Swimming In Sand

(Originally published January 16, 2015)

I meditate sitting in a chair. Years ago, I read an article by Brad Warner saying meditating in a chair was not doing zazen, and I couldn’t understand why. One of his books, Harcore Zen, was my introduction to Soto Zen, so reading that hurt my feelings a little at the time.

I get it now…I think.

For me, and for a lot of meditators, we think of zazen as something we do with the mind. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens. Or bodies…well, they can just dangle there from off our brains like the string of a helium balloon. If that’s the case, what difference does posture make? Chair…lotus…standing on your head…it’s all the same.

As I’ve learned more about practice, and Soto Zen practice specifically, I’ve learned that not everyone agrees with that description. To them, what your mind is doing is irrelevant. It is the physical posture--back straight, legs in lotus or half-lotus-- that makes it zazen and not something else. The word describes a specific bodily act.

So to those people, to say we are doing zazen while sitting in a chair is like saying we are swimming when we’re running across the desert.

This is the point where the non-duality police show up in a screech of brakes and wail of sirens. Nothing is differentiated, they remind us. Zen is everywhere and everything. Truly, I tell you that sitting in a chair is no different from sttting lotus. The mind that swims is the same mind that runs across the desert.

If you‘re talking about mental states, that‘s true. You can have the same quality or attitude of mind sitting in a chair as sitting in lotus posture.  If you‘re speaking metaphorically or symbolically, you can describe running through the desert as “swimming across an ocean of sand.”

If.

Because it’s also true that a couple of monks in the Soto tradition have told me that in Zen, nothing is symbolic. Zazen is zazen. Sitting in a chair is sitting in a chair. Running is running and swimming is swimming.

When we bow before the statue of the Buddha, we might describe what we are doing “expressing gratitude” or “recognizing and acknowledging the Buddha-heart  within.” When these monks bow before a statue of the Buddha, they describe it as bowing before a statue of the Buddha.

Semantics?

Maybe.

 Then again, semantics is the point of having words in the first place. I can say “the world is my monastery” and mean it, but in order to come to that meaning I need to know that a monastery is a place where monks train and the world is that big blue thing spinning around the sun. We need make distinctions before we can move beyond them.

In zen, what we are doing is literally what we are doing.