just sitting

[AUDIO AND TEXT]

Tonight I’d like to offer some expressions from a teacher named Susan Murphy, who comes to us from the lineage of Robert Aitken Roshi and John Tarrant Roshi. In her book, Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary (Wisdom Publications, Boston, © 2006), Susan Murphy shares her experience of living Zen in ordinary life. At its core, this book is a bona fide mind-to-mind transmission of the spirit of Zen practice. I recommend this book to any who wish to engage yet another contemporary Western voice of the Way of Zen.

In ordinary life, Zen practice cannot be just a retreat into silence on the cushion. To be true, it can only be an inflow cum outflow of clear and committed practice, with no goal of attaining anything. It is just living and being in the reality of who we are, without further characterization. However, as we know from our own experience, this practice develops and grows during silent sitting, during zazen. Here’s a passage (p. 64) that talks of “just sitting,” known in Zen parlance as shikantaza. Susan Murphy writes:

Shikantaza means “nothing but sitting.” Just sitting is a matter of sinking into one’s bones and sinews and facing the bare ground of mind. Each thing that arises is allowed to come and go, within the one who sits. What comes and goes there – that too is gradually more empty and clear, like the one who sits. Who is it? Nothing sticks to that one. And nothing is clung to. Is it you? It seems to have no name, and to be far wider than the one called by your name. Attending to the breath is the way in, then that too falls away from prominence in the state of brightly alert attention that opens, directed to no object, attached to no content.

Let’s look at this. “Each thing that arises is allowed to come and go, within the one who sits,” she writes. This is like Fr. Greg’s admonition to us to allow thoughts that come up while we’re sitting to simply pass by like clouds in the air. We needn’t grab onto them or engage them or otherwise invite them into our little room, or even try to push them away. We just let them pass, dissolve, or whatever they’re going to do of their own accord. Remember: We are not our thoughts!

Then, about the one who sits, she bids us consider: “Who is it? Nothing sticks to that one. And nothing is clung to. Is it you? It seems to have no name, and to be far wider than the one called by your name.” Here once more is the basic question of our practice, the fundamental inquiry, our Great Doubt: “Who am I?” Are we anything or nothing more than this person who walks about carrying our name and our personality? How can we discover our “self”? How can we know?

Murphy gives us a clue: “Attending to the breath is the way in…” This is one of the prime techniques we are taught. It allows our meditation to flourish and to flower, and to reveal to us the essence of our true nature. The instruction continues: “… then that [the breath] too falls away from prominence in the state of brightly alert attention that opens, directed to no object, attached to no content.” In our attention only to the breath, only the breath remains. There is no one breathing. There is not even the act of breathing. This is a profound experience of what is real, of ultimate reality, and we all have access to it. Murphy again: “It is the mind of facing life, the mind of facing death, adding nothing at all to what is.” (p. 65)

At the end of the brief section just cited (pp. 64 – 65), Susan Murphy gives us a grand encouragement:

And whatever your path at this moment, every single step is equal in substance. Every step actualizes the true self. Every moment of practice is always the koan of having to agree to your condition, to bring unlimited friendliness to what you are, just as you are, right now. Even your obnoxiousness, your failures, your rank inadequacy is it. Your best revenge is to include it as you.

This passage might again remind us of Fr. Greg’s admonitions:

• In times of anguish or pain or anger at what has come about, he reminds us: “That’s it, too.”
• And when we want to kick away or deny something which to us seems unbearable: “If it excludes anything, it’s not Zen. It’s not real.”

So, we include all that life presents to us within our experience of us. Our experience in the moment, in this very now. We don’t exclude anything. If we’re sitting, we include our aching knees or our rampaging thoughts. If we’re paying bills, we include our declining bank balance or that penny we missed in adding things up. If we’re facing an attitude or a practice we don’t like, or if we encounter someone with whom we disagree, we take that in as part of our experience, and we respond to it as the moment wants.

This is a difficult teaching. But it’s one we must sit with, and live with, for as long as we’re still breathing. Or so it seems to me.

Thank you, Susan Murphy and your upside-down Zen. And thanks to you all for your presence.