Zazen, in Zen Buddhism, seated meditation. The instructions for zazen direct the disciple to sit in a quiet room, breathing rhythmically and easily, with legs fully or half crossed, spine and head erect, hands folded one palm above the other, and eyes open. Logical, analytic thinking should be. Set amongst the dramatic East Coast of Barbados on Cattlewash Beach, Zazen is the first ultra-modern luxury offering of its kind in this unforgettable landscape. Cutting-edge architecture is boldly brought to life in concrete and large swathes of Agate that burst out like fountains of shimmering colour. Welcome to Zazen.
FREE UK DELIVERY for orders over £10 Log in; or; Create account; Cart 0. FREE UK DELIVERY for orders over £10. Home Shop by Collection Handmade Our Tribe Deals Best Sellers Gift ideas Bangles & Bracelets Earrings. How to Sit in Zazen Posture. There are five basic sitting positions from which to choose: the full lotus, the half-lotus, the Burmese, and seiza, or kneeling. You may also use a chair. The essential point is to find a position which you can maintain. Most of us can tolerate some minor discomfort, but if a particular position is unduly painful. Zazen that leads to Self-realization is neither idle reverie nor vacant inaction but an intense inner struggle to gain control over the mind and then to use it, like a silent missile, to penetrate the barrier of the five senses and the discursive intellect (that is, the sixth sense).
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How to do Zazen
The place
When you do zazen, find a quiet place where you can sit without disturbances. It should be neither too dark nor too bright, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The sitting place should be neat and clean.
If possible, a statue of Manjushri Bodhisattva should be enshrined in the room. If there is none available, any statue or painting of a Buddha or a Bodhisattva is fine. Also, when possible, place an offering of flowers on the altar and burn incense.
Preparing yourself
Avoid sitting when you haven't had sufficient sleep or when you are physically exhausted. Before sitting, eat moderately and avoid alcohol. Wash your face and feet so that you feel refreshed.
Clothing
Avoid wearing soiled clothing or garments which are luxurious or expensive. It is also advisable to avoid heavy garments. Wear your clothing loosely but neatly. In Japanese Zen monasteries, socks are not worn in the zendo.
Position of the zafu
Place a thick square mat (zabuton) in front of the wall and put a zafu on it. Sit down, placing the base of your spine at the center of the zafu so that half of the zafu is behind you. After crossing your legs, rest your knees firmly on the zabuton.
Crossing your legs(1): full-lotus position (kekkahuza)
Place your right foot on your left thigh, and then your left foot on your right thigh. Cross your legs so that the tips of your toes and the outer edge of your thighs form a single line.
Crossing your legs(2): half-lotus position (hankahuza)
Simply place your left foot on your right thigh. When you cross your legs, your knees and the base of your spine should form an equilateral triangle. These three points support the weight of your body. In full-lotus position (kekkahuza), the order of crossing the legs may be reversed, and in half-lotus position (hankahuza), raising the opposite leg is acceptable.
Zazenta
Posture
Rest both knees firmly on the zabuton, straighten the lower part of your back, push your buttocks outward and hips forward, and straighten your spine. Pull in your chin and extend your neck as though reaching toward the ceiling. Your ears should be in a line parallel to your shoulders, and your nose should be in line with your navel. After straightening your back, relax your shoulders, back, and abdomen without changing your posture. Sit upright, leaning neither to the left nor right, neither forward nor backward.
Cosmic Mudra (Hokkaijoin)
Place your right hand, palm-up, on your left foot, and your left hand palm-up on your right palm.The tips of your thumbs should be lightly touching each other. This is called Cosmic Mudra (hokkai-join). Place the tips of your thumbs in front of your navel, and your arms slightly apart from your body.
The mouth
Keep your mouth closed, placing your tongue against the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth.
The eyes
Keep your eyes slightly open. Cast them downward at about a 45-degree angle. Without focusing on any particular thing, let everything have its place in your field of vision. If your eyes are closed, you will easily drift into drowsiness or daydreaming.
Exhale completely and take a breath (Kanki-issoku)
Quietly make a deep exhalation and inhalation. Slightly open your mouth and exhale smoothly and slowly. In order to expel all the air from your lungs, exhale from the abdomen. Then close your mouth and continue to breathe through your nose naturally. This is called kanki-issoku.
Swaying the body
Place your hands palms-up on your knees and sway the upper half of your body from left to right a few times. Without moving your hips, move the trunk as if it were a pole leaning to one side then the other, so that the waist and hip muscles are stretched. You may also sway forward and backward. At first this movement should be large, gradually becoming smaller and smaller, and ceasing with your body centered in an upright position. Once again forming the hokkai-join with your hands, assume an unmoving upright posture.
Abdominal breathing
During zazen, breathe quietly through your nose. Do not try to control your breathing. Let it come and go so naturally that you forget you are breathing. Let long breaths be long, and short breaths be short. Do not make noise by breathing heavily.
Awareness (Kakusoku)
Do not concentrate on any particular object or control your thought. When you maintain a proper posture and your breathing settles down, your mind will naturally become tranquil.
When various thoughts arise in your mind, do not become caught up by them or struggle with them; neither pursue nor try to escape from them. Just leave thoughts alone, allowing them to come up and go away freely. The essential thing in doing zazen is to awaken (kakusoku) from distraction and dullness, and return to the right posture moment by moment.
Getting up from zazen
When you finish zazen, bow in gassho, place your hands palms-up on your thighs, sway your body a few times, first a little, and then more extensively. Take a deep breath. Unfold your legs. Move slowly, especially when your legs are asleep. Do not stand up abruptly.
Kinhin
When doing kinhin, walk clockwise around the room, holding your hand in shashu position. From the waist up, your posture should be the same as that in zazen. Henning driver download for windows. Take the first step with your right foot. Advance by taking only half step for each full breath (one exhalation and inhalation).
Walk slowly and smoothly as if you were standing in one place. Do not drag your feet or make noise. Walk straight ahead, and when turning, always turn to right. The word kinhin means to go straight. When you finish kinhin, stop and bow. Then walk at a normal pace around the room until you return to your seat.
These remarks are excerpted from course handouts given by Rev. Fujita at a workshop called “The Lived-Body Experience in Buddhist Meditation” he taught at BCBS in March, 2002.
There seems to be a common misunderstanding about zazen, which some people think of as a technique for reaching a state of “no thought.” Such an understanding of zazen assumes that a certain state of mind can be reached by manipulation, technique or method. In the West, zazen is usually translated as “Zen meditation” or “sitting meditation.” More and more, in contemporary usage, zazen is considered one of the many methods from Eastern spiritual traditions for attaining objectives such as mind/body health, skillful social behavior, a peaceful mind or the resolution of various problems in life.
It is true that many meditation practices in the Buddhist tradition are helpful in achieving these objectives, and these may certainly be skillful uses of meditation tools. However zazen, as understood by Dogen Zenji, is something different, and cannot be categorized as meditation in the sense described above. It would therefore be helpful to us to look at some of the differences between zazen and meditation.
Dogen (1200-1252) was the founder of the Soto Zen tradition, and a meditation master par excellence. His Shobogenzo is one of the great masterpieces of the Buddhist doctrinal tradition. Contemporary scholars are finding much in this text to help them understand, not only a unique approach to Buddhadharma [the teaching of the Buddha], but also to zazen as practice. For Dogen, zazen is first and foremost an holistic body posture, not a state of mind.
Dogen uses various terms to describe zazen, one of which is gotsu-za, which means “sitting immovable like a bold mountain.” A related term of great importance is kekka-fuza—“full-lotus position”—which Dogen regards as the key to zazen. However, Dogen’s understanding of kekka-fuza is completely different from the yogic tradition of India, and this understanding sheds a great deal of light on how we should approach zazen.
In most meditative traditions, practitioners start a certain method of meditation (such as counting breaths, visualizing sacred images, concentrating the mind on a certain thought or sensation, etc.) after getting comfortable sitting in full-lotus position. In other words, it is kekka-fuza plus meditation. Kekka-fuza in such usage becomes a means for optimally conditioning the body and mind for mental exercises called “meditation,” but is not an objective in itself. The practice is structured dualistically, with a sitting body as a container and a meditating mind as the contents. And the emphasis is always on meditation as mental exercise. In such a dualistic structure, the body sits while the mind does something else.
For Dogen, on the other hand, the objective of zazen is just to sit in kekka-fuza correctly—there is absolutely nothing to add to it. It is kekka-fuza plus zero. Kodo Sawaki Roshi, the great Zen master of early 20lh century Japan, said, “Just sit zazen, and that’s the end of it.” In this understanding, zazen goes beyond mind/body dualism; both the body and the mind are simultaneously and completely used up just by the act of sitting in kekka-fuza. In the Samadhi King chapter of Shobogenzo, Dogen says, “Sit in kekka-fuza with body, sit in kekka-fuza with mind, sit in kekka-fuza of body-mind falling off.”
Meditation practices which emphasize something psychological—thoughts, perceptions, feelings, visualizations, intentions, etc.—all direct our attention to cortical-cerebral functions, which I will loosely refer to as “Head.” Most meditation, as we conventionally understand it, is a work that focuses on the Head. In Oriental medicine we find the interesting idea that harmony among the internal organs is of greatest importance. All the issues associated with Head are something merely resulting from a lack of harmony among the internal organs, which are the real bases of our life.
Because of our highly developed cortical-cerebral function, we tend to equate self-consciousness, the sense of “I,” with the Head—as if the Head is the main character in the play and the body is the servant following orders from the Head. However from the point of view of Oriental medicine this is not only a conceit of the Head, but is a total misconception of life. Head is just a small part of the whole of life, and need not hold such a privileged position.
While most meditation tends to focus on the Head, zazen focuses more on the living holistic body-mind framework, allowing the Head to exist without giving it any pre-eminence. If the Head is overfunctioning, it will give rise to a split and unbalanced life. But in the zazen posture it learns to find its proper place and function within a unified mind-body field. Our living human body is not just a collection of bodily parts, but is an organically integrated whole. It is designed in such a way that when one part of the body moves, however subtle the movement may be, it simultaneously causes the whole body to move in accordance with it.
“Just sitting with correct posture’’gets deepened infinitely.
When we first learn how to do zazen, we cannot learn it as a whole or in a single stroke. Inevitably we initially dissect zazen into small pieces and then arrange them in a certain sequence: regulating the body (choshin), regulating the breath (chosoku) and regulating the mind (choshin). In the Eihei-koroku Dogen wrote, “In our zazen, it is of primary importance to sit in the correct posture. Next, regulate the breath and calm down.”
But after going through this preliminary stage, all instructions given as separate pieces in space and time must be integrated as a whole in the body-mind of the practitioner of zazen. When zazen becomes zazen, shoshin-taza is actualized. This means “just (tan) sitting (za) with correct (sho) bodily (shin) posture, with the “taza” emphasizing the quality of being whole and one in time and space. The “whole” of zazen must be integrated as “one” sitting. In other words, zazen must become “Zazen, Whole and One.”
How is this quality of being whole and one manifest in the sitting posture of zazen? When zazen is deeply integrated, the practitioner does not feel that each part of her/his body is separate from the others and is independently doing its job here and there in the body. The practitioner is not engaged in doing many different things in different places in the body by following the various instructions on how to regulate the body. In reality s/he is doing only one thing to continuously aim at the correct sitting posture with the whole body.
So in the actual experience of the practitioner, there is only a simple and harmoniously integrated sitting posture. S/he feels the cross-legged posture, the cosmic mudra, the half-opened eyes, etc., as local manifestations of the sitting posture being whole and one. While each part of the body is functioning in its own unique way, as a whole body they are fully integrated into the state of being one. It is experienced as if all boundaries or divisions among the bodily parts have vanished, and all parts are embraced by and melted into one complete gesture of flesh and bone. We sometimes feel during zazen that our hands or legs have vanished or gone away.
The term “shoshin-taza” might be best understood in terms of posture and gravity. All things on the ground are always pulled toward the center of the earth by gravity. Within this field of gravity, every form of life has survived by harmonizing itself with gravity in various ways. We human beings attained upright posture, standing with the central axis of the body vertically, after a long evolutionary process. The upright posture is “anti-gravitational,” insofar as it cannot exist without uniquely human intentions and volitions that operate subliminally to keep the body upright. When we are sick or fatigued, we find it difficult to maintain the upright posture and lie down. In such situations the intention to stand upright is not operational.
Zazen Meditation
Although the vertical posture is anti-gravitational from one perspective, it can be properly aligned to be “pro-gravitational,” i.e. to follow gravity. When the body is tilted, certain muscles will become tense in order to maintain the upright posture; but if various parts of the body are integrated correctly along a vertical line, the weight is supported by the skeletal frame and unnecessary tension in the muscles is released. The whole body then submits to the direction of gravity. The subtlety of the sitting posture seems to lie in the fact that “anti-gravitational” and “pro-gravitational” states, which may seem contradictory at first glance, coexist quite naturally. Our relationship to gravity in shoshin-tanza is neither an anti-gravitational way of fighting with gravity through tense muscles and a stiff body, nor a pro-gravitational way of being defeated by gravity with flaccid muscles and a limp body.
In shoshin-tanza, while the body sits immovably like a mountain, the internal body is released, unwound and relaxed in every corner. Like an “egg balanced on end,” the outer structure remains strong and firm while the inside is fluid, calm and at ease. Except for minimally necessary muscles, everything is quietly at rest. The more relaxed the muscles, the more sensible one can be, and the relationship with gravity will be adjusted more and more minutely. The more the muscles are allowed to relax, the more precise awareness becomes—and shoshin-tanza gets deepened infinitely.
In zazen we move from the head to the heart and into our Buddha-nature.
I often find that people think of zazen as a solution to personal sufferings and problems or the cultivation of an individual. But a different perspective on zazen is provided by Kodo Sawaki Roshi’s words, “Zazen is to tune into the universe.” The posture of zazen is connecting us to the whole universe. As Shigeo Michi, a well-known anatomist of the last century, puts it, “Since zazen is the posture in which a human being does nothing for the sake of a human being, the human being is freed from being a human being and becomes a Buddha.” (Songs of Life—Paeans to Zazen by Daiji Kobayashi).
Michi also asks us to make a distinction between the “Head” and the “Heart,” saying how in zazen our internal “heart functions” reveal themselves quite vividly. The Head that I have been talking about may correspond to the technical Buddhist term “bonpu” which means ordinary human being. A bonpu is a non-Buddha, a person who is not yet enlightened and who is caught up in all sorts of ignorance, foolishness and suffering. When we engage in zazen wholeheartedly, instead of keeping it as an idea, we should never fail to understand that zazen practice is, in a sense, negation or giving up our bonpu-ness. In other words, in zazen we move from the Head to the Heart and into our Buddha-nature. If we fail to take this point seriously, we ruin ourselves by pandering to our own bonpu-ness; we get slack, adjust zazen to fit our bonpu-ness, and ruin zazen itself.
Dogen Zenji said, “[when you sit zazen] do not think of either good or evil. Do not be concerned with right or wrong. Put aside the operation of your intellect, volition and consciousness. Stop considering things with your memory, imagination or reflection.” Following this advice, we are free, for the time being, to set aside our highly developed intellectual faculties. We simply let go of our ability to conceptualize. In zazen we do not intentionally think about anything. This does not mean that we ought to fall asleep. On the contrary, our consciousness should always be clear and awake.
While we sit in zazen posture all of our human abilities, acquired through eons of evolution, are temporarily renounced or suspended. Since these capacities—moving, speaking, grasping, thinking—are the ones which human beings value the most, we might accurately say that “entering zazen is going out of the business of being a human being” or that in zazen “no human being business gets done.”
What is the significance of giving up all these hard-won human abilities while we sit in zazen? I believe it is that we have the opportunity to “seal up our bonpu-ness.” In other words, when sitting in zazen we unconditionally surrender our human ignorance. In effect we are saying “I will not use these human capacities for my confused, self-centered purposes. By adopting zazen posture, my hands, legs, lips and mind are all sealed. They are just as they are. I can create no karma with any of them.” That is what “seating up of bonpu-ness” in zazen means.
When we use our sophisticated human capacities in our everyday lives we always use them for our deluded, self-centered purposes, our “bonpu” interests. All our actions are based on our desires, our likes and dislikes. The reason we decide to go here or there, why we manipulate various objects, why we talk about various subjects, have this or that idea or opinion, is determined only by our inclination to satisfy our own selfish interests. This is how we are. It is a habit deeply ingrained in every bonpu human being. If we do nothing about this habit, we will continue to use all our wonderful human powers ignorantly and selfishly, and bury ourselves deeper and deeper in delusion.
If on the other hand we correcdy practice zazen, our human abilities will never be used for bonpu interests. In this way this tendency will be halted, at least for a time. This is what I call “sealing up bonpu-ness.” Our bonpu-ness still exists, but it is completely sealed up. Dogen Zenji described zazen in the Bendowa (On Following the Way) as a condition in which we are able “to display the Buddha seal at our three karma gates—body, speech and mind—and sit upright in this samādhi.”
What he means is that there should be absolutely no sign of bonpu activity anywhere in the body, speech or mind; all that is there is the mark of the Buddha. The body does not move in zazen posture. The mouth is closed and does not speak. The mind does not seek to become Buddha, but instead stops the mental activities of thinking, willing and consciousness. By removing all signs of bonpu from our legs, hands, mouth and mind (which ordinarily act only on behalf of our deluded human interests), by putting the Buddha seal on them, we place them in the service of our Buddha nature. In other words, when our bonpu body-mind acts as a Buddha, it is transformed into the body-mind of a Buddha.
We should be very careful about the fact that when we talk about “sealing up our deluded human nature” this “deluded human nature” we are talking about is not something which exists as a fixed entity, as either a subject or an object, from its own side. It is simply our perceived condition. We cannot just deny it and get rid of it. The fact of the matter is that when we sit zazen as just zazen, without intentionally intending to deny anything, our deluded human nature gets sealed up by the emergence of our Buddha nature at all three gates of karma, i.e. at the level of our body, speech and mind. As a result, our deluded human nature is automatically renounced.
All the foregoing explanations—of renunciation, of sealing up, of deluded human nature—are just words. These explanations are based on a particular, limited point of view, looking at zazen from outside. Certainly it is true that zazen offers us the opportunities I have been describing. However, when we practice zazen we should be sure not to concern ourselves with “deluded human nature,” “renunciation,” or any such idea. All that is important for us is to practice zazen, here and now, as pure, uncontaminated zazen.