Master Dogen said that zazen was a continuous process of casting off body and mind: Shinjindatsuraku. Shin means heart mind, Jin means body and datsuraku means casting off or cast off.
Datsuraku has a double signification. It means in part casting off as similar to an intentional action, like an item of clothing that you would take off. It’s also like a natural falling away, like leaves would fall from a tree in the Autumn. But it’s important to understand that although it’s similar to an intentional action, it isn’t an intentional action, as that would be dualistic, and hence not zazen. It’s quite subtle. If I undress because I’m about to go to bed, in a sense it’s intentional, but in another sense it isn’t. It’s just what happens. It’s situational. We live or die by nuance.
Unfortunately Dogen doesn’t give us a lot of commentary on what he means by “casting off body and mind.”.
Arguably, and this might be controversial, we could look at this as a three-stage process [‘Process’ isn’t the right word, but let’s just use it anyway].
Firstly, when we initially come to zazen, we require to develop a certain equanimity about everything which arises. That’s usually characterised as thoughts and emotions. Thoughts tend to be emphasised more. We’re often told that we should just allow our thoughts to come and go freely,
Emphasising thoughts is unfortunate, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s not an accurate description of our lived experience which, if we analyse it closely, has much which can’t reasonably be considered thoughts. Memories are not thoughts, the workings of the imagination are not thoughts, imaginary dialogue, visual images, sounds — a great deal of the content of our experience isn’t thought.
Second, the problematic consequence of assuming that our experience in zazen is primarily thought is that it emphasises what many beginners experience, which is seemingly incessant inner dialogue. The problem with that is that the inner dialogue seems doubly dualistic: some mental thing that’s going on inside one’s head which is both sustaining a Mind/Body dualism and a Mind/World dualism which feeds a general but erroneous idea, namely that what we need to do to realise nonduality and have insight into interdependence is to eradicate our thoughts. That’s completely mistaken.
The second stage after we develop equanimity is “casting off body”, which is an experience that many zazen practitioners will have, although they probably wouldn’t phrase it that way.They’ll often talk about experiencing an expansive awareness, a vast spaciousness or something like that. “Casting off body” is essentially dropping off a conceptual idea of the body. That is, something with clear boundaries which is a kind of object in our consciousness and, in place of that, experiencing our body, not as something fixed or objectified, but something spacious and energetic and indefinable — part of the world. That is “casting off body.”
The third stage, “casting off mind” can build on the first two stages. “Casting off mind” starts from a position that we may well be experiencing [through sitting in the correct posture and having developed equanimity] this spaciousness in our experience. Yet we are still experiencing thoughts, emotions, memories, and all the rest of it.
This is where the dual meaning of datsuraku comes in.
The “casting off body” naturally comes from sitting in the correct energised zazen posture after having developed equanimity. It’s just natural to then experience openness and spaciousness. But “casting off mind” is closer to intentional.
What we require to do is to orientate and maintain an understanding that what we’re experiencing as distinct objects in our consciousness as thoughts, images, and so on are not, as it were, little cannonballs of thought or memory or image. They’re hollow, and inside each of them is interdependence. Everything which is arising in our experience has these threads of interdependence within it. Some of those threads are expressed somatically, but a lot of the threads are interdependence in terms of time. The content of our consciousness isn’t an obstruction to us seeing interdependence. It is interdependence. That’s one meaning of Baso’s saying “Ordinary Mind is The Way”
Interdependence in terms of Casting off Body is experienced in terms of space but interdependence in terms of Casting off Mind is largely [but not exclusively] experienced in terms of time. So we experience impermanence in those two distinct yet related senses.