Tag: Practice

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What is ‘Casting off body and mind’?

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.

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Kinhin

Kinhin, the walking meditation that we do between zazen, is poorly understood. 

Often it’s explained as just an opportunity to stretch our legs a little whilst maintaining a meditative focus so we can sit for longer, but we can also see it as an energetic practice.

It’s unclear the extent to which it was practiced at the time of Master Dogen. His Master, Nyojo, certainly mentions walking meditation, but with little description and without context. And Dogen, who wrote minutely about all aspects of practice, doesn’t mention kinhin. One view is that it may have been introduced into zen practice by Master Menzan in the 18th century. Almost certainly it came, directly or indirectly, from Qigong.

The nature of the energetic practice is that we’re activating the acupressure point on the sole of the foot called “bubbling spring”. It’s also called “kidney 1.“

When we take  half steps forward, exhaling while rolling our weight from the heel to the front and slightly spaying our toes, we’re rolling over this point. When we breathe in, we’re pushing down on this point, activating and lengthening the spine so it’s as if we’re pushing up with the top of the head. 

The activation of “bubbling spring” is grounding and energising and clarifying. Many people though can’t manage it on the front foot, or if they can, it’s often only on one foot. However, the back foot is also slightly raised and so is in the position of activating “bubbling spring” as well, so if you can’t get the activation from the front foot then you can push down on the back foot and that has a similar effect — not quite as powerful, but similar.  

Kinhin also throws a light on zazen. People very often in zazen are troubled by recurring thoughts, persistent emotions and so on. But very rarely in kinhin because it’s plainly a moving and activating practice. By contrast, some people mistakenly think zazen is waiting for something to happen: waiting for our delusion to clear, for example. 

Kinhin helps clarify the nature of zazen as being full activity in the present moment. Just as we have that pushing and elongating dynamic on the in-breath in kinhin, we also have it in zazen. If we’re sitting properly we’re balanced on our base chakra and when we breathe in, it’s as if  we’re pushing down gently on the base chakra and pushing up with the crown chakra. Not in a forceful way, but in an energetic way.

If we practise in that way then we bring the body fully back into sitting. We’re practicing fully exerting both our body and our mind. This is completely different from thinking that the ‘point’ of zazen is to change our consciousness, or to do something with our mind. When people say “zazen isn’t meditation”, even though that’s not really true, that’s what they mean.

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Reflections on Kinhin

Kinhin  – walking meditation –  has an anomalous position in our practice. Dogen doesn’t mention it, and it seems that it was introduced perhaps 500 years or so after his death, possibly  by Menzan Zuiho, a wonderful teacher who lived around the turn of the 17th century.

The original instructions I received for kinhin were pretty sparse.  It was basically taking a half step forward with each cycle of breath and rolling the weight from the back foot to the front foot.

I noticed in my years of being in the International Zen Association that the Kinhin got slower and slower and slower, in contrast to what we were originally taught by Nancy Amphoux. By the time I left people were moving very short distances indeed. I’m impatient with that sort of behaviour, because it purports to declare a profundity which is, I think, fake.

What is kinhin for? 

When I went to Sanshinji  in 2012,  I noticed that they did Kinhin a little differently. In a conversation with one of Okumura’s students, she said on the step forward, just before the out-breath, they placed the heel of the forward foot on the ground first. As the out-breath continued the weight was then rolled forward onto the front of the front foot, the toes slightly splayed. The effect of that was that on the roll forward, the weight went directly over the acupressure point on the sole of the foot, near the root of the big toe, called ‘bubbling spring’. 

It’s an energy acupressure point. It’s well known among Qigong people and Acupuncture practitioners. You stimulate that point in the roll forward and then, when you breathe in, you push down with the front of the front foot and roll the foot a tiny bit backwards at the same time. Again, that push would be going through the ‘bubbling spring point.’ 

I’ve been practicing Kinhin in that way since and what I’ve noticed is that – and perhaps this is just me –  that it’s easier to find the ‘bubbling spring point’ on one foot than the other. For me, it’s my left foot, and often I can’t feel it at all.

Quite a lot of my students are unable to find it.  And if they can’t experience it, those instructions don’t make much sense, and so their focus is more on rolling their weight from one foot to the other and from the back of the foot to the front.

If we experiment with how Kinhin could be,  we could pay more attention on the back foot. All that we’re told is that when all the activity is going on with the front foot, we’re keeping our back foot on the ground. Although, it’s very difficult to stop the heel of the back foot being slightly raised off the ground. 

I realised that when the weight is completely on the front foot, the back foot is positioned in such a way that the ‘bubbling spring point’ on the back foot  is naturally accessible. The back foot is, in effect, balanced on that point.

 I wondered, if instead of on an in-breath pressing down with the front foot, what it would be like if, on the in-breath, we pressed down on the ‘bubbling spring point’ on the back foot.

It’s slightly more convoluted: at the end of the outbreath, our weight is still on our front foot, but on the inbreath, we switch our attention to include the bubbling spring point of the back foot, so we might feel that point on both feet, or perhaps just the back foot. The benefit – at least for me – is a dramatically heightened consistency of awareness of the bubbling spring point, which in turn makes it much easier to experience the body as an energetic system, rather than just a mechanical one. You can feel the energy travelling up the body.

Conceptually it’s still a bit messy: it doesn’t feel correct to pay attention to both feet at the same time, rather than alternating attention. When we’re moving energy, it’s more natural to move it from one point rather than two. If we’re bringing the energy up the body and back down to the earth again, where do we bring it down to? 

But that conceptual confusion is secondary to being able to activate this energetic point. And once we do that, we can experiment with what feels right for us within an enlivened practice. For example, it may feel right to bring the energy up through the bubbling spring point of my right foot, and as I step forward to return the energy to the earth through the same point, whilst keeping within awareness the point on the other foot.

I don’t think we should innovate for the sake of it. We  should however foster open hearted inquiry into the various aspects of our practice, and share our experience with others. Because that upholds the vital quality of practice, which avoids degeneration into hollowed out repetition, which is characteristic of religion, and fatal to spiritual enquiry. 

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More heresy about sitting

One of the curious things about Zen is that, whilst the central part of our practice, zazen, entails an intensely physical posture, and one which is very specific in its form, there’s very little discussion about that posture, apart from hackneyed instructions about having a straight spine, tucking our chin in and pushing up with the top of the head. 

Which, anyway, are wrong. The mind is forcing the body into a shape which only increases tension and reinforces an unconscious body/mind duality.

It’s helpful to remind ourselves that the Chinese and Japanese masters took it as a matter of course that people practicing zazen would practice in the full lotus position. 

But hardly any western zen practitioners can do full lotus.Quite often they might practice in half lotus or quarter lotus. Sometimes they practice in the burmese position. These alternative  cross-legged positions are not symmetrical.

Obviously when you’re in half lotus, your pelvis is tilting. But even if you’re in the burmese position, your pelvis isn’t symmetrical because one foot being in front of the other torques it.

By an odd coincidence, at the start of lockdown I started sitting much more. But also, because of a knee injury, I started sitting in a chair. I would sit on a little zafu, about half the height I would normally use, which I placed on a firm chair. 

Whatever else can be said for it, sitting on a chair is an even posture; there’s a clear balance between left and right. And I think because of that balance I became much more aware of my pelvic floor, much as I would have been had I ever been capable of full lotus.

In the Fukanzazengi and in other instructions about Zazen, we’re given an instruction that just before we start, when we’re in position, we sway from left to right, but we’re not given an explanation why.  I think the reason is that it balances our weight between our two sit bones, so we’re not inadvertently weighing down on one side more than the other, or having our spine off centre.

We’re balanced. Our physical weight is dropping down equally through our sit bones and energetically our weight is going down through our centre at the perineum, where, in the traditional Indian outlook, our first chakra is located.

What I’ve noticed, because of an increased awareness of my pelvic floor, is that my perineum isn’t an undifferentiated area. Specifically, I’ve noticed that if I move very slightly and slowly forward and back (my weight going slightly further forward on my pelvic floor and then slightly further back), I can find an area which  to me feels like (though may not anatomically be) a smooth, round bone. When my weight appears to drop down through that area, it does something to my posture.

It seems to produce what I experience as an energetic, pulsing response. It’s as if my spine becomes like a gently uncoiling snake, and there is sometimes pulsing in my third eye. The crown of my head and my thoracic spine feel as if they are effortlessly going up. Having an awareness of that precise position seems to make the posture deeper, my whole body and breathing dynamically integrated.

Because of all of this, I wonder if the instruction about swaying was incomplete and, hence, misunderstood. Should the sway be a delicate, deliberate sway, not just from side to side, but from front to back too?

My desire is to open up the physicality of Zazen from its subservient and given position, to make it a fruitful area for the exchange of experience, and enquiry. If we don’t do that, the risk is that zen will, with some exotic kinks, be incorporated into a dominant yet unbalanced western view of meditation, which doesn’t just privilege consciousness over alive embodiment, it doesn’t even see it. Which would be a catastrophe. 

Once we do open ourselves to somatic enquiry, then all sorts of exploration becomes possible. For example, in kundalini yoga ( and tantra), much emphasis is placed on the coccygeal gland, located near the tip of the tailbone, which is closely associated with kundalini energy. To what extent is that engaged through the posture? Isn’t it legitimate to be at least curious about that?

It may be said that somatic enquiry has nothing to do with zen. But that’s disingenuous. We are given a very specific posture, which originated in yoga. If we close ourselves off to somatic inquiry, our view will become – and often has become – brittle and ignorant, and fetishises the posture rather than becoming intimate with it. And, I think, the joy and the heart of practice would be lost.

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The Position of our hands during Zazen

In our practice we’re given instructions about our hand position. 

When we’re doing kinhin we wrap our thumb inside our left fist; we put the root of the thumb against the diaphragm and wrap the other hand around so our elbows are in a horizontal line; our shoulders are relaxed.

In zazen, we create a mudra by resting our left hand onto our right hand. Our thumbs lightly touch in a horizontal line; our little fingers are between our navel and our pubic bone, touching our lower belly. 

These instructions are universal, but the explanation of why we hold our hands in those positions is often either lacking, or superficial.  Sometimes we can reason it out from some other discipline. For example, the hand position that we have in kinhin has very substantial similarities with a mudra in yoga which encourages whole torso breathing.

But the  – much more important – mudra during zazen really isn’t given much explanation at all. We’re told that our thumbs touching horizontally are a barometer of our state. If we’re sleepy our thumbs tend to come apart; if we’re agitated our thumbs tend to push together. We’re told that having our hands in that position, touching our lower belly, directs us to breathe to our lower belly. All this is true, but the significance of the mudra is hardly exhausted by these statements. 

Part of our difficulty in understanding the mudra is that we’re attempting to get within the mind of a culture which is very different from ours. For us, what’s easiest is either to define a mudra in abstract symbolic terms, or in terms of expediency. The symbolic explanation can often be very poetic and beautiful. We can talk about this little fragment of being – the left hand – resting within all being – the right hand. We can talk about the reconciliation of opposites. But whenever we stay within this realm of interpretation, there’s a sense in which the meaning of the mudra escapes us, because our understanding of the symbolic is severely deficient.

It seems to me that when we’re sitting in the correct position,sitting on our sit bones, our spine is relaxed and uncompressed. All that opens up the pelvic area of our body. We know intellectually, in terms of anatomy, that that area of our body is quite physically dense. But we’re not concerned with anatomy, we’re concerned with our actual experience. And in terms of that, what we’re feeling when we’re doing zazen is, it seems to me, that the whole area of our pelvic bowl is a field of energized spaciousness. It also feels as if it extends further down than our anatomical picture will allow. It feels as if there’s a substantial indeterminate area behind and below where our little fingers rest against our lower belly.

From another perspective, it’s as if my spine is stretching energetically down into the ground. I’m very aware of the front of the lower spine, seen in this way,  and it’s as if this dynamic space is in front of that. This space also seems in dynamic relationship with the jade pillow, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

Your experience might be different. Obviously one always labors to describe what’s experienced in a way that’s understandable to another person. Please consider it. Try to find something that makes sense within your own experience. Don’t try to superimpose these words onto that experience.

If you were – for the sake of argument – to accept these words as possible experience for you, you could understand that the mudra takes the shape of this area, of our pelvic bowl. Granting that, it seems to me that another kind of understanding of the mudra becomes possible.

A core part of Chinese Buddhism is Buddha Nature. This is the faith that all beings –  in themselves, now – are perfect. That perfection is hidden, sometimes hidden very well indeed, but it’s there.

That idea is given the most obvious form in the concept of tathagatagarbha. In Sanskrit the word garbha is ambiguous. It can mean either womb or embryo, but the word that the Chinese chose for garbha, ‘zong’, privileged womb. 

Zong means variously womb, storehouse and treasure house. There’s lots of references to treasure house in the literature. For example, in Dogen’s Fukanzazengi there’s a reference to “the treasure house opening naturally of itself”. And isn’t the womb, as it were, behind our hands?

It seems to me that the mudra is a representation of that. It’s also a statement about what Buddha Nature is. It’s not something tangible. It isn’t something which you have. It’s something which is empty: the space that is created by the mudra is empty— dynamic and empty— so we’re not reifying Buddha Nature. And the mudra, and zazen generally, is an enactment of this faith, not a striving for some future state.

So think about all this.

Reflect on your own experience, when you’re sitting.

See if explanations of this kind make any sense to you. If they don’t, just continue with your inquiry. Find your own language, and do your best to express what you experience, not from a position of knowledge, but from a position of openness and sharing.

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The Secret of Zazen

The secret of Zazen is the integrity and the dynamism of the spine;  this is why we place such emphasis on posture.

If we sit correctly, with our pelvis at the right angle and our weight dropping down throughout sit bones, then the whole spine becomes dynamic. Our head is no longer a weight on our torso. It’s light and spacious, and our whole torso is integrated and experienced as a dynamic oneness rather than disparate parts. The spine is like an energetic central column.

The hand position that we have, with our little fingers resting between our navel and our pubic bone (depending upon the proportions of our body) broadly directs us to the right place, but I don’t think sufficiently. Our tendency with that mudra is to think that we breathe into our lower belly, which entails when we’re breathing in, our belly is going out. 

That’s not quite right. 

If our spine is in the correct position, it’s true that we’re breathing into our lower belly. But it doesn’t feel as if we’re breathing in our lower belly. Or not just there.

If our spine is in the correct position it opens up the whole space of awareness, as it were, behind and below our hands. The whole of our lower back and our pelvic floor, together with our lower belly, opens up. Specifically an area of awareness emerges which is, as it were, right within this pelvic bowl and experientially towards our front. Although it isn’t anatomically accurate to say this, it’s as if our spine is curving right down into the ground between our sit bones. We’re aware of the front of our spine and we can breathe into that general area.

I think this awareness, which you will need to experiment with yourself, is the key to understanding Dogen’s enigmatic definition of Zazen as being the dharma gate of ease and joy.

To understand ‘ease’ isn’t hard: it’s the equanimity that meditation, all sorts of meditation, promotes. 

But ‘joy’ is something, I think, dependent upon our physicality—the integration of our body and the dynamism of our body, not pictured, not objectified, but experienced.

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341. Shikantaza

Our practice of Zazen within the Soto Zen tradition is also called shikantaza, which  is generally rendered in English as ‘just sitting’.

How we tend to interpret the phrase is that we should sit wholeheartedly, without expectation of gain or achievement. It’s a psychological explanation. The contrast is then with other forms of meditation which we say are goal directed.

Within Zen, the classic contrast is with the koan practice of Rinzai Zen.

Soto people will say this is goal directed, because it is concerned with attaining kensho (a visceral experience of sudden awakening). 

The actual Rinzai position is much more nuanced than this simple contrast. They tend to have a similar caricature of Soto.

This understanding of ‘just sitting’ is unfortunately an error, one which is very common when translating technical terms from one language to another.

The primary meaning of ‘just sitting’ is in terms of non-separation. In other words, when I’m sitting there aren’t two things: a self and a world;  there is simply this whole, this ‘one piece zen’ into which, as it were, both  the self and the world have disappeared into. 

Obviously, from that perspective, there is no expectation of gain or achievement, because there is nothing distinct for either to adhere to, but the phrase is experiential and descriptive, not psychological.

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329. Dropping off ‘Body’

Perhaps Dōgen’s most famous formulation of Zazen is that it’s the continuous dropping off of body and mind. It seems to be an expression unique to him, although he claimed it was derived from his teacher, Nyojō. 

There are two parts to it: dropping off body and dropping off mind. 

Dropping off mind is reasonably easy for us to understand, but what is the dropping off of the body? Much less attention is paid to that, to what it might mean. 

One meaning is the dropping off of a habitual splitness that we experience with our body, the persistent and continual picturing of our body from a vaguely external perspective. This is often dominant over what we’re somatically feeling and experiencing. We’re frequently more aware of what we look like than how we feel. 

Dropping off the body requires, as a prerequisite, the dropping off of this visualization of the body. When we do that, the sense of the body as an object amongst other objects falls away. And although we can still maintain the primary self/world dualism even when we are somatically embodied, the boundaries are much more porous than when we are trapped in the object world, and so, particularly in Zazen, there is much more chance that we experience moments when this separation drops off.

Just as the dropping off of the body has been given inadequate attention, very often the instructions given about our body and Zazen are likewise deficient and brief.

So, I would like to make some suggestions about practice. 

If you ask someone to point to their body, they will generally point to their torso. They won’t point to their head. Yet, if we think about it for a moment, it’s obvious that our body is all of us. So it’s apparent that there’s an unconscious split that’s going on, whereby our head is identified with our self and with our mind. Our bodies are the subservient entity. That’s implicit in our everyday language. So if I asked you to paint my portrait, I would be rather surprised if you painted only my torso or if you painted my foot. I’d expect you to primarily paint my head. 

When we are asked to give attention to our body, what we will often do is try to focus our breath in our lower belly or be aware of our moving rib cage, something like that.

Because of this unconscious dualism, we ignore what is easiest for us to do, which is to bring our attention to the various aspects in our head: to the slight tension our forehead or eyes perhaps; the tightness in our jaw; the sensation of air coming in the nostrils; the sensation of the tongue within the mouth, the textured lips, and so on. All of these sensations are very accessible to us, much more so than feelings in other parts of our body.  

So, giving attention to that is helpful in a number of respects. Apart from being more accessible, it  helps to break the identification which we unconsciously make of our head with our mind—that’s one thing. Also, in a slightly different way, again because of that unconscious identification, it – as it were – embodies the mind. Once the mind is embodied in that way, that embodiment can somatically  flow down from the head to the rest of the body. Although the language is tricky, and certainly my language here doesn’t quite capture it, if you practice this, you will hopefully get a sense of it.

Another suggestion for enlivening the body is that you pay attention to a sensation which is neutral.  

Very often when people practice they’re very aware – too aware –  of their cascade of thoughts and emotions. They only become aware of their body when they experience pain or discomfort. And when they do, there’s often an anxious contraction of awareness around that pain or discomfort. A torrent of anxious thoughts occur which reinforces attention on that pain or discomfort. So it’s a very good idea to just be aware of neutral sensations in the body and develop a kind of muscle of awareness.  Being able to hold within awareness a particular body sensation and hold it within a wider awareness of the rest of the body and the rest of your environment. If you can develop that habit then you can gradually re-frame body sensation not as something physical and specifically located but energetic, changeable, and connected to everything else—changeable, impermanent, interdependent.

A third suggestion is that you make a distinction between your postural muscles and your voluntary muscles. 

Your postural muscles are what hold you up. Your voluntary muscles are those muscles which enable you to do things, reaching for a cup, for instance. If your posture is right, then you won’t be using your voluntary muscles when you’re in Zazen. You’ll simply be using your postural muscles. But if your posture isn’t right then you will be using your voluntary muscles. If, for instance, your pelvis isn’t in the right position your head’s probably going to be in the wrong position too, and you’re going to keep voluntarily moving your head or your torso using your voluntary muscles. You’ll stick your chest out, or try to lengthen the back of your neck.

One of the reasons why the distinction is important is, I think, because of the way the proprioceptive system works. Using your voluntary muscles often comes with a kind of visual sense. Your mind has a kind of picture of what your body is doing, which takes you back to the sense of the body as an object.

The postural muscles, in my experience, don’t come with that visual complement. And so, relying on the postural muscles makes it much easier to drop off the body because the ‘body as object’ isn’t unintentionally  reintroduced.

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323. Resolving the mind/body split

One of the immediate benefits we receive when we start practice is that we cease to identify awareness with thinking. 

From the start, we’re within this space of awareness: our mind, our body, our environment; everything is within this general spacious awareness. We’re like fish in an ocean of awareness. However we don’t think of it as a benefit because we’re keenly aware of how polluted this ocean is with the intrusive, persistent and repetitive nature of our thoughts.

When we’re confronted with the persistence of our thoughts in practice, the temptation is to try one of two strategies.

 The first is to try to defeat those thoughts through mental effort; to change their nature, to extinguish them, or to push them to the periphery of awareness.

The second is to go as far as possible from the apparent location of those thoughts – the imaginary space of the mind within the imagined space of the brain – to something else – our breath, our body, our wider environment – whatever.

Counterintuitively however, what is actually very helpful for us to do is to give specific awareness to what we can feel in our head. It’s no accident that one of the preliminary vipassana practices is to focus on the breath coming in and out of our nostrils. That’s obviously one thing that we can be aware of. We can also be aware of patterns of tension that we’re holding in our forehead. We can be aware of our teeth; the expansive, alive  presence of our tongue and our mouth; the tension or the spaciousness at the back of our head; all these kinds of things. 

What you’ll notice, if you pay careful attention, is that it’s impossible for a thought and an awareness of something sensate to exist at exactly the same time. You have to pay careful attention, because quite often we flip between the two, but you’ll find that they cannot coexist, in the same way that phantoms cannot appear in sunlight. Which is not to say that the thought becomes a vacuity. Rather, it’s experienced as something energetic: embodied noise. 

Practically, it’s much easier to be aware of sensations in our head than in our torso, or legs, but more importantly through this approach we cease to identify the mind with the head, and no longer relegate “the body” to our body below the head. We  embody, as it were, the mind in the head and reconcile the two.

And that reconciliation can then extend throughout the whole.body. In that way we can  resolve the familiar mind-body dualism.  

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322. The Meaning of Gassho

Why do we bow?

The common explanation which is given for bowing, or ‘gassho’, is with bringing together opposites. We take things which are separate and possibly opposed – left and right  – and bring them together in a gesture of integration, with our hands positioned between our head and our heart. 

We can give a slightly more subtle explanation: when our hands are in this position, we’re integrating aspects of ourselves which are often quite scattered. We have an idea of ourselves as subject, somebody acting on the world, yet we also have an idea of ourselves, and certainly our body, as object; something in the world that is either acting upon other objects or being acted upon. 

There’s a smear of self between these various senses, but when we’re holding our hands in gassho, all those various senses are integrated in the simple gesture. Each hand is exerting itself and pushing against the other and each hand is experiencing the push from the other, so in microcosm gassho is a representation and enactment  of this integration and an integration of ourselves with all of existence.

There’s a third explanation which can be made.  In Shohaku Okumura’s excellent book about the Genjokoan, he points out that the characters which Dogen uses for ‘koan’ are different from those normally used. 

‘Koan’ comprises two ideograms – ‘ko’ and ‘an’. In the usual rendition, the ‘ko’ ideogram means something like ‘universal’ or ‘public’ and the ‘an’ ideogram means something like ‘desk’. So, the consequent meaning of ko-an is something like: an order promulgated at an official’s desk, as agent for the emperor, which has universal effect. And that became altered in due course to refer to the verbal teachings of zen masters. Just as the emperor’s proclamation is of universal effect because he’s the emperor, the zen master’s proclamation would have universal validity because it was true.

Dogen uses a different character for the second ideogram. Although the ideogram is different, it sounds the same as the more usual one. This happens in Chinese a lot, and we can get a sense of it when we see equivalents in English: ‘principle’ and ‘principal’, for example. Anyway, this character has as one of its components the signifier for ‘hand’, which changes the meaning of the composite ko-an. The meaning which Dogen places on ‘koan’, by the use of this different ideogram, fundamentally changes. So rather than meaning something like a universal statement of truth, the koan is rather a statement of the reality of this person exerting themselves fully, in this karmic position. There is a pivot, from Truth as Representation to Truth as Expression. 

The meaning which was brought out by Dogen’s successors, was something like, ‘to accept one’s lot’. That doesn’t mean to take a fatalistic position. It’s rather – “In this particular, unique, momentary dharma position my responsibility is to express this position fully”. I do that within a dynamic universe where everything is likewise expressing itself fully. 

In gassho, in openness and gratitude, we do that.  And so, the universe does not collapse into nothingness. 

We can see that the third interpretation of gassho is not, as it were, a bowing to something – a Buddha or a teacher or something else, but rather it is part of the expression of the full momentary dynamic activity of this person. Or as my first teacher Nancy Amphoux would say, “Your life is the koan”.