How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment by Dogen & Roshi Kosho Uchiyama

Author:Dogen & Roshi, Kosho Uchiyama [Roshi, Kosho Uchiyama]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2005-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

Making Life Calculations

I have been discussing the teachings of Dōgen Zenji whereby in this world of impermanence and cause and effect we are to prepare the gruel for tomorrow as this evening’s work. Although we no longer go about anticipating some future happiness or goal, we live out our lives with our present direction clearly defined. This is a truly essential life-attitude.

While usually we spend most of our time chasing after money, a good reputation, or happiness, and place the meaning of our lives in the pursuit of these things, ironically, it is within this very pursuit that we suffer. What we are actually doing is setting up and comparing our present lives with goals such as money, fame, and happiness. Wanting money is premised on the assumption that we think ourselves to be poor now. We desire to become famous or be recognized because we feel we were born of low status. And we seek happiness because we have fixed on the idea that we are not happy now. While pursuing these goals we place our present life in contrast to them. In effect, our lives become dependent on these goals, so that there is no way for us to truly give expression to our lives.

In this context, giving expression to life means that a violet blooms as a violet and a rose as a rose. However, we are apt to start thinking that despite the fact that we happen to be a violet we want to bloom like a rose because we think roses are beautiful. By pursuing this sort of foolishness, we go about presuming to be unhappy. Men put up a front by pretending to be something they are not, while women spend hours preening themselves trying to look like roses when they are violets, or vice versa. Since we are only who we are, we become lonely by trying to make ourselves into something we are not. Some people who see through their own pretentiousness develop an inferiority complex or neurosis and wind up in a mental institution without ever opening the flower of their own nature.

Why is it that prior to World War II sanitoriums for patients with tuberculosis were overcrowded, while today mental institutions are flourishing? I think one reason for this, at least in Japan, is because so many people who had been accustomed to a bucolic life rushed into the cities where the life style was so gay and luxurious. Many of these people became mesmerized by the neon lights and confused by all the activity, and frittered away their lives in pursuit of some strange delusions with which to satisfy their own vanity. I cannot help feeling that the teaching of Buddhism as an attitude or posture of living the life of the Self without trying to juggle one’s present life around the pursuit of some future goal is especially significant for today’s generation. In this present “age of the masses,” if we become absent-minded for even a little bit, we are very likely to get torn apart by the difficulty of having to make choices.

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