Master Dogen described the practice of zazen as being the [continuous process of] ‘dropping off body and mind’.
It’s reasonably clear what he meant by dropping off mind, because he describes that process in quite a straightforward way in Genjokoan: in zazen, we allow all our experience to live fully, unconstrained by the assumption of ownership of this experience by the self.
That is, all the multifaceted aspects of our experience can be expressed, and they don’t have to be stuffed into the small jar of self. Sometimes that is expressed in spatial terms. So we’ll say it’s as if in zazen our awareness is like vast space, within which everything can freely appear, manifest itself entirely then go.
And if we do not give attention to the body, people can quite often have the notion that this sense of vast spaciousness, once developed, is the same as non-duality. That if zazen had a destination, this would be it.
Yet that’s incorrect, because it excludes the actual fabric of being; this body and all others.
Dropping off body is more difficult for us to understand, but it needn’t be. It is simply to forgo an unconscious yet pernicious idea we have of the body as being like an object within consciousness.
Or another way of putting it is as being like a pictured body within the mind: when someone asks us to pay attention to our left hand, do we sense it, or do we look at it?
Dropping off body is dropping off that conceptual sense of the body, so we can actually experience it as it is phenomenologically. And what we notice when we’re sitting in zazen is that very often we will experience our body as being like charged space.
So it’s there [as a ‘something’] but not there. And there isn’t a clear boundary between body and world. There’s not a clear demarcation between this body and the body of all being.
And that is a much more immediate and natural sense of non-duality, which is beginningless and endless.
The earliest of the foundational zen texts is the “Shin jin mei”, The Verses of Faith Mind, normally attributed to the third patriarch, who [in the usual zen way] almost certainly didn’t write it.
There’s lots of different translations. The translation I like has a first verse which goes as follows.
“The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing. When love and hate do not arise, things cease to exist in the old way.”
An understandable way of reading this verse is to see the first two lines as encouraging equanimity, particularly in zazen, and to assume a repetition in the third and fourth lines. So on this interpretation, to say “The great way is not difficult. Just to avoid picking and choosing”, means that out of the cascade of thoughts, emotions, memories and so on that we experience during zazen, we don’t grasp on to some and push others away. So we’re not picking and choosing. We’re just allowing everything to come and go freely. And then, the second part of the verse: “when love and hate do not arise…” repeats that. So [in this interpretation] when attachment and aversion [love and hate] to the various aspects of our experience don’t arise, things cease to exist in the old way.
This is a legitimate [and usual] way of looking at the verse and is [arguably] better than nothing. But we can make a deeper interpretation, which doesn’t keep all our individualistic and dualistic assumptions hidden yet intact.
And that involves an interpretation where there isn’t repetition. In this reading, the first and second parts aren’t the same.
In this reading,“The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing.” doesn’t mean that when a thought arises we don’t grasp it or push it away. What it means is that when a thought arises in the way that we normally understand ‘thought’, we’ve already been picking and choosing, because what has happened is that out of the infinitely faceted nature of all the ‘objects’ of our experience, we’ve homed in on one aspect, thus delineating the ‘thought’ [or emotion, or memory, or sensory experience]
What we’re experiencing as a naturally arising thought which we’re then taking a position towards [of love or hate] is itself a collapse of our awareness around the ‘thought’. Thus we make ourselves unaware of all the corollaries of that thought: in emotional terms, in sensory terms, in memory terms, in karmic terms, in locational terms, and so on. So if we’re able to experience all these different aspects of each area of experience [each ‘thought’] then we’re not picking and choosing and then in consequence, love and hate do not arise. It is like becoming aware again of all the facets of a jewel, not just the one directly facing us.
Thus the reference in the third and fourth lines to love and hate isn’t referring to the individual thoughts, emotions or memories caused by a collapse in our awareness around that thought. It’s a process whereby either our awareness doesn’t collapse, creating the ‘thought’ by delineation and exclusion, or [more likely] when we become aware that it has collapsed, we open out again [‘opening the hand of thought’].
And that’s also what Dogen means by zazen being a dropping off of body and mind. The problem that we have with the usual interpretation, making the two bits of the verse the same, is they are just encouraging equanimity. And that aspiration does not break down either the primary dualism between self and world nor the secondary dualism between mind and body.
In fact, it introduces a third dualism between, as it were, the witness mind, the mind of awareness and the mind which is the conduit and handmaiden of these various ‘thoughts’.
In almost all of these Chinese texts, the Chinese are intentionally using ordinary language rather than technical language. But the difficulty that we have with that is that because it’s ordinary language we automatically try and fit it into our ordinary ways of thinking, which oftenf leaves us in a position of banality, disguised by the sonorousness of ‘Zen’
What Dogen refers to as The great mystical power is not restricted by circumstance, location or time.
What is it?
When we look at our lives, we often see a kind of dichotomy.
One side is what we variously call our conditioning, our karma, our fear, our anger, our pain, our poison.
And on the other is something else. What we might provisionally call love, or compassion or openness or something else.
And the two sides are dramatically different. And they don’t appear to be equal, often it’s as if love or compassion is like a tiny sliver of light within the darkness, perhaps even just a sliver within memory.
Whereas the poison that we experience sometimes fills up our whole awareness. It seems dominant.
But what we need to understand is that this poison that we have is limited by time and space and circumstances. It is not a genuine obstruction. And what we perceive as a sliver of light is in reality like a great fire. It is not a question of turning away or turning towards.
When the Buddhist sutras arrived in China, they arrived in a disorderly way. Sutras that had been written over quite a long period, more than 500 years, arrived randomly.
The Chinese needed to make sense of these often contradictory sutras.
One way was that they ordered them chronologically in terms of their content. So, for instance, they would say that the Flower Garland Sutra dated from the earliest period of the Buddha’s teaching because it dealt with his enlightenment experience, and the Nirvana Sutra was the latest sutra, because it dealt with the Buddha’s death.
Another way that they organised material was by breaking it down into different schools. This wasn’t helped by them erroneously thinking that Nagarjuna and his school came after Yogacara, the “consciousness only” school, when it was actually the other way around.
In the ninth century, coming towards the end of the prominence of Tang Dynasty Buddhism in China, Zen [and Hua-yen] Master Zongmi worked out a fourfold classification.
In his classification there were three cryptic teachings and one, as it were, explicit teaching: his teaching, zen teaching. And the classification was done that way because he would say that the meaning of the first three groupings was implicit. What’s meant by that is that the teachings are in a strange sense preparatory, something both destructive and constructive. The destruction is clearing away the whole mass of beliefs and structures which stop us from living fully, but what and how that life is is left implicit.
That’s why he called these teachings ‘teachings of cryptic meaning’.
In his scheme, you firstly have Hinayana which denies the existence of the self, but affirms the existence of dharmas, the constituent parts of reality.
The clustering around the illusory self, which is the cause of so much suffering, is broken. But the constructed world – constructed by our karma, by our culture, by language and so on, remains intact keeping a dualism between person and the world.
So as an antidote to that the second teaching arises,Yogacara, which denies the existence of both self, and dharmas, saying that everything is “mind only”.
But that creates further problems. If the mind exists, we can aspire to various stages of consciousness development. So clinging, attachment – the cause of our difficulties in the first place – can re-emerge in a more subtle form.
To remedy that we then have Nagarjuna, who says that both self and world and mind are all empty, so there’s nothing to cling to (or to seek to grasp).
But the problem which Nagarjuna makes visible is that his solution appears to suggest a sort of nihilism, where nothing matters. This misunderstanding seems to have been endemic ever since, and is often there in our own time whenever Nagarjuna is thought of as being a forerunner of modern philosophy rather than as a religious figure endeavouring to map out a positive life by demolishing what gets in the way of that, the whole conceptual world.
In Zongmi’s scheme this misunderstanding necessitates the fourth teaching, Zen, which is distinctive because it is the only one which is explicit about the purpose of Buddhism. Explicit because it has a clear and stated positive message. Which is the belief in what is variously called ’ or ‘mind ground’ or ‘Buddha potentiality’ or ‘Buddha nature’, amongst others.
Distinctive because for the first time, there is an explicitly stated positive basis for our true life, after all the negative obstructions have been cleared out of the way.
Yet, in Zongmi’s account, the teaching method of Zen teachers is the same as the first three approaches; it’s negative, to clear the conceptual nonsense out of the way. To remove the confusion which stops the student from seeing their true nature.
The language of classical ( 600-1300 AD) Chinese Zen is particularly difficult for us to understand, but we need to make the effort to understand it because if we don’t we’re likely in our Zen practice to be gradually subsumed by the dominant trend in the West, which is concerned with psychological wellness and individual development. And it’s important
also that we understand that language, not in some abstract or scholastic way, but in terms of our own practice.
A good example of a word which arises continuously (originally in the writings of the Chinese Zen masters of the Tang dynasty period and immediately before is ‘MIND’. By ‘mind’, confusingly for us, the Chinese sometimes mean exactly what we mean by mind: the configuration of thoughts, memories, self-identity and so on which make up what we call the self.
But what they also mean by mind is something entirely different from that. Which they sometimes call ‘mind-ground’, or use metaphors like the bright mirror. And what that means in relation to our sitting is that fundamental level of experience where, as it were, the space inside us and, as it were, the space outside us, is the one alive and charged space within which everything is held: these thoughts, this body, the bodies of all other beings. And the characteristics of that ‘mind’ are openness, calmness, serenity, compassion, and so on.
And when some masters make statements like “mind is world” that’s what they’re alluding to, mind not as a philosophical statement about the real nature of the universe, like some kind of contribution to quantum theory from eighth century China, nor Idealism, but mind as the fundamental level of experience, this experience during Zazen. And often they (the Chinese Masters) will use the metaphor of the ocean. And in understanding all these metaphors, it’s helpful to understand a distinction which they make between substance and function [sometimes nature and function].
So, nature/substance is the irreducible (underlying) specificity of what something is, and function is its various manifestations. in the case of water, for instance, the substance of its nature is that it’s wet (it’s always and necessarily this) but one of its functions (ie what it sometimes manifests as) is that it’s stormy, another of its functions is that it may save someone ( who is dying of thirst) or drown someone. There’s all these different functions, but the one underlying substance. And we can understand the mind on that basis as well. It is this underlying calm, open, aliveness. And (the waves of) our thoughts are, as it were, one function of that. The assumptions behind this are profoundly optimistic.
It’s not that we need to get rid of these thoughts, but that we need to understand them. So we need to understand that our thoughts at the outset, in one sense at least, are illusory: they are not something we need to get rid of, they are something that we need to understand.
So we need to make an effort to try and grasp this very different way of thinking. Otherwise we’ll just interpret the literature, particularly the Koan literature in a very superficial way.
Kodō Sawaki was a famously tough Japanese Zen master of the 20th century. He died in 1965. His successor was Kosho Uchiyama, who wrote ‘Opening the hand of thought’ and the wonderful contemporary teacher Shōhaku Okumura is a successor to Uchiyama.
So he’s a really influential guy. He was famously anti idealistic, which was a general trait, I think, of Japanese Zen teachers after the second world war, when an inflated, idealistic language of Buddhism had unhelpfully colluded with the inflated, self serving idealistic language of Japanese imperialism.
So the postwar environment really encouraged Japanese teachers to present Zen as being something very down to earth, something almost mundane, ordinary. And one of Kodō Sawaki’s most famous quotes was when he said that satori, enlightenment is like a thief breaking into an empty house.
You can understand what he’s trying to get at. When we start practice, we might start with the idea that somehow we’re going to get something marvellous. We’re going to get compassion. We’re going to get wisdom. We’re going to get tranquility. We’re going to be able to break into this treasure house, and wear a crown of enlightenment on our foolish head.
And so the phrase is a sort of antidote to that. And I think you can take it in quite a number of different ways. But one of the ways that you can take it is that we don’t gain anything in zazen because we don’t need to gain anything. We are already complete. But we don’t understand that because we’re always viewing everything from our karmic position of needs, desires, dissatisfactions.
So we can look at it that way. But the phrase I think, and the way that Kodō Sawaki expresses himself generally, has often been used, in the West, to present Zen in an anti idealist way, about it being really about everyday tasks like washing the dishes, attending to your normal life. All of which is true, but unfortunately diminishes something.
The quote is often attributed as a re-quote of a famous Chinese zen master of the eighth century Sekisō. Sekisō is most famous for case 46 of The Gateless Gate where he talks about stepping off the hundred foot pole. And it’s interesting because it shows how the zen currency of trading in quotes and then reflections on quotes and quotes about quotes can often get very confused.
So the source of it isn’t actually Sekisō, it’s an exchange involving another master Ryūge, who knew Sekisō. And Ryūge is asked, “how did the ancient master” -that’s the reference to Sekisō-, “finally cease doing things and completely settle down?”. And Ryūge’s reply is It was like a thief slipping into an empty house. So you notice the word used: to slip in, not break into an empty house. So the thief just, in one interpretation, happens to find himself in this empty house which, from the perspective of the thief, is empty.
Dōgen, right at the end of the Fukanzazengi, his instruction for zazen, talks about ‘the treasure house’. And by the treasure house, he’s talking about, as it were, both something which is and always has been there, and what zazen does.The final sentence of the Fukanzazengi goes something like “the treasure house will open of its own accord. And you can do with it what you wish”. I suspect the Japanese is more vague than that, but pay attention to the first part. The treasure house will open of its own accord. In other words, we don’t need to break into the house of emptiness. We don’t need to break into the treasure house. And the reason why we don’t is that the treasure house opens up from the inside. From our sincerely and wholeheartedly doing zazen.
In the quote we might make a false assumption that there’s just this person, this thief, this clown, this idiot, this self-centered person. There’s just this person who somehow has to cure himself. But that is a completely absurd notion. The idea of using the self to change the self is as ridiculous as someone trying to pull their own head off: it is impossible.
The fact is that when we’re sitting there are two things. There is this karmic self. And there is also the treasure house, a treasure house which cannot be seen by the karmic self [and hence is ‘empty’]. And that treasure house we could call the whole of existence. But we could also call it the true body. So when we’re sitting, we don’t need to give attention to the endless drivel that is generated by our mind. We just need to fully sit in the context of zazen. The treasure house is your true body, and will open up of its own accord. You don’t need to intend it. You don’t need to will it. That’s what practice enlightenment means.
The core insight of Buddhism is that we suffer because there’s a split between self and world. ‘Self’ in the sense not that we have a subjective perspective, obviously we do, but in the sense that there’s some ongoing, continuous ‘something’ which is essential to us, and which we call self. In Buddhism we say that’s a fiction. But the insight creates two fundamental problems.
Firstly, if we suffer because of belief in a fictional self, how can meditation, which is quintessentially a practice of the self, help us see through that fiction, help us displace the self? And second, if what we’re looking for, at least in some sense, isn’t here already, why should it ever be?
Those two issues have been dealt with in various ways in the history of Buddhism. And one of the reasons for the apparent opaqueness of East Asian Buddhism for us is the unusual ways in which the Chinese and the Japanese have chosen, in a very practical way, to address these problems.
And one of the distinctive ways is seeing practice, not necessarily just meditation, but practice generally, not as the practice of the self, but the practice of Buddha or the practice of Bodhisattvas. So, for example, in the Pure Land school, there is the belief that if compassion arises within me, it’s not belonging to me. It’s not my compassion. It’s not personal compassion which I’m cultivating. It’s the compassion of the Buddha Amida.
And in a similar way, Dogen would say that when we practice, we’re not practicing from the perspective of the self, we’re throwing ourselves into the house of Buddha. At other times he might say it’s not you that’s sitting, it’s sitting Buddha.
These are ways that to us are hard to grasp, but which are eminently practical if we take them seriously rather than literally. The problem with taking them literally is we think that instead of the world being as it appears, it’s populated with these technicolor mythical heroic figures. That’s obviously ludicrous. But what’s not ludicrous is understanding that seeing in this way is meant to produce a feeling shift in us. In the example of compassion, it’s not that there’s a garishly dressed future Buddha hiding away in a mythical place, but rather that compassion, like love, is a universal quality. It’s not particular to me, and I don’t own it. It’s a universal quality which is transmitted through me in the same way as sunlight streaming through your window illuminates falling dust. The dust doesn’t acquire the qualities of light, but nonetheless becomes like a jewel, like a mirror.
Master Dogen’s view of delusion and enlightenment is expressed succinctly in the Genjokoan.
[In Tanahashi’s translation]: “to carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion, that the myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.”
The Zen Site [www.thezensite.com] have helpfully collected together a number of other translations of this passage, which we can usefully use as contrast.
Francis Cook translates it as “conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion, the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment”.
Nishijima’s translation is “driving ourselves to practice and experience millions of things and phenomena is delusion. When millions of things and phenomena actively practice and experience ourselves, that is realisation.”
It’s important for us to to note that the distinction which Dogen is making is between a practice which affirms or assumes the self and a practice which de-centres or [in his phrasing] drops off the self. For Dogen the practice of zazen is plainly the second.
We also need to pay attention to the word ‘jiko’ [ which is translated as ‘self ‘] has a double meaning. It means self in the usual way that we mean: ego. But it also means the bigger self: the whole of creation. Which is taken as being like a body: alive, differentiated, connected, changing. And that double meaning has an extra layer to it because obviously from the position of the bigger self Everything is part of the bigger self, including our personal, egoic sense of self.
And it’s fair to say in these translations, the sense of universal self is probably not conveyed. And the reference to what Tanahashi refers to as ‘the myriad things’, and what Nishijima refers to as ‘millions of things and phenomena’ needs to be clarified. What’s meant is everything within our experience when we’re practicing zazen. So obviously it includes what’s within our perceptual field, structures and trees and sky and all the rest of it. But also what’s arising within what we would normally think of as being the separate mental field of our thoughts, memories, emotions and suchlike.
And both form a whole. It’s not that there are two separate realms where perception is good, and the mental stuff is not good. They form a whole which in traditional language is ‘myriad things’. And which for Nishijima is ‘millions of things and phenomena’. It’s also important for us to understand that if we have a practice which thinks that we require to empty the mind or require to achieve a special state of consciousness, or need to acquire some special quality of consciousness which is called enlightenment, we’re going in absolutely the wrong direction. And similarly, when people use ridiculous language like ‘wanting non egoic experiences’, it’s just a disguised way of affirming the self.
The way to get out of all of that muddle is to do away with that false belief that the emotions, memories and so forth which arise within zazen are random junk, and that tranquility or unvarnished perception of things is good. And replaced by an understanding that everything that is arising within our experience is the universe practicing itself through us. You could also say it is interdependence. Everything that arises within our experience, no matter how unpromising, is interdependence.
When I was doing zazen this morning, I was getting a repetitive song from the early 80s. And the obvious thing was to just think that’s a distraction to be driven away. But liking or hating phenomena obscures its actual reality. We just see phenomena at the surface level. We don’t see the threads of connection which come from us.
That annoying song? I could see on reflection later that it connected to many other things. Specifically to a former friend, who I found out recently committed suicide. We would listen to that song together. And the song was sung by somebody who committed suicide.
I’m just using that as an example. Even the most unpromising things arising in our experience is us experiencing interdependence. It’s as if behind the apparent moron of our babble is a great person, extending everywhere.
The mirror is one of the main metaphors of Chinese Zen. But it’s quite difficult for us to tie it in with other metaphors that we encounter frequently, ones concerned with space, illumination, emptiness and so on.
The metaphor of mirror crops up all the time. Sometimes ‘the ancient mirror’ or ‘the empty mirror’, and it appears in one of the most famous exchanges in Zen legend, an exchange involving the Sixth Patriarch. (Hui-Neng)
The Fifth Patriarch had asked his disciples for a poem to demonstrate their understanding. The head monk was the only one who wrote a poem. And that poem was anonymously critiqued by Huineng, who then secretly got the transmission and became the Sixth Patriarch.
The poem goes something like
“ body is the bodhi tree, mind the mirror bright, polish the mirror ceaselessly. And don’t let dust alight”
The nursery rhyme rhythm is my own, but you get the idea. On the face of it, this seems an accurate description of meditation. We can think of ‘dust’ on the mirror as being distracting thoughts, and we are ceaselessly, trying our best to put those distracting thoughts to one side and to keep the mind clear, like a mirror.
Huineng’s criticism was that the poem contained a fatal dualism. A dualism between, as it were, the person doing the polishing, and the mirror or, if you want to put it in a different way, between the self and the mind. And that fatal dualism is then amplified by a judgment about what is of value. So ‘dust’ is not of value, but the things of the world that might appear in the mirror perceptually are.
In considering the metaphor further, it’s helpful to rebut the assumption that when the Chinese talked about mirrors, they were talking about mirrors in our sense. It’s true that glass was invented quite a long time ago. The Chinese were familiar with it and would make mirrors of glass. But they weren’t mirrors in our sense, which appeared quite late, the technology appearing around 1835. When the Chinese talk about ‘mirror’, what they mean is a precious metal, bronze, for instance, which is polished so it becomes a reflector. And so there’s several things that we can tease out of that.
The first is that the bronze mirror is very precious. It’s made of precious metal, and requires a great deal of work to put ( and maintain) it in the state where it’s capable of reflecting the world. It requires continuous activity to keep it this way and not become dull. But although it’s precious, it’s a part of the world, it’s not separate or transcendent. It’s something within the world. And the second thing for us to eke out is the idea of depth. When we think of mirror, we probably think of us looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection and then making some sort of assessment about the reflection: “it’s me, but I’m not the reflection”, something like that, but for them the idea of depth is very important.
The depth of the mirror is the depth of the world. It’s the same depth. And within meditation, the masters would often talk in terms of ‘empty mirror mind’. Although it seems a bit baroque to us, in a sense, when I’m meditating this head is like an empty mirror, reflecting whatever comes before it. This gets us away from the fatal dualism of inner and outer reality which, like the senior disciple’s poem, often goes unnoticed in contemporary discussions of meditation.
One fatal dualism is between the activities of the mind, – thoughts and stuff like that, bad, and activities of the world, our perceptual awareness of the trees outside, the birds and all the rest of it, good. And the second, slightly more subtle, dualism is between the idea of us having as it were, a meditating internal space of awareness, consciousness, our personal awareness and the external space of the world. Within this head is my awareness which different from this adjacent but external space ‘outside’.
The metaphor of ‘mirror mind’ applied to our experience of zazen removes those dualities. Not that that idea is original to me. In 1961, Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head’, where he talks about exactly this. He doesn’t, as far as I can recall, specifically mention the mirror metaphor, but it’s the same idea. So that in our conceptual mind, there’s a difference between internal and external. But in our actual phenomenological experience, when we’re meditating, there is no separation. And because there’s no separation, then our meditation is not striving to do something about our consciousness, to fix our consciousness. It’s enacting something. And that’s a very important distinction.
In the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo, Master Dogen poses the question: What to do when the cart is stuck. Do you beat the ox or do you beat the cart?
And he comments on that. The phrase comes from an exchange between Nangaku and Baso about zazen’s purpose. It starts with Nangaku seeing Baso, his student, sitting in zazen. And Nangaku says, “What is your intention sitting in zazen?” and Baso says something like, “I intend to become a Buddha”.
Nangaku then picks up a tile and starts polishing it with a stone. And Baso says, “What are you doing?” And Nangaku says, “I’m making a mirror”. And Baso says, “How can you make a tile into a mirror?” Nangaku says “Likewise, how can you make a person into a Buddha?”.
Dogen renders that story anew, which ordinarily puts Baso in a subordinate position. He equalises them. In Dogen’s rendering of the story, the exchange takes place after Nangaku gives teacher transmission to Baso. Baso’s responses are given an equivalent weight to Nangaku’s statements, partially by re-formulating Baso’s questions into statements, eg “What are you doing?” becomes “You are doing What [Suchness]”
That particular phrase about beating the cart is very helpful in giving a sense of what is involved in our practice, shikantaza. And we can simplify things by saying that in the quote, the ox signifies the mind and the cart signifies the body.
Dogen’s interpretation is much more multifaceted and subtle than that. But if we make that distinction for present purposes, it is helpful for us in making sense of Dogen’s subsequent statement that sometimes in the Buddha way, we beat the cart rather than beat the ox. Because it seems to me that almost all approaches to meditation other than shikantaza are beating the ox.
Because they’re focused on mental resolve, intention and a directional focus. Meditation practice will take you from an inferior position to a superior one..
Shikantaza makes no sense within this mental, intentional framework. Within the mental framework, i.e. from the perspective of the ox, we are sitting in the faith of non-duality, in the faith that the boundaries that we put in place between ourselves and the rest of creation are illusory.
But from the perspective of the mind it’s hard to avoid that just sounding like pious nonsense.
The intention from that perspective of moving from one position to another is inevitably future focused. Which is why it’s stuck. But if we think of shikantaza from the perspective of the cart, from the perspective of the body, then it starts to make sense. The faith becomes something other than an intellectual assertion of non-duality.
It moves from the field of belief to the lived experience of intimacy and trust. From a body perspective, faith resumes its original meaning, not belief, but trust and connection. And so our faith isn’t an intellectually asserted one of non-duality when we’re sitting, it’s just this simple intimacy that we have with all beings.
With our immediate environment first, and then gradually seeping out to all beings, like ink spreading out on blotting paper. Equally, intention ceases to be something future orientated, something by which through effort we change our position, to an intention of maintaining our position. So it’s present focused, not future focused. Dogen’s phrase is very helpful in illuminating his view of shikantaza and about our practice as letting the body leap free, to no longer be stuck.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
