20241117 - 12:00
“My practice is Shikantaza.”
The words echo through my head as I sit in the queue to Dokusan. The utterance leaves my mouth as I am sitting there; yet their accuracy is always doubted. Calling it a practice is fallacious. Calling it Shikantaza, too. At best an approximation, at worst completely missing the point. Our first conversation he asks: “What do you do when you do Shikantaza?” As a good Zen student, I answer: “It’s not so much about what I do as what I don’t do. And when I do what I’m not doing then I come back.” And yet, there is a doing implicit here. How does Zazen differ from washing the dishes? In one I sit, in the other I stand.
In my head the last few days I’ve been calling it “being-alongside.” To me this seems more accurate, and resolves a few contradictions. There is experience, and I am alongside it. It stems from the recognition that picking it up is a choice. Whatever happens, I choose to engage with it. Experiencing immense pain, I choose to reject it, to pick it up as something to do with. I can, instead, just experience pain. Yes, there is pain. The pain doesn’t lessen on account of me not picking it up. But there can just be pain, and I don’t have to engage with it. And finding that difference, this line of responsibility, this ability to not engage, to not pick things up, brings an indescribable amount of freedom. At the same time, this pain stays the same, and on that level, nothing changes.
There’s no “coming back” to practice, because what I deemed practice is always already here. I don’t create it, I don’t leave it nor can I return to it. We can say that getting caught up is ‘losing ourselves’, and then to disentangle is to practice, to return. But if we lose ourselves, it is only on the basis of being aware of that happening as such, and then we’re here. Because we always are. We might say that we are to recognise that which has always been.