Fukan-Zazengi 3: A Straight-ish Answer - Get the Body Out!


Master Dogen posed an important question at the start of Fukan-Zazengi: Here we are living in reality, and every part of us arose from and is a part of this reality, so why do we have to practice to realise this fact?

His answer might be summed up like this: Because we tend to think too much to the contrary, and to mistake our own thinking for reality, separating things out like the 'gap between heaven and earth' in doing so...


If there is a thousandth or a hundredth of a gap, the separation is as great as that between heaven and earth; and if a trace of disagreement arises, we lose the mind in confusion. Proud of our understanding and richly endowed with realization, we obtain special states of insight; we attain the truth; we clarify the mind; we acquire the zeal that pierces the sky; we ramble through remote intellectual spheres, going in with the head: and yet, we have almost completely lost the vigorous road of getting the body out. 


Master Dogen focuses particularly here on thinking around practice and realisation - after we've sat a bit and gotten a taste of what it's about, the thought might creep in that we've 'got' this, we're the dharmic bee's knees, we know our elbows from our arses while everyone else is knee-deep in delusion -- just more mistaken thinking of, maybe, a particularly insidious kind...

Thinking can be useful and helpful when we see it as it is, but mistaking our imagined stories and narratives about self and others as how things really are is the problem - it's easy to get lost in the fantasies of the mind, especially when things in the real world don't seem so hot.

The body, in contrast, is always living in the real world. It keeps us breathing, eating, pissing and shitting even as we're off starring in the latest imagined version of our life dreamt up in the head.

Simply sitting and letting go of those thoughts and feelings when we notice we're doing that is a very direct sort of training whereby we can learn that the body is independent of our imagined narratives, likes and dislikes, and feelings - we needn't act in accordance with them and can notice that we can just keep doing what we're actually doing - 'the vigorous road of getting the body out'.

This short section quietly contains an essential point about the nature of Zen practice and conduct.

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