Reality is Neither Absolute nor Relative

by Sobun Katherine Thanas, first Abbot of the Santa Cruz Zen Center
(October 2004)

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Sobun Katherine Thanas

In the fascicle “Painting of a Rice” Cake, Zen Master Dogen re-works a famous koan: a painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. Although this statement has been understood as meaning images of reality lack efficacy, Dogen says we need images, language and thoughts in order to enter reality. Our thoughts are reality; they are also signposts into reality, he tells us, just as a painting is composed of an idea, emotions and materials (paint, brush strokes, color, texture, shape, etc.). All these elements co-create each other.

When I was at Koshiji in Japan, the temple Dogen founded in the 13th century, I saw a wooden sculpture depicting Dogen in the Founders Hall there. I was profoundly moved, having never before felt such a powerful embodiment of his energy. The fierce uncompromising quality of his teaching was in the wood, and it entered me. I felt Dogen’s presence deeply.

Kosho-ji

But was that Dogen I felt or my creation of Dogen? Is there a Dogen outside my creation of him?

When our sense organs meet color, sound, smell, taste, and touch, consciousness sees a karmic version of the world, inside and outside. When we see or hear something, our mind usually presents us with a prepackaged world. (A siren screams by outside.) What was that? What did your mind do with that?

We’re seeing what our mind knows, what our mind thinks, what our mind imagines. We know only what the mind tells us. Can we ever see what is before us — before the mind composes a song of love or hatred to it?

Dogen asks if the study of sutras and commentaries nourishes true wisdom. “To think that expedient teachings are useless is a great mistake.”

Daido Loori-Roshi translates Dogen in this essay as: “The paints for painting rice cakes are the same as those used for painting mountains and rivers. For painting mountains and rivers, blue and red paints are used. As for painting rice cakes, flour is used. Thus, they are painted in the same way and they are examined in the same way.

“Examine carefully the pictured buddhas and the pictured cakes,” Dogen continues. “You should understand thoroughly...which is form and which is mind. All are nothing but pictures...birth and death, coming and going are pictures without exception. Supreme enlightenment is nothing but a picture...in the phenomenal world and the empty sky there is nothing that is not a picture. If you say that a picture is not real, all things are not real. If all things are not real, Dharma is not real either. If Dharma is real, then pictured cakes are real.”

Portrait of Dogen Zenji

Loori interprets Dogen to mean that the image of the truth and the truth itself are completely interpenetrated, mutually arising and non-hindering. “All of his teachings express this appreciation of the (identity) of dualities and oneness.”

Unless we eat pictured cakes, Dogen says, we can never satisfy our hunger.

“Therefore, except for the pictured cakes there is no medicine for satisfying hunger. Without painted hunger you can never become a true person. There is no understanding other than painted satisfaction.”

In other words, our hunger is not just physical hunger, but the deeper emotional, spiritual hunger of our lives. The conceptual and emotional content, the picture or story, are essential to gratifying the deepest yearnings of our lives.

Do the words that define reality differ from the reality they define?

I understand Dogen to say that the painted dragon is the True Dragon. In “Zazenshin” he says “you should know that both carved and true dragons have the ability to produce clouds and rain.” When painful muscles overtake our zazen and we feel we could do superb meditation except for the pain, we need to remember to turn to the pain, become the pain, enter the pain and have that be our complete meditation. Then pain becomes the True Dragon, not a hindrance.

Dogen gives us the opportunity to explore this relationship between “things” and our mind, our desires, hopes, fantasies. He seems to be telling us that all things simultaneously include material elements and non-material elements (thoughts, projections, desires, fantasies). When we understand that, we understand hunger and the material world in a more complete way.

Shakyamuni Buddha at Kosho-ji

An 8th century Chinese teacher said it this way: “When I first began to practice, the mountains and rivers were simply mountains and rivers. After I advanced in my practice, the mountains and rivers were no longer mountains and rivers. But when I reached the end of my practice, the mountains and rivers were simply mountains and rivers again.” In a 1968 ceremony, I asked Suzuki-Roshi: “Who are you?”

He responded, “To whom are you asking?” I said, “To all of you.”

Roshi: “Do you really understand all of me, all that you see and what you do not see? I am here. But before I am here, something you don’t know existed. I am someone who exists here who is speaking something. And I am also someone who does not appear in this way. Before I say something, before I exist here, something is here with all being. I am both someone who has form and color, and someone who has no form and no color. And you are speaking to someone who has body and mind.”

When we chant the sutras with concentrated mind and body, are we not immersed in the fullness of our experience? At that time the sutra is not outside us, it is our living experience and as our thoughts intermingle with the words of the sutra, our breath, abdomen, heart, eyes, ears and feelings are not separate from the sutra. At that moment is this sutra a painting of a teaching or an actualized teaching?

We might say that reality is to be found in neither the rice cake itself nor in the painting of the rice cake, in neither absolute nor relative reality. It is to be found in our actualization of the rice cake and its painting as not separate from ourselves.

Kosho-ji

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