Seated Zen meditation – zazen – is less like the meditative practices of many other spiritual traditions, and more like prayer in theistic traditions. This is not because we believe in God (although we might), but because zazen can be seen as a “religious” act – if we define religion in one of the ways philosopher William James offered, as “our total response to life.”
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Why Call Zazen a “Religious Act?”
A Religious Act as a “Total Reaction to Life”
Each Moment of Zazen is Transcendent
Approaching Zazen as Religion
Much of the time, many people who meditate think of the activity in a functional or operational way. Seen this way, meditation is a method we employ to achieve a certain result, such as spiritual insight, a decrease in stress, or an ability to be more mindful in our everyday lives. Meditation helps us identify less with the content of our minds and more with the space through which all of it moves. Most of us find that meditation makes us slightly more sane and less reactive. At a very basic level, settling our bodies down and then engaging the mind in a simple, meditative way sends a profound message to our subconscious that everything is manageable. (If we were in immediate danger, we wouldn’t be meditating.) Meditation also helps us cultivate an open, nondualistic state of mind which allows us to – as I’ve gotten in the habit of saying lately – awaken to Reality-with-a-Capital-R.
Regarding our meditation as functional or operational is fine. There are obviously benefits that come from the practice. However, there are drawbacks to approaching meditation this way. If we don’t get the results we seek, we may become frustrated or discouraged, and maybe even stop doing it. If we strive too hard after results, we may actually decrease the quality and effectiveness of our meditation. And if we only regard zazen in functional or operational way, we miss out on its most profound qualities. It is a mistake to think of zazen only as a means to something else, or as a discipline to be mastered, or a habit we maintain for our health.
Why Call Zazen a “Religious Act?”
Instead – or, in addition – zazen can be approached as a profound religious act – as our deepest, most sincere and heartfelt response to the wonder and challenge of life.
Many years ago, I was involved in the kid’s program at my Zen center. One girl had been attending the kid’s program since she was a toddler. The littlest kids sang Dharma songs, quietly assembled an altar each time they met (complete with lots of little animals), mediated for about a minute, and then enjoyed age-appropriate lessons that usually included a craft project or activity. When the girl I’m speaking of was around five or six years old (as I remember it), her parents told her that she had Type 1 diabetes. They carefully explained to her some of what this meant – how she would always have to live with this disease, and some ways it would impact her life. She listened quietly and then said, “I need to go sit.”
I don’t know how long she sat. It was probably only for a few minutes. But the story has remained with me because how zazen was this young child’s go-to response to what was probably the most challenging moment of her life so far.
When I am faced with something overwhelming, zazen is also my go-to response. This isn’t so much because it will calm me down or help me figure everything out. It just seems like the most appropriate thing to do. It’s my full body-heart-mind response. Today, I want to invite you to think about this as a religious response.
I’m aware that the word “religious” carries a lot of baggage for many people. It may remind you of institutions and mindsets that are rigid, judgmental, exclusive, or otherwise problematic. However, just because the human impulse toward religion has manifested in many unskillful ways doesn’t mean the whole impulse is bad.
Psychologist and philosopher William James gave a series of lectures on religion in 1901, which was compiled into the book Varieties of Religious Experience. In lecture II, titled “Circumscription of the Topic,” James says:
Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion.[1]
Then James goes on to discuss a provisional definition:
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual [persons]in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.[2]
He acknowledges that Buddhism is essentially atheistic, and that other religions have a very abstract concept of the divine. However, all religions, whether they conceive of a deity or not, have a sense of “the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe.”[3]
You may or may not believe in God, or the divine, or think of yourself as regarding the universe has having an “essential spiritual structure.” Even if you don’t, I wonder whether you resonate with these beautiful words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which James quotes in his lecture (I am going to share them at length because they set such a beautiful stage for the rest of our discussion). Emerson speaks of “divine” laws:
These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: Thus, in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted… If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being… But speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear your witness. For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes… The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command… It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man… When he says ‘I ought’; when love warns him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through his soul from supreme wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. All the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. [They] affect us more than all other compositions.[4]
A Religious Act as a “Total Reaction to Life”
With this mind-and-heart-expanding description of religious sentiment as a background, let’s go on to another way James defines a religious act:
Religion, whatever it is, is a [person’s] total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way.[5]
For the Zen practitioner, of course, it’s not just zazen that’s our total reaction to life. Certainly, whatever other elements of Zen we have embraced are part of our reaction, including ethical behavior, taking refuge in Sangha, Dharma study, and bodhisattva activity. However, you could look at our zazen as our central practice – our essential practice, the practice which, if excluded, means our practice is not really Zen. When we are sitting in zazen, all the other aspects of our practice are manifested: We are not carrying out any harmful actions; we are trusting in the Sangha treasure, which recommends this practice; we are opening ourselves up to Reality-with-a-Capital-R, toward which all Dharma teachings point; and we are setting aside all self-centered activities and making ourselves receptive to the truth of interdependence with all things.
I see zazen as our most eloquent, sincere, complete, perfect reaction – or, to use a term that’s associated with mindfulness instead of conditioning, a perfect response – to life. Whatever life is, however we conceive of it or experience it, whether it is – at the moment – fortunate and pleasurable, or terrible and painful, we respond with our presence. With our physical posture and our mental posture, we sit upright, and still – not grasping after anything, not pushing anything away, not running after anything, or running away.
In zazen, we entrust ourselves to the response recommended to us by wise people, based on the idea that whatever life throws at us, the best response is to face it wholeheartedly, as best we can. We aim to let go of our preferences, agendas, fears, opinions, and biases as much as possible, in order to perceive clearly. We open our heart to what is… we listen… we honor the gift of our life with our attention. We show up with honesty and humility, admitting we can’t come close to understanding it all, and we can’t grasp a single thing. Zazen is an enactment of love, wonder, and curiosity.
Each Moment of Zazen is Transcendent
When we sit wholeheartedly, we are closest to who we really are, and partake in something that Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, I think, would not hesitate to call divine. In his fascicle “Bendowa,” Zen master Dogen says:
When even for a moment you sit upright in samadhi expressing the buddha mudra [form] in the three activities [body, speech, and thought], the whole world of phenomena becomes the buddha mudra and the entire sky turns into enlightenment… All this, however, does not appear within perception. Because it is unconstructedness in stillness, it is immediate realization. If practice and realization were two things, as it appears to an ordinary person, each could be recognized separately. But what can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached with a discriminating mind… This being so, the zazen of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time. Thus, in the past, future, and present of the limitless universe, this zazen carries on the buddha’s transformation endlessly and timelessly. Each moment of zazen is equally the wholeness of practice, equally the wholeness of realization.[6]
This is only one of countless places where Dogen sings the praises of zazen, and many other Chan and Zen masters do as well. Maybe they are simply praising zazen because they want us to do it? Maybe zazen is really a rather difficult chore, and they are dressing it up in all kinds of fancy words and images to trick students into seeing it as some exciting, blissful opportunity? Or maybe when Dogen talks about the “whole world of phenomena becoming our seated posture,” or our “zazen according with all things and resonating through time,” he’s talking about really good zazen – that is, when someone is deep in the nondual state of samadhi, experiencing an expansive sense of nonseparation from all that is.
I don’t think Dogen’s praise for zazen applies only to zazen that can be objectively judged to be focused, concentrated, thoughtless, spacious, still, or any of the other ways we might describe samadhi, the meditative absorption we invite whenever we settle into zazen. Dogen is pointing toward something deeper than a concentrated meditative experience. He says that when one moment of samadhi coincides with the entire sky turning into enlightenment, it “does not appear within perception… If practice and realization were two things, as it appears to an ordinary person, each could be recognized separately. But what can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached with a discriminating mind…” So the transcendent merit of zazen he’s talking about is not about the meditator having transcendent experiences they are conscious of.
Dogen also speaks, as he does in many other places, about how practice and realization are not two things. We think they are two things when we regard zazen as a method we need to work on and employ, and transcendent things like a moment of our zazen “resonating through all time” as the realization that results from our work. This is relating to zazen in a functional or operational way. When we do this, we miss something important. Dogen says, “If practice and realization were two things, as it appears to an ordinary person, each could be recognized separately.” In other words, it would be possible to sit zazen in a functional sense, with its meaning and value based on the meditator’s closeness to, or distance from, some kind of conscious “realization.” Someone could be sitting zazen for years with no realization manifested at all. This may be how our experience feels, sometimes, but Dogen is encouraging us not to view things this way.
It is not that we don’t sometimes experience conscious realization. We do! Awakening is central to our Buddhist practice. However, the “realization” Dogen is talking about is more profound than some conscious insight or experience we gain at some point in time. He says, “realization is not reached with a discriminating mind.” I think Dogen is pointing toward a quality of zazen that is as present in the zazen of an absolute beginner as it is in the zazen of an experienced, adept meditator. The transcendent qualities of zazen Dogen celebrates are manifested perfectly in the zazen of the person who joins the practice of a Zen Sangha for the very first time and sits uncomfortably for 30 minutes or an hour, wondering the whole time if they’re doing it right.
For both the beginner and the adept and everyone between, zazen is a “total response to life.” As James said, our “total reaction upon life” is “the completest of all our answers to the question, ‘What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?’ It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way.” [7] Something brings a person to the meditation seat for the very first time. The child in the story I told earlier responded to a life-changing diagnosis by sitting upright and still. Each day, we make space in our busy lives for zazen, an activity we may like to think is worth the time it takes because of the benefits it brings us, even as we worry it’s a waste of time because our zazen isn’t very good. And yet we do it anyway.
What about that fact that Dogen begins the passage I’ve been discussing by referring to “samadhi,” or nondual awareness? Does this mean that when we’re sitting zazen but not conscious of experiencing anything like samadhi, our zazen isn’t the kind of thing Dogen is celebrating? I think the answer to this lies in the fact that Dogen says in one moment of samadhi the “whole world of phenomena becomes the buddha mudra [the zazen posture] and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.” What is “one moment of samadhi?” One moment of nondual awareness, too fleeting to register as part of your self-conscious narrative. One moment of realizing our nonseparation of all things, one moment when our experience of life is direct, fresh, unmitigated by our preconceived notions. Surely it is this kind of moment that brings us again and again to our zazen seat? Surely you have moments like this all the time?
Approaching Zazen as Religion
I’ll leave you with a few words from Uchiyama Roshi, who also thought zazen could be seen as religion. In Opening the Hand of Thought, he writes:
Behind zazen there is the religion of Buddhism, and behind that, our own lives. Consequently, the true or genuine zazen found in Buddhist scriptures was never intended as a means of disciplining the mind or of becoming physically healthier. Our ideas about a mind to be trained or a body to be made healthy are expressions of the view of existence, which presupposes that there are things that can be accumulated. The wish to train and discipline our minds and bodies is nothing but our own egoistic desire. For zazen to function as religion, it is of primary concern to give up this ego-centered way of thinking that clings to body and mind.[8]
Uchiyama goes on to admit that whether zazen should be called religion depends on how religion is defined. He points out that zazen is not religion in the sense of it being a sect, creed, or doctrine. Nor is it religion in the sense of being concerned about “people’s relationship to an authority above them,” because Zen “does not recognize any authority outside of the true self.” However, he says:
If religion means the teaching about the most refined attitude toward life, then Buddhism is certainly pure religion, since to live out the life of the self does not mean the self-intoxication of some egocentric self. On the contrary, this is the attitude of discovering the life within the self that is connected to all things. It means aiming at manifesting the life of each and every encounter, and seeing all of these encounters as our own life.[9]
Can you see your zazen this way? Not in a utilitarian way, which might lead you to focus on the results it gives you, or on how well you think you are sitting, but as your “total reaction upon life,” or your “total response to life, or as a religious act in the purest sense? Your sincerest response, which is to be yourself as wholeheartedly as you can, to inhabit your own life?
Seeing zazen as a religious act may allow you to appreciate your own practice more. It may inspire you to prioritize sitting in your life regardless of whether you enjoy it, or think you’re good at it, or are getting better at it, or whether you hope to get something out of it. Like a hug might be your sincere response to a suffering loved one, or righteous anger might be your natural response to witnessing injustice, zazen can be your sincere response to the mystery, challenge, and wonder of life itself.
Endnotes
[1] James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: Complete and Unabridged (Illustrated) (p. 28). CrossReach Publications. Kindle Edition. Lecture II, page 28.
[2] Ibid page 31
[3] Ibid page 33
[4] Ibid page 33-34
[5] Ibid page 36-37
[6] Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (p. 130). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[7] Ibid page 36-37
[8] Uchiyama, Kōshō . Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice (p. 109). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.
[9] Ibid page 110
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