Verkuilen, Barbara — Dokusan With Dogen. Timeless lesson in negotiating the way

Firethroat Press, Slappe kaft, met flap, paperback, 2011, gebrocheerd, 149 blz., kastexemplaar; klein kneepje rechter bovenhoek kaft, Samenvatting: Recently I was struck by the odd fact that I have spent 40 years of my adult life practicing Zen and studying the obscure writings of a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master. Many interests have waxed and waned during those years, but Master Dogen has remained a constant. From the perspective of an outside observer, I imagine, this might seem unfathomable. Why the enduring attraction? This collection of essays is an attempt to answer that question. The title, Dokusan With Dogen: Timeless Lessons in Negotiating the Way, I fear, may be misleading. The reader is advised that this is not the work of a Dogen scholar, but rather the musing of an ordinary Zen student reflecting on the influence the master had on her life. That said, it's fair to ask, how does a woman living in the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century America have dokusan (the private teaching encounter between master and disciple) with a thirteenth-century Zen master from medieval Japan? It hasn't been easy. But from my first encounter with Soto Zen I have been profoundly moved by the writings of Master Dogen, despite the fact that I understood little of what he was saying. It was surprising how many times I would read a particular fascicle from his Shobogenzo with literally no comprehension, yet feel completely changed. It seems that Master Dogen's powerful, poetic expression of his penetrating understanding whispers to the most silently receptive recesses of our nature, and teaches us to see the world through different eyes. The study of the Buddhadharma (Buddha's teaching) is relevant to any time period in which we may live. The problems that confront us today are not different from the problems any people at any previous time, living anywhere on Earth, have faced. Master Dogen's writings, in particular, address the central difficulty of answering the spiritual question, “What does it really mean to be a human being?” It is in answering that question that Master Dogen clearly defines how we are to “Negotiate our Way.” A key concern of Master Dogen is helping the practitioner define what constitutes authentic practice. How are we to answer the deeper existential dilemmas of existence, as well as confront the numerous and seemingly mundane problems of living our lives day by day? Dogen never allows us to favor one side of this question over the other. He assists us in holding that illusory duality, which we bravely embody until we achieve a state of equipoise where the apparent opposition of the two sides no longer contradict one another, because they are co-identical. This is done through his radical nonduality and compassionate counsel that we persist in living our life wholeheartedly, which means never valuing one side of our nature over the other.