The Ten Thousand Things
On being open to the moment when it happens ...
1. The Ten Thousand Things
That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things, is called delusion;
That the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self, is called enlightenment.
Dōgen
The central question for me, always — am I going forth? Am I staying open to whatever the ten thousand things are bringing me? Or am I smearing my own expectations, narratives, on what’s in front of me?
I touched on this a bit in the last newsletter, about tourism. About the kind of tourists who go forth to experience the thing they expect to experience. Who seem to be impervious to surprise. To the things of the world arising toward them.
Graduate school was, overall, not a good experience for me, but what was good, was getting to hang out with Gary Snyder, and the course he taught at UC Davis on Zen in Ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry. It was one of those seminars where half the participants are other professors. Gary basically came in once a week, gave us a dharma talk, and then we looked at Classical Chinese and Japanese poems. It was worth every awful thing I went through in 8 years. That class alone.
This is where I encountered Dōgen, as well as had a chance to really examine, with a bunch of very smart people, what an art might look like that leaves enough space between the thing itself and the grabby human self, for us to experience that gap, that essential gap we need in order to see, once again, that the grabby human self is not the world. The world is the world.
I’ve lived with this Dōgen quote above my desk, written on an index card, for so long that to me it seems self-evident, but perhaps we should take a moment to put Dōgen into context. “The 10,000 things” is a Taoist concept that is expressed through the idea of tzu-jan, self + thus, self-so, self-arising. As David Hinton notes in his introduction to The Wilds of Poetry:
… tzu-jan is meant to describe the ten thousand things emerging spontaneously from the generative source, each according to it’s own nature, independent and self-sufficient, then eventually dying and returning to that source, only to reappear transformed into other self-generating forms. That source is Tao…
This is why the Tao is often represented by water. We’re all used to water changing forms, from stream to lake to ice to vapor to clouds to rain to stream again. But we also understand that all these forms are expressions of water nature.
Taoism and Zen are intertwined, especially in their emphasis on meditation practice where we discover, by sitting, that we are not our thoughts and feelings. Our thoughts and feelings are separate from us, arising like water vapor. On the cushion we watch them appear and go, appear again and go, appear once more and go.
If we sit long enough, we may achieve moments of “empty mind” where we are able to watch this happen, without grasping at the notion that those thoughts, those feelings, those bits of self floating past, are in some fundamental way us.
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