SHOSHIN-TANZA (3): Cowardly Backtracking

What did Master Dogen really intend by this instruction SHOSHIN-TANZA? I don't know. I can't know. I can form a view about it, but the stronger the view I form, the further away than ever I am from dropping off all views.

Intensive translation of Master Dogen's teaching, of the kind I have been doing for the past couple of weeks on Fukan-zazengi Shinpitsu-bon, is an open invitation to go wrong, to seek in the original text confirmation of one's own view, when it is just this view that is getting in the way of the translation doing itself. The more important the translator thinks his own view is and his own work is, the more emotion that he has invested in the process, the lousier the translation is likely to be.

Maybe when Master Dogen instructed SHOSHIN-TANZA his intention was, just as in the original Nishijima-Bailey translation, "Sit upright, holding the body straight." Maybe the true literal translation of SHOSHIN, as in the SZTP version, is "Straighten your body." I do not know. I cannot know for sure.

But one thing I do know. I know that my own reaction to the English instruction "hold the body straight" was well and truly wrong.

I had the truly chuckle-worthy idea that, by diligently trying to hold my body straight, I could make myself worthy of the epithet of "the most excellent Buddhist master in the world" (not my phrase). I had the idea that I could be not only one who was right -- which is enough of a delusion in itself -- but The One who is Most Right -- Mr. Rightness Itself. In short, Buddha.

Only after several years of Alexander work, did I really begin to see the point of dropping off this deeply (largely unconsciously) held view.

Alexander teachers in England showed me what I could not work out for myself in a month of Sundays in Japan: that the more deeply and completely I give up the idea of me being the one who is right, the more easily this body of mine rights itself.

This is not "Alexander theory." It is what I have actually experienced, what I continue to experience, what I continue to verify in my daily sitting-zen.

I continue to disturb myself by trying to let everybody know where and why I went wrong. But I can't stop doing it. However inept my expression of it is, I am expressing the only truth I truly know. The way Gudo taught me to sit, as if the righting or straightening of the body were something that should be pursued by direct means, was just plain wrong. For 13 years I sat following a completely wrong principle. That is all I know. My sitting was wrong. My sitting is still wrong. And at the root of the wrongness is the end-gaining idea of making myself right.

This is not "Alexander theory." It is something that Alexander teachers have guided me to investigate in my own experience, and to understand for myself.

I submit for your verification that the whole point of Fukan-zazengi is the giving up of end-gaining ideas, and so we should understand in this light the instruction SUNWACHI SHOSHIN-TANZA -- whether we translate it as "Just practice the upright sitting that rights the body" or as "Just sit upright, holding the body straight" or as something else.

Whatever translation is chosen, the universal truth that remains, it seems to me, is that it is not me who rights the body; it is not me who causes the body to grow. It cannot be me and my end-gaining ideas. It is upright sitting itself that rights the body. It is upright sitting itself that redeems the body. It is upright sitting itself that resurrects the body.

This is my strongly held view. I think it is important. Emotionally, I have a lot invested in it. I have a lot to drop off.

I would like to ask Master Dogen: "How can I drop off my own emotional view?"

Master Dogen's answer reverberates through the ages: