West
西
Don’t just sit there—
do something!
East
東
Don’t just do something—
sit there!
Buddhism can lay claim to what may well be the longest ongoing experiment in the history of humanity. I refer to the practice developed by Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. And what was that practice?
Zazen, or seated meditation.
坐禪
After trying, without success, everything the spirituality of his time had to offer, he streamlined his practice and simply sat in meditation under the Bodhi Tree until he experienced enlightenment upon seeing the morning star. On that momentous morning, there awakened a Buddha—a threshold had been crossed and, with the crossing, a revolutionary breakthrough in the evolution of consciousness.
Zazen is a cognitive tool or technology—an interior technology on the spiritual quest just as a telescope, for the astronomer, is an external technology. Both reveal realities that the “naked eye” cannot see. With a telescope, the rings of Saturn become visible; with a profound interior technology, one can, with poet Henry Vaughn, see “eternity . . . like a great ring of pure and endless light.”
And so Siddhartha’s invention, an invention that has transformed countless lives over more than 25 centuries, stands as one of the greatest inventions of all time.
Sometime in the twelfth century, a Zen master named Hongzhi wrote a poem to zazen that ends with these lines:
The water is clear to the bottom;
a fish is swimming slowly, slowly.
The sky is infinitely vast;
a bird is flying far, far away.
水清徹底兮。
魚行遲遲。
空闊莫涯兮。
鳥飛杳杳。