★[Part IV] A Venice Biennale Award-Winning Exhibition Born from Large-Scale Disasters and War　What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? — Exhibitions That Were Created from Large-Scale Disasters and War and Became the Focus of Attention at the Venice Biennale!

What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?

　Dogen’s （道元）『Shinjin-datsuraku, datsuraku-shinjin』—“dropping off body-and-mind, dropping off body-and-mind”—was something he learned from his Chinese teacher, Tiantong Rujing（天童如浄）. What this means, I believe, is to allow all the “anger, jealousy, sexual desire, aggressiveness, loneliness, greed, anxiety, and sadness” that arise within us to emerge during zazen, while gradually letting go of each one, aiming to reach a state of meikyo-shisui—“a clear mirror and still water”—in which the state of being endlessly pulled along by desire is reduced to zero, allowing one to become free and at ease.

　Carl Gustav Jung says, “It is said that the Buddha was a man who shattered to pieces his desire to be reborn into this world in order to spin out of the cycle of reincarnation, but that is something far removed from ordinary humanity.”

　And is such a thing actually possible?

　Indeed, it is something far removed from ordinary human experience!

　Various Buddhist thinkers, including D. T. Suzuki, have put forward their own theories about enlightenment, but most of them have been rather vague. I believe that one of the meanings of enlightenment in early Buddhism is “to consciously shatter one’s own spiritual essence into pieces like a glass marble and reduce it to nothing.”

　Yet no one other than Jung was able to express the idea this far.

　D. T. Suzuki says, “It is said that the Buddha suddenly attained enlightenment when he saw the dawn while sitting in zazen. Buddhist scholars up to now have underestimated this account of enlightenment and have hardly discussed it, but Buddhist scholars must somehow clarify exactly what this experience of enlightenment was. Katsu!”

　He said this in lectures to foreigners, but then he would also challenge his audience by saying, “You understood my English very well, I’m sure, but you probably didn’t understand what I was talking about very well!・・・・Katsu!” In the end, however, he himself never managed to explain what enlightenment actually was.

　The discussion then continues: “Ummmmm! By the way, in order to know a thing itself, it is important to become that thing itself.” (『What Is Zen?』 by D. T. Suzuki, p. 88　『禅とは何か？』　by鈴木大拙　)

　In other words, isn’t that just evasion?

　In the end, nobody really understood what enlightenment was.

　Along with this self-annihilation, I believe that enlightenment means intuitively recognizing a certain truth or fact.

　To attain enlightenment = to understand something clearly.
　
　Previously, when the professional shogi player Kato Hifumi（加藤一二三）9-dan was asked why he decided to become a shogi player, he answered:

　“I looked at the record of a particular game and became completely absorbed in it because I found it extremely interesting. Then I realized, ‘Ahhhhh! I love shogi!’”

　That is enlightenment.

　That is why Zen also speaks of “great enlightenment and small enlightenment.”

　There are people who connect Confucius’ saying in the Analects, “If in the morning I hear the Way, I can die in the evening,” with Dogen, saying that he used the same expression twice in the 『Shobogenzo Zuimonki』正法眼蔵　by 道元　(, and then discuss it in connection with the question of what enlightenment is. But interpreting this as meaning “if one attains enlightenment in the morning” is utterly nonsensical.

　If that were the case, there would no longer be any meaning to living one’s life.

　In Indian philosophy, Buddha means “the awakened one,” and according to a textbook on Indian philosophy at Bukkyo University（佛教大学）, there were apparently many such “awakened ones” at the time, but perhaps no one other than Gautama Siddhartha became a teacher and taught others what he had awakened to.

　The content of what the Buddha became aware of was apparently expressed in teachings such as “all conditioned things are impermanent” and “all phenomena are without a self”—meaning that nothing has an independent, permanent essence and nothing exists entirely on its own. These ideas seem to coincide remarkably well with theories in modern physics.

　When you stop and think about it after being told this, it seems obvious. But that moment of hearing it and thinking, “Ohhh, I see! So that’s how it is!”—the act of “understanding = recognizing” the truth that is right before our eyes—is called prajna wisdom in Indian philosophy.

　That is where it came to be translated as “the wisdom of hannya,” or prajna, isn’t it?

　In other words, Buddha means a person who became aware of various truths and realities.

　Kato Hifumi realized his own genius when he discovered that he loved shogi and was able to read and understand game records as he progressed through them.

　When I was in the first year of junior high school, I saw a photograph of Ryuzaburo Umehara’s　japan (梅原龍三郎)『Sakurajima — Blue』(櫻島　青) and was so deeply moved that I cried. At that moment, I realized, “Paintings are supposed to move people.”

　Take Takeshi Hayashi（林　武）. While he was delivering milk by bicycle on a snowy road, he fell and smashed the milk bottles, scattering them everywhere. A police officer who happened to witness the scene looked at him with disgust and thought, “What a terrifying fellow!”

　At that moment, something deep inside Hayashi’s mind was illuminated by a golden light, as though sunlight had suddenly streamed down from the sky.

　He intuitively felt that someone was telling him: “Don’t worry. You will definitely become somebody important. You have genius within you. You are under God’s protection.”

　He later wrote in his book 『Living for Beauty — My Experiential Theory of Painting（美に生きる　私の体験的絵画論）』 (Kodansha Gendai Shinsho,　講談社現代新書 1965) that this experience continued to encourage and convince him whenever he encountered difficult situations while pursuing a career as a painter.

　This is enlightenment.

　And as you can see from these examples, enlightenment always involves intuition or an intuitive sense.

　If something is reached through analysis and logical judgment, the truth or falsity of the conclusion often remains open to question. But intuition carries a sense of certainty: “There is no doubt that this is true.”

　I believe the teachings of Buddhism mean that human beings are meant to live by accumulating these moments of enlightenment throughout their lives!。

Dogen’s Shinjin-datsuraku and Human Sexual Desire, Violence, Jealousy, Loneliness, and Pride

　Some researchers believe that Dogen’s concept of 『Shinjin-datsuraku』（心身脱落） may have arisen from the violence and greed that ran through the bloodline of the Minamoto clan（源氏）, like Yoritomo(源　頼朝) and Yoshitsune（源　義経）; from the suffering of his mother and his empathy toward Kiso Yoshinaka, who was supposedly his mother’s husband? (It is said that Dogen’s mother became the concubine of Minamoto no Michichika after her relationship with Yoshinaka and gave birth to Dogen); and from the legend that Yoshinaka was so absorbed in his mother’s body that he was consumed by sexual desire even in the midst of war.

　Dogen was an extremely stubborn ascetic who slept under a thin futon even in the bitter cold of Fukui and ultimately died young, perhaps because of it. He is also said to have demanded the same kind of strict ascetic discipline from his disciples. I suppose this may have been the reason.

　This mindfulness cultivated through zazen seems to me to possess an especially great value and brilliance precisely because we live in the modern age.

Click here for other pages in this series!

★【PartⅠ】 A Venice Biennale Award-Winning Exhibition Born from Large-Scale Disasters and War and the Controversy They Generated! — The “Trauma Olympics” and the Reality of International Art Exhibitions!　【See this page】

★【Part II】A Venice Biennale Award-Winning Exhibition Born from a Major Disaster and War and Becoming a Topic of Discussion! What Happened to “Home-for-All” Afterwards? — What Toyo Ito and Koki Tanaka Exhibited, and Their Impact on Disaster-Affected Areas!【See this page】

★【Part III】 A Venice Biennale Award-Winning Exhibition Born from Large-Scale Disasters and War　In the Rubble and on the Battlefield, People Seek Flowers!【See this page】

strong>★Reference Pages

1. Related to the book “The Jewish Buddhist” and “JuBu”

『The Jew in the Lotus』 (by Roger Kamenetz)

　 ※This is an overview page of the representative work that helped make the concept of “JuBu (Jewish Buddhists)” widely known around the world.

2. Related to “Shunryu Suzuki / San Francisco Zen Center” — an introduction to Shunryu Suzuki

　Everyday Zen Foundation (Teachings and History of Shunryu Suzuki)
　※This is reference material explaining the background of the establishment of the San Francisco Zen Center and the classic book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”