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Text of the page (random words):
of steer them toward eventually being the thing that they are in this moment nothing gets fixed it s impossible because for something to be fixed in this moment is for this moment not to be this moment in this moment you have what s been offered do nothing at all don t fabricate any things with the six senses don t create again because these are instructions for zazen zazen is where we start you sit in zazen and you try to make zazen out of zazen we have this koan the one my teachers returned to more than any other nanyue went to mazu to ask what do you intend by doing zazen mazu said i am intending to be a buddha nanyue picked up a brick and started polishing it mazu said what are you doing nanyue said i am trying to make a mirror mazu said how can you make a mirror by polishing a brick nanyue said how can you become a buddha by doing zazen it s the same thing making zazen and making a buddha are the same thing it s an art project i sit and i fold my legs up just like this and i put my hands just like this and my shoulders are back like this and then eventually my breathing is just like this and then my mind is the mind of zazen sometimes i can do that for a few seconds just at the beginning i can project onto zazen this idea of calm and spaciousness and acceptance and focus when i do that i construct zazen just like i m making a craft with paper and glue t hat is not it they use different language but keizan and dogen are saying the same thing over and over don t measure this don t imagine that there s a platonic ideal of zazen and that you re working toward it throw that out the only zazen is the zazen that s real and the only zazen that s real is the zazen that s happening right now the one that happened last week where it felt really good it s not real and the one that you envision ten years from now after you ve been doing this every day and it s really become a part of yourself also not real the zazen of the person next to you that seems really really solid that person who sits like a rock that s not real there s one zazen that s real and you re in it don t add something to it don t try to shape it don t try to sculpt it don t try to give it a story don t push and don t pull and another thing don t push and don t pull doesn t mean there s a sweet spot it doesn t mean there s this magical place in the middle where you re just in between doing this and doing that don t push and don t pull is wider than that if we imagine there s a sweet spot then we fall into the same trap again and we imagine that every time i m not pushing or pulling it s going to feel just like this but tomorrow not pushing and not pulling feels different and the next day it feels different and the next day it feels different because again that s the only one that s real when you re walking you re doing kinhin that s the only kinhin that s real can you walk forward without pushing try it this has ramifications far beyond sitting or walking 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 7 comments posted in uncategorized you know what you re doing keizan s zazen yōjinki part 1 jul 7 last year i talked at zen nova scotia about keizan jokin s notes on what to be aware of in zazen zazenyōjinki a text i feel an impulse to uphold not just because it s so good but because it s so rarely part of the dialogue around what zazen is or isn t below is a slightly edited version of the first of those talks with a few changes for clarity but all of the rambling quality of how i actually speak my deep thanks to mike landay for so patiently transcribing this talk and all the rest at most temples and centers when we chant the lineage we stop at keizan it s dōgen then koun ejō then tettsu gikai then keizan jōkin the lineage divides in two from there so he s the last ancestor common to us all but the fact is we don t treat him very well we say that there are two founders dōgen and keizan and if you go to a full temple in japan that has all of the statuary and all the stuff there will always be a little statue for each of them if not that at least a little scroll for dōgen and a little scroll for keizan either way they both get to be there but even though we say that keizan is the other founder there s a bias he founded one of the two head monasteries sōjiji and people who train at sōjiji have a very strong feeling about him but for everybody else he s kind of second if that the result is that we tend to overlook what he wrote and what he wrote is remarkable you can t really talk about keizan without talking about dōgen and we know a lot about dōgen because everything in this sōtō zen tradition seems to point straight at him the dōgen of our imagination was very upright and very strict kind of pure he had an idea about bringing back something that was authentic so he developed monastic forms and those forms were very much about moment to moment practice he wasn t so interested in what other people were doing he wasn t so interested in ceremonies or at least not in the kinds of ceremonies that have since become standard in sōtō zen in which people chant and then offer merit that really wasn t his thing his idea of ceremony was that when you brush your teeth you do it just like this after chanting a verse and you hold a cup just like this and you open a 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 ...
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