There are a number of translations of Shoji and Zenki, two teaching fascicles by Zen Master Dogen. I am using Dr. Abe’s original translation, which appeared in The Eastern Buddhist journal from the 1970’s. Zenki and Shoji are very short pieces, but they are connected because they both are concerned with Dogen’s understanding of birth and death, from different points of view. Zenki is usually the first and Shoji is second. I can’t say when we will end Zenki and start Shoji – we will just go along. The term "zen" in this case means total or complete, and "ki" means something like the how things work, or the complete dynamic working of things. Thomas Cleary translated it as "the whole works." Usually when we think of life and death, we think of life as the manifestation of our activity and our consciousness, and death as the cessation of activity and of consciousness.

But Dogen equated the two, it’s like two sides of a coin. Birth is one side and death is the other. I don’t like to use life and death as opposites, because if we use life and death this way, it’s like life is something static, and death something static. But actually both birth and death are dynamic activities, and there is nothing static about them. Life is the coin itself.

This is, of course, how most Buddhists think about our experience of continuation. In Buddhism we have terms like reincarnation and rebirth, and there are various theories about birth and death and reincarnation depending on what country a particular Buddhist tradition is from. I think that Tibetan Buddhism has a tendency to believe in reincarnation. Theravada Buddhism thinks more in terms of rebirth. Zen teachers like to think that birth and death are happening on each moment and that life is continuous. To seek some kind of clarity is important because there are many ways to think about it. Dogen’s understanding is that in birth there is death and in death there is birth. Each containing the other.

In the first sentence of Zenki, Dogen wrote, "In the culmination of its quest, the great way of all Buddhas is emancipation and realization." Simply put, the purpose of Buddhist practice is finding emancipation and realization. For Dogen emancipation means that life emancipates life, and that death emancipates death. In this case, he means that it possible to find our freedom or emancipation within life; and it is also possible to find emancipation within death. To find emancipation within life is to live fully on each moment, at one with our activity. Ad it is possible in the same way to find our freedom within death. Suzuki Roshi liked to say that birth and death are the same thing.

There are two ways of thinking about it: freedom within, or freedom from. Suzuki Roshi talked a lot about the meaning of freedom. We usually think that freedom means to do whatever we want. I have the freedom to pursue happiness, but happiness is not a thing that you can pursue, it is a by-product; the result of our actions. Suzuki Roshi mostly talked about freedom from. For him true freedom only comes about within limitations. We can easily become a victim of our deluded understanding of the meaning of freedom without limitations. The practice of zazen is a very disciplined meditation, but it is also offers the greatest freedom within the strictest limitations. When Dogen talked about zenki, he was also talking about zazen as the way to understand or the way to experience Buddha’s teaching; freedom from grasping and freedom from aversion.

Dogen stated, "Emancipation means that life emancipates life, and that death emancipates death. For this reason there is deliverance from birth and death, and immersion in birth and death." Deliverance from birth and death has the feeling of not being subject to. "Within" has the feeling that even though there is birth and death, we are free from birth and death. "Both are the great way totally culminated. There is also the discarding of birth and death, and there is crossing over birth and death. Both are the great way totally culminated. Realization is life, life is realization." He was talking about emancipation, now he is talking about realization. "Realization is life, life is realization. When the great way is realized, it is nothing but life’s total realization and it is nothing but death’s total realization."

First, he spoke from the standpoint of birth or "taking up;" then he spoke from the standpoint of death or "letting go." We feel that death is like emptiness and birth is manifestation. There are two terms, "vijnana" and "vijnapti." Vijnana means consciousness. When we think about human life, we think about consciousness. Buddhism talks about eight levels of consciousness: the five sense consciousnesses, mind consciousness, ego or self consciousness, and finally storehouse of memory consciousness, and then there is the ninth, Buddha nature or Dharmakaya.

Vijnapti means manifestation. When we are talk about birth, we use the term manifestation, something appearing momentarily, due to causes and conditions. Suzuki Roshi and Thich Nhat Hanh had a similar view of potentially. Potentiality means that something, a dharma, or a person manifests because the dharma or person already exists as potentiality, and only needs causes and conditions to make its appearance. When something or someone arises, it is not that it arises without some reason. There are three things that are needed for something to arise: subject, object, and consciousness. According to this understanding, we have always been here in potentiality and the combination of causes and conditions complete the manifestation.

This is called birth. We don’t come into existence from nothing. We manifest through our parents. Our parents are a direct cause, and the environment provides the conditions. When causes and conditions are no longer working together, there is no longer manifestation and we call this death So there is manifesting and non-manifesting which is called birth and death. But the potentiality is always there in the process of continuation. Buddhists think about it in various ways. If we look at time and space, each one of us is at the exact place where time and space meet. Here is space and time is now. Each one of us at any moment is living, existing, manifesting at this moment and at this time, which includes the past, present, and future. But our discriminating consciousness creates discontinuous time. Continuous time is just now. Always now. Discontinuous time is past, present, and future. We invent this time system for our convenience and call it one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock and so forth. We live in different time existences. If you go to the Amazon Jungle, people there exist in a different sense of time than the people in New York City. Their time references are different. We, in a sense, create time.

Eternal is maybe not the right word, but continuous time is now. Anytime that you say you are awake is the time of now. Discontinuous time is sequential. We have both sequential time and continuous time. Sequential time is the dividing up of continuous time into discriminated parts. When we sit zazen, for the most part we sit in continuous time. It is not necessary to know what time it is, but we think there is because of our discomfort. As soon as we have discomfort, we start thinking about what time it is. [laughter] Zazen allows us to let go of discriminating mind. So we leave it up to the time keeper to think about discriminating time, otherwise there is no need to think about time at all. The two sides of time: continuous and discontinuous are the fundamental and the practical. Within the fundamental is the practical and within the practical is the fundamental.

Birth and death are taking place moment by moment. We recognize two kinds of birth and death. One is that we are born at a certain time, and then we grow up, and then we die. The other way of thinking about birth and death is that each moment has its own birth and death; and according to Dogen, its own present, past, and future. Following the breath while inhaling, is inspiration, in other words coming to life. And death, the breath leaving, is expiration. The breath is rising and falling, but it is not going anywhere. Each complete breath is one cycle of birth and death. So paying attention to our breath and its cycles is to study the meaning of birth and death.

Zazen is the practice of zenki; total dynamic activity. When we sit, our body, mind, and breath are harmonized with the universal rhythm. There is no separation. We realize that our whole body-mind is simply universal activity. We don’t control the way the blood runs through our body, we didn’t control the way we were born or manifested into the world. We may have been kicking and screaming, but that is beyond our control. And we don’t control the aging process, even though we may try, and we don’t control the dying process. It is simply the universe doing its thing. We say, "I am breathing," but it’s just an idea we have. We actually are being breathed by the universe itself. There is nothing we can do about that even though we try. So, we try to shape everything in a certain way, but it is simply the flow of the way things go. If we say there is no self, there is some truth to that. If we say there is a self, there is some truth to that, too. This is where people get stuck. They hear that there shouldn’t be an ego self; and they try to shake it off. How do I get rid of my ego self? But the self is necessary. We just offer it to the Three Treasures. There is no inherent self, there is simply the self of the universe. Each one of us is a manifestation of the universal self. As Yasutani Roshi once said, "We all belong to the same nose-hole society." [laughter] Now, here we are, breathing the same air eating the same food, and being deluded about the same delusions and agreeing on them.