The Bravery of Buddhism

This is one on the most mystical and poetic pieces in all of Shobogenzo. I've tried my best not to do a hatchet job on the poetry of it in my attempt to paraphrase.

The basic idea here is one Dogen revisits several times. He believed that nature could often explain the dharma to people better than people could explain it to each other through words. That may sound abstract, but it's really not that difficult to understand.

You could say that nature explains science to people. It explains science by demonstrating scientific principles. The principles of science exist before we put them into words or write them out as equations.

It's the same with the dharma. Reality exists as it is. The words we use to explain our understanding of it are always pale reflections of the truth we are attempting to convey and of our own understanding of that truth.

To me this attitude of insisting that nature can explain Buddhism better than words is part of the bravery of Buddhism. I was initially impressed by Buddhism because, unlike every other religion I'd encountered up till then, it was not afraid of science. For example, these days a lot of misguided people in my country try to deny the observable fossil record and insist that the words of their religious book are truer than what nature tells them.

But Buddhism isn't like that. The Dalai Lama famously said, "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change." Dogen is expressing something very similar here, along with a lot of other good ideas.

---Brad Warner, in Master Dogen's Keisei Sanshoku---