SIT-A-LONG with JUNDO: Fukanzazengi LXII

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Like fine Japanese carpentry, Zazen is a learnable skill of body-mind. It is mastered through years of observing and practice.

But unlike many skills we have a desire to master, mastery of this skill comes by radically dropping all goals of mastery … including dropping the goal to master the dropping of goals.

Learning this dropping is helped along with the guidance of teachers, but ultimately, it is mastered by our own doing …

… by doing that is non-doing.

Thus, Master Dogen stated that Zazen is not learning Zen, nor seeking to practice Zen … it is immediate practice-experience, practice-realization … known only in the act itself.

Learning this skill is hard, I think, only when we try to attain non-attaining.

But when we thoroughly stop trying to attain non-attaining, non-attaining is easily attained.

What is called sitting-Zen is not learning Zen meditation. It is just a peaceful and effortless gate to reality. It is practice-and-experience which perfectly realizes the Buddha’s enlightenment. The Universe is realized, untouched by restrictions or hindrances. To grasp this meaning is to be like a dragon that has found water, or like a tiger before a mountain stronghold. Remember, true reality is naturally manifesting itself before us, and gloom and distraction vanish at a stroke. [NISHIJIMA]

The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the dharma gate of joyful ease, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the koan realized; traps and snares can never reach it. If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. For you must know that the true dharma appears of itself, so that from the start dullness and distraction are struck aside. [SZTP]

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SIT-A-LONG with JUNDO: Fukanzazengi LXI