As we continue exploring Moon in a Dewdrop, please read over the brief PDF.
My focus will be on pages 1–20, but the entire section fosters how we look at the teaching of non-duality. The most important point is that non-duality is played out through impermanence and interconnectivity. There is no splitting. At its core, non-duality means that the apparent split between “self” and “world,” “mind” and “body,” “subject” and “object (etc.),” is a conceptual overlay rather than an ultimate truth. In Dōgen, Genjōkōan): “To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by the ten thousand things.”Here, forgetting the self dissolves the division between perceiver and perceived—self is not erased, but de-centered.
I’ve tried to conceptualize the “look” of non-dulity and I come-up with a swirl of energy without distinction. It is difficult to blend the observer and the observed but less difficult to imagine body-mind. Here too is “Uji” as being-time. We do not move through time, rather our being is time. No being-no time, while each moment is not separate from eternity.
Non-duality lives on the edge of language, which normally creates duality by carving reality into subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs. Dōgen plays with language to destabilize fixed viewpoints: He uses reversal: “To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion; that myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.” The Heart Sutra similarly undermines opposites: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Okumura-roshi often emphasizes that practice and awakening are not two. There isn’t a separate “me” who attains awakening—it’s the practice itself expressing awakening in each moment. I can add bicycling is a human-machine interface that exists only through the non-duality of interconnectivity.
Independent co-arising can be seen in practice-awakening as a nod to non-linear thought. The practice of zazen is awakening, just as a dog is Buddha Nature.
It could be said that living is being which is experiencing when awakened to this our practice is not deluded by duality. Self/other: Compassion arises naturally when the distinction softens. Life/death: “Birth is just an expression complete this moment; death is also an expression complete this moment.” (Dogen) Ordinary/sacred: Washing bowls, walking, eating—no moment is outside awakening.
Again Okumura: “When we truly see that self and others are not separate, the vow to benefit all beings arises naturally.” This isn’t about erasing distinctions but living them fluidly—seeing through the walls we habitually construct.
Palms together,
Sangaku