The Mountains and Waters Sutra by Shohaku Okumura

Author:Shohaku Okumura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

We need faith in ourselves. To teach this Linji used shouting or hitting — a very direct, violent, and dynamic way.

What Dōgen taught through poetry, using the image of mountains and waters, is the same as what the Buddha taught in Suttanipāta, what Nāgārjuna taught through logic, and what Linji taught through shouting and hitting. These teachings aim to avoid the poison caused by contact between self and myriad things. We do this by letting go of thought in our sitting practice and also by examining our views for distortions and fixed foundations.

Dōgen maintains there is no fixed foundation. When we take a close look at how our views are conditioned, then we can be liberated from our own preferences and cravings. In this practice, we discover that each of us is connected with all beings in the network of interdependent origination. We are living as the person in the mountain whose body is all the mountains.

Although I have been studying this difficult and yet beautiful writing for many years, I have sometimes been overwhelmed. I often wanted to give up. But if we can follow the thread of the teachings from Buddha through Mahāyāna Buddhism and Zen until Dōgen, we can discover the meaning of this wondrous writing for ourselves. We will completely miss the point if we simply read Dōgen and create a fixed philosophy based on our understanding of his writings. If we do that, we create another system of views — another problem. Instead, when we read Dōgen we have to apply his words in our lives, studying the relationship between our self and the myriad things.

This is the end of the questions and answers on dependent origination in the Suttanipāta. But there is another question regarding the stage of purification.

14. “Sir, you have explained to us everything we have asked you about. There is one more question we would like you to answer for us: Do the learned scholars of the world say that this is the highest purification of the individual being or do they say that there is some other kind of goal?”

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