When you arise from sitting, move slowly and quietly, calmly and deliberately. For you must know that just there (in zazen) the right dharma is manifesting itself and that from the first dullness and distraction are struck aside. Once its heart is grasped, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. It is simply the dharma-gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment. The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. This in itself is the essential art of zazen.
How do you think of not-thinking? Non-thinking. Once you have adjusted your posture, take a deep breath, inhale and exhale, rock your body right and left and settle into a steady, immovable sitting position. Your eyes should always remain open, and you should breathe gently through your nose. Place your tongue against the front roof of your mouth, with teeth and lips both shut. Be sure your ears are on a plane with your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. Thus sit upright in correct bodily posture, neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward nor backward.
Then place your right hand on your left leg and your left palm (facing upward) on your right palm, thumb-tips touching. You should have your robes and belt loosely bound and arranged in order. In the half-lotus, you simply press your left foot against your right thigh. In the full-lotus position, you first place your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. Sit either in the full-lotus or half-lotus position. Sanzen has nothing whatever to do with sitting or lying down.Īt the site of your regular sitting, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it. Cease all the movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thought and views. Cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs. If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.įor sanzen, a quiet room is suitable. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest. You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Since this was the case with the saints of old, how can we today dispense with negotiation of the way? Or Bodhidharma’s transmission of the mind-seal? The fame of his nine years of wall-sitting is celebrated to this day. Need I mention the Buddha, who was possessed of inborn knowledge? The influence of his six years of upright sitting is noticeable still.
One is making the initial, partial excursions about the frontiers but is still somewhat deficient in the vital way of total emancipation. Suppose one gains pride of understanding and inflates one’s own enlightenment, glimpsing the wisdom that runs through all things, attaining the way and clarifying the mind, raising an aspiration to escalade the very sky. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion. What is the use of going off here and there to practice?Īnd yet, if there is the slightest discrepancy, the way is as distant as heaven from earth. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from one, right where one is. What need is there for concentrated effort? Indeed, the whole body is far beyond the world’s dust.
#Zen bound inhalation free#
How could it be contingent upon practice and realization? The dharma-vehicle is free and untrammeled. The way is basically perfect and all-pervading.