Dogen Zen Belfast

I had occasion recently to transcribe a short talk about this chapter of Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, so I thought I'd have a look at it here on the blog. In Zen practice, in sitting 'dropping off body and mind' in zazen, we directly express and experience the ungraspable (or 'ineffable', as Nishijima Roshi liked to say) nature of our actions and our selves. Our action and our experience happens instantaneously, but it can't be confined or reduced to any thought or theory or name. Buddhist philosophy however needs some way to express the possibility of realising this and so it speaks in terms of 'buddha-nature'. As Nishijima Roshi indicates in his introduction to this chapter in the Nishijima/ Cross translation, Master Dogen focuses on two main conceptions of the idea of buddha-nature that he both confirms and refutes so as to contextualise them from the direct point of view of Zen practice-realisation. The first concept is that buddha-nature is a sor...

I work around people with addiction, and have had my own brushes with it in my time too and, while generalising about it is only of so much value, I think this can be said about it: The reason we take a substance or engage in a risky activity that gives us a dopamine hit is that by doing so avoids or relieves pain - it avoids some sort of suffering, and we get some relief from that suffering. In this way it stems from the same urge to end the suffering of uncertainty and separation that drove the prophets and saints into the wilderness to seek communion with God; it stems from the same urge that drove young prince Siddharta from his life of luxury in search of awakening and an end to suffering, and to eventual buddhahood; it stems from the same human urge that the Sufi masters honoured in dropping their own sense of self to find union with divine love and an end to the uncertainty, the sense of separateness, loneliness, existential boredom, self loathing, heartbreak, guilt, and all of...

    Sitting dropping off thoughts and sensations, every single thing leaps free of new and old, enlightenment and delusion.   Wishing you a happy and peaceful New Year!

When we say something like 'oneness with the Universe' we might think of it as some transcendent state, or a head-trippy multicoloured experience with stars and rainbows, but actually it's already an everyday fact that we are a part of the Universe, every part of us, even the thoughts in our head to the contrary of this fact that chop our experience up into 'me' as opposed 'that' when we mistake them for broader reality. After a while in zazen/ dropping-off-body-and-mind, when thinking calms down and our mind clarifies, we can notice times when we're sitting in an open, restful state where there is no 'me' as opposed 'that', no 'inside' as opposed 'outside'. This is us experiencing ourselves as undivided from everything else. All that separates us from this state of realisation is a thin veil of thoughts and feelings that we might habitually mistake as the self. But the real self, the selfless-self or our 'buddha-natur...

Nishijima Roshi's third point about zazen is the experience of the non-duality of body-mind. Generally we identify with our thoughts ("me") and think that the thinker is sort of like the entity driving the body, as a person drives a car. In zazen, when thought quietens down and we stop identifying with the "me" or "I", we can see this isn't the case. We stop thoughts that separate "me" from "my body" and experience ourselves as open, unlimited and undivided by those thoughts. We can only ever experience this in the present moment, and so in 'dropping off body and mind' we also become one with time, which Master Dogen looked at in detail in the important chapter of Shobogenzo called 'Uji'. 3. Oneness of Body and Mind in the Present Moment Usually we think there is something that is called “mind” and something else called “body” and that the two are separate, although they have a great effect on each other. In Budd...

Although Nisijima Roshi didn't see science as providing all the answers to our human condition, he valued scientific/materialistic advancements and explanations of our reality. In this second of the '4 aspects of zazen' which he highlighted he draws our attention to the physiological effect of sitting zazen, its innate balancing function. Experientially speaking, we might notice that sitting zazen after a while tends to bring us into a state of balanced clarity, regardless of what our thoughts or our intentions about it are. Zazen is a physical action in the real world that addresses our tendency to 'live in our heads', in our churning concoctions of habitual thoughts and daydreams and feelings...  2. Making the Body Right - A Balanced Autonomic Nervous System. In Zazen we sit on a cushion on the floor with both legs crossed,  and with our lower spine, upper spine, and head held straight vertically. Keeping the spine straight has a direct and immediate  effect on th...