1227-1234 2026
This is an AI modernization of The Practice Instructions into contemporary English. The original is available from Japanese Wikisource, from the Eiheiji collected edition of 1909. Also available as an epub.
Dōgen was born in Kyoto in 1200, lost both his parents as a small child, and entered a monastery at thirteen. The question that eventually drove him out of Japan was one his teachers could not answer for him: if every person already has the buddha-nature, as the scriptures he was given kept insisting, then why does anyone need to practise at all? In 1223 he sailed to China to ask it there. He spent four years in Chinese monasteries, found a teacher he trusted in an old abbot named Rujing, and came home in 1227 with no relics and no scriptures.
The two short works in this book are what he wrote about it. The Fukanzazengi, which he composed in the year he got back, is a manual for sitting still: where to put the cushion, what to do with your legs, your hands, your eyes, your teeth and your tongue, and how to let the breath settle. The Gakudō Yōjinshū followed in 1234 — ten sections of advice to students, a good deal of it about how to tell a real teacher from a fraud.
Two facts about the setting change how it reads. The first is that Dōgen wrote in classical Chinese rather than Japanese. That was the learned language of Buddhism in Japan, roughly as Latin was in Europe, which is why a Japanese author is being translated here from the Chinese. The second is that he was writing against the current of his own century. It was widely held that the age had grown too degenerate for anyone to wake up by their own effort, and that the only hope left was rescue by a buddha somewhere else. Dōgen's answer is the flat opposite. Sit down, now, and the sitting is not a technique for arriving somewhere later. It is already the thing.
He is not vague and he is not soothing, which tends to surprise readers who have met Zen in its English incarnation. He is a young man recently back from abroad, certain that he is right, and openly contemptuous of teachers who, as he puts it, count another man's treasure without owning half a coin themselves. Section five of the Gakudō Yōjinshū states that Japan has never produced a true teacher and that a serious student should go to China instead; it is printed here as he wrote it. The most quoted sentence in Zen is also in these pages, sitting in the middle of a posture instruction, between what to do with your tongue and what to do with your breath.
Look into it and you find this. The way is already whole, and it runs through everything. So what is there to practise, and what is there to attain? The truth carries itself. Why would it need your effort? The whole of it stands clear of the dust and noise of the world. Who really believes you can polish it clean, like a mirror? It is never anywhere but where you are standing right now. What good would it do to go somewhere else to look for it?
And yet. Let there be a hair's breadth of difference between you and it, and that gap is as wide as the sky is from the ground. Let the smallest liking or disliking start up, and you have lost it in the confusion.
Suppose you are proud of what you understand. Suppose you are rich in insight and have caught a glimpse of the truth. Suppose you have found the way and cleared your mind, and your ambition reaches up to knock at the sky. You may be strolling round and round at the edge of the entrance. You are still missing, more or less, the living road that leads out.
Look at the Buddha in the Jeta Grove. He was born knowing, and you can still see the marks of the six years he sat. Look at Bodhidharma at Shaolin. He carried the seal of the mind from India to China, and the story of his nine years facing a wall is still told. The old saints were like that. Why will people now not do the work?
So stop chasing after words and running down phrases. Learn the step backwards: the one that turns your light around and lets it shine on you. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will be there in front of you. If you want that, get on with that.
For sitting, a quiet room is best. Eat and drink moderately. Put down everything you are involved in. Let the ten thousand things rest. Do not think about good or bad. Do not take up right or wrong. Stop the wheels of mind and intellect and consciousness turning. Stop measuring things with memory and imagination and contemplation. Have no plan to become a buddha. None of this has anything to do with sitting or lying down.
At your usual sitting place, spread a thick mat and put a round cushion on top of it. Sit in the full lotus or the half lotus. For the full lotus, first put your right foot on your left thigh, then your left foot on your right thigh. For the half lotus, just press your left foot onto your right thigh. Loosen your robe and belt and arrange them neatly.
Then put your right hand on your left foot, and your left hand in your right palm, with the tips of your thumbs just touching. Sit up straight. Do not lean to the left or tilt to the right. Do not bend forward or arch back. The ears should be in line with the shoulders, and the nose in line with the navel. Rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth, with your lips and teeth closed. Keep your eyes open. Breathe gently through your nose.
Once your body is settled, breathe out once, rock left and right, and then sit immovably, like a mountain.
Think of the thing that does not think. How do you think of the thing that does not think? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of sitting.
The sitting I am talking about is not learning to meditate. It is simply the gate to ease and joy. It is practice and realisation in one, a fully accomplished awakening. The koan is realised in the present. No trap and no cage has ever reached it. If you get hold of this, you are a dragon that has got to water, a tiger that has got to its mountain. Know that the true dharma is showing itself, and that dullness and distraction have already been knocked away.
When you get up from sitting, move slowly and stand up calmly. Do not be abrupt about it.
I have seen it myself. Going beyond the ordinary and beyond the holy; dying while sitting, or dying standing up: all of it depends on this power. And more than that. Think of the great turning points in Zen, when a master raised a finger, or a pole, or a needle, or a wooden mallet, and a student woke up. Think of the moments when a whisk, a fist, a staff or a shout confirmed it. None of these was ever grasped by thinking things over. How could they be understood by supernatural powers? How could they be understood by practice and realisation? They are conduct beyond sound and form. Are they not the standard that comes before knowing and seeing?
So it makes no difference whether you are clever or stupid. There is no sorting people into the sharp and the dull. Single-minded effort is itself the practice of the way. Practice and realisation are naturally undefiled. Going towards it is an ordinary, everyday matter.
In this world and in other worlds, in India and here in the East, all hold the Buddha's seal equally, and each has its own style. But they give themselves to sitting, and are held fast by stillness. There may be ten thousand distinctions and a thousand differences. They simply take up Zen and practise the way.
Why leave the sitting place of your own house and go wandering uselessly in the dusty regions of other countries? Put one foot wrong and you go straight past what is right in front of you.
You have already got hold of the essential thing: a human body. Do not spend your time for nothing. You are holding the essential working of the Buddha's way. Who would fool about with a spark struck off a flint? And besides, your form and substance are like a drop of dew on the grass, and your fate is like a flash of lightning. In a moment they are empty. In an instant they are gone.
I beg you, distinguished friends in the study of Zen. Do not be like the blind men in the old story, each feeling one part of the elephant and arguing about what it was, so used to the piece in your hands that you doubt the real dragon when it comes. Go forward on the road that points straight at the thing itself. Honour the person who is beyond study and beyond doing. Fall into step with the awakening of buddha after buddha. Take up the samadhi, the settled concentration, of ancestor after ancestor. Behave like this for a long time and you will be like this. The treasure house will open of itself, and you will use it as you please.
The thought of awakening goes by many names, but they all point to one mind. The great teacher Nagarjuna put it this way: the mind that simply watches the world arise and pass away, the mind that observes impermanence, is itself the thought of awakening. So let us take that mind, for now, as the thought of awakening.
Truly, while you are watching how everything passes, the idea of a self does not come up, and thoughts of name and gain do not get started. You are frightened by how fast time is going, and so you practise the way as if your hair had caught fire. You see how little your body and your life can be relied on, and so you push yourself, like the buddha in the old story who stood on one foot for seven days out of sheer devotion. The sweetest singers in heaven could be praising you, and it would only be the evening wind brushing your ear. The most beautiful women in all the old stories could be standing in front of you, and they would be morning dew across your eyes. Once you are free of the pull of sounds and sights, you fall in naturally with what the mind of the way is about.
In the past as now, there have been people who heard little and people who saw little, and most of them fell into the pit of name and gain and lost the life of the buddha way for good. It is pitiable. It is a shame. You must know this. A man may read the finest scriptures, the simple ones and the profound ones. He may handle and pass on the texts of every school, the open teachings and the secret ones. But if he has not thrown away name and gain, nobody should call that raising the thought of awakening.
Some people say: the thought of awakening is the mind of unsurpassed perfect awakening, and it has nothing to do with reputation and profit. Some say: it is seeing three thousand worlds in a single thought. Some say: it is the teaching in which not a single thought arises. Some say: it is the mind that enters the realm of the buddhas.
People like this do not know what the thought of awakening is. They slander it without meaning to. They are far, far away from the buddha way.
Try turning and looking at yourself. Look at your own name and gain. Look at the mind you have right now. Has it fused with the whole nature of three thousand worlds in one thought? Has it realised the teaching in which not one thought arises? Or is there nothing in it but the craving for a name and the love of gain, and no mind of the way to be found at all?
The saints of old who found the way and found the dharma had their ways of mixing with the dust of the world, but they had no crooked thoughts of name and gain. They did not even cling to the dharma. How much less would they cling to the world.
The thought of awakening I am talking about is the one described above: the mind that observes impermanence. It is nothing like what those madmen are pointing at. The thought in which nothing arises, the three thousand worlds in a single thought: those are wonderful practices, but they come after the thought of awakening has been raised. They are not to be treated carelessly. Only forget the self for a while, and practise quietly. That is close kin to the thought of awakening.
Every one of the sixty-two wrong views takes the self as its root. So when the idea of a self comes up, sit quietly and look into it. What is the root of everything inside and outside this body of mine, right now? Body, hair and skin came from my parents, from two drops, one red and one white. From beginning to end they are empty, so they are not the self. Mind, intellect, consciousness and understanding are tied to the length of one life. One breath in and one breath out, and in the end, what are they? So they are not the self. There is nothing here or there that can be held on to.
The deluded hold on. The awakened let go. And then people work out a self that has no self, and cling to an arising that does not arise. They do not do the practice of the buddha way, which can be done. They do not cut off worldly feeling, which can be cut off. They are disgusted by the real dharma and go looking for a false one. Is that not a mistake?
A loyal minister offers one word, and it can have the force to turn the whole of heaven round. The buddhas and patriarchs give out a single word, and there is nobody whose mind is not turned by it. But unless a ruler is wise, there is no room in him for loyal advice. And unless a man stands out from the crowd, there is no room in him for the words of the buddhas. If the mind has not been turned, the flow of birth and death has not been cut off. If loyal advice finds no room, the good government of the country has not been put into practice.
In the world they say: study, and a salary comes with it. The Buddha said: practise, and realisation comes with it. Nobody has ever heard of a man who got a salary without studying, or realisation without practising. Your practice may come through faith or through understanding; it may be sudden or gradual. Either way, you have to do the practice before you can go beyond it into realisation. Your study may be shallow or deep, quick or slow. Either way, you have to pile the study up before you can draw a salary. None of this depends on whether the king favours you, or whether luck is with you.
If a salary could be had without study, who would hand down the way in which the old kings kept order and settled the world? If realisation could be had without practice, who would understand the Buddha's teaching about delusion and awakening? You should know that you set up your practice right in the middle of delusion, and you get realisation before awakening. Only then do you find out that the raft and the boat were last night's dream, and you cut off for good the old view that took a piece of rope for a snake.
This is not something the Buddha forces on you. It is your own capacity, turning about.
And besides: what practice brings on is realisation. The treasure of your own house does not come from outside. What realisation puts to work is practice. How could the tracks across the ground of the mind be turned back?
And yet, if you turn the eye of realisation round and look back at the ground of practice, there is not a speck of dust in your eye, and what you see is white clouds for ten thousand miles. If you lift the foot of practice and try it against the steps of realisation, there is not a mote of dust under it, and what you tread is the gap between heaven and earth. At this point you take a step backwards, and jump into the ground of the buddhas.
Written on the ninth day of the third month, the second year of Tenpuku.
In practising the buddha-dharma you must take the true instruction of someone who has gone before you, and not use your own private ideas. Besides, the buddha-dharma cannot be got with a mind, and it cannot be got without a mind. If the mind you are working with does not agree with the way, your body and mind will never be at peace. When body and mind are not at peace, they are not at ease. When they are not at ease, thorns grow up over the road to realisation.
So what kind of practice agrees with the way? A mind that does not pick things up and put them down. A mind with no name and gain in it.
The practice of the buddha-dharma is not something you do for other people. But in the world as it is now, the minds of the people who practise it are far, far from the way. If something is admired, they practise it, even knowing it is not the way. If something is not respected and praised, they drop it and will not practise it, even knowing it is the true way. How painful.
Try quieting your mind and looking into it. Is this way of behaving the buddha-dharma or not? It is shameful. It is shameful. The eye of the saints is on it.
A man who practises the buddha-dharma does not do it even for himself, let alone for reputation and profit. He does it only for the buddha-dharma's sake.
The compassion of the buddhas, their pity for living beings, is not for their own sake and not for the sake of others. It is simply what the buddha-dharma always is. Have you not seen it in small insects and animals rearing their young? Body and mind put to hardship, the whole business bitter labour, and in the end they raise them, and for the parents there is nothing in it at all. And yet the compassion of a creature thinking of its young is like that, even in something so small. It is a picture of the buddhas thinking of living beings.
The wonderful dharma of the buddhas is not compassion alone. It appears everywhere, through every gate, and this is the root of all of it. Since we are already the children of the buddhas, why not fall in with the way the buddhas do things?
A practitioner must not think of practising the buddha-dharma for his own sake. He must not practise it for name and gain, or to get a reward, or to get miraculous powers. He must practise the buddha-dharma only for the buddha-dharma. That is the way.
A man of old said: if the thought is not raised correctly, ten thousand practices are all wasted. That is true. Whether your practice of the way turns out right or wrong depends on your guide.
The student is like good timber. The teacher is like a carpenter. However good the timber, without a good workman its beauty never comes out. However crooked the wood, in skilful hands its excellence shows at once. You can tell from this that whether the awakening is true or false follows from whether the teacher is true or false.
But in our country there has never yet been a true teacher. How do I know? Look at what they say and examine it, the way you would trace a stream back to its source. The teachers of our country, from long ago, have compiled books, instructed disciples, and given teaching to gods and men. But their words are green. Their language is not ripe. They have not reached the top of the ground of study, so how could they get anywhere near realisation? They have only handed down written words and made people recite names. Day and night they count another man's treasure, and have not half a coin of their own. The blame for this lies with the old teachers.
Some direct people to seek awakening outside the mind. Some teach people to pray for rebirth in another land. Confusion starts here, and crooked thinking sets up its office here.
Even if you are given good medicine, if nobody teaches you how to take it, it makes you sicker than poison would. In our country, from of old, there has been nobody, so to speak, to give out good medicine, and no teacher to take the poison out of it. That is why the sickness of this life is so hard to get rid of, and why we cannot escape old age and death. It is all the fault of the teachers, and no fault of the students at all.
Why do I say so? Because those who set up as teachers make people abandon the root and chase the branches. Before they have got their own understanding settled, they attend only to their own opinions, teach others carelessly, and drag them down into wrong states. It is pitiable that the teachers do not know they are in error themselves. So how are the students going to work out what is right and what is wrong? It is a sad thing.
In this remote little country the buddha-dharma has not spread, and a true teacher has not appeared. If you want to study the unsurpassed buddha way, you should go far away and consult those who know, in the land of Song China. You should look, far off, for the living road that lies outside the mind. If you cannot find a true teacher, it is better not to study at all.
A true teacher is not a matter of being old and long established. He is someone who has made the true dharma clear and received the seal of a true teacher's confirmation. Book learning does not come first. Clever understanding does not come first. He has a capacity beyond the ordinary measure and a will that goes past the usual limits. He is not held by his own views. He does not get stuck in his feelings and his opinions. What he does and what he understands match. That is a true teacher.
Taking up Zen and studying the way is the great matter of a lifetime. It must not be treated lightly, and certainly not casually. Men of old cut off an arm for it, and cut off fingers. Those are the fine traces they left in China. Long ago the Buddha left his house and gave up his kingdom. Those are the tracks left by the practice of the way.
People now say: do the practice that is easy to do. That is badly said, and it is thoroughly out of keeping with the buddha way. If that is the spirit you bring to one thing, then even lying down is laziness. Be lazy in one thing and you will be lazy in ten thousand. A man who prefers what is easy is telling you himself that he is no vessel for the way.
Besides: the dharma that is current in the world today is the dharma that our great teacher Shakyamuni got only after immeasurable ages of hard and bitter practice. If the source was like that, how could the streams running out of it be easy?
You who love the way: do not set your mind on easy practice. If you look for easy practice you will certainly not reach the real ground, and you will certainly not arrive at the place where the treasure is. The men of old had great capacity, and even they called it hard. You should understand from that how deep and how great the buddha way is. If the buddha way were easy by nature, the men of great capacity in the past would not have called it hard to practise and hard to understand.
Compare the people of today with the people of old. We do not come to one hair on nine oxen. With roots this shallow and knowledge this thin, even if we drove ourselves and tried to do the hard practice, we could not come up to what the ancients found easy to practise and easy to understand.
So what is this dharma of easy understanding and easy practice that people today like so much? It is not even a worldly dharma any more. Nor is it the buddha-dharma. It does not even come up to the practice of Mara the Evil One. It does not even come up to the practice of the non-Buddhist schools, or the lesser Buddhist ones. You might call it the far end of ordinary delusion. It makes a show of getting free, but it is only more turning of the same wheel.
Look at it. To break your bones and crush your marrow: is that so hard? Bringing the mind under control and handling it is harder. To keep the long fast and the pure life: is that so hard? Bringing the body under control and conducting it is harder. If grinding your bones to powder were what counted, then plenty of people from of old could endure it, and very few got the dharma. If keeping the fast were what counted, then plenty have kept it from long ago, and very few woke up to the way. That is because bringing the mind under control is so extremely difficult.
Cleverness does not come first. Learning does not come first. Mind, intellect and consciousness do not come first. Memory, imagination and contemplation do not come first. Without using any of these at all, you bring body and mind into order and enter the buddha way. Old Shakyamuni said of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, that he entered the stream and forgot what was known. That is what this means. The two appearances, moving and still, plainly do not arise. That is what bringing the mind into order looks like.
If the buddha way could be entered by cleverness and wide learning, then the senior monk Shenxiu, the most learned man in his monastery, would have been the one to do it. If the buddha way could be refused to the plain-bodied and the lowly, then how would Huineng, the barefoot rice-pounder who became the sixth patriarch, have dared? It is clear from this that the transmission of the buddha way lies outside cleverness and wide learning.
Search it out. Look, and take part. It does not matter that you are old and failing. It does not matter that you are a child, or in your prime. Zhaozhou began his practice past sixty, and he became the hero of the patriarchs' seat. The girl Zheng studied a long time from the age of thirteen, and she stood out in the whole monastery. The power of the buddha-dharma appears according to whether you put yourself into it or not. It divides according to whether you practise or do not. Those who have long studied in the doctrinal schools, or who have old skill in worldly books, may all come to the Zen gate. There are many examples. Huisi of Nanyue was a man of many talents, and still he went to study under Bodhidharma's line. Xuanjue of Yongjia was an outstanding man, and he went to study under Huineng, and made the dharma clear and found the way. That is the strength of studying with a teacher.
But when you put your questions to a master of the school, listen to what the teacher says and do not match it against your own views. If you match it against your own views you will not get the teacher's dharma. When you study with a teacher and hear the dharma, clean out body and mind, quiet your eyes and ears, and simply take in what the teacher gives without mixing any other thought into it. Body and mind as one thing, like water poured from one vessel into another. Do that, and you get the teacher's dharma.
Now there are foolish, stupid people who either memorise texts or store up what they have heard before, and put that alongside what the teacher says. What they have then is only their own views and the old words, and the teacher's words never fit them. There is another sort who put their own views first and then open the scriptures, hold on to a phrase or two, and take that for the buddha-dharma. Afterwards, when they go to a clear-eyed teacher and a master of the school and hear the dharma, if it matches their own views they call it right, and if it does not agree with their old ideas they call it wrong. They do not know the method of throwing off what is false. So how are they going to climb the road back to what is true? They will still be deluded after ages as many as the sands. It is greatly to be pitied.
Students should know that the buddha way lies outside thinking, distinguishing, guessing, contemplating, perceiving and intellectual understanding. If it lay inside those, then, since we have been in the middle of them from birth and have always played with them, why do we still not perceive the buddha way now? A person studying the way must not use thinking and distinguishing and the rest. Take your own body and examine it while you are carrying thinking and the rest about with you, and this becomes clear as in a bright mirror.
The gate you go in by is fully known to a master of the school who has got the dharma. It is not something the teachers of the written word can reach.
Written on the Qingming day of the year of the horse, Tenpuku.
The buddha-dharma is superior to all the other ways, and that is why people seek it. When the Buddha was in the world there were not two teachings and not two teachers. The great teacher Shakyamuni drew living beings in by unsurpassed awakening and nothing else. Since Kashyapa received the treasury of the true dharma eye from him, there have been twenty-eight generations in India and six in China, and on to the founders of the five houses of Zen, each receiving it in direct succession, with no break in it. So from the Putong era of the Liang dynasty onwards, from the monks up to the kings and ministers, nobody of any standing has failed to come over to it.
Truly, what you ought to love as superior is what is superior. Do not be like the Duke of She, who loved dragons. He had dragons carved on his pillars and painted on his walls, and when a real dragon heard of it and came to visit, he ran away.
In China and the countries east of it, the net of doctrinal writings is spread over the sea and lies all across the mountains. It lies across the mountains, but it has no heart for the clouds. It is spread over the sea, but it has a withered heart for the waves. Fools relish it, as though a man picked up a fish's eye and took it for a pearl. The deluded play with it, as though a man hid away a common stone and honoured it as jade. Many fall into Mara's pit and injure themselves again and again.
It is pitiable that in a remote and backward place a crooked wind blows easily and the true dharma goes about with difficulty. Yet China has already come over to the true dharma of the buddhas, while in our country, and in Korea, the true dharma has not spread. Why is that? Why? In Korea at least they hear the name of the true dharma. In our country it has not even been heard. This is because the teachers who went to China in the past all got stuck in the net of doctrine. They brought back Buddhist books, but it is as if they had forgotten the buddha-dharma. What was the good of it? In the end the work came to nothing. And this was because they did not know how the study of the way is actually done. It is pitiable: a whole human life spent in labour for nothing.
Now, when you study the buddha way and first come in at the gate, you hear the teaching of someone who knows and you practise as you are taught. At that point there is something you should understand. The dharma turns me, and I turn the dharma. When I am able to turn the dharma, I am strong and the dharma is weak. When the dharma turns me in its turn, the dharma is strong and I am weak. The buddha-dharma has always had these two phases. Nobody who is not a true heir has ever known it. Nobody who is not a patch-robed monk has so much as heard the name of it. Without knowing how this actually works, the study of the way cannot be sorted out, and how is right to be told from wrong?
People who take up Zen and study the way now have this handed to them directly, and so they do not go wrong. There is no other gate. A person who longs for the buddha way cannot come to know the true way except by taking up Zen.
From the buddhas and the patriarchs down, it has been directly pointed at and handed on one to one. Twenty-eight teachers in India, six in China, and not a thread or a hair added, not one speck broken. The robe came down to Huineng, and the dharma went round the worlds like grains of sand. In those days the treasury of the true dharma eye flourished in Tang China.
As for what this dharma is: you cannot grope for it, and you cannot go looking for it. Where it is seen, knowing is lost. When it is got, it goes beyond mind. Huineng lost his face at Huangmei, the night the fifth patriarch handed him the robe. Huike cut off his arm at Shaolin to show Bodhidharma he was in earnest. Huike got the marrow, turned his mind over, and bought elegance. He made his bow, stepped back, and fell into the advantage of it. And yet in mind and in body there is no dwelling and no attachment, no staying and no getting stuck.
A monk asked Zhaozhou: does a dog have buddha-nature or not? Zhaozhou said: no.
Can you take a measurement on top of that word "no"? Can you get stuck on it? There is no handle to it anywhere. Please try letting go. Just let go and look.
What are body and mind? What is your conduct? What is birth and death? What is the buddha-dharma? What is the dharma of the world? Mountains and rivers and the great earth, people and animals and houses: in the end, what are they?
Look, and go on looking. Of themselves the two appearances, moving and still, plainly do not arise. When they do not arise, that is not mere blankness. There is nobody to confirm it, and a great many who mistake it.
Those who take up Zen: you have got half the road. Do not refuse the whole road. I pray you. I pray you.
A man of stature who studies the way must first know whether he is facing the way correctly or not. Shakyamuni, the tamer of men, sat under the tree of awakening, saw the morning star, and all at once was awakened to the unsurpassed way. What he was awakened to is not something the wisest disciples can reach. The Buddha awoke by himself, and buddha handed it on to buddha, and it has not been cut off down to now. Can someone who has this awakening be anything but a buddha?
Facing the way means understanding the whole extent of the buddha way. It means making clear what the buddha way looks like. The buddha way is under everybody's heels. Let the way get in your way, let it stop you, and it is clear where you are standing. Let awakening get in your way, and the person is fully complete.
And so, even if you raise a complete understanding, you still come down in a half awakening. That is the elegance of facing the way.
People studying the way now have not sorted out whether the way is open or blocked, and they are very fond of having proofs. Who is it that does not go wrong? Remember the parable of the rich man's son. He left his father and ran off. He abandoned the treasure and went wandering. Though he was the only son of a rich man, he spent a long time as a hired labourer, a low sort of person. There are good reasons for it.
A person studying the way seeks to be stopped by the way. To be stopped by the way is to lose the traces of awakening. Someone who practises the buddha way must first have faith in the buddha way. Someone who has faith in the buddha way must have faith in himself: that he is already in the way, not confused, not upside down, with nothing to add and nothing to take away, and without error. Raise a faith like this, make a way like this clear, and practise accordingly. That is the ground of studying the way.
The rule for doing it is to sit and cut off the root of the intellect, so that it does not go down the road of intellectual understanding. That is a skilful means for drawing in beginners. After that, dropping away body and mind, and putting down both delusion and awakening, is the second stage.
Generally speaking, people who have faith that they themselves are in the buddha way are the hardest of all to find. If you have correct faith that you are in the way, then naturally you will understand whether the great way is open or blocked, and you will know how delusion and awakening come about.
Try sitting and cutting off the root of the intellect. Eight or nine out of ten will suddenly get to see the way.
In sorting out body and mind there are two ways: studying with a teacher and hearing the dharma, and the effort of sitting. Hearing the dharma moves about in your mind and consciousness. Sitting is a matter of practice and realisation, on your left hand and your right. So in entering the buddha way you must not throw either of them away when you take hold.
Everybody has a body and a mind. In what they do there is bound to be strength and weakness, boldness and dullness. It moves, and it takes a form. To realise buddhahood directly with this body and this mind is what taking hold means. Not to turn the body and mind you have always had into something else, but simply to follow them into realisation, is what is meant by directly. That is what is meant by taking hold. Because you simply follow it, this is not the old view. Because you simply take hold, this is not a new nest.
From of old the house of the buddhas has had six officers. They are all children of the Buddha, and together they do the Buddha's work. Among them the cook is the one whose office is to look after the food for the assembly.
The Rules of the Zen Monastery say: he exists in order to make offering to the assembly. From ancient times the post has been filled by teachers who had the mind of the way and by men of high resolve who had raised the aspiration. It is practising the way, all of a piece. A man with no mind for the way will labour and suffer over it, and in the end get nothing from it.
The Rules say: put the mind of the way to work; change what you do as the occasion changes; and let the assembly be at ease and get the good of it. In the past Guishan and Dongshan held this office, and so did many other great ancestors. It is not the same thing as being a cook or a steward in the world.
While I was in China, I used my free days to ask former officers and old hands about it, and they told me a little of what they had seen and heard. What they said is the very marrow left to us by the buddhas and ancestors of old who had the way.
You should read the Rules of the Zen Monastery through until you know them, and then listen to the old hands on the details.
Here is a day and a night of the work.
After the midday meal, go to the prior and the steward and draw the materials for tomorrow's rice and gruel — the rice, the vegetables and the rest. Once you have them, guard them as you would your own eyes. Chan master Yong of Baoning said: guard the permanent property of the monastery as your own eyes. Handle them with the same respect you would show food set before the emperor. Raw or cooked, keep that attitude towards all of it.
Then the officers meet in the office and settle what tomorrow will be: what flavours, what vegetables, what kind of gruel. The Rules say that the materials drawn and the number of dishes for the rice and the gruel are to be settled beforehand with the officers of the storehouse — the officers being the prior, the steward, the assistant, the rector, the cook and the labour steward. When the dishes are settled, write them out and post them at the abbot's quarters and outside the monks' hall.
Then set about preparing the next morning's gruel. Wash the rice and prepare the vegetables with your own hands and your own eyes on them, working with diligence and a sincere mind. Do not for one instant be slack or careless. Do not attend to one thing and let another go. Do not let a single drop out of the ocean of merit; do not fail to add a single grain of dust to the mountain of good.
The Rules say: if the six tastes are not right and the three virtues are not there, the cook is not serving the assembly properly.
Watch the rice, and watch for the grit in it. Look carefully, again and again, and do not let your mind wander from it. Then the three virtues will be complete of themselves and the six tastes will all be there.
When Xuefeng was cook under Dongshan, he was washing rice one day. Dongshan asked him: do you strain out the sand and keep the rice, or strain out the rice and keep the sand?
Xuefeng said: I throw out sand and rice together.
Dongshan said: then what will the assembly eat?
Xuefeng turned the basin over.
Dongshan said: some day you will meet another man, and he will settle it for you.
That is how the men of high resolve of the old days who had the way did this work — with their own hands, and with exactness. How can those of us who come later be casual about it? The old ones used to say: for the cook, the mind of the way turns on rolling up his sleeves.
If any grit gets thrown out with the rice, pick it out yourself. The Rules say: when you are preparing food, look at it yourself, and it will be clean of itself.
Do not throw away the white water the rice was washed in. In the old days they used a cloth bag to strain it. Put the water for the gruel into the pot, and then look after it: do not let mice get at it or let idle passers-by handle it.
While the gruel is cooking, see to the vegetables, and then to the other dishes. Take the bowls and buckets and the utensils that will be used at the midday meal today, wash them with real care until they are clean, and put them all where they belong. What belongs high, put high; what belongs low, put low. High things settle at the high level, low things at the low. Tongs and ladles, everything of that kind — bring them all together, handle them with a true mind, and put them down gently.
Then attend to the materials for tomorrow's midday meal. Pick out any weevils, green beans, chaff, dust, grit or stones in the rice. While you are picking over the rice and the vegetables, the attendants chant a sutra and dedicate it to the god of the stove.
Then see to the vegetables and the rest of the material, according to what the storehouse has issued. Never mind whether it is much or little; never mind whether it is coarse or fine. Only prepare it with sincerity. Above all do not let your face show anything or your mouth say anything about how much or how little of it there is.
Through the whole day and the whole night, let things come to your mind and let your mind go back to them. Be one with the thing, and put the same effort into the way. Before midnight, look after what is wanted at dawn; after midnight, get on with making the gruel.
When the gruel is finished for the day, wash the pot, steam the rice and prepare the soup. While the rice for the midday meal is soaking, the cook is not to leave the sink. Watch it with a clear eye and do not waste a single grain. Wash it properly, put it in the pot, light the fire and steam it.
There is an old saying: treat the pot as your own head, and treat the water as your own life.
When the rice is steamed, put it in the basket and then into the tub and set it on the stand, and see to the vegetables and the soup. The cook is to be there in person while the rice is steaming and while the soup is being prepared. He may set the attendants, or the servants, or the fire-tender to handle the utensils. In the big monasteries lately there are rice-officers and soup-officers, but they work under the cook. In the old days there were no such officers; the cook managed the whole of it.
In handling any material at all, do not look at it with ordinary eyes and do not think about it with ordinary feelings. Take up a single blade of grass and build a sanctuary for the treasure-king; enter a single mote of dust and turn the great wheel of the dharma.
So when you make a soup out of the coarsest greens, do not let a mind of dislike or contempt or carelessness come up. When you make a soup rich with cream, do not let a mind of delight and pleasure come up. If you have no attachment, how can you have any aversion? So although you are handling something coarse, be in no way slack about it; although you come across something fine, be all the more diligent with it.
Above all, do not change your mind because the thing has changed, and do not change your words because of who is in front of you. That is not a man of the way.
Rouse your resolve and give it your whole mind, and aim to be cleaner than the men of old and more exact than those who went before. The way to do it is to put the working of your mind into the thing itself. The old cooks made a feast out of three coins' worth of greens. Today, with the same three coins, we should make a soup as rich as cream.
That is hard to do. Why? Because then and now are utterly different, and heaven and earth lie between them. How could we stand shoulder to shoulder with those men? And yet, when you go about the work closely and exactly, you can come to see further than the old masters themselves. The only reason that is not clear to you yet is that your thoughts fly about like a wild horse and your feelings gallop off like a monkey in the trees. Let the monkey and the horse once take a step back and turn their light inward, and it all becomes a single piece. That is how you, who are pushed about by things, can push things about instead.
Handle the food, then, and make it clean, and do not lose the one eye. Take up a single stalk of greens and make it into the sixteen-foot golden body of the Buddha; take the sixteen-foot golden body and make it into a single stalk of greens. This is the working of miracles and the work of transformation; it is the Buddha's work and it benefits living beings.
When the food is ready, close your eyes and count carefully. How many are on the platforms in the hall; how many are former officers and old hands; how many are living apart; how many are pensioners and old men retired; how many are on leave; how many wandering monks are passing through; how many travelling bags are hanging inside, which tells you how many guests. Go over it and go over it again. If there is the smallest doubt in it, ask the hall office, or the head monks, or the officers, and clear the doubt away.
And here is a riddle to count by. Eat one grain of rice and add one grain of rice. Split one grain and you get two halves, or three parts, or four; put the two halves back together and it is one grain again. Add nine parts, and how many are left over? Take nine parts away, and how many does he have? Eat one grain of the famous rice of Luling and you see old master Guishan; add one grain of Luling rice and you see the water buffalo he said he would be reborn as. The water buffalo eats Guishan; Guishan pastures the water buffalo.
Have I got the measure of it? Have you got the count of it? Not until you have gone over it and checked it and it is perfectly clear. Then speak as the moment asks, and say it straight to the man in front of you.
Do this work as though the second and third day were the first, and do not forget it for a moment.
When a donor comes to the monastery and gives money for a feast, the officers are to consult together over that too, which is the old custom of the monasteries. Share out what has been given by common agreement. Do not encroach on another's authority or confuse the offices.
When the meal has been properly prepared and set out on the table, the cook puts on his robe, spreads his sitting-cloth, faces the monks' hall, offers incense and makes nine full bows. Only after the bows is the food sent in.
A whole day and night spent preparing the rice and the gruel, with no time idled away and everything really made ready — every movement of it becomes of itself the work of nurturing the sacred embryo. To step back and turn yourself around is exactly the way by which the whole assembly comes to be at ease.
It is a long time now since the name of the buddha-dharma was first heard in our country of Japan. But that the food of the monks should be made according to the dharma is something nobody before us wrote down; as for the nine bows before the monks' food, it has not been seen even in a dream. People in this country talk about the food of monks as though it were the way animals feed. It is genuinely pitiable. How has it come to this?
When I was at Tiantong, a monk of that district held the office of cook. One day after the midday meal I was going along the east corridor towards my quarters, and the cook was in front of the buddha hall drying things in the sun. He had a bamboo staff in his hand and no hat on his head. The sun was blazing and the paving was scorching, and the sweat ran off him as he went up and down working at it. He was clearly having a hard time of it. His backbone was bent like a bow and his eyebrows were as white as a crane's.
I went up to him and asked how old he was. He said: sixty-eight.
I said: why do you not get the attendants or a workman to do it?
He said: other people are not me.
I said: you are quite right, sir. But the sun is so hot — why do it now?
He said: when, if not now?
I said no more. As I walked on along the corridor I began to feel, deep down, how essential this office is.
Again, in the fifth month of the sixteenth year of Jiading, the year of the sheep, I was at Qingyuan, and I was talking with the ship's master aboard the vessel when an old monk came up. He was about sixty-one. He came straight aboard and asked the master to sell him some Japanese mushrooms.
I invited him to take tea and asked him where he was from. He said: I am a man of western Shu. I left my home country forty years ago, and I am sixty-one this year. I have been round a fair number of monasteries. Some years ago I was living at Guyun, and then I got a place at Ayuwang, and I have muddled along there. Last year, when the summer retreat ended, I was made cook of that monastery. Tomorrow is the fifth day, and I have nothing good at all to offer. I wanted to make a noodle soup, and I had no mushrooms, so I came specially to buy some to offer to the monks who have come from every quarter.
I asked him when he had left the monastery. He said: after the midday meal.
I said: how far is Ayuwang from here?
He said: thirty-four or thirty-five miles.
I said: and when will you go back?
He said: as soon as I have bought the mushrooms.
I said: we have met today without expecting it, and we are talking here on the ship. Is that not a good connection? Let me make an offering of a meal to you, reverend cook.
He said: I cannot. If I am not there to manage tomorrow's offering it will not be done properly.
I said: surely there is somebody else in the monastery who understands the rice and the gruel? What is missing if the cook alone is not there?
He said: I have held this office in my old age. It is the practice of the way of an old man. How could I hand it over to somebody else? Besides, when I came out I did not get leave to stay a night.
I asked him again: reverend sir, at your age, why do you not sit and practise the way, or study the sayings of the old masters, instead of troubling yourself with the office of cook and just doing chores? What is the good of it?
He laughed out loud and said: my good foreigner, you have not yet understood what practising the way is, and you do not yet know what words are.
When I heard him say that I was suddenly ashamed and startled. I asked him: what are words? What is practising the way?
He said: if you do not stumble over what you are asking, you will be the man for it.
I did not understand him then. He said: if you have not got it yet, come to Ayuwang some day and we will talk over the principle of words.
With that he got up and said: it is getting late and I must hurry. And he went off home.
In the seventh month of the same year, when I was staying at Tiantong, that cook came to see me. He said: when the retreat ended I gave up being cook and I am going home. I happened to hear the brothers say that you were here. How could I not come and see you?
I was delighted and moved, and while we were talking I brought up what he had said that day on the ship about words and practising the way.
He said: a man who studies words does it in order to know what words are; a man who works at practising the way does it in order to affirm what practice is.
I asked him: what are words?
He said: one, two, three, four, five.
I asked him: what is practising the way?
He said: nothing in the whole world is hidden.
We talked of a good many other things, which I will not set down here. That I know a little of what words are and what practice is, I owe to that old man.
I told my late master, Myozen, about all this, and he was extremely pleased.
Later I came across a verse Xuedou wrote for a monk:
One word, seven words, three words, five words — you may search the ten thousand things to the bottom and none of them is the ground of it. At midnight, the moon white, down over the blue sea: hunting for the dragon's pearl, and how many pearls there turn out to be.
What that cook said the year before about words and what Xuedou shows here agree exactly, and I know all the better that he was a true man of the way. So the words I had been looking at until then were one, two, three, four, five; and the words I look at today are six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Brothers who come after, look at this side from that side and at that side from this side, and go about it in that way, and you will get the one flavour of Zen in words. If you do not, you will be poisoned by the five mixed flavours of Zen that are sold everywhere, and you will not be able to prepare the food of the monks with a good hand.
Whoever holds this office should hold to three minds: the joyful mind, the parental mind, and the magnanimous mind.
The joyful mind is the mind that is glad. Think: if I had been born in the heavens I would be stuck in pleasure without a break, I would not raise the aspiration, and practice would not be convenient — much less would I be making food as an offering to the three treasures. Of all things in the world the three treasures are the most honourable and the most excellent. The king of the gods is no comparison, and the greatest emperor on earth is nothing beside them. The Rules say: honoured in the world, at leisure beyond things, pure and unconditioned — of all these the assembly of monks is first.
Now I have been born a human being, luckily, and I am making the food that the three treasures will use. Is that not a great connection? It is a thing to be very glad about.
Think again: if I had been born in hell, or as a hungry ghost, or as an animal, or as a fighting demon, or in any of the eight conditions where the Buddha's teaching cannot be heard, then although I might have wanted the shelter of the monastic community, I could not with these hands have made pure food as an offering to the three treasures; my body and mind would be bound and suffering in that vessel of suffering. In this life I can already do it. This is a birth to be glad of; this is a body to be glad of. It is a good connection made across a vast stretch of ages; it is merit that will not rot. Take ten thousand lives and a thousand lives and gather them into this one moment, and do the work in it. That is how to bind a good connection for bodies through ten thousand lives.
A mind that sees this clearly is the joyful mind. Truly, even if you were born the greatest emperor on earth, if you do not make food as an offering to the three treasures it comes to nothing in the end; it is only froth on water, a bubble, a flame.
The parental mind is the mind of a mother and father. It is to hold the three treasures in mind as parents hold an only child in mind. However poor and hard-pressed they are, they raise that one child with all their strength. What that feeling is like, no outsider knows; only a man who has become a father, or a woman who has become a mother, knows it. They do not care whether they themselves are rich or poor; they think only of the child growing up. They do not mind their own cold, and they cover the child. There is nothing in it but the closest and most urgent care.
Only a man who has raised such a mind knows it; only a man who is used to such a mind understands it. So look after the water, look after the grain, with all the tenderness of raising a child.
Our great teacher Shakyamuni gave up twenty years of the life due to him so as to shelter us in the last age. What did he mean by it? Nothing but the parental mind. He was not looking for any result from it, and he was not looking for wealth.
The magnanimous mind is a mind that is like a great mountain and like the great sea: it takes no side and it belongs to no party. It picks up an ounce and does not call it light; it lifts a pound and does not call it heavy. It does not go chasing after spring because of the sound of spring, and although it sees the colours of autumn it has no autumn mind about them. It puts the four seasons into one scene and looks at light and heavy with the same eye.
At this point you should write the character for "great." You should know the character for "great." You should study the character for "great." If the cook at Jiashan had not studied the character for "great," he could not have laughed the laugh that saved a man. If Chan master Guishan had not written the character for "great," he could not have blown three times on the dead ashes and found a live coal. If Dongshan had not known the character for "great," he could not have wrapped the whole of Buddhism up in three pounds of hemp for a monk who asked him what the Buddha was.
You should know that all the great teachers who came before us learned the character for "great" on the tips of a hundred blades of grass, and now, freely, they make the great sound and speak the great meaning and take up the great matter and bring great people to completion. All of it is that one great matter and its causes.
Abbots, officers, head monks, and monks of the assembly — who among you would ever forget these three minds?
Recorded in the spring of the third year of Katei, the year of the rooster, and shown to gentlemen who study the way hereafter.
Recorded by the monk Dogen, abbot and transmitter of the dharma at Kannon-dori Kosho Horin Zen monastery.