Someone starts telling you something and partway through, you have it. Having it feels like listening well. Dōgen wrote one line about which direction the light was travelling in that moment, and he calls that moment delusion. Let’s read him.
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.
Look at what the first sentence puts inside one clause. Carrying the self forward, and illuminating. Two motions joined, and the word for the pair is delusion. He is not saying the illuminating was fine and the carrying spoiled it. The light and the self travel out together, so whatever gets lit comes back lit by what you took out to it.
He says nothing about whether the light was accurate. A thing can be lit correctly. The person can be read right, the situation can turn out to be exactly what you took it for, and the sentence still holds, because it is about which way the lighting travelled and not about the quality of the result. Being right is not a check on this.
Then comes the chain, and the direction inside it. Study the self. The studying ends in forgetting it. And at the end of the forgetting the verb turns around: to be actualized by myriad things. In the first sentence you go out to the thing carrying a lamp. In the last one the things do it to you. Same things, opposite motion.
One thing a person can do here is improve the lamp. Read people more carefully, get the construal closer to true, sharpen the instrument. What that costs is that everything you learn arrives shaped like the instrument, and the better it gets, the less can arrive that it did not already predict. You become well informed about what you brought.
Another is to put the lamp down. Hold the read back, go deliberately blank, decline to interpret. That is an operation, and you will check how the operation is going, and the checking is you again, out in front, carrying something. Dōgen’s word is forget, and forgetting is not refusing.
The third is the one his last sentence ends on. Let the thing act on you. What that costs is standing. You stop being the one who arrives with the light. Your account of a person can be overturned by something small they do, and you have to let it be overturned, which means you are no longer the one who already knows.
So what are we aiming at. We want to know who moved. Dōgen gives two motions — the self going out to the thing, and the thing coming to act on the self — and the only question is which one happened.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone begins a story about their day and by the third sentence you know where it is going.
- Somebody comes to you with a question and the answer is ready before they have finished asking it.
- A person you have known for years does something a little out of character, and it fits your account of them anyway.
The one thing to watch in all three is who moved. Did the thing reach you, or did you reach it with the meaning already in your hand.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to stop yourself from understanding. Watch who moved, and leave it as it is.