Fukan-Zazengi 12: Just Doing is 'Different-From-Thinking'.


 

When the physical posture is already settled, make one complete exhalation and sway left and right. Sitting immovably in the mountain-still state, “Think about this concrete state beyond thinking.” “How can the state beyond thinking be thought about?” “It is different from thinking.” This is just the pivot of Zazen.


Having explained the cross-legged physical posture of zazen, Master Dogen now addresses the mental area of zazen, or the area of mind.

The quotes in this section are from this famous koan exchange: 

 

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 'nonthinking' has also been translated as 'different from thinking', which may be a better translation as 'nonthinking' may suggest a sort of mental effort, which is not the direction suggested. It's rather just sitting and not engaging with thinking, and stopping engaging with thoughts when we notice we're doing it... getting out of our imaginary life.

Just acting, actually engaging in the activity of sitting, is 'different-to-thinking', and is what we are already doing effortlessly in the real world when we sit zazen. In this way we can sit vividly in the present and see all our mental comings-and-goings for what they really are.

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