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現代坐禅講義 只管打坐への道
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April 20, 2019
What I was looking for—
After learning with a sinking heart (attachment!) that my meditation hero, Ryunosuke Koike has publicly announced on YouTube that he wouldn't be teaching meditation anymore and advised that for those who liked the relaxed style of meditation during his retreats, they should study with someone who can do shikantaza properly, I immediately looked around and stumbled on this. It was exactly what I was looking for: a way to meditate without concentrating, without trying to do anything, and most crucially, without feeding the control-freak of an ego, which is something ANY meditation technique, insofar as it is a TECHNIQUE that you—the ego—can master, unwittingly does, at least in theory. Shikantaza means "just sit," and true to its name (and to the spirit of Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen), Fujita expounds on why it's not another technique of meditation. This, presumably, is what Koike taught during the retreats he conducted—though he called it a technique—but the method seemed to match quite well (how you stop focusing on anything and letting things just pass through you).
I give this book four stars because although the philosophical/theoretical parts of the book—which constitutes 4 out of the 5 "lectures"—were excellent and beyond reproach, the crucial practical part of the book was disappointingly lacking in instructions, focusing on the physical aspects of sitting in excruciating minutiae and not enough on the mental aspects. Though, granted, there's the paradox of how to even go about teaching someone how to "just sit" without any—or much?—conscious effort. The moment you tell someone to sit, you are already encouraging conscious effort. And the moment you try to do shikantaza, you're already straying from it, as you're exerting conscious effort, falling well within the realm of the control freak of the ego. How do you spontaneously sit? And how do you not get your ego involved in your meditation? How do you let go of all control and still meditate? These are super hard practical questions I hoped Fujita would illuminate, but it seems he, too, is and has been grappling with these same questions himself, and hence the disappointing nature of the last crucial lecture on practice.
After learning with a sinking heart (attachment!) that my meditation hero, Ryunosuke Koike has publicly announced on YouTube that he wouldn't be teaching meditation anymore and advised that for those who liked the relaxed style of meditation during his retreats, they should study with someone who can do shikantaza properly, I immediately looked around and stumbled on this. It was exactly what I was looking for: a way to meditate without concentrating, without trying to do anything, and most crucially, without feeding the control-freak of an ego, which is something ANY meditation technique, insofar as it is a TECHNIQUE that you—the ego—can master, unwittingly does, at least in theory. Shikantaza means "just sit," and true to its name (and to the spirit of Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen), Fujita expounds on why it's not another technique of meditation. This, presumably, is what Koike taught during the retreats he conducted—though he called it a technique—but the method seemed to match quite well (how you stop focusing on anything and letting things just pass through you).
I give this book four stars because although the philosophical/theoretical parts of the book—which constitutes 4 out of the 5 "lectures"—were excellent and beyond reproach, the crucial practical part of the book was disappointingly lacking in instructions, focusing on the physical aspects of sitting in excruciating minutiae and not enough on the mental aspects. Though, granted, there's the paradox of how to even go about teaching someone how to "just sit" without any—or much?—conscious effort. The moment you tell someone to sit, you are already encouraging conscious effort. And the moment you try to do shikantaza, you're already straying from it, as you're exerting conscious effort, falling well within the realm of the control freak of the ego. How do you spontaneously sit? And how do you not get your ego involved in your meditation? How do you let go of all control and still meditate? These are super hard practical questions I hoped Fujita would illuminate, but it seems he, too, is and has been grappling with these same questions himself, and hence the disappointing nature of the last crucial lecture on practice.
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