The First Dharma Talk (THotBT Ch2)

For the Sweeping Pine book club, we are currently reading Thich Nhat Hanh's book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. This week's talk is some reflections the second chapter: The First Dharma Talk.

Some Specific Passages

Siddhartha Gautama was twenty-nine years old when he left his family to search for a way to end his and others' suffering.

He studied meditation with many teachers, and after six years of practice, he sat under the bodhi tree and vowed not to stand up until he was enlightened.

Implicit in this passage is the fact that others taught meditation methods. Siddhartha sat down with a vow after six years of aseticism. And in many tellings, he remembers his childhood experience of sitting under the rose apple tree (or: "Jumbo tree" / "black plumb tree"). He recalls the simple peaceful state of open childlike awareness and stillness / "stopping". In that childhood experience - he was "stopping" by no longer participating in the celebration of plowing, people, and the loss of life for the creatures that lived in the soil. I think he was also "stopping" by releasing his sorrow about that loss of life.

Dialog with Dogen

Once you have adjusted your posture, take a breath and exhale fully, rock your body right and left, and settle into steady, immovable sitting. Think of not thinking, "Not thinking --what kind of thinking is that?" Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the dharma gate of joyful ease, the practice realization of totally culminated enlightenment.

This "dharma gate of joyful ease" is anraku no hōmon (安樂の法門). What young Siddhartha encountered under the rose-apple tree, but what the ascetic Siddhartha had been refusing is the very thing Dōgen names ZazenShikantaza (只管打坐, shikan ta za) — "just sitting," or more precisely, "nothing but wholeheartedly sitting" - is the zazen practice central to Soto Zen Buddhism. It is objectless, goalless, method-free meditation: open awareness without a focus point, without striving toward any particular state. Read more about Zazen » as.