Tag: Zazen

Categories
Kusen

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.

Categories
Kusen

340. Non-duality

A central thread of Mahayana Buddhism is non-duality. But when we hear ‘non-duality’ we are liable to misunderstand it. 

To us, duality is generally thought of in terms of the mind-body split, so we see non-duality as fixing that. 

However, the non-duality which Mahayana talks about is not primarily this. Rather, the duality to be overcome is the split between self and world, interior and exterior.

Anyone can see from that an immediate clarifying point: healing the mind-body split leaves the primary dualism of self and world intact. 

However, healing the mind-body split is a prerequisite for healing the greater split.

That’s why it’s extremely important that we do not regard Zazen as being concerned primarily with consciousness. It isn’t a mental phenomena. It isn’t something that we do with our mind. It isn’t psychology or personal development. 

It is something that we do with our whole being. We give everything we’ve got.

In most schools of Buddhism, meditation training is progressive. The Indians express this as first practicing Samatha,  unscattering and calming the mind, and then Vipassana, insight. You would be expected to learn and master various practices to calm the mind, bring focus and do away with dispersion and distraction. Once you had mastered that you would go on to various insight practices.

Zazen isn’t like that. We have just the one practice. But this being so makes us particularly susceptible to getting stuck in a partial or unbalanced position. 

It is possible to practice zazen in a very concrete way – just sitting there relaxed, with thoughts and feelings just coming and going; tranquil and settled within the familiar constructed world. But that isn’t Zazen, it’s Western Mindfulness, because sitting in that way retains the primary dualism of self and world.

Another difficulty is that we can misunderstand what kind of practitioner our teacher’s instructions are directed towards. If we are quite settled and are given further Samatha type instructions to settle ourselves such as the characteristic instruction of bringing our attention back to our breath or our posture, those instructions are otiose. 

On the other hand if we are quite distracted, instructions to do with insight are likely to be completely opaque to us, or be perceived simply as poetic ornamentation.

Traditionally taught meditation is like somebody going into the house of meditation and requiring to first settle in the room of calming the mind. Then the door is unlocked and the practitioner can go into the next room. Zazen isn’t – for better and worse – like that. We can freely roam from the outset, but in consequence, our practice may remain superficial and our expression cliched.

In the one sitting we are, as it were, moving between all the rooms of this vast world. We need to understand that.

If we see that the primary split is between self and world, we can avoid thinking of calming as a personal, remedial quality. We can avoid thinking of insight in terms of me acquiring insight or me becoming wise, insightful, compassionate or enlightened.

So we can then see that insight is primarily an insight into emptiness, that is, an insight into non-separation, non-duality. It isn’t a personal insight, because that would just be reiterating duality in a different key.

Taking all this into account, we can start to comprehend the bizarre and fantastical language and imagery in the Mahayana sutras. Specifically, we can start to understand the idea that the world itself is a liberative force, that the world itself and the beings of that world are not standing in opposition to us, but are bodhisattvas. All the things of the world, all the people of the world, in this perspective, are our teachers, are bodhisattvas.

If we think the purpose of sitting is for me to accumulate merit and then to go out and save all beings, I’m not a spiritual warrior, I’m a buffoon. To change our perspective into seeing the liberative capacity of everything, and to receive that in gratitude enables us, in response, to meet all beings from that position of gratitude and love.

 Which changes everything.

Categories
Kusen

339. The Five Eyes of Practice

In Zazen we practice with our eyes open, but we do not see in the usual way.

The Diamond Sutra says there are five eyes, five ways of seeing.

The first is the physical eye. You can understand that is the eye of our karma. We see a world which has been told to us by our parents, by our society, and by earlier versions of ourselves.

The second eye is the heavenly eye. This is seeing the world conceptually. When I look up at the sky for example, I see it within the context of the world and the universe that’s been taught to me. I can see the world conceptually in many ways: through physics, through economics, through history; any number of ways. 

The third eye is the prajna eye. This the ‘wisdom’ eye that sees the emptiness and the non-separation of all things.

The fourth is the dharma eye which, while seeing the emptiness of all things, uses compassion and skillful means to alleviate suffering—the eye of the Bodhisattva. 

The fifth eye is the Buddha eye. 

When we read about these five eyes, we think that they belong to five different kinds of beings. Or to the one being, in progressive stages of development.

I think we can equally look upon these ‘eyes’ as facets of practice. The Buddha eye is this non-dual awareness, this non-separation which contains the other four. 

Not just those other four eyes of course, but the countless eyes of Avalokiteshvara.  

Categories
Kusen

337. The Whirlpool

Once, the Group had a retreat on the Scottish island of Luing. To get to the island you need to cross a passage of water affected by the nearby Corryvreckan whirlpool; the third most powerful whirlpool in the world. The boat can’t go directly across. It needs to go sideways. The effect of the whirlpool is to pull the boat back so it can cross over to the other side.

Sometimes, when we’re sitting alongside familiar distraction, random thoughts and such like, we have a persistent and unpleasant emotional state. Very often it’s anxiety. But it could be boredom, or rage, or fear, or bitterness.

At those times, it’s as if we’re back near the whirlpool. This time we’re alone in our little boat. By making great effort we can stay an apparent safe distance from the whirlpool, but we can never entirely escape it. We’re expending great effort to keep us in the same position. These disagreeable emotions are like that. We feel we require to keep these emotions at a distance, yet what we need to understand is that it’s that which keeps us stuck.

 What can we do?

From the perspective of this little boat of the self, we can’t do anything. 

But that’s not where our Zazen is.

From the perspective of the body of water, we can experience this whirlpool, not as something to keep our distance from, but as surging and constellating energy. From the position of the fish, we can see the whirlpool in a vision of wonder and astonishment. From the perspective of great dragons, we can see the whirlpool as a plaything.

This is the treasure house.

Categories
Kusen

335. Being Held

In Mahayana Buddhism we often talk of the Dharmakaya, the universal body of the Buddha.

The faith that all beings are the body of the Buddha.

At first blush, we’re inclined to explain this away as a convenient metaphor to explain unity and differentiation.

It seems a faith that’s quaintly out of time.

If we touch another person, at first we just simply experience their surface. 

If we continue that touch, a still touch in a spirit of openness, curiosity and love, we gradually get to feel the depth of that person. And feeling the depth of that person, we also feel the depth of ourself.

In this sense when we are practising, we are held by the Body of the Buddha.

We are held, in this moment of practice, whether we are like a fractious baby, or a dreaming child, or a person caught in the fever of the self. We fall backwards into the depth of the self, and fall forwards into the depth of the world. Or rather, the self is like a narrow ledge, and whether forward or backward, we fall into the same space.

Being still is not the absence of movement, it is actualising this depth, this height

this held, this holding.

Categories
Kusen

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’.

Categories
Kusen

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.

Categories
Kusen

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.

Categories
Kusen

308. The Posture of Zazen

Most contemporary discourse on meditation talks about it in terms of consciousness: what’s going on in our mind; our thoughts; the intrusiveness and nature of those thoughts; all that sort of stuff. And behind that – but not very far behind – is the idea that meditation has a purpose, which is self development. That idea is wrong.

When asked why Buddhism, throughout its history, has insisted on meditation in the cross-legged position they usually say something like, “Well that was just the position that was comfortable for people in classical India.” Except, it would have been equally comfortable for people then to have meditated standing up, or leaning against a tree, or lying down, or sitting in their easy chair, or whatever.

We’ve no reason to think that the cross-legged position was universally comfortable for people. Because if it was, we wouldn’t have meditation instructions by Dogen, for example, which clearly make allowances for people who are incapable of sitting in the full lotus position.

It’s very illuminating to look at the full lotus position as a yoga posture. And if you’ve seen anyone do that, it’s plainly a dynamic posture. The practitioner requires to sit with a tilt on the pelvis, pushing the buttocks out. They’re clearly sitting on their sit bones and they have to get their knees on the ground. And once they manage to do all that, it’s a very dynamic posture: their base chakra (the perineum) is open and in contact with the ground. And there’s a stretch of the whole body between the base chakra and the crown chakra (the fontanelle, at the crown of the head). It feels as if there’s a push coming from the earth, uncompressing the spine, pushing the head upwards.

The only difference between the yoga posture and the customary meditation position is that meditators place a cushion under the pelvis, which makes the posture easier.

It’s also worth noting that in Tantric practices (like the microcosmic orbit in Chinese Tantra) again the cross-legged position is used. The purpose is different: to circulate energy up the back energy channel, then down the front channel. Although it may be of some significance that Bodhidharma, as well as being the founder of Chinese Zen is also (probably apocryphally) the founder of Chinese Tantra, as well as Kung Fu.

The marginalisation of the body in contemporary discourse about meditation is, I think, mistaken. And if that’s so, we’re obliged to look at meditation, not primarily through the lens of consciousness, but as a dynamic interplay between the alive whole body, the dynamic breath and wide and vivid awareness. And within all that, somewhere, is the mind – but it’s no longer of central importance.

And accordingly, whether the mind is busy or quiet, agitated or peaceful, is no longer the most important thing going on in our practice. Put the body in the correct position and it is – we are – naturally activated. The push which rises up, uncompressing our spine, is not something which we’re determining with our will. It’s not something which we’re creating with our voluntary muscles. It’s just something which, as it were, we’re a witness to. 

But not a bystander. 

Categories
Kusen

307. Dropping off body and mind

Dogen described zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. We can assume that both are dropped off at the same time. I’ve often described this as being a letting go of our habitual sense of self, opening into wide spacious awareness. But we can also consider dropping off body and mind in a sequential way. 

Our sense of self is often something like: “I am this mental consciousness located in the brain, which is distinct from the body.” Few people now would explicitly say this, but it doesn’t matter, as it describes how most of us act. Anyway, the idea is obviously dualistic and disembodied.

So we can first drop off the mind by dropping the mind into the body. And we’re only able to do that to the extent that the body is dynamic, alive and joyful. Which is why we place such an emphasis on the posture, because if our posture is right then our body is naturally expressing itself.

So there’s naturally an upward movement of our spine – we don’t require to will it. There’s a natural dropping down of our weight. We’re in a dynamic relationship with heaven and earth.

If we can re-embody our mind, we have our sense of ourselves as this dynamic body (similar to what a baby might experience). And once we’ve done that, then we can drop off the body, because the body experienced in this non conceptual way isn’t separate from everything else. 

We let go of a sharp distinction between this body and the greater body of all being. And that’s easy to do because it’s obvious in our actual experience: there isn’t a clear boundary.