In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 SEVEN Sammai-Ô-Zammai 三昧王三昧 (The King of Samadhis Samadhi) According to a colophon attached to Sammai-Ô-Zammai, it was delivered on the fifteenth day, the second month, the second year of Kangen [1244] at Kippôsh ôja [Yoshimine-dera] in the province of Echizen. The words Sammai-Ôzammai appear in Nagarjuna’s Ta chih tu lun: “It is called the King of Samadhis Samadhi because all other samadhis of various kinds are included in it. It is like all the myriad rivers and rivulets of the human world flowing as tributaries into the great ocean; or like the fact that all people are vassals of the king of the realm.” For Dôgen, it refers to zazen, the authentic practice for followers of Buddhism (Ôkubo, vol. 1, 539–42). SAMMAI-Ô-ZAMMAI To sit crosslegged is to take a leap straightaway transcending the entire world and to find oneself within the exceedingly sublime quarters of the Buddhas and patriarchs.1 To sit crosslegged is to trample over the heads of all the devil heretics and become the Person within the Buddhas’ and patriarchs’ innermost precincts. This Dharma and this alone is the way to transcend the highest 1. To sit crosslegged—kekkafuza—that is, the full lotus position. 100 THE HEART OF DÔGEN’S SHÔBÔGENZÔ reaches of the Buddhas and patriarchs. It is for this reason that Buddhas and patriarchs practice it and never exert their efforts elsewhere. You should know that the total world of sitting is far different from all other total worlds.2 In penetrating the true nature of this difference, you discern and affirm the arising of the religious mind, the practice, enlightenment, and nirvana of the Buddhas and patriarchs.3 At the very time of your sitting, you should examine exhaustively whether the total world is vertical or horizontal.4 At that very time, what is the sitting itself? Is it wheeling about in perfect freedom? Is it like the spontaneous vigor of a leaping fish? Is it thinking? Or not thinking? Is it doing? Is it nondoing ? Is it sitting within sitting? Is it sitting within body and mind? Or is it sitting that has cast off sitting within sitting, sitting within body and mind, and the like? You should examine exhaustively in this way thousands or tens of thousands of such details. It should be the body sitting crosslegged. It should be the mind sitting crosslegged. It should be body and mind cast off sitting crosslegged. My late master, the old Buddha, said: “The practice of Zen (sanzen) is body and mind falling away.5 It is attained only in single-minded sitting. There is no need for incense-offerings, homage-paying, nembutsu, penance disciplines, or sutrareadings .” In the past four or five hundred years it is my late master alone who plucked out the eye of the Buddhas and patriarchs and sat within its core.6 There have been few in China who could compare to him. Rare are those who have understood that sitting is the Buddha Dharma, and the Buddha Dharma is sitting. Some may have known experientially that sitting is the Buddha Dharma, but none of them has known sitting as sitting. How, then, could any2 . All other total worlds—that is, the total world of non-Buddhists and of those Buddhists who do not practice crosslegged sitting. The total, all-encompassing world of the zazen sitter is beyond them. 3. Discern and affirm . . . patriarchs. In the total world of zazen, you realize the truth that the arising of the religious mind (bodhichitta), practice, enlightenment, and nirvana are not relative states of a spiritual process, as is usually thought by those confined to “all other realms.” Each of the four is absolute and includes the other three as well, a truth that is affirmed or confirmed in the sitter. 4. Vertical or horizontal—the commentary SBGZ monge has: “In crosslegged sitting . . . there is no vertical time division of past, present, future; horizontally, the world of all the ten directions disappears. All is cast off. ‘Vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ are provisional names; they have no real existence ” (SBGZ chûkai zensho, v. 8). 5. The “old Buddha” is Dôgen’s Chinese master Ju-ching. The words quoted here appear in the fifteenth section of Dôgen’s practice journal Hôkyô-ki. 6. That is, since the time of the T’ang Zen master Po-chang, revered author of the earliest rules of Zen monasticism, which included a...

Share