The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 5 of 5 Who Is Asking

To forget the self

Dogen, thirteenth-century Zen master, says the whole path in three sentences.

The reading — Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan (1233)

To Forget the Self

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far from its environs. But dharma is already correctly transmitted; you are immediately your original self.

If you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has its own fixed self.

Buddhism c. 1240 CE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

This is the last reading, and it gathers the other four. Ramana said turn and look. Jung said notice the mask. Watts said the border is misdrawn. Krishnamurti said the looker is made of the looked-at. Dogen says: yes, study it, all the way down, and what you find at the bottom of the study is not a truer self but the self’s absence, and in that absence the whole world comes forward and is you.

Forget the self is not amnesia and not self-hatred. It is what happens to a question you have asked completely. Notice the last line of the passage: you are immediately your original self. The course did not take anything from you. It took the one thing that was never there.

Carry with you
If the self were forgotten for one hour today, what would be actualized in its place?
And so

Five readings, and the self that started the course is somewhat harder to locate than it was. That is the intended result. None of these teachers thought you were nothing. They thought the I was a smaller and a stranger thing than you had assumed, and that most of the suffering in a life comes from defending it.

The next course is about what else stands in the way, because the self is only the nearest obstacle, not the only one. Take a day off between them if you like. The question from the first reading will keep asking itself either way.

If you'd like, next
Course III. What Gets in the Way
Once you have seen the mask, the next course is about what else is in the way.
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