“The entire world is the real body of man.” -Dogen, as translated by Kosen Nishiyama
I like my body. It walks, it has sex. It can dance: burlesque, belly, tango, salsa, or just flailing around on a nightclub dance floor or in my kitchen. My body has stood on comedy club stages and in wrestling rings. It’s held my nephews, wrestled with them, and changed their diapers.
Our bodies exist in space. Look around you. What is around you, and about you? What objects are there? What do you see? Not what things do you see, but what do you see--colors, shapes, and motion. Levels of bright and dark. How wide is your field of vision?
What do you hear? High, low or changing pitches. Sound or silence. Where does the sound come from? Is it moving? How loud is it?
We taste the entire universe though our changing body. We experience our bodies through our senses.
Our body is how we express ourselves. Delsarte studied this; his students wrote about we communicate with our hands, our eyes, even the positions of our torso.
Get down on the floor and move. What does your body say to you? How does the world around you look and feel? Your hands flat on the floor. Which direction would you like to move and how? Everything is open to you: up, down, any direction you like. You can propel yourself with any combination of hands and feet, even roll or slither yourself along.
Nishiyama translates Dogen as saying, “The entire world is the real human body.” Edward Brown and Kazuaki Tanahashi translate this line as “The entire universe is the dharma body of the self,” while Hubert Nearman represents it as “The whole of the great earth is your very Dharma Body.”
If you use your senses, if you examine carefully how you experience the world--through touch, sound, sight, and our other senses, we realize the converse is also true; our real bodies are the entire world. Our bodies exist in the world, but it is also true that the world exists in our bodies--we only experience the world through what our senses are able to perceive. The world circles our bodies and our bodies encircle the world, our senses turning it into something we can contain within our minds.
Nishiyama translates Dogen in the same fascicle as saying “This reply is particularly relevant to those who would cause the dharmakaya to emerge while remaining unattached to it. Those who have failed to do so cannot say likewise and should remain silent.” Nearman translates this passage as “If what you offer is indeed this fundamental principle, then at the very moment when you would say ‘The whole of the great earth is my very Dharma Body,” you would do well not to speak. And also, at the time when you would be silent, you may get to the heart of what goes beyond words.”
The same words of Dogen, different translations, different meanings. But are either of them wrong?
Tanahashi and Brown translate the passage more simply: “When words cannot express it, would you understand that there is nothing to be said?”
Our languages forces us to treat processes as things: I want a stronger relationship, so we‘re going to work on our communication--but first I‘m going to watch the basketball game. We can’t hold relationships in our hands and I can‘t load a wheelbarrow full of communication. Even a “basketball playoff game” is not a thing; it’s an event. There is a clock above the ice; anything that happens on the ice while the clock is moving is part of the game. Anything that happens when the clock is stopped is not.
In English we learn that a noun is a person, place, or thing. But we also use abstract concepts as nouns. They are neither person, nor place, nor thing. Instead they are processes. They are verbs. But for the sake of comprehension we wrestle them into the noun spot in sentences.
In reality, there are no nouns, no people, places, or things. Everything is a process. The woman I love today is not the same woman she was three years ago or three months ago or even yesterday. My city is a loose bundle of buildings and boundaries, and even those are always shifting. It’s a place, and that place is not stationary. It’s moving through space and time on the skin of our spinning, revolving planet. Even something as stable seeming as a rock is a chemical reaction. It’s just happening so slowly that I can’t perceive it. But there is something to understanding the world as processes, some happening to slowly for us to perceive, some happenign so quick we don’t even realize it, and others happening closer to our time-scale.
Talking or writing about these things is not perceiving them directly. Language is not understanding; it’s an attempt to make our understanding understandable to others.
Nearman translates Dogen in another section of Shobogenzo as saying: “’Not speaking about something‘ does not mean ‘not expressing something,’ for being able to express something is not the same as being able to put it into words.”
Our bodies express things. Watch any professional wrestler make his ring entrance. The way he or she moves, carries his or her body--the wrestler is trying to express what kind of character he or she is, and inspire you to boo and cheer accordingly. And the wrestler, the burlesque dancer, the stand-up comic uses your bodies too, reacting and responding to the audience cheers or boos, their leaning forward or back, their laughing or staring into their drinks in uncomfortable silence.
Lovers old and new know this. What they say to each other is often immaterial. What matters is their bodies, eye contact, touch, the brush of finger on arms. We kiss and respond to the way our partner kisses us back. The pressure of mouth on mouth. Roving hands. How their hips press towards us.
Sex has a funny relationship with spirituality. Some faith traditions renounce it; other mystics seem to make it a central part of their communion with the divine. Spiritually we face the same challenge with sex that we face in our secular lives--how to put it in its proper perspective. Sexual love is miraculous, amazing, and a gateway to our highest selves…and so is everything else.
Our relationship with our sexual selves and our sexual relationships with others are processes. They come and go just like other things. Dogen tells the story of a monk who asked an old master about the sheer amount of…of stuff…that comes up. “When they all come at once,” the monk asked, “What should be done?”
According to Dogen-via-Tanahahsi and Brown, the old master replied, “Don’t try to control them.”
Dogen comments that the old master isn’t scolding the monk; he’s just telling him the truth. We can’t control the things that come up in our lives. We get sick, we gain and lose jobs; our families and loved ones are exactly who they are and who they aren’t. We don’t even have full control over ourselves: we didn’t ask for the talents we have or don’t have. Much of our personalities are shaped as much by heredity and history as much as conscious choice. We don’t even have control over what we feel, when we feel, and how intensely we feel it.
We didn’t ask to be born, but we were. We were born and grew up and continue to grow--up and old--in a time and a place. We have limited control over the places we live are lives and we have no control over time. I sometimes reflect how different my life would be if even just one thing changed. If I were born in 1923 instead of Canada in 1973 for example. That fifty-year gap, an eye blink in human history, would have changed my life completely. Or consider two men, born on the same day in 1920s Germany. They could have been born on the same block in the same two in the same year and found themselves in the same concentration camp. And yet just one single quality--which ethnic group they happened to be born into--could determine which end of the rifle they found themselves facing. Some say that people choose to be victims, and some say that people choose to become villains, but its possible we and others have a lot less choice than we believe we do.
And yet many of these things--our personalities, our environment, our careers, our sexual preferences--all the things we think make us who we are simply do not matter. They are a much smaller part of us than we realize. Strip them away, and instead of having nothing left, what remains is vaster than you can imagine and unimaginably spacious. It’s finding the entire universe in a particle of dust.
That dust is your human body and that universe is also your human body. Through his translators Dogen might call it the True Human Body, though calling it the true human body seems redundant.
What is true doesn’t need to be said. It says itself.
