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Kusen

268. What is Zazen?

Master Dogen asked “ If the cart is stuck, do you beat the ox or beat the cart?”

In other words, what is zazen? Is it an effort to purify the mind, or is it the full effort of this body of practice to express itself fully?

And in his greatness, his unique position, he answers “the cart”.

This body of practice is not the pictured lump of flesh, it is our actual experience. Freed from this picture, whether “the mind” is agitated or peaceful is of no consequence; it is like an electron in a cathedral.

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Kusen

219. You’re the fool

Sometimes, as if in a dream, we enter a house called Buddha, sit at a table called Zazen, and opposite us is a fool; repetitive, moody, mocking. And the more we wish him to shut up, the louder he is. And we think that if we just endure this, at some point he will go away, or at least be silent, and then better companions: wisdom, compassion, stillness and so on will appear; and they need to appear soon, before we are thrown into nothingness.

We need to understand that we’re the fool. Wisdom, compassion, stillness have been there all along.

How so? Because each thing is everything. A pinpoint of light illuminates the entire universe.

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Zazen Instructions

When we talk about zazen, we need to be careful that our instructions do not casually reinforce the habitual dualities of body/mind and self/world. Yet, the most common instruction that newcomers are given does exactly this, the injunction to allow thoughts to come and go freely.

Perhaps we give this instruction because newcomers are always surprised and distressed at the unrelenting cascade of drivel that appears to be surging through them the moment they start sitting. But zazen is the practice of all of us, not just the mind.

After a while, what becomes more apparent is the persistent colouring of experience in a way that is often very disagreeable: agitation, fear, torpor, boredom, despair. How do we advise the student then? If we call these emotions, we somehow allocate them to the mind. If we call them disturbances of the nervous system, we somehow allocate them to the body. Either way, the duality is enforced.

We need to find a way to talk about practice which doesn’t take these familiar dualities for granted, only to try to dissolve them later.

One way is through the actual experience of breathing. If we pay careful attention, it is not that our breath is the movement of air in and out of our lungs, in and out of our mouth and nose. Our actual experience is that our breath goes everywhere. It goes up, into our head, it goes down, into our pelvis. It extends everywhere.

And, experiencing the breath in this way, it is possible to see a different duality: the dynamic movement of this spacious breath, like an expanding and contracting pillar of emptiness at our core. And around this pillar, likewise alive, likewise moving, the fabric of form; a fabric which is sometimes the body, sometimes the mind, sometimes the heart, sometimes the world.

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169. Zazen is not a practice of the self

The most important thing for us to understand is that Zazen is not a practice of the self. It is a practice of the Buddha.

That being so, it is not concerned with purifying or perfecting the self. Or setting the self off on a journey.

It is not concerned with furnishing the house of the self with wisdom and compassion.

But rather, becoming completely intimate with the ground.

My first teacher said, “What is it which stops the Universe from collapsing?”

He didn’t answer. Of course, he didn’t need to.

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160. Stilling the mind

With application, stilling the mind is not difficult. What is difficult is dropping off the sense of self. The sense of something to gain, something to lose. Self separate from the alive wholeness of everything.

Dropping off the sense of self, or ‘me’, which is central to our practice, means we do not describe practice in terms of acquisition, aspiring to acquire wisdom, enlightenment, compassion or whatever.

That is why we describe our practice as the whole universe experiencing itself through this body.

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158. Allowing thoughts to come and go

The practice of allowing thoughts to come and go freely and not attaching to them is an ancient practice. It goes right back to the origins of Buddhism.

But if we think the aim of this practice is just to make ‘the mind’ still, to make ‘consciousness’ empty; then our practice lacks compassion.

It’s for this reason that when Buddhism went to China and the Chinese truly made it their own, they changed the emphasis from emptiness to suchness. The unstatable state when we are no longer conceptually grasping experience, fabricating self and object, when everything is vivid and whole.

Not Nothing, but nothing that can be described. No-thing, because Everything.

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153. Restlessness and torpor

Of the five hindrances, three seem more related to the mind and two – restlessness and torpor – seem more related to the body.

Restlessness and torpor often arise because we misconceive the relationship between breath and body.

What is the body? Often, we conceive it as something fixed and rigid, like a stone house. And we then imagine that there is a technique of breathing – long slow out breaths say, or a focus on the lower abdomen – that we need to apply.

But we are mistaken.

We place such emphasis on the posture because it enables the breath to breathe itself. This breathing is like a column of enlivened space, from the base chakra in the pelvic floor upwards to the crown chakra at the top of the head. And the body is like fabric around this column. When we breathe in, the column expands and the fabric moves. When we breathe out, the column contracts and the fabric moves. The whole body breathes. The whole body moves.

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Kusen

139. Shikantaza

Master Dogen described our practice of shikantaza as dropping off body and mind.

The Japanese which is rendered as ‘dropping off’ has two aspects. One is intentional, as we might drop off an article of clothing. The other is natural, like leaves falling in Autumn.

Dropping off mind, means dropping off that dualism between mind and world, and which is often prominent, although unacknowledged, in meditation.

So we don’t think, “I must make my mind clear, my thoughts are an encumbrance to that”. But rather, thoughts are just one more thing going on within unbroken experience, where there is not inner and outer, me and not-me.

And likewise dropping off body, we don’t think “My body is experiencing these sensations and emotions”, but rather, there is just this experiencing, which includes everything.

We can drop off Mind, in the sense that we can relocate the mind within the body, but we need to drop off both, otherwise the dualism remains.

So dropping off body and mind is, as it were, sitting within the body of the world. It is not to do with individual gain, or individual effort, and so it is the gateway to peace and joy.

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119. Before Thinking

While Master Yakusan was practicing zazen, a monk asked him, “What are you thinking?”

The Master said, “I’m thinking (shiryo) not thinking (fu-shiryo).”

The monk asked, “How can you think not thinking?”

The Master replied, “Hi- shiryo.”

Hi-shiryo is really problematic to translate. It is often rendered as ‘non thinking’, but what is that exactly? My teacher Michael Luetchford renders it as, ‘different from thinking’. But in what way different? Tanahashi translates it as, ‘beyond thinking,’ which has the unfortunate connotation of a transcendent state.

The Ven. Anzan Hoshin renders it as, ‘before thinking’. Although not grammatically accurate, this rendering is brilliant.

Just as the world didn’t flash into existence when homo sapien appeared, this world does not suddenly appear when thought appears. When we sit, full attention is given to all experience, uncooked. It is as if we are looking along a long corridor. Some way along is the shuffling presence of thinking. We don’t negate it.

But we see it through the immediate and un-thought life of this, now

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115. Zazen is Activity

Master Dogen describes Zazen as dropping off body and mind. That is, dropping off this sense of a me and things that belong to me. It is his way of describing anatta.

He doesn’t say that dropping off body and mind is a preliminary to the real activity of Zazen, but that Zazen is the continuous dropping off of body and mind. The activity of Zazen is this continuous activity of dropping off. It is an activity, not a state. It is an orientation, not an attribute.

He also says, although he attributes this to his teacher, Nyojo, that when body and mind are dropped off, we are free of the five desires and the five hindrances. The five desires correspond to the desires of the sense organs. The five hindrances are desire, ill-will, laziness, restlessness and doubt. If we think that practice is the vehicle for our own aggrandisement, we are full of these hindrances. But if there is no me and nothing belonging to me then where can these hindrances attach?

Hence, Zazen is the dharma gate of ease and joy.