The Zen teacher Kodo Sawaki once famously said, "Zazen is useless!" This is an important teaching, one that I keep coming back to, and it presents us with a genuine challenge. Why would we start a practice that's described as 'useless', a practice that we're told time and again has no goals? What brings us to Zen practice if there's nothing promised to us as a result of the time and effort we have to put in?
Let me first deal with the obvious: meditation practice does have benefits, and over the past 25 years there's been a huge amount of research in psychology and other fields that has explored what these benefits are. They're manifold... and I'll leave you to google those benefits to your heart's content!
But that's not how Zen practice is presented. Master Dogen opens his Fukanzazengi ("Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen") like this:
The way is originally perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from this very place; what is the use of traveling around to practice? And yet, if there is a hairsbreadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth.
Let's have a closer look at this to try to get to grips with this slippery idea. First, what does Dogen mean by "the way"? It brings up feelings of ancient masters passing on arcane instructions to their successors, of traditions of the Mysterious Orient that we can tussle with intellectually. But this "way" is nothing other than our own lives. In the Sandokai ("Identity of Relative and Absolute") by Sekito, we chant, "If you do not see the way, you do not see it even as you walk on it." In truth, there's nothing mysterious about this way, which means that it's very easy to overlook: we continually seek elsewhere, outside ourselves, for answers to the problems in our lives. Who is it that can help us? Which Master can utter some gnomic phrase that will transform the way I understand my life? Even with years of practice behind me, I still find that I yearn for someone to waltz into my life and fix it all! But the promise of Zen practice is that this isn't necessary, we're already deeply involved in our Way, our quest, our struggle. It's not about finding an arcane practice that will lead us to advanced knowledge or special experiences, it's about clearly seeing our lives unfold as the Way with each step we take.
Dogen's mention of dust is a reference to another old text, the story of the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng. His teacher asked for students to express their understanding in a poem, and another monk had written of the pure nature of mind and how in our practice we polish it clear of dust. Huineng responded to this though, and asked, if our original nature is pure, where can this 'dust' alight? What is the point of all this goal-directed and strenuous polishing?
It is this 'original nature' that is the bedrock of our practice. We don't have to do anything: it's always already there. If anything, we have to cease from doing, stop adding our own personal, small-minded desires and prejudices onto the world because they only get in the way of seeing our lives clearly as they genuinely are. We're not improving anything, we're not attaining anything, when we sit in zazen we simply express that fundamental truth: we're already in the middle of the Way
When meditation is presented to people, it's often described as a technique: something we learn to do that will have specific benefits in our lives. Learn to do a body scan, to count our breaths, to focus on the sensation of eating a raisin. And of course this does work for many people to bring some clarity, but this isn't what we do in Zen meditation, in zazen. This is shuzen, which contemporary Zen teacher Fujita Issho (link) describes as "a personal training to achieve a human ideal." He stresses this is different from zazen, "an expression of something transpersonal or universal" - and I love the difference between "achieve" and "express": in our Zen practice, we sit just as ourselves, we manifest who we really are without trying to do anything.
And of course there is a transformation in this, as we sit without goal, we become intimately involved in the experience of right here and now, and in accepting our lives as they unfurl with each breath and each step, we cling less, we cease from grasping for anything outside ourselves. We learn that each moment that we experience is sufficient in itself. That's not to say we don't hurt or love or fear or laugh: we do all of that but we come to do those things more fully, more honestly.
So what to do? Sit. Sit, breathe, breathe again. Allow our lives to unfold in each instant, and appreciate our lives in their entirety.
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