Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice

by Kosho Uchiyama

I described two sides to a person who practices zazen. One side is the personal self that is always being pulled to and fro by thoughts about desires. The other is the self that is sitting in zazen letting go of such thoughts; this is an ordinary person living out universal self. The first side is like clouds, and the second is like the wide sky that the clouds float in.

What is most crucial is to remember to pursue the way of the self selflessly, not for any profit. Because we concretely are universal self, there is no particular value in talking about it. Yet if we don’t make every effort to manifest it, just knowing about it is useless. To concretize the eternal, that is the task before us. Even if we have a cup of cool, clean water sitting right in front of us, if we don’t actually drink it, it won’t slake our thirst. The expression of universal self is a practice that is eternal, but to the extent that we don’t walk it ourselves, it won’t be realized, it won’t be our path.

Please don’t misunderstand me when I use the words Buddhist practice or Buddhism. I’m not talking about some established religious organization. I’m concerned with how a person, any person, who is completely naked of any religious or philosophical clothes, can live out their life fruitfully.

When you think about it, I myself am just an accidental reality. After all, there is nothing that says I had to be born in twentieth-century Japan. I could just as well have been born in ancient Egypt, or Papua New Guinea, or indeed not have been born at all. In other words, being born in any age or in any place is a possibility, an accident, just as my being here right now is an accident.

So, in a broader sense, it isn’t quite right to say that “today” is a clear day. After all, somewhere there are people who are getting rained on or snowed on, and somewhere else, people must be laboring under a hot desert sun. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe that only the things I see with my own eyes are absolutely or undeniably true.

Since nothing is substantial by itself just as it is, there is nothing to hold on to. This means your thoughts are not something to hold on to either, so the only thing to do is to let go of all that comes into your head.

dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don’t understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death. The third undeniable reality is that all of the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen.

when we let go of everything, we do not create artificial attachments and connections. Everything is as it is. Everything exists in one accidental way or another. This is the present reality of life. It is the reality of that which cannot be grasped, the reality about which nothing can be said. This very ungraspability is what is absolutely real about things.

Quite often people become shackled by the past. Believing that you came from a prominent family with a lot of money and feeling ashamed about your present condition is nothing more than being shackled to a conception of the past.

Only if we master the realities of the past can they function vividly and smoothly in the present. Only if we have learned how to drive a car can we effectively use one to go somewhere. Doing exactly that is called genjō kōan, the koan of life becoming life. Genjō is the present becoming the present.

I wasn’t born into a world that was already here before me, I do not live simply as one individual among millions of other individuals, and I do not leave everything behind to live on after me. People go through life thinking of themselves as members of a group or society. However, this isn’t how we really live. Actually, I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die.

You should always bear in mind that all sentient beings are suffering. Everyone is fretting about something inside their head. For example, should I stay where I am or should I go somewhere else? That’s the sort of thing we worry about, all too often. Actually, it doesn’t matter where we are, since that is only a minor problem going on in our heads. There really is no such place as Japan. There really is no such place as America. Where you are living right now is all there is.

You might try looking at all the stuff that comes up in your head simply as secretions. All our thoughts and feelings are a kind of secretion. It is important for us to see that clearly. I’ve always got things coming up in my head, but if I tried to act on everything that came up, it would just wear me out. Haven’t you ever had the experience of being up on a very high place and having an urge to jump? That urge to jump is just a secretion in your head. If you felt that you had to follow every urge that came into your head, well…

Zazen is to Buddhism what prayer is to the Judeo-Christian traditions. Just as prayer is a giving up of our small petty desires and asking that God’s will be done, zazen is also a giving up of our egotistical evaluations of ourselves (whether as superior or inferior) and entrusting our life to the power of zazen as embodied in the fourth seal, all things are as they are.

To rely on others in order to know yourself is to be unstable. Of course this does not mean you should live in some kind of isolation from others. To be isolated is just as unnatural and unstable as to live always in reference to others. Your true self is beyond either relying on others or avoiding them in order to know who you are.

I use the expression “opening the hand of thought” to explain as graphically as possible the connection between human beings and the process of thinking. I am using “thinking” in a broad sense, including emotions, preferences, and all sense perceptions, as well as conceptual thoughts. Thinking means to be grasping or holding on to something with our brain’s conceptual “fist.” But if we open this fist, if we don’t conceive the thought, what is in our mental hand falls away. Our universal self, jiko, also includes that which lets go. Sleeping at night is a natural expression of your life with the hand of your thinking mind wide open. Nodding off while you are awake is something else entirely, from the perspective of the self. While you are awake, opening the hand of thought isn’t dozing or thinking, it is the fine line between them where you really are right now.

If we actually touch fire, we will certainly be burned, but if we merely say the word fire without actually touching it, we won’t be burned. Likewise, if we only think of the word fire, our heads will not be set ablaze. Therefore, the definition of fire, whose nature is to burn all things, cannot itself be the reality of it.

If you put your hand up to your heart, you can feel it beating steadily. It does not beat because you are thinking about making it beat. Nor does it beat because of physiological or medical definitions. The hypothalamus regulates your heartbeat, for example, but it is not the cause of your heart’s activity. As long as your heart is actually beating inside you, it is the reality of your life. A power beyond words and ideas is at work. It is this reality of your life, of your birth and death, not definitions of them, that I want to investigate here.

I am a Buddhist priest living a life of zazen practice in a certain temple in Kyoto, Japan. Is this way of life a way I chose by my own power? Yes, of course, in a certain sense, I did choose it. But where did I get the power to choose it? I cannot help but conclude that this choice, too, has been given life by a great power that transcends my own willpower and thought, whether you call it chance, fate, life itself, or the providence of God.

We would be much better off if our past experience and wisdom were made to live within the raw life-experience of the self here and now. Instead we think that kind of conceptual existence is our real life of the present, and we end up being dragged around by our thoughts. We do things that only stifle raw life. This is happening all the time. When an individual is like this, he can be admitted to a mental institution as a schizophrenic, but when huge masses of people begin to act like that, there is no hospital big enough. Most unfortunately, such groups of fanatics eventually shape the very history of the human race. If we think about it, there is no doubt that everyone is always living out the reality of life. But so often we live blindly, so caught up in our thoughts that we think they alone are what is real and complete. This is a kind of insane reality. The important thing is to find a sane way to live out the reality of life. This is what a true spiritual practice is about: not spirit or mind separated from the body and the world, but a true way of life. This is what zazen is—a practice of living out the fresh reality of life.

You will easily understand what I mean if you compare the zazen posture to Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker (see figure 10). The figure sits hunched over, his shoulders drawn forward and his chest compressed, in a posture of chasing after illusions. The arms and legs are bent, the neck and fingers are bent, and even the toes are curled. When our body is bent and contorted like this, blood-flow and breathing become congested; we get caught up in our imagination and are unable to break free. On the other hand, when we sit zazen everything is straight—trunk, back, neck, and head. Because our abdomen rests comfortably on solidly folded legs, blood circulates freely toward the abdomen, and breath moves easily toward the tanden. Congestion is alleviated, excitability is lessened, and we no longer need to chase after fantasies and delusions. Doing correct zazen means taking the correct posture and entrusting everything to it.

When we actually do zazen, we should be neither sleeping nor caught up in our own thoughts. We should be wide awake, aiming at the correct posture with our flesh and bones. Can we ever attain this? Is there such a thing as succeeding or hitting the mark? Here is where zazen becomes unfathomable. In zazen we have to vividly aim at holding the correct posture, yet there is no mark to hit! Or at any rate, the person who is doing zazen never perceives whether he has hit the mark or not. If the person doing zazen thinks his zazen is really getting good, or that he has “hit the mark,” he is merely thinking his zazen is good, while actually he has become separated from the reality of his zazen. Therefore, we must always aim at doing correct zazen, without being concerned with perceiving the mark as having been hit.

Zazen enables us to realize that all the thoughts that float into our heads are nothing but empty comings and goings that have no real substance and vanish in a moment.

It is not that the cessation of all thought is satori and good, and the arising of thoughts and the tendency to chase after them is delusion and bad. Just sitting, transcending good or evil, satori or delusion, is the zazen that transcends the sage and the ordinary man.

Usually people assume that they are born onto a stage or into a world that already exists, that they dance around on the stage for a while and then leave when they die. Actually, though, when I am born, I give birth to my world as well! I live together with that world; therefore, that world forms the contents of my self. Then, when I die, I take the world with me; that is, my world dies with me.

We all have eyes to see, but if we close them and say that the world is in darkness, how can we say that we are living out the true reality of life? If we open our eyes we see the sun is shining brilliantly. In the same way, when we live open-eyed and awake to life, we discover that we are living in the vigorous light of life. All the ideas of our small self are clouds that make the light of the universal self foggy and dull. Doing zazen, we let go of these ideas and open our eyes to the clarity of the vital life of universal self.

But happiness does not invariably come with wealth, nor unhappiness with poverty. If you fix it in your mind that the materially rich are happy and poor people are unhappy, then when you are poor, you will surely be unhappy. It’s a mistake to hold on to such a view. For those who think this way, no matter now much money they have, the time will come when it will be useless. At death, such people will fall into the depths of misery.

Usually we think of our “self” as an individual independent substance, an enduring existence. But if we think about it carefully, this is by no means the case. I have an album of photographs taken of me every few years from infancy on. When I look at it these days I am filled with an utterly strange feeling. It so clearly shows the changes I have gone through while gradually advancing in age. How my face and figure have changed with the years! I can only wonder at the marvel of creation. Within this constant change, what endures? The birthmark under my eye, the peculiar slope of my head—only these meaningless facts remain. And if it is true that I am only what endures through time, then this birthmark and this oddly shaped head are what I truly am. I cannot help but wonder whether these pictures are all of the same I or not.

We are as selves quite like the flame of a candle. As wax melts near a lit wick and burns it emits light near the tip of the candle that appears as a more-or-less fixed shape. It is this seemingly unchanging shape that we refer to as flame. What we call I is similar to the flame. Although both body and mind are an unceasing flow, since they preserve what seems to be a constant form we refer to them as I. Actually there is no I existing as some substantial thing; there is only the ceaseless flow.

Nevertheless, it is also true that we aren’t always living fully, we aren’t always actualizing our life. This is because unlike the flowers in the fields, human beings bear the burden of thought. Thought has a dual nature: thought springs from life, and yet it has the ability to think of things totally ungrounded and detached from the fact of life. This is delusion and it leads to some strange consequences. A politician says to herself, “I’ve got to whip Tanaka in the election,” and her heart races—though she is alone in her room talking to herself and not in the midst of any competition. A man goads himself deliriously with thoughts of “I’m going to get my hands on that mine and make myself a fortune,” though he is not within reach of it and there is no price tag hanging from pieces of the ore.

In other words our thought, whether through the view of existence or of nonexistence, becomes the basis for the distortions of our lives that prevent life from manifesting in a straightforward way as it truly is.

The feeling that something is lacking is no more than our petty thoughts of being unfulfilled. Sawaki Roshi used to say, “There is no reason to expect the reality of immeasurable and unbounded life to satisfy your puny little thoughts.”

This Middle Way is itself true life. This can be seen in our daily lives as well. For example when we are driving a car, if we are tense, or absorbed in our thoughts, our life becomes totally confused and we cannot manifest it as it is. Our driving becomes highly dangerous. At the same time, it is hazardous to drive when sleepy or drunk, which also blinds us. We can drive safely only when we are relaxed and at the same time wide awake.

To practice opening the hand of thought, right now, right here, knowing that the reality of life is beyond human thought—that is what it means to practice buddhadharma only for the sake of the buddhadharma. It is definitely not to practice letting go of thought for the purpose of gaining some utilitarian reward conjured up in your head. If you practice zazen to become healthy, tough, or brave, you are going in an entirely wrong direction.

The saying “gaining is delusion, losing is enlightenment” has very practical value. In our ordinary human life, we are always trying to fulfill our desires. We’re satisfied only when all our desires are met. In Buddhism, though, it’s just the opposite: it is important for us to leave our desires alone, without trying to fulfill them.

Where do we go after death? Nowhere. Life is universal. When we’re born, we come from this universal life. We are all, without exception, universal. Only our brains get caught up in the notion that we are individual. We’re universal whether we think so or not, and reality doesn’t care what we think.

I was amazed when I heard that there are researchers who study the genitals of fleas. Apparently they classify them according to their shape: some form an equilateral triangle, others an isosceles triangle, and still others are flat. They can tell from these distinguishing marks whether a certain flea lives on bears in Alaska, Siberia, or Hokkaido. Their research is very interesting. In any case, it seems that the genitals of fleas are proportionately quite big. I’ll bet there are even parasitic microorganisms that live on the genitals of those fleas.