Fukan-Zazengi 4: Turning the Light Around.


 

Moreover, we can [still] see the traces of the six years spent sitting up straight by the natural sage of Jetavana park.We can still hear rumors of the nine years spent facing the wall by the transmitter of the mind-seal of Shaolin [temple]. The ancient saints were like that already: how could people today fail to make effort?


In his instructions for zazen, Master Dogen has emphasised the tangible, physical nature of practice/ conduct, 'the vigorous road of getting the body out', and here he affirms it as the standard of Buddhist practice by indicating that this is what the historical Buddha ('the natural sage of Jetavana park') practiced, and also what Master Bodhidharma practiced, the first ancestor of Zen Buddhism who is said to have brought the authentic transmission of the practice from India to the east via Shaolin temple.


Therefore we should cease the intellectual work of studying sayings and chasing words. We should learn the backward step of turning light and reflecting.


Zazen practice requires that we just drop words and ideas when we notice that the mind is wandering that way. The 'backward step' might be the physical backward step we make to sit on the cushion, but also it suggests the attitude of mind of ceasing engaging with things, or stopping chasing things, with the will and the grabby intellect. After some time of doing this we will experience a natural introspection where our thoughts and feelings become more obvious to us - we become more aware of what's going on in what we might generally consider the 'inside'. At this time it becomes more ease-ful to notice we're thinking and to just stop the chains of thought that habitually happen. Our mind opens and clarifies.

This 'turning of the light', a naturally occurring recognition of things both inner and outer, generally happens for me after about 20 minutes of sitting, and the same is true for some other people I've asked about it. Nishijima Roshi spoke of how it happened for him after about half an hour of sitting (his preferred sitting time was 45 minutes), so it may be slightly different for different people... And then some days it happens earlier in sitting, while other days it's just a shitshow of persistent distracting thoughts and imagined stories about our fantasy lives. But that's all good too, and sitting through it is all good training.

'Perfection' is a particularly useless concept in doing zazen, but more about that later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Master Dogen's Shobogenzo: A Layman's Reading

Image
Hello, I'm Harry, a student of Zen Buddhism with my teachers the late Gudo Nishijima Roshi and Peter Rocca Sensei. I live and work a lay person's life in Belfast. On this blog I'll be reading and reflecting upon Shobogenzo, the masterwork of Zen Master Eihei Dogen, the 13th century philosopher-monk and founder of Soto Zen Buddhism in Japan. Shobogenzo ('True Dharma Eye Treasury") is an ambitious literary expression of Master Dogen's zazen practice as he brings his 'Dharma eye' to bear on such things as Buddhist teachings, Zen koans, the central practice of zazen, and essential themes including time and life/death and what it is to exist in this dance of coming and going, realisation and delusion, and also what it is to experience in our practice of zazen that which we are prior to the dance of words or ideas or any opposing, conditioned things at all. Master Dogen, besides being a gifted philosopher, was a poet who dared to attempt to express what many ...
Read more

Genjokoan 1: Three Philosophies, One Reality (views 1 and 2).

Image
When all dharmas are [seen as] the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. The Buddha’s truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are beings and buddhas. And though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish.   In these readings of Shobogenzo I'll be using the Nishijima/ Cross translation of the text, which is available in full (four volumes) in PDF format via the 'links' section in the menu. This chapter, Genjokoan, is considered very important as its opening section is seen as offering an essential insight into how Master Dogen looks at things from different viewpoints in...
Read more

Genjokoan: The Three Philosophies and the 'Nonthinking' Koan.

Image
Master Dogen laid out three viewpoints, or 'three philosophies' as Nishijima Roshi descibed them, at the start of Genjokoan: thinking/ ideas, an absence of ideas, and the phase of Buddhist practice that transcends both an 'abundance' of ideas and a 'lack' of ideas, thoughts and values. This chimes nicely with an important koan that Master Dogen cites in his zazen instructions, Fukanzazengi. He discusses this koan in more detail in the chapter of Shobogenzo called Zazenshin: Once, when the Great Master Hongdao of Yueshan was sitting [in meditation], a monk asked him, "What are you thinking of, [sitting there] so fixedly?" The master answered, "I'm thinking of not thinking." The monk asked, "How do you think of not thinking?" The Master answered, "Nonthinking." This koan presents three modes in relation to thinking: 1. Thinking 2. Not thinking, and 3. Nonthinking (sometimes translated as 'different to thinking') ...
Read more