There is no other place to be, nothing more to do ... and I am so glad that you are here, doing this reading!
This time, we will read from page 23 "The Basics and the Missing Ingredient," stopping before page 29 "And So, 'The Way of Zazen Recommended for Everyone.'"
Today's reading contains this description of the "missing ingredient" of many Zazen instructions:
Let's take this attitude of Zazen off the cushion, into daily life:
Imagine and describe some scene in your life that is tedious, annoying, difficult, frustrating, painful, sad or the like. Describe how you feel.
Now, also describe how it feel when, even as a matter of faith and conviction, one brings a "nothing more to do, no other place to be" feeling to the situation, like the language of this section.
Once again, how is it to experience the event both ways at once, as one?
Gassho, Jundo
SatTodayLAH
This time, we will read from page 23 "The Basics and the Missing Ingredient," stopping before page 29 "And So, 'The Way of Zazen Recommended for Everyone.'"
Today's reading contains this description of the "missing ingredient" of many Zazen instructions:
[W]e must sit shikantaza with the profound trusting that sitting itself is a complete and sacred act, the one and only action that need be done in that moment of sitting. As we shall see in the “Fukan Zazengi” and in Dōgen’s other writings on zazen, this was Dōgen’s unique point, and he emphasized it time and time again in his teachings. Zazen is all the Buddhas and Ancestors sitting in our own moment of sitting, as if our sitting turns us into those Buddhas and Ancestors on the spot. We must have faith in that fact. We must taste vibrantly that the mere act of sitting zazen is whole and complete, the total fruition of life’s goals, with nothing lacking and nothing added to the bare fact of sitting here and now. No matter how busy our lives or how strongly we may feel tempted to be elsewhere, for the time of sitting we put aside all other concerns. To do this, we must have a sense that the single act of crossing the legs as Dōgen instructed (or sitting in some other balanced posture, as many modern students do) is the realization of all we’ve ever sought. That is why there is simply no other place to go in the world, nothing else to do besides sit in this posture.
Even if we do not yet fully believe in the completeness of zazen, we can nonetheless have trust and faith in it, and that trust and faith will
soon turn into an actual experience. ...
... When we truly taste to the marrow the real meaning of “nothing to achieve,” we finally reach a great spiritual achievement. As counterintuitive as it sounds, resting in stillness without needing to run is, in fact, truly getting somewhere.
Even if we do not yet fully believe in the completeness of zazen, we can nonetheless have trust and faith in it, and that trust and faith will
soon turn into an actual experience. ...
... When we truly taste to the marrow the real meaning of “nothing to achieve,” we finally reach a great spiritual achievement. As counterintuitive as it sounds, resting in stillness without needing to run is, in fact, truly getting somewhere.
Imagine and describe some scene in your life that is tedious, annoying, difficult, frustrating, painful, sad or the like. Describe how you feel.
Now, also describe how it feel when, even as a matter of faith and conviction, one brings a "nothing more to do, no other place to be" feeling to the situation, like the language of this section.
Once again, how is it to experience the event both ways at once, as one?
Gassho, Jundo
SatTodayLAH
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