Month: February 2010

(from a correspondence with a friend)

hope your sitting is going well. I am still inspired by our conversation, and tonight I chance upon these words from Shunryu Suzuki:

“You may say that your mind is practicing zazen and ignore your body, the practice of your body. 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.”

Tassajara, Sunday, June 28, 197 (edited by Bill Redican)

(This of course is from a longer lecture, off David Chadwick’s site at www.cuke.com)

If that’s so, then the question might be, is the mind that is moving practicing zazen like the other parts of the body? Suzuki says “Check to see that each part of your body is doing zazen independently.”

So the action comes out of the part in mind, and out of the mind as a part, that’s how I see zazen.

all for now, hope it s a good night up there.

Alright, I like to talk to myself, it’s true. Here I am, doing so again in the disguise of a comment on comments on comments.

My experience has been this: at some point in my practice, the long and the short of inhalation and exhalation enters in. It’s taken me a lot of years and a lot of luck to discover that the “cross-legged” posture is more about the cranial-sacral rhythm than the pulmonary rhythm, but having found that out I still discover that there is a moment where the apprehension of the character of the specific movement of breath enters in. To my mind, this is in fact the most difficult aspect of the Gautamid s practice to discover in my own experience (even though in the “intent concentration on in-breaths and out-breaths” he goes on to describe mindfulness of impermanence, detachment, cessation, and relinquishment).

I can’t speak to the context of Dogen s remarks, or those of his teacher, but I can say that as in hypnosis, only the positive and substantive suggestion makes it for me on some level. The Gautamid was remarkable for saying positive, substantive things about the relationships that matter, and many Zen teachers who no doubt were (are) saints in their own right have been content to be the left hand to his right, and speak mostly in “no” and “not”. I myself have found the vocabulary I needed to learn to sit the lotus in the literature of cranial-sacral therapy, in the facts of anatomy, and in the teachings in the sutta volumes of the Pali Canon.

In that vocabulary, the place of occurrence of consciousness is dictated largely by the needs of the pulmonary and cranial-sacral respirations. Gudo Nishijima speaks of SNS and PNS, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system; turns out one of these concerns the heart and lungs and chest area, and the other concerns the sacrum and cranium (and the guts). I wish Gudo were able to explain his theory more completely, but I can understand that he cannot (at least I haven’t seen the explanation, if he has it). At any rate, the key for me is that the place of occurrence of consciousness can precipitate action in the body, the sense of place in the contact of the six senses has impact on the fascial stretch throughout the body as consciousness takes place, and the impact of the sense of place on the stretch can open feeling to the surface of the skin throughout the body.

The other difficulty in the Gautamid’s teaching is his use of the word impact, as in the sermon on the six-fold sense field in majjhima nikaya. Kobun Chino said that the literal meaning of the components of the word shikantaza is something like “pure hit sit”, and I believe this “hit” is the impact in the fascial stretch of the occurrence of consciousness(and activity is initiated by that stretch, without the exercise of volition), and this accords well with the Gautamid’s teaching.

My understanding is that the four truths concerning suffering only apply when suffering exists. The Gautamid described suffering as “in short, the five groups of grasping”, so when there is suffering, then the origin of suffering is grasping in the five groups, the cessation of ignorance leads to the cessation of grasping, and the path that leads to the cessation of ignorance is the eight-fold path. The point I’m making here is that the expectation is never that suffering goes away altogether, or is overcome. The Gautamid’s enlightenment was recognizing suffering, the origin or suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path, and these truths apply when suffering exists. That s my understanding.

I guess I could cite as evidence the fact that the Gautamid described his practice before and after enlightenment as “the intent concentration on in-breaths and out-breaths” (samyutta nikaya vol 5). He didn’t turn a corner and stop practicing, after his enlightenment; he didn’t claim to have made an end of suffering at some point in his life. When he brought the five ascetics into the order, he said, “come, live the life of purity to make an end of suffering”, so the question is really how you live the life of purity. The three poisons he could dispense with at will, yet he said that after he spoke to his disciples he returned to “that sign of concentration in which I ever abide”; that means he left his sign of concentration when he spoke, and any temporary extinction of suffering he might have attained through concentration. In paranibana sutta he describes his condition in his old age as like a cart, kept rolling through the assistance of rope ties and temporary fixes everywhere, due to its rickety nature.

In the sermon on the six-fold sense fields in majjhima nikaya, he states that anyone, knowing and seeing as it really is sense organ, sense object, consciousness out of contact between sense organ and sense object, impact due to consciousness, and feeling associated with impact has already purified action of body, speech, and livelihood, and in such a one the other elements of the eight-fold path and all the factors of enlightenment can be expected to develop and reach fruition. As I wrote somewhere below, everyone realizes consciousness, impact, and feeling with regard to sense as it really is in the course of a day; the significance of the realization is hidden, until an end of suffering is necessary.