Fukan-Zazengi 13: Here Be Dragons!


Master Dogen continues his zazen instructions with more essential directions on the nature of, and practice of, realisation...


This sitting in Zazen is not learning Zen concentration. It is simply the peaceful and joyful gate of Dharma. It is the practice-and-experience which perfectly realizes the state of bodhi. The Universe is conspicuously realized, and restrictions and hindrances never reach it.


Some other schools of Buddhism, and other religious and philosophical traditions, emphasise methods of training or focusing the mind on an object, or analysing aspects of our self or our experience or such. But the practice Master Dogen teaches is not like that. Rather, it requires that, in just sitting in the real world and in our life, we give up mental striving and any goals that we can imagine around realisation, or anything else. We just stop it when we notice we're doing it and let go.

It requires us to surrender our will for a time. This can be challenging, and it certainly challenges an aspect of our self that may have held sway over much of our lives -- we give up our drive to 'succeed', to advance ourselves in the world. It may indeed be contrary to aspects of our culture and society which are held to be fundamental truths. It may precipitate a radical revaluation of who and what we are and what we may have been led to believe about ourselves and our place in society and in the world...


To grasp this meaning is to be like a dragon that has found water, or like a tiger in its mountain stronghold. 


Nishijima Roshi called the clear, stable state of having 'dropped body and mind' which we experience after a time in zazen 'the balanced state' or our 'natural state'. We come into our own homeplace, like the tiger and the dragon, unperturbed by the fantasies and stories and drives of the mind which we mistake as our reality. In traditional Chinese symbolism the dragon and the tiger represent yin and yang, or the earthly and the celestial. Together they represent the balance of natural energies.


Remember, the right Dharma is naturally manifesting itself before us, and darkness and distraction have dropped away already.


We're already living in reality, in the universe, and all aspects of our selves, including our deluded thoughts, ARE reality even now as we mistake them for a self and as representative of reality. In zazen we 'drop away' those thoughts and feelings and see them for what they really are and allow our body-mind to settle into what we are actually doing here and now -- sitting upright in reality.

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