Tag: Zazen

The contemporary Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton described Zazen as “enactment ritual”.

It’s a very  evocative phrase with many strands.

One is that when we sit Zazen with other people, even if there’s not many of us, a few of us, or five, or ten, even though we’re just sitting in a small, nondescript room, 

through our sincere practice together, we are enacting a different world and a world re-envisioned.

Through compassion, a world where everything matters, everything has meaning and everything is part of a living whole. Where this ceaseless egoic activity which dims everyday life is put to one side.

Although ( in Master Sekito’s words) this room is small, it includes the entire world.  The walls are fluid because we’re not restricted to what is physically here. 

Everything is included.

In time, within our lived experience, the whole world is intimate with us, because when we re-emerge from our practice, the room comes with us.

Another strand:

When we’re practising together, the place of practice is the place of our actual experience. The room itself, the other practitioners themselves, and everything in the room occur within our practice. Not within our self, within our practice.

I’m sitting in this particular part of the room with all my ego, my karma, my psychological noise and so on,  but the space of awareness is the whole room, and in that space of awareness and compassion everything else is also there—other beings, space, connection, relationship.

This room is both the metaphor and actuality of a practice which, although the self is there, it’s just something else going on. The self occurs within the practice and within the ‘room’ of awareness, not the other way around.

In classical China there was a widespread belief that prolonged meditation gave one miraculous powers: the ability to read other people’s minds; to see past lives; to do extraordinary things with the body’s energy; and so on.

Now we think that claims like that are ludicrous. Yet we imagine, equally ludicrously, that through Zazen we might cultivate compassion, wisdom, happiness, joy. 

Dogen, in talking about these claims—the ability to read minds and so on, referred to them as the small mystical powers. They were small because they were limited by person, place, circumstance, and time.

In contrast he talked about the great mystical power. By implication he is talking about Zazen.The famous example which he gave was fetching water and carrying firewood. In other words, the most mundane tasks we can imagine. Contemporary zen people often talk about washing the dishes. 

What does Dogen mean when he talks about the great mystical power?

Last week I was with my mother at the seaside in Edinburgh. We were sitting on the promenade. On the low sea wall was a little Indian girl, playing with her mother. The mother had produced two straws and both of them were delightedly waving around these straws like magicians wands. Waving them at the sea, the sky, the birds, the sand and so on.

The little girl was so happy, so new.

And I suddenly saw that that little girl was manifesting the great mystical power. 

And the reason why Dogen referred to the small mystical powers as small was that they simply involved changing the world.

And that the great mystical power is not changing the world, it is renewing the world.

Renewing the world and in this way, stopping, like the hand of another on a falling person, the collapse into nothingness.  

One of the instructions we’re given when we start Zazen is that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely, like clouds in the sky. That instruction can be quite helpful to people right at the start of their meditation practice to become aware of their mental chatter, and the possibility of not being imprisoned within that. 

But taken as a general instruction, it is both harmful and useless. It’s harmful because it sets up an unnecessary dichotomy between thinking and the absence of thinking; between mental noise, the noise of our thoughts, and silence. The consequence of that is to create, unintentionally, an ideal of meditation which essentially emphasizes silence and an absence of thoughts. That ideal, that perspective on meditation, is both joyless and austere. It’s also frustratingly unattainable. 

The instruction is useless because ‘thinking’ in no way encompasses the range of our experience, either during Zazen or otherwise. Alongside mental chatter we will experience – for example – the various manifestations of our imagination; we’ll experience auditory and visual (and other sensory) hallucinations; we’ll experience  emotions that we can’t name and don’t like. We’ll experience sensations that are very elusive and we’ll experience the movement and aliveness of our body and the world.

The purpose of meditation is not to kill thought: it’s not to kill this rich experience—it’s to liberate it.

When we’re on retreat at Ardfern, at the back of the house there’s a little tree. To it are drawn all these lovely little birds,all different colors. Some blue, some yellow, some green, some red. They’re all drawn to the aliveness and tremulousness of the little tree.

When you’re sitting, your little birds are drawn to your alive tremulousness. Sometimes the birds of thought, sometimes the birds of the imagination, sometimes the birds of movement and aliveness, sometimes the birds of emotion, sometimes the birds of sensation. Do not wish them away; if they come and go freely, everything is as it should be.

When we get carried away with ourselves, we might think of our steadfast sitting as being like a mountain, but we’re more like this little inconspicuous tree which, even though it’s small, its roots extend throughout the earth. because it arises in love, not fear, its branches reach throughout the sky.   

Zazen is sometimes referred to as the still, still state.

What is meant by stillness?

What we need to understand is that stillness, in this context, does not mean the absence of movement in space—it means the absence of movement in time.

There is ‘stillness’ because what is vividly present to us now has not carried over from the past and will not carry over into the future. It is outside Time, our normal sense of time, because that has a flattening and distancing effect on our experience.  

This experience of stillness – suchness – is familiar, although overlooked. Sometimes we may simply chance upon it. For example, a tree in autumn with dramatic and fiery colors somehow catches us.  We’re not seeing the tree as an object in our consciousness within a structure of past, present and future. The tree is in a kind of communion with us, a charged field of being in presence.

In the Vimalakirti Sutra there’s a mythical representation of this. We’re asked to imagine a realm where, instead of a world of material things, there’s simply a world of fragrances. You can see in that imaginary world how it’s much easier to think of the instantaneous present because the continuity implied by objects – including the self – just isn’t there. Like a clumsy god who accidentally creates a world, once we crystallise experience into objects, Time adheres, like dust falling onto mirrors. 

Kodo Sawaki famously said, “If anyone asks you anything about Buddhism, just show them all aspects of your posture”. 

At first glance, this seems to be exactly the kind of superficial, ‘know nothing’ zen that’s quite prevalent in the west. It seems insulting to the effort which Buddhist practitioners have made for the last two and a half thousand years. But when you think about it, you have to say, “Why is that all buddhist practitioners, whatever their beliefs, seem to have adopted the same broad position physically towards meditation?” Nobody is meditating lying down or slouching, they’re all meditating from essentially the same physical position; with a solid grounding of the lower part of the body and the spine straight. How so? 

Taigen Dan Leighton describes zazen as being an ‘enactment ritual’. He wasn’t primarily talking about the physical aspects of zazen but if he were, then zazen is an enactment of buddhism. In our ordinary lives, our spine is rather compressed, as if it has the weight of our mind pressing down on it. 

When we do zazen in the correct posture, our spine is not like that at all; it’s uncompressing itself and there’s a clear and dynamic life to it – an upward movement to it; the spine then changes from being like a kind of inadequate pillar into something like a young tree; its roots penetrating into the ground and its branches extending upward and outward. In that physical posture we can have an actual somatic experience of spaciousness, of emptiness and of non- separation and also wholeness, because our dynamic spine integrates our whole body: we’re no longer a mind and a series of body parts, we’re entirely whole. We can obviously have an intellectual understanding of interdependence, emptiness and so on, but unless we physically experience it, then purely intellectual understanding gets us nowhere. I think it’s all this that Kodo Sawaki is addressing, in his characteristically pithy way.