Zen practice answers fundamental inquiry

by Tom Dickinson
published November 03, 08

Zen is finding your true self—answering the inquiry, “What am I?” Zen practice is a way to go about that. And so a question arises: Why do I need some special practice to answer it? Why can’t I just go about it on my own?

Zen Master Seung Sahn, the Korean Zen Master whose practice we follow at Big River Zen Practice Group, has answered that: you actually can go about it on your own. He said Zen is everyday life, so Zen practice is not special either. Maybe it can help, though. Why not give it a try?

Our particular practice is really four practices, each one working on us from a different angle. None of them has any special content of its own except to help with the basic inquiry, but because of their cultural heritage, they can seem exotic. In fact, they are formal versions of activities we already understand in the course of living, only now directed toward helping answer The Question. The four practices are bowing, chanting, sitting and kong-an practice.

Bowing
Our practice day begins with 108 bows. A bow starts from a standing position in front of a mat, with palms together in front of your chest, a hand position we call hapchang. You drop to your knees, put your hands on the mat and lower your body—hips to ankles, face to the mat, and turn your palms upward. Then you return to an upright kneeling position and then to a standing position, hands back in hapchang. That’s one bow. All 108 take 10-15 minutes, and you do break a sweat! Zen Master Seung Sahn says that bowing practice is the best way to cut through karma.

Chanting
Our daily chanting centers on four chants. The first, Homage to the Three Jewels, is in Korean. The three jewels are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, which can be thought of as True Self, True Way and True Community. The second and third are the Heart Sutra, first in Korean, then in English. The Heart Sutra is a central text of Zen Buddhism and speaks to the nature of existence and perception. The last is the Great Dharani, a long untranslatable mantra.

When I first chanted I was put off by the foreign language, not knowing what I was saying. It almost felt like I was participating in some kind of magical incantation. Yet, Zen Master Seung Sahn said we could chant “Coca Cola Coca Cola” if we believed in it. “The words don’t matter. Just chant.” Chanting is a “together action” as he terms it. Our lives are spent in relationship. Chanting is a clear moment when we all do the same thing together, paying attention to the sound we make and how it fits with the sounds others make.

Sitting
At a long retreat I attended someone asked Zen Master Seung Sahn how to sit Zen. I was glad because I felt no one really ever explained this well enough before. He said, “Back is straight, floor is brown, breathing in and out.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Do you need some explanation?” he asked. “Ok. ‘Back is straight’ means that if your back sags, make it straight again. ‘Floor is brown’ means your eyes are open. We keep our eyes looking down so what you see is the floor, and it is brown. If you notice that the floor isn’t brown [laughter in the audience], then come back to noticing it is brown. ‘Breathing in and out’ is easy. If you aren’t doing that, you’re dead! [more laughter!]”

I was not happy with this explanation. I wanted to know what I should be thinking, how I should be controlling my thoughts, I wanted to know what I was aiming for.

But I’ve found through trying that his explanation was just enough. Sitting is fundamentally a simple activity, just as is driving a car or washing dishes. It becomes very obvious that if while sitting my mind is racing with thoughts—going over music, composing e-mail messages, remembering things I have to buy, getting mad at someone, etc, etc.—that all that thinking has nothing to do with what I am actually doing ... which is just sitting. During sitting my mind has only a simple job: back is straight, floor is brown, breathing in and out. All the rest is what my mind likes to do or is used to doing, but it has no value here.

That is an extremely annoying realization! But over time and bit by bit, that racing mind calms down having no great work to do, and what appears is a mind “Clear like space,” in the words of Zen Master Seung Sahn, “When red comes: red; when white comes: white.” Things appear just as they are. When sitting, just sit; when driving, just drive. The busy thinking our minds like to do no longer dominates, no longer masks what the rest of our self does.  It seems reasonable (even to my chattering, thinking mind!) that when my self functions in its simplest way, solving the question “What Am I?” might come more easily.

Kong-an
The fourth practice is working with kong-ans (koan in Japanese). These are stories, problems, exchanges (they are so varied in form it is hard to pin them down) followed by commentary and questions that are seemingly illogical or unanswerable. A Zen teacher works with a student using these kong-ans to help the student break free of always approaching his/her life through that chattering, thinking mind, the one that always needs to understand. Needless to say, for many of us this is also very annoying. My thinking mind is a fierce and tenacious baby-sitter of my life, and until recently, it, and I, did not like kong-an practice at all. The change came when I said to myself on the way to a kong-an interview, “I just don’t care if I sound like an idiot or feel like an idiot, dammit!”

Kong-an practice works on relationships. Sometimes being in the world means doing the same thing as others, as in our chanting. Sometimes it means interacting with others, fulfilling your life job as others fulfill theirs, and those jobs are never the same. The teacher challenges, so how do I meet that challenge? The teacher helps, so how do I accept that help? The teacher confuses, so how do I meet that confusion? Moment to moment to moment, our lives are constantly new, but the thinking mind can only process what has already happened. It is always too late. So what is this thing that acts in the moment? Kong-an practice works on this question, which ends up being the question: “What am I?”
Each of these practices works on the same thing, clearing the mind of distractions—in our practice we say “cutting off thinking”—so that that fundamental question, “What Am I?” can be addressed. The bowing works through physical activity, the chanting works through “together action,” the sitting works through its simplicity, and kong-an practice works with the mind, dealing with acting in the world. Each of the practices reflects an aspect of how we are this life—solo and communal, active and still. The important thing about these practices is that they encourage clear mind, moment to moment.

Someone once asked Zen Master Seung Sahn why our forms are so complicated and difficult. He said, “Don’t make difficult, don’t make easy. Just do it.” This Just Do It is really the crux of it all. Zen, though presented as an inquiry is not at all academic. It is something you do. No one gives you anything; you find out yourself through your own work.

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Big River Zen Practice group meets Wednesday evenings, 7:30-8:30, and Sunday mornings 9-11. All are welcome. We meet at 3212 18th Ave. S. in the Powderhorn neighborhood.