Got a new SuicideGirls article up now. Yet another one about porn. I swear I'm gonna stop writing this article over & over one of these days. Maybe when people stop asking me to.
I just woke up, so I'm not gonna try and expound anymore about mindfulness until maybe later. The thing with most words used in Buddhism is that once the general public latches onto them and defines them in their own way they're dead. I think it's time to bury the word "mindfulness." It's just a cliche anymore. And, as I said (see below), seems to indicate in practice a state of fuzzy headed thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking while congratulating yourself on how mindful you're being. Lock the God damned doors and close the windows when you leave somebody else's house!
In the only place I know of where Dogen uses the word mindfulness he goes, "Mindfulness is the donkey looking at the well. It is the well looking at the donkey. It is the donkey looking at the donkey. It is the well looking at the well." He also says, "Without knowing who taught you, you think that mind is a function of the brain. When I say that mind is grass and trees you don't believe it." And, of course, Dogen did not use the word "mindfulness" at all. Neither did Buddha. The word did not even exist during their lifetimes. The English language itself didn't even exist in Buddha's day. Later on I'll go look up the Japanese word Dogen used that's translated here as "mindfulness" by Nishijima/Cross*.
Thing is, though, the "mindfulness" being taught nowadays seems to imply that we need to be mindful. As if we could somehow enact mindfulness. Nope. Can't be done. Mindfulness is occurring always. We need to get out of its way.
* It looks like I was wrong! First time in my whole life (hi, trolls)! I'd always thought the donkey-well line was about mindfulness. I even put it in my book Sit Down And Shut Up that way. Which goes to show you can never trust what's written in books! Shameful!!
In fact, the donkey-well stuff occurs in the chapter titled "Not Doing Wrongs" (諸悪莫作 SHOAKU MAKUSA, chapter 10 in book one of the Nishijima/Cross translation of Shobogenzo) and says, "[The relation between] wrongs and not committing is not only a well looking at a donkey; it is the well looking at the well, the donkey looking at the donkey, a human being looking at a human being, and a mountain looking at a mountain." Nishijima explains this chapter on his blog right here. Although he makes a spelling mistake and keeps using the word "will" instead of "well" at one point (I gotta go fix that).
This is a reference to a koan that appears in Eihei Zenji Goroku (永平禅師語録 The Recorded Sayings of Eihei Zenji, a.k.a. Dogen). The koan goes, "Master Sozan once asked a monk, 'How is it when the dharma body of reality is manifesting form in accordance with beings, like the moon reflected in the water?' The monk said, 'It's like a donkey looking at a well.' Sozan said, 'You have said quite a lot, but you have only said eighty percent of it.' The monk then asked, 'What do you say, teacher?' Sozan answered, 'It's like the well looking at the donkey.'"
The only instance I can find where Dogen uses anything like the word "mindful" occurs in a piece he wrote called Zazengi（坐禅儀), or "Method for Zazen Practice." In Kazuaki Tanahashi's translation, which appears in Moon In A Dewdrop it says, "be mindful of passing time." I checked it out and the actual line is: 光陰を護惜べし. Carl Bielefeldt translates this as, "hold dear the passing days and nights." Both the words 光陰 and 護惜 are no longer in common use. 光陰 means roughly "light and darkness." And, by the way, for those of you who think of me as a smutty minded perv, I happen to know the character 陰 from the word 陰毛 which means "pubic hair" or, literally, "hair in darkness." The word 護惜 is a combo of two characters that mean "protect" (護) and "dearly" (惜). That's the word Tanahashi translates as "mindful." It's not as much of a stretch as Brian Victoria translating Kodo Sawaki's statement meaning "we were fed up with killing" as "we gorged ourselves on killing." But it is a slight, though perfectly acceptable, stretch to use the word "mindful" here.
Be careful not to get stuck on words (says a guy who just devoted a couple hours of his holiday morning to looking up some words). Don't say I never looked up nuthin' for you!
