Nyojo said to Dogen “Zazen is dropping off body and mind”
Dogen asked, “What is dropping off body and mind?”
Nyojo said, “When you just sit, you are free from the five sense desires and the five hindrances“
The five desires are the content of our experience: what, either in our mind or in our body, we see, feel, hear, taste or smell.
The five hindrances are our attitudes to that experience: the minds of attachment, aversion, torpor, agitation or doubt.
We are “free”, not because our experience is voided, but because, from moment to moment, there is the possibility of being completely intimate with our experience, with our whole body mind. “Desire” is a partial response. “Mind” is a partial response.
Once you discover that something is just a covering, whether it is there or not, are you not free of it?