We All Start Practice for the Wrong Reasons
There are many reasons to begin sitting zazen. Most of them are good, all of them are wrong.
Maybe we want to relieve stress, or reduce anger, perhaps lower our blood pressure or improve our concentration and productivity, or — dare we say it? — seek enlightenment. Imagine our surprise when we discover that after settling down on the cushion, we have to let go of what we want.
Zazen is goalless meditation. It is shikantaza, or “just sitting”. It’s not “sitting and….”. We don’t sit and try, or sit and want, or sit and intend. We just sit. It’s all very simple — as simple as standing on a tightrope.
But that’s OK, right? We can pick up our goals and desires after the bell rings and the zafu is put away.
At first, yes. We treat our zazen like a workout, or a power nap. Something to give us a respite and make us, in one way or another, better people. And it works!
Then something happens….
We begin taking our pratice “off the cushion”. We come to understand that we are not only curating our minds as exercise curates our physiques. We are also learning to “sand the floor” and “paint the fence” — we grow our own internal bell of mindfulness and walk around with it, and when we hear it, we stop, we return to our breath, we feel our body in the body, then outward, we attend to the full present moment. Breath… body… beyond.
Then one day, as we bow and cross our legs and straighten our backs, it hits us. We’ve been grasping and craving, perhaps at the serenity of meditation, or else at those things we wanted to get out of it when we first decided to practice. We must stop wanting to sit, or to not sit. Or to neither sit nor not-sit.
This is no trivial thing. For many of us, it’s a crisis point. Zazen is simple, but it’s not easy. And we didn’t see this coming, because we couldn’t see it coming before this bend in the path showed it.
When we look up at the night sky, or whatever’s left of it to us, we see the stars not as they are but as they were, a few years to a few billion-years ago. As we look to the future we face a mist of probabilities. We can only sense any there through echo or imagination. Everything that’s real is here.
So we didn’t see this coming. We must face the cushion without wanting to or not wanting to or neither-nor. How the hell do you not-do all that?
Then one day, as we find ourselves putting the palms of our hands together, we see the cushion as a cusion. Everything that’s real is here. We have stumbled upon ourselves doing what we could have been doing all along, had we not bothered to ask the question of wanting or not wanting in the first place.
This is the moment when the Gordian knot falls apart on its own. The rope was real, but the knot was an illusion. We’d been holding it all in place.
Had we been here already, we wouldn’t have needed to get here. So we start for the wrong reasons. The Dharma has grown the good wrong reasons, the way the honeysuckle grows its honey, the way babies grow love.
Image: Creative Commons via Pixabay