shikantaza, just sitting
- hamid ebadi
- Mar 11, 2018
- 4 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Since the beginning of our silent retreats at Maitri-Retreats, our meditation format has been zazen which translates into zen meditation in Japanese; za, to sit, and zen, the transliteration of dhyana, meditation in sanscrit.
Zazen is at once a bare-bone form of meditation and at the same time it is not. Historically, it’s a twice millennial practice passed on through generations by the Buddha as the unique gateway to liberating humans from the rounds of birth and death and the suffering that comes from being enttrapment in samsara; cyclic world of delusion and ignorance. But, it is also not meditation according to our common understanding for it cannot be intrumentalized and used as a technique.
This practice has no object and is not meant to serve as a means towards some end. It is not meant to take us from here to anywhere in particular. Zazen in its simplicity is disarming since it is not a stepping stone to some higher state of consciousness, or enlightenment, whatever we may mean by these terms. It is not something we do as a preperation for something else, usually seen as being in the future. If anything, zazen helps to realize that ultimately there is no getting from here to there. There is no coming and going if in the end there is no getting from here to there. Not that there is no coming and going, there is, but there is no particular person called me who does the coming and going. How to put into words something that comes to us from the unspeakable?
Clearly there is a paradox at the heart of Zen practice and Zen meditation.
The sitting that is nothing other than the sitting is what this practice is about. The Japanese name for it is Shikantaza: just sitting. The emphasis here is on the word just. Just being wholeheartedly in full awareness of body, mind and breath, present to the unfolding of the present moment. In the process, we become more aware of the resistances and discomforts that arise as we sit in the openness of just this moment, just this sitting, just this being. As our mind is mostly involved with thoughts about the past and the future we find it difficutl to give the present our full attention.
Slowly becoming intimate with the resistances. Noticing the arising of our cravings and aversions and the tensions they create inside. Then the next moment, in the next awareness of body-mind-breath presence to this moment returning to the just sitting. Returning to the release and ease of this just sitting.
Zazen is the practice of paying one’s full attention to just this moment in its arising and falling as silence and stillness come upon you.
When there is justness in the just of sitting, being simply present here to this moment, time and space collapse, all mental categories collapse. In the absence of mental construes I face the timeless, the boundless in the sheer openness of a moment that is nothing other than this moment of: here I am, me voici!
As we inquire further into this experience we begin to get a deeper intimation of what Master Dogen thaught throughout his life: practice and realization are one, one doesn’t come after the other. There is no beginning to one nor end to the other, what we practice is the expression of intimacy with what another great, Master Eckhart, called: the eternal now.
The just sitting strips you of whatever it is you think you need to realize, attain, work through in order to enlighten our existence.
Zazen is the art of just sitting beyond the projections of the mind, or not being disturbed by the mind's projections and letting go of them, letting go of the stories they create and over which we obssess. That's called a trance.
When I can just sit, just breathe, just be the being that I am, then I return quite effortlessly to a simplicity where whatever I encouter is just the being or thing that it is.
What I find compelling in the Zen way of looking at things is how we slowly begin to lose interest in projects, noble as they may be, such as enlightenment or self-realization, the more we move into experiences of immediacy, the more we sense with our pores what intimacy means. Intimacy is letting go of goals, drives and strivings.
Intimacy with ourselves, intimacy with others, intimacy with the world.
When we deeply experience intimacy we become part of what Merlou-Ponty, the French philosopher, calls, la chair du monde, the flesh of the world.
The flesh of the world is being part of the silence that opens us to intimacy, resonance and co-responding with all phenomena and beings.
To show up to this, to be here to this, hineni, is to say here I am to this moment of intimacy. To be this moment of intimacy. To become one with the spirit and flesh of just.......
If you are coming then be an expression of the intimacy of the moment of ; here I am, hineni, me voici, I am just coming....I am the coming....the sitting...the breathing...the breath....the just....the thus....
He or she who realizes justness, thusness, things are they are, things just as they are, is called in sanskrit a tathagata......
Tathagata is one of the names of the Buddha.
