Zen Master Dogen- "Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen" For YOUR Sake

I feel there is so much anxiety and trembling for the sake of shadows these days, (which can be found in concentrate here on ATS) that this work MUST be shared with you all. It's been sitting around for hundreds of years, just waiting for you to stop and see it. Give yourself a break and read something useful:

Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師; also Dōgen Kigen 道元希玄, or Eihei Dōgen 永平道元, or Koso Joyo Daishi) (19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto. He founded the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan after traveling to China and training under Rujing, a master of the Chinese Caodong lineage. Dōgen is known for his extensive writing including the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Shōbōgenzō, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment.

1. The Way is originally perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from this very place; what is the use of traveling around to practice? And yet, if there is a hair’s-breadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If a trace of disagreement arises, the mind is lost in confusion. Suppose you are confident in your understanding and rich in enlightenment, gaining the wisdom that knows at a glance, attaining the Way and clarifying the mind, arousing an aspiration to reach for the heavens. You are playing in the entrance-way, but you still are short of the vital path of emancipation....

Consider the Buddha: although he was wise at birth, the traces of his six years of upright sitting can yet be seen. As for Bodhidharma, although he had received the mind-seal, his nine years of facing a wall is celebrated still. If even the ancient sages were like this, how can we today dispense with wholehearted practice? Therefore, put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest. If you want to attain suchness, practice suchness immediately.

Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs. Do not think “good” or “bad.” Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha. How could that be limited to sitting or lying down?… Think of not thinking.

Not thinking—what kind of thinking is that? Beyond-thinking. This is the essential art of zazen. This zazen is not meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma gate of joyful ease, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the koan realized; traps and snares can never reach it. If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. For you must know that the true Dharma appears of itself, so that from the start, dullness and distraction are struck aside.

2. In surveying the past, we find that transcendence of both mundane and sacred, and dying while either sitting or standing, have all depended entirely on the power of zazen. In addition, triggering awakening with a finger, a banner, a needle, or a mallet, and effecting realization with a whisk, a fist, a staff, or a shout—these cannot be understood by discriminative thinking, much less can they be known through the practice of supernatural power. They must represent conduct beyond seeing and hearing. Are they not a standard prior to knowledge and views? This being the case, intelligence or lack of it is not an issue; make no distinction between the dull and the sharpwitted. If you concentrate your effort single-mindedly, that in itself is wholeheartedly engaging the way. Practice-realization is naturally undefiled.Going forward is, after all, an everyday affair.

In general, in our world and others, all equally hold the buddha-seal. While each lineage expresses its own style, they are all simply devoted to sitting, totally blocked in resolute stability. Although they say that there are ten thousand distinctions and a thousand variations, they just wholeheartedly engage the way in zazen. Why leave behind the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands? If you make one misstep you stumble past what is directly in front of you.

You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not pass your days and nights in vain. You are taking care of the essential activity of the Buddha Way. Who would take wasteful delight in the spark from a flint? Besides, form and substance are like the dew on the grass, the fortunes of life like a dart of lightning—emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash.

Please, honored followers of Zen, long accustomed to groping for the elephant, do not doubt the true dragon. Devote your energies to the way that points directly to the real thing. Revere the one who has gone beyond learning and is free from effort. Accord with the enlightenment of all the buddhas; succeed to the samadhi of all the ancestors.

Continue to live in such a way, and you will be such a person. The treasure store will open of itself, and you may enjoy it freely.

Please learn more!

Dogen is one of the greatest Zen masters to have ever lived, and if there is any one Zen master I would point people to to learn the workings of Zen, it would be Dogen.

reply to post by FollowTheWhiteRabbit


My thoughts exactly, friend.

Good stuff indeed.

Everyone should read more about it. I have been reading "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" lately. I recommend it.

reply to post by rbkruspe


Yes! Suzuki is brilliant as well! Once (and if) you find yourself a good grounding in Zen practice, Alan Watts is very good as well.

Zen Mind Beginner's Mind is absolutely invaluable as a text on Zen.