Fukan-Zazengi 16: The Grass is Always Greener...


Master Dogen's instructions for zazen continue...


In general, [the patriarchs] of this world and of other directions, of the Western Heavens and of the Eastern Lands, all similarly maintain the Buddha’s posture, and solely indulge in the custom of our religion. They simply devote themselves to sitting, and are caught by the still state.


Master Dogen sees zazen as the thing that unifies all of Buddhism and those who practice it. Zen tradition is sometimes seen as a 'special transmission' of Buddhist truth 'outside' of the scriptures and the rest of Buddhism, but Master Dogen didn't agree with this. He saw Zen practice, especially zazen, as just the essence of Buddhism itself.

When somebody sits zazen droppin off body and mind, dropping off time and place, they are sitting in the same place and time as all other practitioners who are doing the same thing.


Although there are myriad distinctions and thousands of differences, we should just practice [Za]zen and pursue the truth.


In zazen, things remain what they are (a great diversity of things) but they are no longer encumbered by our conceptual relationships with them based on ideas, imagined narratives and senses of a self.


Why should we abandon our own seat on the floor, to come and go without purpose through the dusty borders of foreign lands? If we misplace one step we pass over the moment of the present.


When I first encountered Buddhism I was very much interested in its exotic cultural manifestations in foreign lands - I wanted, craved maybe, a cultural and spiritual experience that took me out of my own boring and repetitive life. I projected a lot of ideas and expectations onto it from my western socio-cultural perspective. The classic study of this sort of ideation, and its consequences in the real world, is the book 'Orientalism' by Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said.

After a process of stripping away our wants and dreams tied up with bells, robes, gurus, magical incantations and such, we might realise that the essence of Buddhist practice is only ever unfolding prior to our various imaginings right here, right now, wherever it is we happen to find ourselves.

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