Tag: Our state in Zazen

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‘Fatigue’ during Zazen

A very common problem in Zazen, particularly for beginners, is apparent fatigue. You often see people sitting, their heads, which feel heavy, gradually drooping forward, then they notice it and come out of it with a startle. Then they often stick their chest out and lift their head in a rather unrelaxed, mock heroic posture. And then you can see them gradually collapsing again like a slow motion  souffle, then taking up the heroic position again; up and down, like an accordion, often for the length of their sitting.

What’s helpful for fatigue in Zazen is to think of it in a different way. It’s not really about fatigue but about having a spine that’s insufficiently activated. If it were really about fatigue, the practitioner would be exhausted before and after Zazen, and they hardly ever are.

Rather than trying to make yourself do something with your mind, whose imperative is to urgently resume the ‘correct’ posture without anyone noticing,  it’s much better to make sure that your pelvis is in the right position; that your weight is going down through your sit bones. Then, just very, very finely and slowly, rock backwards and forwards on your sit bones.

Going from the back of your sit bones to the middle through the front very slowly, minutely.

As you’re doing that, on the in-breath you’re pushing down with the pelvic floor at the perineum, and on the out- breath you’re allowing the spine to lengthen. You’re not pushing up the top of the head, you’re not stretching the back of the neck,  you’re just allowing the spine to lengthen and be itself, like a young, unencumbered tree.

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380. Manas Consciousness

One of the most common instructions in meditation is to allow our thoughts to come and go freely, and not be attached to them.

The problem with that instruction, or one of them, is that it perpetuates a completely unexamined assumption of what we mean by thought.

It seems to me that there is a common assumption that our ‘inner world’ is populated simply by thoughts and feelings, ordered and disordered.

But whether it’s inner or not [and I say not], if we examine our actual experience, we find that’s completely untrue. If we examine that, particularly in meditation,  we notice that very little of our experience is thoughts. Rather,  we experience  a mass of phenomena: some auditory; some visual; some somatic; some imaginative. Amongst others.

And what we have on top of that is a fairly ceaseless commentary on this primary  experience. This commentary is an attempt, it seems to me, to appropriate these experiences to the self. That corresponds with the Seventh Consciousness in the Yogacara school—the Manas consciousness.

One can see that an idea of meditation as being a quieting of the mind, a letting go of thoughts, isn’t anything of the kind. It’s simply a hidden form of that Manas Consciousness. So now, along with the familiar commentary, there’s an additional commentary that one should stop having this commentary and should let go of thought. Two spotlights, but neither illuminating anything. Quite the opposite.

This unexamined idea of what we mean by thoughts bedevils us in lots of ways. Yogacara is a helpful way for us to get some clarity. The first five consciousnesses [corresponding to the five physical senses] in the Yogacara system, which get remarkably little attention in modern Zen, even though it was one of its main foundations, directly describe our primary meditative experience.

Not just that, but they are a direct manifestation of the trembling and echoes of interdependence. We cannot say that they are either physical or mental. Or both. Or neither.

Those consciousnesses seem also not simply something simply arising in the present moment but rather a direct manifestation of interdependence over time. 

For example, if I hear my father’s voice—my father’s been dead for more than 20 years—that seems to me to be auditory Consciousness just as much as hearing the traffic outside.

My brain does not distinguish between the imaginary and the real,  between the present and the past, and that’s why it’s impossible for me to have an imaginary sound in my head at exactly the same time as a real sound.  It’s impossible for me to have an imaginary picture in my eye and at exactly the same time be seeing the world around me.

So in this system, these first five consciousnesses directly connect us with interdependence, in fact are interdependence.

We fail to see this because of our unexamined idea of what thinking is.

A sixth Consciousness, the so-called ‘mind consciousness’ is not the general activity of the ‘Mind’ [whatever that is].  Rather it is the direct perception of thought in just the same sense that the visual Consciousness is a direct connection with the object seen.

We take these six consciousnesses together, and they describe our primary conscious experience, which is neither just physical or mental.

 Manas Consciousness makes it mental because it says ‘This is mine and this is going on here in my head’. And in that way, Manas Consciousness creates the primary duality of self and world, and the secondary duality of mind and body.

And the instruction to let our thoughts come and go keeps that duality in place, because there’s always an unseen ‘someone’ letting the thoughts come and go. And failing.

This is fundamental. If we believe the universe flooding marvellously through us at each moment is ‘mine’, then we will dramatically constrict what we are able to see to ‘thoughts’, and their close relatives ‘emotions’. We will see the floating debris, but not the river.

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362. Hishiryo

A very familiar story about how we should practice Zazen involves Master Yakusan. It appears at the start of the Zazenshin chapter of the Shobogenzo. 

In Tanahashi’s translation, the exchange reads as follows:

 Yakusan was sitting in Zazen.
A monk asked him, “In steadfast sitting, what do you think?”
Yakusan said, “Think not thinking.”
The monk asked, “How do you think not thinking?”
Yakusan replied. “Beyond thinking.”

The three material words in this exchange are ’thought’ or ‘thinking’ which is ‘shiryo’; ‘not thinking’, the direct negative, which is ‘fushiryo’;  and ‘other than thinking’ or ‘different from thinking’ which is ‘hishiryo.’ 

Tanahashi translates ‘hishiryo’ as ‘beyond thinking’. That isn’t universal. Nishijima, for example, translates hishiryo as ‘non-thinking’, which doesn’t exactly make it clearer what is meant.

This exchange, and how it appears to describe Zazen, has frequently been quite problematic for practitioners. Often there’s a tendency to think that ‘hishiryo’ – particularly when it’s translated as ‘beyond thinking’- is some special state that we need to attain. It also seems to make Zazen peculiarly intentional.

For me, what’s most puzzling is the initial question, because it seems an idiotic question for a monk to ask. The monk presumably has been Yakusan’s student for some time. He would plainly have received instruction about zazen. He’s not a layman, or a simpleton. Why does he ask a question which seems to show complete ignorance of Zazen?

The problem we have as western zen practitioners is twofold. First, what’s being said in texts like these (and in other Asian language texts) is often quite elusive to grasp. That’s made worse by being distantly separated in time and culture. 

The second is that we’re having to rely on translations from languages very different from english. We assume that there is one meaning only, but that’s not so. Classical Chinese is notoriously capable of multiple interpretations, which is exacerbated by a fondness for terseness.

You get very short statements which are capable of a number of different meanings. That creates problems for us.

The contemporary Estonian scholar Rein Raud has written, very interestingly I think, about Dogen. In his 2021 essay ‘Dogen and the Linguistics of Reality’, he retranslates this exchange, and answers my query about the monk’s apparently gormless initial question.

He re-renders the exchange thus:

 As Yakusan was sitting a monk asks “What is motionless thought?” ( That is, the ideogram for stillness isn’t a synonym for Zazen, it relates to the “thought,” making the question intelligent)
Yakusan replies, “It is the thought that occurs during ‘not thinking’. 
The monk asks, “What kind of thoughts do you have during ‘not thinking.’
Yakusan says,”Non thoughts.”

I think that this is a really much more helpful translation, much more understandable. Professor Raud  points out that there’s a problem with the habitual translation of  ‘hishiryo’ as a verb i.e non-thinking/beyond thinking.  He points out that the prefix ‘hi’ is appended to nouns, not verbs. It’s non-thought not non-thinking in the original Chinese text, which is then repeated in the Japanese. It’s only in English that it mysteriously becomes a verb. Similarly, ‘shiryo’ can either be a noun (‘thought(s)’) or a verb (‘thinking’), but in English it is much more frequently rendered as ‘thinking’, which heavily contributes to the overall impression in Tanahashi’s translation of Zazen being primarily intentional. 

‘Non thinking’ seems to be something we have to do. ‘Non thoughts’, on the other hand, seems much more understandable. There is mental activity, but it’s different from mental activity in the normal sense, because:

  • it’s not intentional
  • it’s not part of my internal conversation 
  • it isn’t mine, it’s just something else going on within experience
  • it’s not closed off within an imaginary mental space; it has correlates in the felt sense, in the body, it changes within a matrix of change which encompasses everything. The thought, as it were, remembers its embodiment

Why does this matter? It matters because it’s important for us not to explain away the teachings as ‘mystical’, capable of being understood only by those who are ‘enlightened’. Because that’s no explanation at all. And it contributes to a distorted master-driven version of Zen, where we imagine we have to open our mind. But we don’t need to open our mind, any more than we need to write the biography of a ghost.

We only need to open our heart.

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346. The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment

The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment was written in Tang Dynasty China, probably in the early 8th century, around the same time as The Platform Sutra, just prior to the formation of Baso’s Hongzhou School of Zen, which proved the most durable, going forward into the later Song Dynasty.

The Sutra was very popular in China and subsequently in Korea, but did not become widely known in Japan. Although, I think, it’s clear that Dogen was familiar with it, not least because the initial and dominant metaphor in the sutra – sky flowers – is one of the chapters of the Shobogenzo, which Dogen re-renders as the flowers of emptiness (Kuge). That chapter substantially repeats what is said in the sutra.

One of the reasons the sutra was so popular was because it gave a lot of practical instruction about meditation.

It essentially says that in meditation there are three ways to practise: Samatha, Samapatti and Dhyana. From those three approaches it generates 25 separate practices, using various combinations of these three.

So what are they?

Samatha we are familiar with. It is the wide range of practices focused on the necessity of undispersing, calming and gathering the mind. It is strongly associated with the idea that meditation cultivates tranquility, quietude, and serenity. The metaphor which the sutra uses for this aspect of meditation is the mirror. Just as a bright mirror will reflect everything truly without being caught up in it, and whose primary characteristic, brightness, is unaffected by the nature of the reflections, then likewise the meditator rests within the brightness of calm spacious awareness, unperturbed by any arising thoughts or emotions.

The second kind of practice, Samapatti, is described tersely as using illusion to overcome illusion. The meaning can be unpacked by reading the early part of the sutra, where the metaphor of sky flowers is explored. Sky flowers represent illusory ideas: self, separation from the world, permanence and so on. The mind of the practitioner which sees no-self, impermanence and non-duality is also a sky flower, because there is no ‘mind’ separate from everything else. That is what the sutra means by using one illusion to overcome another. One of the other metaphors used is two sticks being rubbed together to create a fire, which then consumes both. Another brilliant metaphor is of a person cutting off his own head; prior to the act there is a person intending to do something, but after he succeeds, there isn’t. Samapatti focuses on how we can, in the course of meditation, actively examine our tendency to separate, to continually create a “me”, to construct a familiar world of known objects and qualities, and so on. The metaphor that is used is that of a green and lively shoot bursting up through the earth. The aliveness, the activity of the green shoot bursts through the earth of ignorance, but doesn’t become separated from it, like the Lotus Flower.

The metaphor for Samatha is one of peacefulness and tranquility, that for Samapatti is very different, it is a vigorous and dynamic engagement.

The third – Dhyana – is where the separation between body, mind and world drops off or is forgotten about. In Dhyana we are just sitting, ‘One Piece Zen’, as Isso Fujita would say: body, mind and world all dropped off and gathered up in this One Piece. The metaphor for Dhyana is the ringing bell. The bell can ring because it is hollow, empty at its center. It is self-less. Yet, the ring of the bell of zazen rings out everywhere.

We can look at these three meditations as three different practices. We can also look at them as being three aspects, although not the only aspects, of our own practice. We are experiencing this One Piece Zen. At other times we are aware of the necessity of undispersing our mind. At other times we are aware of our habits of fabrication and construction. All of this can be explained in a way which is inclusive, and which broadens our practice, and stops it falling into easy formulation.

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344. Taking the backward step

We can’t hear the voices of all the myriad beings because we’re behind the glass of the self.

But, we can’t break that glass with our head.

Accordingly, Dōgen says that we must take the backward step ( eko hensho no taiho – turn the light inward, take the backward step)

What does that mean?

We can describe it, for example, in terms of the five skandhas.  

We cease to grasp this consciousness, this awareness as mine.   

We cease to grasp this mental activity as mine.

We cease to grasp these perceptions: this is me; here is the world; here are these feelings which I identify with. We cease to grasp in that way.

We cease to grasp sensation. The sensation is simply something which is arising within a whole lived world; arising and changing, not something that we are required to fixate upon or to specify in terms of feeling, without a fixed location or nature.

We ungrasp the body as an object.  Ungrasping in this way, we fall backwards into the actual body. That body is not separate from the body of all things.

In this way separation is gradually reduced; not in a transformative way; not in a mystical or heroic way, but in a natural way.  

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343. Vitality

The non-duality that Buddhists talk about is not healing the mind body split. It is healing the self world split. But obviously, healing the mind body split is a necessary prerequisite to that.

When the Tang Dynasty Chinese wrote about meditation they generally talked about two aspects. One was Samatha —calming the mind—and the other was Vipassana—insight. 

If we think of meditation primarily in terms of consciousness, then we’re liable to interpret both of those phrases in terms of our individual psychology. 

We will think that calming is making my mind peaceful and empty. We will think of insight in terms of my seeing. We may think of it in terms of a special kind of seeing that I can have. 

This is wrongheaded.

Calming is the calming of our whole body mind. And Insight isn’t really seeing. It is a direct experiencing of non-separation; not some woo-woo mystical stuff but gradual and progressive and real.

There is a modern tendency to think of meditation in terms of consciousness alone. Often the body is disregarded or minimised. This ignores the other fundamental pole of meditation.

That other  pole is Vitality. Aliveness.

If you ask what distinguishes living beings, you would answer: consciousness of some sort, and aliveness. 

But Vitality has not had a very prominent place in the history of modern western thought. It tends to be largely ignored. 

The problem with ignoring it is if we’re just thinking of meditation in terms of consciousness, what we will give attention to is the ‘contents’ of consciousness, primarily thoughts and emotions.  We think that’s what our experience is. We ignore or misunderstand the aliveness of the body. 

Dōgen didn’t misunderstand, which is why he referred to “ the vital matter of letting the body leap”

We might just pass over that as poetic effervescence  if we don’t understand the centrality of vitality, of aliveness. If so, we’ll misunderstand the purpose of meditation. We’ll essentially see it in terms of emptiness, stillness, vacuity and space. We’ll misunderstand the ‘contents’ of our experience. We will bracket all of these contents as being that which needs to be eradicated or, at least, set to one side. We will overemphasise equanimity and miss joy.

There’s all the difference in the world between, for example, persecuting voices or persistent, unpleasant emotions or habitual banal patterns of thought and the natural aliveness which our body has. This aliveness shows itself at the level of sensation, which goes ‘upwards’, becoming emotions, becoming thoughts. It will also show itself as an energetic patterning underneath our emotions. 

If we’re not aware of that, then what we’ll see is simply the top layers.

It’s as if we have a landscape where the deeper half is missing. To use another metaphor; it’s as if, when we focus on consciousness alone, we’re like a magician. One who can go anywhere, who can see anything, but who’s suspended a short distance above the ground. The magician cannot fall onto the ground of all being. The reason why he can’t is that he can only fall that short distance through the alive body.   

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319. Experiencing Emptiness in Zazen

If we practice Zazen with a purely psychological or consciousness focus, it’s very difficult to overcome the sense that the contents of our mind come in pre-formed thoughts and emotions. Although we might understand intellectually that those are constructions, they can often prove very difficult to either dissolve or to embody (in embodiment, we are aware of the roots, as it were, in our body, in our senses, of what we’re choosing to describe as a thought or an emotion). That being the case, with this psychological focus, our practice is often primarily an exercise in stoicism and resistance. We’re trying to avoid being taken somewhere by the emotion which arises, being taken somewhere by the thought which arises, being drawn into interpretation, being carried away by a network of related thoughts and suchlike. The two pillars of practice are equanimity and joy. With this focus, equanimity is paramount, but joy is nowhere to be found.

Because our bodily feelings – our sensations – are far less seductive than our thoughts and emotions, it is much easier to experience their dissolution. Not though for pain. With pain, it is difficult not to collapse the awareness around that pain. If we practice with a psychological focus, the body is largely invisible until we feel pain. But once we do, it is all too visible, but in a way which is cramped around that experience of pain, and the anxious thoughts that come bounding along with it.

However, if we just give our attention to non-pain sensations that we are experiencing in the body – a slight tightness in the shoulders, heat in the palms of the hands, and so on – which are emotionally neutral and lacking in the significance which thoughts and emotions appear to have for us, we can hold those sensations in our awareness, but not contract around them. Our awareness doesn’t collapse around the sensation, so we’re able to feel it within a wide, spacious awareness. And if we’re able to do that, we’ll notice that what initially  we think of as something fixed and physical  is quite diffuse and indeterminate. Something that starts out by being a some-thing (this tightness in my shoulders) loses its shape and boundaries. And rather than remaining like a thing, it becomes more like an energetic pattern which changes, merges, appears, disappears. 

With body sensation we can have a direct experience of the emptiness of that sensation. And on the back of that, a felt experience of the emptiness of the form of this body.

The purpose of Zazen is not to pacify or still the mind, but pacifying the mind is a necessary prerequisite for enlivening the body, and it is that which is required to overcome duality. We need to understand that stilling the mind does not mean eradicating thoughts; it means to make the mind vast, not silent. In order to do that we require to, as it were,  drop the mind both into the enlivened body and thence release both into  the greater alive awareness, which includes this being, and all beings.

When I started practising Zazen, we were given an instruction that if our attention wandered we should bring it back to our breath, and to the various aspects of our posture. And, for me at least, that second instruction induced a kind of picturing of my posture. So I would think, “Am I balanced correctly? Are my shoulders tight?” and so on, almost as if either me, or someone like me, was looking from outside. We can see this strange picturing activity of our body going on all the time. For instance, if you say to someone, “Pick this up with your left hand,” the person will very often look at their hand and then pick it up, so the hand is existing in two ways: in an object way, like a seen object existing as an image, but also existing from the inside, in a felt way. But in our culture, the first sense is very often dominant, with all the attendant splitting and alienation.

One of the fruits of Zazen is that this picturing activity, which we are usually unaware of, and which creates a fundamental dislocation, is gradually reduced. If the instruction that I had been given was, rather than attending to various aspects of my posture, being asked to attend to various sensations which I was experiencing in my body- sensations, for instance, of heat or coldness, of slight tension, of weight – sensations which were emotionally neutral, and which couldn’t easily  be pictured, then those initial years of practice would, I think, have been different. And if I had been instructed to hold an awareness of those sensations, but not to contract the awareness around them, then I think my experience of my body would have changed: less objectified, more energetic, more patterned, more empty.

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318. Letting the body leap

When we start Zazen, what is disconcerting and dispiriting is the torrent of thoughts and emotions which we appear to have. We have an idea of what Zazen should be like, yet our experience is very different. And that’s when most people stop practice; they give up.

If we don’t give up, we gradually come to understand that the problem is not the thoughts and feelings. The problem is that when they arise, our awareness contracts around them. When we realize that, we can start to change our attitude, so rather than will these thoughts and feelings away, or distract ourselves with something else, we open out our awareness. For example, if I’m experiencing an imaginary noise – a tune, say, or a remembered conversation, – I’m not attempting to kill or nullify that. What I’m doing instead is throwing my awareness wide open, so I’m hearing everything.

In this way we gradually learn to develop what Charlotte Joko Beck called ‘A Bigger Container’, within which all that disturbs us can simply come and go within a broader awareness.

We can see a similar process going on with physical phenomena. Often when we’re sitting we’ll experience physical discomfort, or what appears to be physical discomfort. We’ll notice perhaps some disagreeable sensation in our hips, or our knees, or our shoulders, and what will tend to happen is that again we will contract  our awareness, collapsing around the sensation. This contraction is usually accompanied by thoughts, such as “Oh, I wonder if this is getting worse… When’s the bell going to go… What does this mean…  Am I ill in some way…”. 

Just as we can change our attitude to the thoughts and emotions which arise, we can also change our attitude to what appears as physical discomfort. We can experience it, but within a greater awareness.

If we’re able to do that, what seems to happen is that the solidity of the discomfort gradually becomes more diffuse, and rather than being a specifically located thing, it seems to become more like an energetic pattern. And what we also notice is that when we can hold that discomfort in this greater space, then the experience of it is often accompanied by images or emotions. So we discover that our mind isn’t just located in our mind; our mind also appears to be located in our body.

Just as non-attachment to thoughts and emotions changes our idea of what our mind is – our experience of what our mind is – then non-attachment to physical discomfort changes our sense of what our body is. Body is much less a thing, a lump of flesh and bone, and much more a kind of spacious, energetic, interconnectedness.

We don’t just need to apply that to sensations of discomfort, we can apply it generally; to any feelings of, say, tightness in the back of the head, contraction in the belly, tremors in the legs, elation in the chest: any sensations; pleasurable, unpleasurable, neutral. Everything which is going on, which is much more than we had first thought. The body is much more alive than we first thought.

 Practicing in this way gradually changes our sense of our body. I think that’s one of the reasons why some groups – not us, but some groups – insist on very long periods of sitting, almost to cause the crisis which will potentially liberate the practitioner from a habitual way of experiencing body phenomena. 
It’s this which Dogen is referring to when he talks about the body leaping out of itself. It’s not that our heart is leaping out of our chest, but rather our heart is leaping out of our ‘heart’.

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310. The direction of practice

One of the most dispiriting things for people starting practice comes from the idea that practice is the gateway to tranquility and peacefulness. Yet when they start it’s as if there’s this crappy person inside their head talking repetitive, bloviating, interpretative nonsense. And always complaining about what’s going on, about not being enlightened, being bored; nonsense really.

As a preliminary, stabilising step it’s important that we get some distance from this crappy person. So we learn equanimity, non-reactivity, mindful awareness and so on. So, as it were, we’re establishing some space around this crappy person.

But the problem is that we’re still within the room of the self. And if we stay with this self centred perspective, we’re likely to see zazen in terms of equanimity or in terms of consciousness. But either way we’re not going to see zazen in terms of connectedness and joy.

So what we require to do is fall out of this room of the self and into the body. And from there we can experience joy, connection, non-duality and so on.

But when we say ‘body’ we don’t mean your picture of the body because then ‘body’ is just another object in your mind. We mean actual alive, vivid embodiment. This vividness can’t be contained within ourselves; it seeps out. So everything (perhaps starting near to us and gradually percolating outwards) loses its picturedness, its conceptuality and acquires vivid embodiment. 

And it’s in this context that we need to see the descriptive language of the Mahayana sutras. They are not describing something fantastical but the actual experience of zazen. But with these familiar constraints of mind and self and consciousness and separation cast off.

Our ways of describing Zazen are limitless and should be understood as being both partial and limitless. Because the point of a community of practitioners is that the expression of the dharma is never closed, never completed.

It’s as if your spine is a cascade of pearls. It’s as if your rib cage is like a weightless basket moving in emptiness. It’s as if your heart inside that basket is a great light, extending everywhere.

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309. Non-attachment, Nonseparation

Mahayana Buddhism has two principal pillars: emptiness and compassion. 

Emptiness is primarily a skillful means to cultivate non-attachment rather than an assertion about the fundamental nature of things. There’s no ‘Emptiness’ lying underneath Form. Emptiness is itself empty

Compassion (feeling-with) is intimately connected with non-separation.

When we say emptiness and compassion, we can equally say non-attachment and non-separation. With regard to the first, it’s no accident that the most common metaphor for our human condition used by Buddhists is the dream. In the dream we cannot say that there is nothing. Our experience is vivid and immediate, yet there is no essence to grasp hold of. Living in this way is not attachment, but neither is it detachment, which would be grasping ourselves.

Cultivating this attitude in our own life and in witnessing the lives of others, we can understand that we are all living within a dream. And so we can cultivate non-attachment for ourselves and compassion for all beings.

When we turn to zazen, it’s true that to steady ourselves, to solidify our practice, we cultivate non-attachment to our thoughts and emotions. But the fundamental practice of zazen is not non-attachment: it’s non-separation. And we achieve this by attempting to practise at a level deeper than that of ordinary perception.

We’re not simply sitting quietly in our familiar world – we are sitting within a new world which is vivid, immediate and momentary. And within which there is no separation between this person and all beings.