Fukan-Zazengi 6: Freeing the Ears.

Master Dogen continues his zazen instructions with a short section of pithy directions on how to practice. I thought I'd offer just a few reflections on them...


In general, a quiet room is good for practicing [Za]zen, and food and drink are taken in moderation.


For the first while when I was practicing, I used to get crabby when outside noises distracted me from *MY* practice - people laughing in the street outside interfered with *MY* zazen, the sudden sound of car horns from the main road sullied *MY* pristine awareness, the cat scraping at the door prevented *MY* arse-clenchingly important 'enlightenment'...

After some time I came to notice that all these things ARE practice, and are the non-self manifesting moment-to-moment. Also, there is really no quiet/silence - there are always sounds from the environment while we're alive, sounds from the living body, that are our life here-and-now.

Zen Master Bansui posed the great koan 'who is the master that hears these sounds?', or simply 'who hears?'

While it's very sensible to try to get away from sounds (TV, radios, phones...) that will pull our attention outwardly into habitual modes of reacting and thinking, regular environmental sounds should not prevent us from 'turning the light around' and meeting our thoughts and feelings more directly in zazen. After a while of sitting, occassional sounds and thoughts and feelings start to flow together in plenty of space. No problem.

Eating and drinking is a fairly obvious one - it's more comfortable to sit if we're not bloated and dozy from having eaten a big meal, and sitting for 20 minutes needing to piss is not the most ease-ful of dharma-gates 😬

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