“The essential method of cleansing is difficult to fathom. The method is itself the essential meaning. Attaining the way is the method.”

It is not that there is only one way. It is also not that there is every imaginable way. There is only one way: the way of doing all things is the doing from the inside. Doing from the outside is doing with thinking, and this is not the way. The correct way is neither normative nor anarchy. To do something correctly there is not doing, but only the being-doing. Doing something correctly means no boundary between the object and the self and the action.

There is a story of Michelangelo sitting and staring at the faulty piece of marble that would become The David for days on end. He was asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for what’s inside.” He was becoming the marble.

His sculpting is the becoming, the being-doing Dogen is describing in the ritual of defecation and wiping. For Dogen, wiping your butt was as holy as sculpting The David. The rules of the cleansing neither matter nor can be discarded. How will you pay attention as if your life depends on it without rules? If you can do so there are no rules. “The method itself is the essential meaning.” Nothing to see here – move along into your own self.

If you go to the Academia and look at Michelangelo’s David, you first walk through the incomplete works of his other sculptures. To go from seeing these partially done chunks of stone – a little here, a little there – done in fits and starts and with the notion there was nothing more to say on this day, but that there would be more, much more on some other day …

To turn from those to seeing the perfectly accomplished monument to humanity at the end of the hall is to see someone at work toiling with process and the imperfections of each second-to-second-to-second to seeing God standing at the end of the hall. At once complete and perfect, without the hint of the struggle of the work, even as if effort and progress toward the end in front of you is an inconceivable concept … it is intoxicating and magical and makes one forget the effort of life. Before perfection, struggle; after perfection, struggle. But the other perfection you see lies and says, “no, in this marble you can exist in perfection eternally”

It also asks you – DARES you thus: “Can you perfect your idea?” And that dare comes even before the thoughts about the subject matter itself … perhaps that is the final genius of the work and the artist … and, also, perhaps that is only the story I create. Regardless, if there was a single human creation to be saved for the future species to understand us, this is the piece. Some equations of physics, some Bach, and this marble. And, of course, there is Cleansing.

Dogen says you are your own creation in progress. Perfect it with every breath, every spoon to mouth, every wiping. “The method itself is the essential meaning.”

“Cleansing”, from Dogen: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Kasuaki Tanahashi Ed. Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachusetts, 2010.

Lisa Feldman-Barrett says our brain’s job is to predict what is going to happen next in the world so we can appropriately allocate resources. Run and hide, stay still, or relax quietly with friends: our ability to successfully decide which is essential for our survival. Kahneman says our brain accomplishes this in two ways: making up stories (System 1) and solving problems (System 2). The problem is we make up stories about the world in front of us for best fit, or most plausible, rather than scrutinize for accuracy. We don’t want to solve problems, cause that takes effort, so we make up stories and proofread them with Sys2 for egregious errors. Part of what fits or seems plausible to us, however, is based on the stories we have constructed in the past. And those stories, since they are not entirely accurate, but only had to be close enough, are filled with inaccuracies that become biases. Worse, biases are formed simply by sloppy story telling to begin with … and there you have the recursive loop of suffering Dogen calls “picking and choosing”.

This is not a bad thing. It just is the thing our brains do – make up stories about the world for our survival. The problem isn’t the suffering it causes – the problem is how good it is. We are FANTASTIC story tellers. It seems to me that most creativity derives simply from the ability of the conscious mind (Kahneman’s System 2) to spur the fabricating mind (System 1) on and on. This explains why so many creative artists gravitate toward substances, or lifestyles that are somewhat out of the norm. They are stoking System 2 to spur System 1 (the Storyteller). “Go farther, and farther, make up more!” Sys2 says, and only later edits in ways that can catalyze even more from Sys1. Creativity is the great byproduct of how our minds work, and the fundamental beauty of that is we have used stories for all of humanity to bind us together as families, tribes, societies and civilizations. We are the great storytellers of the Universe, through music, art, physics, and every other realm.

But that is just the story that makes sense to me. I don’t really know.

You see, that is how it works. And Shakyamuni’s revelation was that our delight in the stories we tell, when anything more than fleeting, causes suffering one way or another. Dogen, to me, is like a great acting teacher. Stop reading the story, stop writing the story, and be the story, he says, over and over again. Just be the story of the meal, the cleaning up, the holding of hands, the music (actually Dogen didn’t appear to be much for music) … whatever it is, just be the story and let someone else witness it. This is a deceptively difficult proposition, precisely because our poor brains will keep making up stories as they cannot help but do.

Zazen is the exercise of stepping into your own story, not picking or choosing the one you want, but just stepping into the story you are.

References:

Feldman Barrett, Lisa: How emotions are made. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2017.

Kahneman, Daniel: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.