Feb 04 2025 14 mins
In the new Thursday Workshop I have initiated for 2025, I am attempting to lay out in great detail what I believe to be the most natural way to meditate: zazen before Zen, so to speak. It may not be your daddy's meditation, but it is that of our ancient forefathers.
Meditation, after all, was not the exclusive discovery of the historical Buddha, and his realization could not have been the first in the long presence of humankind on the planet, just the first recorded in history. What he discovered represents a return to something more primordial than Buddhism; Buddha was not a Buddhist, after all.
Traditional teachings emphasize the perfecting of the Six Paramitas, which enumerate both personal and social dimensions of the place of Zen philosophy and practice in the cultures of India, China, Korea, Japan, and the far East. They are variously translated as charity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom.
But in Zen practice, the perfecting of the paramitas in our daily lives is not merely a matter of remembering and agreeing with them in principle. It is, instead, recommended that we observe them in everything we do, within each dimension of the Eightfold Path; most especially including meditation, the eighth in the usual order, and the first place we begin to make effort. As Master Dogen is quoted as saying, In zazen what precept or ethical principle, is not fulfilled? The main method of Zen cannot be detached from the Eightfold Path, nor can it be left out of the process of perfecting the other five paramitas.
Posture Paramita
In fact, in zazen we begin by taking up another process of perfecting — perfecting the posture. Matsuoka-roshi would often say that you have to work your way through every bone in your body, and suggested that we develop an attitude of continually aiming at the perfect posture, never imagining that we have achieved it. This amounts to a practical application of Dogen's cryptic phrase, "making effort without aiming at it."
This is what I refer to as "posture paramita": an exploratory search for the natural posture. Much like the proposition that we are already enlightened but we don’t yet know it, this approach suggests that our posture is already perfect, but we keep interfering with it. Much of our training in zazen method is about how to stop doing that.
The Natural Way to Meditate
One of the misconceptions I would like to address up-front is that we can do zazen the "right" way — and its corollary, the "wrong" way. While the ancient teachings mention "right meditation" along with all the other "rights" in the Eightfold Path, this translators' choice is not meant to indicate that there is an absolutely right way to meditate, as opposed to wrong ways. The "right" in this construction is more like a verb than an adjective — as in righting a capsized boat, in order to continue sailing. Or righting a wheel that is out of round, so that it rolls smoothly. In Zen, we continually correct as we go, when we detect that we are off-course. The vacillation is built into our conscious mind, continually swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other.
For example, most practitioners interpret the instructions for zazen as strictly indicating that we are to sit stock still. Don't move. And empty the mind of thoughts. The former command to sit still may comprise a more pedantic obiter dictum in Rinzai praxis than in Soto Zen; the latter notion of the empty mind, a Western misconstruing of Master Dogen's "non-thinking." But most Americans, when first approaching Zen meditation, probably harbor these two ideas as a preconception. To which I say "good luck" with either of these notions, especially in combination.
Unless you give yourself permission to move, you will never discover why it is that we sit still.
Unless you give yourself permission to think, you may never realize what Dogen meant by "non-thinking."
This was Master Dogen's expression of the natural state of attention in zazen. It is neither thinking, nor not thinking, which are opposite sides of the same coin. We sit without relying on thinking, our default go-to in most other areas of endeavor.
Feeling Gravity
Take an example from early childhood. Gravity is said to be the "constant teacher." As a toddler just beginning to transition from crawling to walking, we stand up, we fall down. We stand up again, we fall down again. This natural process may be the origin of the old saying that Dogen adapted, "Fall down seven times, get up eight." I always wonder why he didn't say "get up seven."
We don't learn to stand and walk by thinking it through. At that age it is not likely that there is much thinking going on at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. We might better regard it as a process of adaptation. We are learning to navigate and negotiate the causes and conditions of our world, in which gravity is a major player, by trial and error. Which involves intuition and observation rather than intellectual analysis.
Similarly, the very act of sitting and facing a blank wall for extended periods of time is a counter-intuitive and counter-cultural act. That is, its simplicity sets aside the usual resort to thinking and analysis, bringing forth the intuitive, instinctual side of awareness.
Taken for Granted
Once we can successfully balance, standing and walking in the field of gravity, it becomes less and less of a concern, and eventually goes subliminal. We are less and less aware of its influence. Until we take up athletics, dancing, or some other activity that challenges our security in the face of gravitational attraction, such as mountain climbing or walking tightropes. Maybe bungie-jumping.
As Master Dogen was wont to say, after laying out an analogy to help us grasp the principles of Zen, "All things are like this." That is, we adapt to all sensations over time, becoming less acutely aware of all the multiple stimuli that are acting upon us at any given time. In doing so physically and sensorially, we take more and more of our world for granted, until some natural or manmade disaster comes along as a wakeup call.
Stepping Back
Another natural way to de-condition ourselves and recover our awareness of the fundamentals of our existence — like gravity — is to practice zazen. Finding and engaging the most natural posture — upright seated meditation — combined with the most natural breathing pattern, we afford ourselves the best opportunity for discovering, or recovering, our most natural, original mind.
As our attention withdraws from our usual ruminations over the ongoing conditions of our lives that we find unsatisfactory (dukkha) — in what Master Dogen referred to as the "backward step" — we naturally return to a more primordial state of awareness, sometimes referred to as "bare awareness," becoming aware of, or remembering, what it is to exist as a sentient being. This "returning to" is the root meaning of "refuge" — refugo, refugare from the Latin — rather than escaping or hiding out, we are returning to familiar territory, our true home.
I would say, remembering what it means to be a "fully conscious human being," but Zen's teachings caution us to accept that we are not necessarily fully conscious — in fact that we are largely asleep. The Zen Buddhist proposition regarding consciousness is relatively simple in concept, but difficult in execution, as we say of certain problems and processes in design thinking. That is, we were all asleep last night, and we all woke up this morning, and we all know the difference between the two. Although lucid dreaming sometimes calls the difference into question.
One key tenet of Buddhism, that I do not believe is characteristic of any other religious or spiritual practice, is that — as wide awake as we may seem to be at the moment — we are still asleep, to a certain degree. And that we can wake up — fully — as Buddha did. The honorific means, literally, the "fully awakened one." And that we will know the difference.
This suggests that we can do this on our own recognizance. We don't need no stinking teachers, as the threefold Lotus Sutra reminds us. Zen is pointing at something natural, primordial, that comes with the territory of being a human being. We look to teachings for guidance, but we cannot depend upon them, nor upon our teachers, for our own insight. In this matter, Zen is truly the ultimate in do-it-yourself, which helps to explain its appeal to the Western mindset of independent thinking, the cult of the individual.
As we turn our attention away from the pressing concerns of the social sphere, shining the bright light of Zen meditation upon the personal sphere, the natural process of sensory adaptation will set in. By stressing stillness and sameness over motion and change, we begin to experience motion in the stillness, on deeper and more subtle levels. As Matsuoka-roshi would often say, "Zen goes deeper." At bottom, we embrace the reality that these apparent differences are really not separate, that nothing has really changed from the beginning. It is what it is, what it has always been, and what it will always be: everchanging.
Please plan to join our new online and onsite practice opportunities for 2025. My new Thursday evening Advanced Workshop, in particular, is designed to take a deep dive into the more subtle secrets of zazen and Zen.