(Follow this link to see the November 2021 Priory Newsletter where this was originally published.)

East side of the temple where the extension will go.

The third of the four practices, Seeking Nothing is as follows (from the Red Pine translation):

Third, seeking nothing. People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something – always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. Calamity forever alternates with prosperity! To dwell in the three realms is to dwell in a burning house. To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything.

We can think that a teaching like “Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything” is too extreme, is too exotic; but, in our Soto Zen practice, this is what we are doing, in a small steady way, each time we sit down to meditate. Soto Zen is, I understand, called “farmer Zen” in Japan. This is, in part, because it was originally practiced by the peasant class in contrast to Rinzai Zen which was practiced by the Samurai class.

There is also another meaning to this farmer Zen. In our practice, there is a need for the steady undramatic patience of a farmer. We get up in the morning and go to our meditation seat, patiently tending to the garden of our practice. Each time we choose to practice, in small or large ways, we are choosing reason over custom. The custom[s] here are the ingrained habit patterns of our lives, especially those distorted by greed, hatred and delusion.

When we hold onto these habits and patterns, they tend to obscure and distort our True or deeper self; they distort the Sublime. When we wake up and choose reason over custom, we choose to practice, in a steady, step-by-step way; we harmonize ourselves with our True self.

In The Most Excellent Mirror Samadhi, a poem by Tozan Ryokai, (807-869) recited (or sung, in our case) during the Soto Zen full morning service, the opening line reads:

The Buddhas and the Ancestors have all directly
handed down this basic Truth:
Preserve well for you now have; this is all.

Every day, at morning service, we hear, we are told: you already have what you need. This is what Bodhidharma is telling us when he advises us to discover where we seek; where we act on discontentment with what we have; where we fall into the trap of believing that we lack something on a fundamental level, and to let go of these distorting customs. One of my teachers used to say “the more I practice, the more ordinary I appear.” and Dogen says, in the “Rules For Meditation“, “…training and enlightenment are naturally undefiled; to live in this way is the same as to live an ordinary daily life.”

When we work toward detach[ing] from all that exists and stop[ping] imagining or seeking anything, we are entering fully the actual life that we have right now. This is an invitation to fully live the ordinary, wonderful life that we have right now.

To be continued….