My first meditation teacher, Paul Burton, introducing Samatha (calm) practice to a bunch of new university students, explained that Buddhist meditation had two elements: concentration and mindfulness. That still seems like a good place to start. Mindfulness is paying attention to what is right here, right now. Master Ichu, when asked about what Zen was, said, “Attention, attention.” When asked what that meant, he said, “Attention means attention!”
Initially one has to learn to focus, to develop what is known in mindfulness practice as ‘access concentration’. In Zen we talk about developing joriki - concentration power.
Counting the breath
The normal starting practice for doing this is counting the breath. One might start by counting both in- and out-breaths, up to ten, and then starting again. You are not trying to control the breath! Just breathe naturally. Usually people switch quite soon to just counting the out-breath, and that seems naturally to lengthen as you go along. So you just notice the in-breath, and count on the out-breath, a long slow subvocal counting as long as the out-breath. For some people, that becomes their practice for ever, and that’s absolutely fine. Completely become one with the numbers and the breath.
Finding the tanden
After some time doing Samatha practice and then the various Osho meditations, I took up the Japanese martial art of aikido. The teacher, Kanetsuka Sensei, said, “If you want to be really good at aikido, you must have strong tanden. To have strong tanden, learn to sit zazen. My house, Tuesday mornings!”
So when I started zazen (1982, I think) there was a lot of focus on the lower belly, where the tanden is located. It’s a point, three finger-widths below the navel. Of course, if surgeons opened you up they wouldn’t find anything there! But the tanden or dantien (Chinese) is still my starting place when I sit zazen.
So if you decide that your concentration is sufficient to drop the numbers, then you shift to following the breath. There are different ways to do this, but, involving the dantien or tanden (or hara), you feel the movement of the lower belly as you breathe. If you watch toddlers breathing, you will notice that their bellies naturally expand as they breathe in, and contract as they breathe out. So we need to get back to that. At first it may even be helpful to gently push the lower belly out as you breathe in, and then let it collapse a bit on the out-breath.
Of course we know that the breath doesn’t actually go into the lower belly. But what happens if you expand the lower belly as you breathe is that the diaphragm sinks and more air goes into your lungs. If you breathe into your chest, the diaphragm lifts, and there is less room in the lungs.
However, if you practise using the dantien, after a while it feels like another organ inside, as real subjectively as your heart. It is also your centre of gravity.
You hear something — where I live that’s often seagulls — and it feels like it’s happening inside you rather than ‘out there’.
When you have sat for a while focusing on the dantien, then sometimes the awareness naturally expands to the whole body and beyond, so there is no outside or inside. In Zen we want to develop a sort of open, boundless concentration that doesn’t exclude anything. Unless you get on to koan work, but that’s further down the line (and optional).
Posture
An important aspect of zazen is posture. Traditionally, one sits in one of the sitting yoga poses like full- or half-lotus. Many in the West find this too difficult, and so opt for easier options like seiza (kneeling posture) or ‘Burmese’, sitting on a cushion with one leg in front of the other, which is tucked into the groin. But if either of these is too difficult then sitting on a straight-back chair is fine. Ideally sit away from the back of the chair, so you are self-supporting, and use a cushion to raise yourself up slightly so your hips are a little higher than your knees.
Whichever sitting position you adopt, the hands are in ‘heaven-and-earth’ mudra: the left hand rests on the right hand, both palms facing upwards, with thumbs just touching. This acts as a kind of biofeedback mechanism — if you’re falling asleep or drifting off, the thumbs fall away from each other; if you’re trying too hard they tend to push up. You may need a little cushion, blanket or rolled-up jumper to rest your hands on so that your shoulders are not being pulled forward. Ears should be above shoulders, and shoulders above hips. The lower back will hopefully naturally have a slight arch in it, so that the lower belly is slightly pushed forward, but it’s not meant to be rigid.
How long to sit
If you’ve never done this before, start with five or ten minutes at a time. Don’t worry if your mind wanders — that’s not a sign that you ‘can’t do it’. Minds wander, it’s their nature. Some years ago, when I was a student of Patrick Kundo Roshi, I was complaining that there was too much thinking going on in my zazen. He gently reprimanded me, saying:
This is meant to be a non-dual practice. Don’t make thinking worse than not thinking! Patrick Kundo Roshi
That said, don’t use it as time to sort out your accounts or whatever — when you find thinking happening, the first thing to do is to congratulate yourself for having noticed that you were thinking, and then gently return your attention to whatever your focus is (e.g. counting or following the breath) without giving yourself a hard time about it!
When you feel happy with ten minutes, build up to 25 minutes at a time. If you want to do more than that, great, but stop and do at least a stretch or some slow walking before sitting down again.
Making it a habit
I would say it’s better to do a shorter time every day than two hours on a Sunday and then nothing the rest of the week. What helps is to find the place in your day where zazen belongs. That’s not necessarily clock time, but somewhere in the sequence of regular events. For me, it’s always before breakfast (and then again before going to sleep). But breakfast can be at different times, depending on what else I’m doing that day. Some people find the time after work but before the evening meal is good. After a while, if you practise regularly, the day just doesn’t feel right without it!