Dogen Zen Belfast

Nishijima Roshi's first aspect of zazen is a main point from Master Dogen's zazen instructions Fukanzazengi and the 'non-thinking'/'different from thinking' koan that Dogen discusses in Fukanzazengi. In other forms of Buddhist practice people try to cultivate concentration on an object such as the breath, or try to bring about certain states of calm abiding or mental stability... that comes in zazen, but we don't try to make it happen. Our thinking mind, that likes to think it's in control (it isn't!), might not like this at times, but it's through dropping off all intention and mental fabrication of methods and imagined goals that we directly clarify our experience. It's like 'taking a step off a one hundred-foot pole' as the old koan says -- No mental nor conceptual safety net. We throw ourselves open to the whole world. "Zazen is useless!," as Kodo Sawaki Roshi said, and that is a very advanced teaching in this regard, an...

Nishijima Roshi was very helpful in explaining Buddhism and Buddhist practice to people. While he always maintained that Zazen, or action itself, is ultimately ungraspable and beyond words he didn't shy away from talking directly about what practice is about. He wanted to demystify it, to remove the 'woo-woo' factor, and make it approachable for contemporary peoples I think. In a nice booklet called 'Introduction to Buddhism and the Practice of Zazen' (available to buy online) he lays out four aspects of practicing zazen, that can help orientate us to what the practice is about. I'll look at them separately over the next few posts, but this is how he introduces them in the booklet... What do we experience in Zazen? Zazen is the simplest form of action, and when we are practicing Zazen we do not intentionally think about anything or concentrate on our feelings and perceptions. We sit in a simple non-discriminating state where our body-and-mind are balanced and un...

The old Zen texts don't have an awful lot to say about what we in the west call 'feelings' or 'emotions'. In the traditional zazen instructions, as discussed previously, we're just told to drop stuff off - 'drop off body and mind' - without much discussion of the implications of this, or of the qualitative content of it. A bit can be teased out around feelings though, I think, because many of us will have 'emotional baggage', patterns of reactivity around feelings which arise from our life-experience, and practice can bring this to the fore in our experience. Feelings, in zazen, can be seen as just that. In the calm clarity that we sometimes settle into in practice we can sense directly that a feeling is a sensation in our body to which we mentally ascribe a name ('anger', 'grief', 'shame', 'happiness' etc) and very often a 'good' or 'bad' designation... we assign attraction or aversion to the base ...

When I was at college as a 'mature student' (mature in years, but nothing else!) I used to walk by the college chaplaincy door and notice a poster on it that said - "WHATEVER YOU BELIEVE, BELIEVE SOMETHING!" I suppose, like many otherwise non-religious people, I had my basic underlying beliefs about how the world was and how to be in it, but was never really an active believer in religion or a God or gods. I used to imagine that it might be pleasent and comforting to believe in that way, but I could never bring myself to really commit to it. Some time later I began practicing Zen Buddhism. My teacher said that Buddhism was unusual as a religion (to the western mind) because it was more characterised by doubt than belief - 'doubt' has quite a negative association in western discourse maybe, but what he was indicating might be more positively phrased as 'questioning' - Buddhism requires us to question deeply the nature of things and self. Nishijima Roshi...

The main thing that drew me to Nishijima Roshi's (pictured above) and Master Dogen's approaches to Zen is that they are very direct. Both teachers emphasised that what we realise in Zen practice is that we already ARE reality. In practicing just dropping off the thoughts and feelings that we habitually identify with we realise directly what we already are unhindered by our thoughts and feelings and personal brain-narratives to the contrary. It doesn't come in from some far-off mystical realm. It happens here. It's already always happening right here and now. This seems important, because when I first approached Buddhism I got involved with a group based around a Tibetan teacher. In that group there were levels of practice you had to obtain, gradual empowerments to practice to be won (and bought) from the Master, hierarchies of students you had to negotiate, secret teachings doled out to the most loyal and deferential, bizarre behaviours passed off as 'crazy wisdom...

Hatred, including racism, is unprocessed grief. It's unprocessed suffering turned outwards to the world so as to avoid a person looking inwards at their own grief. Politicians, since ancient times, manipulate this in people. But it's up to adult human beings to take responsibility for and process their own grief. In Zen practice we sit and allow our grief to come and unfold as it arises. "Adult practice" as Kodo Sawaki Roshi called it.

"The Irish Buddhist is the biography of an extraordinary Irish emigrant, sailor, and migrant worker who became a Buddhist monk and anti-colonial activistn early twentieth-century Asia. Born Laurence Carroll in 1856, U Dhammaloka energetically challenged the values and power of the British Empire and scandalized the colonial establishment of the 1900s. He rallied Buddhists across Asia, set up schools, and argued down Christian missionaries--often using western atheist arguments. He was tried for sedition, tracked by police and intelligence services, and was thought to have died at least twice. His story illuminates the forgotten margins and interstices of imperial power, the complexities of class, ethnicity and religious belonging in colonial Asia, and the fluidity of identity in the high Victorian period." "Too often, the story of the pan-Asian Buddhist revival movement and Buddhism's remaking as a world religion has been told 'from above, ' highlighting scho...