One Time, One Meeting

Eihei Dogen, Fukanzazengi (1233)

“It’s time for Congress to step up to its job,” writes Chris Dunn on his blog Collegiate Times. “It’s time for the Lakers to step up,” writes Darius Soriano on the Forum Blue and Gold. “It is time for webOS to step up,” writes Derek Kessler on precentral.net, if Hewlett-Packard is to compete with the iPad.  And “it is time to step up and be found faithful to God and his work,” writes Pastor Joe on the website of the Oakdale Baptist Church.

Surveying these pronouncements, one might conclude that it is time for American bloggers—and American popular culture—to find a new figure of speech. But cliches often reflect common beliefs, and behind this particular cliche lies a widely held belief that whatever the problem might be, it can best be addressed by someone stepping up. Whether the field of endeavor be politics, sports, business, or religion, this belief is so familiar as to be mistaken for empirical fact. And though the contexts in which it functions are most often practical, it also carries its share of moral weight. Those who have stepped up are to be commended. Those who have not would do well to get with the program.

“Stepping up” is shorthand for “stepping up to the plate.” In its most common usage, the phrase means to assume responsibility, to become accountable. It may also refer to action in the service of a cause. As with baseball, so with our actions in the world: stepping up to the plate requires skill, courage, and initiative. In many situations, especially those involving political corruption, social injustice, or racial discrimination, stepping up to the plate is exactly what is called for. “He stands like a gaunt lighthouse of honesty,” wrote Ernest Hemingway of his friend Herbert Mathews. And the same might be said of the leading activists of our time—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, to name a few. Their work has left a mighty wake, as has their moral example.

Yet as the great contemplative traditions, Zen included, remind us, self-assertive action, however noble or necessary, is only one mode of being. Stepping forward is only one way of meeting the world. And in one classic text of the Soto Zen tradition, Eihei Dogen’s Fukanzazengi  (Recommending Zen to All People), the practitioner is admonished to do the very opposite:

Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop away, and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.*

In this passage the phrase “just this” refers to undifferentiated reality: whatever is happening, within and around us, in this very moment. That reality cannot be grasped by concepts or described in words, which divide the totality into its constituent parts. But the wholeness of our experience can be realized by taking “the backward step,” which is to say, by shifting one’s orientation from ego-centered thinking to selfless awareness. In the light of that awareness, what is occurring in the mind and body becomes luminously clear.

Dogen’s formulation is abstract, but it can be illustrated by a concrete example. Let us say that you are an avid gardener, and as you walk down the sidewalk on a midsummer evening, you are thinking about your gardens. Lately, you note, the deer have been roaming your backyard and devouring your red-twigged dogwoods. The woodchucks have also been busy, eating your phlox and destroying your bachelor buttons. And just yesterday you noticed that slugs have been attacking your marigolds. Perhaps you should put out slug bait. Or put out a shallow bowl of beer, which the slugs can imbibe until they drown. You can use almost any kind of beer, with the possible exception of Pabst, which even a slug might be smart enough to avoid. . . .

Such is your train of thought, which a car’s loud horn brings to an end. Waking from your reverie, you realize that you are walking on a cracked, uneven sidewalk. Looking around, you also realize that you have walked the better part of a block without noticing a thing. Not the storm clouds gathering in the west, nor the chill in the air, nor your own thoughts as they have come and gone. As you settle into your newly awakened state, you notice that thoughts are still arriving, but now you are aware of their arrivals, as you are of your immediate surroundings. Although you are still moving forward, you have taken the backward step.

In urging us to take that step, Dogen is not suggesting that we remain forever in a state of pure being—or culpable inaction. Rather, he is urging us to inhabit our experience, naturally, spontaneously, and completely, in the very moment when it is occurring. Elsewhere in his teachings, Dogen speaks of a rhythm of backward and forward steps, by which he means a reciprocal relationship of thinking and awareness. Stepping forward, we think, speak, and act; stepping back, we cultivate awareness of what we are doing. In this way we learn to look deeply into our thoughts, words, and actions, even as we are stepping up.

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*Eihei Dogen, Beyond Thinking, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (Shambhala, 2004), 4. Translation by Edward Brown and the Editor.