Quotes from teisho are run sequentially in the eMirror
photograph by Anne Muryo Schmitz
Dogen zenji says,
This face-and-eye is not stained. To be stainless does not mean trying to manufacture having no intention or discrimination, or that you maintain a state of aimlessness. Being unstained cannot be intended or discriminated at all. Being stainless is like meeting a person and seeing their features without judgment; and it is like not wishing for more color or brightness when seeing flowers or the moon.
Each moment, each experience, each life and death are like expressions coming and going on the Original Face. Even if it cries, it can still laugh. Even if it smiles, it can still grit its teeth. None of these expressions are what the Face is. Like a mirror is unstained by what rises and falls as reflections on its face, the face-and-eye are always stainless.
Being unstained is our practice. This does not mean distancing ourselves from any state or experience that comes and goes. It does not mean adopting an attitude or intention or trying to be placid or aimless. Practising stainlessness or "fuzenna" is allowing the recognition of the openness of each moment of experience and doing this with the whole bodymind. Stainlessness is the natural intimacy without self and other and without strategy that is the nature of each and every thing and event and being.
When a usual person usually sees another person, they see their associations, their intentions, their fears and uncertainties, their hopes of gain, their wish not to be interrupted by having to deal with the other person, instead of that person's features. You could be seeing and facing someone who is living as the face-and-eye of the Buddhas and not recognize that. Instead you are scoping out their breasts or wondering what they would look like without a beard or getting irritated because you don't understand what they're grinning about.
Seeing flowers or the moon and allowing them to present themselves as they are is easier for people than looking at other people without judgement. In many circumstances people do have much to fear from other people. Since people do not understand themselves, they do not understand others. Since people believe the collapsed thoughts and stories they tell themselves about themselves and each other, they become capable of doing terrible things. Fortunately, most of us who will encounter these words live in conditions where these words can be heard easily, without them being drowned out by the sounds of explosions and buildings shattering, and car bombs melting asphalt and cracking bones. There are dangerous people in every city but most of us will never meet them. Instead we meet people like us: associates at our jobs, friends, family, people on the streets, and in the shops. We do not need to protect ourselves from physical harm. We have no reason to fear. Yet even so, when we look at each other's faces we do not see them without judgement the way that we can look at flowers or the moon. But we can.
Instead of focussing on someone's face, we can see that face arise within the visual field as a whole. When they look at us, when we see their eyes, we can recognize that this is our seeing looking at us. Seeing eye to eye, we can let go of self and other and just see intimately, without narrowing our vision or attention.
- Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, beginning teisho 2: “Face and Eye,” from Monday, May 17, 2004 in the series “Seeing Eye to Eye: Commentaries on Eihei Dogen zenji’s Yuibutsu Yobutsu. (If strange characters instead of 漢字 hanji or kanji appear this means that you need to enable UTF-8 in your Character Encoding settings.)
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