One Time, One Meeting

Peace Pagoda, Providence Zen Center

To live in a place is one thing, to inhabit it another. The word inhabit derives from the Latin inhabitare, which originally meant to dwell. “They shall build houses,” prophesied Isaiah, “and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them” (Isaiah 65:21). To eat the fruit of your vineyards, you cannot be flitting from one locality to another. You must dwell in one place for a while.

What is true of grape farming is also true of the practice of Zen.  “Authentic Zen,” writes Dr. James H. Austin, a neurologist and longtime Zen practitioner, “has always meant inhabiting each present moment in the most natural, direct, and spontaneous way.”[i} And in his book Being Upright, the Zen priest Tenshin Reb Anderson employs the same verb to describe the practice of zazen:

For a sentient being to practice the ultimate good means not to move. How do you realize not moving? By fully settling into all aspects of your experience: your feelings and your perceptions. Not moving means to be fully congruent with yourself. You go down to the bottom of your experience, as all buddha ancestors have done, and enter the proverbial green dragon’s cave. Graciously and gently, you encourage yourself to fully inhabit your body, speech, and thought. You may even command yourself to be obedient to yourself, and to come all the way in and sit down.[ii]l

 “Although no one issues the invitation,” Anderson further explains, we “invite the self into the self.” As both “host and guest of the self,” we fully inhabit our experience.

That process can commence with recognition of our physical environment. Just as movies often open with a bird’s-eye view of a city or a panoramic view of a landscape, we can begin a sitting by surveying the room in which we are practicing. How large or small is the space? How bright or dim the light? How cold or warm, dry or humid is the air? What are the ambient sounds, and how long does any new sound last? By asking such questions—or, more intuitively, by feeling our way into our environment—we reconcile ourselves with our surroundings, however pleasant or not-so-pleasant they might be.

Having attuned ourselves to the place in which we’re sitting, we can turn our attention to our own presence within that place. We can fully inhabit our bodies. If we are at ease with our physical selves, we might have already settled into stillness. If not, it can be helpful to recite the gatha, “Breathing in, I am aware of my body / Breathing out, I release the tensions in my body,” letting these phrases accompany our inhalations and exhalations. If we continue in this vein for five minutes or more, we may discover—or re-discover—that we are not solid objects set into a foreign or familiar space. Rather, we are breathing organisms in constant interaction with whatever is occurring, within and around us. If we are practicing with others, we may notice how the smells of cologne or perfume or even a freshly laundered shirt affect us, or how the slightest rustle of clothing resonates within us. If we are practicing alone, we may notice how external sounds—the hum of a fridge, the racket of a passing motorbike—create or release tensions in our bodies.

Noticing these things, we may also notice what the eighteenth-century master Menzan Zuiho Zenji called the “frozen blockage of emotion-thought”: the worries and fears, cravings and aversions that we carry into meditation. Defining “emotion-thought” as a “stubborn attachment to a one-sided point of view formed by our own conditioned perception,” Menzan urged us to bring effortless awareness to that attachment. By so doing, we clarify “how emotion-thought melts” in the light of mindful awareness.[iii] In the passage quoted above, Tenshin Reb Anderson offers similar instruction, enjoining us to settle into our feelings and perceptions and to “fully inhabit [our] body, speech, and thought.” Rather than try to cut off thoughts and their emotional subtexts, we watch their comings and goings. Rather than repress our mental activities, we dwell in our awareness of their presence.

If we continue to sit in this way, we can indeed “go down to the bottom of our experience.” We can inhabit the ground of being. By settling peacefully into our surroundings, our bodies, our feelings, and our perceptions, we can discern the causes and conditions that have created our present experience, and we can realize our place in the dynamic, interdependent web of life. In the words of Shohaku Okumura, we can “participate with the whole universe as it practices through our individual minds and bodies,” and “allow the universal life force to practice through us for all beings.”[iv] And paradoxically, by relinquishing the notion of a separate self—a self absorbed in its likes and dislikes, its comforts and discomforts—we can give our unique and individual selves their fullest expression.

When that occurs, we will not only become most fully ourselves. We will also continue the long line of Zen practitioners, which spans a period of more than fifteen hundred years. “When the Horse-master becomes the Horse-master,” wrote Eihei Dogen Zenji, “Zen becomes Zen.” [v] By fully inhabiting ourselves, we also inhabit Zen.

i  James H. Austin, Zen and the Brain (MIT Press, 1998), 644.

ii  Tenshin Reb Anderson, Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts (Rodmell Press, 2000), Kindle edition, 75-76.

iii  Menzan Zuiho Zenji, “Jijuyu-zanmai” (“Samadhi of the Self”) in Shikantaza: An Introduction to Zazen, edited and translated by Shohaku Okumura (Kyoto Soto-Zen Center, 1985), 106.

iv  Shohaku Okumura, Realizing Genjokoan (Wisdom, 2010), Kindle edition, 70-71.

v  Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 1973), 81.

Photo by Natalie Wright