Month: September 2013

Kobun Chino Otogawa had this to say about shikantaza:

Shikan taza sounds very strong. Shikan is understood as identical to taza. Shikan means “pure”, “one”, “only for it”. Ta is a very strong word. It shows moving activity. When you hit, that movement is called ta, so “strike” is ta. Za is the same as in the word zazen, sitting. To express the whole character, shikan taza is actually quite enough, but not enough until you experience it. Shikan taza is sitting for itself. You may say pure sitting for itself, not for something else.

Shinjin datsu raku is the same as shikan taza. Shinjin is “body/mind”. Body/mind is nothing but our whole life. This cannot be seen in two ways; body/mind is one thing. Datsu is “to refrain”, and “to drop from”. When you are dreaming some terrible dream, and the dream is cut off, that is called datsu. When you get rid of that dream, that also is called datsu. When you have a sword, the action of pulling a sword from its sheath is called datsu. So datsu has a very strong meaning of freeing from something. Another way to express it is : to have conquered something which hindered your existence, like attachments, delusions, or misunderstandings. Zazen itself is cutting off those conditions.

(jikoji.org/intro-aspects-“Shikantaza”)

If you find body/mind as one thing, you have only found where you are at this moment. When you find where you are at this moment, you will lose where you are at this moment unless you allow the sense of where you to shift and move, to have a freedom. This is how we fall asleep. This is how we wake up.

Any posture that is held for a period of time can allow for the observation of reciprocal activity related to pitch, yaw, and roll, as a matter of necessity in the relaxed movement of breath. I find pitch, yaw, and roll is actually present in the experience of location itself, along with the necessity of a freedom of sense. When I realize the necessity of a freedom of sense, I lose the doer, yet it’s the necessity and not the realization that acts.

Thanissaro Bhikku wrote:

Emptiness as a quality of dharmas, in the early canons, means simply that one cannot identify them as one’s own self or having anything pertaining to one’s own self… Emptiness as a mental state, in the early canons, means a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, noting simply, “There is this.” This mode is achieved through a process of intense concentration, coupled with the insight that notes more and more subtle levels of the presence and absence of disturbance.

(Wikipedia, “Sunyata” entry as of Sept. 19, 2020)

I don’t recall mention of emptiness in the first four sets of volumes of the Pali Canon sermons, the books which I think constitute the “early canons”. The attribution of meaning to emptiness by Thanissaro appears to me to be entirely his own, as is his description of a method by which his notion of a goal might be achieved.

This is what I recall:

Whatever… is material shape, past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, mean or excellent, or whatever is far or near, (a person), thinking of all this material shape as ‘This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my self’, sees it thus as it really is by means of perfect wisdom. Whatever is feeling… perception… the habitual tendencies… whatever is consciousness, past, future, or present (that person), thinking of all this consciousness as ‘This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my self’, sees it thus as it really is by means of perfect wisdom. (For one) knowing thus, seeing thus, there are no latent conceits that ‘I am the doer, mine is the doer’ in regard to this consciousness-informed body.

(MN III 18-19, Pali Text Society III pg 68)

In my piece Letting Go in Action, I say this about “perfect wisdom”:

“By means of perfect wisdom” is an affirmation that seeing through the conceit “mine is the doer” depends on a knowledge inherent in human nature, a knowledge that escapes the use of reason.

I say that because until a person experiences action of the body without the exercise of volition, they cannot find a way to believe it exists, even though they may have seen it in someone else during a performance of stage hypnosis or in the presence of someone like Kobun Chino Otogawa.

The practice of Gautama was the intent concentration on in-breaths and out-breaths, both before and after his enlightenment. That his observation of cause and effect could have been so selfless is the reason his descriptions have endured (but he also made mistakes as a teacher, as when his “meditation on the unlovely” resulted in the suicide of scores of monks).

For me, “this is not mine, this am I not, this is not myself” is a a part of freeing the mind in an in-breath or an out-breath, and yet freeing the mind is preceded by composing the mind in an in-breath or out-breath: this is proprioception alongside of equalibrioception as a nececessity in the movement of breath, and the experience of detachment and the cessation of volition in an in-breath or out-breath can take place out of necessity in an in-breath or out-breath. Mindfulness of detachment and mindfulness of the cessation of volition constitute the fourteenth and fifteenth aspects of Gautama’s practice, preceded by mindfulness of composing the mind, of freeing the mind, and of impermanence.

Deliverance from thought without grasping is non-thinking, but in this consciousness-informed body there can be no doer of non-thinking; it’s a matter of relaxed necessity in the movement of breath.