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Teisho 3: Not "Now This, Now That"
Monday, October 8, 2001
from the series “Turning the Wheel of the Way"
Commentaries of Dogen's "Gyoji: Continuous Practice
Presented by Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi
© Copyright 2001 White Wind Zen Community
The endless activity of Aware Space that upholds us and all beings is limitless.
It arises and falls as the ten directions of the universe and all of the spaces and
places, the stones and leaves and faces that rise and fall within the ten directions.
Our awareness of it is limited to what we notice and most of what we notice is
limited by the three klesas of passion, aggression, and stupidity. When we move our
hands and feet, the endless activity of luminosity moves our hands and feet and is
our hands and feet. But we do not notice this because, with almost every step, we do
not feel the step. We are too busy running away from something that happened in
the past or running towards something that might or might not happen in the future.
If we notice our feet at all, it is usually only because we hope that someone is
admiring our shoes or because of the blister on the back of our heel. We pick up a
cup but do not feel this intimate touch because we are focused only on what we will
do with the cup, if we even are open that much to what is right in our own hands.
But our hands and feet are not encased in some hard shell that must be
broken away. There is nothing stopping us from feeling the cup in our hands, from
being right where we are standing, from being alive to our lives. We can breathe this
breath. We can see, we can hear. We can stop narrowing and focusing attention into
absurd, repetitive, and obsessive loops of discursiveness and feeling-tones. We can.
There is nothing stopping us from doing that.
When we begin to open to our lives as they are, as the Buddhas and
Awakened Ancestors invite us to, then there is room for us to notice how much space
is available to us to live in. Practising the Way that has been so generously set out
for us by our Lineage of Buddhas and Awakened Ancestors, we begin to realize that
this open space is opening as us and that we are opening space. 
When we are sitting, standing, walking, and lying down all within continuous
practice, then our continuous practice is the limitless activity of the ten directions.
The limitless activity which is continuous practice has always been so, whether we
have practised it or not. Limitless activity, continuous practice, the Treasury of
Luminosity, the Activity of Aware Space is not some abstract essence or religious
idea. It becomes actualized by us as what it always was when we continuously
practice this limitless activity by manifesting and upholding the precepts and
instructions. When we actively engage the Way, then there is no way in which the
Way does not meet us and no way in which we are separate from the Way.
Continuous practice actively upholds us through continuous practice.
And so Dogen zenji says,
The continuous practice which actualizes continuous practice is nothing
other than our continuous practice now. The immediate “now” of continuous
practice is not something that you have brought with you from before now.
The now of continuous practice does not emerge from or go to, enter or
leave, a self. The time we call “now” did not exist before continuous practice.
The time when continuous practice is manifested is what can be called “now.”