Mountains and Waters, by Subhana Barzaghi, Roshi

　　Dogen is revered as the founder of the Soto Zen School. He came from a very wealthy background and received such a rigorous education that by the age of seven he was reading ancient Chinese classics. When he was eight his mother died, and it is said that he awakened at that time to the impermanence of life. Dogen revealed later that while his mother was dying she had encouraged him to become a monk. So he studied for some time in the court, and then he sought the help of his uncle to run away and become ordained as a monk, at the age of fourteen. It is said he read the whole of the Buddhist canon, twice, while he was still in his teens. At the age of twenty-one he received transmission in one of the lineages.

　　Dogen had a number of teachers from different lineages. He spent time in China with his last teacher, Nyojo, and so intensive was it that it is said he did not sleep for two years. Nyojo came into the dojo one day and scolded a dozing monk. "Zen study requires the shedding of body and mind! Why do you sleep

　　" At that moment, Dogen was completely enlightened.

　　Dogen left a great body of writing, and one of his classic pieces is the Mountain and Waters Sutra. Here is an excerpt:

　　The mountains and waters of the immediate present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas. Because they are the self before the emergence of signs, they are the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality. By the height and breadth of the qualities of the mountains, the virtue of riding the clouds is always mastered from the mountains and the subtle work of following the wind as a rule penetrates through to liberation from the mountains. The green mountains are forever walking. A stone woman bears a child by night. If one doubts the walking of the mountains, one doesn”t even yet know one”s own walking.

　　So this is his exquisite sutra, which I love because it has such symbolic language. The mountains here mean the phenomenal world, existence. The waters means emptiness and these beautiful Taoist expressions like riding the clouds and following the wind simply mean transcendence or liberation. So we can read it as; form and emptiness of the immediate present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas. The mountains and waters are the way of enlightenment. In essence, both are beyond conception. And when he talks about before the emergence of signs, he means before the emergence of conceptualisation, conceptual mind. He goes on to say that the way of transcendance and liberation is none other than of the mountains, of this very world, of this very existence. Ordinary mind is the Tao. So the very heart of the teaching is that emptiness is form, form is emptiness. This sutra is symbolic of the interpenetration of emptiness and form, mountains and waters. So, form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness is not some thing out there, that exists.

　　It is none other than this rock, this blue tarpaulin, the tree and the wind. "Emptiness is form" means that Buddha nature pervades the whole universe. We wake up to this great vast body. And that fullness of the field of perception comes from the non-dualistic mind. So there are the twin aspects of the realisation of mind, the experience of waking up to this vast body.

　　Many years ago, I was a very intense yogi and doing a number of Vipassana retreats. In those days in Vipassana practice, you took one-hour vows for sitting without moving. You were not allowed to move for one hour. So I did that. And then I thought, well I”ve managed to do that, now two hours! And I was interested in just pushing it to the limit. I had heard somebody say that they became enlightened because they sat for three hours, and I accepted this naive idea that this wa…

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