Category: A Natural Mindfulness

In one of his letters, twelfth-century Ch’an teacher Yuanwu wrote:

Actually practice at this level for twenty or thirty years and cut off all the verbal demonstrations and creeping vines and useless devices and states, until you are free from conditioned mind. Then this will be the place of peace and bliss where you stop and rest.

Thus it is said: “If you are stopping now, then stop. If you seek a time when you finish, there will never be a time when you finish.” (1)

In my teenage years, I became keenly aware of the “creeping vines” of my mind. I read a lot of Alan Watts books on Zen, thinking that might help, but I soon found out that what he had to say did nothing to cut off the “creeping vines”.

I was looking for something Shunryu Suzuki described in one of his lectures, though I didn’t know it at the time:

So, when you practice zazen, your mind should be concentrated in your breathing and this kind of activity is the fundamental activity of the universal being. If so, how you should use your mind is quite clear. Without this experience, or this practice, it is impossible to attain the absolute freedom. (2)

I began to try to sit zazen, based on the illustrations in the back of “Three Pillars of Zen”, by Philip Kapleau.

Zazen is almost always taught to beginners as sitting with a straight back and paying close attention to inhalation and exhalation. With regard to the straight back, Moshe Feldenkrais wrote:

“Sit straight!” “Stand straight!” This is often said by mothers, teachers, and others who give this directive in good faith and with the fullest confidence in what they are saying. If you were to ask them just how one does sit straight or stand straight, they would answer, “What do you mean? Don’t you know what straight means? Straight is straight!”

Some people do indeed stand and walk straight, with their backs erect and their heads held high. And of course there is an element of “standing straight in their posture.

If you watch a child or an adult who has been told to sit or stand straight, it is evident that he agrees that there is something wrong with the way he is managing his body, and he will quickly try to straighten his back or raise his head. He will do this thinking that he has thereby achieved the proper posture; but he cannot maintain this “correct” position without continuous effort. As soon as his attention shifts to some activity that is either necessary, urgent, or interesting, he will slump back to his original position. (3)

For many years, whenever I sat at a zendo with a teacher who walked the room during a sitting, the teacher would invariably stop behind me and correct my posture. I generally couldn’t maintain their correction to the end of the sitting.

With regard to close attention to inhalation and exhalation, Shunryu Suzuki described such attention as only a “preparatory practice”:

… usually in counting breathing or following breathing, you feel as if you are doing something, you know– you are following breathing, and you are counting breathing. This is, you know, why counting breathing or following breathing practice is, you know, for us it is some preparation– preparatory practice for shikantaza because for most people it is rather difficult to sit, you know, just to sit. (4)

Shikantaza, or “just sitting”, is emphasized in the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, the school to which Shunryu Suzuki belonged.

The Soto school was founded in the 13^th century by Eihei Dogen. In one of Dogen’s most famous essays, called “Genjo Koan”, he wrote:

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. (5)

Dogen said nothing here about sitting up straight or paying close attention to the breath. Instead, he asserted that “practice occurs” as a natural consequence of finding “your place where you are”. Dogen went on to say that the activity effected by practice is precisely “actualizing the fundamental point”, even though he never explained what the “fundamental point” was.

Neuroscientists describe “your place where you are” as your “embodied self-location”:

A key aspect of the bodily self is self-location, the experience that the self is localized at a specific position in space within one’s bodily borders (embodied self-location). (6)

Dogen’s “Genjo Koan” can be paraphrased in terms of “self-location”:

When you find the “specific position in space” where you feel your bodily self to be, activity in the body begins to coordinate by virtue of that place.  A relationship between the place of “embodied self-location” and activity in the body comes forward, and as that relationship comes forward, practice occurs.  Through such practice, the point that is the “specific position in space” of embodied self-location is manifested in activity.

Most of us are unaware of our breathing most of the time. Moshe Feldenkrais wrote of how people can be unaware that they hold their breath in getting up from a chair. He explained why the breath is held:

The tendency to hold one’s breath is instinctive, part of an attempt to prevent the establishment of shearing stresses or forces likely to shift the vertebrae horizontally, out of the vertical alignment of the spinal column that they constitute. (7)

Holding the breath creates pressure in the abdomen, pressure that allows the “fluid ball” of the abdomen to bear load and thereby relieves shearing stress on the spine (D. L. Bartilink, J Bone Joint Surg Br. 1957 Nov; 39-B[4]:718-25). There is in addition an apparent mechanism of support for the spine from the fascial tissue that runs behind the sacrum and spine, a mechanism that relies on the lever arm of the abdominals to work against the extensor muscles of the spine to align the vertebrae of the spine, and thereby allow pressure in the “fluid ball” of the abdomen to effect a load-bearing displacement of fascia.

I delve into the science of spinal kinesiology in my last post, although the primary benefit of the science for me has been to free my mind from various common misapprehensions about posture.

Feldenkrais described an effortless way to overcome the tendency to hold the breath in standing:

…When the center of gravity has really moved forward over the feet a reflex movement will originate in the old nervous system and straighten the legs; this automatic movement will not be felt as an effort at all. (8)

Feldenkrais stipulated, there must be “no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control”:

… there must be no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control, regardless of whether this effort is known and deliberate or concealed from the consciousness by habit. (9)

Feldenkrais suggested shifting the center of gravity over the feet. In Omori Sogen’s “Introduction to Zen Training”, Hida Haramitsu advised shifting the center of the body’s weight over “the triangular base of the seated body” in seated meditation:

We should balance the power of the hara (area below the navel) and the koshi (area at the rear of the pelvis) and maintain equilibrium of the seated body by bringing the center of the body’s weight in line with the center of the triangular base of the seated body. (10)

Haramitsu’s advice is similar to Feldenkrais’s, in that a shift in the center of gravity (“the center of the body’s weight”) is expected to generate the necessary activity without recourse to “muscular effort deriving from voluntary control”.

Gautama made reference to the sense of gravity in some of his descriptions of concentration, although the reference was indirect. Here’s Gautama’s description of the initial concentration:

Herein… the (noble) disciple, making self-surrender the object of (their) thought, lays hold of concentration, lays hold of one-pointedness.  (The disciple), aloof from sensuality, aloof from evil conditions, enters on the first trance, which is accompanied by thought directed and sustained, which is born of solitude, easeful and zestful, and abides therein. (11)

The feelings of “zest” and “ease” are to be extended as a part of that concentration:

… (a person) steeps, drenches, fills, and suffuses this body with zest and ease, born of solitude, so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded by this lone-born zest and ease. (12)

Words like “steeps” and “drenches” convey that a sense of gravity accompanies the feelings of zest and ease as they are suffused throughout the body.

In Gautama’s description of the first concentration, concentration begins when a person lays hold of “one-pointedness”, something Gautama also referred to as “one-pointedness of mind”. Translated into the language of the neurobiologists, concentration begins when consciousness is retained at the “specific position in space” of “embodied self-location”.

The zest and ease of the initial concentration are a result of the effortlessness of the automatic activity initiated by gravity where one-pointedness of mind takes place. To drench the entire body with the feelings of zest and ease such that “there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded” ensures that the consciousness retained with “embodied self-location” can remain “one-pointed”, even as the “specific position” of “embodied self-location” shifts and moves.

There can come a moment when the experience of consciousness retained with “embodied self-location” becomes the experience of “embodied self-location” retained with consciousness. Dogen continued his “Genjo Koan”:

When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point… (5)

To paraphrase:

“When you find your way at this moment”, a relationship between the freedom of consciousness and the automatic activity of the body comes forward, and as that relationship comes forward, practice occurs. Through such practice, the place of occurrence of consciousness in the moment is manifested as the activity of the body.

“When you find your way at this moment”, the activity of the body in posture and in the movement of breath becomes solely by virtue of the singular location of consciousness.

At such a time, said Gautama:

… (one suffuses one’s) body with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind. (12)

The “purity” that suffuses the body is the pureness of the mind without any will or intention with regard to the body.

I believe that activity of the body solely by virtue of the location of consciousness is what Shunryu Suzuki referred to as “just sitting”. “Doing something” with regard to the body or the breath, whether “known and deliberate” or “concealed from the consciousness by habit”, has ceased.

Suzuki cautioned:

Sometimes when you think that you are doing zazen with an imperturbable mind, you ignore the body, but it is also necessary to have the opposite understanding at the same time. Your body is practicing zazen in imperturbability while your mind is moving. (13)

The freedom of “your way at this moment” is touched on in daily living through “your place where you are”. That’s Yuanwu’s “place of peace and bliss where you stop and rest”.

When the body rests from volition, so does the mind, even in the midst of activity. In my experience, that is how the “creeping vines” of the mind come to be cut off.