Myriad Things

Dear Friends,

Today we return to the famous quotation from Dogen (1200-1253) that we have mentioned before:

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

This is from his master work, the Shobogenzo. It describes a progression of realizations that we will attempt to follow experientially ourselves. We may split it up into a few weeks, so please ponder very slowly as you work through the path.

Notice how hard it is to define your "self." What does this word even mean? It may be for us as it was for St. Augustine with regard to the concept of time: "When no one asks me what time is, I know what it is. When someone asks me, and I am supposed to answer, I find I do not know."

As we try to study the self, we may discover that a self, thought of as a fixed thing, is either unfindable or uninteresting or unhealthy. Something else can happen, not a normal sense of self at all, called here being "actualized by myriad things." Together, we will find our way into a livelier world -- not so much a world we see, but a world that sees and actualizes us.

with love,
Michael