I remember reciting these names every morning in our meal chant when I lived at the monastery, it took me 4-5 years until I really knew what they were conceptually. I find my voice stumbling through the pronunciation, the teaching is awkward for a native english speaker to pronounce. And yet, the three bodies teaching actually permeates the poetic imagery of Dogen Zenji’s Zen, I just didn’t realize it. It is so foundational to the Buddhist worldview.

Perhaps another reason why the Three Bodies of the Buddha teaching isn’t so popular in the transmission of Zen to America is because it is difficult to be embodied. As James Joyce said; “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

Most of us come to practice as a Duffy, living a short distance from our bodies. Or living mostly from the neck up; Zoom for all the ways that it has brought us together during the pandemic, furthered this reification with being talking heads.

Kosho said once in a Dharma Talk following our Earth Medicine Retreat last year at Great Vow, “perhaps we can’t love the earth, until we love our bodies.”

And it's hard to love our bodies, it's hard to love ourselves. American culture does not help us learn to love our bodies. Many of us have experienced violence to our bodies, have been sexually assaulted, taken advantage of. Perhaps you experience systemic racism or sexism, or trans or homophobia daily. We live in a culture that institutionalizes violence against certain bodies. And many of us have internalized violence against ourselves and our bodies–this comes out in the form of the inner critic or habitual numbing or tensing certain areas of the body.

So loving our bodies, being embodied–is not so simple. It's a healing process to love our bodies. To love ourselves.

The teaching of the three bodies of buddha reveals three ways we experience embodied reality. And here embodied reality includes the felt sense of the body (physical sensations), but also all of the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking–awareness.

The nirmanakaya is the form body. The world of physical sensation, the world of the senses. Here we experience compassion, love, connection. Here we are alive within the senses.

The sambogakaya is the dream body, or imaginal body, sometimes translated as the bliss body, or energetic body. Sometimes when we think of the energetic body we think of the chakras. But this is more than that–it's what I like to call the imaginal realm, which manifests as visions, dreams, visualizations, light. The early buddhist ancestors and zen ancestors who shaped this tradition were very much keyed into this realm. As western buddhists in the Zen tradition, we seem to have been trained, not to take this realm so seriously.

If you read stories of the early buddhist ancestors, you read about prophetic dreams, past lives, you read about tree spirits and nagas (dragons). The story of the Buddha’s awakening involves the shadowy figure of Mara and his army as well as the earth goddess rising up to meet the buddha’s hand as they touched the Earth. 

The Earth herself responds to the Buddha’s awakening and then later the Buddha’s death by showering flowers and creating great earthquakes.

Keizan Zenji made major life decisions based on his dreams. He built a temple based on a dream and ordained women based on a dream. He even gave a successor transmission due to a dream.

Myo-e another great teacher around the same time as Dogen Zenji, kept extensive dream records and used his dreams as dharma teachings. He also had a deep love for the earth and would often meditate in trees. He even painted a self-portrait of himself meditating in a tree. 

He fell in love with an island where he once lived and practiced, and wrote a love letter to the island and had one of his monks deliver the letter.

When I was living in Japan at a Soto Zen monastery, one morning we set up an altar in the back of the room & opened all the windows and doors to the temple. We then performed the entire morning service to the earth spirits and temple protectors in gratitude to them for supporting us in our practice and allowing us to practice on this land.

I cite all of these as examples of how the sambhogakaya body is actualized in dharma practice. Part of this body is seeing everything as alive; opening to the unseen world, the animating–creative force of the universe–living in everything.

For some of us, I think this is quite a natural aspect of life, and for others perhaps it is something we knew well when we were children and then forgot, or actively disengaged from. Perhaps because we were told we needed to be more serious, or that the imagination isn’t real, or it's just for children.

The Dharmakaya is the essence mind. This is a familiar teaching in zen. Dharmakaya points us to the ground of being. Pure awareness, whole, complete, awake–without beginning or end, spacious, clear and bright.

The thing about the three bodies is that they are all always happening, all at once!

Zazen is a practice for most of us of the Dharmakaya. Opening to the spacious nature of mind. Bearing witness. Affirming our wholeness. Radical Acceptance.

Perhaps for you it also includes elements of Sambhogakaya, perhaps you use visualization, or sit with an image, or are tuned into the energetic body, or have visions. These would all be practices of the sambhogakaya. 

Mindfulness and the divine abodes are practices of the nirmanakaya, so is the posture in zazen, or opening the senses.

We live enfolded in this three kaya world.

Dogen Zenji says in Being Time: the way the self arrays itself is the shape of the entire world.

Another Zen Master says:

Valley sounds are the long broad tongue of the Buddha

Mountain colors are no other than, their unconditioned body

In my planetary imagination class we have been learning to praise the Earth, to see everything as alive, once we were guided to imagine that all the things in our room were actually the inhabitants of the room, that we were the guests in their room.

What if you were the guest on this earth? The visitor? What if this earth belonged to the dolphins and fish, the mountains and trees, the finches and crows, the spruce?

I was appreciating how familiar these exercises were. Chozen Roshi would always ask us to treat the table as if it were alive. Or the zendo floor, the walls.

What happens when you do this?

When you live in communion with the animating force of the universe? When you live in relationship with everything that you come in contact with?

Could it be how we approach the world, limits our experience? If we see everything as dead, or see humans as the most important species, or see ourselves and our own thoughts as most important–then how will we regard the other? How will we treat the earth if it is dead? How will we treat plants and creatures if we think that human beings are more important, or that my personal comfort is most important?

And what if we treated everything as if it were alive, as if we could consult the benches on the wall, the picture frame or tea kettle for advice? As if each part of our universe or world, had a perspective, something to offer, was an unknown mysterious part of life that we could get to know?

What would your world be like? What would the earth be like? If we were participating in the ways that our ancestors did?