Tag Archives: 108Enso

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adjust just sitting

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Hummingbirds like to hang out in the front garden.  There, the bee balm and honeysuckle keep them well-fed enough to dismiss my plastic containers of fake nectar.  Sometimes, however, they hover over the little red fake flowers and I can watch them, entranced by the buzz of the wings.  It amazes me that wings can move so fast and the sparkles doesn’t fly off the feathers.  To keep themselves fed they may have to visit as many as 1,000 flowers a day.  Perhaps the fake nectar helps although I doubt the average hummingbird gets a complex if it sips sugar syrup rather than flower nectar.  Its only intention after all is to just do what it does.

In the term shikantaza, the word shikan is sometimes translated as “just,” or “only.”  Ta Means “hit,” and za means “sit.”  It literally means “hit sitting,” but the ta really intensifies “sitting.”  So it means “sitting.”  Shikan means “just,” but it also means “by all means do it,” or “get on with it.”

Tenshin Reb Anderson, in Just Sitting (The Art of Just Sitting edited by John Daido Loori), emphasizes the intention of shikantaza – stopping conceptions of what it should be and experiencing, immediately and directly.  Just sit.  As with his book Being Upright, I like Anderson’s affinity for another slant on the word “just.”

In English, just also means “valid within the law, legitimate, suitable, or fitting.”  It means “sound, well-founded.”  It means “exact, accurate.”  It means “upright before God, righteous, upright before truth.”

It may feel uncomfortable or even contrary to load onto shikantaza these concepts that carry a tinge of “right” and “wrong” in the sense of judgment, but I don’t know that practice can be separated from the ethics or ethos of practice.  However, Anderson takes it in an interesting direction.

What I’m saying here is just reminding you of what you already know, what you already intend.  Mostly, what I will be doing besides reminding you will be simply adjusting you, just “justing” you.  That’s all.  That’s all I can do.  I’m not correcting you, I’m adjusting you.  Of course, I can’t really adjust you: you’re already adjusted.  But sometimes I may feel that you’d look a little more “just” if you sat like this, rather than like that.  If I see your mudra over here, I may think, “You’d be a little more just if it were over there.”

I try to steer clear of any kind of judgment in the adjustment: I just adjust.  And then it’s for you not to think about being judged, but rather whether you feel more just after the adjustment.

Sweet.

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actual reality

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The baby cardinals have trouble staying on the feeder.  They don’t cling like the baby woodpeckers or nuthatches.  Mostly they careen against the column of mesh, knocking themselves off in a shower of sunflower seeds which lie on the ground for the mourning doves and sparrows.  Eventually, they manage to crash and cling to the rim on the rebound.  It takes practice.

Dogen said, To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.  He used the Japanese word narau for “study” and its root means “to get accustomed to,” “to become familiar with,” “to get used to,” or “to become intimate with.”

Shohaku Okumura in To Study the Self (in The Art of Just Sitting edited by John Daido Loori) explains:

In the Chinese character for narau, the upper part of the kanji means “bird’s wings.”  The lower part of the kanji refers to “self.”  This study is like a baby bird studying or learning how to fly with its parents.  By nature,  a baby bird has the ability to fly, but a baby bird does not know how to fly.  So the baby watches its parents and learns how to fly.  It tries again and again, and finally it can fly like its parents.  This is the original meaning of “to study” here.  This is not simply intellectual study.

Okumura points out that accumulation of intellectual knowledge keeps us from flying, by which he means, we cannot live out our true meaning weighted down by perceptions and ignorance.  (Ironic how knowledge can also lend itself to entrenching ignorance.)  To see actual reality we must become who we actually are (actualize ourselves).  And studying the self is as essential for us to become human as is flying to a baby bird is to become a bird (except for those cute penguins and ostriches).