Myth & Metaphor in Dogen’s Shobogenzo [Part 1] Our Highest Ancestor in India, Shakyamuni Buddha, once said, “The snowcapped Himalayas are a metaphor for the great nirvana.” You need to know that He is speaking metaphorically about something that can be metaphoric. ‘Something that can be metaphoric’ implies that the mountains and nirvana are somehow [...]

Greetings dear reader, This post is in honor of those that have managed to trudge through the various “Dogen” posts of the last month or so. Those posts attempted to explore some of Dogen’s teachings on ”expressions”, “language”, “perception”, and the reality of “all thoughts and things.” In this post, I will simply offer a brief overview of some of the highlights of Shobogenzo, Sansuikyo in relation [...]

Whenever we experience doubt or confusion as we walk the path of Zen, we may find some clarity and serenity in one of its most basic teachings; the real Buddha is never apart from our own true self. While this will remain conceptual until we experience this truth directly, the simple universality of this message by all the great [...]

  You should understand that, in Buddhism, we have always spoken not only of body and mind as being inseparable, but also of the nature of something and the form it takes as not being two different things. Shobogenzo, Bendowa, Hubert Nearman The so-called ‘mind which has been correctly Transmitted’ refers to the whole mind [...]

Through our training with our Master, we explore the words and ways of Old Buddhas so that we may awaken to the Truth of Old Buddhas, for They are Old Buddhas for generation after generation. Even though the ‘old’ of ‘Old Buddhas’ is the same as that in ‘new and old’, such Buddhas have gone [...]

Now where were we… Oh yes! After discussing the “loop” process in Shobogenzo, we digressed to discuss the Soto Zen master Taigen Dan Leighton and his excellent books and translations… See: Dogen’s Zen Expressions & Shobogenzo’s Loops – Part 1 We were about to notice how the inherent “loop” process reveals one good reason why [...]