We are strongly advised not to insert any kinds of "anticipation", "aim" or "intention" into the practice of zazen. If you bring any goal, however noble it may be, into zazen, this calculating frame of mind will, in a sense, split into two facts: one doing zazen and one who's attending to the goal. This kind of zazen has a crack inside, which prevents the practitioner from hitting the mark of zazen. Dogen's Manual of Zazen said, "Do not try to become Buddha". Therefore, when practicing zazen, we need to let go of all of unnecessary considerations like "I should try to become like this or that in the future". We should only do our best to just sit zazen.
... The point is to sit zazen, not to do it aiming at certain "benefits or results." If zazen is thoroughly zazen, that is all. Zazen is so completed in itself that it does not need anything else. ...
But a strange thing happens here. When you just sit zazen without doing anything to do with "benefits/results", the unlimited and immeasurable "benefits/results" are naturally given to you beyond your expectation. Therefore if we say that zazen has some benefits and results, they are not what we attain as the results for which we seek with our will and intention but what is given to us unexpectedly. That is why we can not take credit for them as if they were the results of our own efforts.
Let us assume that we hear or see the sentence, "If you practice zazen, you will get X results". Examples of X might be "enlightenment", "peaceful mind", "freedom", "calmness", "compassion and love", etc. Hearing this kind of formulation people who think that they lack "X" within themselves will imagine that X must resemble their mental image of X and so they start practicing zazen very hard in order to get closer to their ideal. There may be a lot of people like this. However, as I have argued so far, this type of zazen practice is misdirected. It can not be called zazen. And this X, what is guaranteed as the benefits/results of zazen, will never ever be attained.
Let me explain this by using one example. Here is a man who feels he is always irritated and short-tempered. He is suffering from this trait and wishing, by all means, to become a person whose mind is always calm and peace. One day he hears from someone that he can attain calmness by zazen. He thinks, "This is a good news. I might be able to change myself by this method". He, then, immediately starts practicing zazen. He tries to find out what he imagines is the peaceful mind in his zazen. And by accumulating the benefits of zazen little by little, he also expects to increase the degree of imagined calmness in his mind.
Do you think that he will succeed in becoming a calm and peaceful man? I do not think if he keeps practicing zazen this way.
The peaceful mind which he pictured to his mind as an ideal is nothing but a kind of photographic negative or projection of the very same irritated mind which disturbs him. He does not really understand what the peaceful mind is like. Therefore, each and every effort he makes to attain peace contains subtle irritation, which sneaks into his practice. The fact that he can not accept his irritated mind as it is, is by itself the manifestation of his deepseated irritation. Even if he feels that he is becoming calmer a little bit, it only implies that his irritation is becoming subtler and better at disguising itself. Then his irritation will simply become deeper and deeper part of him.
If this is the case, how do we avoid this pitfall in our practice? First, we should temporarily stop looking at ourselves through words, concepts and judgements such as, "I am always irritated and short-tempered. It is not good". And then we should set aside the impulse to change ourselves as we wish. In fact, to sit proper zazen is not to try to calm down his irritated mind and forcefully create the peaceful mind but to put oneself in the state of completely setting aside all over personal agendas. When this is accomplished, we can directly see the reality of ourselves; the reality of our irritation in our body, speech and mind. This is not the fabricated self grasped by thoughts but the real and true self.
It is possible for us to "see deeply the reality of irritation as it is" only when zazen is being practiced as zazen. This seeing enables the irritation to transform itself into true peace.
There is no peace outside the irritation. They are not separate.
I used the case of irritation as an example of how the transformation is brought about by seeing it as it is. Roughly speaking, I think the deep transformation as the result of zazen happens in the same way.
Issho Fujita - Polishing A Tile