Question Regarding Where to Sit

[Doshin]

I have mostly sat facing a wall, sometimes the back of a seat on an airplane, a few times when accompanying my wife to church I look down at the bench in front of me or at the floor of a waiting room. However where I feel most anchored is in front of a rock, a tree, a mountainside, or a far vista. The possible translation “sit as if a wall seeing” gives me pause and understanding.

Thanks to all for the discussion

Doshin
St

[Tai Shi]

Question Regarding Where to Sit

It mattes not the direction I look. More importantly I see, yes I see others disappear and truly come into focus. I vision others deep within and in my mind I see the reality of now. This is now of appreciation, not a wall
But what the wall represents as the pallet of paint like light in photography, or canvas upon which my richly painted reality is given away. Otherwise why sit but to find compassion for another’s sorrow, hunger, or shelter from the storm. Sitting liberates the mind to see reality of the still point in the turning world. The bonds of selfishness are broken and in the quiet of the mind if on an operating table with the helpful knife liberating pain the surgeon sees me, the nurse affixed a pillow beneath my head and I see her strong giving hands, the teacher gives me tools of words the building blocks of civilization and society, or the judge affixes right from wrong, or escape and liberation, all this in the moment of one breath and Shikantaza come inhalation exhalation one breath of life and the moment comes into view as reality.
Tai Shi
sat / lah
Gassho


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[Seibu]

Let me quote an older post ...

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... the historical reason may be a mistranslation of Bodhidharma, regarded as the First Patriarch of Ch'an or the Zen tradition, and a writing long attributed to him (The Two Entrances and Four Practices) that used the term in Chinese "biguan/pi-kuan". Historian Heinrich Dumoulin discusses Bodhidharma's wall-contemplation.



The actual meaning of "wall gazing" may not be a literal "sit while gazing at a wall", but closer to "sit as if a wall seeing". Nobody really knows what the term originally meant however. The great Zen Historian Yanagida Seizan has (ala Shikantaza) interpreted the term to denote a sort of witnessing of the world with the steadfast detachment of a wall in which one “gazes intently at a vibrantly alive śunyatā (emptiness).”

Thank you for sharing this Jundo, and welcome to Treeleaf Eddie.

Gassho,
Seibu
Sattoday