Why We Practice: Shohaku Okumura's Realizing Genjokoan

Last Updated: 2025-03-24 00:00:00 -0500

Around the middle of 2024, I set myself a goal to “read more deeply”, which is a horrible goal by most metrics, since it doesn’t have a concrete deliverable artefact or metric you can care about. This was actually something of a weird theme in 2024 for me more broadly: for a year that was supposedly (at least in part) about metricized living and trying to have a concrete sense of what was happening, it sure contained a lot of ill-defined goals. Still, you can at least some up with a plan for this sort of thing, so I did: a small list of non-fiction books I wanted to get through in roughly six months, and a fancy new five-step process for doing my damndest to “really understand” what I was working with.

Enter Realizing Genjokoan. While it wasn’t the first book on the list, Shohaku Okumura’s novella-length dissertation on the Shobogenzo Genjokoan of Dogen Zenji was certainly a priority for this new practice. I first read both Realizing and the Genjokoan somewhere around Christmas 2023, and as should be expected, I retained more or less exactly nothing. The Genjokoan itself is couched in deeply poetic language, I’m reading a third-hand translation of it, and both the original document and Realizing are heavily technical documents about the already hard to communicate topic of philosophy; especially with respect to Zen philosophy, which I’ll go so far as to say (as a long term practitioner) is obtuse on purpose. Realizing Genjokoan certainly deserved a better read than what I could skim from it overnighting on my little brother’s couch, so it also made the perfect object-exercise for testing the new mechanism.

And so, with all that out of the way: let’s try and understand it.

At its core, Realizing Genjokoan is its author’s attempt to clarify and demystify the much older Shobogenzo Genjokoan for a primarily Western audience. The author, Shohaku Okumura, is the founding abbot of a Soto Zen monastery in Birmingham, Indiana, and served for some time as the director of the Soto Zen Buddhism International in San Francisco - further, he was a student of Uchiyama Roshi. This is all by way of establishing something important up front: this is a Soto Zen interpretation of a Soto Zen founding text. This is important for me to clarify as a self-described syncretic, since that term is going to imply that in general terms I’m quite happy taking intersectional and multidisciplinary approaches to philosophy. At the same time, this shouldn’t be taken as a condemnation. While much can and has been said about the patriarchal and sometimes problematic nature of lineage in Zen, the fact remains that the lineage of dharma transmission is important to the field of study. If anyone was going to be qualified to help me understand the Genjokoan, it was going to be a soto priest.

The Genjokoan itself is a foundational text in the soto school, one of the many interdependent essays compiled by the (now quite late) Zen master Dogen Zenji. The book Realizing is, unsurprisingly, structured around the original structure of the Genjokoan itself, which is structured and presented as a semi-poetical essay and set of instructions for monks. What neither this analysis nor the Genjokoan itself are is scripture. I could have written an entire blog post on what scripture is, and isn’t, and what role (if any) “scriptures” have in Zen practice. So with that in mind, I should probably qualify why you should care about what’s in the Genjokoan: you shouldn’t, necessarily. If you think that Dogen Zenji was on to something, well, Dogen Zenji thought that the Genjokoan was important enough to include in the Shobogenzo, which was, itself, broadly considered to be his most important contribution to Zen Scholarship. Since Dogen himself is seen as foundational to the school of Zen Buddhism that I describe myself as a member of, I want to understand his body of work, in part because I have hit a personal roadblock in what has largely been a self-led and practice-alone effort to reach whatever it is this particular road goes down.

In that respect the Genjokoan is a useful map. For me, anyway.

Okumura makes the original Genjokoan understandable by structuring his book around it, but fundamentally the book is an attempt to address three core questions, in part because I think these are the three core questions posed by the Genjokoan itself. And, while we’re at it, he makes an effort to translate the term Genjokoan into English, which is easier said than done, but we end up with something along the lines of “to answer the question posed by true reality through the practice of our everyday activity”. That long translation comes through a considerable discussion of the original kanji used to write the phrase “Genjokoan”, and this is a trend that repeats itself throughout the book in ways that really please the part of my brain that loves a good deep-dive and rabbit hole. Another great example is the entirety of the ninth chapter of the book, which hinges on the question of which of three possible interpretations of the word “realization” Dogen actually intended - since Dogen wrote out the word ‘satori’ in hiragana, thus making it ambiguous which of three actual words he meant, each (of course) subtly different from one another.

Question 1: Why Practice if We Already Have the Buddha Nature

Dogen, Okumura, and this essay all take for a given the teaching that all beings inherently have the buddha-nature. This is a doctrinal question of Buddhism that I sometimes call the “good news” of Buddhism, or at least Zen Buddhism (and probably other Mahayana schools): yeah, life is suffering, but you have the inborn quality of being able to transcend that suffering. As we’ll see, I’ve probably misunderstood this, much like a Dwemer scholar.

Fortunately, clarifying this point seems to be the main thrust of the entire Genjokoan, and Okumura re-explores the same problem space by adding in the context of other sources of teaching, and he does it in a straightforward and contemporary way that made things much easier to understand than trying to winnow the same teachings directly out of hastily-translated Edo-era essays. Much of the book is concerned with this question, and answers it by first taking it apart in a couple of different directions.

Well, First, What is “Practice”

Zen practice is often described as ‘just sitting’, which is a reasonable translation of the phrase ‘shikantaza zazen’ which is the technical name for the practice of Zen ‘meditation’. (Much like Okumura, I avoid referring to zazen as a meditative practice. In most ways its actually counter-meditative, or at least runs counter to the western conception of meditation, which might better be qualified as ‘transcendental’ meditation.) Okumura clarifies, with reference to the Genjokoan and other portions of Shobogenzo, as well as the teachings of other Zen patriarchs and pre-Zen monastic tradition, exactly what the nature of Zen practice is, and isn’t.

It’s actually a bit difficult to articulate just what is shikantaza zazen. It would be easy to get bogged down in the physical particulars: for a given period of time, sit in this fashion, facing the wall, and engage in no other activity. It’s a little tougher to explain the practice’s mental component. I’ve had a little success explaining it to people by metaphor: imagine you’re sitting on a roadside watching the cars go by. Every thought that occurs to you is a friend, pausing their journey and inviting you to go on a lift. Your job is to not get in the car with them and let the thought pass you by. Tricky, isn’t it? The idea isn’t not to think. It’s to watch the thoughts come and go and not think them.

(Except you’re not really not thinking them, are you? They’re thoughts. They’ve already been thought.)

Okumura calls this “opening the hand of thought”. When a thought lands in your mind you’re meant to just let go of it and allow it to pass. You never stop thinking - that’s impossible - but you stop being governed by the thoughts. This is still an approximate description of practice. The book is full of such approximate descriptions of the qualities of Zen practice, but the general idea is this:

Shikantaza Zazen is a form of Zen practice, but it is not the only form.
Shikantaza Zazen prepares the practitioner mentally for other occasions of practice.
Every present moment is the opportunity for practice.
Practice is possible only by being fully present in the present moment, and opening the hand of thought in that moment, to fully live that moment.

This practice is often referred to in many places as the “practice of buddhas”.

Second, What is Buddha-Nature

The question of what is and isn’t buddha nature is slippery in Zen and in philosophy in general. It feels like every third or fourth koan is a parable about some young monk questioning whether object X has buddha nature in Y circumstances, and getting a sarcastic response from their master.

Okumura takes the approach that the buddha nature is the “thusness” required of something or someone before it could possibly awaken to Buddhahood, but also that Buddha-Nature is exactly what you are awakening to. You could rephrase the question of “Does a rabbit have buddha nature” as “can a rabbit escape the cycle of samsara”.

Samsara is the Buddhist term for the ongoing cycle of suffering which we might call “material reality”. In attempting to explore this point and explain buddha nature, Okumura presents an idea of “two realities” that was new to me:

Sabetsu - the everyday understanding of reality with its distinct causal subjects and objects.
Byodo - reality as seen through the dharmic lens of absolute equality.

At various times and in various ways, the buddha-nature phraseology is used to imply a variety of other points. In its primary thrust though, we learn something important about buddha-nature, enlightenment, and practice: it’s just as impermanent as everything else.

I think a lot of people - especially in the west, and including me-from-the-past - tend to view ‘Enlightenment’ as the central goal of Buddhist practice, because what else could the goal possibly be? If all life is suffering (samsara), surely the point of a Buddhist practice is to become a Buddha, zero-sum our way to Nirvana, and transcend, permanently, the ongoing millstone-suffering of Samsara.

Zen Practice Is Not Like This.

To recondense several chapters of the work, Zen is a practice of Bodhisattvas. The principle distinction of a Bodhisattva and a Buddha is this: if a Buddha can be said to dwell perpetually awake in Truth and entirely separate from reality, a Bodhisattva is the opposite. A Bodhisattva is awake to the middle way and dwelling in the material world - a bodhisattva practices remaining in samsara until the bodhisattva vows of helping all deluded beings to the same liberation is fulfilled.

This is a very bleak way of thinking!

Okumura goes further and postulates this about Dogen’s teaching, and I think he’s right: Nirvana is not “another world” free of suffering, like some kind of Buddhist Heaven. It’s not a state that you’re imbued with. There is no moment, along the road that starts on your zafu, where you are going to open some magical third eye that stays permanently there. Enlightenment-experiences like Satori and Kensho are beautiful fruits of the practice but they are neither authoritative nor permanent. Nirvana is nothing more than the behaviour of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in Samsara. Nirvana is the Practice, and the Practice leads us to Nirvana. Nirvana is nothing more than living our lives in complete accordance with reality.

Why practice even though we have the Buddha nature? Practice is the true expression of the Buddha nature.

Question 2: “How is True Practice Actually Achieved”

There’s a quote from the third chapter that I find to have been really helpful in winnowing down just what exactly the practice is. After all, this entire exercise is about finding some clarity on what practice is. A grown man can only sit and stare at a wall for so long before he needs a good reason to do it.

“Action rather than thinking is practice.”

It’s easy to get wrapped up in what an author we’ll discuss later might dismiss as “intellectual solipsism” when discussing Zen practice and the qualities of buddhas. We can, after all, create essays like this and full books to the point they are unprintably long, talking ourselves in circles about all the pretty mental constructs that might help you understand an “argument of Buddhahood”. It was around this point in the book, during my rereading of it, that I got the phrase “the map is not the territory” stuck in my head and couldn’t quite get it out, and this quote helped me understand why that is.

No description of the way a buddha is supposed to think or feel about something will let you move from samsara to nirvana. Only the lived experience of thinking or feeling in those ways provides relief from suffering.

My ability to draw a compelling map of what the town I lived in looked like in 1976 is not related to my ability to actually enter that space. At another point, Okumura writes:

“We cannot prevent our mind from creating our world as it does, but it is possible to realize that the world of our creation does not reflect the true reality.”

So now we have to hold two ideas in tension with one another, both equally true:

There is an empirical world which contains objects and forces and causes and effects, which is definitely true.
There is a mental world which contains all our subjective observations of the first world, which is subjectively true.

And at first this seems like a contradiction, or at least a dangerous idea. It feels easy to leap from the second point and say “Then nothing about how you perceive anything to be has any actual bearing on reality; facts clearly don’t care about feelings.” It invites a kind of low-pressure nihilism that I see a lot when people first read the Heart Sutra and encounter the phrase “Form is Exactly Emptiness”, an implicit permission to “reject your reality and substitute my own”.

(In fact, this misunderstanding of the sutra is so pervasive that Okumura spends at least one chapter unpacking it.)

The proposed remedy for this apparent contradiction is a teaching from another master, Tendai Chigi, which Okumura skillfully weaves into the argument by a clever observation that the teaching is actually alluded to in the section of the Genjokoan where the practice is described as being like the moon in water.

This teaching is the “Three Truths”:

Truth of Emptiness - the truth that all things lack a fully independent and permanent essence and are instead part of the universal interconnectedness of all things (interdependent origination);
Truth of the Expedient - the truth of seeing reality as a temporal collection of causes and conditions, and that everything we have a name for is both real and merely a conceptual expedient. Things exist - as these collections of causes and conditions.
Truth of the Middle - both the emptiness and the expedient are true. There is no contradiction between the Truth of Emptiness and the Truth of the Expedient.

Put another way, I believe that one of the best ways to see the Truth of the Middle is as a union of opposites between the other two truths. I haven’t exposited well on any of these ideas, but I did allude earlier to my own syncretism, and this is an area where multiple teachings overlap with each other. In European Alchemical Traditions, the union of opposites is often an indicator of the presence or activity of what Buddhists might call “skillful means”. In one alchemical tradition, for example, it is said to create a special quasi-divine being known as the Rebis through a union of the divine masculine and divine feminine - much as it is possible here to construct the Truth of the Middle from the concepts of Emptiness and the Expedient. The exact way I have phrased it in my notes from the reading was:

I truly believe that this touches the circumference of truth’s ultimate essence. Expressing the Truth of the Middle in full is Avalokiteshvara’s “nothing-to-obtain”.

For his own part, Okumura had this to say:

I think Dogen wants to show us that we must live, practice, and perform all of our activities in accordance with the first two truths. … When we practice this way, we accord ourselves with the truth of the middle.

And now we have gotten somewhere. By this point in the book, we know a few things:

Shikantaza zazen is a facet of a greater, global, and around the clock system of practice.
Practice is fundamentally about being able to hold two ideas in your head simultaneously: the idea that all things are empty of an independent existence (that all things have interdependent origination) and that all things are still truly existing, just as collections of interdependent causes and conditions.
It’s imperative to practice constantly, because nirvana is just the condition of existing while fully expressing one’s buddha nature, and practice is the mechanism of action for doing that.

In fact, skipping ahead slightly, Okumura concludes in a reflection of Dogen’s conclusion - where the latter simply presents the koan best known as “Boache’s Fan”, Okumura presents his analysis of the koan: the buddha’s practice as professed by Dogen is not a philosophical debate. It is not enough merely to be able to state the Truth of the Middle. One has to fully realize (in the sense of “make real”) the Truth of the Middle, to hold both the Expedient and the Empty Realities in perception simultaneously. This is possible by rigorous - and continuous - practice. The method of the practice comes to us by a traceable lineage from Shakyamuni Buddha. In short: realizing the Buddha Way is an active process of active practices, bringing the activity of the mind into alignment with the buddha-nature, which is nothing more or less than the true nature of reality.

Something Lacking about Something Lacking

My praise for Realizing Genjokoan isn’t universal, however. Immediately after the profoundly informative and, honestly, inspiring ninth chapter, Okumura delivers a tenth, which focuses on a frankly slightly empty argument that goes something like this, in brief:

It is not possible to be aware of all active and relevant causes and conditions in any given situation.
Therefore, our mental models of reality are always limited (and in many ways these limitations are karmic.)

On their own, these two points are unarguably true and very arguably salient. However, it’s possible to walk away from this chapter and think the key takeaway is a dangerous concept: the idea that, since all worldviews are limited, they are all equally meritorious. I feel that this is an incomplete position. Zen obviously discourages value judgements - we are meant to simply see the reality as samsara without actually pouring our judgements into it, as part of the mechanism of escaping suffering. It’s not really discussed here, but there’s a general idea in Zen philosophy that the true source of the suffering in reality is our willingness to conclude “this is undesirable and I have too much of it in my life” or “this is desirable and I don’t have enough of it in my life” which is another place where the people who like to call things “solipsism” like to get shouty.

I want to give a kind of a refutation here: Samsara sucks. It’s a “Noble Truth” that it sucks. Based on that alone, I really don’t think there’s a single Zen teaching out there that would actually support the idea that we’re meant to avoid value judgements of any kind. The way I know that we’re encouraged to remember that Samsara sucks is that every Zen sitting I’ve ever gone to in a group has included the Boddhisatva Vows and the very first vow is “Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them all.”

Okumura, to his credit, mildly joins this refutation in his own words, emphasizing the “need to get to the truth of the matter”, so I don’t think this was the point he was trying to make in the first place. The problem is less what he said and more how that line of inquiry can and has been used by comfortable Zen practitioners to justify an attitude of disengaged Buddhism, where the practice is about eschewing the suffering of the world rather than trying to find solutions for it. Obviously I feel quite differently and quite strongly, but since Okumura stops short of making the argument, it’s really not fair to cudgel him with it.

Conclusion

To bring things back around full circle, Realizing Genjokoan is on my very short list of essential Zen works, now. In a discipline and thought-school that de-emphasizes study and scripture, an analysis that can bring the writings of Dogen into clearer focus for the lay practitioner is a much-needed tool. In fact, I’ll make this argument: reading this now, at a time where I was largely disillusioned with the practice, in part because I was honestly practicing incorrectly, has more or less “saved” my efforts to continue to study and practice Zen. I think if you’re in a similar position to me - a largely solitary practitioner without a formal student-teacher relationship - this book borders on being required reading. It’s not a replacement for works like Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind or the study of actual sutras, but it lays a very good example for how to approach the older texts, does a wonderful job of explaining its own arguments, and really does a wonderful job of elocuting the nuanced truths of Zen in a way that the pithy and memorable cliches often don’t.

I give it five stars.