Dropping Off Heart, Mind and Body

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So let's chant Kaikyoge.

[recitation, 00:00:05–00:00:38]

As I explained about the chants at mealtimes, even Japanese people find it difficult to understand the meaning, because the characters are Chinese characters, from medieval China. And the pronunciation is Japanese pronunciation. So some people may know the meanings, but most normal people in Japan don't know the meaning. So they chant just as a group activity. I have never heard a Japanese person ask the meaning. But in the West, we like to know the meaning of what we're doing. If we don't agree with the meaning, we don't like to do it. So to chant these meaningless chants is a nice way for us Europeans to throw away our habits. We like to understand everything exactly, and then we want to choose. I like this. I don't like this. This is good. This is bad. And this attitude is the basis of our excellent civilisation. It's the basis of our excellent civilisation. But it's also the basis of our unhappiness. So Buddhism teaches not to choose. Which sounds terrible.

Today I wanted to talk about zazen. Some of you have practised zazen for a long time. And others of you are practising for the first time. Master Dogen, the Japanese 13th century monk whose teachings I follow, said that the first time we practise zazen is the same as the nine hundredth time we practise it. But it's difficult to believe. Sometimes the first few times we practise zazen seem to be just pain. Or just confusion. Or just thinking. How can that be the same? And somebody who has practised for thirty years or forty years. It's a puzzling statement.

So I want to look at the meaning of zazen that Master Dogen taught, based on two phrases that he made very popular. The phrases are Japanese, but I guess some of you may have heard them. The first one is shinjin datsuraku. Anybody heard? Few heard, I presume.

Participant: Yes.

Participant: Yes.

Mike: Shinjin datsuraku. If you even ask somebody in Japan, did you hear shinjin datsuraku? They say, Ah yes, yes, something like Buddhism, yes, yes. We learned it at school. And then they say, Ah, but zazen, oh. And the reason is because many Japanese schoolchildren used to be taken to the temple on the school trip every year. And they had to sit in the temple in zazen, and a very stern priest with a big stick is hitting them on the shoulder. So these children were very frightened. And that fear about zazen is quite common in Japanese society. And the reason is because the Japanese education authority wanted to make zazen popular. But the zazen that Master Dogen taught is rather different.

So let's look at the phrase, shinjin datsuraku. Shin means mind, but not exactly mind in the English sense. I don't know whether the Czech word for mind has a very narrow intellectual meaning.

Participant: No.

Mike: In English, it has that rather narrow meaning. A mind is thinking. In Japanese and Chinese, the character shin also means heart. So, heart-mind. In Japanese culture, there is no division between thinking mind and emotional heart. Of course, in modern times they make the same division because they study Western psychology. But originally, shin means heart-mind. The second character, jin, is also pronounced shin. But when you put the two together, you don't say shin shin, you say shinjin. I don't know if you have phrases like that in Czech. But in Japanese it's very common. The pronunciation of the second character changes when it's together with the first character.

And the second shin means body. Completely different. So if you hear shin, you don't know which. Do you mean mind or do you mean body? You have to see the character written. And when you see the character for heart-mind, it's completely different to the character for body. Shinjin, heart-mind body. Datsuraku. Datsuraku is a verb. It means to drop off, which is different to throwing away. If we throw something away, we push it from us. Intention. If we drop off something, we stop holding it. So the phrase shinjin datsuraku means to drop off heart, mind and body.

If you have a question or are puzzled about what I'm saying, please don't wait until the end. You can say something now. Master Dogen said, practising zazen is dropping off heart, mind and body. But he didn't say this until he was twenty-seven. He became a monk when he was thirteen. He was very sincere about finding out, what am I doing? What is my life about? Both of his parents died when he was very small. And he could find nothing to rely on in his life.

So he joined the temple as a young monk. All the people in the temple were making great effort to practise and to chant and to do many things. And he wondered, what are they doing? What are they getting? So he asked the senior monks questions. But nobody could answer him. Of course, they gave him answers, but the answers didn't make him feel satisfied. So, for more than ten years he practised all the ceremonies and read the sutras. Then he practised zazen.

But he couldn't understand, where am I trying to get? Why do I have to make so much effort? So after many years, he went to China, which was where Buddhism came from. And he visited several Chinese temples. And in these temples, he was searching for an answer to his question. We're making lots of effort. What are we trying to do? Eventually he went to a temple which was run by a teacher, and while he was practising zazen, this teacher said some words to the monk who was sitting next to Master Dogen. And the words were quite simple. The teacher said to the monk, Zazen is not about sleeping. It's about dropping off. At that moment, Master Dogen understood, I see. We're not trying to get anything. We're trying to let everything drop away.

And that very simple realisation made him realise that sitting in zazen is taking off all the layers of habits, mental perceptions, mental ways of thinking, discriminating between good and bad, worrying about ourselves, and returning to something which is there before all those layers. So if you like, zazen is taking off our clothes. Although I don't recommend that, because we become distracted.

This is very important for one main reason. Human beings have an excellent ability to think. And when we think, we can create a picture, which is different from where we are and the way things are now. The picture can be, ah, I'm going to Padma Farm. It's going to be a beautiful building with lots of green fields. The people would be like this. The food would be like this. And I will learn zazen. We arrive, and everything is completely different. Oh. Okay. This is our nature as human beings. We make a picture which is different from the way things are.

This is extremely important for human civilisation. Without making pictures of reality which are different from reality, we can't create a wonderful modern civilisation. But we mistake the picture for reality. So we tend to believe the picture is right, and the reality is wrong. So then we become unhappy. I wish it was like this. When we practise zazen, we practise throwing away our pictures. But that doesn't mean we should try to throw away our pictures in normal life.

If we try to throw away our creativity or our imagining in our jobs, it may be disastrous. What are we going to do next month? I'm a Buddhist, it doesn't matter. But we do need to notice the way that we are. So by practising zazen regularly, we can learn to drop off all the layers which we need in order to live in society, and return to something more simple. Then, when we go back to normal society, we can notice the difference between our images, our ideas, our dreams, and what is in front of us. So noticing that difference is very important.

Master Dogen says, we can drop off all our thinking and feeling. But he also says, drop off body. That seems to be different. However, if we practise some kind of sport, it's not so easy, and it's not so difficult to understand. Dropping off body. If you train for some kind of physical sport, although you are concentrating on physical activity, when you are practising that physical activity, for instance, dancing, or swimming, soccer, football. Anything. We need to forget about our body in order to perform well. If a footballer is worried about the position of his arms and legs, tension in his muscles, the pain in his legs, well, he can't perform. So any athlete knows how to throw away the body. We can say to throw away the body is to act. And when we act, we lose consciousness of the parts of our body. And we become something whole that is acting. So putting those together, dropping off heart, mind and body means dropping off all our thoughts, images, habits or worries. And also dropping off all our consciousness of our physical body.

But if we look at our actual zazen, we find it's not like that. If we're sitting in zazen, and we have a pain in our knee, I have a pain in my hip today, then the pain in my hip becomes very, very important. And it pulls me out of my peaceful state. But then it disappears. And then it comes back again. So we can experience in zazen a kind of wobbling. Sometimes we're caught by an uncomfortable posture. And sometimes all the problems disappear. So we can say that zazen is a kind of wobbling. Although Master Dogen described zazen as dropping off mind, heart and body, the image this creates in our mind is only an image. Our real zazen is different from the image.

But if we practise zazen regularly, we can notice that at the centre of our experience in zazen is a state which is dropping off mind, heart and body. Sometimes we have a strong body. Sometimes we have a strong mind. But when we wobble between the two, we are always passing through the middle. In this middle state, we can drop off everything. When we start practising, maybe we wobble a lot. So we don't notice the state which is in the middle. If we practise regularly, on and on and on.

We notice that in the middle between all the different states that come and go in zazen is a state that Master Dogen calls shinjin datsuraku. We just glimpse it. Then if we practise regularly, we see it more clearly. So, this state is always in our zazen, even the first time we practise. But it's difficult to notice if we don't practise regularly. But because the state is always in our zazen, even when our zazen feels very confused, we are getting the benefit of zazen. So sometimes our zazen is like this. Thoughts, worries, pain, everything. And sometimes our zazen is like this. It depends on our life. If we lead a very busy, very stressful life, and we sit in zazen, we will notice that busy, stressful person. If we have a nice rest for a couple of weeks, and we practise zazen, we can feel more calm. But what we're doing is the same. We are wobbling about the point in the middle, which is a balance point. And Master Dogen's realisation about zazen describes shinjin datsuraku, that centre or middle point which we all experience today, without any exception.

But I think we can also lessen our stress. So, in the West, we usually feel, I have stress. To get rid of the stress, I must do something. Buddhism says, I have stress. To get rid of the stress, I practise not doing something. So this relies on our natural state. In other words, if we sit quietly and don't disturb ourselves, the stress which has accumulated in us will drop away, very slowly. It's difficult to explain this satisfactorily in modern terms, but we can think that stress is related to two main things. Physical tension. When we're stressed, we often have tension, maybe in the neck, muscles, and so on. Maybe working at a computer gives us a certain kind of tension. And also the state of our nervous system, which controls the balance between the activities of our organs, like heart, lungs and so on. So, sitting in zazen or practising some physical activity reduces our stress. So we can think in terms of going to the gym for training. After training, we know that we can get rid of stress. If we go for a long walk in the countryside, we can get rid of our stress. We come back afterwards and we feel release. But sitting like this, it's difficult for us to believe that it can get rid of a lot of stress. So we have to try. But in my case, I believe completely that sitting like this—seems to be not moving—has the same effect as, for instance, climbing mountains. But we have to test it out in our own experience.

Question: When he said that, for instance, those who are starting with zazen won't notice it, I was wondering whether he perhaps knows if one notices it at the moment when one is in that state, or whether only afterwards one perhaps realises that… So, everybody has this experience during zazen. So do you notice if you practise? Do you notice that you do it, or do you notice afterwards that it happened?

Mike: When I first started practising zazen, I didn't notice at all. But now, when I practise zazen, thirty years later, I can notice. Let go and settle it. For me, a nice explanation is learning to ski or learning to skate. When you learn to skate, you're balancing on a very narrow edge of the skate. So you're skating round like this. But if you don't fall over, you're skating. However, if you keep practising, this very narrow balance somehow becomes wide, and you can stand on the skate and go smoothly. So how does the very narrow balance point of the skate become wider? This is my explanation of what happens in zazen.

Question: Sometimes during zazen I have a feeling that I was somewhere, I don't know where, or I suddenly find out that I have been thinking about something completely different all the time. And is there a way of using that?

Mike: Probably your guide will be talking about that. Sometimes we think a lot during zazen. It's true. Sometimes during zazen, we feel we are not here.

Participant: Yeah.

Mike: So we have a kind of hard work in zazen to keep bringing ourselves back to where we are. Again and again and again.

Question: So if you feel somehow sleepy and tired and absent-minded, you should press on?

Mike: Yes. When I practise, it always reflects my state. So if I feel sleepy during zazen, I always think, ah, I'm sleepy. I have to go to bed early. So if we feel sleepy, we usually need to sleep. Practising zazen doesn't usually make us less sleepy. But over a long period of time, practising zazen, we can notice, I don't get enough sleep. So we change a small thing in our life. And for instance, we think, if I go to bed a little bit earlier every night, I can get up and practise zazen. So, a very, very, very slow revolution. So zazen doesn't stop us being sleepy, but it shows us we are sleepy. It shows us if we're tense. It shows us if we're excited. It shows us if we're miserable. It shows us the real person who is us, who sometimes we don't like. And to notice who we are, separate from like or dislike, has some kind of effect to change us. But it's almost impossible to understand that effect. When we notice how we really are, separate from like or dislike, separate from nice person, not nice person, separate from selfish or not selfish, and so on, noticing that fact changes us. But we can't understand how. It's a kind of acceptance. So we can only believe that noticing ourselves somehow— We can't prove it. We can't explain it, but we can believe it.

Dogen also used another phrase to describe zazen, shikantaza. Shikantaza is a very strange expression. Shikan means only. Nothing else. Nothing other than. Ta means just, or only. Za means sit. Nothing else, only just sitting. This was his description. Not worrying about whether zazen is improving us. Not worrying about whether our zazen is good or bad. Sitting. Very difficult. Because his statements are so simple, we find them difficult to understand. So at the end of the talk, let us recite Fueko. So the first four lines are at the same speed as the first chant, and the last three lines are much slower. Let's try.

[recitation, 00:52:34–00:53:15]