The Zennist

Misrepresenting Buddhism

In the Preface of his book, The Religions of Tibet, Tucci reflects, among other things, on the theoretical foundations of Tibetan Buddhism, that these foundations, to a certain extent, condition the “actual religious experience” which gives the various Tibetan schools each “their particular character.”  Keeping this before us, where the real difficulty lies in presenting Tibetan Buddhism to the West is, first of all, understanding what Tibet’s meeting with Indian Buddhism created uniquely for Tibetan Buddhism.  Yet, because there are problems with agreeing on what important religious terms mean “in Tibetan religion and gnosis” a misrepresentation and falsification of Tibetan religious thought is not out of the question.  It is of real concern, in fact.  

And now to the really interesting part when Tucci is convinced that Tibetan religious thought was being misrepresented and most likely, falsified.  I will let Tucci speak for himself.

“I become convinced of this when I showed Tibetans who knew English well certain translations which had recently appeared of particular works or of commentaries on the doctrines they contained.  The Tibetan scholars found it difficult to make any sense of these translations, since Buddhist thought was expressed in them in a mode other than that in which they were used to understanding it.  Besides this, many Tibetan concepts and doctrines refer to interior and mystical experiences, and their transposition into rational concepts and expressions is extremely problematic.  The corresponding Tibetan words are symbols, which can evoke living experiences which the word as such can only suggest but not define.  We are faced here with an extremely difficult, almost impossible task:  to coin equivalent technical terms for experiences which take place with the spiritual realm, and which can radically modify our psychic and spiritual reality” (p. viii).

This is not only a major problem for any scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, like Tucci, but this is a problem for Buddhism, in general, as it appears in the West through Westerners who firmly believe they are transmitting what Gautama realized.  In plainer words, if Gautama were to read Western books on Buddhism, would he recognize most of them as being representative of what he taught in India several millennia ago?

If we assume that much of Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism easily falls into the general category of mysticism which includes such examples as Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, Westernized Buddhism, as it is taught by Western Buddhists, may end up being a huge misrepresentation because the bulk of its content is far from the shore of mysticism.  (I am going with Frederick Heiler’s assessment that Buddhism is the only really consistent form of mysticism.)

For the most part modern Westerners, and this includes modern day Christians, are uncomfortable with mysticism—and some disavow it, completely.  There is, in fact, a long history of reacting against any and all forms of mysticism and essentially scouting it in modern Western philosophy.  

The majority of Westerners like their religion mundane and down to earth.  If Jesus is going to return, for example (or any savior for that matter), he will have to be a real guy—a biped.  He, sure as heck, can’t be like the non-bipedal Jesus whom Paul encountered on the road to Damascus.  Anything, so to speak, an average Westerner can’t observe with his senses doesn’t exist which, I hasten to say, eliminates any religion based on a knowing of the really real, that is, a transcendent reality beyond the pale of the senses.  And perish the thought that Buddhism’s enlightenment may, in fact, transcend what is observable by sensory consciousness.

This is not a trivial matter; it goes to the heart of what ails the West, which has given us more than several centuries of genocide, not to mention a Holocaust and the threat of nuclear war based on the game of chicken.  Buddhism’s entry on the Western stage is perhaps no accident.  Nor is it quite an accident that it is being misrepresented.  Buddhism comes to the West when the West is reaching its nadir; when its religions are false religions; its philosophies nihilistic; and the many are spiritually unquenched, drinking the salty waters of materialism. 

Like two ships passing in the night

History informs us that many monks from India like Kumarajiva and Paramartha, were instrumental in transmitting Indian Buddhism to China.  This is not to suggest, however, that the transmission of Indian Buddhism to China was without problems.  Nor does it suggest that Indian Buddhists mastered Chinese sufficiently to make accurate translations in which Indian ideas flowed into the Chinese mind unchanged.  

Robert H. Sharf, in his book, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism besides being an annotated translation of the Treasure Store Treatise,  is helpful in giving the Buddhist reader a more accurate glimpse of what was going on in China when Buddhist texts and Indian Buddhist monks began to arrive on the scene.  Sharf tells us,

“There is, in fact, little evidence that Indian or even Central Asian Buddhist priests were ever active in large numbers in medieval China.  Foreign translators and exegetes influenced religious history primarily through the agency of their Chinese translations and commentaries, and even then it is only with qualification that they can be considered “translators” in the modern sense of the term; not all of the foreign monks celebrated as translators were fully conversant in Chinese, and fewer still were fully literate in the written language.  The foreign priests were primarily responsible for reading, reciting from memory, or explicating the original text in their native vernacular, while the actual task of producing a Chinese rendering was done by one or more Chinese scribes (pi-shou), often with the help of bilingual translators who may or may not have had facility with Buddhist doctrine and terminology” (p. 18).

Sharf makes the point that the role of the foreign monks is “easily overstated” even though they take center stage in Buddhist biographical collections.  Chinese was always the main ecclesiastical language of dialogue not to mention the ideas contained in the Chinese language, often unique to Chinese culture and philosophical thought.  Ideas important to Indian Buddhists were not always taken up by Chinese Buddhists.  Sharf describes this as being “Like ships passing in the night...” in which Chinese Buddhism takes on a life of its own, the development of Zen or Ch’an Buddhism being a good example.  This is not to suggest that the essence of Buddhism is not faithfully conveyed in Chinese Buddhism, it just means that it is conveyed much differently when compared with Indian Buddhism.

On another note, we learn from Sharf that “the Chinese showed remarkably little interest in the study of Sanskrit or any other foreign language.”  Interestingly, we also learn that the ability to read and write in Sanskrit did not always mean that the Asian cleric had any real “command over the grammar, or even the lexicon, of any Indic language”!  In other words, if I could pronounce Sanskrit words, not knowing what they meant, and write in the Siddham script, I was supposedly proficient in Sanskrit.

Stopping here (because I haven’t finished the entire book), this is a great book for the serious student of Zen.  It is important to mention that the Treasure Store Treatise was popular with T’ang and Sung Zen masters such as Tsung-mi (780–841), Yün-men (864–949) and Ta-hui (1089–1163).  Here is an excerpt from the treatise.

“The unarisen is the point of genesis.  It does not appear, nor does it disappear.  Like empty space, there is nothing with which it can be compared.  All conditioned dharmas are illusory and unreal.  It is only through the contingencies of codependence that [things] perdure or perish.  Follow it back to the source and return to the original apex of reality.  It is only because sentient beings have lost the origin that they seek outside of themselves, engaging in futile and agonizing practices for aeons on end without awakening to the truth” (p. 244). 

Hard is the infinite to see

During the day (if I am lucky) I find something that needs to be blogged about, hopefully, to push back the veil of ignorance that works to obscure the Buddha’s message.  This veil—sorry to say—is our ordinary life that is always caught up in trying to feed its desires, make lots of dough, take care of the kids, and avoid the truth as much as it can.

Despite the power of this veil, behind the veil—sometimes if we are still enough—we can hear the faint beating of the Buddha’s deathless drum (amritasya dundubhim).  Because some of us can faintly hear it (though not with our ears), we try to move closer to where we reckon this deathless or immortal (amrita) sound/vibration is coming from.  But then, nirvana is no drum and it hardly makes a sound!  

The immortal element of nirvana is certainly something we can’t hear with our ears, let alone imagine or see with our eyes.  Our senses are far too limited to sense nirvana’s abode, and this goes for our reflective consciousness, also, that is bound to the senses and their objects; which doesn’t know how to turn away from them.  

But then, it is not actually a matter of turning away so much as our spiritual eye is overly engaged with the mundane, sensory eye.  When, for example, our sensory eyes look at a tree, the spiritual eye looks through the sensory eyes and stops at the tree.  While the spiritual eye can see the element of nirvana and infallibly know, it has fallen into the bad habit of following his severely limited twin and trusting this boob.

For those who have managed to distinguish the spiritual eye from the finite body’s senses together with their objects, it sees a field or an abode that cannot be adequately described by language.  The Buddha does his best to explain this mysterious field or abode with these words:

“Monks, there is that abode where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air; wherein is neither the sphere of the infinity of space, nor the sphere of the infinity of consciousness, nor of nothingness, nor of neither perception nor non-perception; where there is neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon.  That state, monks, I call neither coming nor going, neither appearing nor disappearing.  It has no origin, no evolution, no stopping.  This, in truth, is the end of suffering.

Hard is the infinite to see.  Truth is no easy thing to see.  Attachment is severed by him who knows.  For him who sees, nothing remains” (Udana 80).

This abode is completely real—as real as any object we see with our eyes or touch with our fingers.  If we could find a term to express this field or abode we might think of it as a spiritual medium in which the world we live in is composed of transverse waves of this medium arising and falling in opposition to it, like ocean waves, so that it remains hidden.

As long as we tenaciously cling to the world made up of these transverse waves we remain completely blind to this spiritual abode of which the Buddha speaks.  We also limit our freedom.  Moreover, living under such a limitation we bring upon ourselves and others, nothing but suffering.  When we might become compassionate, instead, we become bestial.  When we might pursue the way that leads to the revelation of this abode, instead, we ridicule and punish those who follow this path.

Reducing Buddhism to something it is not

There is always some reductionism going on in Buddhism, especially in Zen, either by individuals or through its institutions.  By reductionism I mean that some things at a particular level can be explained in terms of another.  Whether or not it takes hold, enough to reduce Buddhism to something it is not, rather than to help clarify it, is something we need to watch out for.  

When, for example, Buddhism is generally defined as learning to be mindful, being one with nature, and getting rid of the ego, Buddhism has been explained by the psychological level.  Also this assumes, to some degree, that the Buddha’s enlightenment was an emergent property of the Five Aggregates (skandhas) or the same, the psychophysical individual. (What if the Buddha’s enlightenment instead turned out to be an emergent property of a higher reality transcendent to our samsaric world of impermanence, suffering and insubstantiality?)

It is easy to fall prey to bad kinds of reductionism that lead to oversimplification which ends up distorting the real picture of Buddhism.  Without a doubt, this leads to misunderstanding and error but above all, keeps us spiritually in the dark.

As to being in the “dark” this applies, for example, to the idealization of “everyday Zen” which is about meeting our everyday responsibilities and life challenges as if there is nothing other than learning to live with one’s samsara.  Joko Beck captures this kind of reduced and oversimplified Zen well when she writes:

“Wisdom is to see that there is nothing to search for. If you live with a difficult person, that’s nirvana. Perfect. If you’re miserable, that’s it. And I’m not saying to be passive, not to take action; then you would be trying to hold nirvana as a fixed state" (Everyday Zen).

Such a modification of Zen, or for that matter Buddhism, is not out of the ordinary.  It is generally referred to as bonpu Zen meaning ordinary-person Zen (bonpu in Sanskrit is prithagjana meaning ordinary person in contrast with arya-sravaka or noble disciple).  Such a way of life can also lead to buji Zen in which the practice is almost no-practice in the belief that since I am intrinsically a Buddha already, why bother exerting myself towards enlightenment?

All this is unfortunate for the beginner who may have unwittingly joined a particular Buddhist sect that has reduced Buddhism to the mere chanting of a Sutra’s title or learns to just sit as if this was all the Buddha taught.  Such becomes even more serious when we try to explain Buddhism through psychology or through neuroscience. 

All beings and things are not Buddha-nature

Kûkai (774–835), who was mainly responsible for starting the Japanese Shingon school is credited with bringing to light to the Japanese mind the notion of “original enlightenment” (hongaku).  He postulated, for example, that plants and trees have the Buddha-nature.  This somewhat lays the foundation or shows at least the tendency of Japanese Buddhists to ontologize or absolutize phenomena.  

At about the same time Japanese Tendai marketed the idea of original enlightenment.  In a nutshell, it is the belief that all beings are inherently enlightened, including even inanimate things like mountains and rivers.  A more simplistic overview, this is the belief that phenomena are intrinsically enlightened or the same, phenomena are the absolute!  One could even take this to mean the average run-of-the-mill individual is already a Buddha.  He only has to believe he is to make it so.  This, I hasten to add, makes religious practice no less important.

Religious practice does not necessarily run counter to hongaku's this-worldly absolutism.  In fact, it serves as a means of affirming the belief that I am enlightened whether it be in the act of chanting the Nembutsu (recitation of Amitabha Buddha’s name) or sitting in meditation on a zafu I ordered off the Internet.  As to the possible reason practice works is because it takes place in the immediacy of original enlightenment but more importantly, it works because it confirms primordial enlightenment, although we, the practitioner, may not realize it at the time.  However, this view is not without its problems especially if Japanese hongaku thought proves to be mistaken.

Turning now to Dogen who was originally a Tendai monk as were both Eisai and Nichiren, it seems he never completely left his Tendai roots.  Judging from the literature attributed to him, nowhere in his writings does he make a direct attack on hongaku (keep in mind that Dogen studied Tendai on Mt. Hiei from 1212 until 1217).  In other words, Dogen is not adverse to Tendai’s unique original enlightenment theory probably modifying it in such a way that meditation or “just sitting” (shikan taza) complements it—being a means of shoring up one's faith that “I am a Buddha whilst I sit.”  

Oddly, and unexplained, Dogen certainly feels a strong need to alter the Mahaparinirvana Sutra's idea of Buddha-nature thereby converting it into something that chimes more with hongaku which ends up absolutizing phenomena.  Here is an example.  Where the Sutra pericope reads: “The sentient beings possess the Buddha-nature; the Tathagata abides constantly and without change,” Dogen with some of his own additions, twists it to read,  “All are sentient beings, all things are the Buddha-nature; the Tathagata exists eternally and is nonexistent and yet existent, and changing.”

The last pericope is no doubt meant to be understood that all things and sentient beings are the Buddha nature.  And the presence of the Tathagata is to be recognized as our phenomenal world which is at once nonexistent, existent, and ever changing eternally.

Evidentially, Dogen was uncomfortable with the Mahaparinirvana Sutra.  By reading the Mahaparinirvana without tinted hongaku spectacles, Buddha-nature means the character or nature of a Buddha which is different than the character of nature of a sentient being.  To be sure, sentient beings neither sit under a Bodhi-tree and battle Mara and his armies, nor do they have the 32 marks of a Buddha!  One becomes a Buddha only at the end of a long process of self transformation—not before.

A number of times the Mahaparinirvana Sutra uses the example of cream being obtained from milk this being analogous to the Buddha-nature being attained by sentient beings using the correct religious methodology.  But throughout this bulky Sutra we are never led to believe that cream preexists in the milk.  Strictly speaking, sentient beings do not possess the Buddha-nature anymore than fresh cream comes from out of a cow's teats!  In fact the Mahaparinirvana says:

“The Buddha-nature is apprehended [by sentient beings] at the fulfillment of various conditions....Since [sentient beings] attain the Buddha-nature dependent on various conditions, they do not have any [definite] nature; and since [sentient beings] do not have any [definite] nature, they an attain the most perfect enlightenment" (trans. Ming-Wood Liu).

That sentient beings have the potential for being able to attain the character or nature of a Buddha is not in dispute as regards hongaku.  Where the problem lies is the process is not automatic or by any means natural.  This also means that our ordinary life is not the life of a Buddha and this world is not the manifestation of the Tathagata.  No matter how many times we drive our SUV to work, we are not getting any closer to realizing our Buddha-nature.  As long as sentient beings wallow in the mire of samsara they will be unable to reach Buddhahood.

Self is not the bad guy

The subject of self has always overshadowed the real significance of the Five Aggregates obscuring the fact that they are, without a doubt, harmful if not evil, and more importantly, cannot be purified.  This is not the case with self.  

Nowhere in the Pali canon, for example, does the Buddha equate self with Mara the Evil One, which is not the case with the Five Aggregates which he equates with Mara as a killer ( S. iii. 189).  Yet, many Buddhists have come to believe the self is the bad guy—the aggregates are okay.

This is rather odd when you take into consideration how much ink has been spilled by sectarian Buddhists proclaiming that the Buddha denied the self—even the Dalai Lama—who have fallen prey to this not-so-provable hypothesis.

Presently, it has become a scandal to even suggest that Buddhists are wrong who postulate that the Buddha categorically denied the self!  (He did not.)  Yet, if we open up the Pali canon, it is not so self-evident or obvious that the Buddha categorically denied the self.  He did, however, say that the Five Aggregates are not the self which is to suggest (and strongly so) that the self is not at all like the harmful and evil aggregates which belong to Mara, the Buddhist devil!  This can only imply that since the self is not an aggregate it isn’t to be rejected—and it is certainly neither evil nor Mara.

There is almost a kind of intellectual madness that takes over some Buddhists who impulsively feel it is their duty to attack the idea of self while, at the same time, being  mum about the evil Five Mara Aggregates, failing to acknowledge that the aggregates—not the self—are what is to be rejected.  Here is such an example whereby the disciple rejects each of the five aggregates as being his self.

“But monks, an instructed disciple [ariya-savako] of the pure ones...regards material shape as: ‘This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my self;’ he regards feeling as:  ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my  self;’ he regards perception as:  ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my  self;’ he regards the habitual tendencies as:  ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my  self;’ he regards consciousness as:  ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my  self.’  And also he regards whatever is see, heard, sensed, cognised, reached, looked for, pondered by the mind as:  ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my  self’” (M. i. 136).

This is not a straightforward, unambiguous denial of the self by any stretch of the imagination.  When we examine the bulk of discourses on the Five Aggregates, the latter are always portrayed in a bad light, the self never.  Yet, to reiterate, the self gets the bad press; the Five Aggregates almost never.

I.B. Horner who was a scholar and translator of Pali, working mainly with the Pali canon; who was also the late president of the Pali Text Society, had this to say about the self in Buddhism:

“The Self (attâ) as both divine and human was no more repudiated by early Sâkya than were either the Âtman as Brahman, or the âtman as the self of man by the Upanishads” ( I.B. Horner, The Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected, 41).

Moving to the big picture

It seems that the big picture is always missing in modern culture.  E.g., while academic economists are hard at work on data to present the big economic picture, what the average person in the street receives as ‘economic news’ is more than often the small picture (microeconomics).  It is like driving a car in thick fog in the morning with no lights on (you know, the kind in California’s great central valley).  If there are dangers ahead or behind, well, you can’t see them until it is too late.

Our lives, too, consist of the small picture—lots of small pictures, in fact.  We lack the big picture, this is to say, we lack an overarching perspective by which we are able to avoid future problems and come to some measure of contentment.  Using the simile again, we are driving this life of ours down a foggy road.  We can barely see over the hood of our car.  A few examples of what I mean, at this point, might help.

• Eating non-nutritious food on a daily basis.
• Neglect of daily exercise such as walking.
• Driving in a hurry and too fast.
• Putting the car keys anyplace when we arrive home.
• Buying too many items we can’t really afford.
• Drinking too much before we have to go to work the next day.
• Waiting until the last minute to do something important.
• Having unprotected sex.

If we decide to give up our life of small pictures, to delve somewhat into Buddhism (maybe read a book or two), which is all about the big picture, we hesitate to look too long at the big picture which Buddhism presents which is about suffering, especially the suffering that comes with old age and our death, not to mention the possibility of rebirth.  It is a scary sight, to be sure.  But it is reality.  It is a picture we have to get used to if we are going to begin to live a better, fuller life. 

If we accept the big picture of Buddhism that all phenomena are impermanent, including our bodies, almost paradoxically we discover that we have to pay a great deal of attention to running, so to speak, a tight ship; paying attention to the little details.  We have to discipline ourselves, for example, to lay off the pizza and beer tonight.  Maybe we should try a salad.  In other words, we have to lead a more focused life always asking ourselves, “Where is this action going to lead me?”  On the same note, we have to avoid as much as possible what the comedian Dana Carvey dubbed the “fuckits” which usually comes when nothing in our day is going right for us (yes, those days will come).  What we don’t see is that the fuckits are the result of having lived with the small picture always in front of us.  The fuckit is like a demon enticing us back to the small picture.

Reorienting and adjusting this precious life of ours for the big picture of Buddhism demands of us that we first accept our life with this body to be possibly a short one and not without anguish.  But Buddhism, at the same time, also demands of us that we profoundly acknowledge a higher part of ourselves which transcends this limited body and its death.  This means we have to study and practice the Buddha’s teaching so the transcendent becomes completely real for us—not just a fancy.  Living this way, at least, is more like driving with fog lights on and not having so many fuckit days!

Original enlightenment isn't final enlightenment

The Japanese Buddhist understanding of “original enlightenment” (J., hongaku) (as first presented in the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana Treatise (Mahayana-shraddhotpada-shastra) is in some cases certainly novel if not almost entirely idiomatic, seeming to fly away from the transcendent context of the Awakening of Faith.  To be sure, hongaku shisô, or hongaku thought, is not an easy concept to grasp for those who tenaciously cling to thick illusion of samsara.  Even for hardcore Buddhists, this concept proves difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

The real problem with the concept of original enlightenment is that it can be interpreted to mean that everything in our world—indeed, our universe—is but the manifestation or working of enlightenment which goes as far as to imply that even this phenomenal world is the Buddha (i.e., enlightened).  In addition, this also suggests that our defilements are also enlightened if we believe that samsara is nirvana.  Furthermore, this means that any kind of practice—moral or immoral—is unnecessary which is saying that my practice is “no-practice”!

None of this, as we might suspect, follows in the footsteps of the Awakening of Faith.  It also makes a laughingstock of the Buddha-to-be, Siddhartha whose own efforts, which almost cost him his life, eventually led to him becoming enlightened thus ending suffering.  So what does the Awakening of Faith say about “original enlightenment” or hongaku?

“The essence of Mind is free from thoughts. The characteristic of that which is free from thoughts is analogous to that of the sphere of empty space that pervades everywhere. The one without any second, i.e. the absolute aspect of the World of Reality (Dharma-dhatu) is none other than the undifferentiated Dharmakaya, the “Essence-body” of the Tathagata. Since the essence of Mind is grounded on the Dharmakaya, it is to be called the original enlightenment. Why? Because “original enlightenment” indicates [the essence of Mind (a priori)] in contradistinction to [the essence of Mind in] the process of actualization of enlightenment; the process of actualization of enlightenment is none other than the process of integrating the identity with the original enlightenment” (trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda).

In other words, sentient beings have the potential to become Buddhas (i.e., fully awakened) but they lack as yet the full and complete actualization of Mind.  In their present state of being oppressed by the sensory world, they are unable to distinguish the enlightened state from the unenlightened state or using different terms, they are unable to distinguish the Mind-of-Thusness from the Mind-of-samsara.

This is brought out and explained in what follows in the section on “the process of actualization of enlightenment” in the Awakening of Faith.

“Grounded on the original enlightenment is non-enlightenment. And because of non-enlightenment, the process of actualization of enlightenment can be spoken of. Now, to be [fully] enlightened to the fountainhead of Mind is called the final enlightenment, and not to be enlightened to the fountainhead of Mind, non-final enlightenment” (trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda)

The Awakening of Faith goes on to say that Bodhisattvas “have an insight into the original nature of Mind.”  They subsequently realize “that Mind is eternal” this being called “final enlightenment.”  In sharp contrast to “original enlightenment” is “final enlightenment” in which what is merely potential and innate, that is, original enlightenment, has finally been developed, actualized, and accomplished.

Hongaku thought reminds us, or at least it should, that the Buddha did not teach us to accept things as they are, believing that everything is fundamentally enlightened so we don’t have to do anything further—far from it!  Instead, the Buddha wanted us to see things from the standpoint of the enlightened or fully awakened Mind.  This is no easy task, I hasten to add, but one will worth the trouble.

Zen, the movie

 Over the weekend I watched the movie Zen (2009) which was directed by Banmei Takahashi and based on the historical novel, Life of Dogen by Tetsu Otani (as far as I can determine the novel has not been translated into English).  If I have any criticism of the movie it would be that the director was unable to bring his own vision across cinematically or more simply put, was not all that inspired by the project.  So let me say at the outset, I have no criticism of this film.  The director accomplished his aim.  The film was a little over two hours long and could have been much longer.  Watching Zen was time well spent in other words.  

My overall impression of the movie was that it was cinematic hagiography in which Dogen is idealized; in some respects raised to the level of a Japanese Buddha.  Believe it or not, this works well in a film like this because the intent of the director, and certainly his consistent vision, is not to present an expose of Dogen, the man, but present, instead, Dogen the Bodhisattva (a Buddha to be) who brings the Buddha’s true spirit and Dharma to Japan.  This is, in fact, where the film gets interesting, when Dogen returns to Japan.  There ensues a clash between Dogen, the personification of the Bodhisattva spirit, and the culture of medieval Japan where a Buddhist sect even has a small army that, eventually, confronts Dogen’s mission by force of arms considering Dogen to be a heretic.

Dogen’s time spent in China is portrayed by the director as a vision quest, not at all unlike Siddhartha’s own quest for enlightenment, seeking to end the existential matter of human suffering.  In fact, the film begins with Dogen’s mother dying who wisely puts the question of suffering to her eight year old son saying, “Why must people fight wars and suffer from illness, unable to escape from the pain of death?  I want you to find a way to escape all this suffering? (Italics mine.)

Dogen eventually meets the right teacher during his travels in China who can show him where suffering ends.  This is the Chinese Zen master Ju-ching (1163–1227) of the Ts’ao tradition (tsung).  At first meeting, both resonate with each other so that eventually Dogen, during meditation, is able to let go of his deep attachment to the psychophysical body of birth and death.  This disembodiment he calls “dropping off mind and body” (shinjin datsuraku).  The director illustrates this disembodiment symbolically as well he should.  For there is no way to describe Dogen’s religious experience except symbolically.  The director chooses to portray Dogen seated on a lotus ascending vertically, going beyond the world of samsara (Dogen sitting on the lotus symbolizes spiritual birth).

Dogen’s return to Japan begins the perfecting (paramita) or practice process of his awakening (bodhicitta).  The subsequent chapters of the film deal with Dogen perfecting his initial awakening under Ju-ching in a Japan that is, for the most part, insensitive to spirit.  Helping us to see this, perhaps some of the best scenes are with Orin the prostitute, a lotus of the mire, who struggles to leave the carnal side of her being; who is eventually reborn in the spirit which Dogen brought to Japan.

At least for me, the film has the potential to inspire Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike and those who, for the first time, might be interested in looking into Buddhism.  It certainly has all the right elements going for it.  The film, of course, is not going to enlighten anyone!  It is not meant to.  It is only meant to inspire us as it were, to give us a nudge in the right direction.  And that it does.  The early chapters of the film when Dogen is in China are eye candy.  We are as awed as is Dogen (and would like to be with him on his quest).  The rest of the film is intended to show the effect of Dogen’s spirit on the times; its ability to summon forth the Bodhisattva spirit in those with whom he meets. 

For those who wish to read about the less-than-hagiographical side of Dogen (yes, he even suffered from hemorrhoids not to mention the fact that the sacred transmission document Dogen allegedly received from his teacher Ju-ching is a medieval forgery) Steven Heine's book, "Did Dogen Go to China" is the book for you.

Mistaken identification

In samsara we identify the self with the psychophysical body this being the Five Aggregates of form, sensation, perception, inclination, and sensory consciousness.  By this identification with the aggregates we are inescapably linked to countless birth and death cycles with no apparent way out except to grin and bear it all.  What makes this identification possible is my powerful belief that these aggregates constitute me.  Of course the Buddha teaches a way to end this identification which brings with it only suffering.

To consider the aforementioned in a different light, we are entangled in misidentification.  Modern Buddhism doesn’t quite get the problem of misidentification.  Carelessly, modern Buddhism wants to believe there is no self (although this is not a doctrine that can be found in either the Nikayas or the Mahayana canon).  Under this belief it would follow that misidentification is no problem at all since there is no actual self.  There is just the body of Five Aggregates that eventually is going to crap out—which, by the way, is nirvana (but it isn’t).  Regrettably, this kind of thinking is, to put it mildly, nonsense.  In also falls under the category of annihilationism which adheres to the belief there is no such thing as a self.

For now, let's say the real work of Buddhism begins when we acknowledge to ourselves that we have to decouple from the aggregates so that we can eventually say, with some degree of relief, these aggregates are not mine; I am not these aggregates; they are not my self (atmâ).  If we cannot accept this process, we should at least acknowledge that we are tied to the Five Aggregates and wish not to escape from their fate.

For authentic Buddhists who have not decided to follow the path of which depends on the aggregates they understand that ending identification of the self with the Five Aggregates is what ending samsara is all about, or the same, freeing the self from the aggregates constitutes the entry into nirvana.