Who is Sitting? (Zazen)

Who is Sitting? (Zazen)

I discovered Zen Practice while I was living in Green Bay, Wisconsin and attending the UW-Green Bay taking up Fine Arts studies. The book that most influenced me at the time and drew me into Zen Buddhism was “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts. Later I was introduced to the works of Robert Aiken (SP?) and Gary Zukav among others. I have always considered myself a born Buddhist and later converted to Islam at the age of twelve and so these books spoke to me with greater meaning when I reflect upon the days while I was growing up in Penang where I had to study Buddhism at the Mahindrama Buddhist Temple one of the oldest if not the oldest Hinayana Buddhist Temple in Malaysia. My uncle who adopted and raised me at that time was a Buddhist and thus I was made sure to attend the Pali classes and memorize the Pali chants every weekend.

I was raised at home in Sungai Pinang, Penang among my Malay relatives who were all of them Muslims and this made it awkward for me even when I was child to have to sneak off to the Temple to study Buddhism and every Friday to join my cousins at the Mosque or learn to read the Koran. Every so often at school my fellow Malay students would call me a Kafir or an infidel and I would hang out with the Chinese and Hidus to avoid being accused. I had to deal with religious prejudice at a very early stage in my life so much so that today it does not bother me what others think of my faith.

Zen Buddhism, especially its Japanese version has a very strong attraction for me because of its down- to-earth-ness and its simple method of discipline. Minus all the temple rituals Zen presented with a common sense approach to tackling life at its basic day to day level to its esoteric concept. Ever since I was exposed to the Japanese culture while in secondary school through Samurai movies I felt an affinity with everything Japanese. Never in my wildest dream did I imagine that one day I would end up living in Japan for three years. However it was at the San Francisco Zen Center in Green Gulch that I really got to know Zen Buddhism up close and personal. I lived and practiced at the Green Dragon Zen Community for almost two years of my life and my take on life was forever changed since then.

I have written in more detail of my life in Green Gulch Zen Community in my journal section of my Gallery Web-site which is still in the making for the last two years. And so I am not going it beyond just letting it be known that I was there and having been there it has given me new insights into my life. In relation to it my life today is much more complex or to put in plain English much more confused. Here I am back in a predominantly Muslim community and raising my two children in the Islamic way a lot of personal beliefs and perceptions that I have comes into question. Again and again Buddhism and Islam takes a collision course and I am trying to circumnavigate my field of consciousness and not to be distracted by the influences of those around me. My goal is to let the two come together in a merging of differences, to reconcile to become a collective psyche rather than a split personality.

There are those of us whose life has taken a detour somewhere along the way and the road we have stumbled on to is the one less traveled, we have been sidetracked and for some odd reason forced to venture into new territories that others are spared. Mine was to travel in search of my true nature, my collective consciousness, my destiny and my soul. I am faced with questions and choices along the way and guided by an inner voice speaking to me and urging me on so that I do not succumb to settling for and easy way out. I have found it harder and harder to accept ready made answers or follow dictums carved in stones, I have to chew hard before I can swallow and more often than not I would end up spitting out or regurgitating thoughts and ideas offered me by words of wisdom handed down through the ages.

I had a vivid dream once where I woke up from the dream scribbling the word eclectic on a piece of paper a word that someone was shouting at me in my dream. “You are an Eclectic!”. I did not know what the word meant or even how to spell it at the time and so I wrote Ekletik so that I did not forget it before I fell back to sleep. I learned of the word the next morning from my host Angelo De Benedetto at whose studio in Central City Colorado I was a guest student this was in 1980 and I was on my trip through the Southwestern States of the US. You have the tendency to collect the best of all possibilities presented to you in life Angelo explained to me as he showed me from a book called the “Book of Secrets” where Eclecticism was at one time a school of thoughts in ancient Greece.

Today after twenty odd years since I dreamt of being called an eclectic I am still
wandering through life picking and choosing what is best for me even though sometimes I feel like I have made more wrong choices that right ones. As a Zen student this would have simply be dismissed as a wrong view because there is no choice to be made, no chooser and no-thing to choose from it is all simply is. My understanding of Zen mind is that it is like the taking of one breath at a time and the next and the next, whatever arises in the mind has no affect to the breathing unless entertained by the one who breathe. Whatever choices or changes taken is the act of will of the one breathing but the breathing continues on regardless of the outcome. Nothing happens when the one who breath disregards or simply observe with bare attention at whatever arises in the mind no thoughts or consciousness and hence no choices or changes is manifested. But the Breather is a like a sponge that sucks up every single thought and images that arises in the mind, the one who breath has the need to justify its existence in relation to the external, the one who breathe has the need to rationalize and be in control of whatever the mind projects.

This is attachment, this is clinging this is the desire to identify and be identified
with the projections of the whole of humanity the collective consciousness. We criticize, we admire , we judge and we honor, we are by nature reactive beings we cannot help it but reach out and touch that which we project or is projected before our mind's eye. We ask questions, we swear upon our dearly departed's grave, we justify oh, yes we need to justify and we stereotype, we are envious and often greedy and we are proud and aloof before those our subordinates, but there a part of us more compassionate than God Himself or more caring than Mother Theresa, we are all of these and more. We are so cluttered in our mind so full in our consciousness that we have a difficult time in recognizing who we are. We identify ourselves with our success and our failures, our strength and weaknesses, we either become self centered our egos puffed up or we turn into a defeatist succumbing to the dictates of events and societal whims. Where goes our Original Nature our Center of Primordial Being our God given Spark of Life, our Soul?

How often do we ask ourselves these questions or do we even take the matter into
consideration in our daily lives? The greater number of us is so busy striving to gain the world loosing our souls in the process with the impeccable reasoning that we will regain our souls when we have enough of what this life can offer and more than often by which time we discover that it is too late. Somewhere along our busy-ness we have accumulated more than we need and buried our souls deep underneath it all. Somewhere along the road we have lost our sense of innocence and awe, our childhood sense of curiosity and adventure, our sense of compassion and understanding, we adopted a doggy dog attitude of screw you and more for me. Our God given intelligence disappears to be replaced by ignorance, our charitable nature becomes a blurry vision of the past to be replaced by greed and when our quest for success fails we loose hope and faith to be replaced by anger and despair.

Who are we? The Ancient have asked this question and the contemporary have about exhausted their inkwell writing about it, delved into it and shouted it out at the masses to awaken, to remain awaken and to become one with our Souls for there is no greater quest in our human life than this. To enlighten ourselves is not a Buddhist idea alone it is a universal concept taught by just about every Beliefs and Religion, we are enlightened beings only we have shrouded our enlightenment with the ignorance of accumulating through greed, hate and delusion instead of through charity, compassion and wisdom.

"What you intend is what you become. If you intend to take as much from life and others as you can, if your thoughts are of taking instead of giving, you create a reality that reflects your intentions. You draw to yourself souls of like frequency, and together you create a taking reality…You see the people around you as personalities who take, rather than personalities who give. You do not trust them, and they do not trust you."

The Seat of the Soul - Gary Zukav.