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)