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.
Themes
Connections 18
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Unsure
Merton was reading Zen in the 1950s; his Louisville vision (1958) came a year before his letters with D. T. Suzuki began.
Unsure
Plotinus joined a Roman campaign in 242–243 hoping to learn Persian and Indian philosophy. Whether Indian ideas reached him is argued.
Travelled
Taoism reached Buddhism by 65 CE. Buddhism entered China in the 1st century CE. Early translators borrowed Taoist words, and Chan grew out of the meeting.
Unsure
Close parallels have been argued (Conze 1967; Pagels 1979). A route through Alexandria’s trade with India is possible, but undocumented.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Hermeticism while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Hinduism reached Buddhism by 500 BCE. The same Indian world. The Buddha taught among Brahmanical and ascetic schools, and the two argued and borrowed for centuries.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Judaism while these teachings took shape.
Unsure
Buddhism and Shinto were in documented contact, but this teaching’s date is uncertain. Buddhism formally reached Japan in the 6th century. For a thousand years kami and buddhas were worshipped together (shinbutsu-shūgō).
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Buddhism.
Travelled
Krishnamurti grew up within Theosophy’s Hindu–Buddhist frame, though he later rejected every tradition.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Buddhism.
Travelled
Ram Dass read and drew on Buddhism.