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4 Aspects of Zazen II: Making the Body Right.

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Although Nisijima Roshi didn't see science as providing all the answers to our human condition, he valued scientific/materialistic advancements and explanations of our reality. In this second of the '4 aspects of zazen' which he highlighted he draws our attention to the physiological effect of sitting zazen, its innate balancing function. Experientially speaking, we might notice that sitting zazen after a while tends to bring us into a state of balanced clarity, regardless of what our thoughts or our intentions about it are. Zazen is a physical action in the real world that addresses our tendency to 'live in our heads', in our churning concoctions of habitual thoughts and daydreams and feelings...  2. Making the Body Right - A Balanced Autonomic Nervous System. In Zazen we sit on a cushion on the floor with both legs crossed,  and with our lower spine, upper spine, and head held straight vertically. Keeping the spine straight has a direct and immediate  effect on th...
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Nishijima on Enlightenment.

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  "Whenever we gain some clear insight into our real situation in life, it is a kind of enlightenment. Such insights are very important, but they are not the fundamental enlightenment of Buddhism. Enlightenment, in the Buddhist tradition, is not an intellectual discovery but a state of being or a state of body and mind. It is a state of momentary oneness with the world, a state in which dualistic interpretations fall away and the real qualities of all things are exposed. It is, in other words, the state in zazen." -- Gudo Nishijima Roshi
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4 Aspects of Zazen I: Different from Thinking.

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Nishijima Roshi's first aspect of zazen is a main point from Master Dogen's zazen instructions Fukanzazengi and the 'non-thinking'/'different from thinking' koan that Dogen discusses in Fukanzazengi. In other forms of Buddhist practice people try to cultivate concentration on an object such as the breath, or try to bring about certain states of calm abiding or mental stability... that comes in zazen, but we don't try to make it happen. Our thinking mind, that likes to think it's in control (it isn't!), might not like this at times, but it's through dropping off all intention and mental fabrication of methods and imagined goals that we directly clarify our experience. It's like 'taking a step off a one hundred-foot pole' as the old koan says -- No mental nor conceptual safety net. We throw ourselves open to the whole world. "Zazen is useless!," as Kodo Sawaki Roshi said, and that is a very advanced teaching in this regard, an...
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Four Aspects of Zazen: Intro

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Nishijima Roshi was very helpful in explaining Buddhism and Buddhist practice to people. While he always maintained that Zazen, or action itself, is ultimately ungraspable and beyond words he didn't shy away from talking directly about what practice is about. He wanted to demystify it, to remove the 'woo-woo' factor, and make it approachable for contemporary peoples I think. In a nice booklet called 'Introduction to Buddhism and the Practice of Zazen' (available to buy online) he lays out four aspects of practicing zazen, that can help orientate us to what the practice is about. I'll look at them separately over the next few posts, but this is how he introduces them in the booklet... What do we experience in Zazen? Zazen is the simplest form of action, and when we are practicing Zazen we do not intentionally think about anything or concentrate on our feelings and perceptions. We sit in a simple non-discriminating state where our body-and-mind are balanced and un...
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Disarming Harmful Feelings.

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The old Zen texts don't have an awful lot to say about what we in the west call 'feelings' or 'emotions'. In the traditional zazen instructions, as discussed previously, we're just told to drop stuff off - 'drop off body and mind' - without much discussion of the implications of this, or of the qualitative content of it. A bit can be teased out around feelings though, I think, because many of us will have 'emotional baggage', patterns of reactivity around feelings which arise from our life-experience, and practice can bring this to the fore in our experience. Feelings, in zazen, can be seen as just that. In the calm clarity that we sometimes settle into in practice we can sense directly that a feeling is a sensation in our body to which we mentally ascribe a name ('anger', 'grief', 'shame', 'happiness' etc) and very often a 'good' or 'bad' designation... we assign attraction or aversion to the base ...
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Buddhism is Beyond Belief.

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When I was at college as a 'mature student' (mature in years, but nothing else!) I used to walk by the college chaplaincy door and notice a poster on it that said - "WHATEVER YOU BELIEVE, BELIEVE SOMETHING!" I suppose, like many otherwise non-religious people, I had my basic underlying beliefs about how the world was and how to be in it, but was never really an active believer in religion or a God or gods. I used to imagine that it might be pleasent and comforting to believe in that way, but I could never bring myself to really commit to it. Some time later I began practicing Zen Buddhism. My teacher said that Buddhism was unusual as a religion (to the western mind) because it was more characterised by doubt than belief - 'doubt' has quite a negative association in western discourse maybe, but what he was indicating might be more positively phrased as 'questioning' - Buddhism requires us to question deeply the nature of things and self. Nishijima Roshi...
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We Already ARE Enlightenment.

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The main thing that drew me to Nishijima Roshi's (pictured above) and Master Dogen's approaches to Zen is that they are very direct. Both teachers emphasised that what we realise in Zen practice is that we already ARE reality. In practicing just dropping off the thoughts and feelings that we habitually identify with we realise directly what we already are unhindered by our thoughts and feelings and personal brain-narratives to the contrary. It doesn't come in from some far-off mystical realm. It happens here. It's already always happening right here and now. This seems important, because when I first approached Buddhism I got involved with a group based around a Tibetan teacher. In that group there were levels of practice you had to obtain, gradual empowerments to practice to be won (and bought) from the Master, hierarchies of students you had to negotiate, secret teachings doled out to the most loyal and deferential, bizarre behaviours passed off as 'crazy wisdom...
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