Washing Out Emptiness
In our own impermanent bodies, we face our deepest fears and aversions. Drawing on Dogen's writings and her personal experience as a nurse, Sallie Tisdale challenges us not to look away, but to practice in this most intimate realm. Sallie Tisdale
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His tone is matter-of-fact when he is describing how to brush one’s teeth, and just as matter-of-fact when he is describing how brushing the teeth is awakening itself. For Dogen the acts themselves are layered with dharma—marbled with dharma, for the deeper mind cannot be separated from using the toilet and folding a towel.
His tone is matter-of-fact when he is describing how to brush one’s teeth, and just as matter-of-fact when he is describing how brushing the teeth is awakening itself. For Dogen the acts themselves are layered with dharma—marbled with dharma, for the deeper mind cannot be separated from using the toilet and folding a towel.
Dogen criticizes those who don’t care about hygiene or reject the possibility of using care of the body as a vehicle in practice. But he also criticizes those who seek after purity, who want to skirt past the messy nature of the human. An earlier ancestor, the famous Chinese woman known as Kongshi Daoren, wrote in a poem on a bathhouse wall: “If nothing truly exists, what are you bathing? Where could even the slightest bit of dust come from?. . . Even if you see no difference between the water and the dirt, it all must be washed completely away when you enter here.”
Dogen reminds us that we are neither pure nor impure. Awakening is the state of seeing past the false opposites of emptiness and form, purity and profanity. So brushing teeth and having a bowel movement are not acts that can lead us to purity—they are themselves purity. They are complete in themselves. And even so, it isn’t enough just to wash—we have to discover what it is to be this naturally pure form. “Without washing the inside of emptiness, how can we realize cleanness within and without?” Such apparent paradox is part of the endless repeated pairing of Buddhism: wisdom and activity, each incomplete alone. Such couplings are the skin and bones of the Buddha’s body, and they are found in our skin and bones. They are the inside of our emptiness. Aversion is one of a pair; to be averse to one thing implies being drawn to its opposite. But if we are averse to the body, toward what are we drawn? What else is there for us here? “Remember,” Dogen writes, “purity and impurity is blood dripping from a human being. At one time it is warm, at another time it is disgusting.” The opening of the wound may be hard, but the flowing of the blood is very easy. Dogen cautions us not to be drawn into a life solely of the mind or spirit, away from the reality of the body, but to be working always at a true and total presence in the self, here and now—the self, in his words, that is always “flashing into existence.”
If we see the body and its fluids as tainted, we ourselves become tainted—not by the fluids, but by the fear. To be truly untainted is to be free of fear—that is, free of self-concern and self-regard. Impurity lies in fleeing reality on any level, physical, metaphysical, or in between. Both the acts and their meanings—the commonplace acts and the multiplied meanings—must be taken together. This way we are able to step outside both, and embrace both. The opposites of pure and impure disappear. Completely present, we emerge into true purity. One of the blessings of long relationships is seeing the changes in the body of another, and embracing them. We watch our friends and family grow gray and wrinkled and stooped, and this is a gift, a strange kind of nakedness. We watch our own faces change and blur in the mirror, and we are watching endless, endless change. We are watching eternity.
At the end of our lives, we will find ourselves in the hands of others. I go to work. I cause pain, I relieve pain. I clean up vomit and feces and blood. I dig in, and sometimes I get disgusted, from somewhere down near the brain stem and the gut. I keep astraight face. I see how afraid people are of being judged in just that way, how devastating it is for them to confront the way their bodies crumble. They are so afraid that I will turn away, that they are no longer worthy because they are crumbling. But we are all crumbling, all the time.
Now and then, I think about Dogen dying, soiling his bed, being nursed by Egi, one of his female students. I imagine nursing my own teacher someday. I think of the Buddha dying from food poisoning, puking in his death bed. I think of myself washing him, his undefended, old body: his skin as fragile as fine paper, tearing at a rough touch, so thin I can see the pulse of blood along the veins of his hand. I imagine his wasted, bony body, the tendons on his neck standing out plain and clear as he gently takes his last breaths.
I think of Dogen and Shakyamuni, and all the rest, after this last breath—after their bowels relaxed and ran, and their bladders emptied and their eyes clouded over. I think of the flies arriving, and laying their eggs, and what happened after that.
