On Sitting Doing Nothing Part 1

Without hope, without despair.

Today I attended a research day on Idleness, and for that reason, I have been too busy to write an entry.

But yesterday, along with what you read here about possibly ignorin everything I’ve said so far, I wrote about something very important to me.

Recently the last line of my author’s biog has read, ‘When he is not writing, Toby likes sitting doing nothing.’

I’d like to tell you more about that sitting, that doing and that nothing.

This is my -

Beginner’s Guide to Sitting Doing Nothing

Disclaimer: I am not an ordained Soto Zen Buddhist monk, therefore what I’ll be talking about today is just my own thoughts about zazen, which is the practice of sitting doing nothing. If you would like something more authoritative, and with a more direct lineage, I suggest you look up IZAUK – International Zen Association United Kingdom.

What I’d like to bring to your attention, if you don’t already know it, is a text by Dōgen. In the translation I’m going to use, which is in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shobo Genzo, that text is called, ‘Recommending Zazen to All People’.

This is a translation of ‘Fukan Zazengi’. It’s also been translated as ‘Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen’.

Dōgen lived in Japan; his dates are 1200 and 1253. He visited what is now China, to study with many Buddhist teachers there. Then he returned to Japan where he established several monasteries, including the Eiheji Monastery in Fukui Province, which I visited in 2019 – just before the pandemic – for a retreat of several days.

I have been regularly meditating, in one form or another, for about a decade and a half. I began with something called Mindful Breathing, which involves sitting with your eyes closed and concentrating on and counting your breaths – in-breath, out-breath, and where the air first touches your nostrils, or how your solar plexus moves.

I picked this up through a session organized in Edinburgh, during the Book Festival, by the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. But I’d been taught Mindful Breathing when I was about twelve or thirteen, by my best friend, Luke. What I learned in Edinburgh in 2006 was what I’d already learned in Ampthill in 1981 or 2.

The reason I started doing zazen, rather than Mindful Breathing, may seem elevated, but it’s very much about the theme of the day: Idleness. And the theme of this session: Nothing gained.

The core of Buddhism, to my way of thinking, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

These are: there is suffering, there is a cause of suffering, there is an end to it, and there is a way to end it.

Suffering is caused by desire or craving or lack. The constant human feeling of incompleteness.

This seems convincing to me.

Dōgen’s teaching is that the way to end suffering is simple: just sit, just do zazen. Everything else – including all the elaborations of all the other forms of Buddhism – is distraction.

This seems – or seemed when I began – less convincing to me.

Surely it has to be more complicated than that? Just sit doing nothing. Surely there are things you have to learn?

But the logic of Soto Zen is very clear, as soon as you take on the idea of suffering arising from lack, and you relate this to ‘nothing gained’.

Recommending Zazen begins:

The real way circulates everywhere; how could it require practice or enlightenment? The essential teaching is fully available; how could effort be necessary?

I moved from Mindful Breathing to zazen, as a practice, because it seemed to me that too many of the reasons I was giving myself for doing that form of meditation were gaining ideas. You will get something from this. You will be calmer, more focussed. Your mental health will improve. You may even become enlightened.

To me, this seemed a complete misunderstanding of the Four Noble Truths. If you immediately set up, in the practice you use to deal with suffering, a set of external desires – a checklist of wants which, if you don’t fulfil them, either on this day or at some point during your life, will cause you to suffer – then you are reinforcing the same cycle you started out trying to end.

By desiring things from your meditation, you are negating it as a way to end or at least mitigate desire.

This, I think, is one of the things Dōgen means when he writes:

If the slightest discrimination occurs, you will be lost in confusion.

That is, if you begin to rank or judge your practice – Yes, today was a good day – No, I’m really not feeling it right now – then you’re lost in confusion.

Do not think good or bad. Do not judge right or wrong. Stop conscious endeavour and analytic inspection.

What you need to do is commit to the practice as practice, this is what I do, and then carry it out as thoughtlessly as possible, just as Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) said of writing:

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

To be continued tomorrow.

(Which is here.)