Do you see that Zen student? He has forgotten what he has learned, yet he practices easily and freely what he has learned and also what he should learn.
He lives in equanimity, calmly and contentedly. He is free of all care, yet he acts naturally and reasonably.
He neither strives to avoid delusion nor searches after truth. He knows delusions as baseless and truth as himself.
He sees the true nature of ignorance as Buddha-nature, and the true body of his illusory body as Dharma-kaya, the Buddha’s eternal body.

Yoka-daishi is admiring and praising the Zen student. He sees a person who has gone beyond relative good and evil, and who leaves no trace of his learning nor shadow of his doing. He is a sage who does not look like a sage, and he is a philosopher who does not carry the odor of philosophy.

If you try to avoid idle thoughts or delusions when you meditate, you cannot enter samadhi. Whoever seeks after the truth will remain behind the truth. What you consider idle thoughts or delusions are nothing but waves on the vast ocean of Buddha-nature. Just as there are no waves apart from the water, there is no delusion, no idle thought, no ignorance separate from Buddha-nature.

Since our bodies are impermanent, it follows that they are also empty and visionary. In fact, they do not even really belong to us. Your body is not yours, and my body is not mine.

When one realizes completely the Dharma-body, one sees no object.
Material things and mental phenomena come and go like clouds in the blue sky.
Greed, anger, and ignorance…these three forms appear and disappear like a mirage on the ocean.

When one recognizes the Dharma-body as such, no matter how beautifully he may define it or describe it, he is still lingering in dualism. But once he has unified himself with the Dharma-body, there is no more and there is no less. He is the Dharma-body, and the Dharma-body is he.

A Tibetan Buddhist once wrote: “Greed, anger, and ignorance…these three stand as obstacles to the way of deliverance; they prevent us in the growth of insight as the roots of couch-grass prevent the growth of useful plants.”

Zen students never run away from the three poisons but see them only as an ephemeral mirage.

When she realizes the truth, she has no delusions concerning personal desires nor any self-limited ideas.
She knows that there is no ego entity existing and sees clearly the voidness of all form as merely shadow in relation to both subjective and objective elements.
If you live in this Zen, you can leave Hell in your dreams of yesterday and make your own paradise wherever you stand.
Those without realization, who cheat people with false knowledge, will create a hell during their own lives.

Zen aims at nothing but realization or attainment. Philosophers may postulate reality, driving themselves to the end of the trail of logic, but none of them ever succeeds in attaining. To follow logic and believe that something must be is one thing, but to experience it is another.

When Zen asks to hear the sound of one hand, it demands actual experience and nothing else. A student may say that this is the truth or that this is the absolute. These answers are a ghostly conception, mere shadows of baseless delusions. Why not work deeply enough in meditation to reach the Mind-Essence? The outcome of this honest, hard work is attainment.

When one attains reality, one actually realizes the truth of all beings. He can prove it by his attitude toward “self-entity” and “self-limited ideas.” He knows there is no ego entity, that all forms of objectivity are void, existing only in terms of relativity.

Zen realization must be manifested in two ways: rejection of an ego substance and recognition of the voidness of all forms of objectivity.

In a koan, one monk says, “The flag is moving.” Another replies, “The wind is moving.” The former clings to the entity of the flag. The latter has a broader view but does not understand true emptiness.

The Sixth Patriarch answers them, “The flag is not moving. The wind is not moving. The mind is moving.”

Yoka-daishi (665-713)
Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958)

Excerpted from Buddhism and Zen by Nyogen Senzaki and Ruth McCandless 1987

There are several translations of the Shodoka, and this is just the beginning of a very long poem translated as Song of Realization of the Way. With a commentary and translation by Nyogen Senzaki, it’s as if we are listening to two teachers, as it was intended to help his own students understand the depths of Yoka-daishi’s message.

As with any translation, the nuances change. Even this first stanza can evoke different responses.

Another more contemporary translation by Sheng Yen reads:

Have you not seen the idle man of Tao who has nothing to learn and nothing to do,
Who neither discards wandering thoughts nor seeks the truth? The real nature of ignorance is Buddha-nature;
The illusory empty body is the Dharma body.

A student of Zen becomes a person of Tao in contemporary terms. However you phrase it, this first section presents another stretch for us. And once again, while we can understand the meaning of the words, the depth of this beginning also spells out the challenges. There are the words, and then there is the reality the words point to.

Ideally, there is really nothing to see in a person of the Way. There is no “stink of Zen” and no signs of anyone special. At some point, the need to know where one is on the path drops away as there is no place to hold onto in this constantly changing adventure.

He sees a person who has gone beyond relative good and evil and who leaves no trace of his learning nor shadow of his doing.

Nothing extra,
Elana, Scribe for Daily Zen