Daishin Morgan, Rev. Master

This is an extract from Chapter 2 of Sitting Buddha

There are four positions for meditation described in the Buddhist sūtras—standing, sitting, walking and lying down. Wherever you are, whatever the circumstances, you can always do zazen, even if you are ill or dying. These recommended positions refer to the formal practice and learning them helps to facilitate the right attitude of mind, as well as deepen one’s mindful awareness of the body. The sitting position is the primary one for formal practice but no matter which position you are in, it is essential to be grounded and focussed within your physical body. When Buddhists meet each other and wish to express respect, we put our palms together with the fingers pointing upwards in a gesture called the gasshō. As well as engendering respect and gratitude, it is an expressive way of bringing yourself together. Mind and body are one, so being aware of your body gives you a basis for understanding the mind; it provides a starting point and a place of stability to which you can always return. If you are settled and grounded within your body, then your mind will have some stability too. If the mind is just trying to understand itself without reference to the body, it can spin off into abstraction and unreality, thus becoming divorced from the here and now.

The Standing Position

Although sitting is the primary posture for meditation, I have found the standing position to be the easiest one in which to learn what it means to be present within the body in a way that is relaxed and centred. You can try this by standing up straight with your heels about two fists apart and with your arms hanging loosely by your sides, while letting your shoulders and abdomen relax. Have your knees slightly bent, just enough so that they are not locked. Now feel the weight of your head being carried by your neck and shoulders and let them relax. In your mind, follow the weight down your body. Feel the weight passing down your arms, through your wrists and out through your fingers, relaxing you as it goes. Relax your shoulders and feel the weight of your torso resting on your pelvis; relax your buttocks and pelvis so your weight goes down your thighs and on through your knees and calves and then on into the floor. Feel how the floor absorbs your weight so that you and the floor are one. Stand there for a while like this with your attention focussed just on your physical presence.

When standing formally in meditation, as is done during a temple ceremony or for walking meditation, place your left hand with the thumb gently held within a fist at the level of the base of your sternum with the right hand covering it. The forearms should be level and parallel with the floor. This hand position is known as shashu. When you move your arms into this position, keep your shoulders relaxed. This may be hard at first, as the tendency is to stand rather stiffly, but as you become aware of tensions keep letting them go. As you relax, other muscles take over and your weight is held evenly by all of you. The body has a natural source of energy that will hold you once you learn to trust it. All the formal meditation positions have some aspect that requires a degree of muscle tone to maintain. Learning to maintain this tone is connected with remaining present in your body and is extremely helpful. It takes time to learn how to do it in a relaxed way.

Whenever you are standing, say waiting in a queue, you can take this position and be very grounded and centred (without the formal hand position which might feel a bit odd in the middle of an airport). This is extremely helpful in dealing with stress, worry and a host of other emotions and tensions. All the positions for meditation can be adapted to suit the situation you are in, once you get the idea of how they work.

Sitting Meditation

This is the best posture of all for meditation and its most important feature is to have your back in the right position. To get an idea of the correct position, take the standing position described above only this time place your forearms in the small of your back. Feel around and notice how your back is, notice the degree of the lumbar curve in the small of your back when you stand straight. This is how it should feel when you are sitting.

 Using a Chair

I will begin with how to do zazen on a chair, as this position is one nearly everyone can manage right away without unnecessary discomfort. Whatever sitting position we adopt, the whole architecture of the zazen posture depends upon the “sitting bones” which are the lowest part of the pelvis. You can feel these knobbly bones when you sit on your hands. To sit up straight without strain, these sitting bones need to be supported in such a way that the pelvis is tipped slightly forward. This in turn allows the lower back to assume a slight inward curve in the lumbar region and the upper body can then be comfortably supported with the shoulders relaxed and the chest open.

Sit on an upright chair with a flat seat or on something like a piano stool. It is important to avoid chairs that have a backward slope to the seat. Position your sitting bones in the middle of the seat; if the chair has a back, don’t lean against it but sit up straight. Place your heels about two fists apart and make sure your feet are flat on the floor and more or less parallel with each other. Position your feet far enough forward so that your shins are approximately vertical; let your knees be apart as feels natural. To check that your back is in the right position, put your forearms in the small of your back again. Your back should feel like it did when you were standing.

It will be important to have a chair that is the right height for you. If you look at the illustration below you can see the model’s thighs are sloping slightly lightly downward. You may need to add a cushion if the chair is too low, or place something under your feet if the chair is too high. It is worth taking a bit of time to get this right.

You may find that having a wedge-shaped cushion to sit on helps to achieve this forward curve. Alternatively, you can fold a towel or flat cushion to achieve the same effect as the wedge. An important point to watch is not to force your lumbar area to curve inwards too much. If the chair is too high for you and your thighs slope down too steeply, this may tend to happen. If in doubt about the correct lumbar curve, stand up again and check how the curve should be in the way described above.

The abdomen should be allowed to relax; don’t hold yourself in. Everyone experiences tension at times in meditation and this is often felt in the abdomen. Don’t worry if it feels tense. The important thing is not to fight but to accept the presence of the tension and it will begin to relax in time.

You can find the right position for your head by imagining a string attached to the crown of your head. If the string were pulled gently upwards, your neck would lengthen and your chin would tuck in just slightly and this is what you want to achieve. The head should rest on your neck and shoulders in a relaxed way and feel weightless, i.e. there should be no strain in holding it there. Keep your eyes open and lower your gaze to about 45 degrees from the horizontal. If you normally wear glasses, it is best to keep them on. Your eyes should be in focus; however, do not pick out a point on the floor or wall in front of you and stare at it. Do not concern yourself with what you see—your attention needs to be inward. Keeping your eyes open helps to keep you grounded here, where you are, and is one means of countering dreamy states of mind that sap your energy. The teeth should be closed, not clamped shut. Breathe normally through your nose.

Place your hands in your lap so your arms are relaxed. If you find it difficult to relax your arms, a small cushion or other soft item placed under your hands may help. Place your hands as shown below with the thumbs lightly touching – so that you could just hold a piece of paper between them without letting it fall. Don’t press your thumbs together. This hand posture requires the maintenance of some muscle tone to keep your thumbs in place, in the same way that the pelvis and the back do. When people fall asleep or get drowsy in meditation, their thumbs usually droop.

It is important not to lean off to one side, or backwards or forwards. To settle yourself into the right position, it helps to sway the body in a circular motion, gradually decreasing the size of the circles, until you have centred yourself. The idea is to sense from the inside what being centred feels like. Having done this, you should then sit steadily, letting go of thoughts as they arise by keeping your attention focussed on your physical presence.

 To continue reading this chapter about the other postures of sitting – on a zafu (cushion), using a bench, lying down and walking meditation – follow this link:

 https://throssel.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/chaptertwo.pdf

Chapter 6: Skilful Means in Zazen

“No method is easy and in the end it is not a matter of perfecting a technique. How do you sit still? Just sit still!”

Especially in the beginning, zazen can feel very confusing. There seems to be no handle by which we can grasp it. The best advice is to keep going, as in a very direct way you are dealing with some of the fundamental problems that have to be overcome to realize your true nature. We have to entrust ourselves to the primordial pure mind of zazen rather than continually seeking reassurances and explanations, for ultimately there are none. In the end, there can be no mediation between you and zazen. Even though you may be sitting there wondering what on earth you are supposed to be doing, just treat that thought like any other thought and let it pass by. Ground yourself again and again and keep going. It is like learning to paint a picture—you have to splash some paint about and make a bit of a mess, but then gradually you get the feel of it as your faculties develop.

In the Serene Reflection Meditation tradition, we teach the basics of zazen at the beginning, rather than starting people off with a separate preliminary practice. We do this because there are no “methods” or means for doing zazen. Zazen is the fundamental primordial mind itself and the Zen way of training and realization is to entrust oneself to it completely. It simply is; to approach it by any method is to add something to it and as soon as you attempt to do that, you have missed the point. In so doing, you believe that you stand outside seeking the doorway, when you are already “inside”. To concern oneself with methods is not to trust the pure mind of zazen, a state Dōgen describes as the “dropping off of body and mind”. The essential point of zazen is also lost if one goes searching for the technique that is fastest, quickest, highest or whatever, for no technique can ever be zazen. I believe this point is important to understand at the outset so that one will use skilful means with discrimination and not let them obscure the real nature of zazen.

Yet within the Zen tradition, masters (including sometimes Dōgen himself) have always used skilful means to help awaken us to this fundamental mind. One of my favourite quotes attributed to Kohō Zenji¹ is, “The truth, the whole truth and anything else that works!” We all need a helping hand to get started, and as training unfolds we should not be too idealistic or too proud to accept help. My advice is to use skilful means when you need them and seek the advice of a teacher who can help you find the heart of zazen directly. As soon as the means have achieved their purpose, then return to the effort to do pure zazen and “just sit”.

Circular Breathing

This method was recommended by Rev. Master Jiyu. It is an imaginative exercise to begin with in which you picture your breath as starting at the base of your spine, then as you breathe in you picture the breath as rising up your spine to the top of your head. As you breathe out, picture the breath moving down the centre line of your front to the pubic bone so that the “breath” forms a circle. Breathing in, up the back, breathing out, down the front. Keep this going for three or four breaths to start yourself off when beginning a period of zazen or when you find yourself getting lost or distracted. Breathe normally when doing this, i.e. not especially deeply but just as it comes. This practice is not designed to be used all the time, but just as a means of focusing yourself. It links in with the basic movement of chi within zazen and can be of great help. It can be used in conjunction with the grounding practice.

What to Do When Falling Asleep or Sitting Like a Pudding

A common difficulty is falling into drowsiness—not actually falling asleep but going into a drifting semi-anaesthetized fog. Your posture slumps and you rock forward and then catch yourself with a start, but usually not enough of a jerk to actually wake you up! This state is familiar territory to anyone who tries to meditate for very long. The best advice is to check your posture, open your eyes wide for a moment and take a deep breath and carry on sitting. Sometimes, however, nothing seems to work and although you may not be really exhausted, you find yourself dozing off again. Keeping going when this happens is really doing something useful, even though it may not seem like it; if you give in to drowsiness, it will never pass.

Laxity of mind is a problem related to drowsiness, although it may not be quite so noticeable. Zazen can reveal uncomfortable feelings and somewhat unconsciously we opt for being only partly present. One can waste years of practice by not focussing on what you are doing. This is sitting like a pudding rather than like a mountain! You have to bring all of yourself to the party to meditate properly. It helps to ground yourself, as described in chapter two. If you still keep wandering in a dreamy way, then it may help to count your breaths as detailed below. Please remember, though, that the technique itself won’t do it; you have to use the technique to focus your mind and really be present. If you do that, you can cure “pudding mind” right away.

Counting Your Breaths

This is a concentration exercise that can be used now and again to help you focus your mind, but it is best not to let it become your main practice. To try this, keep your mind on the rise and fall of your abdomen as you breathe in and out and then count each out-breath. By developing a strong focus on this deliberate foreground of meditation, you exclude thoughts by concentrating on the breath count. You may notice thoughts passing through in the background and that is no problem, as long as you do not lose your place in the count. Count your out-breaths up to ten and then start again. If you lose your place in the count, then without giving rise to irritation, quietly go back to the beginning again. You may find it quite difficult to actually make it to ten. Don’t worry about it, just keep going. After doing this for some time, a feeling of concentration begins to develop if you keep at it. There is also a degree of peacefulness that comes at the same time, because you are no longer scattered and are much more in control of yourself. Familiarize yourself with this feeling of being centred, it is a helpful bench mark, then go back to just sitting in zazen. It is useful to count your breaths for a meditation period every now and again just as a diagnostic test for pudding mind! It can be a bit of a salutary shock! However, pudding mind can and does come and go in a moment. If you find you are caught up in a dreamy state, it is just another mental affliction to let go of.

It is easy to underestimate how long it takes to get the feel of zazen and to start casting about for alternatives; don’t jump the gun and start counting the breaths when you may not need to. Regular contact with a teacher can help in this area. There are many other devices like these that a skilled teacher can show you when they are called for, but over the last thirty years I have been impressed with people’s natural ability to find their way into the practice if they keep going. No method is easy and in the end it is not a matter of perfecting a technique. How do you sit still? Just sit still! Everyone finds it difficult to start with so do not underestimate your capacity.

Chapter 7: Some Mistakes to Avoid

“We have to be willing to fall apart…in the sense that we let go of all our self-images and come to a real spiritual poverty. It is in such a place that the true nature is found.”

People often have the idea that zazen is about experiencing blissful states and if they do not experience such things, they think that either they are doing something wrong or else zazen doesn’t work. Blissful states do arise from time to time, but they are not enlightenment. This is because they are fleeting and when one emerges from them, the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion can still arise again, as one has not yet cut their root. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with these states and they can be of enormous help in confirming that there are fruits to be experienced on the way—and all too easily we make them into another object of desire and find that our minds grasp after them.

If all the Buddhas come to greet you or all the devils come to pursue you—either way—the path of zazen is to sit still, not chasing after the one or fleeing the other. The true nature is beyond all appearances. We may “see” all kinds of things with the mind’s eye; all such images are just images that appear, we should not hold on to them or push them away. Just treat them like another thought. They may contain good teaching or they may contain delusive teaching. If we do not hanker after them, time will put them into their proper perspective. We so much want confirmation that we can inadvertently make such things the object of our practice and that is a mistake.

To free ourselves from delusion involves seeing the nature of the delusions we are subject to. This is sometimes painful, yet to be able to see them is a real mark of progress. This means that if we try to assess our meditation according to whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, then we are likely to misjudge it.

People can sometimes approach Zen like a customer in a supermarket buying a product that should fix their suffering. Unfortunately, sometimes this attitude is fostered by the way spiritual traditions try to sell themselves. Training is not a contract in which you can buy certain benefits. Often we can get caught in looking for the fix, the magic that will do it for us, whether we conceive it as a technique or a revelation. All these pitfalls miss the essential point: training is not about boosting the self; it is about letting the self fall away. Those who are very competent in their career and have a lot of valuable skills can come to the practice seeking to become an expert, just as they have successfully done in other areas of life. This will not work with meditation, although sometimes the appearance that is created can be deceptive. The “I” can seek an appearance of spiritual competence in which it can hide by imitating the true nature. We have to be willing to fall apart, not in the sense of a psychological disintegration, but in the sense that we let go of all our self-images and come to a real spiritual poverty. It is in such a place that the true nature is found.

It is possible to try too hard in meditation. The effort needed is to bring oneself to sit and to patiently and quietly accept what comes and let it flow on. If we are trying to make things happen, to force our way in, then, again, we obstruct ourselves. We have to do our part and let go and trust the true nature. Many people find that their practice oscillates between trying very hard and then giving up. Suffering brings them to training, then with practise the suffering eases a bit and so they stop before the root of the suffering has been truly seen. Regularity of meditation is a great help with this, especially if we let go of trying to assess our practice.

Although there are many mistakes, it is still necessary to trust that you are doing it right unless something shows you that you are not—in which case just take that on board and alter course accordingly. It may be that we each have to make our own mistakes along the path as part of the learning process, so we should not fear mistakes or we can paralyze ourselves. At the same time, it makes sense to seek help from those with enough experience to be able to help us see more clearly. A good teacher will not judge or condemn; in all likelihood, they will be able to spot the mistake because they have made it themselves.

If we should realize that we have made a mistake, one that perhaps has caused suffering to others, then it is important to acknowledge it and do what you can to put it right, but not to beat oneself up about it. All the great masters of the past have made their share of mistakes, some of them very serious indeed, yet they still went on to true realization and were able to be of great help to others. We cannot go back, but we can learn and accept the consequences of what we have done without complaint. Some of the simplest and best advice I have ever been given in the spiritual life is never give up.

To continue reading Sitting Buddha, the complete book is available as a pdf and an audio version at this link:

https://throssel.org.uk/sitting-buddha-book/