Why Practice?

[Douglas]

If you don't mind, I'd like to share a bit of my experience while sitting.

The other day I decided it might be interesting to write down why I practice.

- To be calm
- To prepare for painful life events
- To be more mindful in everyday events
- [placeholder for whatever want/desire you can think of. They are endless]

Of course, these are wants/desires. Zen Buddhist teachings point to their danger.

But wanting to not have wants/desires is itself a want/desire!

So what is there to do? I am the dog chasing its own tail. There is nothing to do. I cannot dispense with my wants/desires.

So I'm stuck, and I sit there on the cushion, or on my chair. Staring at a wall with my mind chasing itself and my body aching. The want/desire to DO something rages up like bubbles in boiling water.

There is nowhere I can go, there is nothing to do. Sigh. Might as well just sit here.

And that is why I sit. I don't know how to say it in any other way. I don't know that I CAN. This seems important.

Thanks for reading!

Gassho,
Doug

[Jundo]

- To be calm
- To prepare for painful life events
- To be more mindful in everyday events
- [placeholder for whatever want/desire you can think of. They are endless]

Reminds me of something I wrote years ago. We do not practice to be calm, prepare for life, be more mindful ...

Dogs Chasing Their Tails

It is important to understand from the very outset of beginning practice that Shikantaza (“Just Sitting”) Zazen is a radical, to-the-marrow, dropping of all need to attain, all “running after.” And we work very very diligently to attain this “non-attaining!“ For the time we are sitting Zazen, it is important to feel in the heart that there is nothing more in need of doing in that moment, no lack to fill, no other place to be that just sitting here in this moment.

Why is this philosophy of Shikantaza so unique and vital to understand?

Because in our lives, we are morning-to-night chasing after things, rarely still … whether it is dreams and goals, food on the table, fame and fortune, praise, possessions, whatever we think will “finally” make us happy and content in life, complete (once we get there, if we get there). Like a dog chasing its tail.

How rarely are we truly still, at rest and at peace, right here.

...

The Practice of Shikantaza may be unique in being, unlike most other ways of seeking, a radical stopping of the search, a true union with life “just-as-it-is,” dropping all need for looking “beyond” so to make life complete here and now.

Yet, far from being mere resignation, a half-satisfied complacency or lazy “giving up,” Shikantaza is, instead, finding what we are longing for by allowing all just to be. Life is complete when one allows life to be complete. All things are perfectly just what they are if we see them as such. The hard borders and friction between our self and the world fall away.

By stopping the search, something precious is truly found!

We discover stillness and peace, not by running after stillness and peace down the road, but by being truly still and at rest just here. To do this, we sit on our Zafu cushion, dropping from mind all judgments of the world, all resistance… all thought that life “should be” or “had better be” some other way than just as we find it all. In this manner, we find the sitting of Zazen (and all of Practice) to be a perfect act just in and of itself, the one place to be and the one thing to do in the universe at that moment. When we are sitting, we do not think that we “should be” someplace else, or that there is a better way to spend our time. Instead, when we sit, there is just sitting, no other place in need of going. We find each moment of sitting complete, with not one thing to add or take away from the moment.

We discover stillness even amid the activity of life, peace without regard to whether all around is chaos! Even though we are still, we keep living and moving forward!

Thus, we find that, like our own tails, what we have been searching for is here all along.
image.png

And, hmmm, funny thing ...

... doing so may actually leave one more calm and accepting, prepared for the hard moments of life, and allowing the moment to be

Gassho, J
stlah

[Douglas]

Reminds me of something I wrote years ago. We do not practice to be calm, prepare for life, be more mindful ...



And, hmmm, funny thing ...

... doing so may actually leave one more calm and accepting, prepared for the hard moments of life, and allowing the moment to be

Gassho, J
stlah

Thank you! On a side note, I believe it was Alan Watts who pointed out that dogs chase their tails for fun, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it, so one may not need to beat oneself up over mentally chasing one's tail.

I love that dog graphic! My wife makes T-shirts. I'd love to put that on a t-shirt and have above it something like "Maybe you already have what you are chasing after!"

Gassho,
Doug

[Bion]

My answer to "Why practice?" is because I am a buddha and a deluded human being, both at the same time, so it is only my whole life that I can use to act out the buddha or act out the deluded person. Nobody can live my life for me, nor can anyone use this body-mind that I call "me" to give voice to the dharma. I throw myself into the practice of the Way for the sake of the practice and let buddha act out buddha. Something like that...but it is already too many words. It is like trying to answer why do you breathe, why do you sleep or why do you blink

Gassho
sat lah

[Douglas]

My answer to "Why practice?" is because I am a buddha and a deluded human being, both at the same time, so it is only my whole life that I can use to act out the buddha or act out the deluded person. Nobody can live my life for me, nor can anyone use this body-mind that I call "me" to give voice to the dharma. I throw myself into the practice of the Way for the sake of the practice and let buddha act out buddha. Something like that...but it is already too many words. It is like trying to answer why do you breathe, why do you sleep or why do you blink

Gassho
sat lah

I really like what you've written!

Somehow, this is pertinent and related to attempting to talk and using words. If you can believe it, I had not read the "Tao Te Ching" until quite recently. I opened the book for the first time last month and read that first line.

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao"

I was stunned. I was thinking "Well...uh. I....".

It was metaphorically like Lao Tzu reached through time with a rolled up newspaper and smacked me in the face. I now seem to be less likely to grasp onto things while sitting, not that I'm doing anything to grasp less (what could one do?) That line, for some reason has affected my sitting.

Gassho,
Doug

[Houzan]

If you don't mind, I'd like to share a bit of my experience while sitting.

The other day I decided it might be interesting to write down why I practice.

- To be calm
- To prepare for painful life events
- To be more mindful in everyday events
- [placeholder for whatever want/desire you can think of. They are endless]

Of course, these are wants/desires. Zen Buddhist teachings point to their danger.

But wanting to not have wants/desires is itself a want/desire!

So what is there to do? I am the dog chasing its own tail. There is nothing to do. I cannot dispense with my wants/desires.

So I'm stuck, and I sit there on the cushion, or on my chair. Staring at a wall with my mind chasing itself and my body aching. The want/desire to DO something rages up like bubbles in boiling water.

There is nowhere I can go, there is nothing to do. Sigh. Might as well just sit here.

And that is why I sit. I don't know how to say it in any other way. I don't know that I CAN. This seems important.

Thanks for reading!

Gassho,
Doug

Thank you for sharing. I get the sense that you try to describe what it is like to surrender to reality. Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve.

Gassho, Hōzan
satlsh

[Tom M]

I practice because, though I don't recall it ever being otherwise, to wake up each day as an ape's head is such an odd predicament. Surely there is something deeper to discover. That, and the frequency of unpleasant states of mind, which keep revealing themselves to be self-inflicted.

Tom
Sat today

[Hosai]

Why not practice...? Do we even have a choice?

_/\_
sat/ah
hōsai

[Bion]

Why not practice...? Do we even have a choice?

_/\_
sat/ah
hōsai

There's always a choice, so we have to choose correctly.

Gassho
sat lah

[Hosai]

There's always a choice, so we have to choose correctly.

Gassho
sat lah

nope, absolutely no choice... Even when you're not practising, you're practising not practising.....
_/\_
sat/ah
hōsai

[Bion]

nope, absolutely no choice... Even when you're not practising, you're practising not practising.....
_/\_
sat/ah
hōsai

Not practicing the way is fully not practicing it, indeed. One can absolutely deceive oneself into thinking that is enough.

Gassho
sat lah

[Hosai]

Not practicing the way is fully not practicing it, indeed. One can absolutely deceive oneself into thinking that is enough.

Gassho
sat lah

Yes you can.

_/\_
sat/ah
hōsai

[Onsho]

He was offered the whole world,
He declined and turned away

He did not write poetry,
He lived poetry before it existed.
He did not speak of philosophy,
He cleaned up the dung philosophy left behind.

He had no address:
He lived in a bowl of dust playing in the universe.

-Jung Kwung


You sound like a good role model for yourself, I think you are lucky to have you.

Gassho
Onshō
satlah

[Myo-jin]

At some point I came to the conclusion that there really is no point to practice. That is, in the long run it doesn't matter if I spend my life doing zazen, or if I spend it in a bar getting hammered on whiskey. That is to say; the end result is the same, a corpse, the monk and the drunk are equal in the end.

I can only really say that as somebody who spent most of their life, from their early teens to now (mid-40s) looking for a 'point' to it all. You could say that my path has been one of exhausting all of the options, looking for spiritual validation and illumination in all sorts of places. Glimmers here and there, like images dimly seen in dreams, but nothing I can point to and sat definitively, this is the 'point'. So, I gave up, decided to stop running after things. In the face of the unknowable, what else is there to do but sit in silence?

If there's some place called enlightenment, then I don't know the way. I've never been there but the brochure looks nice, as the song goes.

So why practice? I've asked myself this a lot. And I realise that I practice because I like to. It's a nice way to start the day, with a period of stillness in zazen. Why uphold precepts? Because they make life with my family run more smoothly, and might possibly make my little corner of the world a little bit better.

The Trappist Monk Thomas Merton wrote:
"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm."

To me I think that's about the sum of it in the end.

Sattlah
Gassho
Myojin

[Douglas]

Thank you for sharing. I get the sense that you try to describe what it is like to surrender to reality. Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve.

Gassho, Hōzan
satlsh

Surrender…very interesting word to use! But to whom? Or what? I'm as much "reality" as anything else. Am I surrendering to myself (rhetorical question) Words are so inadequate. I really feel for Zen masters trying to communicate what can’t be communicated in words. It’s got to feel frustrating.

Gassho,
Doug