Month: March 2013

I do think some of the Western, second-generation Zen teachers are actually established in the teaching (if I may say so), even though they may not be monsters, as Kobun Chino Otogawa once described his own teacher (the Rev. Chino).

The question is really, can they teach? At least, that’s the question in my mind.

My take is that Western Zen is a family affair, like Layman Pang and company.  A return to teaching both the esoteric and the exoteric without the closed fist of the teacher (and in mixed company) is the order of the day. Really the principal shortcoming of Western Zen teachers is their inability to vocalize the esoteric aspects of their own practice in a way that is meanful to others; “just sit zazen” may be good advice, but in the end I think it was the inner happiness that Gautama experienced as a child that gave us all a seated practice. Western Zen teachers don’t mention that happiness much.

I think most Western Zen teachers haven’t read the sermons of the Pali Canon; that’s probably because the Japanese Zen heritage emphasizes a person-to-person transmission of some kind of experiential wisdom, and study can be a stumbling block to that kind of wisdom.

I won’t argue, but to me the measure of the hall is in the instruction to the total novice, and most Western Zen teachers seem out of their depth in giving meaningful instruction about the practice to first-time sitters.

I have had to teach myself. This in large part because what I need to know is not being taught, and yet I feel it could be.

The pain in the left knee, I’m pretty sure is related to the support or lack thereof for the fifth and fourth lumbar vertebrae in inhalation and exhalation.

Cheng Man-Ch’ing prescribed relaxation from the shoulders to the finger tips, from the groin to the soles of the feet, and from the sacrum to the crown of the head, followed by relaxation of the chest, as a means to sink the ch’i to the tan-t’ien. His advice implies a relaxed extension up the spine, both in inhalation and in exhalation. Particularly in exhalation, the alignment of relaxed extension becomes a function of the ability to feel right to the surface of the skin: here’s a dermatone chart that shows the relationship between feeling in the legs and nerve exits at specific vertebrae that allow the ability to feel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatome_(anatomy)

I’m fascinated to see that at the tan-t’ien, it’s T10-12 in front, and L1-3 in back, so Gautama’s advice about “(conscious) behind as before, before as behind” would juxtapose feeling related to the alignment of the bottom-most chest vertebrae with feeling related to the alignment of the upper part of the lower spine.

“The ch’i can only sink to the tan-t’ien if the chest is relaxed”, as Cheng Man-Ch’ing said, and yet this statement doesn’t directly address the hypnogogic nature of the phenomena and how the necessity of breath is involved in that.

“The true man, breathing to his heels”- this is an old Chinese adage which concerns the ability to feel at the soles of the feet informing support at S1-L5 as a matter of necessity in the relaxed movement of breath.

The old man, Sasaki, knows all this intimately. Teaching it may distract people from their own sense of location, their own sense of gravity and proprioception, and so at Cobb Mountain last year he started his lecture with: “Good morning- where am I?”