Monday Night Zazen

We never got around to reading any passages from Zuimonki tonight. After the sitting period was over, questions came up about whether one stops thinking altogether while in zazen, and the conversation stayed on that topic for the evening's discussion.

Thoughts don't stop while in meditation - attention to our thoughts is what is dropped. The brain is an organ that squirts out thoughts, just like the stomach squirts out digestive juices and the heart squirts out blood. Thought is just the brain functioning as designed. As long as we're not brain damaged, the brain will continue to think.

This doesn't mean, however, that we have to pay attention to those thoughts. When sitting in zazen, we first put our attention on the breath, and purposefully dismiss our attention to any thought that is not on breathing. This is done at first by counting the breath, and once we're proficient at that, by just following the breath. Eventually, one can even drop following the breath, and just sit in a state of shikantaza ("just sitting") without engaging our thoughts at all.

Imagine you are having an intense and profoundly important conversation with someone, a literal life-and-death issue. There's a television on in the other room and you can hear it, but you're not paying attention to it; you're hanging on to every word of this life-and-death conversation. It's not that your ears can't hear the television, it's just that your attention is selectively focused on that profoundly important discussion.

So it is with zazen. We can take that same sense of life-and-death urgency and apply it to focusing our attention where we want it, when we want it, for as long as we want it, and even though other thoughts still bubble up from our brain, we can ignore them. It's not that our brains stop functioning, it's just that we can choose to ignore the output of that function.

But an interesting thing often happens. Unlike a television, which drones on and on unaware of whether it is being listened to or not, the thoughts that bubble up from our brains become fewer and fewer if they are ignored, and everything becomes quieter inside. Like the surface of a pond after a storm has passed, the waves become fewer and less frequent and everything becomes stiller. On close examination, we can still see some level of activity, but neither nature nor our thoughts ever quite stop, and even that close examination itself stirs up a little activity.

Hui-Neng called this neither thinking nor not thinking, but "non-thinking." How do we achieve non-thinking? By not thinking about thinking.

I think.