[A talk delivered by Rev. Steve Kanji Ruhl for Green River Zen Center on July 2, 2024]
I’ve been asked to speak about Dogen and “genjokoan,” and I’ll start by sharing some dharma talks that Dogen gave, collected in the Eihei Koroku.
The first one was delivered to his monastics in 1241 at Kosho-ji in Fukakusa, Japan. Here it is, in its entirety:
“Everybody should just wholeheartedly engage in this genjokoan ‘Full manifestation of ultimate reality.’ What is this genjokoan? It is just all buddhas in the ten directions and all ancestors, ancient and present, and it is fully manifesting right now. Do you all see it? It is just our present rolling up the curtain and letting down the curtain, and getting up and getting down from the sitting platform. Why don’t you all join with and practice this excellent genjokoan? Today this mountain monk, without begrudging my life or my eyebrows, for the sake of all of you expounds this again and repeatedly.”
Dogen pounded the floor with his staff and immediately got down from his seat.
This talk also was delivered to his monastics in 1241, again in its entirety:
“Buddha ancestors turn fifty-thousand somersaults.
The genjokoan is [“The koan is manifested”] in a hundred thousand pieces.
One blade of grass erects temples in the ten directions.
Without expectation, cloud and water monks manage to arrive.”
And this talk was delivered in 1248 or 1249:
“This patch-robed monk’s staff is as black as lacquer.
It is not in the class of ordinary worldly wood,
but breaks apart traps and snares, as genjokoan [“and actualizes reality”].
In the snow, a plum blossom suddenly opens on a branch tip.”
Dogen gave these talks around the same time as his “Fukazazengi,” and eight years after writing the “Genjokoan” fascicle of his Shobogenzo – both of which we’ll get to a bit later.
But we see that for about 15 years, while addressing many other topics, Dogen came back numerous times to the theme of genjokoan, and this evening we’ll get an understanding of why this was so important to him.
First, before we do that, we need to make a brief digression. We need to address the issue of translation. We can never just claim that “Dogen said this” or “Dogen said that,” because the translations vary widely. For example, how do we translate the simple phrase “genjokoan” into English – let alone into Italian, Russian, or Swahili? Here are some of the most common English translations of the medieval Japanese term “genjokoan”:
Incidentally, in contemporary Japanese, “genjo” means “present condition” and “koan” simply means “idea.”
It might seem that I’m belaboring this point about translation, and that it’s academic and irrelevant, but it’s not – because in talking about Dogen and genjokoan, or anything else in Ch’an or Zen Buddhism, first we have to be aware that there’s no definitive “meaning” in English, only interpretations. We need to apply what scholars call a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” being skeptical and questioning, and moving in a realm of uncertainty.
When I was in the Master of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School, to graduate I needed to demonstrate intermediate-level writing, reading, and speaking fluency in my theological language – and because I’m a Zen practitioner, my theological language was Japanese. I translated the first chapter of Shunryo Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners’ Mind from English into Japanese, and I translated a chapter of a Soto Zen manual from Japanese into English, and I realized that the written characters of Japanese exist in a charged energetic relationship to each other, and also in a field of indeterminacy – that’s how it works; that’s the magic of it – so that to take the words “snow / plum / blossom / lonely (or isolated, or withdrawn) / falling” and impose a rigid English syntax of noun, verb, object on them damages the original fluidity and the depth of possibilities.
And as a result, while the five translations of the phrase “genjokoan” that I listed earlier – Actualizing the Fundamental Point; The Realized Universe; Realization of the Ultimate as It Really Is; Koan of Everyday Living; and Full Manifestation of Ultimate Reality – are technically accurate, each in its own way, I don’t think any of them really get to the essence of what Dogen means by “genjokoan.”
And this evening I’ll explain why.
The medieval Japanese word “koan” is an abbreviation for “kofuno an toku,” the Japanese rendering of the Chinese word “kong-an,” meaning a notice board on which new laws were announced to the public in ancient China. And Ch’an teachers adopted this phrase to mean something like “public case,” in which T’ang Dynasty stories of encounters between monks and teachers were presented publicly by monastics in the dharma hall. And then later, as the practice evolved, also in private interviews between teacher and student.
During the Song Dynasty, these stories were collected into volumes that we’ve come to know as the No-Gate Gate, the Blue Cliff Record, the Book of Equanimity, and so on. These formalized classic koans are called “kosoku,” and Dogen brought many of them from China to Japan and used hundreds of them in his talks and writings.
But they began in the Ch’an schools as koans of everyday life – as things said and experienced in the monasteries – and Dogen adapted this original Ch’an sense of koan also, though in doing so he sacralized the activities of everyday life. Washing your face, using the toilet, separating pebbles from rice grains in the kitchen all could become liturgy, become ritual, rendering the everyday life in the monastery as sacred timespace.
Of course, when we speak today of the koans of everyday life, we’re speaking as 21st-century American lay practitioners, as householders, with families and jobs. And this is what we mean by the phrase “genjokoan” – the challenges and opportunities that we fully engage throughout our everyday lives as lay people.
One of my spiritual guidance clients is a woman who was a professional dancer and she’s now physically disabled following a car accident – she recently asked me, “What does it mean to be a dancer with a broken body?” and I told her, “That’s your genjokoan.” And we proceeded to work on that together.
In Eve’s and Egyoku’s wonderful Book of Householder Koans, mine was about the fact that in Divinity School I took several courses on the subject of death and dying which emphasized the importance of helping a person die a “good death.” So when my father lay dying, I was conditioned to think in terms of “this is a good death” or “this is a bad death,” depending on what was happening in the hospital room. At the moment he died, I had the jarring realization that each death is just what it is – completely unique – and beyond the dualism of good and bad.
Today, in the sense of householder koans of everyday living, my genjokoans include how to best maintain my cancer remission, and how to best reconcile my life’s vocation as a writer with the demanding realities of the publishing world. And each of you have your own koans of everyday living, your genjokoans, also.
But in his dharma talks and his writings, Dogen meant something different by “genjokoan.”
He didn’t mean the kosoku tradition of formalized stories of teachers and students in monasteries, and he didn’t mean “koan of everyday life” in the exact way that we mean it, although it’s closely affiliated and not a stretch to get there.
When Dogen refers to “genjokoan” he means “practice-realization of the ordinary moment” – and I have a lot to say about that, but before I do, it’s necessary to make just one more brief digression and explain some important things about the Taoist cosmology that so profoundly shaped Ch’an and Zen. Because without some understanding of the Taoism at the source of our tradition, we’re missing a huge part of Ch’an and Zen, including what Dogen means by “genjokoan.”
When India’s Mahayana Buddhism arrived in China around 70 CE by the Silk Road and the sea route and began to encounter China’s Confucianism and Taoism, over time it turned into something new. In crucial respects it was no longer Indian Buddhism at all. Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism are like a whale and a horse; they share a common evolutionary ancestor but are now utterly dissimilar.
This is especially true in regard to Taoism and its view of the unity of cosmos and consciousness and living in harmony with the Way, the Tao, the flow of nature. In the Taoist cosmology, the universe is a constant dynamic process of emptying and forming, receding and emerging, absenting and presenting, from Dark Enigma into differentiated phenomena and back again, through ceaseless spontaneous unfolding of “wu-wei,” or effortless effort, the action of no-action, all of it functioning by an inner pattern of innate order and all of it suffused with “qi” life force.
The absenting and presenting are not binary opposites but complementary aspects of Reality –like yin/yang. This dynamic process of absenting and presenting – or, as the Heart Sutra describes it, of emptying and forming – pervades all of Ch’an and Zen. It’s part of the world view, taken for granted. It’s like the law of gravity for us – if we drop a book on the floor, we don’t say, “There’s that law of gravity again; the Earth is a massive object, so it exerts a force on objects of lesser mass and pulls them toward the center.” No, we simply take it for granted.
An example of how the Taoist world view of absenting and presenting also was taken for granted: a Ch’an monk enters the teacher’s room for interview. The teacher says, “No!” That’s “wu” in Chinese – meaning not only “no,” but “absence.” As in “wu-wei,” absence-effort. As in Wu-Mon Kon – Absence Gate. In other words, the monk presents himself and the teacher shouts, “Absence!” The teacher is directly pointing to the presenting-absenting relationship.
Another example: in the first koan of that Absence-Gate Gate collection, we read, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” and the answer is, “Mu!” A more precise way of rendering the question would be, “Is a dog presenting Buddha nature?” and the answer “Mu!” – which is the Japanese rendering of the Chinese “wu” – becomes not merely “no” but “Absenting!” Thus, the dog’s Buddha nature is a dynamic process of presenting and absenting, both comprising the whole Reality.
Part of Dogen’s radical brilliance lies in his gift for turning words around to give them new meanings. In the phrase “genjokoan” he takes the word “koan” or “kong-an” – public case – and frees it from its ancient Chinese legalistic context, and also frees it from its standard kosoku context in Ch’an and Zen tradition. For Dogen, the “koan” in “genjokoan” doesn’t refer to classic stories about moments in the lives of T’ang Dynasty Ch’an monks who lived 500 years before he was born; “koan” means this living moment, right now.
Koan means each thing that’s emerging from absence in this moment of presenting itself – through spontaneous generation, in the effortless effort of wu-wei – as itself, as thusness, and thereby making itself public; in fact, making itself a public case. Everything emerging from Dark Mystery into the public light of differentiated phenomena is, for Dogen, a koan, and our practice-realization of the public case of each moment – just this – just this – just this – is genjokoan.
In other words, in those moments when bodymind drops away into absence and we lose the self and are realized by the active presence of the myriad things of the universe, for Dogen, that’s genjokoan, whether we’re monastic or householder.
Practice-realization, or practice-enlightenment, is “shusho-ichi-nyo” in Japanese, and for Dogen it’s central. There’s the practice-realization of sitting on the meditation cushion, in which the experience of zazen is itself the experience of awakening. Dogen rejected what was called “taigo-zen,” or “the meditation of awaiting enlightenment,” and he rejected “shuzen,” or “step-by-step meditation,” meditation to get something, to attain something. In Dogen’s view, we don’t sit on the cushion to become enlightened; rather, because we’re enlightened we sit on the cushion.
For Dogen, Zen meditation is not Indian Buddhist meditation – it’s not sitting with the goal of achieving quiescent stillness of mind, aspiring to ultimately transcend the round of suffering and earthly rebirths and achieve nirvana. It’s not that.
Rather, sitting in zazen on the cushion is practice-realization, practice as realization, not a means to an end, but enlightenment itself, in which we sit with the presenting and absenting of thoughts as they rise and disappear, embodying the Taoist cosmology of absenting and presenting. In doing this, the practice-realization of zazen becomes genjokoan. Just this.
Similarly, for Dogen there’s the practice-realization off the cushion, when we selflessly experience the koan, the public case, of everything emerging from absence and presenting itself in its public-case moment, in its total exertion of itself as itself – manifesting in its “zenki,” or full dynamic energy. For Dogen, koan is not a means to an end, not an expedient, any more than zazen is.
In the standard understanding, a student works on a koan to gain a glimpse of enlightenment. But for Dogen, realizing a koan is genjokoan, is practice-realization, just as zazen is genjokoan. We don’t practice a koan to become enlightened; rather, because we’re enlightened, we practice a koan – and the koan is this very moment of everyday life, as it emerges from dark absence into bright presence and recedes again.
Dogen’s fullest expression of this occurs in the “Fukazazengi,” composed at Kosho-ji in its final form in 1242:
“The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma gate of peace and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated awakening. It is genjokoan [“the koan realized”]; traps and snares can never reach it. If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. For you must know that the true Dharma appears of itself….If you concentrate your effort single-mindedly, that in itself is wholeheartedly engaging the way. Practice-realization is naturally undefiled. Going forward is, after all, an everyday affair.”
Dogen also uses the term “genjokoan” several times in his masterwork collection Shobogeno:
In the fascicle called “Being Time,” or “Uji,” he writes that “mind is the moment of genjokoan [‘actualizing the fundamental point’].”
In the fascicle called “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” or “Sansuigyo,” he writes that “water is genjokoan [‘actualiation of the fundamental point’].”
In the fascicle “Refrain from Unwholesome Action,” or “Shoaku-makusa,” he writes that
“the very moment of doing is genjokoan [‘is realized’}.”
In the fascicle “Three Realms are Inseparable from Mind,” or “Sangai-yu-ishin,” he writes that “the triple world is mind-only is genjokoan [‘the koan realized In life’].”
In the fascicle “Twining Vines,” or “Katto,” he writes that “Buddha ancestors appearing is genjokoan [‘the fundamental point is actualized’].”
But of course the place in Shobogenzo where Dogen focuses on genjokoan is in the fascicle of that name, translated – as we’ve seen – as “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” “The Realized Universe,” “The Koan of Everyday Living,” and so on.
Dogen wrote the “Genjokoan” fascicle of the Shobogenzo in the mid-autumn of 1233 as a parting gift for a student named Koshoyo, who was returning to his home island of Kyushu.
Ironically, the fascicle “Genjokoan” doesn’t say a lot specifically about Dogen’s meaning and teaching of genjokoan, but what he does say is very significant. And although the fascicle is not what we think of as a coherent, integrated essay in the modern sense – it’s more of a collection of reminders for Koshoyo when he’s practicing at home, about the nature of birth and death, time and transition, and so on—nevertheless everything it says does relate to the general theme of genjokoan, even if sometimes obliquely.
Of course, among the famous passages is this one: “To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self (in other words, to absent the self). To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things (in other words, the presenting of myriad things).”
And especially pertinent are these passages:
“There is practice-enlightenment (or practice-realization), which encompasses limited and unlimited life….When you find your place where you are, practice occurs as genjokoan [‘actualizing the fundamental point’]….Here is the place; here the way unfolds….the realization comes forth simultaneously with the full experience of buddha dharma.”
It’s the practice-realization of the ordinary moment.
So, in closing, let’s return full-circle to where we began – and know it for the first time, as T.S. Eliot said. Let’s listen again to the dharma talk that Dogen gave eight years after writing those words in the Shobogenzo:
“Everybody should just wholeheartedly engage in this genjokoan ‘Full manifestation of ultimate reality.’ What is this genjokoan? It is just all buddhas in the ten directions and all ancestors, ancient and present, and it is fully manifesting right now. Do you all see it? It is just our present rolling up the curtain and letting down the curtain, and getting up and getting down from the sitting platform. Why don’t you all join with and practice this excellent genjokoan? Today this mountain monk, without begrudging my life or my eyebrows, for the sake of all of you expound this again and repeatedly.”
Dogen pounded the floor with his staff and immediately got down from his seat.
Today, how do you expound genjokoan again and repeatedly?
I’ve been asked to speak about Dogen and “genjokoan,” and I’ll start by sharing some dharma talks that Dogen gave, collected in the Eihei Koroku.
The first one was delivered to his monastics in 1241 at Kosho-ji in Fukakusa, Japan. Here it is, in its entirety:
“Everybody should just wholeheartedly engage in this genjokoan ‘Full manifestation of ultimate reality.’ What is this genjokoan? It is just all buddhas in the ten directions and all ancestors, ancient and present, and it is fully manifesting right now. Do you all see it? It is just our present rolling up the curtain and letting down the curtain, and getting up and getting down from the sitting platform. Why don’t you all join with and practice this excellent genjokoan? Today this mountain monk, without begrudging my life or my eyebrows, for the sake of all of you expounds this again and repeatedly.”
Dogen pounded the floor with his staff and immediately got down from his seat.
This talk also was delivered to his monastics in 1241, again in its entirety:
“Buddha ancestors turn fifty-thousand somersaults.
The genjokoan is [“The koan is manifested”] in a hundred thousand pieces.
One blade of grass erects temples in the ten directions.
Without expectation, cloud and water monks manage to arrive.”
And this talk was delivered in 1248 or 1249:
“This patch-robed monk’s staff is as black as lacquer.
It is not in the class of ordinary worldly wood,
but breaks apart traps and snares, as genjokoan [“and actualizes reality”].
In the snow, a plum blossom suddenly opens on a branch tip.”
Dogen gave these talks around the same time as his “Fukazazengi,” and eight years after writing the “Genjokoan” fascicle of his Shobogenzo – both of which we’ll get to a bit later.
But we see that for about 15 years, while addressing many other topics, Dogen came back numerous times to the theme of genjokoan, and this evening we’ll get an understanding of why this was so important to him.
First, before we do that, we need to make a brief digression. We need to address the issue of translation. We can never just claim that “Dogen said this” or “Dogen said that,” because the translations vary widely. For example, how do we translate the simple phrase “genjokoan” into English – let alone into Italian, Russian, or Swahili? Here are some of the most common English translations of the medieval Japanese term “genjokoan”:
- Actualizing the Fundamental Point (Tanahashi and team)
- The Realized Universe (Nishijima and Cross)
- Realization of the Ultimate as It Really Is (Sokuo and Shohei)
- Koan of Everyday Living (Kim)
- Full Manifestation of Ultimate Reality (Leighton)
Incidentally, in contemporary Japanese, “genjo” means “present condition” and “koan” simply means “idea.”
It might seem that I’m belaboring this point about translation, and that it’s academic and irrelevant, but it’s not – because in talking about Dogen and genjokoan, or anything else in Ch’an or Zen Buddhism, first we have to be aware that there’s no definitive “meaning” in English, only interpretations. We need to apply what scholars call a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” being skeptical and questioning, and moving in a realm of uncertainty.
When I was in the Master of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School, to graduate I needed to demonstrate intermediate-level writing, reading, and speaking fluency in my theological language – and because I’m a Zen practitioner, my theological language was Japanese. I translated the first chapter of Shunryo Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners’ Mind from English into Japanese, and I translated a chapter of a Soto Zen manual from Japanese into English, and I realized that the written characters of Japanese exist in a charged energetic relationship to each other, and also in a field of indeterminacy – that’s how it works; that’s the magic of it – so that to take the words “snow / plum / blossom / lonely (or isolated, or withdrawn) / falling” and impose a rigid English syntax of noun, verb, object on them damages the original fluidity and the depth of possibilities.
And as a result, while the five translations of the phrase “genjokoan” that I listed earlier – Actualizing the Fundamental Point; The Realized Universe; Realization of the Ultimate as It Really Is; Koan of Everyday Living; and Full Manifestation of Ultimate Reality – are technically accurate, each in its own way, I don’t think any of them really get to the essence of what Dogen means by “genjokoan.”
And this evening I’ll explain why.
The medieval Japanese word “koan” is an abbreviation for “kofuno an toku,” the Japanese rendering of the Chinese word “kong-an,” meaning a notice board on which new laws were announced to the public in ancient China. And Ch’an teachers adopted this phrase to mean something like “public case,” in which T’ang Dynasty stories of encounters between monks and teachers were presented publicly by monastics in the dharma hall. And then later, as the practice evolved, also in private interviews between teacher and student.
During the Song Dynasty, these stories were collected into volumes that we’ve come to know as the No-Gate Gate, the Blue Cliff Record, the Book of Equanimity, and so on. These formalized classic koans are called “kosoku,” and Dogen brought many of them from China to Japan and used hundreds of them in his talks and writings.
But they began in the Ch’an schools as koans of everyday life – as things said and experienced in the monasteries – and Dogen adapted this original Ch’an sense of koan also, though in doing so he sacralized the activities of everyday life. Washing your face, using the toilet, separating pebbles from rice grains in the kitchen all could become liturgy, become ritual, rendering the everyday life in the monastery as sacred timespace.
Of course, when we speak today of the koans of everyday life, we’re speaking as 21st-century American lay practitioners, as householders, with families and jobs. And this is what we mean by the phrase “genjokoan” – the challenges and opportunities that we fully engage throughout our everyday lives as lay people.
One of my spiritual guidance clients is a woman who was a professional dancer and she’s now physically disabled following a car accident – she recently asked me, “What does it mean to be a dancer with a broken body?” and I told her, “That’s your genjokoan.” And we proceeded to work on that together.
In Eve’s and Egyoku’s wonderful Book of Householder Koans, mine was about the fact that in Divinity School I took several courses on the subject of death and dying which emphasized the importance of helping a person die a “good death.” So when my father lay dying, I was conditioned to think in terms of “this is a good death” or “this is a bad death,” depending on what was happening in the hospital room. At the moment he died, I had the jarring realization that each death is just what it is – completely unique – and beyond the dualism of good and bad.
Today, in the sense of householder koans of everyday living, my genjokoans include how to best maintain my cancer remission, and how to best reconcile my life’s vocation as a writer with the demanding realities of the publishing world. And each of you have your own koans of everyday living, your genjokoans, also.
But in his dharma talks and his writings, Dogen meant something different by “genjokoan.”
He didn’t mean the kosoku tradition of formalized stories of teachers and students in monasteries, and he didn’t mean “koan of everyday life” in the exact way that we mean it, although it’s closely affiliated and not a stretch to get there.
When Dogen refers to “genjokoan” he means “practice-realization of the ordinary moment” – and I have a lot to say about that, but before I do, it’s necessary to make just one more brief digression and explain some important things about the Taoist cosmology that so profoundly shaped Ch’an and Zen. Because without some understanding of the Taoism at the source of our tradition, we’re missing a huge part of Ch’an and Zen, including what Dogen means by “genjokoan.”
When India’s Mahayana Buddhism arrived in China around 70 CE by the Silk Road and the sea route and began to encounter China’s Confucianism and Taoism, over time it turned into something new. In crucial respects it was no longer Indian Buddhism at all. Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism are like a whale and a horse; they share a common evolutionary ancestor but are now utterly dissimilar.
This is especially true in regard to Taoism and its view of the unity of cosmos and consciousness and living in harmony with the Way, the Tao, the flow of nature. In the Taoist cosmology, the universe is a constant dynamic process of emptying and forming, receding and emerging, absenting and presenting, from Dark Enigma into differentiated phenomena and back again, through ceaseless spontaneous unfolding of “wu-wei,” or effortless effort, the action of no-action, all of it functioning by an inner pattern of innate order and all of it suffused with “qi” life force.
The absenting and presenting are not binary opposites but complementary aspects of Reality –like yin/yang. This dynamic process of absenting and presenting – or, as the Heart Sutra describes it, of emptying and forming – pervades all of Ch’an and Zen. It’s part of the world view, taken for granted. It’s like the law of gravity for us – if we drop a book on the floor, we don’t say, “There’s that law of gravity again; the Earth is a massive object, so it exerts a force on objects of lesser mass and pulls them toward the center.” No, we simply take it for granted.
An example of how the Taoist world view of absenting and presenting also was taken for granted: a Ch’an monk enters the teacher’s room for interview. The teacher says, “No!” That’s “wu” in Chinese – meaning not only “no,” but “absence.” As in “wu-wei,” absence-effort. As in Wu-Mon Kon – Absence Gate. In other words, the monk presents himself and the teacher shouts, “Absence!” The teacher is directly pointing to the presenting-absenting relationship.
Another example: in the first koan of that Absence-Gate Gate collection, we read, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” and the answer is, “Mu!” A more precise way of rendering the question would be, “Is a dog presenting Buddha nature?” and the answer “Mu!” – which is the Japanese rendering of the Chinese “wu” – becomes not merely “no” but “Absenting!” Thus, the dog’s Buddha nature is a dynamic process of presenting and absenting, both comprising the whole Reality.
Part of Dogen’s radical brilliance lies in his gift for turning words around to give them new meanings. In the phrase “genjokoan” he takes the word “koan” or “kong-an” – public case – and frees it from its ancient Chinese legalistic context, and also frees it from its standard kosoku context in Ch’an and Zen tradition. For Dogen, the “koan” in “genjokoan” doesn’t refer to classic stories about moments in the lives of T’ang Dynasty Ch’an monks who lived 500 years before he was born; “koan” means this living moment, right now.
Koan means each thing that’s emerging from absence in this moment of presenting itself – through spontaneous generation, in the effortless effort of wu-wei – as itself, as thusness, and thereby making itself public; in fact, making itself a public case. Everything emerging from Dark Mystery into the public light of differentiated phenomena is, for Dogen, a koan, and our practice-realization of the public case of each moment – just this – just this – just this – is genjokoan.
In other words, in those moments when bodymind drops away into absence and we lose the self and are realized by the active presence of the myriad things of the universe, for Dogen, that’s genjokoan, whether we’re monastic or householder.
Practice-realization, or practice-enlightenment, is “shusho-ichi-nyo” in Japanese, and for Dogen it’s central. There’s the practice-realization of sitting on the meditation cushion, in which the experience of zazen is itself the experience of awakening. Dogen rejected what was called “taigo-zen,” or “the meditation of awaiting enlightenment,” and he rejected “shuzen,” or “step-by-step meditation,” meditation to get something, to attain something. In Dogen’s view, we don’t sit on the cushion to become enlightened; rather, because we’re enlightened we sit on the cushion.
For Dogen, Zen meditation is not Indian Buddhist meditation – it’s not sitting with the goal of achieving quiescent stillness of mind, aspiring to ultimately transcend the round of suffering and earthly rebirths and achieve nirvana. It’s not that.
Rather, sitting in zazen on the cushion is practice-realization, practice as realization, not a means to an end, but enlightenment itself, in which we sit with the presenting and absenting of thoughts as they rise and disappear, embodying the Taoist cosmology of absenting and presenting. In doing this, the practice-realization of zazen becomes genjokoan. Just this.
Similarly, for Dogen there’s the practice-realization off the cushion, when we selflessly experience the koan, the public case, of everything emerging from absence and presenting itself in its public-case moment, in its total exertion of itself as itself – manifesting in its “zenki,” or full dynamic energy. For Dogen, koan is not a means to an end, not an expedient, any more than zazen is.
In the standard understanding, a student works on a koan to gain a glimpse of enlightenment. But for Dogen, realizing a koan is genjokoan, is practice-realization, just as zazen is genjokoan. We don’t practice a koan to become enlightened; rather, because we’re enlightened, we practice a koan – and the koan is this very moment of everyday life, as it emerges from dark absence into bright presence and recedes again.
Dogen’s fullest expression of this occurs in the “Fukazazengi,” composed at Kosho-ji in its final form in 1242:
“The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma gate of peace and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated awakening. It is genjokoan [“the koan realized”]; traps and snares can never reach it. If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. For you must know that the true Dharma appears of itself….If you concentrate your effort single-mindedly, that in itself is wholeheartedly engaging the way. Practice-realization is naturally undefiled. Going forward is, after all, an everyday affair.”
Dogen also uses the term “genjokoan” several times in his masterwork collection Shobogeno:
In the fascicle called “Being Time,” or “Uji,” he writes that “mind is the moment of genjokoan [‘actualizing the fundamental point’].”
In the fascicle called “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” or “Sansuigyo,” he writes that “water is genjokoan [‘actualiation of the fundamental point’].”
In the fascicle “Refrain from Unwholesome Action,” or “Shoaku-makusa,” he writes that
“the very moment of doing is genjokoan [‘is realized’}.”
In the fascicle “Three Realms are Inseparable from Mind,” or “Sangai-yu-ishin,” he writes that “the triple world is mind-only is genjokoan [‘the koan realized In life’].”
In the fascicle “Twining Vines,” or “Katto,” he writes that “Buddha ancestors appearing is genjokoan [‘the fundamental point is actualized’].”
But of course the place in Shobogenzo where Dogen focuses on genjokoan is in the fascicle of that name, translated – as we’ve seen – as “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” “The Realized Universe,” “The Koan of Everyday Living,” and so on.
Dogen wrote the “Genjokoan” fascicle of the Shobogenzo in the mid-autumn of 1233 as a parting gift for a student named Koshoyo, who was returning to his home island of Kyushu.
Ironically, the fascicle “Genjokoan” doesn’t say a lot specifically about Dogen’s meaning and teaching of genjokoan, but what he does say is very significant. And although the fascicle is not what we think of as a coherent, integrated essay in the modern sense – it’s more of a collection of reminders for Koshoyo when he’s practicing at home, about the nature of birth and death, time and transition, and so on—nevertheless everything it says does relate to the general theme of genjokoan, even if sometimes obliquely.
Of course, among the famous passages is this one: “To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self (in other words, to absent the self). To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things (in other words, the presenting of myriad things).”
And especially pertinent are these passages:
“There is practice-enlightenment (or practice-realization), which encompasses limited and unlimited life….When you find your place where you are, practice occurs as genjokoan [‘actualizing the fundamental point’]….Here is the place; here the way unfolds….the realization comes forth simultaneously with the full experience of buddha dharma.”
It’s the practice-realization of the ordinary moment.
So, in closing, let’s return full-circle to where we began – and know it for the first time, as T.S. Eliot said. Let’s listen again to the dharma talk that Dogen gave eight years after writing those words in the Shobogenzo:
“Everybody should just wholeheartedly engage in this genjokoan ‘Full manifestation of ultimate reality.’ What is this genjokoan? It is just all buddhas in the ten directions and all ancestors, ancient and present, and it is fully manifesting right now. Do you all see it? It is just our present rolling up the curtain and letting down the curtain, and getting up and getting down from the sitting platform. Why don’t you all join with and practice this excellent genjokoan? Today this mountain monk, without begrudging my life or my eyebrows, for the sake of all of you expound this again and repeatedly.”
Dogen pounded the floor with his staff and immediately got down from his seat.
Today, how do you expound genjokoan again and repeatedly?