“It cannot be reached by intellect – much less can those who lack trust or who lack wisdom know it. …. Know that fundamentally you do not lack unsurpassed enlightenment, and you are replete with it continuously. But you may not realize it, and may be in the habit of arousing discriminatory views, and regard them as real. Without noticing, you miss the great way, and your efforts will be fruitless. Such discriminatory views create flowers of emptiness.”

For a man who espouses direct realization, Dogen sure knows how to use a large number of words. It must have been difficult or him to have spent sooo much time with a topic, completely understand it and have no real way to transmit the knowledge to someone else except to say: “Sit still and pay attention. Pretty soon you will get it.” This is, after all, the heart of the matter. Sit still and pay attention. Eventually you will stumble onto your discriminatory views. Where do you begin? Four and a half billion years ago when some membrane formed creating an inside and an outside of a something – was that the first discriminatory act that has led to our delusion, anger and greed? Or was it some parent child quest for pleasing? This is where I begin to understand the Buddha’s teachings because it doesn’t matter what the answer is. He wasn’t interested in finding that answer because he considered it unknowable. The fact is the discrimination, the sense of separate self, the sense that You are somehow not linked to every other aspect of the universe and that You should have something permanent that IS separate from everything else – this is the root of all suffering, all dissatisfaction.

All the reading and writing about it doesn’t bring realization, I can attest to that. Yesterday was a challenge. This, of course, means I was a challenge, because there is nothing to tolerate but me. I was barely patient. There is such a mess to life, to work, that accomplishing something of substance within the mess often seems an insurmountable task. Perhaps the way, for me at least, is to simply keep an eye on the path and expect us to fall off it and keep acting as sheep dog keeping us all together.

I wonder if the border collie is unhappy with the crazy wandering sheep. Is that what Joshu was asking?