Dogen’s
Fukanzazengi
Zen is, after all, zazen: just sitting. But how many of us have wondered whether
Dogen was making some kind of cruel joke?
Where is the repose? Where is the
bliss?
Zazen, zazen, and more zazen. Sometimes a minimum of two hours a day on the
cushion, usually 3 hours, and during the 7 day sesshin, ten periods of
zazen. I checked the sesshin schedule,
and there were 295 minutes of zazen a day (equaling 4.91 hours), and if you add
in the dharma talk, tea, and three oryoki meals, that is an additional 3.5
hours on the cushion.
I thought I had trained for this. I was sitting 30 minutes a day, 3 times a day,
for two months. But I felt as if I had
never sat at all. I knew that I should
not condemn myself or feel like a failure – although that was often how I felt. As my good friend and mentor, Chris Fortin,
said, “It’s not that you were a failure, it was just not what you expected.”
The big shock was on Day 2, when we did a tangaryo. I went to the Ino, the head of the hall, and
said, “Let me get this straight. I sit
from 5 am until 9 pm with bathroom breaks and three short breaks for meals?” “Yes,”
she said, “do your best.”
Doing my best was an ever-present koan. What is my best? What is the discomfort one works through in
order to gain a strong posture that one can hold? What level of pain is simply too much – pain that
would cause any reasonable person to stay in bed?
During the entire practiced period, I was dismayed by how
much my body hurt. I switched between a
chair and the cushion, but I can tell you sitting motionless in a chair for 40
minutes can be just as painful as sitting on a cushion. On the chair, I felt
burning sensations in my neck and shoulders.
On the cushion, pain between my shoulder blades.
One good thing:
during the 40 minutes, I was constantly making small adjustments and
learned my true posture. My teacher,
Norman Fischer, said that I would become intimate with my spine. How true! If I slightly bent my head or
tucked my chin, my neck and shoulders felt better. I would adjust my spine and learned that if
the vertebrae were in a line, like children’s play blocks stacked in a column,
I could sit better. There was a balance
between using muscles to sit upright and yet staying (relatively) relaxed.
This must sound pretty masochistic, and one would reasonably
question whether this is a “cult of pain,” – words my mind repeated at my very
lowest experience. There were
instructions from the Abbess to stay with the schedule, to stay with the
pain. I do not agree with this
philosophy at all. I think intense pain
is not necessary and possibly harmful.
But I do think, now, that pushing through discomfort can be useful.
So, although this description might sound grim, it was, in
retrospect, a wonderful challenge. After
these two months, it is as if I found my posture, found my foundation, and I am
now able to just sit for several hours.
Not exactly in repose and bliss, but with a body-mind open awareness
that is actually refreshing.
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