Best Of

The opportunities which lie behind each instant! From doing good, from refraining to cause harm.

What are the possibilities beyond the stillness of zazen?

This is my reflection: the more I sit, the more I remember those instances of stillness and how the heaps, my perceptions and preferences adjust the different phenomena into "good, bad, meh" and their respective reactions.

Argh! Autopilot mode is still strong..

Often it is said that Zen is available from any situation. A little story…

A Zen master and his young student were travelling through the forests. While walking, the student was wondering when the master would begin to teach him Zen. He asked the master, “so, master, how do I enter Zen?” The master replied, “Do you hear the forest stream?” The student thought about this, and at long last his mind grew silent, and the world became vivid, and far away in the distance he could hear the murmur of flowing water. “Master, I can hear the stream,” he said excitedly. “Enter Zen from there,” replied the master.

Zazen is a beautiful practice, I enjoy just sitting once in a while. But eventually you find it becomes easier, and you get to take your Zen with you, and posture and facing the wall are no longer important except as occasional reminders.

I have been continuing to explore this practice, and over the months have found myself caught up in a noisy sinaesthesia of sensations of the skin and hearing. It is only when I bring my awareness back to the bones, to the position of the body and the kinaesthetic sense, that I find my pulse, my breath, and a stillness.

It is as if my attention gets dragged out of me by the many activities on the surface… I feel a tingling here, or a knocking there, or a little jerk elsewhere. It is like the process of meditation, learning to ignore these things and continually bringing the attention back to the quiet, back to the bones… very analogous to focussing on the breath.

There seems to be a gradual deepening of sensation, like a getting to know the body and the breath better. I feel that over my lifetime I have accumulated many energies, many streams of ideas, and now there are encounters and resolution.

So… is this it, then?

Yep that sounds about it...
In Zen mind Beginner's mind, Shunryu Suzuki says just focus on your posture. According to Shunryu Suzuki, sitting correctly, with full presence, is enlightenment in action.

Right posture/practice
Suzuki teaches that zazen is not a means to an end, it's not to “get” enlightenment or escape problems. The practice is the realisation.

“Zazen is not a means to an end. It is the practice of the Buddha.”

Right attitude
This is the heart of Suzuki’s teaching. He constantly returns to the beginner's mind

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.”

Right understanding
Suzuki's Zen isn’t about intellectual mastery, it’s experiential. Understanding comes through doing.

"True understanding arises from direct experience in zazen, not from concepts or words"

Thus have I heard, the true magic happens when one stops trying to achieve something.