For Dogen, zazen is “dropping off body and mind” as a continuous process.
The phrase originates almost certainly with him, although he attributed it to his Master [Tiantong Rujing/Tendo Nyojo]. The phrase occurs in Dogen’s enlightenment story, where they’re all doing zazen late at night. The monk next to Dogen is drifting off to sleep, and Tiantong/Tendo, says something scolding to the monk like “Zazen is dropping off mind dust. Why are you sleeping?” And Dogen creatively mishears this in his inner translation to Japanese as ‘dropping off body and mind’, because the word ‘jin’ is a homonym in Japanese [but not Chinese], meaning both ‘body’ and ‘dust’.
The expression does not occur in Tiantong’s writings. And the phrase ‘dropping off mind dust’ appears quite often. We can’t know for sure. In any event, in Dogen’s universal recommendation of zazen, Fukanzazengi, what we notice is that there is a lot of instruction about how we should physically sit, and there’s very sparse instruction about how we should comport our mind in sitting. This strikes us as weird.
There are a number of paragraphs telling us about how to sit, how to place our legs, how to place our hands, not to lean, to keep our eyes open, all of that sort of thing. Yet so far as the mind is concerned, there is just a very short passage, which reads, “now sit steadfastly and think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen”
And we are likely to question why there is a disproportionate amount of preliminary instruction about the physical aspect of sitting and very little about the mental aspect of sitting, because our tendency is to skip over these physical instructions as preliminary, since we assume the important part is Dogen’s instructions concerning the mind.
This mental bias is reinforced by how people talk about practice. Often you hear practitioners say that zazen is watching the mind. Or zazen is allowing our thoughts to come and go freely without becoming attached. Or zazen is when we notice that our mind is attaching to thoughts or emotions and bringing our awareness back to our posture. All those instructions are concerned with our awareness, with our mind. They’re not concerned with dropping off body.
Yet it’s clear that Dogen is giving instructions about dropping off body as well as dropping off mind. And he says in the text that this is a natural process. So you put your body in this particular posture, you put your mind in this particular frame, and the process will happen naturally. He says that several times.
So why do we tend to disregard these detailed physical instructions and be a bit frustrated because the instructions about how we comport our mind are so brief?
For a number of reasons. Dogen is writing this text in a culture which is obviously different from our own; it’s a much more physical, embodied culture, the practice that people are likely to have is likely to involve longer, more intense periods of practice. And, often overlooked but critically important, people are just more used to sitting cross-legged.
In the text, the only options that are given are to sit in full lotus if we can, otherwise half lotus. That’s it. So, presumably, that’s what they did. Yet if you go into a Western dojo, very few people are sitting in those positions. They are probably sitting in a kneeling position or a variant of the Burmese, or quarter lotus or, less frequently, half lotus. But hardly ever full lotus. We also sit for shorter periods of time, we’re stiff, and we’re often physically uncomfortable.
Sitting full lotus isn’t accidental. It’s a dynamic, balanced posture which connects our perineum to the earth and activates the spine, making the body an alive, non-conceptual whole.
Additionally, we’re the inheritors of protestant religious culture, which doesn’t really involve the body at all. It’s an activity of our mind. And we carry that viewpoint into meditation.
If we put all these things together, it’s quite difficult for practitioners to just naturally experience the dropping off of body which Dogen is talking about, because we’re sitting for shorter periods of time, we’re almost certainly in an unbalanced posture, we’re probably a bit physically uncomfortable, we’re stiff, and we have a predisposition to thinking of meditation as being a practice of awareness, a practice of consciousness. And the problem with all of that is that the distinctive vision which Dogen has of dropping off body and mind is subtly abbreviated to mind only.
Which renders zazen indistinguishable from other forms of meditation, apart from the ceremonial husk.
Calamitously.