Month: March 2021

 “Nothing in the universe has ever been concealed.”

I stumbled across this Dōgen quote over forty years ago in a book that I pulled from a library shelf while killing time between classes my first year of college, and the entire world changed.

Or maybe the entire word was suddenly allowed to be itself. Or maybe simply being itself was suddenly more than enough. Or maybe both of these, and I suddenly noticed something about myself that I should have known all along.

Dōgen’s eight words are as direct and unadorned and sturdy as the potent message they convey, a simple and profound wisdom. I understood the purpose behind his words immediately; it was as clear and fresh and new as if I was sitting beside him as he spoke to his students at the Eihei-ji monastery northeast of Kyoto in the thirteenth century. I could smell the 750 year old incense lingering in the cool mountain air.    

Problems arise when we get stuck on the surface of things. Dōgen, however, seemed to be saying that the real problem is not that we get stuck on the surface, but that we assume there is something besides the surface itself, something else, something more fundamental lurking beneath or behind the surface, that there is some deeper or more meaningful reality than our actual moment-by-moment experience. Where could such a reality be? Where might it be hiding? Why would it do so?

The universe is exactly what it is, and is not intentionally trying to make life difficult for us. We don’t need to search for hidden meaning behind, beneath, or outside of experience. Moment-by-moment experience is all that has ever been. It is all that can ever be.

And it is entirely enough.

The word traces to the medieval Latin verb contrarotulare, a combination of contra (against) and rotulus (wheel or roll). In ancient times, official contracts, laws, regulations, treaties, and decrees, were reified through written documentation stored as cylinders of rolled parchment. Supporting a legal argument or verifying the accuracy of a claim involved comparing statements or assertions “against the rolls.” To control something originally meant that you had access to the documentary means of justifying the exercise of power over that thing: the bill of sale for a slave, for example.

Control is an entirely civilized word. Literacy is a prerequisite—the very idea of control is derived from the magical power civilization assigns to things that have been written down.

The word has grown much since its earliest days. Its application is no longer limited to the realm of bureaucratized power; its broad metaphorical application has made it a word that the civilized simply cannot do without. Control as metaphor is so widespread and commonplace that it is no longer possible to recognize it as metaphor.

We are asked to control our temper, for example. We are told the control of fire was a decisive event in our species’ evolution. But this is metaphor. No one really has power over fire—whether we are talking about an emotional flame or one that burns skin, not the kind of power that commands the labor of another person, not the kind of power that seals a man in prison, not the kind of power that empties the ocean of fish and the forest of trees.

Control—real control, not its metaphorical cousin—still requires documentary means of justification. An Achilles heel here, I think: remove the words, and you remove the power. Burn the rolls, and the magic becomes mere ashes.  

A warm afternoon in early March, and the dog and I are sitting in the sunshine on the deck. There is a birdfeeder hanging just on the other side of the deck rail in front of me, perhaps only six feet away. A single small round bird is feeding, apparently also enjoying the sun’s munificence. I am watching the bird eat—seed husks spilling out of both sides of its beak—while I ride a slowly snaking train of thought on its way to nowhere in particular.

Then the air shatters suddenly someplace just to my left, and a hawk bullets past the birdfeeder in a laser-straight line, a speckled football that plucks the bird off its perch like a street magician making a dollar bill disappear. The dog jumps to her feet and breathes a reflexive growl, but it is over and done by the time either of us knows what happened. My eyes linger on the motionless birdfeeder while I shake off the impulse toward horror and replace it with the ragged beginnings of a joke: “it’s called a birdfeeder for a reason.”

A half hour later a student emails me, inquiring about her grade and apologizing for several missing assignments. She says that things have not been good. She says she has been struggling and unable to keep up with her classes because several members of her family have recently been killed, victims of ethnic cleansing, slaughtered as part of the genocide ripping its way through the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia.  

She asks about the possibility for extra credit to bring her grade up.

My eyes linger on the motionless words on the screen, and I am unable to shake off the impulse toward horror because there is nothing to replace it with.