ZAZEN NO YOJUTSU: The Secret of Sitting-Zen
SHI this
ZA sitting
ZEN dhyana, zen, thinking, meditating
ZAZEN [= ZA + ZEN; one word] sitting-zen
NO of
YO main point, essence, secret, key
JUTSU art, technique, skill, means, artifice, trick, strategem.
YA is
In Japanese:
KORE ZAZEN NO YOJUTSU NARI.
KORE this
ZAZEN sitting-zen
NO of
YOJUTSU vital art, essential technique, secret
NARI is
“This is the secret of sitting-zen.”
“When a desire arises [to gain some end], just wake up. In the full sensory awareness of this [end-gaining idea], it has instantly ceased to exist. Taking plenty of time, forget involvements -- naturally become one piece. This is the secret of sitting-zen.”
“The secret of sitting-zen.” Mmmmm. Looks and sounds tempting.
If there is a secret of sitting-zen, I would like to know it. If there is a vital art of sitting-zen, I would like to master it. If there is a golden key to unlock the practice of sitting-zen, I would like to keep it in my pocket. If there is an essential strategem for sitting-zen, I would like to work it out, write a book about it, and copyright it, Mike Cross 2007.
Thus, I would like to turn the true teaching of Master Dogen into its exact opposite. Because I can’t stop end-gaining, I would like to take the teaching which points in the direction of freedom from end-gaining, which points towards a bit of nothing, and I would like to turn that teaching into a bit of something, a bit of something around which I can get my dirty paws, a bit of an end that I can go for directly, even if it kills me.
This is what very easily happens. I continue to experience it happening in myself, all the time. With just a little tucking in of the chin, with just a bit of using the Alexander directions to organize myself, with just a hint of grim determination, I turn the truth into fraudulence.
I am such a fraud I should write a book: Teach Yourself Enlightenment in 12 Easy Lessons -- A Proven Method of Allowing the Head Forward and Up, As Endorsed by A-list Celebrities. By the Certified Zen Master and Alexander Teacher, Mike Cross; only £12.99 from all good booksellers. (All Rights Reserved.)
I am not the only fraudulent one. The world of so-called “Dogen Zen,” and the world of so-called “Alexander Technique,” are rife with chin-pulling and other more subtle forms of self-arrangement.
What Master Dogen means by JI-JO-IPPEN, “naturally becoming one piece,” or HI-SHIRYO “non-thinking,” I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you because I don’t know. I do not know. I do not bloody well know.
I don’t know what the secret it. What I know, at least a bit, is what it is not.
“This is the secret of sitting-zen.”
I don’t subscribe to the statement “The secret is that there is no secret.” There is a secret. Master Dogen strove to express, as best he could in words, what the secret is. Old Alexander teachers have exhausted themselves in the effort to reveal to me what the secret is.
The problem I have repeatedly encountered is that, whatever I think it is, whatever bright idea about it I come up with, it is always not that.
Pulling in the chin is not it. Shaving my head, putting on the Buddha’s robe, and arranging myself into a posture that looks good, is not it. My habitual attitude of grim determination to understand it, and to let others know about it, is not it. But a secret there is, in the backward step which, with consciousness, we can learn.
“Taking a long time to forget and naturally becoming one piece,” and “non-thinking,” are both expressions of the backward step which, with consciousness, we can learn.
Like an infant who learns balance primarily by falling over, we learn the backward step primarily by making mistakes; by blundering forward -- onward and downward. As a first step, we learn the backward step by “bodily sitting in the full lotus posture,” which is Master Dogen’s own expression of pure endgaining.
But, to add a word of caution to Master Dogen’s exhortation to bodily sit in the full lotus posture, he also exhorted us, before we start end-gaining like that, to meet a true teacher. Such a teacher may be one who is clear in regard to two fundamental misconceptions -- body and mind; form and emptiness. In seeking such a teacher, beware. Even if he says that “body and mind are one,” beware: he may belong to a school of holistic hairdressing. And even if he preaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” again beware: he may be parroting ancient philosophy without ever having realized, by bodily and mentally sitting in the full lotus posture, form as form, and emptiness as emptiness.
The Alexander teacher Patrick Macdonald, who was held in the highest regard by two teachers who taught me, used to speak of “looking the bugger in the eye.” The bugger in question is our own predilection for endgaining. The path of endgaining is always readily available to us. It is our well-worn wrong path, our known path, the path of our habitual inner patterns of misuse of the self -- pulling in the head, arms and legs, and thereby failing to breathe freely and fully. The alternative path, the right path, the vigorous path of getting the body out, is not readily available to us. It is a path into the unknown and it is in general hidden from us.
In fearing to go down the wrong path, we are already on the wrong path. In trying to find the right path, we are already off the right path.
If we persist in putting ourselves in a hopeless situation like this, how can we win? What strategem can help us be a winner? How can we avoid becoming a total loser?
Are there any answers?
Are there any questions?
posted by Mike Cross at 7:54 AM
19 Comments:
Hi, Mike.
Maybe the part of us that gives a shit is doomed to being a total loser, doomed to lose everything totally?
Regards,
Harry.
No Harry, What you think it might be, it is not. You cannot be the one who knows. You cannot be the one who is right. Your idle speculations can never hit the target.
This is also what Master Dogen is telling you in Shobogenzo and in Fukan-zazen-gi, but before you come face-to-face before a living teacher you will not begin to understand it. Even though you read it, it will not penetrate the filter of your intellect, and you will not absorb it.
Your question suggests the existence of a little bit of hope in your mind that I might affirm your viewpoint. But if you met me in person you would begin to understand that I will never ever affirm your viewpoint.
Thus you have now been thwacked by a big metaphorical stick. Unfortunately, however, a metaphorical thwack cannot change anything at all. If you are sincere, you will resolve to seek out a true teacher, without counting the cost. Only after that will reading Shobogenzo and visiting Zen blogs have any real value for you.
Mike,
My viewpoint is really not that important to me, and your affirmation of it even less.
Thanks for the 'thwack', but I am resolved about being somewhat of a human idiot, and am more-or-less dedicated to a path of not making this a cause for further dissatisfaction with my lot.
If this flies in the face of 'true teachers' then fuck em' and I'm not a Buddhist.
All the best,
Harry.
p.s.
Mike,
Excuse my further ignorance (or twhack me again, if its that sort of day).
But in the other blog entry you and another chap mention "leading with the chin" in relation to posture. Just what do you mean by this?
Regards,
Harry.
Thank you, Harry.
I don’t know you and can’t change you. The only person whose end-gaining I may be able to give up, at least a bit of it, on a good day, is me.
So let me try to spell out for me, as clearly as I can, what the link is between end-gaining and upholding my view.
In general, my viewpoint is all-important to me, and I strongly desire to feel right as I sit here upholding it.
So, lying to myself and others, I cling to my viewpoint blindly. I can’t see myself clinging to it. Everybody else can see me clinging to it. I am the only one who can’t. That is the little trick that God seems to play on me.
The question I have raised is: What is the secret of sitting-zen?
Because of clinging blindly to my self-important viewpoint, I answer the question not only by fearfully going down the wrong path, but also by naively trying to follow the right path -- both at the same time. That is what my shouting and swearing is really all about, and that is what my interpretation of Master Dogen’s teaching is mainly about -- manifestations of me fearfully trying to be right.
This is the difficulty that end-gainers always have, because we desire to feel ourself right in the gaining of some end. The end in view might be the hitting of a golf ball, the hitting of a right note in music, or the hitting of the target in Q&A on this blog. The end in view might be the emergence of my original face in sitting-zen. The end in view might be to convince another that my direction is right and his blind attachment to a view is wrong.
It doesn’t matter what the end is -- the problem lies in my desire to feel myself right in gaining it. This desire is what imprisons me in the web of the familiar, the known, the habitual. This desire is the desire to be given up. But in as far as I don’t see it, it is very very difficult for me to give it up.
A process of waking up to my own end-gaining, and thereby dropping off my own viewpoint, was initiated in me primarily through face-to-face contact with a very excellent Zen Master. Her name was Marjory Alexander Barlow. Because I met face-to-face with Marjory Barlow, a true woman of clouded eyes, and only because I have met face-to-face with her and teachers like her, I am able to make my effort on this blog to express to you what is not my own viewpoint.
In opposition to my own end-gaining tendency, thanks to teachers like Marjory, something else seems to be struggling here to assert itself.
Master Dogen did not write Fukan-zazen-gi for those Buddha-saints who have already ascended far beyond. He wrote it for miserable end-gainers like me -- the bastard son of the bastard son of the King of Masturbation. The target audience of Fukan-zazen-gi is miserable end-gainers everywhere. That is why every word in Fukan-zazen-gi is exhorting us to give up end-gaining.
Every word in Fukan-zazengi is exhorting us to give up end-gaining. But before I met face-to-face with a woman of clouded eyes, even though I had studied Fukan-zazen-gi in the original already for several years, and even though I had devoted myself uncompromisingly to sitting in the full lotus posture for several years, even though I had the form of a Buddhist monk, with shaven head and traditional robe, I had not really begun to understand one single word of Fukan-zazengi.
P.S.
The big end that FM Alexander himself wished to gain was to be a great reciter. He observed that whenever he went for this end directly, in reciting a sentence out loud, what happened was that the muscles at the back of his neck tigthened unduly, which pulled the back of his head down.
When the back of the head is pulled down, that action tends to result in the chin being raised up.
In boxing, for example, this tendency to raise the chin, or “to lead with the chin,” is recognized as dangerous -- it is like asking to be knocked out.
There are basically two ways to counter the tendency to raise the chin.
The direct way is to tighten those muscles which pull the chin down and in, by “tucking in the chin.”
The indirect way is to prevent the fear-related reaction which causes the neck muscles to tighten in the first place.
The direct way is the way of end-gaining.
The indirect way Alexander called “the means-whereby” which he opposed to end-gaining.
This is all explained much better than I can explain it by Marjory Barlow on my webpage at www.the-middle-way.org.
Mike,
Good luck. 'End gaming' doesn't give me half as much a pain in the ass as it seems to give you I think. I do what I can, more than most, less than many... "no big swing of the mickey" as we say over here (i.e. no big deal). Does this seem contemptible, pitiful; do I need saved, improved, enlightened??? What would you do with a blind fool like me?
There are no 'right notes' in music, although it certainly could be said that there are 'more appropriate' notes in a relative sense... but when you are a little bit used to abandoning absolute values to an extent then maybe 'right' doesn't seem so bad.
Every note is unique: playing with this view is not very easy though (especially under performance conditions); 'trying' to play with this view seems often self defeating. Thankfully, musicians play either way.
Regards,
Harry.
I know almost nothing of the world of music-making. But I know a bit of the worlds of Zen and AT. And in those worlds it is common for people to affect a casual, easy style -- imitating the effortless playing and effortless movement of great exponents of the art. But affecting a style like that is just end-gaining. Great exponents of an art have invariably devoted great attention to the means. Imitators, seekers of empty reputation, put the cart before the horse and just go for the end. In our age of celebrity culture, that seems to be the general rule -- never mind about the hard work, just give me the fame.
End-gaining is going directly for the end, without paying due attention to the means.
End-gaining is focusing directly on some specific goal, without paying due attention to big picture.
Great teachers like Marjory Barlow do it, and beginners do it. But the former are more or less awake to the problem; the latter are more or less blind to it.
Expressing a view about “end gaming,” with a put-on air of cool detachment, when you haven’t paid sufficient attention even to the 10 letters of the word E-N-D-G-A-I-N-I-N-G, is just blind end-gaining.
You and I don’t realize what a problem end-gaining is for us, because, just in the moment of doing it, we are almost totally blind to it.
At the same time, here we are corresponding on this blog on which Master Dogen, character by character, is trying to open our eyes to our own end-gaining. So something else is trying to assert itself, other than our blind end-gaining.
Truly to wake up to end-gaining is to stop end-gaining. And to realize an action without end-gaining is truly to wake up. This is a virtuous circle on which Master Dogen is recommending every body to get. This is the backward step of turning light around that Master Dogen is recommending every body to learn.
But casual Irish blarney isn’t it.
Yes, I thought so.
"E-n-d g-a-m-i-n-g" (or insert preferred bogey man) equals "BAD".
"your interpretation of this-and-that" equals "The Way".
I think I preferred the way of the stick! Being in the fog between 'sleep' and 'awake' doesn't seem so bad to me, but you wouldn't understand that I suppose.
You don't understand the Art of Irish Blarney either.
Regards,
Harry.
After its birth, a baby understands, suddenly or gradually, that where there was originally no separation, there is separation. In Master Dogen’s case, he got a sudden shock in his infancy, when his mother died.
Sometimes a growing boy refuses a cuddle from his mummy, auntie, or grandma, wishing to show himself to be a big strong boy, no longer an emotionally dependent baby.
But then, many years later, as an adult musician, he may use a wind instrument as a substitute for his mother’s breast, without realizing what he is doing.
The sitting-zen of Master Dogen is more conscious than that, and more total than that. We allow our original face to emerge by deliberately changing our direction -- it is a process that I am still learning, day by day, three steps forward four steps backward.
Garbled Zen teacher AND amateur psychoanalyst (and here's me taking you at your word that you didn't know me!)... you have a lot to offer the world, Mike :-))
I think I much prefer my treatment of my ailment where I replace my mummy's breast with another, real one. Flute's do have their limitations where intimacy is involved (at least the sort of intimacy that I go for!)
Like I said: Good luck, Mike.
Regards,
Harry.
Speaking for myself, my infantile desires and infantile reactions are not only psychological phenomena; they are a function of my whole self. And waking up to them might be a function not only of my whole self, but also of the forest.
Good luck to you too, Harry. And stay with this blog -- behind this garbled teaching, something else is struggling to assert itself, if only I would get out of the way.
Maybe you ain't so bad.
Regards,
Harry.
Believe me, Harry, I am bad to the bone -- the bastard end-gaining son of the bastard end-gaining son of the end-gaining King of Masturbation.
But Fukan-zazengi is good in its beginning, in its middle, and in its end.
That's why the three stoogoes, Kodo, Gudo, and Chodo, have spent their lives grasping for its true meaning, like drowning men clutching at a straw.
Dear Mike,
Are you, by any chance, a vatican plant?
Last time I checked masturbation was quite enjoyable (ages ago you understand... just by accident... hadn't done it in ages etc. etc... ahem)
Regards,
Harry.
Hello again Harry.
Since you ask, I have got a very tenuous family connection with the vatican -- my great gran Cross was from County Cork and I remember in my early years visiting her in a bedroom that had more religious artefacts in it than I was used to seeing in a bedroom. But her son, my grandpa Cross, who was born in South Wales, was excommunicated when he married outside of the Catholic Church.
My own upbringing was thoroughly non-conformist -- my parents didn’t even conform to non-conformism. Boozily singing “Bread of Heaven” while watching Wales play rugby was the nearest I got in the way of religious education from my own father.
The reason I see “the King of Masturbation” thing as significant is that this is what Master Kodo Sawaki, self-deprecatingly, called himself -- Masu-O. But my teacher Gudo, when I discussed masturbation with him, expressed a dim view of masturbation. So the lineage of Fukan-zazengi from Kodo through Gudo to me is like this. Gudo sits in the middle, on his high horse, keeping his exalted position, maintaining a dim view of this and that.
Notwithstanding the fact that Master Kodo wasn’t perfectly pure, notwithstanding the fact that Gudo is full to overflowing with his own views and opinions about this and that, notwithstanding the fact that Kodo saw something in Gudo that caused him not to want to accept Gudo as his formal disciple, notwithstanding miscellaneous obstructions in various channels, the truth of Fukan-zazengi has flowed from Kodo through Gudo and it is flowing now on this blog.
It seems that the truth of Fukan-zazengi is so powerful that it can flow through the unlikeliest of channels. I take comfort from that. That is why I call myself the bastard son of the bastard son of the King of Masturbation. It is a kind of confidence in the power of Fukan-zazengi itself.
The community of sitting-zen practitioners doesn’t need a Buddhist pope, or a vatican hierarchy. Gudo’s equivalent of Al Qaeda --- “Dogen Sangha International” -- may also turn out to be surplus to requirements. What we do need, I believe, is clear and true translations and expositions of Fukan-zazengi, so that all who sit may be united -- not by a hierarchy, but by a text.
In this way, the kind of democratization that happened during the reformation by dint of the printing press, might just happen today by dint of the internet.
Mike,
Is there a more skillful way for you to use the internet do you think? Oh yeah, that would be end gaming I suppose.
Its just that there are lots of blogs where people go and play together; but here you are playing with yourself.
"Democracy!" has become the warcry of head cleavers; I'd rather a relatively peaceful benign dictatorship to that I think.
Regards,
Harry.
You make a fair point about "democracy." Yes, fuck democracy.
At the same time, we are not talking here about anarchy, either.
We are talking about each individual person making his or her own effort to get to the bottom of Master Dogen's RULES for sitting-zen.
The benign dictator by whom I wish to be dictated to, is Master Dogen himself.
He'd stink up the Zendo a bit.
Still, even this 'gone beyond' mode he would offer us less by way of confusing philosophy and spurious rebuttals.
...And what a powerful twist on The Flower Sermon: "The Corpse of the Master Sermon".
Regards,
H.
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