I gave this short talk at our Full Moon Zen sunrise sit on October 18, 2023.

This is a koan included in Genjōkōan, one of the essays in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō:

Ma-ku Pao-ch’e was fanning himself one day when a monk came and asked, “The nature of the wind is abiding and universally present.  Why do you still use your fan?”

The teacher’s answer was, “You know only the nature of the wind as abiding; you do not yet know the truth of its being universally present.”

The monk said, “What is the truth of its being universally present?”

The teacher only fanned himself without a word.

And the monk saluted him.

Activity was a key concept in Dōgen’s thought, which we inherit as a resource and as inspiration for our own journeys.  “The truth of Buddha-nature is such that Buddha-nature is embodied not before but after becoming a Buddha.  Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously,” he said.

This might sound a bit discouraging initially.  One way to hear this is that we lack Buddha-nature until we become a Buddha.  “The truth of Buddha-nature is such that Buddha-nature is embodied not before but after becoming a Buddha.  Buddha-nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously.”  How do I become a Buddha then?  From that perspective, this seems like a real chicken-and-egg problem.

If we hear Dōgen that way, however, we’re not hearing from what he calls “the Buddha side,” or from what Erich Fromm called “being mode.”  We’re hearing Dōgen’s words from what Fromm called “having mode.”  A bit like the monk in our koan, we’re still thinking of Buddha nature as something separate from us we either have or don’t have; something we eventually can get if we don’t have it.  The monk perceives that it is abiding and universally present, but still he subtly seems to think it could be separable from Pao-ch’e’s fanning.

The monk has got it in one sense:  He gets that Buddha nature abides everywhere and always.  This is an important insight, and one gets the sense that he is rather proud of it.  I don’t know about you, but his question seems just a little too cute to me; like he’s showing off that insight just a bit.  With his response, Pao-ch’e tells the monk—nay, shows the monk—that we don’t have Buddha nature, we are it.  Then the monk truly seems to get it.

Buddha nature abides universally by presenting universally.  It manifests.  Buddha nature is more verb than noun.  There is no wind without blowing.  Pao-ch’e and fan together manifest as fanning.

Buddha nature is manifesting as us all the time whether we know it or not, yet we have the opportunity to know ourselves and all else as Buddha nature.  That’s the invitation and call of the Zen Way.  This is what Dōgen and all the ancients want us to realize. 

Some of our theistic wisdom traditions have their own ways of expressing this.  If you’ll permit me to appropriate a bit of nondual theistic language into our nondual nontheistic Zen context, here’s an example from Christianity.  St. Teresa of Avila, the great 16^th century Spanish nun and mystic, said:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ’s compassion to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

The great Austrian poet Rainer Marie Rilke, also using theistic language, expressed the same idea and invitation in one of my favorite poems, with which I’ll close:

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions . . . For the god
wants to know [it]self in you.