works"), Dogen writes this ...
Life can be compared to a time when a person is sailing a
boat. On this boat, you are working the sail, you manage
the rudder, you are handling the pole. At the same time,
the boat is carrying you, and there is no “you” to sail without
the boat. By your sailing of the boat, this boat is made
to be a boat. Please study and understand profoundly just
this instant of the present. Understand this fully. At this
very instant, everything is nothing other than the world of
the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore have all become
this time of the boat, which is very different from what
this time would be if there were no boat. Thus, life is what
you make of it, and you are what life is making of you.
While you are sailing in the boat, your body and mind,
self and environment, are all essential pivot points of the
boat; and the entire earth and all of space are all essential
pivot points of the boat. That is to say,
life is the self, and the self is life.
Until this moment, maybe you thought that you were a single, independent, sometimes lonely, isolated, frustrated being living apart from the rest of life. Maybe you felt like a lone sailor struggling on a boat, fighting the wind and ocean currents, with the shore moving swiftly by. But in zazen, that separation melts in such a way that sailor and sea and shore and sail and wind, and the other sailors and vessels and lands to the horizon and beyond, prove to be a single whole, and all flow as the true nature of the sea that was our nature all along.
Firewood turns to ash and it does not turn to firewood again.
But do not think that the ash is the future and the firewood
is past. Rather, ash is wholly ash with nothing remaining,
and the firewood is just firewood with nothing more. You
should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal
expression and wholeness of firewood, which fully includes
its own past and future yet is independent of all past and
future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression and wholeness
of ash, which fully includes its own past and future too.
We come to experience each moment of life as wholly what it is—a fully contained and actualized instant without comparison to any other moments of life. Of course, we live in a world of time, of before and after, past, present, and future. But we can come to see each instant as just that instant, its own fully contained moment of time that stands as its own shining jewel.
Just as firewood does not turn to firewood again after it is
ash, do not think of returning to birth after death.
What is true about fire is true about aging and death. Let us leave aside the mystery of what may or may not follow after death. Rather, let us just come to experience life wholly as the time of life, and when death comes, we experience it simply as the moment of death. Likewise, aging is just the time of aging, health the time of health, sickness the time of sickness.
We will continue about birth and death next time ...
Reply With Quote
Sat
).
Originally Posted by RobP
I am in Spain so, for me it ends at 5 am .. I am so happy you made it all the way through! Thank you for the effort! 
Thank you, TL
