Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Spontaneous Opening of the Treasure House

That the treasure-house opens naturally, or spontaneously, is Master Dogen's fundamentally optimistic realization, expressed at the beginning and at the end of his rules of sitting-Zen for everybody. It is the fundamentally optimistic realization expressed in the Lotus Sutra, that the Universe is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end.

When Gudo first met Kodo, he became a target that was hit by this teaching, and he has spent nearly 70 years endeavoring to clarify it. The truth, Gudo proclaims, is available to us naturally because our natural state is balance of the autonomic nervous system; and, to enjoy this state, we should just sit upright, keeping the spine in the position that feels to us to be vertically straight.

What I am proposing to you is a more dynamic clarification of what true uprightness is -- based on testing out Gudo's hypothesis, by trial and frequent error, in the painful laboratory of my own life.

According to Prof. Frank Lambert, all spontaneous processes are manifestations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (=energy-change), because they involve energy dispersing.

So if we wish to clarify the real meaning of body and mind spontaneously dropping off, and the treasure house spontaneously opening, we should understand those phenomena dynamically, in terms of energy change.

And so now, standing on Gudo's shoulders, I am suggesting that true uprightness is a spontaneous transformation of energy that is sensed and directed primarily by means of the vestibular system.

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