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Text of the page (random words):
door just like this that was his sense of ceremony when he died his whole funeral was that his disciple koun ejō chanted a very short little sutra three times and that was it that was the end and it feels appropriate given who he was the joke about dōgen is that everybody wants to train the way dōgen trained but that probably the only person who trained the way that dōgen trained was dōgen in all likelihood the tradition started to change as soon as he died no one had the patience to do every little thing just like that so immediately people start tweaking it or they said you know every fifth day you can skip that one part and so on koun ejō followed then tettsu gikai and so we arrive at keizan i have to confess i don t know deeply about keizan s history i don t know where keizan came from or maybe i did at one point but i ve forgotten because i m wrapped up in all of this too but when keizan came along he was considered to be a popularizer of sōtō zen until that time it had been a bunch of people in a monastery in the mountains with very little contact with the outside world following this rigorous schedule then keizan came along and he made it make sense to people outside the tradition and one of the ways that he did that was by synthesizing with things that people were already doing including these ceremonies in which we chant and we offer merit so under keizan ceremony in the sense of ceremonial achieved a new importance what we find today is that even though there was kind of a political decision to acknowledge keizan as a second founder and honestly i think it s realistic to say that the lineage may not have continued without someone like keizan coming along there s always been this feeling that dōgen was the pure thing and that keizan somehow muddied the waters a little bit it s as if he s earned our gratitude but maybe not our full respect one genuine distinction between dōgen and keizan is that up until keizan the story of the lineage is that the buddha transmitted to mahakasyapa mahakasyapa transmitted to ananda and so on and it was one to one one teacher one student and then one student and then one student all the way to dōgen still just one dōgen had one student to whom he transmitted or at least one student we would call his successor that student had one successor that student had one successor but that student was keizan and keizan transmitted to two and that was all it took for the sōtō lineage to explode because those two transmitted to a few and then a few and a few and this thing that had been a straight line suddenly had branches and the branches had branches so today when we chant the lineage we only chant to keizan because that s the last name upon which we can all agree that too was instrumental in keeping the school going but when we tell the story there s a little bit of come on you couldn t choose one it seems wishy washy keizan s just not coming out on top keizan was not as prolific as dōgen but he wrote a few things of huge importance one is what we call now the keizan shingi which was his set of monastic standards up until then everyone trained using the eihei shingi which was dōgen s set but today no one does if you train at a monastery in japan you ll basically follow a modified version of the keizan shingi in part because it just feels more practical there were philosophical reasons why for example in dōgen s schedule the monastic day begins the night before in his schedule there s a moment in the evening when it s no longer the day that it has been and now it s the next day these things make sense if you go through old chinese texts but keizan said well we wake up in the morning so the day will start the way normal people think that the day starts that i think was well received keizan s other really critical text which we too often forget about is called zazen yōjinki notes on what to be aware of in zazen these are his zazen instructions and they are not the same as dōgen s not in conflict but definitely not the same they don t feel the same here s the opening just a taste translation from the art of just sitting essential writings on the zen practice of shikantaza sitting is the way to clarify the ground of experiences and to rest at ease in your actual nature dōgen in his instructions for zazen fukanzazengi says zazen wa shuzen ni wa arazu zazen is not learning zen zazen is not some volitional practice whatever zen it is it isn t zen that you re doing and then he goes on to say in fact it is the dharma gate of joyful ease so they re starting out on the same page here keizan is saying sitting is the way to clarify the ground of experiences that s worth talking about and to rest at ease in your actual nature this is called the display of the original face and revealing the landscape of the basic ground so he s beginning from this idea that there s a starting point a kind of home base for a human being he calls this the ground of experiences actual nature the original face the basic ground and then he says we re clarifying this and we re revealing this and we re resting at ease in this when we encounter anything like this it s critical to not go where our mind automatically goes which is to think of whatever this is as something other or something lost or something obscured when he says your actual nature we think oh i have another nature that s not my actual nature and it can sound very exciting because i have a real one i m going to find it i m going to sit in zazen and i m going to reveal the thing that is true and all the other stuff will just disappear there s adventure there s something you re going to find there s a diamond there s a pearl that is not what he means i m sometimes hesitant to say something like that because who knows what anyone actually meant but i m confident about this because he s coming out of a conversation and the conversation is never that the conversation is never that there is something that is the kernel of you or that is an unformed part of you that should be formed because that would be somehow more true the conversation is that you right here right now are one hundred percent but also that it probably doesn t feel that way why not a lot of it has to do with this notion of resting at ease we don t rest at ease in the same way that the brainwave patterns of zazen so often happen to be the same as the brainwave patterns of deep dreamless sleep the experience of zazen has to do with when you re not trying to do zazen the only thing more difficult than doing something correctly is not trying to do something that you think can be done correctly while you re doing it what happens then is that when we sit we take up this posture and then we contract around it if you do yoga you know that in order to stretch a muscle you have to contract a muscle there s no pure stretch unless you re on a rack intuitively we understand this so we sit here and we think i m going to stretch my mind and the way that we stretch our mind sometimes is by contracting everything else or more to the point maybe we think i m going to stretch the part of my mind that i think is the spiritual part of my mind and the way that i m going to do that is by clenching the rest of my mind so that nothing else can interfere nothing else can come in guilty i am this is why or this is part of why when we do a newcomers night i ask everyone to go ahead and contract from the beginning take a memory or a fantasy or a regret or a hope and just go ahead before you even start wrap yourself around it like you re a cat with a ball hold it and play with it exhaust yourself around that thing and then experience just dropping it not pushing it out but getting tired if you don t really recognize what contraction is then you don t know what it is to let go and most of the time we don t realize the degree to which we re clenching around something i was thinking about this recently because i attended a talk by isshō fujita in which he led us through an exercise and said that to find the posture of zazen the first thing you do is you find the posture that it s not he continued something like this go ahead and roll your back roll back on your hips so that your back is round and your head is forward and feel how even though this feels lazy at the same time it s exhausting to sit in this way you re actually working really hard you re working really hard in your stomach to do this and then once you ve done that go ahead and roll forward and then roll your hips forward as far as you can so that you feel that stretch in your back you re trying to push your belly button down to the ground and roll your shoulders back this is the other way we do it and then drop that zazen is in between it s not volitional sitting down is volitional there s a choice to be made there but then you sit and you let the blocks just stack leaning back is not a stack leaning forward is not a stack and holding yourself rigidly in place means the stack isn t supporting itself but somewhere in there you can find a place where your body isn t doing anything now i m saying this and you re thinking ah there s a right way and i m going to find it next time i m going to find it and i m going to do it just like that and i m going to find the place in the middle and as soon as i find it there s going to be a locking sound ker chunk and i ll just stay right there that s not it that s not it either if you watch sped up video of someone doing zazen it is never a person who is perfectly still if a person is perfectly still the whole time they re doing it i m going to come out and say they re doing it wrong because in that perfect rigid stillness there s no relationship to the body that s someone who s just able to clench for forty five minutes what you really see when you see people doing zazen if they re doing it in an active way and an honest way is that there re sitting still but every once in a while there might be a little turn or they kind of find their neck a little bit they re always in the process of settling in in that same talk by isshō fujita i learned a wonderful new word pandiculation pandiculation refers to the involuntary movements that we make in response to our bodies think of how when you yawn you stretch maybe this time i do it like this because my body just needs to do that i don t think about it if you think about it it gets really weird if you plan it if you think i m going to yawn and this time i ll do the wide arms but next time i yawn oh maybe i ll do something else that s weird there s something that your body just does you see this with animals you see this with cats they just move this is my understanding of what pandiculation is and when we re doing zazen if we are actually being active in zazen if we re really bringing ourselves to zazen and to this idea of rest then there are lots of small versions of pandiculation going on all the time while we sit not these big stretches but we re responding we re here and we re letting ourselves move because it s not that my mind is sitting in some sort of crystal cage doing zazen and this is the platform for it that needs to hold it up it s that this body mind is doing zazen the whole thing the whole organism and the whole organism really the point of the whole thing is that the whole organism actually knows what it s doing there s a degree to which zazen or the tradition behind zazen rests on a faith that we already kind of understand what to do we re already at a hundred percent so there s a trust when you sit to a degree yes there s trust in the posture because we ve been taught this but then once we get there there s this other trust that we know how to do this and so we adjust a little bit we trust our bodies to do this and in that trust we relax not because it s supposed to feel a particular way but because it s not supposed to feel a particular way it just is what it is i ll post parts 2 6 soon this and many other talks can be found on the zns podcast you can support both zen nova scotia and the podcast by clicking here share this tweet share on reddit opens in new window reddit email a link to a friend opens in new window email more print opens in new window print share on tumblr like loading 9 comments posted in uncategorized no big deal dec 5 i love my wife and i tell her i love you a lot when we wake up when one of us leaves when we text when we meet up again when we go to bed when she s tired and uses japanese grammar for english and sounds hilarious when our kids are adorable i just say it if you were to read a transcript of our daily conversations you d probably determine that i love you for me no longer has any meaning or serves any purpose here s the beautiful thing you d be right in the beginning of course it meant a lot and it did a lot i no longer remember the details of the first time i told her or anyone i love you but i know i planned for it i was nervous guaranteed i thought it would change things my own sense of commitment the atmosphere between us how she saw me it meant things were going to the next level and for a long time after those little stories continued i really did love her but i love you was transactional i d say it in hopes of making her feel good or of making me feel like a good person or i d say it as a way of smoothing something over as a reminder that everything s ok or because i thought well this is something we do now if i didn t say it one day i d think that i d failed i d dropped the ball but now i don t expect anything from i love you no magic no reward no orchestra it doesn t make my wife weak in the knees it s more like a sound i make or like breathing she says it too of course we pass the phrase back and forth and the actual words don t seem to matter much when i say i love you i don t think i mean i love you anymore not really i don t consider i or you i ve been saying this constantly for about fifteen years now it s shorthand for something too big and too complicated to say in words it includes my entire sense of commitment it s my past and it s my direction it s code i like to think i also express it in lots of other nonverbal ways as well but i love you is the most direct it s honest i just don t know exactly what it means anymore i don t know what zazen means either but i used to think i did i knew what i wanted from it and what it meant about me and i thought it was something i did there was a subject and an object but after twenty five years of it more than anything it just feels honest there s something we recognize in that posture we know it when we see it and we know it when we do it there s peace and power and poise of a kind we intuitively grasp and that all adds up to something something i want to express and the best way i know is to simply do it at the heart of zen practice is the notion of doing something anything but especially zazen for its own sake not for gain not as preparation for something else but as a complete ...
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