Just One World (samsara and nirvana the same)
In a book called Zen Seeds, written by the Japanese priest Shundo Aoyama, the author, a novice at the time, was asked by a Zen Master, “What does it mean to say ‘Life and death, as they are, is nirvana.’?” When the novice couldn’t answer the question, the Zen Master advised her to return after thirty years of practice and then try to answer. [1]
“Thirty years” of zazen is the conventional period in Zen to wait for enlightenment. So the Zen Master is saying, “You will know the answer to my question when you are enlightened.” Indeed the Zen Master’s question points to the core enlightened insight in Zen, that, to use Suzuki Roshi’s words, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.”[2] Or as Dogen puts it, “Hundreds of grasses and myriad forms – each appearing ‘as it is’ – are nothing but buddha’s true dharma body. . . .”[3] Dogen also says evocatively, “The great ocean has only one taste.”[4]
The fundamental insight that everything is Buddha comes gradually to a zazen practitioner. Maybe it takes thirty years, maybe more or less, but it eventually comes. Again to quote Suzuki Roshi, who says that becoming enlightened is like walking in a fog:
"It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, ‘Oh, this pace is terrible!’ But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog, it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.[5]
You might say that progress is unconscious. To quote Dogen again, “When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas.”[6]
To return to Zen Seeds, Shundo Aoyama also says there, “People who are about to cross the bridge called Buddhism know that the Other Shore is a more splendid world than this mundane, deluded world.”[7] However, when you do get to the Other Shore, as Aoyama Roshi knows, you realize that there is no “Other Shore.” In Zen commentary, the world to be crossed over to the “Other Shore” is called “samsara,” the deluded world; it is contrasted with “nirvana,” the enlightened world. In Zen commentary, you also read that samsara and nirvana are the same things. In an enlightened mind, there are not two worlds, just one wonderful world. The sixth Zen patriarch, Hui-neng, says, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” [8] There is just one great and wonderful world.
Footnotes
- Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds, Shambhala, 2019, p. 117.
- Shunrya Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shambhala, 2011, p. 44.
- Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, New York, 1985, p. 129.
- Ibid., p. 62.
- Shunryu Suzuki, p. 46.
- Dogen, Genjo Koan.
- Shundo Aoyama, p. 129.
- The Platform Sutra.