shikantaza, just sitting

Since the beginning of our silent retreats at Maitri-Retreats, the meditation format has been zazen which translates into zen meditation in Japanese; za meaning to sit, and zen, a transliteration of dhyana, meditation in sanscrit.

This practice of just sitting is how I have been meditating for some time. This is what is practiced in soto zen, the strand of Buddhism where my teacher's lineage comes from. That's how we sat so it felt natural to share what was close to me with others. I actually didn't give that any thought. It felt right to share a practice that had over the years become an integral part of my life.

While anchored in an ancient tradition, you don't have to belong to one or believe in any article of faith in order to practice it. You could actually do better without any of that if that didn't raise the following difficulty; there is no better or worse, there is no good or bad zazen, nor right ir wrong. Were it so it would be something other than just sitting.

Anyone can sit zazen, it's an open and generous practice and, whatever it is you believe in or believe against, the idea is to drop the ideas or to leave them in abayance the time of availing onself to the sitting.

So in a way you could say the just leaves you simply with the sitting and the sitting places you in the center of what feels just. Yet while you sit still the center moves. Or maybe the center doesn't move and is still and it is beacuse of its stillness that all is set in movment. " At the still point of the turning world. - T.S.Eliot." Here we are facing a silent move that implies some kind of faith. Faith without subscribing to any article of faith. Faith is what? Yes, faith in what. We never fully meet what without some kind of faith in it, without knowing and not wanting to know what ultimately what is about.

Zazen is at once a bare-bone form of meditation and at the same time it is not. What is it then? It is just sitting, that's all I can say without deviating from it. We find it hard to do or engage in something just for the sake of the thing itself, for in our worldview things need to have a purpose and by that we imply have some use. So it is disconcerting when we hear some well known Zen teachers proclaim that zazen is good for nothing. But that is the whole beauty and profundity of it.

On this point we touch something essential that is not just limited to zazaen; it's a fundamental way of presenting/expressing oneself and harmonising with life; ways of being dear to the ancient Taoists. It's Chuang-Tzu, the great 4th century BCA Chinese thinker who wrote: " everyone knows the use of the usefull but noboday knows the use of the useless." Using things up ends with us being used up, the use of the useless is that it is inexhaustable. It has the feel of trying to empty the ocean with a cup. What exposes the human mind to what is beyond its grasp is frustrating but beyond the frustration what opens up is a deep sense of awe.

Historically, zazen is a twice millennial practice passed on through generations beginning with Buddha as the unique gateway to liberating humans from the rounds of birth and death and the suffering that comes from entrapment in samsara; the cyclic world of delusion and ignorance. It's while sitting silently for several days under the bodhi tree that Buddha had his great realization while seeing the glitter of the morning star one early morning. And, at the same time, zazen is also not meditation according to our common understanding of the word for it cannot be intrumentalized and used as a technique to arrive at some accomplishment such as reaching great realization or becoming a buddha.

Zazen is the accomplissment of the inaccomplishable.

This practice has no object and is not meant to serve towards arriving at some end. It is not meant to take us from here to anywhere in particular. Zazen in its simplicity is disarming since it is not a stepping stone to some higher state of consciousness, or enlightenment, whatever these terms may mean. It is not something we do as a preparation for something else, seen usually as happening somewhere in the future. If anything, zazen helps to realize that ultimately there is no getting from here to there.

There is no coming and going if in the end there is no getting from here to there. Not that there is no coming and going, there is, but there is no particular person called me or you who does the coming and going. How to put into words something that comes to us from the unspeakable? From beyond language? From beyond the thinker, beyond the thinker when the thinking takes a pause, or is paused in the process of thinking. How to speak of the one who is a no one, a no one who is not a nobody. A no one that is beyond the ego, the self, a no nobody beyond personhood. In German you have Niemand, in French personne and, in Portugese pessoa.

Of this someone who is a no one Paul Celan wrote this verse in one of his haunting poems: Gelobt seist du Niemand / blessèd art thou, no one. As one can perceive, we are here in some dimension of prayer. Prayer to whom? What is a prayer without an object, a prayer without an addressee, a prayer for nothing. Out of the silence of nothing the deepest prayer arises. These words of Ryotan Tokuda, my teacher echo in the mind when I first heard him say: zazen is my silent prayer!

Clearly there is a paradox at the heart of Zen practice and Zen meditation.

The sitting that is nothing other than the sitting is what this practice is about. The Japanese name for it is Shikantaza: just sitting. The emphasis here is on the word just. Just being wholeheartedly in full awareness of body, mind and breath, in awareness of the moment as it unfolds. In the process, we become more aware of the resistances and discomforts that arise as we sit in the openness of just this moment, just this sitting, just this being. As our mind is mostly involved with thoughts about the past and the future we find it difficutl to give the present our full attention. This is what our restlessness is about. We let the restlessness take a rest.

Slowly becoming intimate with the resistances. Noticing the arising of our cravings and aversions and the tensions they create inside. Then the next moment, in the next awareness of body-mind-breath presence to this moment returning to the just sitting. Returning to the release and ease of this just sitting, just being.

Zazen is the practice of paying one’s full attention to just this moment in its arising and falling as silence and stillness come upon you. We fall short, then we begin again, again and again.

When there is justness in the just of sitting, being simply present here to this moment, time and space collapse, all mental categories collapse. In the absence of mental construes I face the timeless, the boundless in the sheer openness of a moment that is nothing other than this moment of: here I am, me voici!

As we inquire further into this experience we begin to get a deeper intimation of what Master Dogen thaught throughout his life: practice and realization are one, one doesn’t come after the other nor does one come without the other. There is no beginning to one nor an end to the other, what we practice is the expression of intimacy with what another great, Master Eckhart, called: the eternal now.

The just sitting strips you of whatever it is you think you need to realize, attain, work through in order to enlighten your existence.

Zazen is the art of just sitting beyond the projections of the mind, or not being disturbed by the mind's projections and letting go of them, letting go of the stories they create and over which we obssess and, that is called a trance. The trance of thoughts.

When I can just sit, just breathe, just be the being I am, then I return quite effortlessly to a simplicity where whatever I encounter is simply the being or thing that it is.

What I find compelling in the Zen way of looking at things is how we slowly begin to lose interest in projects, noble as they may be, such as enlightenment or self-realization, the more we move into the dimension of immediacy, the more we sense with our pores what intimacy means. Intimacy is letting go of goals, drives and strivings and settle with what lies beyond them. A way of naming that would be simplicity.

Intimacy with ourselves, intimacy with others, intimacy with the world.

When we deeply experience intimacy we become part of what Merlou-Ponty, the French philosopher, called, la chair du monde, the flesh of the world.

The flesh of the world is being part of the silence that opens us to intimacy, resonance and co-responding with all phenomena and beings.

To show up to this, to be here to this, hineini, is to utter in a silent way: here I am, present to this moment of intimacy. To be this moment of intimacy. To become one with the spirit and flesh of just.......

If you are coming then be an expression of the intimacy of the moment of ; here I am, hineini, me voici, I am just coming....I am the coming....the sitting...the breathing...the breath....the just....the thus....

He or she who realizes justness, thusness, things are they-are-ness, things just as they are, is called in sanskrit a tathagata......

Tathagata is one of the names of the Buddha.

boraboudor, java, january 2025