Tag: Sitting Instructions

For Dogen, zazen is “dropping off body and mind” as a continuous process. 

The phrase originates almost certainly with him, although he attributed it to his Master [Tiantong Rujing/Tendo Nyojo]. The phrase occurs in Dogen’s enlightenment story, where they’re all doing zazen late at night. The monk next to Dogen is drifting off to sleep, and Tiantong/Tendo, says something scolding to the monk like “Zazen is dropping off mind dust. Why are you sleeping?” And Dogen creatively mishears this in his inner translation to Japanese as ‘dropping off body and mind’, because the word ‘jin’ is a homonym in Japanese [but not Chinese], meaning both ‘body’ and ‘dust’.

The expression does not occur in Tiantong’s writings. And the phrase ‘dropping off mind dust’ appears quite often. We can’t know for sure. In any event, in Dogen’s universal recommendation of zazen, Fukanzazengi, what we notice is that there is a lot of instruction about how we should physically sit, and there’s very sparse instruction about how we should comport our mind in sitting. This strikes us as weird.

There are a number of paragraphs telling us about how to sit, how to place our legs, how to place our hands, not to lean, to keep our eyes open, all of that sort of thing. Yet so far as the mind is concerned, there is  just a very short passage, which reads, “now sit steadfastly and think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen”

And we are likely to question why there is a disproportionate amount of preliminary instruction about the physical aspect of sitting and very little about the mental aspect of sitting, because our tendency is to skip over these physical instructions as preliminary, since we assume the important part is Dogen’s instructions concerning the mind.

This mental bias is reinforced by how people talk about practice. Often you hear practitioners say that zazen is watching the mind. Or zazen is allowing our thoughts to come and go freely without becoming attached. Or zazen is when we notice that our mind is attaching to thoughts or emotions and bringing our awareness back to our posture. All those instructions are concerned with our awareness, with our mind. They’re not concerned with dropping off body.

Yet it’s clear that Dogen is giving instructions about dropping off body as well as dropping off mind. And he says in the text that this is a natural process. So you put your body in this particular posture, you put your mind in this particular frame, and the process will happen naturally. He says that several times. 

So why do we tend to disregard these detailed physical instructions and be a bit frustrated because the instructions about how we comport our mind are so brief?

For a number of reasons. Dogen is writing this text in a culture which is obviously different from our own; it’s a much more physical, embodied culture, the practice that people are likely to have is likely to involve longer, more intense periods of practice. And, often overlooked but critically important, people are just more used to sitting cross-legged.

In the text, the only options that are given are to sit in full lotus if we can, otherwise half lotus. That’s it. So, presumably, that’s what they did. Yet if you go into a Western dojo, very few people are sitting in those positions. They are probably sitting in a kneeling position or a variant of the Burmese, or quarter lotus or, less frequently, half lotus. But hardly ever full lotus. We also sit for shorter periods of time, we’re stiff, and we’re often physically uncomfortable.

Sitting full lotus isn’t accidental. It’s a dynamic, balanced posture which connects our perineum to the earth and activates the spine, making the body an alive, non-conceptual whole.

Additionally, we’re the inheritors of protestant religious culture, which doesn’t really involve the body at all. It’s an activity of our mind. And we carry that viewpoint into meditation.

If we put all these things together, it’s quite difficult for practitioners to just naturally experience the dropping off of body which Dogen is talking about, because we’re sitting for shorter periods of time, we’re almost certainly in an unbalanced posture, we’re probably a bit physically uncomfortable, we’re stiff, and we have a predisposition to thinking of meditation as being a practice of awareness, a practice of consciousness. And the problem with all of that is that the distinctive vision which Dogen has of dropping off body and mind is subtly abbreviated to mind only. 

Which renders zazen indistinguishable from other forms of meditation, apart from the ceremonial husk.

Calamitously.

When people talk about their experience when they start zazen, there’s a real commonality: a sense of being subject to a cascade of thoughts, feelings, internal dialogue and so on, most of which is repetitive and banal. And  when people persist with zazen –  most people don’t – they often report a lessening of this cascade and an increasing sense of spaciousness.

It’s as if, instead of experience just being a jam packed cascade of nonsense, there’s gaps that appear when the mind appears still. And people will almost always talk about that in spatial terms, the “ vast field of awareness” in the poetic image of Hongzhi.

The difficulty with thinking of spaciousness primarily in those terms is that it becomes easy for zazen practice to remain within a self/world dualism. So in another words, I can conceive of this awareness, this field of awareness as being a psychological attribute of me. And even although I may sometimes experience this field of awareness as including everything, even though I may experience this field of awareness as not discerning between inside and outside, of it all just being this one spacious awareness, the default position of the culture that we’re in is likely to collapse an experiential sense of spaciousness into some kind of personal attribute which is internal to me.

And that’s an issue with meditation generally. That, as it were, it changes the person. But the world stays much of the same. And a way around that and a way of escaping from the individualistic picture that we often have of meditation in the West is to pay attention to two other sorts of spaciousness: the spaciousness of the body and the spaciousness of the breath which are very interlinked.

And  we experience this spaciousness of the body when we’re sitting in the correct position, our spine is energised, our posture is balanced. And we gradually experience a kind of body spaciousness, which is different from the mind spaciousness that we might be more familiar with. And it’s not that our body ceases to exist but it ceases to exist as an object within consciousness. So it’s there and it’s not there. And very often we will experience our body not in conceptual, fleshy or organ terms, but in terms of charged space.

So we experience it here, this body, this body,this body as a kind of charged spaciousness. And that’s our phenomenological experience unpolluted by our ideas of what our body actually is, made up of body parts, just paying attention to what we’re actually experiencing. And if we do that it seems to me there’s a distinct number of advantages.

Firstly, we can’t think of that body sense of spaciousness as being a psychological attribute. And it’s locational. So we’re experiencing it in this body, in this position. As it were, gradually percolating out into the surrounding space. So spaciousness is actualised but in a different way. And in a way which we cannot so easily falsely attribute to being a psychological quality. So we’re in a concrete sense breaking down that sense of separation which is the foundation for the duality which causes us to suffer. 

And the third sort of spaciousness that we should pay attention to is the spaciousness of the breath.

When we’re sitting in the correct posture, our breathing is naturally in our pelvis, we’re naturally pushing down gently on the perineum on an in-breath and there’s an elevation upwards to the crown and again, this is a slightly different sense of spaciousness. So as it were, the breath outside and the breath inside, are not two separate things. And the breath inside the emptiness as it were,  the breath is right at the center of our being, it’s like our posture is garments being gently blown by a fluctuating wind. And again that inverts an idea of inside and outside, where outside is space, inside is flesh in favor of something where right inside at our centre is our spacious breath, which in our experience goes everywhere throughout our body is not restricted to what we physically imagine it to be, located in our lungs alone. And so that again breaks down this division between this person and the world.

These three kinds of spaciousness are very important for us to keep in mind if we wish our meditation to be something other than mere self-improvement which leaves the conceptual world intact.

How should we breathe during zazen? Master Dogen’s descriptions about that are surprisingly brief. He just says that your long breaths should be long, and your short breaths should be short. In other words, we should breathe naturally. But obviously we’re breathing naturally in the posture of zazen. So, an almost universal consensus has been reached that our breath should be centered on our lower abdomen. Those descriptions are brief, I think, because Dogen is very keen that we shouldn’t have a technique of breathing.

But notwithstanding that, quite often people do describe a technique of how to breathe in zazen. And the technique is very often that we focus on our exhalation. We have a complete exhalation and, towards the end of that exhalation, we’re pressing our lower abdomen out. Those instructions are wrong. And they’re importantly wrong for a specific reason. Dogen doesn’t wish us to have technical ideas of what to do once we put ourselves in the posture. Because if we do that, we’re still within the realm of the self. We’re not, in his language “throwing ourselves in the house of the Buddha” We’re still within our calculating mind.

So our zazen, as it were, is taking place within the sphere of the self, rather than the self being put to one side within the universe practicing zazen through you. So it might appear to be an obscure point, but it is actually very important. 

The brevity of Dogen’s instructions are carried forward to the Soto school’s website where they give instructions for zazen, which repeats almost word for word what Dogen says about breathing and posture in the Fukanzazengi.

Taking it as a given that we should not have a technique, and specifically not a technique of breathing, then how should we breathe? It’s fair to say that most practitioners do probably have an emphasis on the outbreath. So, for instance, when I first started practicing with the AZI, what we were taught was to have a complete exhalation. And then, just as it were, waiting for a natural unwilled and uncontrolled inhalation: quite natural, quite uneventful, and then we start exhaling again. 

 And whilst it’s not right to impose a technique on top of that, we can observe what our experience is. And it seems to me that what our experience is when we’re focusing on our exhalation is like a down elevator in our centre, so our breath is going lower and lower and down our abdomen, into our pelvic bowl. And if we’re paying careful attention there is actually a slight push at the perineum; not a conscious push, just a downward push  like a lift gradually going down, compressing what is beneath it. And then that downward movement on the exhale just stops,  then there is a natural pause and then an inhalation which happens as above

It is equally possible for us to pay attention to our inhalation. And if we do, what we notice is, again on the inhalation,  a downward pressure, but it’s a different downward pressure than on a long exhalation. So on the long, conscious exhalation, downward pressure is like something gradually coming down, like a delicately falling weight, compressing what’s beneath it. Whereas if the focus is on the inhalation, it’s like an energetic jump up, there’s a downward pressure on the in-breath, like a dancer pushing down before jumping up into the air, there’s an unfurling energetically of the spine. And so we experience this upward movement as well as the downward push, which people often try to artificially replicate by saying that we should push up with the top of the head, by which they mean the crown chakra, which is here, i.e. the fontanelle. Those instructions are terrible. Please ignore them.

But it’s true that on the inhalation in this way there is this energetic movement upwards. The attention that we pay to the exhalation, and potentially to the inhalation, are not exclusive of each other. We don’t have to choose particularly when we’re not trying to impose a technique there’s often a natural variance. And it seems to me that they also have different but related and complimentary benefits.

The focus on the slow deliberate exhalation, it seems to me, really helps with a kind of meditative absorption. So rather than some superficial and possibly quite rapid breathing in our upper chest, this slow, very embodied breathing really really helps our state of focus in zazen and it really helps with embodiment as well. So it acts as a kind of counter to the activities of our thinking mind. The focus on inhalation has, I think, a slightly different focus than the deliberate exhalation, which is a kind of absorption. The conscious focus on the inbreath has a much more energetic  [rather than absorbitive] focus and that energetic focus, in its own way, is also very helpful. It’s not egoic. So it’s not taking place within the sense of self, but it’s also, I think, quite integrating with our environment [which enhances the non-ego] when we’re sitting, breaking down the self/world dualism. So it’s not as it were, our energy that’s unfurling on the in-breath. It’s a field quality. It’s something universal.

Master Dogen refers to zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. Yet body and mind don’t disappear. But they are different, because they’re no longer labouring under the ownership of the self, which is really ownership by a ghost which haunts us. And because that liberation takes place, the body can exist in its power, beauty and expression, because it’s no longer an object within consciousness. 

Central to zazen is the enlivening of the spine. Sitting properly, our pelvis in the right position, our spine becomes energised, and we can express that in a number of different ways. So some people have expressed that enlivenment as being like the body is, as it were, suspended in space from above.

That’s personally, not something which I find resonant. My own inclination is to express it as the body in zazen being like a tremulous young tree. So the roots are going down into the ground and there’s this alive upward movement in response. And sometimes people can feel a sense of incipient energy in it, like a cork in a champagne bottle would feel.

These are all figures of speech to try and describe our actual experience. Choosing a variety of figures of speech makes sense because we are then likely to see these as just being provisional attempts to describe experience. Which leaves us free to find our examples which are equally provisional. So we don’t have to be, as it were, hanging about until we feel that our bodies are hanging in space, we’re free to find our own mode of expression.

So in my case, I would say that I experience my base, my pelvic floor as being like the roots of a tree going into the earth. I experience this area around my heart as uncompressing, lengthening, so my heart is no longer squashed, so it can, as it were, come out into the world. And the back of my head experiences widening. And I also experience a line of force like a needle going up in an imaginary space, not a real [physical] space, an imaginary [yet real] space between the crown chakra and the occipital joint. So not trying to push up the top of the head, which just creates tension, but just this effortless, as it were, needle of energy directing upwards.

This is all my language, not yours. And it’s fair to say as well that the aliveness of the spine is the same as the aliveness of the world. If we experience the spine as enlivened, our body is enlivened, and then we likewise experience the world in the same way. And again, we can think of this in figurative terms, so we could think of, as it were this tree being in the forest of beings, you could think of the alive spine as being like a lighthouse amid the glorious storm of creation. You can think of it in a whole number of ways. We just need to let our heart speak.

The contemporary American Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton has written many wonderful books. One of my favorites is ‘Cultivating the Empty Field’ which is his translation of Master Hongzhi. It’s divided up into various sections. One of the sections is ‘Practice Instructions’ where there’s passages like this:

“you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything, attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly, light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off your own skin and the sense dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied”

When we hear ‘practice instructions’ like that we think that’s what I need to do so in my zazen I have to aspire to practice in the way that Master Hongzhi is describing,because they’re instructions.

I think that’s an unfortunate misunderstanding. I don’t think they are instructions. I think they’re descriptions of Master Hongzhi’s own experience. 

If we take the instruction as a description, but a description of what zazen should be [and is with Hongzhi] there isn’t really a difference. But that’s what Hongzhi is getting at. What he’s talking about when he’s describing his practice of zazen, isn’t that you must replicate that practice, but rather the world of your zazen contains unseen vastness which is yours and which you require to find your own way of describing. 

And that’s where sangha comes in. Because we can share our experiences with fellow practitioners in a spirit of compassion and love.

Because our orientation is very often psychological, what’s most obvious to us in zazen is whether our mind is peaceful or agitated. We tend to neglect the evolution that takes place, over time, within our true body. For example, it took me a tremendously long time, to understand the practice instruction of gently pushing out the lower belly when we were breathing in. It was a mistranslation. What it was getting at was when we are sitting in the correct posture, with our weight dropping down through our sit bones, our pelvis aligned correctly, our in breath without intention gently pushes our lower belly out,  pushes our pelvic floor  – almost imperceptibly – down, and pushes the back of our pelvis back, and all that is a dynamic and connecting movement. On the in breath you are pushing the earth, connecting to the earth, and on the out breath we just relax. And the sense of this energised pelvic bowl pushing the earth makes possible a way of feeling, which is as if our connection isn’t just a  physical connection with whatever we are sitting on, it is the connection to the ground of all being. Our root is going down into this shared ground of existence which all other beings participate in.

Likewise, when I started sitting and I heard instructions for pushing up with the top of the head, those instructions misled me for a long time. But what I came to understand is that if our pelvis is aligned in the right position, there’s a natural up movement in our spine. And that pushes out through the crown of the head, the crown chakra and that’s as if we’re pushing the sky. But it’s not a conscious push, it’s a natural movement, An energetic movement of the spine that just –as it were– shoots our being upwards through our crown chakra.

Gradually I came to understand other components. What the Chinese referred to as the ‘jade pillow’, the area around the occipital joint also opens and  participates in this up movement.

Our embodied awareness isn’t static: it gradually articulates itself. I became aware after a while that this push up wasn’t coming from my head, it was actually coming from down deep in my torso. That was where the energetic upward impulse came from.

Awareness isn’t a static. Once we realise something, it’s as if there’s the vast world of our zazen which ‘s possible for us to eventually describe as it is gradually revealed by the light of our awareness.

In a similar evolving way although I know intellectually that sitting in a balanced posture with the spine energised  uncompresses the torso, it’s only very recently that I’ve come to experience this area around my heart expanding, uncompressing which has a wonderful energetic quality to it, but also an emotional, connecting quality to it. It’s as if the spine, when activated, is like a tree. The roots are going into the ground, the top branches are going up into the sky of spacious, empty awareness. And the heart, the branches, as it were, come out  into the world. So, the compassion that we talk about so much in Buddhism is actualised in the body. You feel it, it’s as if there’s a living connection with all beings.

And for me, I want to share this because there is a continual evolution of our posture and our potential awareness of it, which is very often out of sight, but which is extremely valuable for us to give attention to.

I think there’s another point to be made. Our miracle power as human beings is description and empathy. We can feel what someone else is experiencing. But that miracle power isn’t accessed by a description of our emotions, nor by an intellectual description of what’s going on for us. It’s accessed through metaphorical and poetic language. That’s the miracle power.

The problem is that Hongzhi and all the other teachers who are earnestly trying to describe their practice with the language which they have available, are going to use metaphors which are very often particular to the culture, and are quite hard for us to understand. It’s quite hard for us to see that  metaphors aren’t an idiosyncratic capsule of compressed meaning but are  –as it were – a capsule of feeling, a seed of feeling which opens up something much bigger. And when we’re describing our posture it seems to me we’re obliged to talk in metaphorical terms, not least because the somatic energetic experiencing, the connective and feeling experiencing we’re having during zazen does not fit within analytical language, does not fit within an ordinarily descriptive language. Metaphor and poetry is necessary.

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If we want to attend to overcoming duality, it seems at first blush that there’s two ways to do it.

 The first is that we try to change our ideas. The second is that we meditate in an intense way and then have a dramatic awakening experience. 

The Soto position of practice realisation is neither of those, but it has a clear idea at its core: when we’re meditating, we’re engaging our somatic sense. We’re very particular about the posture because we want to have an activated spine, we want to be able to feel the breath at the centre of our body and generally, we want to have an active, energetic embodiment free of ownership by the mind.

And we want to activate the somatic sense because duality is not the result of ideas about us being separate. It’s because of the dominance of our visual sense. We’re carrying around with ourselves an idea of what we look like from the outside, an odd two-dimensional visual re-presentation of our body, which is very connected with the mind. By activating the somatic sense, we displace the visual sense, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for longer. That is practice realisation. Because paradoxically, when we feel ourselves more as a somatic three-dimensional being, we’re not disconnected from the rest of creation.

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The key to sitting Zazen is a dynamic spine. In turn, the key to that is the correct positioning of the pelvis so our physical weight is dropping down through our sit bones and our energetic weight, as it were, is dropping down through our base chakra.

If we’re sitting in the correct position, certain consequences follow. For example, when we breathe in, there’s a subtle and natural push down on the base chakra. It’s as if the base chakra pushes the earth and the breath floods in through there upwards, up through the body to the top of the head, and slightly beyond.  It’s like a wave coming in, followed by a naturally slower out breath, like a receding wave, falling naturally downwards through the body.

On the outbreath, alongside the downward movement, there’s a subtle and natural downward pressure. And we might think, “well, a little downward pressure is a good thing so more downward pressure must be a better thing”. And so we might consciously push down with our diaphragm, or consciously compress or otherwise act on our stomach muscles.

Similarly if our spine is dynamic, our head is naturally going up, the back of our neck is stretched and our chin is slightly tucked in, naturally. Yet we might think it a good idea to stretch the back of the neck more.  So we tense our muscles and tuck our chin in more.

This is the behaviour of an idiot.

What we require to do once we put our body in the correct posture is just to trust entirely in Zazen. If we do, all the nonsense of our self arises within Zazen. If we attempt these ‘helpful’ interventions, Zazen is arising within the ego, like everything else.

And it’s no good.

Master Dogen gives virtually no instructions about the breath, apart from telling us that we should breathe through our nose not our mouth and that we should let our long breaths be long and our short breaths be short. In other words we shouldn’t try to control our breath.

This brevity gives us freedom to consider, from our actual experience of practice, how the breath should be. 

It seems to me that breath and posture are two halves of a whole. If we’re sitting properly, if our pelvis is in the right position, our weight physically is dropping down through our sit bones and energetically is dropping down through our perineum, specifically that part of the perineum which corresponds to the base chakra in the Indian perspective.

If our pelvis is in that position, then there’s a stretch that’s going on, not just at the back of our neck, but a stretch all the way between our base and the top of our head. So it’s as if the spine  energetically is like a kind of very alive tree whose roots go into the earth, whose dynamic expression flows right up our body, right up to the top of our head and beyond.

Now we know anatomically that isn’t accurate, but we’re not interested in the pictured body—the body of knowledge. What we’re interested in is the body of experience. 

The same thing applies to the breath in this analogy. 

The breath is like the leaves of that tree which spread throughout the body.

So again, although we have a knowledge of where our lungs are and the knowledge that our breath comes in through our nose or our mouth, that isn’t what we’re primarily interested in.

We’re interested in the body of practice. 

In that body of practice, if our pelvis is in the correct position, if our weight is dropping down in the way in which I’ve described on an in-breath, there’s a slight push down at the base chakra.

It’s not that our air is coming in through our nostrils and flowing down. Within the body of experience, it’s as if the breath is flooding upwards right up to the top of our head from the base chakra. That’s a relatively speedy movement, like a wave coming in.

As far as the outbreath is concerned, it’s like a wave going out, slightly slower.  The wave going out corresponds with a kind of dropping down through the body.

That’s where I think erroneous instructions arise. Because there’s this natural dropping down you think, well I can give this a helping hand. I can consciously press down in my diaphragm area. I can consciously press out with the muscles in my lower belly. I can just give it a hand—but that isn’t so.

The breath has to stay natural. 

We do not fully express our practice by exaggerating aspects of natural movement with our will. That simply makes it a technical movement.

We do it by gradually becoming aware of a greater subtlety and integration in our whole body.  If we think that breathing in is consciously breathing in through our nose, that’s not actually a natural breath at all. It’s a willed breath, because it’s coming from this knowledge of the breathing structure. Within that body of knowledge, there’s breath coming in through the nose, travelling down into my lungs. 

Whilst it appears to be a natural breath, it’s an idea. If you pay careful attention you’ll notice that if you try to breathe that way particularly in the zazen posture, you’re actually restricting your breath. 

Breathing to be natural must be natural not within some thought of what the breath should naturally be like

but natural within the posture.