I wrote recently about two lines from Eihei Dogen’s “Genjo Koan” (1). Both lines speak about “actualizing the fundamental point”.
There’s a third line about actualization in “Genjo Koan”:
Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent. (2)
Kobun Chino Otogawa gave a practical example of that third line, even though he wasn’t talking about “Genjo Koan” at the time:
You know, sometimes zazen gets up and walks around. (3)
Activity of the body solely by virtue of the free location of consciousness can sometimes get up and walk around, without any thought to do so.
Action like that resembles action that takes place through hypnotic suggestion, but unlike action by hypnotic suggestion, action by virtue of the free location of consciousness can turn out to be timely after the fact. When action turns out to accord with future events in an uncanny way, the source of that action may well be described as “the inconceivable”.
I have found that zazen is more likely to “get up and walk around” when the free location of consciousness is accompanied by an extension of friendliness and compassion, an extension beyond the boundaries of the senses. Gautama the Buddha described such an extension:
[One] dwells, having suffused the first quarter [of the world] with friendliness, likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth; just so above, below, across; [one] dwells having suffused the whole world everywhere, in every way, with a mind of friendliness that is far-reaching, wide-spread, immeasurable, without enmity, without malevolence. [One] dwells having suffused the first quarter with a mind of compassion… with a mind of sympathetic joy… with a mind of equanimity that is far-reaching, wide-spread, immeasurable, without enmity, without malevolence. (4)
Gautama said that “the excellence of the heart’s release” through the extension of the mind of compassion was the first of the further concentrations, a concentration he called “the plane of infinite ether” (5).
The Oxford English Dictionary offers some quotes about “ether” (6):
They [sc. the Brahmins] thought the stars moved, and the planets they called fishes, because they moved in the ether, as fishes do in water.
(Vince, Complete System. Astronomy vol. II. 253 [1799])
Plato considered that the stars, chiefly formed of fire, move through the ether, a particularly pure form of air.
(Popular Astronomy vol. 24 364 [1916])
When the free location of consciousness is accompanied by an extension of the mind of compassion, there can be a feeling that the necessity of breath is connected to things that lie outside the boundaries of the senses. That, to me, is an experience of “the plane of infinite ether”.
Dogen didn’t offer an explanation of his third line, but he did provide a case study from the literature of Zen:
Mayu, Zen Master Baoche, was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself?”
“Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent,” Mayu replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”
“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk again. Mayu just kept fanning himself… (2)
The wind that reaches everywhere was actualized immediately in Mayu’s fanning.
Kobun said:
It’s impossible to teach the meaning of sitting. You won’t believe it. Not because I say something wrong, but until you experience it and confirm it by yourself, you cannot believe it. (7)
2) “Genjo Koan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point]”, tr. Kazuaki Tanahashi.
3) Kobun Chino Otogawa, this author’s recollection of a lecture at S. F. Zen Center in the 1980’s
4) MN 7, tr. Pali Text Society vol I p 48
5) MN 111; tr. Pali Text Society vol III p 79
6) Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ether (n.),” March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1514129048.
7) Kobun Chino Otogawa, “Embracing Mind”, edited by Cosgrove & Hall, p 48