When people unfamiliar with our practice talk about zazen, they’ll often refer to it as objectless meditation. And what they mean by that is that there isn’t a mandala, a mantra or an object that we fix our attention on when we’re doing zazen.
But they do tend to find their way to discovering an object of meditation circuitously. They’ll describe it as being something like awareness itself. So they’ll say that in zazen we are aware of our awareness; or they may say that we are aware of emptiness; or of dependent origination. So there’s lots of formulations, not forgetting of course the familiar one of bringing the attention back to the body and the breath, and hence to assume that that’s the object of meditation.
All these perspectives arise from the same mistake, which is assuming that meditation is something that we do with our minds. And because the mind is inherently dualistic, then that way of looking at things will always be divided into a subject and an object. But that’s not our practice.
Dogen, in the Fukanzazengi recognized something like this when he wrote,
“You could be proud of your understanding and have abundant realization or acquire outstanding wisdom and attain the Way by clarifying the mind. Still, if you are wandering about in your head you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.”
Dogen, Fukanzazengi
That’s the Tanahashi translation, and both in that translation and the other ones that we presently have in English it’s not so clear what Dogen’s doing in his own language. In it, he’s making a kind of joke. The suggestion is that if we understand zazen intellectually, our head gets stuck. So we can jam our head in the entranceway of zazen, but we can’t get our body in.
Whereas if we can get our body in, our mind will follow. But of course we can’t get our body in intentionally. We have to fall backwards into the space, whole.