unchanging  block--they  prefer  not to associate  their  own
highly dynamic Absolute with the term "monism." But monist in
some respects  (or at least nondualistic) it surely  is, even
though it is anything  but static and however it embraces all
the changes and emergences of

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our  temporal  and  relative  sphere.  However,  if  Doogen's
ontology is not dualistic, must it not follow that the "evil"
which  one is not to do either  does not exist  or is as much
the character of the Absolute as the good we are to do?
  In a rather diffcult  passage  Doogen says: "Examining  the
problems of the evil referred  to, three kinds of disposition
are to be distinguished: the good, the evil  and the neutral.
The  evil  is (indeed) one  of them.  Nevertheless, the  evil
disposition  is, as much  as the good and the neutral, in its
essence  birthless.  They  are all birthless, immaculate  and
finally  real." Hiroshi Sakamoto  interprets  this as meaning
that the Unborn is the reality of all that is.  Consequently,
when a mind turns  to evil, even that by which and with which
it does evil (its energies and so on) must be the Unborn. Not
only the good but also the evil disposition is birthless, and
consequently   in  its  true  and  essential   nature  it  is
"immaculate."  Its  quality  as "evil," then, is not finally,
decisively,  or   ontologically   alien   to   the   Absolute
Reality,but (and here I take leave of Professor Sakamoto) may
perhaps  be thought  of metaphorically  as karmic  dust which
adheres  to the disposition  and blurs its reflection  of the
Unborn. If this is too dualistic an image, its "evilness" may
be  considered  to.be  so  only  relatively  and  within  the
realm-of  our present relative  existence, but not to be evil
in  that   finally   Real   realm   which   is  the  Absolute
itself.'Perhaps  ?it could  be said that the Unborn  "maketh
even the wrath of man to praise him!"
  Possibly  Doogen  himself  can help  us to see more clearly
what he means.  In another passage  he says: "We have a truth
which declares:'one twisting, one letting loose.' At the very
moment of the practice-power's  emergence  (in us), the truth
that evil does not violate man is recognized, and at the same
time the truth  that man does not destroy, that which  is the
essential  nature  of the evil is also realized."  The.phrase
"one twisting, one letting loose" is probably an epigrammatic
way of pointing  to the law of causation.  Every twisting  is
followed by a letting loose. Every act has a consequence. So,
in the moment  when the Dharma-power, that is, the Unborn  as
the power-to do the good, emerges in us we come to know, as a
consequence, that what we formerly  did as evil actually  did
not damage that which we truly are--the  Unborn-and  that our
doing  good, while  it  destroys  the  form  of  evil  or the
appearance  of evil in this transient  world of shadows, does
not destroy  that which is in the ground  of the evil as well
as the good--again, the Unborn.
  To  recapitulate   a  little  before  pressing  on  to  our
conclusion: the great Absolute, void of all distinctions  and
oppositions, 'suunyataa, the  Buddha-nature, the  Buddha-mind
or whatever  synonym  we choose  to employ, is the  Real, the
finally unborn and undying ground of all that appears  in the
temporal  and particularized  level of our mundane existence.
Here is the ground of the injunction  to do good, and here is
the power  to fulfill  the injunction, and both are one.  And
here, too, is the reality  of each piece of human  existence.
This does not

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mean that the Unborn fragments  itself and that you and I are
respectively  pieces  of  it;   in  its  essence  it  remains
undivided, and  it  "expresses  itself"  as you  and  as  me.
Consequently, to be enlightened  is to know  yourself  as the
Absolute;  but it is also to know, quite  paradoxically, that
I,  too,  am  the  Absolute   and  that  the  story   of  our