Shikantaza: Open Awareness
Photo by Charlotte Youlten
In this talk Zuisei opens up the meditative practice of shikantaza. Getting to the heart of it, she offers clear beginner’s instruction to this open awareness, guidance on how to work with obstacles specific to it, and the inspiration to just dive in.
She draws on the Buddhist teachings, the work of philosopher L.A. Paul, and more.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Shikantaza: Open Awareness
Good afternoon, I hope that your morning has been quiet and spacious, settling and clarifying. We are in the second half of our Buddha’s Enlightenment Zazenkai. Zazenkai means to come together to practice meditation. I mentioned earlier in the week that every year, Buddhist sanghas around the world come together to celebrate Buddha’s Enlightenment. It is said to have taken place on December 8. Traditionally, Zen communities do Rohatsu, the most intensive and final sesshin of the year, from December 1st to December 8, to celebrate this auspicious date, and to do as the Buddha did when he took the bodhi seat (the seat of enlightenment) and vowed to not get up until, the sutra says, he’d seen what he had been working for six years to see.
So today we too are sitting together. We’re sitting faces ourselves, our minds, and meeting, I hope renewing, our aspiration to wake up to who we are so we can be of benefit to the world. So we can live deeply and joyfully—as joyfully as it is possible to live within what is by definition a rather challenging life. But we are up to that challenge, bodhisattva warriors that we are, enlightenment beings, which is a bodhisattva is. So today I want to speak about shikantaza (open awareness, objectless meditation) because I speak a fair amount about koan study and sometimes I feel I give shikantaza short shrift for no other reason than it is difficult to talk about. How do you talk about not doing, not trying, not meditating, not concentrating? But given that several of us have shikantaza as our practice, and given how important it is in the development of our own minds, I thought I’d say a few words buoyed and guided, I hope, by the power of the Buddha’s own enlightenment on the anniversary of this most fortuitous of events.
What is Shikantaza?
So, shikantaza—just sitting, nothing but sitting or focusing on just sitting, as some translations say. Yoney Mingyur Rinpoche, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, says that sitting in open awareness is like “trying to see light in empty space.”
Now, light has two characteristics:
1. it is other-illuminating
2. and it is self-illuminating
What does this mean? First, light is other illuminating because if you have a source of light like a candle or a flashlight, you can use that light to see an object, let’s say your hand. But the interesting thing about light is that it also illuminates itself. Looking at the light of a candle you don’t need another light to see the candle. The candle illuminates itself, because the light is luminous in itself, just like the mind. The mind sees all kinds of objects, like planes and trees and skunks. It can also see intangible objects like thoughts, dreams, and in a way, ideas. And not only can it see, but it can also hear and smell and touch and taste. Mind illuminates the sensory world and sensory objects so that we can perceive them. Well I don’t know if it’s light’s intention that we see them, but the result is that we can see them.
But that’s not all. The mind can also see itself. It can perceive itself, which I think is absolutely amazing. This does require a different kind of seeing, and therefore a different kind of learning to see in this way, which is shikantaza. Meditation at its most basic you could say, but it’s shikantaza. That’s why I love the image that a fellow teacher used at one point which is: If you go to the movies, what would it be like if instead of focusing on the story that is taking place on screen, you focused on the screen itself? That is what sitting in open awareness is like. You’re not focusing on the stream of thoughts, the content of the thoughts themselves, but instead you are aware of the stream flowing and you’re aware of awareness, and, I hope at a certain point, of the one who is aware. This kind of seeing is a little bit like using your peripheral vision to see in the dark. When you walk where it’s pitch black, you have to not look directly at where you’re going, but just a little bit to the side. Use the sides of the retina, that’s where there are more rod cells, which can see in low light. If you try to see, you can’t. You have to relax and not try—shikantaza. Just sitting, without doing, without effort, without concentration or mindfulness, without letting go and coming back. Just awareness itself, exactly as it is in the moment that it is. It would seem to be a very simple kind of meditation and yet it is very difficult to do.
Obstacles to Open Awareness
Why is it difficult? Because we’re so used to striving. We’re so used to working hard and feeling good about it, getting rewarded. We like ourselves when we work hard, at least, some of us do. I’m working hard, I’m quieting my mind, I’m spending hours doing zazen, I don’t miss a day, I have heard people say, I haven’t missed a day for years. Okay, that’s nice. It could be powerful. Except not missing a day is not the point. Sitting for many hours and trying very hard is not the point. The point, in shikantaza, is to see there is no point, and therefore no striving. The mind, your mind, is already perfect exactly as it is. It’s already perfectly self illuminating and other illuminating. It doesn’t need your involvement to do that. You don’t have to mess with it, it just does it. Just as your body doesn’t need your permission to breathe, it knows perfectly well how to do it. It doesn’t need your involvement.
The point, in shikantaza, is to see there is no point, and therefore no striving. The mind, your mind, is already perfect exactly as it is.
I think it was Khandro Rinpoche who said something along the lines of, “Can you live with the fact that others don’t need you to live well?” What she meant is that they don’t need our goodness, our hard work of doing meditation and practicing the precepts and cultivating wisdom. They’re fine as they are, just as we’re fine as we are. Can we hear that? Can we let that in—really let that in? Because if we can, then we’re already doing shikantaza. Shikantaza has nothing to do with crossing our legs, closing our eyes. It has nothing to do with sitting on a beautiful mat looking out over a pristine Zen garden, sand beautifully raked into concentric circles. It does have everything to do with a mind that could be on that day messy, harried, distracted, flitting from thought to thought, thing to thing.
Do you see? There really is nothing we need to do. Nothing. But then if that’s the case, why is shikantaza an advanced practice? Because most of us don’t know how to not do, how to let our minds alone. It’s very hard for us to trust that we don’t have to mess with things, that we don’t have to make them better, brighter, more beautiful, more presentable, more acceptable. It’s hard for us to believe that this moment, which doesn’t feel like enough, really is. We don’t have to make more of it. How many moments have you had where your perception was exactly the opposite of that, this is not enough, this is not OK, this is not the moment I want? It’s hard to give up that inclination to improve, but it’s not necessary, and it doesn’t really improve this moment, this nowness. It only makes it more cluttered. It only stamps it with more of me—that’s burdensome.
The reason I call shikantaza the practice of ultimate trust is because it requires that we have faith in the fact that we really are enough in this moment. And the moment is enough, and others are enough, which means we can just let things be—what a relief! When we finally see that, we can set down that huge boulder we’ve been carrying around. We realize we are lugging all that weight around, we grow tired of it and we put it down. So that we can do the work that this moment is presenting us with because it doesn’t mean there's nothing to do. That’s perhaps the biggest paradox. Certainly the way we frame the path in Buddhism, there’s nothing to do and there’s lots to do, my teacher used to say and both of those coexist simultaneously. And so some of that effort is discerning what kind of effort is needed here, which of course leads us right into how do you do this shikantaza, this not-doing.
Shikantaza Instruction
So, how do we do shikantaza? If shikantaza is all about non-doing, then how do we do it? How do we practice it? Well, like all other forms of Buddhist meditation, shikantaza relies on shamatha-vipassana, stopping and seeing, calm and insight. The mind has to be quiet so that we can see what’s going on in it. But you can’t calm the mind by forcing it to be calm. You calm the mind by removing what gets in the way of its inherent calm.
Let’s take again the usual analogy of water. If the mind is a river, in the beginning, we notice that the mind is like a brook rushing down a steep hill. The water just flows and flows without pause, too fast for us to see the thoughts even. This is when people say, “I can’t sit; it’s too hard, my mind won’t be still.” They can’t even pick out thoughts that are throwing them this way and that. But the thing about this brook, is that if you start to look at it very intently but very calmly, it loses steam. It needs that rush, that distraction, to keep its momentum. Put your mind, your awareness on it, and it begins to slow down.
Next, you notice that the mind is like a turbulent river. It’s full of rocks, which makes the water choppy, but now at least you can see the rocks, you can see the water smashing against them. You can start to see the thoughts and you can even see yourself thinking them, here and there. You catch yourself in the process of thinking— water rushing downstream. That’s a step toward calm, believe it or not, even though it doesn’t feel that way. You’ve become aware of the stream of thought, awaring as Toni Packer used to say. It’s no longer just happening to you. Now you can start to pick out the various pieces. You can see there’s water, there’s rocks, there’s lots of waves, and there’s the one who’s watching. I don’t know if there are other animals who have the capacity for that self-awareness. They think that maybe elephants, maybe octopuses. This capacity to turn our attention around, to notice the one who’s noticing, how incredible! The more you watch, the more the water slows down. Now you’re sitting there watching the movie, and you can pick out the pixels that are making the image, you can see the gradients of shadow and light, and the water is slowing down even more.
So now in the third iteration, the water is flowing slowly. Now before it smashes the rocks it just flows around it. You don’t get smashed against this rock or that, in the clatter of your own noise. And there begins to be a sense of ease, of smoothness in that process of thinking. It doesn't feel so conflicted. Now you start to feel like you are actually navigating those waters and you can see the rock coming and you can avoid it, and that comes with that sense of ease and confidence because that builds a sense of power because you see I don’t have to be a victim of my own moods, ups and downs. It’s not that you can control them necessarily, but you are in a different relationship with them. So some of that energy you had tied up into protecting, navigating, just surviving really now is freed up. It’s an interesting moment in practice because people start to become interested in new things. Maybe they take up a form of art, or they start to learn a new language, or they start going hiking, because they have more of themselves available to themselves. It’s really beautiful to watch when you have the privilege to do that. You start to see they’re putting that weight, that burden, down. And if that river continues in that vein, it opens up, it flows into the ocean, an ocean without waves, very calm. The water flows in and it gets absorbed into all that space.
That is a moment of samadhi, meditative absorption, one pointedness when you’re using a single object. In the case of shikantaza, there is no one, there is no many, there’s just that whole period. When you get to this point you might feel joy, bliss even. It feels spacious inside, it feels quiet. But if you know enough to not stay there you just keep watching and you just keep moving through that ocean. The ocean begins to realize it is ocean, not just waves. The mind watching mind begins to realize it is luminous. Like the candle, it has an inner luminosity. It starts to see things in a different light because it doesn’t see them as just out there. It begins to see itself in a different light—not as a thing—but as light itself. At this point thoughts stop, even briefly. This is the state of nonthinking.
And how did you get there? By not-thinking, as Yaoshan said, in that famous koan:
A monk came along as Yaoshan was sitting and he asked him, “What are you doing, sitting so quietly?”
And Yaoshan, humoring him, said, “I think not thinking.”
“But how do you think not thinking?” the monk asked.
Yaoshan said, “Nonthinking.”
This is shikantaza.
All you can do is trust.
Recently I was reading an article in the New Yorker about a philosopher by the name of L. A. Paul (Laurie Paul). Paul is known for making the argument that when you’re anticipating making a transformative decision like having a child (her main example because at the time she was considering whether to get pregnant) there are two selves that are yourself: the one before the decision and the one after. So the one that has not yet had the child and is considering it, is not the same and can never be brought together, she claimed, with the parent. Why? Because no matter how much she imagines—no matter how many books she reads, how many stories she hears from friends and family—she simply cannot know what it’s like to be a parent. The parent, having had the child, cannot possibly know anymore what it was to be before that transformative experience. They remember, yes, but that is not the same self.
More famously, Paul framed this problem of decision making in terms of a thought experiment. Imagine you were offered the chance to become a vampire. It wouldn’t be painful and it wouldn’t hurt others (to me, the thought experiment breaks down right here; it doesn’t sound like we’re talking about a vampire at all, but in any case). If you chose to become a vampire, you’d gain incredible powers, but you’d have to give up being human. All your friends have decided to make the leap and they’re loving it. They tell you you should do it too—would you? A vampire no longer has human experience, so they’re talking to you from their vantage point. You, as a human, have no idea what it would be like to be a vampire and can’t even imagine it, no matter how hard you try. The problem, she says, is there is no way to make that decision rationally.
Plenty of people have debated if this is true. What I thought interesting was this concept of two selves, more than two usually. I agree with the fact that there are many selves operating in each of us at any given moment, but there’s also the one before and the one after. “For many big life choices,” she says,” we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.”
Exactly like practice. The person before an experience of insight and the person after an experience of insight are not the same person. And they can’t possibly tell each other what it’s like. Which means we don’t have to waste any time wondering what seeing Mu or letting go of the self or seeing our minds will be like. You do not have to worry about it one bit because no matter what you imagine it can’t possibly be that. There’s absolutely nothing anyone could say, nothing any book could show, to give you an accurate picture of what that experience is like or will be like for you. Therefore, all you can do is let go and practice. All you can do is trust. You can trust that the person you’ll become will be alright—will be someone with whom you’d like to hang out. “In the end,” Paul says, “the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.” Aspiration, vow, that’s the best response.
Do you want to discover the person you’ll be in the next moment and the next and the next? Then don’t know, not just who you’ll become, but who you are now. Don’t think about it. Trust, even a little, your non-thinking mind, because if you trust even a little bit that’s your foot in the door. Then it’s a matter of time. Trust that it has something huge and invaluable to teach you. I promise you, it does. But don’t take my word for it. Never take my word for it.
See it for yourself.
Explore further
01 : Shikantaza: The Methodless Method of Zazen by Zuisei Goddard
02 : The Philosopher L. A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves by Alice Gregory
03 : Just Show Up & Sit with Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
A Satisfying Life, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard on the work needed to see that we’re enough, and so are our lives—just as they are.