About Zen — Meditation in Action
Zen Master Man’an Eishu
In An Elementary Talk on Zen, Japanese Zen Master Man’an Eishu (1591–1654) stressed meditation in action.
“True mind is not remote. It is not a step away, not an inch away, nor a single thought away. It is nearby.
In our Zen practice, we simply see our essential nature to attain Buddhahood.
We need only the will for enlightenment.
In our practice, we continue right mindfulness with purity and singleness of faith. We realize our own essential nature by means of our own mind and understand our own life by means of our own insight.
Our concentration is purely single-minded. We cultivate our concentration of right-mindfulness in the midst of activity. We need not prefer stillness.
We are absorbed in the concentration of right mindfulness twenty-four hours a day, although we don’t know it consciously.
We search out enlightenment with principle and fact, unified. This is called genuine study.
We attain mastery of all truths and are independent by sitting in the midst of the material world. We don’t indulge the six senses, but we practice right mindfulness continuously, without grasping or rejecting.
When we clearly see the essence, the objects of the six senses are meditation. Desires are the way of unity and all things are manifestations of reality. We enter into “the great Zen stability,” undivided by movement and stillness, and our body and our mind are both free.
We attain pure and undivided concentration with our overpowering faith, or our overpowering doubt or wonder. We are inspired with overpowering certainty or overtaken by overpowering death.
We experience immense joy when we are careful how we spend our time, aware of life’s evanescence, concentrated single-mindedly on Zen practice in the midst of objects of desire. We become the master within the sense objects. Like the lotus blooming in fire, we become more colorful and fragrant in contact with the energy of fire.
We sit and meditate as lay people living in the world of senses and desires. We concentrate within our wordly duties. We practice Zen even with an official or professional career. As poor and sickly, we have the power to practice.
When we observe that the matter of life and death is serious and we know that the world in impermanent, our will for enlightenment grows. Our heart of egotism, selfishness, pride and covetousness dies out. We work on the Way by sitting in zazen, in which principle and fact are one.
When we search for wisdom single-mindedly, as someone who has lost a child or dropped a priceless gem, we encounter wisdom, and we light up with joy.
Many people have awakened to the Way and seen essential nature in the midst of activity. We are all manifestations of one mind. When the mind is aroused, all sorts of things arise. When the mind is quiet, all things are quiet.
When the one mind is unborn, all things are blameless. For this reason even if we stay in quiet and serene places deep in the mountains and sit silently in quiet contemplation, as long as the road of the mind-monkey’s horse of conceptualization is not cut off, we will only be wasting time.
Models for practice of sitting meditation and ways of applying the mind in concentration have come down through tradition from the Buddhas and Zen masters. However, there are also types of sitting meditation typically practiced by seekers of individual liberation, seekers of heavenly states, humanitarians, and assorted cultists. Those who aspire to unsurpassed supreme enlightenment should practice the sitting meditation of the Buddhas.
Buddhas, Zen masters, and sincere practitioners conceive great compassion from the outset, never forgetting the great mass of living beings. Sitting with the body upright, maintaining correct mindfulness, and tuning the breathing are essential arts of sitting meditation.
In a clean and uncluttered room or under a tree or atop a rock, spread a thick sitting mat. Then loosen your belt and sit. Sit straight, neither leaning backward or forward, aligning the ears with the shoulders and the nose with the navel. Do not close the eyes, for that will beckon oblivion and drowsiness. Rest your mind in the palm of your left hand, and have your energy fill your lower abdomen, waist and pelvic region, then legs.
Expanding the ocean of energy in the umbilical sphere, take one deep breath and expel it completely through the mouth. Then close the lips and let fresh air enter through the nose in continuous subtle movement, neither hurried nor sluggish. Being aware of the exit and entry of the breath, think of what is not thinking. If you concentrate intently, basic energy will naturally fill and solidify you. Your lower abdomen will become like a gourd or a ball.
When this concentration becomes continuous, the physical elements of the body become well tuned, the internal organs are purified, and the upper parts are clear and cool while the lower parts are warm. Body and mind will spontaneously produce great joyfulness.
When we maintain an open, silent, radiant awareness whether we are active, stationary, sitting, or reclining, we arouse intense determination. At this time, if we have the slightest conscious discrimination, any thought of peace, bliss, or seeing essence, we will never be able to get out of birth and death, even in a hundred eons and a thousand lifetimes.
We are all imbued with wisdom and virtue, and fully endowed with the wish-fulfilling jewel, yet we degrade ourselves and impoverish ourselves. Many of us say we have minimal potential, or we are sickly, or we are obstructed by our past history, or we are entangled by circumstances, or there are no teachers, or the teaching is degenerate, or we have professional jobs, or we are householders. Creating our own laziness and boredom, lax and passive, we do not arouse the determination to practice Zen and study the Way.
Even if we meet teachers with clear eyes, we do not relinquish our own opinions to learn the Way. Even if we study the koans of the ancestral teachers of Zen, we do not bring them to mind with focused concentration. The sad fact is that both teachers and students are superficial in their attention to the Way.
On the borderline of life and death, on the very last day, of what use will any of this be? One day when we suffer illness, false thought will increase all the more, the fire in our heart will back up, and we will agonize in pain. When we observe the world closely, we find that more people are killed by false thoughts than by physical diseases.
Intensive Zen requires strength of spirit and intensity of concentration. We do not degrade ourselves. We do not let ourselves be weak, and we do not debase ourselves. The Buddhas and Zen masters were thus, and we also are thus. Sages have horizontal eyes and vertical noses; we too have horizontal eyes and vertical noses. Breathing out and in, we do not borrow the nostrils of anyone else; stepping forward, stepping back, we do not use another’s legs. Always keeping up this determination to transcend the Buddhas and Masters, searching into the root core of one’s own mind, is called a robust will.
Here is it not a question of whether we are a monk or a layperson. It does not matter whether we are a man or a woman. It makes no difference whether we are keen or dull, more or less intelligent. It does not matter whether we have a lot of work to do or are at leisure. Those who make the great promise and undertake the great commitment, who are full of great faith and arouse the Great Wonder, do not fail to perceive essential nature, awaken to the Way, and attain the skin and flesh of the Buddhas and Zen masters.
If we do not liberate ourselves in this lifetime, what lifetime will we wait for? Once this day has passed, that much of our life is gone, too. With each passing thought, observe the impermanence of the appearances of the world and give up thinking there will be a tomorrow. With each step, tread the Great Way of the mind source, and do not turn to another road.
We should let go our hand and footholds, as if plunging off a precipitous cliff. When body and mind have died away at once, it is like standing right in the middle of cosmic space, like sitting in the center of a crystal vase.
All of a sudden there will emerge the great state that is not ordinary, not holy, not Buddha, not mind, not a thing; we will attain penetrating realization that mind, Buddha, and living beings are all one. This is the reality body of all Buddhas, the inherent essence of all people. By realizing this, one becomes a Buddha or a Zen master; by missing this, one remains an ordinary mortal.
Although people’s faculties may be keen or dull, and practice and realization may be gradual or sudden, the secret I have been revealing here is the teaching of attaining Buddhahood by sudden enlightenment. It is a standard rule in which higher, middling and lesser faculties are one whole. It is far from the gradual practice and learning of the two vehicles of individual liberation.
To think Buddha nature is the state where mind is empty and objects are silent, where there is radiant awareness without arousing a single thought, is to consider the conscious spirit to be the original human being. It is like taking a thief to be your son, like taking a brick for a mirror. This is the fundamental ignorance underlying birth and death. It is like being a corpse that is still breathing. We cannot release our own radiant light, illumine the self within, and shine through mountains, rivers, and earth.
Even if great awakening is realized and the body of reality is clearly comprehended, if we are polluted by practice and attainment, the Buddha Way does not become manifest. We should know that there is that which is beyond even the beyond.
As for the Zen of the living exemplars, even if a clear mirror is placed on a stand, they break through it right away. Even if a precious pearl is in their palm, they smash it at once. A mortar flies through space; the eastern mountains walk on water. Having the fortune to know that all living beings have Buddha nature, and that there is already a matter of utmost importance right where we stand, investigate continuously, twenty four hours a day, in principle and in fact. What is it that is walking, what is it that is sitting, what is it that acts, what is the mind?
If we forge bravely and powerfully ahead, wholeheartedly questioning and wondering for three to five years, without flagging, the Great Wonder will inevitably occur and we will not fail to awaken.
Nurturing the embryo of sagehood, cultivating practice in the aftermath of awakening, is not easy. An ancient said, “If your potential does not leave a fixed position, it falls into an ocean of poison.” It is imperative to know that there is cultivation on top of realization and to preserve the Way of living Zen with hidden practice and secret application.
Do not make the mistake of maintaining the idea of having gained something, lest we become a hungry ghost forever keeping watch over a treasure, or a starveling with a hoard of wealth. Even if we see a Buddhaland manifest and perceive the realm of Buddha, we see only once, not twice.
We concentrate and let go as we breathe out and in, remove all leakage from the stream of mindfulness, perpetuate the bones and marrow of the Buddhas and Zen founders, dispense the pure teaching, like sweet elixir, for the benefit and salvation of all living beings, gratefully requiting the deep and far-reaching blessings we have received.”
[Minding Mind, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala, Boston, 1995.]
