Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts

Key points

• Precepts aren’t rules, they’re challenges to examine who we are, to be curious and open to all of our experiences.
  • Look deeply into the ways we fail to live up to precept.
  • Welcome what we tend to reject.
• Knowing by being. Insight from genuine understanding.
• They’re not just ethical norms but expressions of enlightened reality.
• Precepts have three parts.
  • Taking a wider, less literal, interpretation of each one.
  • Allowing what is, without judgement, preference, shoulds, success/failure.
  • Complete welcoming, compassionate allowing.
  • Beginning to manifest themselves spontaneously.
• The only way to freedom is through, not around or turning around.
• Whatever we suppress in ourselves we tend to oppress in others.
• Working with others helps us to expose what we hide.
• What’s important for Zen is a (often sudden) realisation of the nature of reality and a (gradual, never-ending) actualisation, embodiment, and integration.

Part One: A Workbook for the Zen Precepts

• Hiding from others what we don’t like about ourselves is separation.
• Bear witness, from a state of not-knowing.

Partner Or Group Exercises

• What are some ways you fail to live up to this precept?
• What are you learning about yourself working on this precept?

1. Non-killing

• Life is everything. At the level of the absolute, non-killing is non-separation.
• Whenever we are self-conscious, we’ve split ourselves in two.
• Welcome all emotions, sensations, and thoughts, with curiosity and compassion.

2. Non-stealing

• Taking something that is not mine, with stealth to not get caught.
• Possessiveness, instead of non-attachment or generosity. From the delusion that we lack, are lacking.

3. Non-misusing Sex

• “Attachment,” “greed,” “grasping”.
• Give up any effort, ideas, control, self-images.

4. Non-lying

• Flattering; exaggerating; blaming.
• Have no complicity with lies: speak up.

5. Non-misusing Intoxicants

• Clouding over of clarity.
• Blaming, analyzing, justifying, and storytelling. Apologising, obsessing, infatuation.
• Being seen the way you want to be seen.
• It’s not the intoxicant itself, but the craving, the being taking away from discomfort.

6. Non-talking About Others’ Errors and Faults

• Not finding faults, not expounding on faults. Notice the implied “should.”
• Ask what motivates the talking.
• Befriend your own faults, compassionately allow them.

7. Non-elevating Oneself and Blaming Others

• There’s ultimately no separation between oneself and others.
• Prohibiting blaming usually sets up more blaming, normally on oneself.
• There’s often big energy in blaming when the blamer wants to do the action themself, but feels prohibited.
• Ask what you’re afraid of, what you’re not tolerating.
• Being a victim is a sneaky form of self-elevating.
• The Way can take us out of blaming, through guilt, into responsibility.

8. Non-being Stingy

• We are always trying to get something, even from our Practice.
• Be fully expressed, be transparent.

9. Non-being Angry

• Suppressing anger is a way of avoiding getting to know it. But so is acting it out.

10. Non-abusing the Three Treasures

• The Three Treasures are the heart of Buddhist teachings, regardless of school, history, or culture.

Part Two: Exploring the Precepts through Dogen’s Nonduality

• Oneness in the sense of an absolute unity. There is nothing else but it, nothing outside it to compare it to.
• The experience of the Absolute is inwardly like wood or stone (motionless), outwardly like the void (without bounds or obstructions).
• In contrast to the whole, the particulars that make up that universe can be experienced both dually and nondually. To experience them nondually is to experience and live the nonduality of duality.
• Some of the deepest spiritual experiences can be with the particulars of everyday life.
• “Intimacy” is used is Zen for: interpenetration of nameless, borderless particulars; interpenetration of any particular form with the formless absolute.
• Being absorbed changes our experience. Looking back, we realise we experiencing nondually, not feeling separate. But not merged or dissolved or disappeared; formless forms, which seems conceptually contradictory.
  • We’re not aware of them, thinking about them, while these experiences occur.
• Nothing is what it is on its own.
• Empty as in: no sides, no bottom, no top.
• Suchness: everything is “just as it is,” nothing added. No added stories, expectations, reactions, shoulds, preferences, or concepts.
• “The Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
• When there are no conceptual boundaries, there is no obstruction to prevent interpenetration or oneness.
  • Interpenetration is mutual nonconceptuality or boundarylessness, hence, freedom from hindrance or obstruction for both subject and object.
• Animals exist is a preconceptual world, which would more appropriately be called “a-conceptual”, whereas the spiritual experience of the nonconceptual is post-conceptual.
• Language, reason, and discrimination are not outside the Way.
• “Mystical” experiences: nondual, nonconceptual glimpses of a reality not graspable by our everyday mind.
• Shikantaza, “just sitting,” as in “nothing else but sitting.” “Not turning away”.
• “Dogen’s zazen is a ritual expression and celebration of awakening already present.”
• The spontaneity associated with Zen is simply a groundless samadhi of self-fulfilling activity. Free of reasons, grounds, goals, or outcomes. Play is the best example.
• Separation is the main source of our own suffering and certainly the source of our causing suffering in others.
• From not to non: both stealing and not stealing have been liberated to become non-stealing.

My notes from Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts by Nancy Mujo Baker.

An Introduction to the Zen Precepts

• I have chosen to present them, as is often done, with non instead of not or don’t before each one.
• important Zen teachings such as emptiness, suchness, interpenetration, no hindrance, or the samadhi of self-fulfilling activity.
• not about how to be “good” and live by the precepts; rather, they challenge us to examine deeply who we are
• a willingness to be open to and curious about every aspect of our experience, deluded or not. This means not thinking about it, whatever it is, but sinking deeper into it in a state of not knowing and total welcoming. This allows insight and genuine understanding to occur. The result is a knowing by being.
• The exercises at the end of each precept talk are a spiritual method based on structured inquiry and are best done with a partner.
• invites us to look deeply into the ways we fail to live up to what each precept asks of us.
• It has three parts: The first involves using one’s imagination to extend the narrower, more literal or conventional meaning of the precept in question to cover much more than we normally think of.
• This is the second part. It is a practice of no preferences, no judgments, no shoulds or shouldn’ts, no ideas of failure. It is a practice of simply allowing what is.
• that the precepts begin to manifest themselves naturally and spontaneously in my life—and this is the third part of this approach,
• the only way to free ourselves from our general shared delusions, our personal conditionings, and the sufferings we cause ourselves and others is by going through them, not by bypassing or rejecting them.
• we can’t let go of something until we know what it is we are hanging on to.
• As Dogen famously said, “To study the self is to forget the self.”
• There is a real danger in the case of the precepts that we use them as a way of avoiding acknowledging the killer, the liar, the stealer, and so forth, in us in our efforts to be “good.”
• whatever we suppress in ourselves we tend to oppress in others.
• the value, and perhaps necessity, of working with others in this inquiry into who we are. This involves exposure of what we hide, which turns out to be a very liberating practice.
• The Diamond Approach has taught me that learning to voluntarily open up with others is a very effective way to start ending the personal version of the distinction between inside and outside, not to mention self and other,
• The main difference is that instead of aspiring to keep the precepts, we look deeply into our failure to do so. It is this practice of allowing and, indeed, welcoming all that we tend to want to reject in ourselves and in others that opens us to oneness and the possibility of the precepts arising naturally and spontaneously.
• The Zen precepts are not thought of as having been developed by human beings as a way of managing our social and moral interactions but rather as having been revealed to Shakyamuni Buddha as intrinsic to the enlightened reality to which he awakened.
• zazen for Dogen is not just some practice we do sitting on a cushion but is enlightenment itself.
• Understanding that the precepts are not just ethical norms but rather expressions of enlightened reality changes our relation to them, such that when we sit in zazen, we have become one with them instead of “following” or “observing” them.
• what I will provisionally call three “levels.”
• The first is a kind of absolute version—absolute in the sense of “never, ever under any circumstances” kill, lie, steal, and so forth.The second, which comes closest to our everyday understanding of morality, always accounts for context, such that, depending on the circumstances, something like killing might sometimes even be the right thing to do.
• The third level is the realm of the absolute.
• Instead, they are—as indicated by Dogen’s saying, “In zazen, what precept is not observed?”—intrinsic to enlightenment, to the enlightened one, as non-stealing, non-lying, and so on.
• “Why?” only makes sense when there is separation between the one who acts and the precept.
• when a precept is the expression of oneness, there is no “Why?” and no “Because…”
• What is important for Zen is the realization or recognition, no matter how it comes to one, of a truth about the nature of reality and the integration of that realization into the life of the body-mind. The realization of any truth is by definition sudden, like “a sudden and unexpected sneeze,” as Dogen puts it, whereas the deep integration, embodiment, or actualization of that realization is a gradual, never-ending process.
• A typical Zen way of describing the revelation or realization is to say that it has to be “experiential” as opposed to merely intellectual.
• The revelation, recognition, or realization of a truth has no experiential content. It’s rather that the experiences “reveal” a truth.
• Such illumination, called “radiant light” (komyo) in Zen, while uncomfortable at first, helps us see what we are hanging on to. It reveals and loosens our attachments to aspects of our conditioning so that conditioning can let go of us.
• Bernie Glassman pushed the envelope on the possibility of triggers by taking his students on street retreats to find out what it was like to be homeless,
• He called these trigger situations “plunges.” We are plunged into situations the ordinary mind and heart cannot encompass. Working with precepts in the way recommended in this book, and doing so in the presence of others, is a plunge.

Part One: A Workbook for the Zen Precepts

Part One Introduction: Working with the Precepts by Acknowledging the Killer in Us

• anything we reject in ourselves, we then reject in others.
• Hiding from others what I don’t like about myself—or any kind of defensive self-protection, even verbal corrections of others’ perceptions of us—is automatic separation. This is why it is so good to work with others.
• We actually isolate ourselves. We close down and cut ourselves off from the whole of reality. We lose a kind of compassionate openness and lightheartedness about our own situation and therefore that of others.

Bearing Witness—How to Work with a Partner or Group

• Opening to oneness with the Zen precepts requires bearing witness, which can be done only in a state of not knowing.
• Can our minds be still and open? This is what is required in working with others on the precepts.
• no judgment, self-protection, or self-promotion.
• not intellectual but, again, a true and total listening to whatever is present, a complete openness, a not knowing and bearing witness to one’s own experience and to the speaking of the other.
• As an academic teacher for many years and as a Zen teacher, I know well the value of repetition. It allows us to see different aspects of the same thing and, most important of all, deepens our understanding.

1 Non-killing Zen Precept #1

• Discussions about what’s right or wrong are important and necessary, but this isn’t our task in this approach to the precepts. Rather, we want to use the precepts as means to consider the various kinds of separation that occur.
• Life is everything.
• Nothing is excluded.
• So, at a very fundamental level, the level of oneness, the level of the absolute, non-killing is really non-separation.
• Learning to pay attention to our sense of separation can teach us a lot here.
• The life of 100 percent, of just sitting, just walking, just eating, just skiing, just making love, or just being myself. Whenever we are self-conscious, we’ve split ourselves in two and taken the life out of whatever activity we’re engaged in.
• To welcome fear, anger, greed, hatred, and all possible negative emotions, sensations, and thoughts gasping for breath in us, and to do so with curiosity and compassion, is to be surprised by freedom, space, love, transformation, and life!
• Any buddha I meet is separate from me and, we might say, is already dead because of my having imagined her separate from me. That kind of buddha can only be an object and hence a conceptualization of something that can’t be conceptualized. Drop it. Kill it. Forget about it. We can only be it.

Non-Killing: Partner Or Group Exercises

Repeating questions: Ask (1) and (2) separately for 10 minutes each. No cross talk.

1. Tell me a way that you kill.
2. Tell me a way that you experience maintaining the wisdom life of Buddha.

Monologue: 15 minutes each. No cross talk.

What are you learning about yourself working on this precept?

Discuss together as long as you like.

2 Non-stealing Zen Precept #2

• We tend to oversimplify the phenomenon of stealing.
• Stealing is taking something that is not mine and doing so with stealth so as not to get caught.
• stealing can seem remote from our everyday lives, especially when we associate it only with what is illegal or criminal.
• the great variety of noncriminal ways in which we steal, and how “mine” or “not mine” show up in our experience.
• One of the marks of the enlightened person is being satisfied.
• there is the feeling of being stolen from
• Most of the time we hide it and we know it. This is stealth.
• But still somewhere in all of us there is a moment of shame when we turn away from discarded paper on the street or a bottle or a can that we could have easily picked up.
• there is some kind of possessiveness going on, when there could be non-attachment or even generosity.
• when we steal from the past or the future, we are actually stealing from the present—from its fullness, its hereness, its richness.
• We suffer from the delusion that we lack something, and as a result, we are not satisfied.

Non-Stealing: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me something you steal.
2. What kind of lack do you experience?

Monologue: What are you learning about yourself working on this precept?

3 Non-misusing Sex Zen Precept #3

• What causes the misconduct and the impurity has been translated as “attachment,” “greed,” “grasping,” and “desire.”
• The practice of trying to be present from moment to moment is to give up any goal. It is to give up any effort, ideas, control, self-images. It is to be fully in touch with that sacred energy and the generous sharing of it with another.

Non-Misusing Sex: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me a way you have misused sexuality.
2. Tell me a way you experience “the fire of creation.”

Monologue: What are you learning about yourself working on this precept?

4 Non-lying Zen Precept #4

• As adults practicing with the fourth precept, non-lying, it’s important not to have a narrow view of lying.
• We lie personally to each other and to ourselves.
• We need to use our imagination to extend the narrower, more literal meaning of the precept in question to cover much more than we normally think of. We do this in order to find the right version for our own practice and to make the precept come alive for each of us.
• it is also important not to treat the precepts as moral principles—shoulds and shouldn’ts—independent of us and thus fodder for our superegos.
• some examples of the ways in which we fail to tell the truth: flattering; exaggerating; blaming;
• Robert Aitkin Roshi says that no lying means “no complicity with lies.” This refers to a very important failure to tell the truth—namely, the failure to speak up.
• Fully facing, getting to know, and actually welcoming the various kinds of liar that we are gives us a taste of not excluding anything, a taste of no inside, no outside.
• It is a practice of no preferences, no judgments, no shoulds or shouldn’ts, no ideas of failure. It is a practice of simply allowing what is.
• What results is a relaxation, an opening up, a diminishing of judging both of ourselves and of others.
• The problem isn’t words or phrases but our relation to them:
• “I’m late,” with or without an apology, depending on the circumstances, but definitely without excuses, explanations, or justifications.
• No separation between hearer, hearing, and the reality heard. No separation between speaker, speaking, and the reality spoken about.

Non-Lying: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me a way that you lie.
2. What is being protected by the lie?

Monologue: What are you learning about yourself working with this precept?

5 Non-misusing Intoxicants Zen Precept #5

• intoxication has something to do with ignorance, defilement, delusion, darkness, and a clouding over of light or clarity.
• Daydreaming, a form of tuning out, is a great intoxicant. So are blaming, analyzing, justifying, and storytelling.
• Apologizing—great intoxicant. Obsessing—even better. Tuning out or sleeping. Being a victim. Being confused. One of the best is infatuation.
• We miss the true depth of pleasure by being intoxicated with the possibility of more.
• We get intoxicated with a future version of ourselves.
• We want others to be as untruthful as we are and to join us in that high.
• Being seen, especially the way I want to be seen, is a big intoxicant.
• It isn’t lunch that is the intoxicant but the thoughts about it, the craving itself, that take us away from whatever discomfort is occurring.
• ask what it does to your mind, to your awakeness.
• To practice the Buddha-Way is not-to-look-aside.
• enlightenment in its concrete expression.

Non-Misusing Intoxicants: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me a way you intoxicate yourself.
2. What are you turning away from?

Monologue: What are you learning about yourself working with this precept?

6 Non-talking About Others’ Errors and Faults Zen Precept #6

• Putting ourselves in the shoes of the one whose faults are talked about or the one who is the subject of gossip and asking how it feels can help us see how serious this can be.
• from the point of view of oneness, we start seeing that difference and hierarchy, which depend on separation, don’t exist and therefore neither do faults or even “other.”
• Not finding fault, which suggests that we actually look for faults.
• not expounding upon those faults, which makes me think of the pleasure of shared “analysis” of the behavior of others
• notice the moralistic connotation of these words, an assumption that things or people should be other than what they are. Notice the should here.
• in speaking about as opposed to speaking to someone, we’re failing to honor this precept.
• it’s amazing to think that we use speaking about the faults of others in order to feel connected. Notice the contradiction, the delusion, here: We use, and even create, separation from one thing or person to overcome separation from another!
• most important for honoring this precept is to inquire into what motivates us to pass it on.
• What is there that we actually know and what is there that we actually do not know? It often takes courage to find out the truth.
• One is that “speaking” here is not just speaking out loud, not just speaking to another. It’s also speaking in the form of judging that goes on in our heads.
• The main thing to work with is our relation to our own faults. Can we befriend them or compassionately allow them?
• The main thing is not to suppress them, act them out, or split them off onto others. Disowning our faults or even just disparaging them only piles separation onto separation,
• No preferences, no judgments, complete welcoming, accepting what is, compassionate allowing.
• Dogen suggests that in practicing kind speech we remember how we speak to children.
• Another thing we can practice is always asking ourselves about the suffering of the other.

Non-Talking About Others’ Errors And Faults: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me a way you speak of others’ errors and faults.
2. What makes you do it?

7 Non-elevating Oneself and Blaming Others Zen Precept #7

• this precept is about there being ultimately no separation between you and me,
• we should describe this precept as non-blaming, instead of not blaming. But as we’ve seen with each of the precepts so far, before attaining that realization, we work with not blaming
• A prohibition on blaming can just set up more blaming, usually of myself.
• Rather, it’s good to get to know myself in a compassionate and accepting way as a blamer and as one who elevates myself.
• The more I can do that and the deeper I can go with it, the more this precept will begin to manifest naturally.
• When we see this in young children, it’s rather cute. A child, tattling on a sibling for doing something bad or wrong, calls out, “Mommy, Mommy, Johnny’s taking a cookie out of the cookie jar!” There is a certain hysterical tone to it. The enormous energy being expressed is due to the fact that there is in the accuser or blamer a desire to perform the very same action and a powerful prohibition against it—and neither is conscious. This happens because the blamer is not mature enough or strong enough to acknowledge her own wish, take the inner condemnation, and experience guilt, which is the next stage in our development.
• Blame is what happens when I don’t assume responsibility for the fact that I might be the one who lost my own socks or misplaced my own keys.
• it’s good to ask, “What am I afraid of being or becoming? What am I not tolerating in myself?”
• It’s also good to notice the speed with which these kinds of judgments happen.
• Can we do it without blame even while quite exasperated?
• “giving feedback,” which is a really good thing to practice. It is very difficult to do in a way that is non-blaming and non-elevating, which is why some people avoid it altogether.
• One of the most insidious kinds of self-elevation is being a victim.
• notice here, too, that although there is more maturity, there is still separation, only this time in myself, from my own guilt.
• Our development from childhood to adulthood and to spiritual maturity takes us out of blaming, through guilt, and into responsibility. The latter movement can only happen when I am willing to become one with my guilt.
• even if we have suddenly glimpsed or even deeply realized that realm, we still need the gradual practice of actualization.

Non-Elevating Oneself And Blaming Others: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me something you blame, judge, or reject for not being the way you want it to be.
2. Tell me a way you elevate yourself by judging something else.

Monologue: Explore this precept more deeply in relation to yourself. Consider how you think of yourself as a victim.

8 Non-being Stingy Zen Precept #8

• Rumi describes stinginess perfectly in his poem “Dervish at the Door.” At the end of this poem, Rumi reminds us that the stingy one tries “to turn a profit from every human exchange.”
• We are always trying to get something—admiration, love, recognition, praise, acknowledgment, even just staying connected. Bargaining is something stingy people do all the time.
• We also try to turn a profit in our spiritual practice—to get something from it. We try to get better. We try to get enlightenment.
• So how do we surrender? How do we do this non-doing? We have to be taken, if you will. We can only prepare the conditions for being taken. Taken by what? By the present moment.
• We are stingy when we’re not fully participating in what’s happening here and now.
• One of the important things that we’re stingy with is gratitude.
• We can also be stingy with receiving gratitude or praise.
• To not be stingy with my life, with myself, is to fully express myself at every moment—fully express everything that I am. I’m not talking about exercising one’s talents or gifts. Exercising one’s talents is not what fully expressing oneself means. When we are fully expressed from moment to moment, we are transparent.
• The first thing is to not be stingy in discovering who we are in relation to stinginess.
• Coming to terms with who I am in relation to stinginess—and doing so with no judgment—is one thing, but being non-stingy enough to place my stinginess right out on the table before others takes the practice even deeper.

Non-Being Stingy: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me a way you are stingy.
2. What you are afraid of losing?

9 Non-being Angry Zen Precept #9

• In a sense, of course, the Zen precepts are moral principles, but they aren’t “out there,” separate from me to be held up as standards with which I can beat myself up whenever I fall short—or, even worse, beat up others when they fall short. Nor are they moral straight jackets to be used simply to control my behavior or anyone else’s. They are, instead, what the realized person does naturally.
• Because anger is so universal, frequent, and varied, it serves as a particularly useful model for a way of working with the precepts that liberates instead of confines us as we deepen our practice.
• In working with this precept, we can get very precise.
• Like many emotions, anger has both a cause and an object.
• Getting to know my anger means turning my attention away from its cause and its object, and from all the stories swirling around both, to the anger itself. Getting to know it means being curious about it, not having any judgments about it, and compassionately allowing it.
• suppressing anger is a way of avoiding getting to know it, but interestingly, so is acting out the anger. In the latter case, it’s like a hot potato—I can’t get rid of it fast enough.
• there is no freedom in avoiding or suppressing it.
• truly accepting it without any judgment is a very important step in working with any of the precepts. If nothing else, it provides some space around what needs to be worked with.
• getting to know it, even welcoming it, is an enormous help, especially when we have the courage to talk about it with others and thus stop hiding it.
• When there is no self, no self-territory to defend or construct, then there is no anger. But can there be an anger that does not come from a postulated self, an anger that is not defensive? Yes, of course.
• These are the quick, five-second kinds of anger.

Non-Being Angry: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. Tell me something that makes you angry.
2. What kind of anger is it?

Monologue: Explore your anger. What’s it like? Where does it occur in your body? What’s your relation to it? What happens if you get so close to it, you no longer know its name?

10 Non-abusing the Three Treasures Zen Precept #10

• The Three Treasures are the heart of Buddhist teachings, regardless of school, history, or culture.
• As described by Dogen, binding has the sense of imprisoning or obstructing the freedom of the subject, the one doing the binding.
• The important thing, especially in considering the precepts from Bodhidharma’s and Dogen’s oneness point of view, is that we are the Three Treasures.
• we take refuge not in the Three Treasures but as the Three Treasures.
• When we make something an object, a thing among things, we may not always be aware that we as a subject have also become a thing among things. We become a subject as opposed to an object.
• Because our attention is usually on the object, we are often not aware of ourselves as bound subjects.
• One of the things we hate is being perceived in ways that don’t accord with our self-images.
• Being judgmental of others is a dead giveaway of unconscious self-judging.
• A teisho is a special kind of dharma talk, completely nondual.

Non-Abusing The Three Treasures: Partner Or Group Exercises

1. How do you conceptualize yourself and when do you do it?
2. Who are you taking yourself to be right now doing this exercise?

Monologue: Keep exploring the ways you conceptualize yourself and when and why you do it.

Part Two: Exploring the Precepts through Dogen’s Nonduality

Part Two Introduction. The Nonduality of Duality: From Not to Non

• This will also help us see why the Jukai ceremony of “receiving the precepts” is not about becoming a Buddhist but rather about becoming a buddha.

11 Different Kinds of Oneness

• the experience of being one with—namely, the nondual experience of oneself as the whole boundless, birthless, empty reality that is our universe.
• One Mind, or Buddha-nature. The One here is not one as opposed to two or three but is rather oneness in the sense of an absolute unity. There is nothing else but it.
• the word Absolute is important. It indicates that it’s not a question of formlessness as opposed to form.
• the formlessness of One Mind is not a nihilistic nothingness.
• “The [experience of] the substance of the Absolute is inwardly like wood or stone, in that it is motionless, and outwardly like the void, in that it is without bounds or obstructions.”
• We can experience nondually the manifestation of the One Mind, understood to be the whole boundless reality of interconnected forms.
• There is nothing but it, hence nothing outside it to compare it to.
• We can also experience nondually each of the actual particulars that make up the boundless reality, and this includes the particular that each of us is as subject of this experience. This is what it means to be “one with” a particular thing or person.
• In contrast to the whole, the particulars that make up that universe can be experienced both dually and nondually. To experience them nondually is to experience and live the nonduality of duality, and this is what Dogen means by “enlightenment in its concrete expression.” He even treats concrete particulars as perhaps the most important part of enlightenment.
• None among the particulars that make up this world is excluded from being Buddha-nature,
• What Dogen is telling us here is that Buddha Mind of Buddha-nature, so often associated with the boundless, empty whole of reality, also includes everyday functioning.
• It took Dogen to articulate it in many ways and to show that some of the deepest spiritual experiences can be with the particulars of everyday life.
• among the particulars of the universe are human beings, whose relations to one another give rise to the precepts.
• as we will see, deciding on a course of action in light of particular circumstances is not the same as being one with those circumstances.
• there is still a distinction to be made between the two, but the distinction is not conceptually experienced. It’s not experienced as a separation. Experientially, it is more like an interpenetration of two nameless, borderless particulars, something our ordinary or everyday minds cannot quite imagine.
• Intimacy is a term often used is Zen for both this interpenetration of nameless, borderless particulars as well as for the interpenetration of any particular form with the formless absolute.
• So often in Zen contexts we hear emphasis placed on interconnectedness, but when it comes to oneness, it is interpenetration that is important.
• Being absorbed in it completely changes my experience. If I reflect back on it, I realize that I was no longer separate from the book, no longer experiencing a gap between me and the book, but it wasn’t as if the book and I merged or dissolved into each other such that we disappeared. Rather, we became formless forms, which to the ordinary mind seems like a contradiction.
• A nonconceptual experience is that it is not experienced as “this, not that.” Just this.
• Even thought we human beings, of necessity, live largely in the conceptual realm, we do have experiences like these, even though we typically haven’t awakened to them, which is to say we are not aware of them while they are occurring.
• Even though this kind of reflecting back on the pre-reflective is conceptual and can’t reproduce the actual experience, it can show us both that reality can present itself in ways other than the usual, dualistic ways and that we can in some sense know something in nonconceptual, nondual ways.
• We can’t conceptually bring about experiences of being awake to the nonconceptual.

12 Suchness, Uniqueness, and the Nonconceptual

• “The total experience of a single thing” does not deprive a thing of its own unique particularity.
• nothing is what it is on its own. It can only be what it is through its comparing and contrasting connections to everything else, especially its nearby connections.
• When we know what something is, we know it is a this, not a that, which means it has borders, edges, boundaries.
• We experience the absence of conceptual connections is what Dogen calls “the total experience of a single thing.”
• to say that something is empty is not to say it is like an empty vessel. In the Zen tradition, one of the most important aspects of something being empty is that, unlike an empty vessel, it has no sides, bottom, or top.
• Even though the experience of something as empty is nonconceptual, it nonetheless doesn’t disappear or cease existing.
• Emptiness and suchness are the answers to two different questions about the same entity. Our everyday minds cannot make sense of this.
• One way suchness is described is to say that everything is “just as it is.” Nothing is added—no stories, history, causes, analyses, comparisons, connections, categories, concepts, likes, or dislikes.
• It isn’t that I am here experiencing or “seeing” no boundaries in an objective something or someone over there, separate from me, in those moments. It is rather than I am that other, whatever or whoever it is.
• One sure way to make something an object and hence conceptual is to prefer it or not prefer it so something else. “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”
• When there are no conceptual boundaries, there is no obstruction to prevent interpenetration or oneness.

13 A Defense of Concepts and Language

• Animals exist is a preconceptual world, which would more appropriately be called “a-conceptual”, whereas the spiritual experience of the nonconceptual is post-conceptual.
• the experience of something conceptual as nonconceptual - without name, without dependency and opposition.
• everything we humans do and think or verbally express in our everyday world is conceptual. That is our distinctiveness, our greatness. It’s what makes possible culture, history, and art, as well as conversation, breakfast, improvisation, riding a bicycle, driving a car, practicing with koans, and even the notion of “enlightenment.”
• A Zen student us expected to listen nondually to the words of the master in a talk or to read a sutra nondually. This means just listening or just reading - namely, doing so without any of the associations we automatically make in coming to understand something.
• Dogen has quite a lot to say about language–much more than we can cover in this book on the precepts. Suffice it to say, he has strong criticisms of those who treat language, reason, and discrimination as somehow outside the Way.

14 Experiencing Suchness

• For our purposes, which include understanding oneness in relation to the precepts and why Hee-Jin Kim calls Dogen a “mystical realist,” it is sufficient to call those experiences “mystical” that are nondual, nonconceptual glimpses of a reality not graspable by our everyday mind.
• Kim calls Dogen “a mystical realist” because he brings together the mystical–namely, the nondual–and the ordinary, everyday conceptual–namely, the dual–into a new “living out of.”
• gradual, never-ending practice of actualization.
• “Form” doesn’t mean solid, separate, and permanent. It simply indicates the presence of borders and hence of conceptualizable objects of awareness.
• When we totally exert ourselves, what I like to call “100 percent,” there is nothing left over for self- consciousness or for “efforting.” The passivity that is approached is absolute receptivity.
• It sheds light on certain kinds of Zen experience to realize that after being “hit” or “struck,” our minds go to the conceptual aftermath, which is the only place they can go.
• What we fail to notice in our everyday life experiences, unless it is pointed out, is the moment that preceded the temporal, conceptual aftermath. There was no subject or object in that moment. There was no-thing.
• We start “living out of” our realization more and more, which means experiencing things, people, and precepts more often just as they are with no added stories, expectations, reactions, shoulds, preferences, or concepts.

15 The Suchness of the Subject

• penetration is a Zen word, important to Dogen, for the experience of the suchness of a particular.
• we forget that penetration is not one-sided and that what is required is interpentration. Interpenetration is mutual nonconceptuality or boundarylessness, hence, freedom from hindrance or obstruction for both subject and object.
• One way of saying what happens to the object of awareness of knowing in this kind of experience is that it is no longer “objectified.” It has become what Zen calls “no-thing.” But as Dogen reminds us in his Shōbōgenzō fascicle “Gabyo” (The Pictured Cakes), it doesn’t lose “its own unique particularity.”
• Experiencing ourselves as objects is self-consciousness–precisely that which Zen hopes to free us from.
• bifurcating ourselves into two—a subject, I, and an object, me. I, as subject, am aware of conceptualizable me—namely, all my mental, physical, and emotional characteristics.
• what if we also try to know the I in this ordinary, separting way of knowing? It’s as if another I pops up and is aware of the first I, now an object. I have turned the original I into a me, and on ad infinitum.
• Eventually, however, those of us who begin a practice like Zen see how the somebody we think we are is the source of our inability to live with an ease of being.
• Shikantaza, “just sitting,” The “just” here is “nothing else but.”

16 The Samadhi of Self-Fulfilling Activity

• free of reasons, grounds, goals, or outcomes. Play is the best example of something that is always self-fulfilling.
• When shikantaza, just sitting, can be just as it is, it is self-fulfilling.
• “Dogen’s zazen is a ritual expression and celebration of awakening already present.”
• The spontaneity associated with Zen is simply a groundless samadhi of self-fulfilling activity.

17 Oneness of Self and Other

• any kind of reactivity is a dead giveaway that separation is occurring.
• All our self-images, judgments, insecurities, self-protections, self-promotions, and most of our fears are created by and continue to create separation.
• Separation is the main source of our own suffering and certainly the source of our causing suffering in others.
• not dependent (as the concept saucer is dependent on cup) or opposed (the concept short is opposed to tall).
• nonconceptual
• “neighbourless and seamless”
• our natural self-protection in being asked to reveal what we’d rather keep hidden, even from ourselves, eventually gives way to compassionate allowing.
• For a moment the borders fall away. This is Dogen’s body-mind “dropping off.” What drops off is the conceptual.

18 Oneness and the Way of the Bodhisattva

• This is the way of the bodhisattva. No separation here—no stories, no choices, no should. Nothing conceptual about the object, the subject, or the circumstances. No boundaries, hence nothing to hinder or obstruct oneness.
• This awakening comes from our complete allowing of anything to be “just as it is” without any binding concepts, stories, or descriptions.

19 Opening

• T. S. Eliot’s three words from the Four Quartets—“Concentration without elimination”—are invaluable. I’ve always thought that these three words should be at the heart of every beginning meditation instruction.
• “not turning away.” This is the meaning of the “just” in “just sitting.” It means “only sitting,” or “not turning away”
• Dogen mentions two other ways that we turn away from what we are to be with 100 percent. One is that we sit with an “in order to,” an intention to gain something
• A useful term here for the wide-open, receptive state we have to be in is choiceless awareness.

20 Oneness and Compassion

• This kind of compassion could be termed feeling-compassion. It’s where my acting to relieve your suffering is based on my ability and maybe desire to feel your feelings and connect them to my own. The compassion of the bodhisattva who spontaneously does what is needed is different in that it is not based on feeling. It’s not based on anything. It is self-fulfilling!
• From the standpoint of precept practice, one of the most important inquiries concerning separation and oneness has to do with those parts of ourselves that we are tempted to reject, deny, or hide.
• It is what he would call an “unstained” relationship with these parts of ourselves. This is the crucial first step in opening to oneness with the Zen precepts. It is a profoundly compassionate practice. It is also a necessary practice, because it is only compassion for ourselves that allows us to have compassion for others.
• The second step is to get so close to whatever it is that I no longer know its name.
• It’s no longer a this as opposed to a that. It’s not “I am a liar as opposed to a truth-teller.” If I can allow myself to be 100 percent the liar that I am, it ceases to be conceptual, ceases to have boundaries, and thus ceases to be something to resist
• I and it become the oneness of suchness. There is nothing left to reject.

21 Oneness and the Precepts

• When precepts are taken in either the absolutist, “never-ever” sense or in the relative-to-context sense, we have some version of a dualistic relation to them,
• In the third, nondual way of taking the precepts, to be found in Western mystical traditions and in the Dogen Zen we are considering here, they have in a certain sense ceased being precepts. We are in the realm of no separation and therefore are one with the precepts.
• for Dogen, zazen, or sitting meditation, is not a means to the end of enlightenment but rather an expression of enlightenment.
• Can I so deeply allow the killer or the liar in me that I cease the pattern of attachment and rejection by making them opposites of the exclusionary “not” version of each precept?
• Can I be aware of my preference or opinion without creating polarization?
• this attachment to “should” and “should not” can, of course, make us powerfully judgmental.

22 From Not to Non

• Not stealing, when conceptualized, can never be wholehearted. It can never be free of stealing and thus is not liberated. It obstructs and is obstructed by stealing. Stealing becomes something to avoid, to not like, and to resist, and not stealing becomes something to be attached to. This opposition creates a division in us.
• Both stealing and not stealing have been liberated to become non-stealing.

23 The Jukai Ceremony

• the ceremony is not so much about becoming a Buddhist, as it is about becoming a buddha.

24 Being a Buddha

• We may be buddhas, but we don’t know it. The ceremony reveals to us that we are buddhas.
• more importantly for Dogen, even though we are buddhas, we have to actualize our buddhahood.
• the more we practice, the more those moments occur until eventually we start recognizing them for what they are.
• everything that makes up what we call life is impermanent, and as Dogen shows us, that impermanence itself is Buddha-nature. It is a boundless dynamism in which nothing is excluded.
• It’s a discovery, not a process, but what we already are needs to be actualized over and over again until we begin to “live out of” it.
• The phrase “not actualized without practice” makes it sound as if practice were the means to actualization, but it is rather that practice itself is the actualizing of this incomparable Dharma.

List of the Zen Precepts

The Three Treasures

• Buddha
• Dharma
• Sangha

The Three Pure Precepts

• Cease from Evil
• Do Good
• Do Good for Others

The Ten Grave Precepts

1. Non-killing
2. Non-stealing
3. Non-misusing Sex
4. Non-lying
5. Non-misusing Intoxicants
6. Non-talking About Others’ Errors and Faults
7. Non-elevating Oneself and Blaming Others
8. Non-being Stingy
9. Non-being Angry
10. Non-abusing the Three Treasures

Notes from Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts by Nancy Mujo Baker

Added 2024-05-26, last updated 2024-06-29.