whole (adj.)

Old English hal "entire, whole; unhurt, uninjured, safe; healthy, sound; genuine, straightforward," from Proto-Germanic *haila- "undamaged" (source also of Old Saxon hel, Old Norse heill, Old Frisian hal, Middle Dutch hiel, Dutch heel, Old High German, German heil "salvation, welfare"), from PIE *kailo- "whole, uninjured, of good omen" (source also of Old Church Slavonic celu "whole, complete;" see health).

taint (v.)

1570s, "to corrupt, contaminate," also "to touch, tinge, imbue slightly" (1590s), from Middle English teynten "to convict, prove guilty" (late 14c.), which is partly from Old French ataint, past participle of ataindre "to touch upon, seize" (see attainder). It also is from Anglo-French teinter "to color, dye" (early 15c.), from Old French teint (12c.), past participle of teindre "to dye, color," from Latin tingere (see tincture). Related: Tainted; tainting.

In my last post, I wrote about embodiment: "If we let ourselves be embodied – that is, without the bias towards thinking before acting – then we act as a whole being." Now I want to examine this in more detail using the terms "wholeness" and "tainted", which is not used here in a negative sense, but rather in the older meaning of coloured or tinted.

The word "whole-ness" ends in -ness and is therefore an abstract noun. We think of abstract nouns as labels for qualities or states that a thing or person possess, like kindness or cleverness. So we tend to think that to be whole, to have the state or quality of wholeness, is something we get by doing something, and that we then continue in that state of wholeness for some time.  However, in the sense that the word is used to describe zazen, wholeness describes, not a quality or state, but a momentary event or happening. In zazen we allow ourselves to become whole; wholeness happens to us at a moment in time. In that sense, the practice of zazen is sitting in a posture that allows wholeness to happen at that moment of time. 

Being whole in zazen is not difficult. It means that you are content to be where you are, sitting in zazen. If you have a busy schedule and you sit with the thought that in half an hour you need to be somewhere else, that will colour your zazen. If you sit with the feeling that you would rather be doing something else, but you feel you should practice, that too will colour your zazen. If you sit and your mind is busy with what happened yesterday, or what will happen tomorrow, that will colour your zazen. But if you accept that at just that moment you are sitting and that's what you want to do at that moment, then you will be whole. And in the moment of being whole, you will be in that instant, present together with everything in the universe. It is only in our minds that we can remove ourselves from the present moment. None of the particles in the universe removes itself from this moment, and so all the atoms in the universe are present in that instant with you, sitting on the zafu. That's what Dogen means by being one with the whole of the universe. It isn't necessarily a wonderful feeling that we recognise. But when we stop thinking and imagining and allow ourselves to be at this place in this instant, we are whole and our experience is uncoloured by anything. As each new moment in our zazen unfolds, we lose and regain wholeness many times. This is the authentic experience of the practice. 

In the many moments in which we do not feel as though we are whole, maintaining the traditional upright posture of zazen allows wholeness to happen. We allow thoughts and images in our minds to stop and allow tensions in the body to drop off. We can refer to this event or happening as embodied action, rather than a state. If your zazen appears to be sometimes just one long period in which you are trapped in your thoughts, remember that by sitting in the upright posture, you are allowing wholeness, and be aware that wholeness sometimes happens. Like any training, with practice, wholeness is more likely to happen, not only while we are practicing zazen, but also whenever we are acting sincerely as a whole being.

Dogen describes this embodied or whole way of acting many times in his writings in the Shobogenzo. When our action is biased by thinking, he says that our actions are “tainted” and when our action is truly embodied, we are whole. He says in the first chapter of Shobogenzo written in 1231, “... a beginner’s pursuit of the truth is just the whole body of the original state of experience". When he writes “whole body” (全身) he means the “whole body-and-mind” or embodiment. He says in another place, “the whole body is naturally beyond … taintedness”, suggesting that when we are embodied, our actions are whole and unbiased by thinking before acting and not coloured or tainted by our ideas of the world. 

Here are some of the ways in which Dogen uses the terms wholeness and whole body to describe the momentary experience we have in zazen. He uses the phrase “... the whole body already being hung upon the whole body,” to suggest the state of wholeness that happens when sitting in zazen. 

 "If, when we research the body-mind of the ancestral Master, we say that inside and outside cannot be oneness, or that the whole body cannot be the thoroughly realized body, we are not in the real land of Buddhist patriarchs". 

“The whole Universe in the ten directions is a sramana’s whole body.”

"The state at the present moment in which going is going there and coming is coming here, there being no gap between them, is thorough exploration with the whole body, and it is the whole body of the great truth. Therefore, it is a moment of the present when, in vivid activity through the whole body, the whole body is totally turned around."

I chose as the subtitle of this blog a quotation by Dogen of the words of Chosa Keishin, a zen teacher from 9th century China:

"On top of a hundred-foot pole, we should step forward./The Universe in ten directions is the whole body.”

This presents a poetic image of embodied action in wholeness. Standing in a precarious position (on top of a tall pole) we should step forward into the next moment (the unknowable future). When we act in this way, we cease to be aware of a separation between us and the rest of the Universe. Our wholeness and the Universe are one momentary happening. We have all experienced this kind of happening, often noticed most clearly when we are presented with an emergency and have to "act without thinking". Because we all experience this, Dogen writes, "This dharma is abundantly present in each human being, but if we do not practice it, it does not manifest itself, and if we do not experience it, it cannot be realised".

So for Dogen, the whole purpose of zazen and the core of the teachings he received and passed on is to dwell in wholeness. And he writes that in wholeness, we are allowing ourselves to be, not only one whole human being, not split into a physical body and a mind, but also one with everything around us, one with the Universe. This sounds so mystical and unachievable that we start to think that if we try hard enough, we should be able to feel one with everything. And if we don't feel one with the Universe, then we must be doing something wrong. I sometimes wish that Dogen had left out all his beautiful descriptions of this simple experience beyond words, but he was by nature a poet, and probably couldn't help himself. I am an engineer by nature and I need more down-to-earth descriptions that match my own experience of life. To me, experiencing wholeness in zazen again and again helps me to realise that, although in my mind I can imagine myself as existing separate from where I am, what I am doing, the situation I am in, in fact this is not possible. It is not possible to be somewhere other than where I am, impossible for the circumstances I am in to be other than what they are at this moment. It is only in my mind that I can imagine a world that is different from the one I am in at this moment. To imagine the world as different from what it is at this moment is our greatest ability as human beings, but is also the cause of many of our problems.  

Zazen is not a way to achieve some state that we do not have, that we have not experienced. It is a way to notice that, when we stop trying to achieve anything, we are already whole, already untainted. In other words, wholeness and untaintedness belong to us. We just need to find where we have hidden them for so long. They were there when we were small children, before we were taught how to taint or colour our experience of the world by learning to take our part in society, to start to believe in the story of our life, to put on the tinted glasses of civilisation. And wholeness appears again, unfiltered, when we take off the glasses and let go of that story, even for a while. But to let go of the story that we are trained to be part of proves to be almost impossible. So we practice letting go. We practice the sitting posture called zazen.

The Stupid Robot 

In the 1960s, I was a young electronics engineer designing guided missile simulators. In the late 1970s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, of which I had become a member, started a competition for engineers who were interested in robotics and the new field of artificial intelligence to see who could produce a robot mouse that would be able to find its way through a wooden maze in the fastest time. The original competition specified that the robot mouse had to find its way out of a 10ft x 10ft maze and was held in New York. You can read about the history of the competition here. 

That competition, originally known as the Amazing Micromouse Competition, is still going on and has spawned many clones all over the world. As you can imagine, the robot mice of the 1970’s were rather stupid. This was before the spread of the personal computer, which only started to become available around 1975 and were still large and heavy. I know because I owned one in the late 1970s and used to lug its 24kg around with me from office to home. A robot mouse that could be entered in the competition could only be tiny in comparison – about 16cm x 16cm. 

What interests me is that what the micromouse has to do moment by moment to find its way through the maze seems to me to be strangely similar to what we humans do to navigate our way through life, moment by moment. Because we live in the present and cannot access the future until it happens, one of our main tasks is to decide at every moment which way will lead us in the right direction – I don’t mean only in a physical sense. Every decision we make at every moment leads to and affects the next moment. All religions give us codes of behaviour that will hopefully help us to make the right decision here and now – how to make the "right" decision and not the "wrong" decision; how to make a "good" decision and not a "bad" decision. And so it is with the micromouse. In early versions, engineers tried to design a mouse that would “feel” its way through the maze with arms that touched the sides of the maze. 

Modern Micromouse

Modern micromice use all kinds of sensors to enable the mouse to “see” where it should go next. Engineers have developed micromice that have memory so that they can “remember” the best route to take and avoid making mistakes. Memory is also used to enable the mouse to predict what is coming next based on past experiences, an activity known as “learning”, and the mouse is allowed a trial run so that it can learn about the maze. So the mouse moves forward, at every moment processing the inputs from the sensors arranged round its body and comparing with the information in its memory. The more information the mouse has from its surroundings and the better its memory, the better it should behave, measured by the time it takes to get to its goal at the centre of the maze. A fast mouse is able to integrate all the information made available to it and instantaneously make the best decision on which way to go at every moment. The mouse in this video seems to know exactly where it is going. 

And do we humans know where we are going? How do we decide which way to go? Or what to do? Or how to behave? Decision-making forms one of our most fundamental tasks, because it is the memory of all our present actions that, strung together, form the story that constitutes what we call our “life”. And it would seem that if we want to lead a “good” life, we need to keep making good decisions. And if we keep making “bad” decisions, we will end up leading a bad life. 

In most “developed” countries, we are taught that the best way to make a "good" decision is by thinking about it. The maxim “think before you act” sums this up well. It advises us to look deeply at what we intend to do and think over how we should do it before we begin to act. It also implicitly warns us that if we do not do so, we will not act “right” and problems may follow. This emphasis on thinking is one of the reasons for the excellent progress made by western civilisation. At the same time, it is the root cause of many of our problems. 

Returning to the micromouse for a minute, a successful micromouse does not only use its ability to "think"; it must integrate all the abilities that the designer has given it – memory, processing power, inputs from sensors and motional dexterity – to make an instant decision and to act as a whole. On the other hand, we are taught to stop, think and then act. We are not encouraged to take into account any other inputs to our system. No one will encourage you to listen to your body, to be aware of your stomach or any tensions in your neck when deciding. Over the course of time, we have come to believe that the body and the mind are separate, that the mind thinks and the body acts. That the best way to act is to get the mind right and then use our mind to get the body to act right. 

This belief is not always helpful, and often limits our ability to live simple and harmonious lives. But although this is what we are taught to believe, it is often not how we actually live. In fact, we are more like the micromouse than we know. In reality, we do to some extent listen to our body and our mind and all other inputs when making a decision. But because we are taught that we should think about our decision, we give priority to what we think, and don’t fully trust these other inputs. Our action is biased – our belief in the maxim “think before you act” changes or biases the way we act. 

Just as the micromouse engineer tunes his little mouse to use all the inputs available to make the right instantaneous decision, so can we. But to do so, we need to learn how to correct the bias towards thinking that our civilisation has imprinted on us. How to describe that? My dear friend John Fraser uses the term “embodiment” to describe the state where we “put the body-and-mind back together” and I like that a lot, so I will use it here. If we let ourselves be embodied – that is, without the bias towards thinking before acting – then we act as a whole being. This is the state studied and written about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and by Timothy Gallwey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, and several others. It is often described as “being in the zone” and it is the state that forms the basis of the martial arts. 

Dogen describes this embodiment as the buddhist state experienced in zazen and talks about it many times in the Shobogenzo. He talks about the state where we are not embodied with the phrase "tainted". He says that our actions are tainted (ZENNA, 汚染) when we are not embodied.  I will look at some of these phrases next time.

 

The Practice of Dynamic Balance 

The word “balance” suggests a middle position between two opposites. Balance forms a fundamental part of our existence. Without the ability to balance, we would not be able to walk upright or move around in a directed way to create our lives. But we do not often appreciate that balance can only exist with wobbling. Take, as an example, riding a bike. Without being able to move the handlebars from side to side we would not be able to keep upright. And a tightrope walker would not be able to maintain her balance on the rope unless free to wobble from side to side. It is therefore true to say that balance needs a certain degree of instability. In other words, balance is a dynamic, not a static condition. We need to have the freedom to wobble to keep our balance. 

Balance as the Middle Way 

Most people think that Buddhism is a religion, and so they expect buddhist teachings to be spiritual in nature. But the teachings of Zen master Dogen are in fact an integration of the spiritual and the material; in this respect Buddhism is not a religion but a way of living. The buddhist way has traditionally been described as “the middle way” from the Pali term majjhena dhammam, which literally means “doctrine by the middle.” The phrase is taken from a discourse of the Buddha in the early Pali sutras. [1]

Balance and Sunyata 

One of Buddhism’s central teachings is the state of sunyata, a Sanskrit term often translated as “emptiness.” I would like to introduce you to a radically different interpretation of this term. The word sunyata is an abstract noun formed from the adjective sunya, which the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary gives as meaning “empty, void, hollow, barren, desolate.” However, in Indian arithmetic it was used to mean “nought, a cipher.” The word “cipher” is from the Arabic sifr (Medieval Latin zephirum), meaning zero or empty, itself a translation of the Sanskrit sunya. The word “cipher” was in common use until 200 years ago, when the word “zero,” a derivation from the Latin zephirum, was introduced in Mediaeval Venice. So another acceptable meaning of sunya is zero, in the sense of neither positive, nor negative. 

Balance as Zero 

“Zero is neither positive nor negative, but the narrowest of no-man’s land between those two kingdoms. Yet our analogy-driven minds, ever eager to read expressions on neutral faces, seize on its emptiness and make our powers and portents there.” [2]

Taking sunyata as referring to a condition which is neither positive nor negative, we can relate this to the zero position between opposites. The zero between love and hate, the zero between good and bad. The zero between left and right. We can think, for instance, of the tightrope walker as attempting to maintain the zero position between left and right as she walks along the rope. We can illustrate this in a diagram like this: 

The line waves backwards and forwards around zero as the tightrope walker wobbles along the rope. Without wobbling, the tightrope walker cannot maintain her balance. 

Balance between Opposites 

“Opposites are an illusion of language. Something and nothing… are equally false substantives.” [2]

We can illustrate this balance between opposites in a similar way for many situations, both physical and psychological. For example, mood swings are often cyclic like this: 

We may feel depressed at the thought of work on Monday morning, and then slowly recover and begin to feel excited as the weekend approaches. Some people set up a habitual mood pattern like this, with weekends being exciting and workdays being depressing. Again, we can see that our mood wobbles about a zero line, in which we are relatively calm and neutral. It is easy to see how impossible it is to keep ourselves exactly on this “zero line” in reality. We can no more go through life in a calm and neutral state than the tightrope walker can walk along her rope without wobbling. But the important thing here is to see that there is a position between opposites, and that this “neutral position” is in fact dynamic. That is, it is only possible to wobble around this balance or zero point, it is only possible to attain this balance by wobbling around it. I want to call this activity “dynamic balance” here. 

Balance contains imbalance

Choreographer to ballet student while teaching a difficult routine:

“Have pleasure in that imbalance, let yourself go… Use the imbalance.

Balance is a set of imbalances, even in life.

Dancing is the best school of life.

One that is always balanced is unhappy.

That’s why there must be a lot of imbalances.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Ete te ubho ante anupagamma majjena tathaagato dhammam deseti: Without approaching either extreme, the Tathagata teaches you the doctrine by the middle. Kaccaayanagotta Sutta, Samutta Nikaya 2.17.

[2] The Nothing That Is – A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan, p. 190, OUP 1999. 

[3] From Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, a gripping coming-of-age story set within the walls of the National Conservatory Dance School in Lisbon, Portugal. You can watch the full video here. 

George Harrison was right when he wrote “… as it’s not like it was before …” in the words to the song Be Here Now on his 1973 album Living in the Material World. Here is the first verse: 

Remember, now, be here now


As it's not like it was before


The past, was, be here now


As it's not like it was before - it was 

Apparently, his inspiration for this profound statement was the book of the same name by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who died only in December of last year at the age of 88. When asked if he could sum up his life's message, he replied, "I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people ...” 

I like that a lot. For me, it seems to sum up a whole way of life that I wholeheartedly subscribe to. I haven’t read any of Ram Dass’s books or listened to his teachings. And I have my own version of his message: “I find it helpful to view everything that happens to me as an opportunity to realise something about myself and the world.” That sounds pretty selfish, but it doesn’t feel that way. And I haven’t always felt like that. But it works well for me these days. I don’t always feel that I need to do something to change what I have realised, even when it is unpleasant. Just to realise how I am and how things are seems to have the effect of initiating some sort of change in my relationship to the world. That sounds a bit hopeful, even a bit mystical, but that’s how it seems to work. As if some invisible being is holding up a mirror in front of me, and as long as I take a careful look at what I see in the mirror, I am able to move on. If I don’t see what is there, the mirror appears again sometime later in different circumstances to give me a chance to look again. And again … 

Anyway, back to the present … Or rather, my present memories of the past. Fifty years ago this year I was climbing in the Himalayas. During the three months that we were high in the snows, one experience sticks in my memory. It was when we reached the top of our highest peak and sat down on a rock in the snow. At that moment, the clouds parted and we could see our base camp, some 4000 feet lower down at the foot of the glacier. And rather than feeling some sense of achievement, at that moment, I became aware that I was just sitting in the snow. It was a feeling of peace and contentment that I didn’t really understand fully until many years later. It was so unlike any feeling of achievement or of reaching a goal. From that moment in 1970, my desire to climb mountains dissolved, and within 3 years I had stopped climbing completely. 

I had noticed clearly for the first time in my life that I was fully present. I was “here, now”. But to arrive in the present and to know clearly that I am in the present has been a long journey for me. Years later, I found that other people have also been on the same long journey, so clearly described in the first four lines of this poem by T.S. Eliot, a poem I like so much that I included it at the start of my book Between Heaven and Earth, a translation and commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. 

We shall not cease from exploration


And the end of all our exploring


Will be to arrive where we started


And know the place for the first time. 

I think we are all on that same journey of exploration. As my journey through the mountains stopped, I started to climb my inner mountains by training as a therapist. Then I went to Japan to find a new life after my marriage ended, and stumbled upon a philosophy that exactly matched the different aspects of my journey through life, and a practice that helped me to arrive where I started and to know that place. For the first time. Again and again, each time I practice, I arrive where I started and know the place for the first time – and as George says, “… it’s not like it was before”. 

What do climbing mountains and zazen, the practice of balance, have in common? You don’t need to study Buddhism to climb mountains. You don’t even need a philosophy, although you may end up with one. It isn’t easy to find an answer if we treat zazen as a spiritual practice. I have never felt that zazen is spiritual, and my teacher didn’t like to use the word “spiritual”. He was very pragmatic and totally down to earth. So I think that it can be helpful to look at zazen as a physical practice, and that’s what I want to do. 

You will find many writings and videos telling you how you should sit, giving you tips on keeping the right posture. Papers have been written on the benefits of meditation in controlling stress and managing anxiety. But having trained as an engineer, I want to take a more practical approach and look at the mechanism behind this practice that brings us into balance, and to look more closely at what balance means and why it seems to be so important. That will be my next topic.

 

One of the most important things I learned from climbing in the high Himalayas has turned out to be for me a metaphor for life. It is this: every step you take in the high mountains brings a different view. A few hundred steps and you can see around the big peak in front of you and see the path as it unfolds in front, appearing to wind upwards. Another five hundred metres, and you see that the path drops down to the right. Half an hour further on and you notice the path climbing to the left and disappearing over what looks like the top of the rise. Five minutes later, you can see that what you thought was the top of the rise is in fact only a slight change of slope, and the hill continues ever upwards towards the invisible summit… 

Every time you stop and look around, the scene changes, sometimes showing a completely different aspect of the terrain that was impossible to see an hour ago. So to find your way through high mountains, especially through unmapped terrain, you need to constantly stop to look around and take in the view – to “feel” your way through to your destination, which may not be visible to you for large parts of your journey. 

Life is unmapped terrain. Although we think we have a good map and know where we are going, no one has been this way before. So metaphorically to stop and notice the terrain as I journey onwards is, for me, essential. And as each vista unfolds in front of me, I notice where life is leading me next. I have learned through experience that most of the maps I have been given in my life have not been very accurate; in fact, I wonder if it is possible to map out our journey through life. I wonder if it is not just as valid to move forward step by step without a map, noticing which way life is leading at every moment. And to do this, it is important to be present; that is, to be here where I am now, not lost in maps, plans, thoughts, hopes and regrets. This is why I practice zazen. For me it is a practice of returning to the present moment again and again at every moment. Leaving my life story behind and returning to the simple reality in front of me. It is a dynamic practice, and this is what Dogen meant when he wrote 800 years ago that zazen has no fixed form. Because we live in society, a constructed reality that is always pulling us this way and that, we practice finding our balance again at every new moment. And from this moment we step forward. 

The reason that I have found the teachings of the ancient master so useful is that they have provided me with pointers on how to live. For me, the pointers need to be practical. I am not by nature an academic, and I find it difficult to study through books. That is why I was happy to take on the role of editor and publisher for Sensei’s project to translate Dogen’s teachings into English. Editing, formatting and publishing the chapters of the Shobogenzo allowed me to become familiar with Dogen’s writings without having to study them academically. Improbable as it may sound, my way of studying the teachings has been to let them pass in front of my eyes again and again as I edited, proofread and prepared them for printing. Although I cannot claim to have a complete understanding, my method of studying, which is rather like throwing mud at a wall – eventually some of it will stick, has given me some pointers to live by. 

One of the most valuable of these pointers has been an understanding of how to live without a map. The ancients taught about something that they called “prajna” in Sanskrit. The term is often translated as “wisdom”, “intelligence” or “understanding”. In Dogen’s work, it is sometimes 般若 (HANNYA), a phonetic rendering, or 智慧 (CHIE), which we translate as “real wisdom”. However, the way that Dogen refers to it in his writings suggest something somewhat difference from the traditional meaning of wisdom. He talks about the “ultimate, unadorned and profound state of prajna”; he says that “all human beings have the right seeds of prajna in abundance”. He says that the “…secretly working concrete mind, at this moment is… prajna itself…” This points to some kind of intuitional faculty that human beings possess. The Sanskrit word prajna is made up of the prefix “pra” which means “before” and the verb “jna” which means “to know, comprehend or understand”. So one interpretation of the meaning of prajna is “before knowing, before comprehending, before understanding”. This interpretation fits in well with the way that Dogen uses the term in his writings. Before we start to think about or consider what to do, there is present in our consciousness an intuitional realisation of something that is not readily apparent to our thinking mind. It is subtle and fragile. We can easily override it with our intentions, hopes and fears and habitual views. It is easier to notice it when we are balanced; when our mind is not separate from our body; when we are whole. 

Around a decade ago, I started to notice that I appeared to be living without a map, and I wondered whether what I was using to guide me through life could be described as prajna. Now, I can say clearly that this seems to be the case, judging from the evidence. I do seem to be living my life according to the metaphor I outlined at the start of this post. 

I feel rather conscious of using the word “I” so many times in my posts. The reason I am writing almost completely in the first person is that I have no wish to teach you, the reader, how to live. But I feel some kind of urge to tell you how I am living, and how I came to be living in this way. I don’t want to tell you to live in this way – it feels rather insecure and at times frightening to live without a map. On the bad days, I wonder where I am going and how I ended up here in this place. But on the good days, it brings with it a sense of freedom that is unique and that I can only recommend to you.

 

In the early days, Nishijima Roshi (Sensei) didn’t really care much about the rituals that accompanied temple life. He said that after attending Koda Sawaki’s retreats when he was young, he thought that it would be impossible to follow Dogen’s teachings in a temple setting. He spent his time in the evenings after work translating Dogen’s writings into modern Japanese. Then, when he was 55 and retired from his job as a fund manager in Japan’s Ministry of Finance, he decided he wanted to become a priest. Searching for a master who would accept him as a priest, he came across Master Rempo Niwa, who at that time was head of a country temple called Tokei-in near the city of Shizuoka, where Sensei had attended school as a boy. By a fortunate coincidence, Master Niwa had just completed building a new zazen hall in the temple and was pleased to accept Sensei and allowed him to use the new zazen hall for weekend retreats. For the next two decades, Sensei held all his retreats at Tokei-in, which is where I attended several hundred retreats with Sensei and the group of foreign students that formed around him in the 1970s and 80s and that grew in size into the 90s. 

It was always Sensei’s intention to form a group that was separate from the Soto Sect. He felt that the young western people he had begun to teach from 1977 were enthusiastic in practicing Zazen and learning about Dogen Zenji’s teachings, but that the hierarchy and bureaucracy of the official Japanese organisation would weigh them down. As a result, in 1987, in concert with setting up the Ida Zazen Dojo in the outskirts of Tokyo, he and five of his students formed Dogen Sangha as a group centred around the teachings of Dogen Zenji and the practice of Zazen as a new school of teachings. As members of that original group, on returning to the UK in 1999, Yoko and I decided to use the name Dogen Sangha for the small sitting group we started in Bristol. In the early 2000s I was fortunate enought to meet two people running already established groups who supported me in starting to teach and became my first two dharma heirs. In 2013, I gave dharma transmission (Shiho) to 12 of the people who had been sitting with me regularly over the previous 10 years, and to another 5 people in the time since then. Some of them have gone on to form and run their own groups. Now, 20 years later, we have several small groups here and there, all following the same practice and teachings. 

As my interest in Dogen’s teachings came through my experience with mountaineering, I was never interested in the ceremonial side of Buddhism. For that reason, I found it easy to follow what Sensei was teaching, centred around what he called “the philosophy of action”. It fitted in well with my life experience and helped me to understand the feelings of balance and contentment I had experienced in my life as a rock climber and mountaineer and how valuable those experiences were in guiding my life. It wasn’t difficult for me to follow his ideas about action in the present moment, and I had no strong feelings about following the simple Buddhist ceremonies that he introduced, always based on what Dogen had written down. It was a relaxed attitude that I liked a lot. He didn’t care about chanting, except with the formal temple meals at Tokei-in during retreats. We didn’t need to follow the kind of formal zen behaviour that has been adopted by many zen groups in the west. He encouraged us to make the kasaya, which Dogen revered, using a sewing machine rather than by hand. He didn’t teach us how to make a rakusu, but presented us with one when we took the simple precepts ceremony, again based on Dogen’s description. This relaxed attitude was ideal for me, as I had no interest in formal zen behaviour beyond the simple conduct associated with practicing zazen. 

When we set up the Ida Zazen Dojo in 1989, the only condition placed on the young people who came to live there was that they should practice zazen at least twice a day – usually morning and evening. Looking back, I realise that Sensei gradually adopted more of a traditional approach as he became older. It may have started when his assistant, Taijun, returned from her two-year training as a nun, and she told him that he should start to chant the Heart Sutra after morning zazen. Then, as some of his foreign students asked if he would give them the ceremony to become priests (tokudo), he obliged. He would always try to meet the requests of his students. As he passed into old age and stopped going to his office in the city every day, he started wearing the robes of a priest. 

I had never been attracted to zen as a religion. I had discovered Sensei’s Saturday seminars in Tokyo by chance and had been attracted to this practice that gave me the same balance and contentment I had already experienced in the great outdoors. I don’t feel that this attitude has changed for me. When I returned to the UK in 2000 and started to teach people how to sit, I brought with me the simple practices that I had become used to in my life in Japan – bowing before and after sitting and chanting at mealtimes during zazen retreats. But these practices are for me not central and not so important. At home, I usually bow before and after I sit because it has become a habit. Like saying hello to people when you meet them. But if I don’t do it, it doesn’t change my zazen. Equally, you can still have a nice zazen retreat even if you don’t chant at mealtimes. I think that chanting, which is a form of singing, unites those who are going to eat, and therefore has value. However, what I would really like to say is that if we concentrate on these Japanese customs without understanding their role or function, then the practices become formulaic and lose their vitality. 

To me, it is more important to find a balance in our lives than to follow any “path”. I have read accounts by respected teachers that suggest that we should follow the Buddhist path, and if we stray from it, we should repent and return to the path. Then our life will be happy. For me, there is no path that I should follow. My life itself is unfolding moment by moment, day by day, and my behaviour depends, not on an understanding that I should act properly or that I should do right and should not do wrong. To me, my behaviour depends on my state at this moment – whether I am acting sincerely. To act sincerely, I practice zazen, the practice of dynamic balance. Whether my actions are the right ones or not I cannot tell. This is a simple way to live, that may sound a bit stupid. Well, my teacher took the name Gudo, which means “stupid way” and he gave me the name “Eido” which means “excellent way” (The character Ei also means English). So I am the excellent student of a stupid teacher. I am excellent at following a stupid way of life. 

It is true that I cannot even tell you that I am sure that this way of living is good or not, or that it will make me happy or not. But there is something undefinable, ineffable, that makes me continue to live like this. Even though I sometimes wonder what I am doing. I will write more about this ineffable something that has become so central to my life in a later post.

 

Yes, I can’t tell you how tired I am of “Zen”. 

It’s not meant as a criticism of Zen, but rather as an honest statement of my personal feeling about something I have been involved in for the last 45 years. As a young man in 1970’s Japan, I joined enthusiastically in all the rituals with which Zen Buddhism in Japan surrounds itself. Although my teacher, Nishijima, was not by any means a traditionalist, spending weekend retreats with him in a beautiful temple deep in the countryside was so peaceful compared to my busy and crowded life in Tokyo. Being involved with translating and publishing the works of Dogen Zenji gave my life a purpose and direction for the following several decades. 

Let me try to set down what these teachings mean to me now, as I approach my 76th year. It feels now as if I have emerged into a much simpler understanding, which for me retains little connection to this world of Japanese “Zen”. Although I retain an interest, I no longer have much enthusiasm for studying the mountains of scriptures and books recording and discussing the sayings of the ancient masters. It’s not that I don’t think they have value. Indeed, all that I learned about the ancient teachings has come in one way or another from Dogen’s writings, and I spent more than 20 years helping to produce the first English version of his writings. 

For me, those teachings are all about balance. What Buddhist teachers have called “the middle way” is to me a teaching about finding the balance between extremes in my life. Between the extremes of thought and feeling, between feeling excited and feeling depressed, between having too much confidence and not enough confidence, between being too passionate and being unfeeling, between overeating and not eating enough, between having nothing to say and being too chatty, between being too busy and not having enough to do, between being too agressive and too passive, between being selfish and being altruistic, between helping myself and helping others. When I find a balance between the opposites in my life, I feel contentment. Always, whenever it happens. 

I discovered that I was not able to find a balance between opposites in my real life just by deciding what I wanted to do and doing it. I realised a long time ago that I am not strong enough to lead a life that follows what I think would be best for me. Although I can understand intellectually what I should do to lead a balanced life, in fact I cannot do it. I have needed a practice, something that I can do regularly to train myself to be balanced. When I was young, I found that rock climbing was an activity that gave me a feeling of balance and contentment. So for more than two decades I climbed rocks and mountains to bring balance to my life. I climbed whenever and wherever I could, eventually conquering unclimbed peaks in the Himalayas. 

Climbing always brought me balance, but I wanted to keep doing it at the expense of other aspects of my life so that the feeling of contentment it brought me would continue. But of course, the contentment only came when the balance came. I realised that balance is a dynamic thing. You can’t become balanced and then stay balanced ever after. You need to practice it. Then, when I arrived in Tokyo in 1977 and stumbled on the practice of zazen by chance, I found a simple practice that did exactly the same for me as my climbing had done – it allowed me to find balance. 

So to me, zazen became a practice of dynamic balance that I could do every day, finding a balance for my life every day. And I have practiced dynamic balance every day since then. Has my life become more balanced? Today I found balance. Will I find it tomorrow?

In these posts, I want to explore week by week my idea that balance lies at the heart of living for everyone and to explore how this simple practice can bring stability to our lives.