Entering the Heart of the Buddha (tHotBT Ch 1)

For the Sweeping Pine book club, we are currently reading Thich Nhat Hanh's book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. This week's talk is some reflections the first chapter: Entering the Heart of the Buddha.

Some Specific Passages

Anchoring the emphasis of the Buddhist project directly on dukkha / suffering (although he never actually uses the word dukkha in this chapter!):

For fourty-five years, the Buddha said, over and over again, "I teach only suffering and the transformation of suffering."

He reminds us that suffering is not simply "bad" in a one-sided way: the existence of our suffering is a "holy" (or "noble") truth and the very root of our practice:

Your suffering and my suffering are the basic condition for us to enter the Buddha's heart

And:

Please don’t run away from your suffering. Embrace it and cherish

In Dialog with Dogen

In Shoji (Dogen's short fascicle on birth-and-death) Dogen says:

This life-and-death is just the sacred life of buddha. If we hate it and want to get rid of it, that is just wanting to lose the sacred life of buddha. If we stick in it, if we attach to life-and-death, this also is to lose the sacred life of buddha.

Look how similar! "Please don't run away from your suffering" as it "is just the sacred life of Buddha". With "understanding and compassion" (and practice), we can heal the wounds in our hearts.

Thay presents a "living Buddha" whom we can go to with our suffering and who will help us transform it:

Go to the Buddha, sit with him, and show him your pain.

This Buddha is a Mahayana Buddha, a Buddha that is within us:

When we recognize and acknowledge our own suffering, the Buddha - which means the Buddha in us - will look at it, discover what has brought it about, and prescribe a course of action that can transform it into peace, joy, and liberation.

In Dialog with Dogen

Dogen's Bussho fascicle deconstructs the language of "containers" that leads to "a Buddha within us." Specifically, Dogen's does one of his creative re-readings of: issai shujō shitsu-u busshō ("All living beings totally have Buddha-nature"): treating shitsu-u not as "all have" but as "whole-being", leading to something like:

All living beings are the Total Existence of Buddha-nature

See the footnotes of the NishijimaGudo Wafu Nishijima (西嶋愚道和夫) (November 29, 1919 - January 28, 2014) practiced Zen Buddhism for over seventy years, taught students from around the world, founded the group known as "Dogen Sangha", and translated Buddhist texts from Japanese and Sanskrit, including Dogen's ninety-five-fascicle Kana… Read more about Nishijima » / Cross translation for why they chose "Total Existence" as their preferred English rendering.

So perhaps in Soto we might speak of Buddha that we are not separate from, or perhaps Buddha that we can directly manifest by taking the actions of Buddha. In this way, we take our suffering and practice with, allow it to transform: because (as NishijimaGudo Wafu Nishijima (西嶋愚道和夫) (November 29, 1919 - January 28, 2014) practiced Zen Buddhism for over seventy years, taught students from around the world, founded the group known as "Dogen Sangha", and translated Buddhist texts from Japanese and Sanskrit, including Dogen's ninety-five-fascicle Kana… Read more about Nishijima » might say) reality is only truly available in action, not in idealism.

And if the difference between a Buddha within us vs we are the total existence of Buddha feels like semantics, it perhaps is: representing a difference in focus rather than a difference in kind.