Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘If the Buddha-Dharma were transmitted and received on the basis of limited consideration of the relative and the absolute, how could it have reached the present day? Wild kittens, barnyard bumpkins, who have never explored Tōzan’s inner sanctum,people who have not walked the threshold of the truth of the Buddha-Dharma, mistakenly assert that Tōzan teaches people with his five positions of the relative and the absolute, and so on. This is an outlandish insistence and arandom insistence. We should not see or hear it. We should just investigate the fact that the founding patriarch possesses the right Dharma-eye treasury.’ (Shobogenzo Shunju)

The Tanahashi translation for this passage has ‘If buddha dharma had been transmitted merely through the investigation of differentiation and oneness;’ the ‘merely’ is a great signal word in Dogen, as an indication that you can’t stop where you are or try to limit what you believe (also, ‘peasants or stray cats’ for the next sentence – Dogen’s pejorative streak in full effect).