Transcription
Check out this quote from Dogen. These mountains and waters of the present are the expression of the old Buddhas. Each abiding in its own dharma state fulfills exhaustive virtues because they are the circumstances prior to the culpa of emptiness. They are this life of the present because they are of the self before the germination of any subtle sign. They are liberated in their actual occurrence.
Since the virtues of the mountains are high and broad, the spiritual power to ride the clouds is always mastered from the mountains. And the marvelous ability to follow the wind is inevitably liberated from the mountains. This Dogen is such a masterful writer when it comes to pointing at non-duality. It's It's really uncanny how directly these words um for me uh illustrate something that is so hard to talk about and yet is intrinsic to experience all the time. Always here, always the case. Something that is um clear before any illusion of boundaries appears. clear before any illusion of a center or form appear.
This I have no word for it. I have no name for this. I point to it all the time. I talk about it all the time, either indirectly or I try to talk about it directly. I'm always pointing people to this, but it doesn't have a name. It's um it's too free to be nominalized. It's too multiaceted to be described succinctly. It's too flexible uh to be concretized into a word or a phrase or even an understanding. It's too mutable to be described as anything fixed at all in any way, even fixed to a an idea or fixed to a even a poetic pointing. It's it's too fluid for that. Uh so the language has to be alive. The language as you read the aliveness has to come through. It has to be catalytic, right? The the words uh are like catalysts. Each word following the the previous word is a is a catalytic experiential pointing that drops you right right in to where you never left. Uh yeah, there's poetry and then there's this kind of transmission. This is so potent, so clear and direct and simple. Um, it doesn't have baggage. It's so clean and it's so clean that I I I hesitate to even say anything about it because all I could do is make it worse. Dogen does it so well. Um, but I love I but I'll say a few things anyway because that's just what I'm going to do.
I love that he relates natural phenomena, let's say, simple nature, the mountains and the waters and the rivers and the sky. I love that he he relates those which seem so solid, so we expect them to be there so thoroughly that we we overlook what what's even there. We we judge it as uh our mind judges it as something that that can just be filtered out actually strangely, right? Sure, there are times when we look upon the majesty of the mountain and the sky and think of how beautiful it is and feel it in our body. But also we we overlook it a lot, right? It's easy to overlook that because you just assume it's there. You assume it's going to be there every time you look toward toward the mountains that they're they're just going to be there. Um they seem so solid, so real. uh and consistent. And yet he uses the imagery of those not even imagery, it's the direct experience of those natural phenomenon, those stable natural phenomenon to point to something that has no intrinsic stability or or I could say it's its stability is in its instability. uh it has no form and yet it is not apart from the apparently formed. It is glowing in the formed. It is glowing in the in the 10,000 things coming forward everywhere all the time. Uh and yet it is not in time and there is no place that it exists. So there's some kind of genius in using these natural occurrences, natural phenomenon uh in this kind of imagery to juxtapose and simultaneously bring out and illuminate this unnameable, the unnameable, the unconditioned fabric of reality.
Sometimes it feels something like that to me. um these manifold dharmas interpenetrating all all experience all sense fields um also there's this thing about nature that is an atunement it's a very important attunement I point this out reasonably frequently that if you want to know the signature of freedom if you want to know the cadence of freedom if you want to know the cadence of fluidity, of that which has never been bound or could not be bound. Watch nature. Watch animals move, including your your own house pet, your dog or your cat. Watch how animals move. Watch how they utilize energy. Watch how they discharge energy. Watch how they rest. Watch how much they rest. Watch how they transition so effortlessly from rest to activity and activity to rest. Notice their naturalness and their exuberance. This goes this goes for all all of nature. And of course, we're not apart from nature. Humans are not apart from nature. Uh even the the the iPhone and the the Android phone in your hand, these aren't apart from nature, of course. And yet you can pick up the signature of mind of of identified mind woven through a lot of human activities and what humans produce to keep themselves hypnotized. It is also still nature but it it's more the the formless form the physicality of of those that that resonates deeply rather than the apparent information being propagated through thought.
So uh so when I talk about nature in this context I mean animals, the sky, trees, uh even inanimate objects, you will at some point tune into the energetics of what appears to be inanimate. Like I said, the mountain that's been there for 10,000 years, 100,000 years, 100 a million years, 100 million years, right? All those numbers are are essentially meaningless because the mind can't get around those. It's just been there a long freaking time. It feels like it'll be there a long time. And yet, if you look correctly, if you look at that mountain correctly, you will see it's not what you think it is. It's not what it appears to be at all. Uh in the same way, if you look at the dharma vehicle, it's not what it appears to be. It's not what you think it is. It's not what you can think it is. It's deeply mysterious. And this is where as the heart sutra says form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The mountain representing form and emptiness being represented by the dharma vehicle itself. And then you see those switch places very easily. The formless mountain and the dharma vehicle coming forth in concrete examples, concrete movements, concrete communications. This is infinite flexibility. Interpenetration of relative and absolute interpenetration of form and emptiness. This is how it functions. Amazing. And its benefit is your benefit. Its benefit is the benefit of all sentient beings, of all suffering beings. It's absolutely personal to you. It is your own personal suffering. That mountain represents your own personal suffering and it also represents your own personal liberation. And the dharma vehicle is where those two come into contact always. And that vehicle is infinitely flexible. It will meet you everywhere anywhere. There's nowhere you're going to go that this can't find you. That this can't meet you. You're not terminally unique in your own suffering. No matter what you think, no matter how bad your conditioning is, no m how how much trauma you've had piled on top of you. And for some people, it's it's a heartbreaking amount. But I've seen it again and again. This this what I'm calling the dharma vehicle can reach you. It will find its way in there if you open to it. You let it let your mind rest. You know, thinking outside the box is more like letting your mind rest. Don't think inside the box. Just let the let the unfolding happen. Let the unbinding happen. Let the dharma vehicle do its job. Let the mountain do its job. Let the air you breathe do its job. Let the emotion do its job because it's its job is liberation. It's liberating you. It's liberating you. Everything is liberating you. Just open to it. Trust it.