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.