A Talk About Zazen Instruction — Forest City Zen Group

A Talk on Zazen Instruction

Kuden Paul Boyle

Forest City Zen Group

London, Ontario, Canada

When I give zazen instructions, I find myself saying the same or similar things most of the times. It occurred to me that I could take what I usually say during zazen instructions and try to fashion the instructions into a Dharma talk. This is what I’ve come up with based on that idea; I will discuss topics that will come up during my instruction presentation and then add some context, which I don’t usually bring up in an instruction session, about how these instructions relate to Buddhist teaching.

Another reason why I wanted to give this talk is because many of the people who are regular attendees at Forest City Zen Group teachings have zazen instruction and experience at other Zen centres before coming to the Forest City Zen Group. As such, I would like to share with them some of my perspective on zazen.

I start zazen instruction by providing a broad over view, and then I point out that most people believe that meditation has to do with the mind. That isn’t wrong; however, in Zen we work with the mind indirectly through the body. So, most of what I usually say has to do with our body. I emphasize the importance of proper posture and awareness of bodily sensations.

Most people in our everyday lives assume that the mind leads the body. For example, the mind decides, “Oh, I need a drink of water – the glasses are in this cupboard and the water faucet is there”. Then the mind directs the body to execute the action of drinking a glass of water. In Zen meditation, we flip that relationship on its head – we let the body lead the mind. So, if we have a stable physical body, then our mind will eventually settle down into our body. It is like having a jar full of muddy water. If we are constantly shaking the jar, the water will never become clear; however, if I set the jar down, the mud will eventually settle and the water will become clear.

You can demonstrate this with your own mind. Suppose you try standing on one leg; you will notice that your mind becomes very active. Your mind is constantly trying to assess what sort of bodily adjustments need to be made to keep us from falling over. The mind is judging, “am I too far to the left?” and, “Am I going to fall over backwards?” and so on. You can feel your foot constantly adjusting to maintain the standing in one leg pose. The mind is doing the assessing and judging of what is called the discriminative consciousness in Zen. In Zen meditation, we want to give the discriminative consciousness a rest.

Before continuing on this topic, I don’t want you to think that the discriminative consciousness is the “bad guy” in the story. Our discriminative consciousness is very important in our day to day lives. If you drive a motor vehicle, you must use your discriminative consciousness to differentiate between the gas pedal and the brake, between red and green lights. The problem is that because the discriminative consciousness is so useful in our everyday lives, we tend use it and its use becomes habitual. It is as if your mind is like a toolbox; which tool ends up on top? The one you use the most. Picking a hammer is great if you are a builder nailing plywood to roof frames all day long. Picking up a hammer is less useful when your kid tells you that their smartphone is not working. Hitting the smartphone with a hammer probably isn’t going to fix the phone; odds are that it is going to create other problems for the phone.

This is similar with our lives; when life presents us with a situation, through habit energy, we tend to grasp the hammer of our discriminative consciousness. We react to situations from well-practised, habituated pathways. It is even worse than that because it isn’t just our actions which are habituated, but our thought patterns, perceptions, and views. When we see someone, we don’t really see who they are; we see our views of them. We tend to see them as a “certain type of person”. These views guide how we react to the person and this is why we suffer. We habitually perceive the world we experience as divided up into relational realms of “I, me, and mine”, and “the other” and we suffer as a result. What we want to do in Zen meditation and more generally, in Zen practice, is to let go of the tight hold on our discriminative consciousness, and give our minds the space to become more open and flexible in order to generate an appropriate response to situations which arise in our life.

All this starts with a stable posture. About five thousand years of yogic tradition has indicated that for a human shaped body, the full lotus posture is the most stable. To be honest, most Western practitioners probably cannot sit in full lotus. We have to sit with the bodies that we have rather than the body we would like to have. Fortunately, there are a variety of other postures from which we can choose: half-lotus, seiza, sitting on a bench or chair. What all of these postures have in common is three stable points of contact – both knees are touching the zabuton and the buttocks are elevated. The three points of contact provide a stable base for our sitting body-mind.

For a round zafu, we sit on the first quarter or third of the zafu. If we sit farther back we increase the chances of pinching a nerve or cutting off the blood circulation to our legs. In addition, sitting on the front edge of the cushion causes our pelvis to roll forward. This, in turn, helps drive the knees down into the zabuton and it encourages the spine to straighten.

In order to feel grounded and centred, our bodies must be physically centred. How do we know what that feels like? The easiest thing to do is to purposely uncentre your body by bending sideways at the waist. Take a moment to feel what that feels like. Then do the same thing on the other side. Now start to sway back and forth, and each time decrease the amount of you that are swaying. The swaying gets smaller and smaller until it is imperceptible on the outside, but you might be able to still feel the mind’s oscillating. The shrink it even smaller until you feel centred in with your weight evenly distributed between both sitting bones.

Then we straighten our back. Now, when I say straight, I don’t mean straight like a 2x4 piece of lumber. Straighten means that our spine is put in its natural shape – which is sort of like an ‘S’. The lumbar region curves toward the front of our bodes. We then generate a lifting up sensation in our solar plexus. You can imagine a rope attached to your solar plexus and it is being pulled up toward the ceiling. We relax our shoulders and tuck our should blades against our spine. The tips of the shoulder blades should be pointing downwards. So there is this dynamic balance of lifting up in the front and a downward sense in the back. In addition, tucking our should blades against the spine, helps open our heart. We become literally open hearted during our sitting zazen.

We put our hands in a certain position called the “meditation mudra” or “cosmic mudra”. In this hand position, the fingers of the left and right hands overlap and our thumb tips are barely touching. The opening between your fingers and thumbs should be an oval. It is OK to bend your fingers to get the shape. We position our mudra by placing the edge our hands lightly against our abdomen and the lightly touching thumb tips at about the height of our navel. During zazen, it can be good to occasionally “check in” with our thumb tips which can act like “mental attention fuse”. When our mind wanders, our thumbs may also wander away from each other. Noticing this can be a way to bring our mind back to our zazen intention-effort.

The arms should be neither rigid, nor slack. They should maintain a vibrant pliancy. Imagine that you are holding raw eggs in your armpits. If you are too tense, the eggs will break, if you are too slack the eggs will fall out. Try imagining what is the minimum force that you need to keep the eggs from falling and not breaking.

The head should rest above the body – not tilting forward or backward, nor twisted to the left or right. Some people use the image of the top of their head being attached to the ceiling by some rope and that helps generate a lifting up (and straightening sensation). The nose should form a line with the solar plexus and navel. The ears should form a plane with our shoulders. To put the ears on a plane with your shoulders, simply move your head straight back, by only a few millimetres. If you go more, it will strain your neck muscles. If you were lying on your back, you would be pressing the back of your head directly into the floor. Adjusting the posture in this way also helps to open the heart.

The teeth and lips are kept shut and we breathe naturally through our nose. The tip of the tongue is gently placed against the back of the top front teeth.

One of the distinctive features of zazen is that we keep our eyes open. In Buddhism, there are six senses – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The world of our direct experience is what is created moment by moment with the input from these sense faculties. This is what our life truly is. When we talk about “being present”, we are talking about being present with the totality of this arising sensory input. If we close our eyes during zazen, we are cutting off part of our world. In zazen, we don’t shut anything out. If a dog barks, that’s part of our zazen. If the tenzo is cooking breakfast and we can smell it during zazen, that’s part of our zazen. We do not try to create a perfect environment, we let our environment be our zazen.

That being said, keeping our eyes fully open somehow activates our discriminating consciousness. Therefore, what we do is two things: First, we keep our eyes half open; this allows visual stimuli to enter, but prevents us from “looking at something”. Second, we cast our eyes slightly down; this helps anchor the mind. I keep my eyes cast down so my line of sight would intersect the floor one to two metres in front of me (assuming I’m not facing the wall). Every time I have drifted off in zazen, I’ve noticed that my eyes have rolled up. It is as if I’m looking up trying to find something to think or dream about. So, keeping our eyes cast down helps to tether the mind. When keeping the eyes half open, the eyes will naturally defocus. That is OK, and, in fact, desirable. If you focus on something, you are looking at it, and create an object, and then it is very difficult to stop generating a narrative about the object you’ve created. Letting your eyes defocus helps minimize this tendency.

We breathe gently and naturally from our abdomen. We do not try to manipulate the breath in any particular way. Abdominal breathing means that when we inhale the abdomen expands as the diaphragm pushes down on the stomach and intestines, making room for air to fill the lungs. When we exhale, our abdomen pulls in as the diaphragm pushes up and expels the air from our lungs. Breathing from the abdomen helps settle our body. Some people breathe through the thoracic cavity which causes their shoulders to raise and lower with each breath; this increases tension and mental agitation in our bodies. If you have trouble breathing abdominally, try noticing how you breathe when you are laying on your back. In that position, the body tends to use abdominal breathing.

What do we do with our mind during zazen? When I give zazen instruction, I suggest two techniques. The first is “following the breath” and the second one is “counting the breath”. Either of these techniques provides an intention to set for our zazen. This is an important point – meditation is an intentional practice. That is, meditation is framed by an intention. For example, “for the next 15 minutes, I’ll sit zazen following my breath”, or, “I’ll sit zazen for five minutes, counting my breath”. In either case, we are establishing an intention to follow. We can then gauge whether or not we have wandered away from our intended practice.

In following the breath, we simply place our “mental attention” (manaskara) at a point on our abdomen about three fingers below the navel. This corresponds to the hara (in Japanese) and the tan t’ien (in Chinese). When we breathe in, we simply become aware, “bodily sensation breathing in”, when we breathe out, we simply become aware, “bodily sensation breathing out”. You do not need to cast the experience in terms of words like, “I am breathing in”. The notion of “I” is completely unnecessary to the experience of breathing.

Your mental attention should rest gently on the bodily sensations of breathing. The image which comes to my mind is that of a fishing bobber – the small plastic floater which sits on the surface of the water. As the waves come and goes, the bobber just rides those waves in place.

There is nothing really special about following our breathing or focusing the hara. Other Buddhist traditions focus on the sensation of the air flowing in and out of the nostrils. One can also put their attention into their sitting bones, or thigh muscles; however, following the breath is recommended because when sitting still, breathing is going to be the grossest motion our bodies are making. Therefore, it is relatively easy to use as a focus point for our mental attention, as you are going to be breathing anyway, consequently, you might as well use your breath. If you are not breathing, sitting zazen shouldn’t be your highest priority (unless, of course, you are actively dying and want to be meditating at the moment of death).

Breath counting is almost the same as following the breath – we focus our mental attention on our hara and simply are aware of the bodily sensations of breathing. Nevertheless, the difference is that we add silent counting along with our breathing. When we exhale, we say silently to ourselves “one”, then we inhale, and on our exhale we silently say, “two”, and so on until we reach “ten”. If you are like most people, you will be able to cycle counting to ten maybe two or three times. Then, a distracting thought will appear, something like, “Hmm. Do I need to pick up cat food on my home?”, or, did I bring coupons for the toilet paper I need?” Pretty soon you will be fantasizing about shopping rather than doing your intended practice.

When you notice that you have drifted away from your intended practice, you need to simply stop your wandering and return to your intended practice. If you are counting breaths, then you do not need to try to remember where you got lost. Simply return to “one”, and start counting from there. You do not need to add any extra melodrama like self-deprecating comments. It does not matter how many times you have to start over as this is not about reaching “ten”, it is about the continuous applied effort of gently reasserting our intended practice. It is like slipping and falling down on ice; if you fall 100 times, you get up 101 times.

This brings me to another point, we do not judge any particular period of zazen. We do not evaluate as “good” or “bad”. Every Zen teacher I have ever talked with about this has said the same thing. I understand the desire to evaluate our meditation practice. In our everyday lives, we evaluate the results of our efforts and seek to improve our performance. Zen meditation is not like that. To be completely frank, you have no idea of what “improved zazen” might be. So, any evaluation is going to be off the mark. More importantly, though, we are not able to evaluate the effects of our zazen. I will use the analogy of a large and deep lake to illustrate what I think is happening.

On the surface of the lake there will be waves; these waves are driven by the wind. The disturbance in the water from these surface waves does not go very deep and below a certain depth, the water is not disturbed by affected by the wind whipped waves. By analogy, our discriminating and conceptualizing consciousness is like these surface waves. It gets stimulated by some sort of “external” event, but does not reach down very far. On the other hand, the layers of consciousness where are closest to our physical body are like the bottom of the lake. The bottom of the lake has its own currents which are not affected by the wind whipped surface waves. The effects of our zazen practice work at the bottom of the lake. Our conceptualizations and our discriminating consciousness literally cannot see the levels of consciousness where zazen has its effects.

Therefore, judging our zazen is simply a distraction and waste of energy. As the Hsin Hsin Ming reminds us, “The burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness.” As our sitting practice develops, we might begin to notice how onerous and scattering judging our zazen can be. After experiencing that, it becomes easier to let go our judging zazen.

This brings to mind that working with layers of consciousness which are closer to the body provides some context as to why we emphasize our physical posture in zazen. In the Buddhist models of consciousness there is what is called the “six-fold consciousness”. These six consciousnesses correspond to the different aspects of consciousness which are associated with the six sense gates I mentioned earlier – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. This is a teaching which roots consciousness in our bodily experience. There is “eye consciousness”, “ear consciousness” and so on. Mind consciousness is a little bit different from the others in that it takes our physical sense consciousnesses and conceptualizes the experience. So, it is in a little bit of a different category than our other (physical) sense consciousnesses. Aside from the mind consciousness, the other sense consciousnesses are the moments of consciousness which are generated from our operating bodily sense faculties. Therefore, how we align our bodies and sit in zazen has a lot to do with our zazen practice affects us.

The other topic I talk about in zazen instruction is self-narratives. In my experience, many people can see the need to let go of fantasies which can arise during zazen with regard to less charged topics. For example, the fantasy of shopping for cat food which I gave earlier is an example of letting go of fantasies during zazen. On the other hand, people’s fantasies about who they are, i.e. their notions of self are more deeply rooted and are taken more seriously as “really being true”. I try to make the point that the reality of their self-narratives is not more real than any other narrative they have.

For example, I ask the person if they can visualize a pitcher of iced-tea, and most people say that they can. I then point out that I cannot actually drink their visualized iced-tea. In Buddhism, something is considered real if it has objectively demonstrable effects. Consequently, the visualized iced-tea is imaginary, as it is only an image in one’s mind. This is true for all of our thoughts – the fact that a thought arises in our mind is a real thing. The changes in brain activity can be measured when a thought arises; however, the content of the thought is purely imaginary. It is exactly the same for our views of self. I say this to highlight that there is nothing about a self-view which makes it more privileged than any other act of imagination or narrative. My guess is that this probably does not make sense to most people when they first starting a zazen practice, but I try to plant the seed.

Finally, when someone comes to zazen instruction, I know there is a good chance that I will never see them again. I’ve spoken with other people who give zazen instruction and their experience is similar – about 90-95% of the people do not come back. Therefore, I use this opportunity to do my best to clarify why and how we sit zazen and hopefully inspire their practice, even if they choose to not return to the Forest City Zen Group. I say this not to end this talk on a downer of a note, but rather to acknowledge that people finding their way to some spiritual rooting in their lives is a complex, and very often, twisty process. There is no need to feel sad or take it personally if someone does not resonate with Zen practice. I am not trying to sell Zen or zazen; my role is to do the best job that I can to help them find their place. Thank-you.