Fukan-Zazengi 14: Dance Unhindered By Dancer.


Master Dogen's instructions for zazen continue...


If we rise from sitting, we should move the body slowly, and stand up calmly. We should not be hurried or violent. 


It's considered bad form to move quickly in the zendo, as it may disturb others, but also our legs may have gone to sleep and standing up quickly could therefore result in a most excellent 'Zen fail' YouTube video.


We see in the past that those who transcended the common and transcended the sacred, and those who died while sitting or died while standing, relied totally on this power.


We allow both earthly, mundane thoughts and feelings to 'drop off' in zazen, but also 'spiritual' thoughts and feelings and daydreams. Although the main practice is sitting, this sitting informs the rest of our conduct in life (and death), including standing up.


Moreover, the changing of the moment, through the means of a finger, a pole, a needle, or a wooden clapper; and the experience of the state, through the manifestation of a whisk, a fist, a staff, or a shout, can never be understood by thinking and discrimination. How could they be known through mystical powers or practice and experience? They may be dignified behavior beyond sound and form. How could they be anything other than criteria that precede knowing and seeing?


All the instances mentioned -- involving a finger, a pole, a needle etc. -- are recorded encounters from Zen tradition where people have had insights into the nature of the self arising from actions and everyday objects. All actions take place before, and independent of, thinking and discrimination.

How can an action in the real world even be known? It appears to be gone even as it's happening.

They are 'beyond sound and form' in their immediacy and dynamism. They 'precede [our] knowing and seeing' of them. 

Our own sitting, and all our actions, can be realised like this as we 'drop off body and mind' -- actions are dynamic, immediate, completely ungraspable by the mind, and are therefore the manifest criteria of directly realising the nature of self.

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