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287. Letting Your Body Leap

When people unfamiliar with our practice talk about zazen, they’ll often refer to it as objectless meditation. And what they mean by that is that there isn’t a mandala, a mantra or an object that we fix our attention on when we’re doing zazen.

But they do tend to find their way to discovering an object of meditation circuitously. They’ll describe it as being something like awareness itself. So they’ll say that in zazen we are aware of our awareness; or they may say that we are aware of emptiness; or of dependent origination. So there’s lots of formulations, not forgetting of course the familiar one of bringing the attention back to the body and the breath, and hence to  assume that that’s the object of meditation.

All these perspectives arise from the same mistake, which is assuming that meditation is something that we do with our minds. And because the mind is inherently dualistic, then that way of looking at things will always be divided into a subject and an object. But that’s not our practice.

Dogen, in the Fukanzazengi recognized something like this when he wrote,

“You could be proud of your understanding and have abundant realization or acquire outstanding wisdom and attain the Way by clarifying the mind. Still, if you are wandering about in your head you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap.”

Dogen, Fukanzazengi

That’s the Tanahashi translation, and both in that translation and the other ones that we presently have in English it’s not so clear what Dogen’s doing in his own language. In it, he’s making a kind of joke. The suggestion is that if we understand zazen intellectually, our head gets stuck. So we can jam our head in the entranceway of zazen, but we can’t get our body in.

Whereas if we can get our body in, our mind will follow. But of course we can’t get our body in intentionally. We have to fall backwards into the space, whole.

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282. The Body Is The Bodhi Tree

The first line of the poem in the Platform Sutra attributed to Shen-xui is, “the body is the bodhi tree.” In other words, the body in zazen is like the bodhi tree. 

What are we to make of that? 

The bodhi tree is the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.

It has several distinctive qualities. It’s very old:  it lasts a very long time, has a very long life. The second, and more fundamental quality is that it’s hollow. It doesn’t have a core.

Like all trees, it is completely rooted in the great earth. It doesn’t require to move. And it’s completely expressive in the great sky. 

The emptiness inside of it isn’t the absence of anything, it’s the presence of everything. 

How does that compare with the emptiness–the space–inside us when we are practising?

The arising of our thoughts, insofar as it’s not an attempt to  interpret our present experience, is surely interdependence in time. The experience now of thoughts and feelings is the tremble and echo of the activity of everything. 

The dynamic space which we experience in our body, in our breath, as we are balanced, breathing in and breathing out cannot be clearly separated from the space around us and in turn, that cannot be clearly separated from the greater space, extending in all directions, everywhere, like floodwater, surging in, surging out.

Outside my window is a great tree. When the wind blows it moves its limbs freely, like a dancer.

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274. Sitting Joyfully

Sitting Joyfully

In his Fukanzazengi, his Universal Recommendation for the Practice of Zazen, Master Dogen has this to say about Zazen: it is not learning meditation, it’s simply the Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy. 

The Dharma Gate of Ease and Joy

Dogen is a famously difficult writer and this seems a surprisingly straightforward passage. But although it’s straightforward, it’s hard for us to get. At a pinch, I think, we can understand how Zazen connects with Ease, in the sense that we’re putting aside our ideas, our conditioning. 

If we think of Zazen in terms of the Virtues, we’re probably thinking of Equanimity. Compassion too, at a push. But Joy? That seems much more problematic. 

It’s difficult. It’s physically challenging. It’s psychologically very challenging. Surely the point of it is to enduringly go towards some state that we might term Enlightenment. Which might, of course, entail Joy. And I think that would be most people’s understanding of what Zazen is, and indeed what meditation is.

But Dogen doesn’t say that “at some point in the future, Zazen will be joyful”. He says that Joy is one of its principle characteristics, together with Ease. And I think to have any chance of understanding what he’s talking about, we have to go back to basics, and the basics for us mean the basics of the Posture.

It’s one of the peculiarities of Buddhism that the central feature of it is this very physical practice of meditation. But yet we’re not given huge amounts of instruction about how we’re supposed to sit. 

So for example, when I was first introduced to Zazen I was told only two things.

The first is that if you’re sitting in some variant of the cross-legged position, then your knees need to be on the ground. And that’s eminently practical, because if your knees are off the ground, propped up by a cushion, your back’s going to bow out and you’re going to be uncomfortable. And the second instruction, which is more ubiquitous I think, was that we should push up with the top of the head and tuck the chin in. 

And that was it. 

The instruction about the knees obviously makes sense. The instruction about pushing up with the top of the head is a terrible instruction, and it’s terrible because it’s introducing tension – more tension–into the head and neck. And it’s directing our attention to the wrong place. It’s like trying to improve the decor of the attic whilst the basement is collapsing from dry rot. 

So the foundation of our practice requires us to start lower down. What I say to my students, repetitively – but never enough – is that the absolute foundation of sitting is the correct position of your pelvis. That’s absolutely essential. And specifically you require to tilt your pelvis forward in such a way that your bum is sticking out a bit, so there’s a curve in your lower spine. And your weight is going down directly through your sit bones, and specifically the middle and front sections of your set bones.

And if you have that as your foundation, then everything above that stands a chance of being right. If your pelvis is in the right position, you’re not having to make an effort to keep your trunk straight. Your trunk is naturally straight. And you could sit upright for an indefinite period of time.

And likewise, because your pelvis is in the right position, your head can be in the right position as well. It can be nice and balanced, and not heavy on the trunk. And that produces tremendous benefits. Conversely, if we’re following some idiotic instruction like pushing up our head, whilst our pelvis is out of position, then we’re going to be uncomfortable and our attention is going to be disproportionately fixed on our head. 

Which means even more disproportionately on our thoughts, and we’ll state that the purpose of Zazen is to empty the mind. Then fruitlessly try to get rid of those ridiculous repetitive thoughts, and replace them with something wise, or empty. Or both.

However, if the body is in the right position, then our attention isn’t so much on our head and trying to do something with the head and neck. Our attention is much more on our torso. If we’re sitting in the right position, the musculature of our body is right, so those nice postural muscles are doing their proper job. And our breathing is naturally in our lower belly and our pelvis, primarily. It’s obviously not fixed there – because that creates more tension–but it’s primarily located there, naturally.

And here’s the point: if our body is balanced we’re released from the tyranny of the mind. If our body is balanced then our awareness can be embodied. And if awareness is embodied, then we have a lot more attention that we can give to our pelvis, to our belly, to our torso, to our throat. And the effect of all of that is that the stretching that we’re trying to do through our will if we’re trying to consciously push up with the top of our head seems to effortlessly occur, lower down. 

There is a sense of expansion and elongation in the torso but it’s not willed. It’s not something that we’re intentionally doing with our muscles. It’s something that happens naturally. 

Then we’re experiencing the body, the whole body, when we’re sitting. Not as some vehicle of the mind, but as something pleasurable and dynamically alive.

Hence, Joy.

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267. The Senses in Zazen

Our five familiar senses stand, as it were, at the border between our body and the world, gathering information about the world. Except, other than when we are in pain, our body, apart from its surface details, is largely unknown. Not in the abstract, obviously. We have a lot of information about our body. We have a body of knowledge. But we don’t, generally, have a body of feeling.

When we do zazen, the situation changes. Our familiar senses are displaced by ones less culturally familiar. The sense of the breath moving dynamically inside us in a dance with our flesh. The sense of the aliveness of the spine uncompressing itself, like a tree expressing how it is to be upward. And the sense of balance between this body and the great earth.

These senses have nothing to do with information, and everything to do with expression and interconnection: it’s a paradox. We constantly go on about non duality, yet zazen awakens the body from the stupor of the self. And this enlivened body of expression is our bridge, both symbolic and real, to the greater body of all beings.

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249. The body of the buddha

One of the most significant innovations of the Mahayana is the Dharmakaya; the idea that the whole universe is the body of the Buddha. It is a radical re-imagining and enlivening of our normal view, changing our picture of the universe from a collection of objective, separate and largely inanimate things, from which we are somehow separate, to one where everything is “alive” and expressive, within a greater, alive whole.

I believe it derives from our actual experience in zazen. When we sit, we are not within the primary alienation, which thinks of the body as an object, distinct from, yet controlled by, the self. Rather, we experience ourselves as activity and expression – aliveness – and there is no clear boundary between this body, and the great body of all being.

It is not that this small body becomes the great body, nor that this small deluded person becomes a great person, because this would simply be ego inflation on a grand scale. But rather, we are taken back into the heart of all being.

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227. Vast unitary awareness

When we sit, our aim is to manifest vast unitary awareness – unitary like space.

This awareness is not the property of the self yet the self appears within it, along with all beings and all phenomena.

If this awareness becomes fractured or partial, we return the attention to this body and this breath.

Not because this body and this breath is the subject or the object of zazen, but because this body and this breath is simply the most accessible to us, like a mountain in its upliftedness, feeling it is a part of the great Earth.

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215. The breath liberated

In our practice, the breath is absolutely essential.

We are scrupulous about posture because when we sit upright and balanced, the breath is liberated.

The breath is central not because it relaxes and settles us; although it does, obviously.

It is essential because it clarifies our nature.

If we pay attention to the actual experience of breathing – not a conceptual one – we realise there is nowhere that our breath doesn’t reach.

It’s as if our breath is this dynamic vast moving space at our centre.

And the body is draped around it.

We are not this body in space. We are space.

There is no clear divide between the space inside and the space outside.

So to actualise this space inside us is to actualise all space; not as something abstract but as

the space between us.

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200. The breath in zazen

A familiar instruction many of us have received is: keep returning the attention to the body and the breath.

This instruction is helpful providing you don’t imagine it’s your body, your attention, your breath, because to imagine this is simply to reintroduce the self, and the familiar dualities.

Returning the attention to the breath means that we are aware of this dynamic moving space within us. Which is the same space as that around us and beyond us. Hence, Emptiness is actualised.

Returning the attention to this body is to clearly see that this body is part of the great body, the body of everything. Hence, Being is actualised.

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193. Softened eyes

When we sit, we soften our eyes. Everything becomes very near, intimate. In softening the eyes, we become bodily aware, first the head, then the rest of the body. It is as if the whole body becomes an eye.

But because we don’t force the eyes to stay relaxed, the eyes, and the other sense organs, can suddenly, as it were, come into focus. So, we see the wall, hear the birdsong, smell the incense.

Sitting with our softened eyes, our mind is softened too. It is as if we are very aware of this intimacy, this underlying being-ness, prior to the emergence of objects, emotions, perceptions, formations. We might call this ‘not thinking’.

And, like the eye suddenly focusing, we suddenly get fragments of perceptions, mental formations, feelings. We might call this ‘thinking’.

We should not think one state is good and the other is not. It is of paramount importance that we accept everything.

Accept everything, uncontained by a self.