Something in you quietens, and a second later you turn around to see whether it really did. That turn is what today is about. Dōgen sets out the whole path in four short sentences and then adds one more describing what is left when it has happened. Let’s read them.
To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion.
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 actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
Dōgen’s sentences run in one direction and every step takes something away. Study the self, and the studying ends in forgetting it. Forget it, and things act on you instead of you going out to them. Then body and mind drop off. Nothing is acquired anywhere along that chain, and the last sentence says so outright: no trace remains.
A trace is what you would go back and look for. If one were left, you could hold it up, inspect it, and find out where you stand. Dōgen is saying there is nothing there of that kind. Whatever turns up when you go back to look was made by the looking.
The man who goes looking always finds something, and that is his cost. There is a small satisfaction available, or an account of how the moment went, and both of them are him — arrived back in a space he had just been out of. He can no longer tell a quiet moment from a moment he handled well, because by the time he examines it, it is the second one. The checking manufactures the thing it reports.
The other position costs him too, and it is worth saying plainly what it costs. He gets no confirmation, ever. Nobody tells him it is happening, there is no day on which he finds out, and the effort he puts into looking comes back with no receipt. He has to be able to do it without knowing.
So what are we aiming at. We want to let a quiet moment go by unchecked.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Something at home that would usually have got a sharp reply from you doesn’t get one, and a second later you notice that it didn’t.
- You let a small slight go in the morning, and around the middle of the day you go back to see whether it is still let go.
- You sit down quietly for a few minutes, and partway through, a question arrives about whether this is working.
In all three, watch for the turn — the small movement back toward the moment to see how it went. One question, two answers. Is the thing still happening, or am I standing next to it now, looking at it.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to stop yourself from checking. Watch the turn arrive, and leave it as it is.