121: Zen versus Daily Life part five

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Attention
Just pay attention —
But why; to whom; what; and where?
Complete attention!

Let’s recall our initial outline of areas of interest we are using to compare and contrast the Zen life with our usual preoccupations. To refresh your memory, they were, and are:

Lifestyle: Monastic versus Householder
Physical: Zazen versus the four Cardinal Postures
Biological: Meditative breathing versus everyday situations
Psychological: Shikantaza versus ordinary attention

In this segment we will take up the last of the four — attention — the third disposition, after posture and breath, of Matsuoka Roshi’s simplified model of zazen, Zen’s upright seated meditation.

One of his repeat instructions was that, “When the posture, breath, and attention all come together in a unified way, this is the real zazen.” Which implies that we may think we are practicing zazen, when we are not. And what determines whether we are, or not, is, mainly, our attention. We can be sitting in the natural, upright posture; and following the natural, full breathing cycle, all the while paying attention to the wrong thing; or, perhaps better to say, not really paying attention at all, in the Zen sense.

So, let’s examine what we mean by “attention,” and later, how it works in zazen. In marketing and design circles, attention is regarded as a kind of commodity, upon which we may place a value. That billboard on the expressway attracts a certain amount of attention from the drivers passing by. The owner of the billboard can charge a certain amount of rent, based on the number of “eyeballs” exposed to its message, the client’s message.

In today’s post-print media market, we are saturated with electronic media competing for our attention, seeking to maximize the amount of “clicks” or “hits” a message gets online, as well as on “legacy” or “traditional” media channels such as film, broadcast television, radio, and print publishing.

So one way to think about paying attention in Zen, granted that it is a choice we make, is to ask ourselves: What is the most important thing to pay attention to? Of course, I can hear you responding with the hip and flip, too-clever-by-far, all-too-predictable trope: “Everything.” Like the hotdog joke — the Zen master will have one with everything. Which, seriously, raises the question of whether that is even possible. Actually paying attention to everything simultaneously, that is.

Master Dogen, in his seminal tract on zazen, Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation, at one point says:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism
how can you be satisfied with the transient world?
Our bodies are like dew on the grass and our lives like a flash of lightning
Vanishing in a moment

This lands about two-thirds of the way though the text, and by then he has said maybe a hundred or so things about Buddhism, so it begs the question, “Which of these is the most important?” But I think we can safely surmise that it has something to do with attention.

The legendary Master Bodhidharma, credited with bringing the direct practice of Buddha’s meditation to China at the end of the 5th century CE, taught that it is not necessary — or should not be necessary — to do zazen, but that we have only to “grasp the vital principle.” Of course, for most of us, we have to burn through a lot of zazen to be able to grasp the vital principle of Zen. Notable exceptions include Master Huineng, the sixth in the Chinese succession in the 7th century, who underwent a profound experience of insight without benefit of a teacher, or any prior practice. This rare event is traditionally attributed to “merit accumulated in past lives.” But such prodigies are few and far between.

My theory is that the main reason that most of us have to sit in zazen to such an extreme extent is that the load of ignorance, personal opinions, and rationalizations we carry on our shoulders has accumulated to that extent. In design and art circles, we speak of two different fundamental kinds of processes working with material media. One is “additive”: lumping clay onto an armature to build a bust of Napoleon, for example; the other is “subtractive”: chipping away the stone to reveal Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

I find zazen to be mostly the latter. We are chipping away at our own ignorant ideas and preconceptions of reality to get to the bottom of things. And it’s a long way down.

So what we have to pay attention to is, or may be, “everything,” in one sense; but by taking one thing at a time. And there are a lot of things in the pile we have accumulated. “Pile,” by the way, is one meaning of “skandha” — a “heap,” or “aggregate” — of many like things. Which gets a mention early in the Heart Sutra chanted frequently in most Zen wheelhouses around the world.

O Shariputra, form is no other than Emptiness; Emptiness no other than form
Feeling, thought, impulse, and consciousness are likewise Emptiness

So there you have it. The four aggregates of sentient experience of which we can be conscious — the form, or appearance, of things; the feelings, both tactile and emotional, that we experience on both instinctual and intentional levels; the stream-of-conscious thoughts relentlessly emitted by the brain; and the underlying impulses triggered both subliminally and on the edges of awareness. And finally, consciousness itself, can become conscious of consciousness, “form and reflection” beholding each other, in Tozan Ryokai’s memorable phrase from Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi.

Back to Bodhidharma, who refers to this same point in an oblique manner: The great Buddhist saint went on to say that if and when we do zazen — in spite of his reluctance to claim the necessity of doing so — there are four basic aspects of ordinary awareness that we can observe, or pay attention to: the breath; physical sensations; emotional sensations, or mood swings; and finally, the machinations of the mind: our various thoughts or concepts, about everything and nothing. A four-pointed model.

I think one of Bodhidharma’s main points is that in observing the breath, we note that it comes and goes momentarily — we never breathe the same breath twice. Likewise for physical, emotional, and conceptual phenomena — they are ever-changing, by nature impermanent. Well, “Duh!” you say. But these are four of the main aspects of what it is to be a sentient being — those we most associate with our personal identity: This is MY breath; I am hot or cold, in pain, or comfortable; this is MY moodiness; and these are MY ideas. And yet all four are essentially ephemeral, like “a bubble on a stream,” to borrow from Shakyamuni himself.

So where does this pervading sense of continuity come from, this “persistence of vision,” and all the other senses? And what are we to make of this contrarian stanza from Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind, by Master Sosan:

To move in the One Way
Do not reject even the world of senses and ideas
Indeed accepting them fully
Is identical with true enlightenment

As I discuss in excruciating detail in the chapter on “Deconstructing Your Senses in the Most Natural Way,” from my first book, ”The Original Frontier” (I know, I know, it is weird to be quoting from your own writing), as we settle into the relatively extreme stillness of zazen — fixed gaze and all — a kind of profound sensory adaptation begins to set in, which is also referenced in the Heart Sutra, just after the bit about the skandhas:

Given Emptiness
[there are] no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
No seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching;
No realm of sight; no realm of mind-consciousness

So now we are getting a clue as to what to pay attention to in zazen. And the implication that things are not exactly as they seem to be, sensory-wise. If we simply sit still enough for long enough — and it is anything but simple — everything changes. Through the natural process of paying strict attention to the senses, the process of adaptation takes us through what is sometimes referred to as samatha, or samadhi — calming or stilling the mind; and eventually, and hopefully, vipassana, kensho or satori in Japanese; or what is referred to as “spiritual insight.” Which, by definition, is different from, but inclusive of, normal sight. Do you “see” what I mean? Then the Sutra goes on to say:

And so no ignorance; [and] no end of ignorance;
No sickness, old age and death; no end of sickness old age and death

Whoa! Here is a whiplash-inducing claim. Transcending the senses — as we ordinarily experience and interpret them — takes a seemingly sudden turn, eliminating the very ignorance that has been bedeviling us all along. It also magically relieves us of the burden of the three main marks of dukkha, or sentient suffering: sickness, old age, and death. This challenges our credulity. That those things we fear most in life: the loss of life itself, through the random crapshoot of contracting one of the innumerable fatal illnesses threatening us; or the natural process of aging out of life, just as we age out of our professions and familial responsibilities. Is it all just a figment of our imaginations?

In summation, we are all paying full attention every moment of our waking day. But, like the proverbial monkey jumping from limb to limb of the tree of consciousness, it seems random and pointless. The challenge, and the question, becomes what is the most important thing in the flux-and-flow of daily life to pay attention to, and more precisely, how?

I would submit that we begin with accepting, and even embracing, the flux-and-flow itself. Master Nagarjuna, 14th in the Indian succession, where Bodhidharma was 28th, said something to the effect that enlightenment entails “seeing into the flux of arising, abiding, and decaying.” And it seems to me that that “abiding” piece is one source of our confusion. If anything is abiding, it is not for long, not in geological time, nor in the quantum realm. So a big part of what we are observing, or paying attention to, is change itself, the passing pageantry of life.

I would suggest that, as a benchmark, simply paying more attention to posture and, more pointedly, your breath, will help extend the halo effect of your meditation into every situation you confront in daily life. It may also begin to bring home the deeper meaning of the seemingly trivial and mundane activities which otherwise amount to distractions.

There is much more to say about attention, of course, as there is about posture and breath. But for the sake of simplicity, and the practical constraints of this podcast, I will leave that to your imagination and to your discovery in zazen. And I will leave you with a final caveat concerning the nature of the realization of insight, as well as the limits of our imagination, from Hsinhsinming:

With a single stroke we are freed from bondage
Nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing
All is empty; clear; self-illuminating;
with no exertion of the mind's power
Here, thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value

For more on Soto Zen, its meaning and application to our modern life and practice, please check out our online and in-person schedules on the Atlanta Soto Zen Center website, and register for my Master Class on the Soto Zen liturgical verses.