The Radiant Thread of Being | Shōyōroku 67

Every time I sit sesshin, I love witnessing all the great unfolding.

The Buddha recognizes Buddha.

It’s this great ceremony of recognition. Whether or not there’s a jukai, all of you catch a glimpse of your true nature, and you can see the wonder writ large on all of your faces.

And that wonder is the key to joy.

A lot of you think that, you know, if I could just know the truth, I would find joy.

But knowing is just such a weak way of being.

Wonder is much more intimate. It's something you have to experience to really appreciate.

Because again, we've been given initiative into thinking that reason and knowing is the way we get close.

But when we wonder, there's a loosening of the cynicism that's inspired by our ideas—our ideas of who we think we are, our ideas of who we think you are, or who the other is—and an opening to who we all collectively really are.

There’s a case that points to this in the Shōyōroku, the Book of Equanimity. It’s Case 67. It’s called The Avatamsaka Sutra’s Wisdom.

“Attention! In the Avatamsaka Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha says: As I now see all sentient beings everywhere, they are endowed with the Tathagata’s wisdom and virtue. But because of deluded thoughts and attachments, they do not realize it.”

Entire case. That’s the entire key teaching. And it’s a very important teaching.

The Buddha here is not saying some beings—some beings from the correct political party, some beings who live in the correct country or hold the correct ideological beliefs.

He’s saying: all beings.

He isn’t saying all awakened beings. They can be asleep. They can be deluded. And they still possess that same virtue and wisdom intrinsically—whether or not they recognize it.

All beings without exception are already endowed with the virtue of the Tathagata.

That includes you.

But if you don’t realize it, then this radiant birthright might as well not exist.

The throne is there—but we don’t sit on it.

This, unfortunately, tends to be the central wound of human life. We carry this Buddha nature, this priceless treasure, yet we spend all of our days bargaining for some scrap, for something to just get by.

Interestingly enough, the Buddha here isn’t bargaining. He’s not setting a bar we have to leap over.

He’s pointing right directly to the ground beneath our feet:

We already are what we’re looking for.

Yeah?

We just have to see it.

The Avatamsaka Sutra is one of the most visionary works in the Mahayana canon—especially cherished in the Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism. Its teachings explode dualistic thinking. They render it very clear and obvious—so that it drops away. They present a radically interdependent cosmos.

At the heart of Huayan thought is Indra’s Net.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this expression. It actually shows up in several texts in the Hindu canon as well. So as you know—we’re cousins, right? We come from the same Brahmanic root. These teachings and even some of the characters carry on between these texts.

Indra’s Net is a shimmering metaphor that cuts through this illusion of separateness.

And the idea is that we imagine a vast, boundless net stretched infinitely throughout all space and time.

At every node of the net—every meeting point—is a jewel. And each and every jewel reflects every other jewel in the entire net.

Not just the jewels next to it—every jewel, no matter where it is in the cosmos.

Within each is the whole.

Within each is the whole.

You might think, “Well, it appears a little differently…” but intrinsically, it’s reflecting everything.

This is the absolute structure of reality.

This isn’t some vague hypothesis.

You’re one of those jewels—reflected and reflecting all the other jewels.

And therefore, within you is all of it.

And it’s easy to want to see Indra’s Net as just some sort of metaphor. But it’s really a vision of the real.

And it’s not just metaphysical—it’s karmic.

We’re born into patterns, into momentum, into habits of thought, speech, and behavior that distort our view and condition our experience.

This is what I often refer to as karmic momentum—the accumulated force of causes and conditions, the deterministic weight of our own and of the world’s karma, expressing itself through us moment by moment.

Karmic momentum is when we keep mistaking the reflection for the source.

So we imagine ourselves as discrete, as fixed, as isolated.

We fail to recognize that our every action, our every thought, resounds through Indra’s Net.

You’re not just caught in karmic momentum—you are, in this sense, karmic momentum.

Your actions are your continuance.

You are momentarily configured as you.

You crafted this notion of self—and so you know it and wear it very well.

And that’s why it’s very hard to let go. You spend a lot of time on this thing—some of us more than others. Right?

To forget the self, Dōgen says, is to forget the entire scaffolding we’ve built over countless eons to give ourselves a sense of stability and separation.

It’s that scaffolding of self that hides our treasure.

And we find it when it drops away.

There’s a wonderful parable in the Lotus Sutra.

There’s a poor man who visits a wealthy friend. The wealthy friend wants to bring him out of his poverty, but he knows the poor man would certainly resist charity.

So they go out drinking. And when the poor man passes out, the rich one sews a priceless jewel into the lining of his robe and then leaves.

And when the man wakes—he shakes it off—and he leaves, unaware of the gift that he carries.

Years go by.

He continues to live in poverty. He struggles constantly. It’s always just getting by.

Until one day he bumps into his rich friend, who sees him in the same clothes that he left him in, and sees him in this state of abject poverty.

He says, “Why are you still struggling?”

And the man says he’s poor. Then the friend motions to his clothing. He says:

“You have a priceless jewel right here. You’ve been rich all along. You didn’t have to live like this.”

This is us—walking to and fro, searching for peace, searching for meaning, searching for enlightenment or awakening—but all the while it’s woven into the fiber of our very being.

The problem isn’t that enlightenment is not at hand.

The problem is we look for it elsewhere.

Shakyamuni says the obstacle is deluded thoughts and attachments—those conditioned patterns, that karmic momentum, those thoughts that keep us spinning in circles.

A deluded thought is any thought that introduces a gap—a gap between your experience and what is, a gap between yourself and others, between yourself and reality.

Think about some of the things we tell ourselves:

“Not good enough.”
“I’m more advanced than others.”
“Zazen is easy for them, but it’s very hard for me.”
“I wish I was enlightened.”
“I am enlightened.”

All of these present that gap.

They’re all stories.

Every one of them keeps us spinning—as if we’re rolling a boat down the river of life, and instead of pushing with the staff, we just stick it down in the mud.

Then the boat turns around in a circle—around that moored oar.

When you tell a story, you try to pin down reality.

When you try to pin down reality, you go into this tailspin.

There’s an old story of a monk who carries a sack of horse manure around with him everywhere he goes.

Each time he goes to a monastery, he walks in, he puts his sack down, and stands there for a few minutes. He looks around and says, “Good God, this place stinks. I’m not staying here.”

So he picks up the sack and he carries it with him to the next place. And surprise—yeah, that place stinks too.

The only one constant in all the troubles we have in our life is this idea of self.

Master Dōgen cuts through it all with just a few simple words:

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by everything.”

What is it to be enlightened by anything?

Some of you met Master Guite this week. You say, “Oh, I can be enlightened by lollipops and rainbows!”

Certainly not through pain…

But it’s in pain too.

When we release our grip on identity—our grip on self-image—we release our cherished fictions. We release our grip on our wounds, and our defenses to prevent that wounding.

Then our world itself rises up to meet us as a teacher.

The 10,000 dharmas—the myriad things, the infinite forms—all work directly with us to reveal our enlightenment.

When you turn a doorknob, the door opens.

When you take a step, you move forward.

If you forget to tie your shoes, you trip.

All awakening.

Even the most painful experiences in our life can become a gate of liberation.

What’s interesting is that Dōgen doesn’t stop here.

You’d think, “Oh, that’s the path.”

But he says:

“When you have this enlightenment—this practice-enlightenment (because practice and enlightenment can’t be separate)—then no trace of this enlightenment remains. And the traceless enlightenment is realized forever.”

There’s no trace of enlightenment—but the traceless enlightenment continues forever.

It’s a wonderful way of putting it.

When you think you’ve attained—put that down.

When you think you’ve really messed up—put that down too.

Yeah?

When you do that, then you can experience this traceless enlightenment. And you can rediscover it, moment by moment.

It’s a beauty and wonder—for wonder—of awakening.

It happens every single thought, every single breath.

When we do service, we say: “Let the mind-flower bloom in eternal spring.”

That’s the name of the order we ordain priests into: The Eternal Spring Order.

Every moment blooms anew. Never stops blooming.

First, you’ve got to let go.

You’ve got to let go of clinging to enlightenment as an idea, or accomplishment, or a credential.

You’ve got to let go of the self that would do that—try to aggrandize itself in that way.

Anytime you think you’ve attained something, you’re still playing in the field of separation.

In the end, traceless enlightenment is just being fully alive with nothing extra.

So how do we attain this?

How do we attain this liberation that comes with it?

Well—the first thing you do is stop searching.

Yeah?

You have to stop imagining there’s something missing, and instead bring your full awareness into this moment, into this life—with all its noise, with all its confusion, with all its grief.

Your life just as it is is that jewel sewn into your robe.

Ironically, you don’t need to earn it (although I am going to encourage you to continue studying your calendar!).

But you do need to realize it.

That means sitting down—as you’ve become accustomed to doing a lot over the last few days.

That means practicing with your karmic momentum, instead of against it.

Your karma—the only way to exhaust your karma—is to recognize it for what it is.

If I try to deny the facts of me being a middle-aged man, I’ll be feeling some pain pretty fast. I went out last week. I did a 60-mile bike ride. And when I got done, I recognized some of my mortality there. You can’t out-pedal it.

That means allowing the 10,000 dharmas to teach you—even when they’re teaching heartbreak. Even when they’re teaching confusion.

And by the way—your delusions? They’re not obstacles to practice either.

For awakening to be awakening, it must contain everything—which by definition means it also has to contain your delusions.

Your doubts, your fears, your longing, the wounded parts of yourself you carry along—all of it is a path to the Buddha mind.

If we can stop pretending that it’s something we have to escape…

Don’t ignore these things.

Don’t bury the family treasure contained within each of you.

All of you are luminous jewels in Indra’s Net—and as such, you are the Buddha.

So bow.

And let that jewel shine.

And most importantly, moment by moment… what will you do with it?