Nothing Happens Next

One of the earliest of Zen-themed cartoons is still one of the funniest and most poignant. It was drawn by Gahan Wilson in the 1970s. It shows the wizened Master and his disciple sitting side by side on their cushions. The pupil looks somewhat bewildered, and the Master is obviously responding to his question. The caption reads, “Nothing happens next. This is it.” Thirty years after I first read those words—in the New Yorker, or was it Playboy?—they still make me smile.

The humor of the student’s situation springs from the disjunction between his expectations and the reality of his situation. We can guess, for instance, that the disciple has been told merely to sit up straight and still. He is perplexed because he is expecting further instructions. He is expecting to be given more to do.

Moreover, he probably supposes that, when he begins to “meditate,” things will be different. Something will happen in the way of transformation for the better. Instead, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of his ordinary experience, with nothing to distract him but his thoughts. For many of us, when we are sitting still voluntarily for the first time, we become suddenly aware of the sheer volume and intensity of “inner” events, and it seems to us as if we are going mad. Or else we are gripped by an almost irresistible urge to flee, and our restlessness provokes the defensive reaction of profound boredom. “Surely,” we think, “they can’t expect us to just sit here like this, with no objective and nothing to occupy us!” We wonder why anyone would waste her time in such a way. Our situation begins to look like a kind of joke in itself.

Something always happens next, of course, but it is not necessarily what we want. Beginners are vexed because, so long as we follow the simple rules of zazen, we can’t control what happens next. We can’t even control our own thoughts! That is the first, terrible lesson.

Getting Started

I have committed to do zazen regularly. On the pretext of “just sitting,” I have undertaken to investigate a complex of processes that together produce what we call awareness, perception, mind, and the self. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the organism looks into its own workings. In any case, the field is vast—it is the whole sensory world, after all—and at any given moment I can be aware of just a small portion of it.

At first glance it would seem that I am in just the position of one of the blind men in the famous parable about the elephant, perfectly situated to draw the wrong conclusions. However, when that story is told it is seldom mentioned that even a blind man, with sufficient persistence, can form a rough idea of what an elephant is like, provided he is willing to come at it from lots of different angles, maintain prolonged contact, and think about what he has experienced.

There is another sense in which the analogy is misleading. Not only do I have all my senses and a fair measure of curiosity, I am able to adjust the focus and scope of awareness in a number of ways. For instance, the shifting of attention from one sensory realm to another, which happens spontaneously thousands of times every day, is something that I can do deliberately, too. I can also limit my attention to hearing alone, or sight, and I can process the information so obtained in various ways. I can home in on a particular bodily sensation and remain attentive to that small patch of sense-data as it changes. Then I can compare that experience with past events. In other words, any vantage point—any given space-time location—can yield multiple views.

Although the mindscape is virtually without boundaries, I am not much bothered by the question of where to begin. If the unknown authors of the Avatamsaka are right, and the universe (or multiverse) is holographic, then it will not be hard for me to navigate this topologically challenging landscape. Starting with whatever happens to be in front of me, I need only allow one thing to open into the next naturally. Sooner or later I will find myself back where I started.

Zazen (3): A Somatic Approach to Right Mindfulness

It is sometimes said that zazen does itself[1]. The aim of such statements is twofold. First, they call attention to our tendency to arrogate all things to ourselves and to take credit where no credit is due. Second, they reinforce the dogma that zazen is not a skill that can be taught, learned or used in any way. Such admonitions are frequently coupled with statements intended to discourage goal orientation and striving for results. We are also told to apply ourselves to sitting with diligence and effort, to practice with the single-mindedness and energy we would muster if our heads were on fire. In effect we are enjoined to do, with utmost vigor, what cannot be done and, if it could be done, would not yield any result. What to make of this absurdity?

According to the traditions of mainstream Buddhism, mental clarity, acuity, and stability can be cultivated in a step-by-step manner that leads to awakening. The methods of establishing mindfulness and clear comprehension (satipatthāna-yonisomanasikāra) are characterized by schedules, indicators of progress, and scrupulous attention to detail in the manner of performance. Awakening is accomplished in stages.

On the face of it, there does not seem to be any comparable process in the life of the student of Dōgen’s Zen, which more closely resembles the Daoist traditions of Mind Fasting and Sitting in Oblivion. Kobun Chino has spoken of zazen as something into which the trainee vanishes. Nevertheless, experience suggests that the two “activities” have more in common than might meet the eye at a casual glance.

The instructions for zazen are simple. We are told merely to monitor posture to see whether or not the body is relaxed, upright, balanced and stable. All other sensations—thoughts, feelings, judgments, memories, etc.—are to be cast adrift. Attention is not so much focused as gently pressed into service in a rudimentary way. The beauty of this method is that we do not have to learn anything new. Everyone knows how to do what is required. We have been learning it since infancy. We already know how to find our various body parts, how to project the mental map upon the relatively amorphous mass of tactile sensations. But we don’t ever have to think about it. We just have to remember to check in once in a while.

Both zazen and the four primary methods of satipatthāna entail the harnessing of mindfulness and other mental faculties. Zazen differs from satipatthāna mainly in being less deliberate. With attention to posture as the sole task, mindfulness of the body develops naturally. There is no need to master the intricacies of technique. There are no elaborate protocols, no noting, no analysis.

In order to check our posture, we make use of a spectrum of bodily sensation—pressure, texture, muscular tension, and the propriocepts that convey a sense of balance and the body’s orientation in space. We do that in a way that does not require that we acknowledge each and every sensory event, though we are barely aware of them. In this kind of first-order awareness—a mere sensory presence—there is no imposition of higher-order interpretations. Zazen is therefore sensual in the most basic meaning of the word. As we acquire the habit of checking our posture many times a day, for weeks and months and years, we acquire a global, minimally-conscious awareness of the body’s sensory presence, its disposition in space, and the many subtle events occurring within that sensory-imaginal space.

Of course, we are bound to notice things because, although in zazen there is no other job than to look in on posture from time to time, we are evolved to be very good at noticing things. And so we will learn, for instance, that the bodily sensations associated with breathing in are not the same as those associated with breathing out, and we will learn a great deal else besides. We come to know a lot without necessarily knowing that we know.

To summarize: in Dōgen’s zazen, mindfulness of the body and feelings is acquired gently, without the extra layers of self-consciousness that build up in the course of constantly acquiring new skills, as is the case when training in the Four Methods of Setting Up Mindfulness. It is not just that zazen gets you out of your head. This way of “meditation” also has a notable advantage over satipatthāna, namely, that it is much less likely to reinforce the illusion of agency. I will have more to say about the phenomenon of self-attribution in a future post.

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[1] According to a story that circulates among students of  Shunryu Suzuki, a student came to him and announced that she had at last really begun to do zazen. “No!” replied the Roshi, “You must never say that. Zazen does zazen!” Is that sort of talk meaningful? Is it helpful?

Two Odd, One Even

sitting buddhas

walking buddhas

not yet buddhas

ever buddhas

not one not two

summer autumn

winter spring

coming going

never moving

myriad buddhas

foolish beings

being buddhas

just this once

in no time at all

Sitting & Walking for Others

We had completed the Initiation Walk and had just reached the high point of Pine Mountain Road between Oat Hill Road and the Bolinas-Fairfax Road. Arrayed before us were Mt. Tamalpais, Tiburon, and much of the East Bay. At the very center of the landscape, its details obscured by haze but easily identifiable, lay the prison at San Quentin.

Just two weeks before, in the course of a pilgrimage from Pema Ösel Ling to Land of Medicine Buddha, I had spoken to members of the Santa Cruz Zen Center about nourishing the intention to walk for others. I told a story about how my friend Rick Field, when he was struggling with cancer and nearing the end of his life, said to me, “I don’t have the strength to make the pilgrimage, but that’s okay. You can walk for me.” It was suddenly obvious to me that walking should never, could never be a solitary activity.

I am thinking about that moment now, and of the men locked up behind the walls of the prison at San Quentin. And I am wondering what kind of bonds there may be between me and them. When I agreed to walk for Rick, what kind of pact did I make with him? Did I make it with him alone or, through him, with all beings, human and non-human? It is my conviction that whenever I walk in consciousness of others, am I merely giving physical expression to a relationship that began billions of years ago in the fierce fires of a star.

Although I am not sure that we know what merit is, much less how it can be transferred from one person to another, I will go on reciting the dedication of merit with the resolve that my living will serve, one way or another, the true needs of those people I have not met, will never meet.. In our intention and attention there is much of unquestionable value that can touch many lives in ways we cannot forsee. 

The Who of Me, the person I am becoming, was formed in relation to others and evolves in relation to others. Although I am an organism distinct from others and from my surroundings, my boundaries are permeable. I am an open system, able to let in nourishment and expel waste. Like other organisms, I am also food; I eat others and am eaten by them. Every time I breathe in and out, some part of the world enters into this body and some part of this body goes out into the world. Through my sensory organs and nervous system I am constantly welcoming and giving hospitality to the environment even as I provide an environment for other beings. My body is host to a teeming multitude of living things. I and the world collaborate to produce this life, even this consciousness, such as it is. In our chemistry, biology, social-interpersonal relations, and sensory awareness—even in the highest-order abstract thinking—you and I are interdependent and globally connected. What could be more foolish than to believe we are separate?

All the same, we suffer because we are deeply in thrall to the illusion of independence. We have been so thoroughly schooled in the ideology of separateness and competition that it takes the concerted use of all our faculties to free ourselves from the illusion. One way of overcoming our education is to enter into the great mandala of nature and surrender ourselves to it through intellectual, imaginative, and contemplative activity. It is the path of transforming social emotions. It is the practice of just sitting. It is the rite of mantra, mudra, and visualization. It is the way of pilgrimage and mountain practice.

Perhaps we can never be sure that, by means of this work, we have done anything that directly results in benefit to the prisoners, the physically disabled, the work-obsessed, and those trapped in the maze of cultural delusion and ruinous ambition. They do not even know that we are thinking of them (though we might be able to do something about that; and think of what a contemplative hiking program for ex-offenders might be like). The limitations of our knowledge cannot diminish the strength of our connection. To practice with and for others is not only the fulfillment of vows, it is a celebration of a reality. It is our life and death and rebirth together.

Sitting (2)

“Shikan means ‘pure, one, only for it.’ Ta is a very strong word. It shows moving activity. When you hit, that movement is called ta, so ‘strike’ is ta. Za is the same as in the word ‘zazen,’ sitting.”

—Kobun ChinoOtogawa Roshi

In my study and practice of Zen, I am not much concerned with the culture of Zen or the preservation of a particular lineage, much less with matters of institutional continuity. I am motivated in the main by the desire to penetrate the mystery of zazen. Those of you who have perused the texts on zazen by Dōgen Zenji and other famous teachers of the Sōtō lineages will know whereof I speak. If they are to be believed, zazen cannot be learned, nor can it be won by effort. Zazen is a non-method.Yet we are admonished to pursue it with great devotion. In spite of its will-o’-the-wisp quality, we can’t seem to help talking about it as a practice, nay, the Practice and, what is more, Practice inseparable from Realization. It is the great prize that we are not permitted to wish for and—alas!—you can’t get there from here, anyhow (see “Huaijang Polishes the Tile”).

The months and years pass in a game of hide-and-go-seek with zazen. Am I getting any closer to understanding the problem? Does it matter? Unlike Buddhism, Zen practice is a path that is often described as having no end. Insights into the process of getting to zazen occur from time to time. My ideas about Zen and the whole contemplative enterprise continue to evolve. The way I express my understanding has changed, too. In any case, I enjoy sitting more than ever. This is how I see it now.

If there is a secret of zazen, it is contained in the words “shikantaza.” We usually translate them as something like “merely sit.” That compound word is about as unambiguous as you can get. If we have difficulty in believing that the phrase is really our instruction manual for zazen, it is because we suppose that zazen is a kind of meditation and, in common parlance, meditation is something you do with your mental faculties. As described in the texts of the mainstream Buddhist traditions, dhyāna entails such factors as attention, mindfulness, and discernment, while the bodily posture and mudra act as material and causal support for the mind.

Zazen in the Dōgen tradition reverses that relation. Mind supports body and is typically given little to do. The student is shown how to arrange her body and regulate her breath, and thereafter is left free to realize Buddha in due course. The absence of follow-up instructions can be frustrating, all the more if, like me, the student was trained in the methods of establishing mindfulness. In the satipatthāna tradition of Southeast Asia, the trainee follows elaborate protocols, moving step-by-step through finely graded stages under close supervision. Contemplation is undertaken with map and compass, as it were, guided and frequently evaluated. There are landmarks and watersheds aplenty to be noted, and a detailed itinerary.

The “awareness” that characterizes zazen has nothing of probing about it, nothing of scrutiny, analysis, or discrimination. There is no task, no pressure to get anything done. There is no stairway to paradise, with a new step every day. There is no goal or reward at the end of the path because, we are told, the sitting is in itself the realization of our true nature. There can be a gap between view and realization which, if it is as much as a hair’s breadth, separates us from awakening as if by a vast chasm. But that gap is not found within zazen!

Sherlock Holmes said that when you have eliminated what is impossible, then whatever remains must be the truth, however implausible or bizarre. It turns out that when you have eliminated all of the things zazen cannot possibly be, there is nothing left. In our customary way of thinking about human enterprises, zazen is nothing.

There is no activity that can be called zazen. If you are looking for a method that you can learn and teach to others, you will not find it. There is no way to attain zazen by doing anything, no way to train yourself into zazen through mental discipline. Certain masters of the Sōtō line have chosen to emphasize the physical act of sitting above all other practices precisely because the extraordinary posture and restriction of mobility tends to draw in and unify the faculties.

And yet there is that ta, the disposition to strike, yet without a particular target. Could we say that the target is the whole universe? And, who is about to hit? S/he cannot be named.

Although we are taught that zazen is no technique, it would not be wrong to say that the approach to zazen is a process of elimination, a gradual or sudden letting go. It is not a conscious process. It is not a series of acts of deliberate renunciation. On the contrary, the dropping away of body and mind is natural and effortless. It occurs in silence and obscurity while I am otherwise occupied. What is accomplished by the task of sitting itself—the posture, the mudra, the uprightness and balance—is nothing less than the loosening of the bonds of identity and intentionality.

Zazen is free of tension. That is, there is no particular object of attention, no particular intention with respect to anything, and none of the usual see-saw shifting of weight between self and other. The “awareness” of zazen is not that of an I-and-Thou perception, nor even the consciousness of perfect reflections in a mirror. Rather, it is simple presence, a fundamental sense of Being, inseparable from things, containing nothing and lacking nothing.

In a future post I will try to show how this somatic approach to zazen relates to the mainstream practice of satipatthāna.

Meaning & Self-Acceptance

“We sit to make life meaningful. The significance of our life is not experienced in striving to create some perfect thing. We must simply start with accepting ourselves. Sitting brings us back to actually where we are. This can be very painful. Self-acceptance is the hardest thing to do. If we can’t accept ourselves, we are living in ignorance, this darkest night. We may still be awake, but we don’t know where we are. We cannot see. The mind has no light. Practice is this candle in our very darkest room.”

--Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

The first thing that strikes me about this statement by Kobun is how it brings together two ideas that do not usually arise together in my own thoughts, namely, meaning and acceptance. As I normally think of it, meaning is something that we bring to our lives as a function of the need to impose order upon a world made up of events that are causally inscrutable. The realm of meaning comprises the forms of the world as it emerges into awareness, shaped by our ideas, attitudes and desires. Part of that meaning is determined by biological necessity, the remainder by socially determined agendas. Personal meaning is built up over time, subject to change, and continually revised.

For Kobun, however, that kind of meaning is false or superficial. It is ideal whereas true or deep meaning is actual. The first kind of meaning is the product of our aspiration and striving and lies always in the future, like a distant beacon; the second comes into focus when we turn attention to the arising of sensation. The former is a mental projection; the latter is to be found in the configuration of conscious events as they occur in the phenomenal moment.

Although it is hard to live even a few days without “striving to create some perfect thing,” the highest value is to be found in coming “back to who and where we are.” Anything less than moment-to-moment acceptance of This is ignorance. Without the candle of practice, we are living in “the darkest night.” That candle is “sitting.” Without zazen “[w]e cannot see. The mind has no light.” All of which suggests that zazen is the means for bringing about awareness of who and where we are. And here, again, we come up against the refractory teaching of the Dōgen tradition, according to which zazen is not a method or a skill. Kobun was certainly right to insist that self-acceptance is crucial to spiritual practice. But how, exactly, does zazen facilitate my overcoming of the barrier against Reality that I set up in the first place?

(To Be Continued)

Sitting is Really Something in Being Really Nothing

We emerge from the wombs of our mothers ready to grasp and to suck. Evolution has provided us with powerful urges to nourish ourselves, to reproduce our kind, and to attain a measure of security. Our society has taught us to advance ourselves through hard work and to measure our success in the acquisition of material goods. We are as relentless in play as in labor, seeking education or entertainment whenever we are not working. At the beginning of the 21^st century our lives and those of our children are more complex and stressful than ever. There seems to be no respite from activity. And in the compulsiveness of our business we have brought the planet to the brink of destruction.

And yet…

Twice a week I serve as Do-an (bell-ringer) for the midday zazen period at the Santa Cruz Zen Center. Twice a week, at some point during the period, I am struck by the radical nature of what I and my fellow trainees are doing for those eighty minutes—or, rather, what we are not doing. We are not doing anything. We are not seeking anything. We are not holding on to anything. We are not comparing ourselves to anyone. We are not wishing we were somewhere else. We are not planning or scheming. We are not projecting our thoughts into an imagined past or a non-existent future. We are simply enjoying the upwelling and passing away of phenomena in whatever forms they may take. We are allowing the ten thousand things to celebrate themselves through us.

Is that not amazing?

On Not Taking the Problem of the Ego Too Seriously

We hear a lot of talk about the ego, how insidious it is and how it works against awakening. Much of that kind of speech is useful up to a point. But we ought not let ourselves be fooled by the way we sometimes talk. If we take the so-called ego-problem too seriously, we might end up thinking that the ego was a thing that we could point to or feed or put out of the house, like a puppy who is no longer appreciated when the master notices that the little feller has been chewing on his shoes.

It is true that ego, as a complex of ideas and as an ongoing construction project, is implicated in our dissatisfaction. But we cannot get rid of dissatisfaction by throwing away the ego, even if we want to. Our minds do not work that way. If I choose to take that path, the best I can hope for is some kind of dissociative personality disorder. If we had no self whatever we could not be part of a community. We could not make any sort of human life at all. Ego is a set of concepts and neural operations that form the focus of the human being’s communications with others and with itself.

AND the self is not a real object. It is not a being that exists independently of our relations and development. It is not permanent. It is not self-existent. It is not even perfectly stable. As a unitary, immutable agent, the ego is an illusion that results from a complex collaboration of faculties that have evolved in a way unique among beings. Our ability to maintain the semblance of continuous consciousness is what makes us the kind of organism we are, capable of doing all sorts of amazing things, and also capable of harboring the most complex delusions. The self is a very powerful magic show closely related to the illusions of agency and consciousness. But the ego is also a necessary element of our being-in-the-world, real but not real in the way we are taught to think of it.

One obvious problem with “I” is the importance we give to our desires, preferences, agendas, stories, opinions, and so on. Here the task is to train ourselves to step aside from the torrential stream of our own narratives, and to learn to look at our desires, etc., as transient products of momentary causes and conditions. As one of my teachers put it, “Most of the things that you hold so precious and take so seriously are just brain farts. Watch them for a few minutes and they’ll go away.” However, when it comes down to it, we are extremely reluctant to give up our habitual way of relating to experience. We will go to great lengths to delay the change in perspective.

Yet we hear again and again from teachers of various spiritual traditions that the ego is a tyrant; a vicious, even demonic being who stands between us and Enlightenment. Thus the ego is made to appear as an enemy, a notion that is self-contradictory when you think about it. The ego is also portrayed as something dispensable. Get rid of it, and you are free! That view is not only false but a little mad. It is by means of the magic show—the process by which the nervous system of the human being produces self, world and all the rest—that we can negotiate the events of our constantly changing lives at all.