This is the third episode in my Ten Fields of Zen Practice series, beginning my discussion of the second field of practice, Zazen, our “Total Response to Life.” In some ways, this is the most challenging chapter to write because so much can be said about Zazen. By its nature, Zazen is difficult – if not impossible – to describe in a completely satisfying way. It also is profound and has infinitely many aspects, so what do you choose to say about it in one chapter? I begin by talking about Zazen as “becoming intimate with Life.”
Read/listen to Chapter 1 or Chapter 2, Part 2
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Quicklinks to Article Content:
Zazen as Becoming Intimate with Life
The Five Efforts within Zazen
Zazen as Building Tolerance for Life
Zazen as Making Peace with Life
The second Field of Zen practice is Zazen. “Za” means seated, and “zen” means meditation. However, as 13th-century Zen master Dogen famously stated, “…Zazen is not meditation practice.”[i] Superficially, our Zazen may look like the meditation done in other spiritual traditions, or even in secular settings. We even call Zazen “meditation” sometimes, for convenience. However, Zazen is not meditation in the sense of a mental exercise aimed at a particular result. Zazen is our total response to life.[ii] It is the essence and enactment of our entire Zen practice.
Zazen as Becoming Intimate with Life
It is very important for us to understand what Zazen is. We do not employ a meditative method we can focus on. While our Zazen may sometimes bring about clear, spacious, non-dual states of mind that are pleasant and beneficial, we do not reach them by aiming to attain them. Because it is unlike the willful efforts we make in most areas of our life, we may struggle to get our minds around what Zazen is and how to “do” it. We can easily fall into complacency and dullness, simply putting in our time on the Zazen seat without leaning into the profound nature of it.
Zazen is simply setting aside all self-centered activities in order to be intimate with Life. We deliberately dedicate time and space to this purpose, temporarily setting aside all our tasks, distractions, entertainments, and relationships. Mentally, we aspire to maintain open, alert, inclusive, and curious awareness without object or boundary. When we inevitably get drawn into self-centered mental activities like planning, fantasizing, worrying, or trying to figure things out, we simply expand our awareness as wide as we can, so our mental activities become one small part of the wider landscape of the present moment. Everything that happens, internally or externally, is part of the Life with which we are seeking intimacy. To allow true intimacy, we refrain from making our Zazen into a self-centered activity; instead of judging our experience or trying to control it, we sincerely return, again and again, to our intention.
When I say Zazen is being intimate with Life, I capitalize the word “Life.” Life-with-a-Capital-L includes all aspects of existence from the perspective of a living being, including your body, mind, and heart; your personal life and relationships; your community and nation; the wider world within which you find yourself; the wonders of nature, and the mysteries of consciousness, free will, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. Anything you can sense, perceive, think, or experience is part of Life in this broad sense.
What about the word “intimacy?” Intimacy means closeness between living things. The greater the intimacy, the closer two beings get, until they are separated by only the thinnest of boundaries – boundaries fundamental to their existence as independent individuals. Although intimacy results from two beings drawn to closeness, it also involves appreciation for the other, and for the joyous miracle of one individual experiencing another as completely as possible. Physically, the closest we can get to another being is to touch them with our skin, or perhaps embrace them. Emotionally, great intimacy involves two beings perceiving each other clearly and respecting each other’s autonomy while consciously sharing experiential space. Intimacy is one of the most rewarding human experiences, but it also requires great courage because we can’t become intimate with anyone or anything without simultaneously becoming vulnerable. Anything close enough to be intimate can also hurt us.
What does it mean to be intimate with Life in general? While you are not actually separate from Life in the broad, inclusive sense, you perceive yourself to be. In your mind, there is a “you” which senses, perceives, thinks, acts, and experiences. Whatever you can sense, perceive, or act upon becomes separate from you, lumped into the infinitely large category “not you,” or “Life.” Whatever you can’t control gets categorized as “not you,” even if it is your own body, mind, or heart. In short, almost everything in the universe is “not you,” while “you” is an unlocatable but persistent sense of your separateness and autonomy.
You lose intimacy with Life – all that you perceive as “not you” – when you distance yourself – mentally and physically – from anything you don’t like, and when you ignore anything you don’t perceive as being relevant to you. Ironically, you also compromise intimacy with Life when you try to grasp and hold on to anything you do like. Intimacy involves perceiving clearly, respecting autonomy, and sharing experiential space. When you lean into closeness and then try to capture or control something or someone out of your own self-interest, intimacy is quickly lost. You stop perceiving clearly and see only your own agenda. You stop respecting the precious autonomy of that which you grasp, which is part of what drew you to it to begin with. You stop sharing space with the object of your longing because your mind is caught up in a narrative of how to possess it.
When you are intimate with Life, you notice what’s happening within you and around you. Without the separation caused by your self-centered thinking, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations feel more vivid. Each thing that arises within you or around you, each thing you encounter, you are able to see in its own-being – clearly, as it really is, independent of your judgements about it. The monolithic “not you” differentiates into infinite phenomena, most of which are supporting you in some way, like the air you breathe or the gravity that holds you upright and anchors the earth to the sun. Certain aspects of Life may upset you, but a certain kind of liveliness is revealed in your encounter with them because, after all, it proves you are still alive!
The Five Efforts within Zazen
Intimacy with Life is its own reward, and becoming intimate with Life is a useful way to describe Zazen in a few words, but this is not the entirety of our Zazen practice. There are two kinds of effort you need to make before you can even begin to focus on intimacy, and there are two kinds of effort that build on intimacy and bring your Zazen to fruition. First, you need to build tolerance for Life. Then you make peace with Life. Only at this point is it possible to become intimate with Life. As lovely as intimacy with Life might sound, there’s not much point to it if it remains limited to your subjective experience during Zazen. When you’re intimate with Life, it becomes possible for you to see the true nature of Life, including yourself. Seeing the truth is liberating and helps you be a wiser, more compassionate person. Finally, thanks to your understanding of how things really are, you can make the fifth effort: Being one with Life. After all, even intimacy presumes the existence of two separate things, and you aren’t actually separate from Life to begin with.
Early in your practice you might find yourself working very hard simply to build tolerance for life, and then to make peace with it. However, even once you become familiar with the later efforts, there will be many times you will need to start back at the beginning. You may need to start at the beginning every time you sit Zazen! That is okay. Any of the five efforts is perfect Zazen if that’s what your life calls for at the moment. Zazen can’t be captured in any of these five efforts, even the last one. Instead, it is our Total Response to Life. We want to meet Life, to understand it, know it, and live it fully.
Zazen as Building Tolerance for Life
The first effort in our Zazen is building tolerance for Life. There are countless things that make life uncomfortable, including physical and mental illness, pain, injustice, loss, conflict, poverty, and existential angst. Most of the time, we are focused on objective means to alleviate our discomfort, or at least on ways to distract ourselves from it. There is nothing wrong with such activities, but our lives can easily end up controlled and limited by whatever it is we are trying to avoid experiencing fully.
Sitting Still with Our Discomfort
If you have sat Zazen even once, congratulate yourself on your courage. To sit still with Life, setting aside all distractions, is to invite awareness of whatever is causing you discomfort. Most of us are adept at mental distraction even when external distractions have been set aside, so it is far from guaranteed that your Zazen will immediately bring you face to face with whatever you are trying to fix or avoid. However, it’s impossible to remain completely unaware of the possibility that your unresolved fear, anger, grief, trauma, or confusion could invade the silence of your Zazen at any moment. Perhaps you don’t relate to this concern, but most people do. Just ask a random sample of the people you encounter over the course of your day whether they would be willing to sit silently with themselves for 30 minutes – no talking, no fidgeting, no entertainment, no music, not even a guided meditation. You’re not going to get many takers.
If we want greater freedom and peace of mind, if we want to move toward becoming more intimate with life, we need to build our tolerance for Life. Fortunately, the great discovery of Buddhism is that there is a simple, reliable, and rewarding method for doing this. It turns out we can radically change our relationship to whatever causes us discomfort, such that the discomfort can be recognized and endured without it overwhelming or destroying us. This is far preferable to denying or running from the difficult aspects of our lives. Gradually, we gain confidence in our capacity to meet and adapt to whatever life throws at us. A sense of calm and groundedness can pervade our life.
The first step to building tolerance for Life is physical and mental stillness. Temporarily, deliberately, you set aside all efforts – physical or mental – to fix anything or figure anything out. You have to simply let whatever causes your discomfort to be, and also allow your discomfort to be. The instant you form this intention, you are already less identified with your distress and its source. Your discomfort and its cause are part of Life whether you like it or not. Resisting them simply compounds your suffering.
Instead of resisting, you dedicate yourself to the process of Zazen: Expanding your awareness as much as possible, so that whatever is upsetting you becomes one part of the larger landscape of the present moment. By doing this, discomfort is acknowledged and included but it becomes less central to your experience. You are less likely to be overwhelmed by it, and less likely to perseverate on it. Your mind may be drawn back into reactivity over and over, but you patiently and diligently expand your awareness every time this happens. Over time, your tolerance for discomfort grows, in Zazen and in the rest of your life. This may not sound like a big deal, but it can be very transformative.
It is natural to resist the idea of setting aside all efforts to fix anything or figure anything out, particularly if you are facing real problems in your personal life, or in the wider world! Sometime people interpret the instructions for Zazen to mean you should take a passive, detached approach to life, but this is a great misunderstanding. Zazen is a deliberate thing you do for limited periods of time, like sleep or exercise. To dedicate yourself to Zazen does not mean you stop taking care of your life. In fact, your Zazen practice only makes you more able to do so. No matter what is going on in your life, even if it is falling apart, chances are good that you can devote ten, twenty, or thirty minutes to physical and mental stillness. If your house is burning down, then of course you shouldn’t be sitting Zazen! But almost all other kinds of problems are not so immediate that you can’t give your body and mind a break from the endless process of trying to fix things or figure them out.
Tolerance for Our Own Zazen
It’s essential to remember that you are not only aiming to build tolerance for discomfort associated with external affairs. Life-with-a-capital-L includes anything you perceive as “not you,” including your own body and mind when they are not behaving as you would like them to. It is crucial to build tolerance for any aspects of your Zazen you don’t like, or that you don’t perceive as being the way things should be. People get very confused about this point. You are likely to think you need to fix your wandering mind, your drowsiness, or your uncomfortable Zazen posture. After all, you reason, how else are you going to meditate properly?
It’s not that Zazen requires us to passively sit and be yanked around by habit energy, but that the way to greater intimacy with Life requires a radically different approach than we’re used to. Rather than judging something in our Zazen as needing fixing and then willfully trying to change it, we simply surrender over and over to Zazen itself. When you realize you have been caught up in the dream of thought, you expand your awareness as much as possible, and try to let go of any judgment or agenda. Even the thought, “I was just caught up in thought, but now I will practice Zazen,” only agitates the mind and divides you from your experience.
Our goal is not to be free from thought or dullness, but to be intimate with Life. What happens in your mind and body during Zazen is part of Life. When you expand your awareness, periods of thinking, distress, distraction, and dullness recede in importance. They are experiences that arise and pass away, and as you build tolerance, you are less bothered by them.
Zazen as Making Peace with Life
Building tolerance for Life flows smoothly into the next effort in Zazen: Making peace with Life. Once you are less troubled by what is arising in your Zazen, once you have a little perspective on it and are able to sit through it without too much reactivity, it’s time to look deeper into your experience.
Even if you aren’t experiencing acute discomfort and can sit in Zazen relatively calmly, it doesn’t mean you’re completely at peace with Life. Every one of us contains a lifetime’s worth of regrets, hopes, fears, judgments, and resentments. We carry around a host of fixed beliefs and assumptions that cause problems in our relationships and disappointment in the world. Almost everyone I know suffers from painful self-doubt which manifests as inhibition, self-criticism, defensiveness, or belligerence. Few people know how to remain open-hearted but resilient in the face of the immense suffering and injustice in our world. It is no simple matter to be at peace with Life.
Including in Our Zazen Where We Are Not Yet at Peace
The first step to making peace with Life is recognizing where there is a lack of peace. If your Zazen is fairly calm and you rely on it for your mental health, it can be very tempting to guard your Zazen against anything unpleasant or agitating. Of course, you are more than welcome to use Zazen this way. There’s nothing wrong with it at all. However, if you want to explore Zazen – and by extension, the Dharma – more deeply, it’s necessary to invite anything and everything into it. After all, we’re aiming to become intimate with Life, and Life includes any pain, confusion, or unresolved stuff we’re carrying around, even if these things tend to behave themselves most of the time by staying conveniently within our subconscious, or maybe just at the fringes of our consciousness.
How do you “invite” things into your Zazen that you still need to make peace with? At first, this may sound like a willful activity that conflicts with the whole approach of Zazen, but this is not the case. You don’t go seeking things that are currently outside of your Zazen and then bring them in by thinking about them. You simply immerse yourself in Zazen even more deeply, expanding your awareness as much as possible, and then questioning and exploring the limits you have placed on your awareness with your own mind.
It is typical for people to have a very limited and fixed idea about what kind of awareness we are cultivating in Zazen. When they hear the instructions to maintain open, alert, inclusive, and curious awareness without object or boundary, they think this means to limit their awareness to whatever sense data they are receiving at that moment: Whatever they can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, and whatever passing thoughts happen to arise of their own accord and are perceived by the mind.[iii] This kind of focused – if broad – awareness is meditation, but it is not Zazen. In Zazen, we do not discriminate what belongs in our awareness and what does not. We do not set a boundary for our awareness at the furthest reaches of our senses. We do not even set a boundary in time.
The expansive awareness of Zazen is not something we ever attain. There is no point at which we say, “Big enough,” because then our effort becomes limited. Ideally, there should always be a sense of energetic movement toward infinite expansion and permeability. At the same time, we do not need to willfully push the edges of our awareness toward something we imagine might be beyond it. All we have to do is notice and let go of the many ways we are limiting our own experience, or subtly trying to deny, avoid, or exclude certain things.
When your awareness is truly open in Zazen, you will realize that all your stuff is right there with you. Your fears, worries, longings, and delusions are present, sometimes buried deep in the body, sometimes lingering just below the surface of consciousness, sometimes manifesting as thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations. When Zazen is part of a much larger Zen practice, there will be things that arise in Zazen because of your ongoing Dharma study, precept practice, or karma work. When something arises in Zazen, you should not brush it away because you identify it as “just a thought,” or as being about something that isn’t right-here-right-now, or as being irrelevant. You shouldn’t brush anything away in Zazen.
When anything arises in Zazen, the practice is to expand your awareness as much as you can, but you do not do this in order to chase away or dismiss thoughts, feelings, and sensations. With an expanded awareness, you fully attend to whatever has arisen but do not get lost in it. You are not trying to control what happens to it – to make it linger, change, or dissipate. Some things flicker through your awareness and disappear almost immediately. Sometimes things arise and, even as you accept and embrace them as a legitimate part of Life as it’s unfolding at the moment, they melt away because of your sincere intention to temporarily set aside self-centered activities and make peace with Life.
Sometimes things arise in Zazen that show you where you are not yet at peace. These are worth paying attention to. You may, instead, prefer to ignore them and hope they melt away, telling yourself that it breaks the rules of Zazen to engage them. It’s true that you stop doing Zazen if you decide instead to think about what has arisen, analyzing it and trying to figure out answers to your problems.
Fortunately, there is a way to pay attention to something within the stillness of Zazen. It’s possible to gently hold something in the center of your expansive awareness and invite it to unfold with your attention. This is a delicate operation, because you need to offer attention that draws its energy from Bodhicitta and curiosity, rather than from any self-centered agenda. You have to be willing to see more, to learn more, even if it challenges your ideas about yourself or the world. If you can maintain this open-handed, curious attention, it is sometimes possible to open up deeper levels of truth beneath whatever initially arose. Of course, it’s also very easy to simply slip into thinking and analyzing, at which point you just expand your awareness again and see what happens next.
Over the course of many years of practice, you will become more and more aware of all the things you have not yet made peace with. This is good, because it opens up the possibility for you to do so.
What It Means to “Make Peace” with Something
But what does it mean to “make peace” with something? Do not think for an instant that it means you resign yourself to terrible situations or stop trying to make positive changes in your life or in the world. Such an approach is incompatible with Bodhicitta. When you make peace with something in a practice sense, you give up your struggle against the fact that things have turned out this way. In the next moment, you may take decisive action with the intention to help relieve suffering, but without resentment, shame, or anger based in the past. You free yourself from the endless list of “shoulds” – things you or other people should have done or not done, or ways you, or other people, or the world, should have ended up being at this point in time. You may have a vivid vision of what the future could hold, but you are no longer caught in internal resistance to what has already happened.
It’s strange how we human beings think we can alter reality with our minds. We imagine that as long as we hold on to our resentment or judgment, whatever is unacceptable to us will be held in check. As long as we keep analyzing what went wrong, or refuse to even acknowledge what happened, the jury is still out and any negative consequences are mitigated. We resist making peace with Life because we worry it will make us into a doormat and all hell will break loose, but of course this is not what happens. We are not actually holding bad things in check with our minds. In fact, our internal resistance only makes us miserable and requires a lot of energy which is better spent elsewhere.
In Zen practice, making peace with Life doesn’t end with Zazen, but it often begins there. This is because every Zazen period is an opportunity to practice making peace for a specific amount of time, in a conducive setting. Whatever difficult or unresolved stuff within you comes to the Zazen with you. When it manifests in some way, on its own or at your invitation, you expand your awareness, acknowledge it, and let it be what it is. You don’t look away or suppress it, but you are also bigger than it is so it doesn’t overwhelm or control you. You don’t try to fix it. In fact, you may even lean into it to see if it has anything else to teach you. Zazen is making peace with Life. It may take additional work to extend the truces you have made in Zazen into the rest of your life, but wherever peace is made, it will involve the same attitude.
The effort to make peace with Life is reflected in our physical Zazen posture. We sit upright, centered, and still, alertly facing whatever arises. Leaning neither forwards nor backwards, we enact with our body our intention to be with things just as they are, instead of trying to avoid them or interfere with them. There is a good reason why so many non-Buddhists like to have a Buddha statue around – just the seated position communicates peace.
Read/listen to Chapter 1 or Chapter 2, Part 2
Endnotes
[i] Fukanzazengi, https://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/eng/practice/sutra/pdf/03/c01.pdf
[ii] In The Varieties of Religious Experience: Complete and Unabridged (CrossReach Publications. Kindle Edition. Lecture II, page 28), William James offers way to think of “religion.” He says, “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.”
[iii] In Buddhism, it is said we have six senses. The eye perceives sights, the ear sounds, the nose smells, the tongue tastes, the body tactile sensations, and the mind perceives thoughts.
