To Forget the Self
The Teaching
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.
Commentary
Dogen's great koan: to study the self is to forget the self. This is the most precise formulation of the spiritual path across all traditions. The ego-self, examined deeply enough, reveals its own groundlessness, and in that groundlessness, all things are present.
'Body and mind drop away' is what Christian mystics call theosis, the dissolution of the boundary between individual and divine. It is what Merton experienced on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. It is what Plotinus called 'the flight of the alone to the Alone.'
Meister Eckhart: 'The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.' The observer and the observed collapse into a single seeing.