Tag Archives: zazen

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buddha, ltd

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Do not try to become a buddha.  How could being a buddha be limited to sitting or not sitting?*

It’s difficult not to feel the pressure of time multiplied by dreams of what was to be.  These days I hear a little voice, more frequently than is comfortable, whispering, “It’s too late.”  Too late for this dream to be realized, too late for that wish to be fulfilled.  It’s not the frantic rabbity sense of “too late” but more a slothful, sluggish drag-my-butt sense of a compressed future.  I can be quite rational about this urgency (or lack thereof) when it relates to the to-do list of career or social eddies.  However, in matters of practice, it is a turbo-charged driveness that isn’t always useful.

And then I’m reminded that buddha or buddha-limited, sitting up-straight is the only option.  In fact, not just sitting up-straight but being upright is non-negotiable.

I think I’ll start a new organization: buddha, limited.  Anyone want to join as CEO?

*Dogen, Recommending Zazen to All People.  In Tanahashi, Kazuaki (ed.), Enlightenment Unfolds: The essential teachings of Zen Master Dogen.

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an opportunity provided by a finger

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Practice, apparently, is not about recognizing esoteric signs.  Fingers (flipped or no), banners, needles or mallets don’t count.  Nor do Rorschach leavings in the bottom of my ink pots.  Realization of our true nature doesn’t come carefully packaged and delivered by Fed-Ex.  And, listen carefully, it definitely doesn’t arise out of being whacked by a kyosaku, pummelled by a fist, a staff or a shout*.

This is the place we get stuck.  We try to understand enlightenment by our discriminative mind; yet, our discriminative, our discursive thought, is the very thing that binds us.  The question really is how to go beyond, how to transcend that dichotomy.  But we all have to start with that discriminative mind. 

At this point, I am beginning to get the inkling that I’ve wasted precious practice time diving into shallow waters.  But the discriminative mind, the mind that wants to have evidence, steps, and stories, is what we have as the start point.  Perhaps that first tentative step (or sometimes ego-inflated step) is simply to want this because my own suffering is too much and I am willing to take, buy, trade, barter time on the cushion for the promise of relief.

That’s ok.  Unless it stops there.

*Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi, Commentary on Fukanzazengi.  In Loori, John Daido (ed), The Art of Just Sitting, 2nd Edition