Here is the place; here the way unfolds. The boundary of realization is not 
distinct, for the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of buddhadharma. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is 
grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable 
may not be distinctly apparent. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge.
          Zen master Baoche of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached 
and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not 
reach. Why, then do you fan yourself?" "Although you understand that the nature of 
wind is permanent;" Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its 
reaching everywhere." "What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the 
monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. The 
actualization of the buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like 
this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is 
permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither 
permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, 
the wind of the Buddha's house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant 
the cream of the long river.


          My first formal Zen teacher, Genki Roshi saw me chopping wood and he told me that I was in samadhi.  At the time I chopped a lot of wood because my house had only wood for heat and cooking.  I got very good at chopping wood and relished in the activity.  I was fully engaging body and mind in the words of Dogen.  Later Genki told me that the essence of Zen was samadhi, samadhi chopping wood, samadhi playing tennis, samadhi at work, and samadhi sitting Zazen.  This happened a long time ago when I was young, in my 20's.  There is something special about being young,  all that energy and flexability.  The patterns of thought have not be come hardened.  Samadhi may be more natural.  At that time my whole life revolved around my spiritual search and I found it a lot of fun and my zazen was improving.  At one point I noticed that there was space between my constant internal verbalization.  My mind was actually getting quiet.  Not long after, I had my first deep experience and passed my first koan.
          The other day a long time practitioner of Zen told me that maybe it didn't matter how long one practiced or how much effort one put into zazen.  Maybe he thought the grace of enlightenment just fell on people randomly.  Maybe he was just expressing his frustration.  In this last section of the Genjo Koan,  Dogen gives his answer to this delema, the basic delema of all serious practitioners, how does one experience enlightenment? His answer, the answer, is very simple, you must practice.  There are no promises in this game.  No matter how much effort and time one puts into zazen there might never be any dramatic results,  but the conditions for any results is practice.  And there are benefits even when there is no large experience.  
        Some times I feel like we practitioners in the West are all tilling soil for the future.  So few of us seem to attain anything really deep in our practice.  I know many many practitioners who have been working at this for years and have never had that desired big experience.
           And again,  practice is not just sitting in a cushion trying to look good, or going to sleep.  Are you wipping the cart or are you wipping the Ox?  Wipping the Ox is  purifying the mind.  Purifying the mind is engaging fully in practice untill the mind is clear and bright, and then once it is clear and bright we can just sit with this clarity. This is zazen this is practice.
          For Dogen practice is enlightenment, dramatic experiences aside.  Even if we are only to feel the light soothing breeze of the dharma we must fan ourselves.  Buddhist retoric is often confusing.  Yes everybody is already enlightened  and yes we all have Buddha Nature but this is an enlightened view and not properly understood by most.  Dogen makes this clear in this last part of his essey If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind.  But if you do practice (fan your self) then naturally your practice  brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant 
the cream of the long river.
          
          

If we listen even once with open heart to this truth, then praise it 
and gladly embrace it, how much more so then, if on reflecting within 
ourselves we directly realize Self-nature, giving proof to the truth 
that Self-nature is no nature. We will have gone far beyond idle 
speculation.


          Hakuin is famous for setting the modern Rinzi Zen training curriculum which consists of a series of Koans that the monk in training must pass.  This was in the 18th Century, not so long ago.  Before this time koans were inconsistently used even in the Rinzi schools. 
           Koans on first glance seem to stress cognitive understanding over quietistic meditation.  Many people seem to think that any issue that they struggle with is a koan, and koans  can become an excuse for lots of thinking.   
          A koan is very specifically a question  ( Koans are not usually presented as questions but as stories, but the question  in this case is always how do you understand the story.)
which is designed to open one to Zen experience and or Zen insight.  Koans cannot be answered through thought alone but can be answered from experience in zazen.  Here Hakuin is pointing to one and maybe the most important insight to be gained from Zen experience, and this insight is the subject of many Koans, 
          Though I might seem to be contradicting what I wrote earlier in this commentary there is one insight that seems to be the demarcation between one who is good at zazen and one who is enlightened.   In Zen terms this is the difference between samadhi and kensho.  But is there really a difference?  The Sixth Patriarch thought there was no difference, they work together as the natural out growth of each other.  But practically speaking sometimes someone needs a kick in the pants for insight to arise from zazen and this is the function of koans. This insight which is so important is the insight into our true self nature.  There are many koans which point to our self nature.  One of the most famous is, "Thinking neither good nor bad what is your true nature?" Even the Koan "MU!" points to our true nature.   Most people think they are what they think and feel but what are you when you stop thought and emotion?  What are you when you are in truly deep zazen?  You might be asking, How can I have any insight if I have stopped thought?  Well, actually thought does not begin with our inner or outer verbal dialogue nor our emotions.  How could it?  Any psychologist will tell you that there is a subconscious element to thought,  and experience in zazen will tell you this.  Some people call it intuition but if zazen is truly deep and clear then it is just seeing clearly with that inner sense of understanding.  It is seeing clearly that the person in front of you is suffering or happy.  It is seeing clearly that someone needs or doesn't need help.  And if one is playing tennis it is knowing that a down the line shot is better or worse then a cross court shot.  There is no need to verbalize.  Now, clearly see who you are.
          The Buddha, 2500 years ago, after his enlightenment talked mostly about happiness, why we are unhappy and how we can become happy, but somewhere in there he verbalized the Non-Atman Doctrine.  Usually non-atman is translated as no soul, and so the Non Atman Doctrine states that we as individuals have no permanent or indestructible essence like a soul, that we are in effect an ever changing and temporary like everything else in the Universe.  Wow, this is unusual to come out of the mouth of a religious leader.  It makes perfect sense but our attachment to our own specialness also makes it difficult to believe.  Only a deep experience like the experience of deep zazen can, like Hakuin states, "giving proof to the truth that Self-nature is no nature." 
          I had been practicing meditation for ten or eleven days in retreat.  Early in the morning I was sitting practicing listening, hearing the morning sounds with an unusual intensity.  My mind was quiet and as sounds arose in my internal soundscape I would hear them appear and disappear like flashes of light adding no extra thoughts to the experience such as identifying the sources of the sounds.  Then with one very large explosion of sound I disappeared.  Even that small bit of self-awareness that functioned in the meditation was gone.  This only lasted a few moments but when awareness returned I clearly understood  that if through the practice of meditation all the aspects of self definition, the inner voice, emotions and consciousness could be turned off then there was nothing left which could be called "I".  With this simple insight an understanding of Buddhism and Zen opened.  The reverberations of this insight have completely changed my way of thinking and my relationship with the rest of the world.  
          Many people who practice Zen and other forms of Buddhism think that there is no real need to stop verbal thought and emotions, that the insight we call enlightenment will just appear after many years of practice.  But there is a logic to this insight.  It will not just appear with out, as the Shakyamuni Buddha would say, the proper causes and conditions.  To truly give proof to this understanding the personal experience must be deep, and this can only happen if everything that attaches us to our normal way of thinking is turned off.  This is sometimes called the Great Death.  It need only last a few seconds and it needs to be reflected upon shortly after the experience for it's transformative power to be truly great.
This is why we have koans.

          Hi everyone I am back from sesshin.  This is - I think- my 28th sesshin with Harada Roshi.  And then I put in many years of practice before I started doing sesshins with Harada,   The hours I have sat in meditation is mind boggling.  I don't regret a minute of practice.  I  am engaged in a dynamic ever deepening phenomena that has changed and molded my life.  
          It has been a while since I have actually worked on anything with Harada.  Much of the time in the one on one meetings with the teacher (sanzen) he just asks me, "How is your state of mind?"  He often  presses me to be more involved as a teacher. I am just a small town teacher of meditation.  I have never led a retreat.  When I go to sesshin I go to push the boundaries of my meditation and deepen the "Dharma Eye."  A sesshin is an all out affair.  It is a week long mountaineering expedition of the mind, a constant push except for a few rest stops and sometimes a little comic relief.  So this blog will be about how I approach a sesshin  and some of what I went through in this last sesshin.  I would not say that my experiences are indicative of a beginner at sesshin so you might or might not find this interesting. 
          Much of my practice is to cut thoughts and remain fully and clearly conscious.  What I aim for when I meditate is to stop thinking.  Many Zen practitioners would quickly say this is a wrong approach and they might even point to passages in Zen texts like the Platform Sutra that seem to also say that stopping thought is the wrong approach.  But if they think this, it is only because they have never had a truly deep meditation experience, have never experienced Kensho.  They also don't understand what these Zen texts mean by stopping thought.  Zen is different from many of the other meditation systems which asks the practitioner to withdraw from the sensory input of the external world.  In Zen we sit with our eyes and ears open.  So stopping thought to a Zen practitioner is different from stopping thoughts in these other systems which ask the meditator to turn everything off.  It was against these other systems that the Zen masters argued  In Zen we want to stop our interior verbal dialog, any imaginings, anything extra added on to awareness but we don't stop awareness.  In fact we discover that verbal thought and imagination impinge on awareness.  Then when we do stop our thinking we find ourselves in the realm of deep awareness and another type of thought.
          The first day of sesshin I am already sitting well.  Nothing hurts.  My mind is already generally quiet from all my many years of sitting.  But not totally quiet, interrupted every minute or two by a short stream of thought or dream like images.  I cut them off with focus on my breath and by keeping my eyes open and focused on a spot on floor or the person sitting across from me.  I have many meditation techniques which I use throughout the sesshin but I always start each block of meditation by counting breaths.  During the sesshin there are four sitting blocks which run from 1.5 hours to 3 hours and these are generally divided up into half hour  periods.  We also do 40 min. of chanting and there is a talk which we sit through that is not cut into periods.  During the first period of each block I count my breaths, sit tall, keep my eyes wide open and focused, and hold a mudra (hand position) high, not on my lap.  This is not a relaxed in any way.  I am pushing my concentration, I am putting energy into my physical posture.  You might say that I am driving out my thoughts.  Isn't meditation suppose to be relaxing? Not this type.  But then near the end of this first period there are long periods between thoughts and I have started to build up a type of energy called Chi or Ki.  I feel this energy as making me wide awake.  Now for the second period  I generally take another approach.  I just let go.  My hands are siting in my lap.  I sit tall but  am not concentrating.  I just relax my mind which is now quiet and all the sensations of sound and sight just wash across my consciousness.  My mind become like a clear mirror.  The longer this period of thoughtlessness lasts the more Chi energy seems to build up but this is just the beginning of sesshin and after maybe 5-10 minutes my eyes close and I momentarily loose consciousness and I start dreaming  and thinking.  As soon as I notice this I open my eyes and let go of the thinking and go back into thoughtlessness until after a few minutes again my eyes close and I go through the same cycle.  I go through this cycle of completely awake thoughtlessness, loosing consciousness, closing eyes, dreamlike thoughts, noticing the thoughts, opening the eyes wide and returning to thoughtlessness, several times during the period.  Some times these periods of thoughtlessness get shorter and shorter and I start counting breaths again.  Other times after a few cycles I settle into thoughtlessness till the end of the period.  This pattern of practice, going from concentrated practice to relaxed practice, is called holding fast and letting go.  
          Many people think that they can just let go and relax their minds into good thoughtless meditation without any effort in developing concentration, but my experience is that when most people try to meditate this way they are never able to completely drop their thinking.
          And then there is letting go and completely letting go.  I am reminded of the Indian Sage Ramana Maharshi who as a young kid wanted to know what it was like to die so he laid down and completely let go of everything in his mind. He ended up in deep samadhi and had the enlightenment experience that set the course for his life.   In meditation, with some effort, it takes concentration, you can experience this complete letting go. I do this at the very bottom of the breath when I have let all the air out.  I completely still both mind and body and then completely relax all the focus of the senses and conscious awareness  Then for a few moments it is as if I am completely absorbed into the undifferentiated but I also seem to become a vessel with the energy of the Universe just poring in.  Energy seems to poor in so quickly that this letting go becomes so intense that I can no longer hold this meditation.
          When I sit sesshin I am trying to do two things, one is quiet the mind but the other is to accumulate Chi energy.  They work together.  Completely letting go is not easy.  It takes quite a bit of Chi to let go but once you are able to completely let go for even a short time the Chi just pores in and fills you up from the abdomen to the crown of the head.  Because I have been doing this for many years in just a couple days of sesshin I am almost completely filled with Chi and had several prolonged periods of deep thoughtless samadhi.  Also I have generally stopped thinking to myself as I walk around.
          On day 3 things get tougher.  I am experiencing more pain and I am just plain tired.  I face this challenge every sesshin.  It comes with such negative thoughts as, "Why am I doing this to my self?" "I am just too old for this." and "Will I ever sit deeply again during this sesshin?"  I may try to sleep through a period or two to regain some strength and avoid the pain but I know the real answer is to sit even more deeply and so I put even more effort in deepening concentration.  When in pain usually I count breaths.  I can always put up with the pain for another ten breaths.  And then another  It is the nagging thoughts that really make the pain difficult.  If I can cut my thoughts and really concentrate then the pain will recede into the background and not bother me.  Also the pain keeps me awake and focused and even if the pain sits like a big rock in my consciousness I am not thinking much, deepening the meditation and accumulating Chi.  Eventually the pain often seems to disappear as meditation deepens and I have accumulated enough Chi.  I remember thinking to myself that as a soccer player when I was younger I often played in pain but that never stopped me from putting out all out effort and I loved it and so I do the same with meditation.
          There is a few other meditation techniques that I want to discuss.  I call this purifying the channels. Sometimes I do these during the second and third periods of a sitting block. The first channel I focus on is that of sound.  The idea is to become absorbed in the sounds around without being attached to any one sound.  I do this by moving my concentration to my ears and feeling the sound on both ears.  Eventually it becomes like an ocean of sound washing across an empty consciousness.  The next technique I use is to purify the visual channel..  In this technique I open my eyes wide and move my attention to the whole visual field without attaching focus to any one thing.  Done correctly the edges of the peripheral vision become clear and the visual field becomes a single round mandala.  I find this technique so difficult that not only does it cut off all thoughts but I just cannot hold it for very long.  I once did this technique for a whole sesshin and actually lost vision in one eye.  I guess my eyeball went dry and would no longer properly transmit light.  But I also attained a very deep samadhi.  Once I have successfully purified both channels then again I let go and just let everything in.
          I don't know exactly what Chi is.  I don't know any scientific studies that have tried to pinpoint a cause to the phenomena.  I tend to think of it as nervious system energy but its importance in meditation cannot be over emphasized   It accumulates through deep meditation but it helps to continue to deepen meditation.  It definately can be felt in various ways such as a strong sensation at one of the Chakra points.  When you are filled with Chi the Crown Chakra on the top of the head is activated.  Also when you are filled with Chi there is a certain "pressure" that you feel when meditating.  Harada Roshi calls this a "taught balloon."
          So what is the outcome of all this effort in meditation.  Each sesshin is a little different.  Sometimes I experience strong feelings of love and joy  And certainly all that meditation intensifies sensations.  And my mind is quiet.  But most important is that I look out at the world and don't see it as just divided up into individual beings and things but the whole world, the whole Universe as a single body that contains us all.  And the joy and love I feel is not only my joy and love as an individual but the Universe's own joy and love.  And this insight is not only my insight but the Universes own self realization.