The Soto doctrine of Practice Enlightenment— the unity of practice and realisation/enlightenment- seems at first blush and to put it mildly, implausible.
The purpose of practice -the purpose of buddhism – is to overcome the primary duality of self and world. Common sense tells us that we can achieve that in one of two ways. Firstly, we can change our conceptual framework to deny the existence of a separate self. It’s easy to say. We can declare the unity of all being, and look around for corroboration of that assertion, in quantum theory, for example.
Yet somehow that never seems to make enough of a shift. So we then say—if I practise, and I practise seriously enough and long enough, I can achieve realisation.
Realisation is the fruit of practice.
Practice is putting in the hard yards for the reward of realisation .
That’s a very attractive notion for us because it fits in with our general sense that we do something to get something, in this case a dramatic, miracle-like experience of non-separation. Being a vividly alive part of a vividly alive whole.
By contrast, the idea that somehow, just by sincerely practising, we’re already, as it were, in the ocean of realisation seems ludicrous. Yet the idea that there’s practice and then there’s enlightenment is not an unchallenged view within the original Zen schools. For example, Zongmi (who was the fifth and last Patriarch of the Hua-yen school, and also a Patriarch in the Heze Zen lineage) was of the view that Enlightenment preceded practice. That is, we would have an experience of the wholeness of everything, which drove us to practise, which was then deepened and integrated.
I think Practice Realisation is eminently understandable if we reflect on our own experience rather than trying to cobble together an impressive sounding, but fundamentally hollow, bricolage from the words of Dogen and others. We owe it to ourselves and other practitioners to state our understanding of doctrine in terms of our actual experience.
And although we may be wrong, it doesn’t matter, because our errors allow other practitioners to state their errors. And through that, we get somewhere. We shouldn’t try to create a match between now and a constructed past. Yet in starting from our own experience, we can see that it arises within the interdependent network of all practitioners: past practitioners, practitioners now, and practitioners of the future.
This is my understanding of Practice Enlightenment:
The emphasis we place on correct posture can be understood, in part, as an attempt to displace our dominant visual sense in favour of our somatic sense.
Generally, as we go about our lives, we’re carrying around a picture or a number of pictures, and primary among them is a sense of what we look like from an external vantage point. Don’t take this too literally: it’s not a picture, it’s like a picture.
And it’s the dominance of that visual sense [which is very connected to thinking] that is primarily responsible for our sense of separation, and hence our sense of duality. Our attempts to try and overcome that duality by ideas, or by effort based on ideas, simply propagates and continues the dominance of that visual sense. It’s inherently self-defeating. And even if we experience a dramatic sense of unity, in due course it is appropriated to the self.
It becomes my Enlightenment, my wisdom.
The doctrine of Practice Realisation is part of a means of displacing that visual sense in favour of a felt sense, a somatic sense.
Which explains the emphasis on sitting properly, which creates the sense of a dynamic energised spine, connected with the earth and sky. It rediscovers our breath as being like a non-conceptional, alive, present and energetic presence at our core, around which our body is gathered. All of that helps manifests a sense of ourselves as somatic, three-dimensional, energetic beings.
And the paradox is that once we can experience ourselves in that way, non-separation arises naturally. Not as a dramatic miracle. As an ordinary one.
You need to use your own language. You may have a sense of all encompassing spaciousness. Or a deep sense of peace permeating everywhere. Or s sense of the universality of light. But what’s indisputable is if we can experience ourselves somatically, already we’re not separate from the rest of creation. That’s not to say that we’re not having thoughts and ideas or that there’s the sense of intermittent mental interference and so on, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
It’s that primary sense of non-separation into which, as it were, through practice we can sink further into, as if we’re slowly walking into the ocean we were always standing in.
Practice Realisation seen in this way matches up with Shikantaza, just sitting.
Simpletons think ‘just sitting’ means we’re not focusing on gain. It doesn’t mean that. It means that when we’re sitting, there’s just this Oneness of sitting, which includes everything. This is what Isso Fujita calls One Piece Zen: all of creation, all of time is this One Piece.