Fukan-Zazengi 5: Dropping Off.


Master Dogen continues with some very direct and insightful comments regarding 'learning the backward step of turning light and reflecting'...


Body and mind will naturally fall away, and the original features will manifest themselves before us. If we want to attain the matter of the ineffable, we should practice the matter of the ineffable at once.


Our 'original features' suggests the Zen koan 'show me your original face before your mother and father were born', or our life experienced here and now before we split things up into 'this' and 'that' with our thinking and our naming of things. It sounds grand, but actually we can experience this in sitting zazen from early on, even if only momentarily at first. At such times we experience our life more directly than we do when we're thinking about it - it's 'ineffable', already existing fully and manifestly before we divide it up with our thoughts and feelings about it.

'Body and mind falling away' evokes a very important instruction that Master Dogen gleaned from his teacher in China - 'dropping off body and mind'. Dogen repeats this phrase often in his writings, and it is an essential direction in his approach to zazen practice.

'Dropping off body and mind', in the western scheme of things, might seem to suggest that we should slip into some sort of coma, so it might be useful to look at it from the Buddhist perspective. Buddhism posits that a human being is made up of five aggregates or five 'heaps' of stuff. They are:


Form (Rupa)

Feeling (Vedana)

Perception (Samjna)

Mental Formations (Samskara)

Consciousness (Vijnana)


Of note here is the fact that the Buddhist view of what makes us up separates our basic quality of awareness ('consciousness') from the content of that awareness i.e. thoughts or 'mental formations'. So 'dropping mind' in this sense means dropping 'mental formations' or thoughts, memories, imaginings etc. while remaining aware of it. In the west we might tend to identify the mind with thought alone ("I think therefore I am") and not with that which can be aware of thought, and/or an absence of thought. So Buddhism looks at it a bit differently.

'Dropping body' is letting go of physical sensations, which includes what we generally call 'emotions' in the west. This may seem strange from a western perspective as we may consider emotions or feelings to be in the area of the mind, but if we look at it in practice we can see that emotions are actually felt in the body, and that we label them 'anger', 'fear', 'grief' etc, and 'good' or 'bad', with the mind. If we just stop that thinking/ labelling with thoughts then we experience 'feelings' as just that - temporary sensations in the body that need not be part of the narratives of 'self' that we create with thought, or with the interaction of those feelings and our thoughts.

In this way we can allow thoughts and feelings to come and go and directly realise that they are not a 'self'.

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