Shikantaza

Photo by Patrick Schneider

Acknowledging that practice does not always come easily, in this talk Zuisei skillfully guides us back to the art of shikantaza, “the gate of ease and joy,” as Dogen called it.

But what is shikantaza? How do we practice it, when we have to let go of doing and striving? Zuisei describes three steps: failing, falling, and feeling—ways to enter our zazen and also our day-to-day lives.

If you’d like to know more about shikantaza, here’s Zuisei’s Lion’s Roar article.

This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.

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01 : Fukanzazengi (Principles of Seated Meditation) by Eihei Dogen, translated by Carl Bielefeld

02 : Shikantaza by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

04 : Working with Fear with Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

It is very good to sit with you. It was a little bit of a long day, and it's good to end it this way. Yesterday morning I was swimming at sunrise. The wind was low, the water turquoise, clear. To my left there were boats bobbing lazily on the waves. To my right were many of the beach clubs, quiet, sleepy. It was a bit cloudy, promising rain. Now and then the sun peeked out from behind a cloud as it slowly rose over the Caribbean. I was still tired with this tiredness that is... in my cells. But in that moment, at that time, which is usually the best time of the day for me, I didn't mind it so much.

I was just swimming slowly, steadily out to sea. And because it's the Caribbean, there are parts of it that are very shallow, and I could catch glimpses of these tiny, blue fish. I don't know what they were. They were really cute swimming in schools right under me. At one point, I took a stroke and I turned my head to breathe and was suddenly caught by the sight of a huge rainbow. It looked almost painted in the sky, as if someone had slipped out while everyone else was sleeping and taken a brush to the clouds. It seemed so impossible because it wasn't raining. Afterward I thought, there are moments like these, now and then, moments when I feel fulfilled and at peace. I notice them because despite all my years of meditation, I have a restless soul—a melancholy soul. It is, in fact, an active endeavor for me to rest easefully, in this, in me.

I know I speak easily of being in the moment, but I just want you to know that it's not easy. It doesn't come easily to me. I want you to know because of what some of you have been saying to me recently. You've been speaking of your anxiety, your sadness, your—at times—inability to sit, or when you do, your inability to stay on the cushion for long.

Life is difficult. We know this. There is so much to be anxious about nowadays, isn't there? Scrolling doesn't help. Reading the news doesn't help. And when even your cushion can’t be a refuge... This restlessness, this anxiety is real. It’s real because we feel it. It is just as real as a moment of ease.

I was reminded of what Dogen said so many years ago. "The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of ease and joy… the manifestation of ultimate reality." The dharma gate of ease and joy. How could he say this so surely? What does that actually mean when it is often so challenging? How can zazen be a gate of ease and joy? At times when it’s not, why don't we experience it like this?

Some years ago I came across an unusual description of shikantaza. I've shared it with some of you—shikantaza or just sitting. Yasutani Roshi, who is our dharma great-great-grandfather (he was my first teacher's, teacher's, teacher), said, Shikantaza is “like sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, knowing that ultimate danger is about to strike but not knowing what form it will take or from what direction it will come.” That doesn't feel very easeful does it? It doesn't feel very relaxed. But think about it for a moment. Right now, if you heard a noise nearby, you would instantly freeze, and all of your senses would be completely open and alert. Right? You would be both incredibly still an incredibly alert, just like an animal in the forest sensing danger and readying itself to respond.

We often think of ease as lying on the couch or lying on the beach. That is a kind of ease, for sure, but there's also a dullness to it. It's certainly not when I feel most alive. It is not sparkling.

Now, think of a moment when you have felt most alive and yourself in the midst of everything, fully engaged, fully still. Then, the gate opens. Then, your being sparkles. You know yourself and the world in a different way. “The field of perception is maximally open and receptive to being,” Flora Courtois, who studied with Yasutani, said.

Courtois wrote an essay where I read this quote of Yatsutani’s. She was talking about her own path, which is incredible in itself—it’s worth reading just for that. And she quoted Yasutani,

There’s a fine line between alertness and relaxation, between doing and being. I don't want to make it sound like it’s just in these magical moments I'm swimming at sunrise and there is the rainbow. Because I also feel it when I get ready for these evenings on Zoom with you, for example. I have a very particular sequence in which I do the setup. There is setting up the stool that the computer goes on and the computer. The whole setup I have to do with a light and the camera and this other light. The futon that I'm sitting on, etc.

I learned this years ago when I was first participating in and then helping to lead the camping retreats at the monastery. One of the cardinal rules to make your life a little bit easier is to have a very particular sequence for packing and unpacking. So, if you need to break camp you can do it in the dark. You can do it in the rain. You don't have to think. It’s simply a sequence, a series of movements, that at a certain point you do naturally, effortlessly. So, I trained myself to do that. Every time I would put the same thing in the same pocket of the pack. It took me a while to get there, but when I got there, I never had to rummage again. I never had to wonder, where was the flashlight? Where was the candle? Where was the stake for the tent? It's a kind of liturgy. I do the same when I set up and break down after being with you, and I feel that ease. There's nothing else I would rather be doing, which is not how I felt about it at first. [laughs] The first few times I set this up, I thought, oh my God, I have to do this every week? Now, I could do it with my eyes closed. It prepares me to meet you. It wraps something up when we're done.

Any moment can be magical in that sense. We know this, too, but how do we sit when it doesn't feel that way? When even getting to the cushion is hard? When staying feels impossible? Well, first, we have to be willing to fail. We have to be willing to not know if we're doing it right. In one sense, that should be the fine print. If your teacher gives you shikantaza to work with, then they should tell you that you will not know if you're doing it right. So, forget about it. Just don't worry about it. Is that even the relevant question to ask?

We are so success-oriented. We enthusiastically and insistently measure everything. Yet here, we have to be willing to fail, thoroughly. We have to be willing to trust—probably more than we’ve ever trusted before, that we're perfectly okay as we are. I know you've heard me say this a million times, and you'll hear me say it a million more—our zazen is perfectly okay as it is. This means we have to let go of every last bit of measuring. If we can't, that's okay too. Shikantaza can hold that, even our obsessive measuring and our insistence to know that we're okay. It is difficult to trust this because we're not used to feeling at ease. I think we are convinced that it has to feel different than pretty much every other moment we experience in our lives when things don't feel right, or complete.

Somebody asked me the other day, "Is sitting enough?" I said, "Enough for what? To address all the problems in the world?" No, of course not. Sitting is not enough. Saving one being, ten beings, a hundred beings, a million beings is not enough. There's what, 8 billion of us? Protesting, lobbying, working for women's reproductive rights, transgender rights, for climate change, for police accountability, none of these are enough. They are necessary, but if we step back, make a list of the issues, and start checking boxes, of course it's not going to be enough. Nothing we could possibly do will be enough. Even realizing yourself is not enough.

She was very disappointed when I said this to her. [laughs] I told her it's because she’s still measuring. If we think any of part of our work—realization included—is going to solve every problem and check every box, no, I can tell you quite directly and assuredly, no. It is not enough. But again, this is not the relevant question to ask. This is not the question that will lead to the end of suffering.

I just finished reading Michelle Obama's memoir, Becoming. I was thinking of the dozens of big projects that she started and saw through that effected real change. Not to mention what her husband did. Do you think they're sitting at home now and looking back and thinking, yeah, that was enough? In fact, so many of their projects were willfully taken apart. I suspect that they don't spend much time worrying about that because then they wouldn't have much energy left to do the work they really want to do.

There was once a desert father who lived in a cave. He spent his day weaving baskets out of palm fronds. All day he would weave and weave and weave, until the baskets would pile all the way up to the ceiling. When the whole cave was filled, he would take them apart, and then he would start weaving again. That's it. That was his spiritual practice. That was his prayer.

So let me propose a question that might help to open the gate, or at least prop it open. How do I do without doing? How do I do without constantly jumping forward to the moment when I'll be done, when I will not have to worry about what is next, when I will finally be able to rest because I will be done with everything? How do I “do” without thinking that rest will come once I'm done with everything? In other words, how do I rest in doing? Do you understand?

Once a student asked Yaoshan, "What do you think about when sitting so still and so quiet?"

Yaoshan said "I think not-thinking."

The student asked, "How do you think not-thinking?"

Yaoshan said, "Non-thinking."

Notice he did not say, have no thoughts. He said, “I think not-thinking.” How? “Non-thinking.” I sit non-sitting. I work non-working. This isn't Zen speak—well, actually it is. [Laughs] But it's pointing to something true. It's pointing to a real way of being, of seeing, of moving through the world. Which brings me to the second condition for doing shikantaza.

The first is the willingness to fail, or better yet, to stop measuring failure and success altogether. The second condition is to go deep. We have to fall, like free-diving. We have to let ourselves get to the heart of things. If we stay on the surface there will always, always be something telling us, seemingly, that there's something wrong with us. That there's something lacking. Because on the surface, where the waves are buffeted by the eight worldly winds—praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute —we will always find something to threaten our rightness. In the bottom of the ocean, where the water is still, we can see the truth of who we are. We can feel our vastness. There the question, is that enough, am I enough doesn't even come up. It's not even anywhere near that universe. It's ironic and unfortunate that the thing we most need in those moments of anxiety, of deep sadness, is the thing we shun. That, too, is understandable. We do this because we're afraid of feeling. Right? Feeling can be painful. But you know, what? Not feeling is even more painful—infinitely more painful.

So, the third condition is to open ourselves to feeling, to feel completely. To stay with difficult feelings, difficult thoughts, because it's the only way to self-liberate them. By staying I don't mean harboring them or following them. And I’d say, if there are steps in practice, I think feeling is the most difficult. I think it's because we get confused. We get lost in trying to understand the feeling, where it came from. We wonder, what's its place in my history and my karma?

I was just reading this book on Mahamudra and Thrangu Rinpoche was saying that mahamudra is about looking at the feeling directly, at the thought directly. You face it. You're not trying to understand its interdependence. You're just trying to understand— understand is not even the right word—to be with the feeling itself, allowing it to be as it is. Be with it without judgment and with a sense of curiosity. What are you? Where are you? Why am I so afraid? Why am I so afraid to feel when we are built to do this? We are.

I have a mantra for exactly these moments: "Fear is the mind killer. I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me." I wish I could tell you that it is some ancient teaching that I got from the sutras, but I got it from the Children of Dune, the movie. I thought, well, wherever you can find it... It’s surprisingly effective. "Fear is the mind killer. I will face my fear, I will let it pass through me."

So fail, fall, feel—shikantaza. You're not going to find this in the sutras either. And if this sounds challenging, I would agree with you. I think we have such a strong, often unacknowledged, belief that if we are practicing correctly, that if we do it earnestly and really hard, then it will be easy. Sorry. Life isn't easy. Well, then why practice? What's the point? It's not always going to be smooth sailing. You're in the ocean, after all, not in a pool. But it’s not always going to be hard, either. Sometimes it will be smooth, sometimes it will be rough, just like life. As you become more comfortable with that, it matters less to be comfortable. It matters less to be sure. Am I doing it right? You trust more that you can glide over the tiny wave, and you can brave the ten-foot wave.

To go back to the beginning, Master Dogen, speaking of shikantaza said, "Zazen is the dharma gate of ease and joy.” Where is that gate to be found? How do you enter? Because if we are waiting for things to be smooth, to feel joyful, then we could be waiting for a long time. The most difficult thing is to accept that the gate is not hidden. It's not hidden. It never has been. It never will be. All sorts of esoteric teachings notwithstanding, the gate of ease and joy is not hidden. The gate is here. The gate is now. So the question, the relevant question, is how do I enter? Not, can I do it? Not, will I do it? Not, do I have what it takes? Just how do I do it? Thousands, millions of people have done it before me, and they had exactly the same equipment I have: human body, human mind. It has nothing to do with intelligence or ability, faith, belief. In one sense, it really is just fail, fall, feel. That's something we can all do. In fact, we do it all the time. So I guess all we have to do, actually, is to just do it on purpose.

Just do it on purpose.