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We must keep in mind that even if we were able to establish without question Dogen’s original intention in this or any other passage of the sutra, it would not make his teachings any more understandable or logical. Why? Because his teachings are not meant to be rationalized. They are not intended as an explanation; they’re meant to point to the nature of reality.

As Dogen says, we must study the dharma exhaustively—which means we need to practice, realize, and actualize it. There’s no other way to plumb its depths.

Once, when I was staying at my teacher Maezumi Roshi’s house, I woke up late one night and saw a light in his study. I knocked on the door and heard Roshi’s quiet, “Come in.” I opened the door to find Roshi sitting at his desk, reading. “Roshi, it’s three o’clock in the morning!” I said. “What are you reading?”

“Dogen,” he replied.

“Dogen?!” I said, incredulous. He’d been studying Dogen for more than forty years.

He simply looked at me and laughed softly. “Yes, Dogen.”

We should investigate the fact that since that very time before the appearance of any subtle sign, since the age of the King of Emptiness, walking both forward and backward has never stopped for a moment.

Because all things are intrinsically empty, they lack self nature. To realize this emptiness, the absolute basis of reality, is to realize the first rank of Master Dongshan, “that very time before the appearance of any subtle sign.”

The notion of emptiness, or shunyata, has become so convoluted in our language that it merits some clarification. First of all, the word “emptiness” is not even an accurate translation. We use the term in a way that implies that emptiness is the attribute of an object—like roundness. We say that a sphere is round, and simple observation will confirm this perception. Then we apply the same logic to emptiness, describing it as a quality of an object in the phenomenal world. But the emptiness of shunyata is not a thing. It’s meant to oppose all views—including the view of emptiness. Shunyata is neither existent nor nonexistent.

When we say that an object is empty, this means that it is empty of independent existence or inherent characteristics. It is interdependent with everything. From a Mahayana Buddhist perspective, emptiness and interdependence are one and the same.

Samadhi, the falling away of body and mind, is usually a practitioner’s first experience of emptiness. Samadhi is the state in which we relinquish all our passions and desires. Master Dazhu Huihai said: “Total relinquishment includes all ideas of duality, such as being and nonbeing, love and hate, pure and impure, concentration and distraction. In this, there is no thought of ‘Now I see all duality as empty or now I have relinquished all of them.’”

In samadhi, all perspectives disappear. We become completely intimate with the breath, with a koan, with ourselves. Zazen becomes like a bottomless, clear pool.

Whether we are doing zazen or entering the mountains, intimacy is the basis of all of our practice. It is the basis of our lives. If we want to understand the mountain, we have to become the mountain. We have to let the mountain fill our whole body and mind.

A student asked Dongshan, “You always instruct us to follow the way of the birds. What is it to follow the way of the birds?” Dongshan answered, “You don’t meet anyone.”

What is it to follow the way of the birds, the way of the mountain, the way of the river? What is it to follow our own way? Before we can answer these questions, we must realize that fundamentally, there’s not a single thing outside of this gigantic body. In the first rank we realize that our body and mind is the body and mind of the universe.

Master Dongshan’s poem on this rank reads:

In the third watch of the night, before the moon appears,

No wonder when we meet, there is no recognition,

Still cherished in my heart is the beauty of the earlier days.

In the evening, before the moon shines there is complete darkness, complete emptiness. It’s a state without