Wasting Time Under the Bright Window

In this post, I share my recent translation from Dōgen's Eihei koroku with some annotations. I'm offering this now because Tetsugan Sensei and I are highlighting the importance of vividness in zazen with our Vine of Obstacles Zen students. This follows having recently discovered that sufficient vividness is not something that many Zen students put into practice, despite the pervasive presence of images in brightness and illumination in Zen literature.

For example, the character for bright, 明, occurs 100 times in The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, 268 times in The Record of Going Easy, and 338 times in The Blue Cliff Record. And in The Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage, old master Shítóu writes, “In ten feet square, an ancient person illumines forms and their nature.” 

The issue of insufficient brightness becomes especially salient when students work with a finely balanced body-mind zazen pose. Medium laxity – the absence of sufficient brightness – is what keeps many mature Zen students in a stuck place, not thoroughly vivifying the great Way, nor actively "...illumining forms and their nature."