I was reading Brad Warner's Don't Be a Jerk, and I came across this about Dogen's "thinking not-thinking:"
When I was in Munich, Germany, a little while ago, my friend Annette, who was hosting me there, took me to a river called Eisbach, which means “Ice Brook.” There’s a bridge over the river under which there is a standing wave, owing to some kind of concrete thing under the water. People like to surf that wave. As I stood there watching the surfers stay on for a little while and then fall off, I thought about Dōgen’s advice about thinking the thought of not-thinking.
No matter how good those surfers were, nobody could stay on that wave for more than about a minute. Even though it was about as predictable as a wave could possibly be, it was still a vibrant, living thing. When those surfers crashed after a minute or so, they didn’t waste a lot of time beating themselves up for not staying on for five or ten minutes. Everyone knows that simply can’t be done. They crash and then they get right back on the wave again.
For me, zazen is kind of the same. I ride my nonthought for as long as I can, then I crash and get right back on it again. How long I stay there depends on factors beyond my control. It depends on what’s been going on for me that day or that week, how much I’ve eaten, how much sleep I’ve gotten, what the person next to me smells like, and an endless list of other factors I can’t do anything about. In zazen we are not trying to establish control of our thoughts. That’s an illusion anyway. Just stay upright as long as you can, crash as you inevitably must, and get back on again.
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This is a really good point. Back in the day when I first started meditating, I thought I was failing because I was not able to stay on the wave for twenty minutes. I thought that's what one was supposed to do. (I was following the Tibetan tradition, which doesn't have the same approach to meditation.)
Gassho,
Kirk
#sattoday
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