An Account of the Intensive Zen Practice of the Sesshin Retreat

Tim Pallis

Bulletin of the European Association for Japanese Studies no 21 june 1984

(Presented at the EAJS Third International Studies Conference on Japan at The Hague in September 1982)

One can research the meaning of religious life from many different angles. The religious scriptures of the world can be interpreted philosophically, psychologically, etymologically, sociologically, historically, and so on, but there is one way to treat religion which is rather unscientific, and this is what I would like to treat here. I am, of course, referring to the practice of religion, religious training, so to speak.

The reasons why Zen training is an unscientific type of research are many. First, we have all heard again and again, that Zen cannot be understood through the study of texts and through intellectual pursuits. Second, we can say that Zen is neither to be understood subjectively as an inner psychological experience of any kind nor objectively as knowledge about the external world. Third, Zen is unscientific because the very starting point of scientific research presupposes a dualistic separation between subject and object, inner and outer, real and unreal, dream and reality, being and nothing, irrational and rational etc., and Zen can only be understood when that dualistic split is healed or broken down in Buddhist awakening.

The fourth example of the unscientific nature of Zen Buddhism is a serious one, for the great thing about scientific work is indeed its utterly humble attitude to knowledge. Scientists are usually very careful not to reach a conclusion and postulate anything prematurely. The truth-seeking mind is the noblest attitude we have, and I think everybody will agree, that in the pursuit of knowledge we often have to admit, that what we have thought was a truth has just turned out to be another hypothesis, when new researches unveil as yet unseen aspects of our theme. I short, science does not provide us with one absolute truth, but only with relative and reasonably well-founded truths.

In this context Zen might seem strangely arrogant as the starting point, for its religious practice and research assume the possibility of awakening to an eternal truth. In all the Zen scriptures the Masters are constantly referring to something they variously call the Absolute, the Ultimate, The True Nature, the True Man, the True Buddha Nature of everything. This Buddha Nature is said to be our true destination and our real home and birthright. And strangely enough, even if it is said to be right here and now in the midst of our daily life and in our most trivial activities, it is at the same time said to be unborn and imperishable, unconditional and eternal.

The fifth reason why Zen training is a very peculiar type of unscientific research has to do with the way it seeks the truth, for the Zen Masters have found a practical way to attain knowledge about the true Nature of Reality. The knowledge of truth the Zen student is seeking is, of course, of a different kind from relative scientific knowledge, but it is no less humble than the noblest intellectual attitude of critical truth-seeking.

When I say that it is humble I am alluding to a knowledge that cannot be reached, unless the individual seeker of that knowledge as a personal self has utterly vanished and with him the very distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. Dôgen said in the often quoted passage: To study the Buddha is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. The self Dôgen was talking about is, of course, our individual self-conscious ego, which must be given up or forgotten, and this is a very humble attitude.

Scientific research and truth-seeking are purely intellectual work: Study, analysis, selection, evaluation and formulation of ideas into readable papers. Here mental functions such as interest, curiosity, desire to know, attention and concentration support the intellectual and verbal processes in the scientist's mind. Attention is directed to the mental and verbal streams in the mind in such a way that we can say that the thought-processes are objectified.

Now, in Zen Buddhist psychology all such objectified intellectual processes, including ordinary daily-life thinking and feeling, are called delusive thinking. The only way of thinking, which is not delusive thinking is the constant remembrance of the kôan, namely the question "What is it? What is it? This kôan has to replace all other thinking processes in the mind, not only in intensive training periods like the Zen sesshin, but also as much as possible during daily life and work, if there is any hope of an awakening taking place at all. Common to both intellectual work and kôan work are mental functions such as interest, desire to know, attention and concentration. The most important thing in Zen training is the desire to know, and so the Zen Masters distinguish between two types of kôan work.

The first is the verbal repetition in the trainee's mind of the kôan "What is it? What is it?". But one should be careful not to turn this verbal question into a lifeless repetition without significance, because it is not the repeated formulation or verbalization which brings about awakening, but the desire to know. The verbal question should produce mental intensity and doubt, which give active energy to the kôan. When the trainee's questions in this manner, he must do it so earnestly as he thinks of food when he is hungry, and devotedly as he thinks of his beloved when he is in love. He must stare piercingly at the kôan, as a cat keeps its eyes on a mouse hole, waiting for the mouse to show up.

If he works untiringly in this way over a long period of time, he will come to the second type of kôan work, where the verbalization of the question will fade away, and the formless desire to know remains as a great doubt mass. This is the condition we hear so much about in Rinzai Zen training. The meditator has extinguished all thoughts and has become one with the desire to know. He is now one great question himself, he is the very kôan, and the mental intensity is so strong that he perspires all over his body. Concentration and quest become, during meditation, focused to a point, and he will feel as if he is clad in heavy armour. This is called "silver mountain and iron cliffs".

As he becomes entirely one with this condition and forgets himself and his surrounding when he sits down on his seat, the day and the night will pass like a second. The body will become light, as if it is floating in space, and he will not know whether the world exists or not. He is now in the condition of deep samadhi, like a cold incense burner in a forgotten temple, but the absorbed mind is pure and clear like fresh water. Even if he appears to be both deaf and dumb his mind is light and happy, vivid and quiesent and everything will be very bright.

But this is not awakening. Awakening takes place as an explosion or as a mental earthquake. As Sôhaku Kobori of Daitokuji formulates it: At the moment when human consciousness, having gradually submerged into the ocean of the cosmic unconsiousness, suddenly rises up to the surface of that consciousness, it cuts into the level of normal consciousness again. Here Zen declares that it is human consciousness awakened to the original nature: Satori or enlightenment. Awakening is therefore the regaining of consciousness after having once "gone through" the cosmic unconsciousness. It is breaking through the abyss of unconscious samadhi. (1)

Now, the Zen sesshin, as a 7-day retreat into intensive work on the kôan, is an opportunity for the Zen student to become one with his personal existential dilemma expressed as the great doubt mass and become awakened to his True Nature, which is the same as everything else's True Buddha Nature. The retreat is a very well organized seclusion from ordinary life for the purpose of doing zazen alone in the midst of a like-minded community of fellow sitters. It is the most important part of the Zen training, the essence of practice and a great challenge to the trainee's physical and psychological staying power, without which there can be no attainment of Buddhist enlightenment. The Japanese word sesshin can be translated in different ways: to collect one's mind. It is to bring something together and to unify it in the mind.

The 7-day sesshin seclusion is a living reiteration of the 7 days it took Sakyamuni sitting under the Bo tree at Bodh-Gaya to awaken to his Original Nature and become a living Buddha. He had learned to master the most efficient meditation technique from the best teachers, but was still not clarified. One day he decided to give up the useless starvation of his body and began to eat again. When he had recovered and regained his strength, he sat down in the shadow of a big fig tree and wowed not to get up before he had seen that, which he was seeking. He must at that time have been so skilled and experienced in meditation, that he knew that if he could just become one with his desire to know the truth, there would be a basis for realization or an opportunity for an awakening to take place.

The task was indeed heroic, because he put himself in a situation of no-return, confronting the annihilation of his self consciousness. To solve the first kôan one must be in a disparate situation, with no way out. There is just one thing one must do, and that is to ask and ask until one reaches the bottom. Then all of a sudden, when the bottom is broken through, one will realize what it really is and who the Buddha is.

When Sakyamuni sat down under the Bo tree he knew very well, that up til then he had always been conscious, that the desire to know was in his mind. But as long as he was conscious of that quest, it meant that he was separate from it; and that is not the proper basis for awakening. But towards the end of his solitary sesshin, he ceased to be conscious of the kôan. This condition is the state of mind called samadhi or cosmic unconscious. But it is still not enough, one must come out of that state, be awakened from it, break through it, so to speak. The moment of coming out of cosmic unconscious and seeing it for what it is - that was the Buddha's great enlightenment. On the morning of the 7th day he awoke from his deep samadhi by seeing the light of the planet Venus, and he suddenly regained the reflective activity of his ordinary consciousness and became a living Buddha.

This is the meaning and background of the 7-day sesshin retreat. Zazen, sitting in meditation and working on a kôan, is the most severe part af Zen training. Other aspects of the training are Kinhin: walking meditation; eating meditation; samu: manual work meditation; sûtra-chanting meditation and going to Sanzen, an interview with the master. The reason for my calling all these activities meditation is, that it has always been emphasized that there is only one meditation. All activities are the same meditation, because the kôan has to be remembered in all circumstances. One could even speak of sleeping meditation, for if the kôan is deeply encoded in the mind, one will also be working on it unconsciously during sleep.

I the above, I have been explaining that part of the zazen practice which could be called mental concentration or kôan work, but before one can investigate a kôan in a proper way, one would have to pay considerable attention to physical concentration or breath control. The most suitable physical position for doing zazen is full lotus posture, sitting on a not-too-soft cushion on a flat, thick quilt like pad with the right foot on the left thigh and the left foot on the right thigh.

The first thing one has to learn in doing zazen is to stretch the back. The waist must be put forward so that the weight of the body is concentrated in the lower abdomen. The knees should rest firmly on the quilt like pad. This position will in turn push the lower abdomen forward and at the same time throw the buttocks backward. Tension and pressure should be kept in the lower part of the abdomen all the time; in due time it will bring about both physical and mental stability.

The abdominal muscles control both inspiration and expiration in that position, and one might discover the strange fact, that both inspiration and expiration in zazen will make the belly swell. In this grounded zazen posture one must learn little by little how to oppose the contraction of the abdominal muscles by the diaphram during expiration by withholding the breath and expiring slowly, gradually, pushing just a little bit of air out at a time in a rhytmic wavelike fashion until the breath nearly stops. In this way it is possible to direct all one's strength into the lower belly.

This technique is the classical Japanese belly breathing technique to which Hakuin Zenji attributed so much importance. It is not easy to learn in the correct way and much more difficult to maintain for hours during sesshins. But once it is learned, it is the best way to control physical and mental pain, sleepiness and wandering thoughts.

The sesshin retreat is a veritable battlefield and the enemies are: pain in the knees and ankles, the mental pain of sitting still for many hours without being allowed to move an inch, the mental pain of boredom, the agony of not knowing and not being able to do zazen the way one wishes to, the heavy and irresistible inclination to doze off during zazen, and the frustration of not being able to focus exclusively on the kôan all the time, but being unconsciously pulled out of a good and blissful concentration and carried into a stream of wandering thoughts.

The only effective sword against these mighty enemies is the development of a strong Ki, the power of motivation radiating from the center of one's being, which is called Tanden, the area a few inches below the navel. The Zen trainee learns to make use of this power in his effort to link physical concentration to mental concentration, whenever he discovers that his attention is being stolen away by the enemies trying to disturb his meditation.

Naturally all this takes years of training, and many sesshins must be devoted to developing strong staying power and endless patience for the single purpose of evoking a constant wish to know the True Nature of oneself and of everything else. But through daily practice and occasional sesshins one will be very much stimulated by a delightful feeling of inner peace and strength, which fills one's entire being in the midst of the active physical and mental work one is doing.

Little by little, there awakens a joyful og subtle feeling, so that in the meditative presence the combined work of breath control an kôan toil becomes one single activity to such an extent, that this existence, consciousness, breath, and the desire to know is one focused point of awareness. When in time the physical and mental concentration deepen mutually, one's total organism will become one single eye-and-quest, and the condition for an awakening is then ripe.

The organization of a sesshin for modern lay people is naturally modeled in keeping with the monastic sesshin for the sole reason, that hundreds of years of tradition have created a model which is extremely direct, practical and supportive for the participants. Only minor changes are usually introduced to adapt to different cultural situations in time and place.

There is one golden rule that is important to follow very strictly during a sesshin, and that is: absolutely no communication of any kind between the participants. For 7 days this fertile silence has to reign in the meditation hall and create a tight space of consciousness. The leader of the meditation schedule will do his best even to create a pressure-cooker atmosphere with thunderous shouts in the silence: "Don't move!", "Silence!".

A sesshin is expected to be a hard-driving attack on reality which spares nothing to push the trainee through the barrier of his kôan. A loose and relaxed atmosphere is not supportive for the sitters, because they have to produce inner ki and mental intensity to fight against the power of the enemies, which have the tendency to take over in a relaxed spiritual atmosphere.

The second rule is not to look around in the hall, not to look at anybody, not to see anything but the kôan and one's existence-breath-awareness. Even brief eye contact between the sitters is not welcome. The repetitive and boring physical strain and mental stress of the sesshin, the tough reality of it, very soon take care of any illusion and visionary daydreams about great yogic powers and attainments among romantically inclined sitters. The intensive zazen practice of the sesshin brings everybody down to earth. It is hard work.

For most Zen students the first sesshin is a rather painful experience, but it is not self-torture, because there is time for beginners to skip a period of zazen now and then, and permission to let a foot slide down quietly from the thigh onto the pad if the pain is too much. In some sesshins it is even allowed to stand up for a while, until one is ready to continue zazen again. There is plenty of time to find out how far one can push oneself, and it is surprising to learn how much one can actually take. Very soon one will find out that there is a certain plateau of suffering that does not increase, and one discovers that one can accept that level of pain.

I remember a amusing episode on the fourth day of my first sesshin. The last sitting period had been 15 minutes longer than most of the people could take. When the signal to end the sitting finally came, and we unlocked our legs and could breathe a sign of relief, the atmosphere in the meditation hall was at a breaking point. Nobody could immediately arise from his seat, and it looked very comic and ridiculous to see people crawling down from their seats like self-made cripples trying to hide a painful grimace. I couldn't suppress a chuckle halfway between laughing and crying. Luckily it was contagious, and suddenly we all bust out in such a liberating fit of laughter that tears flowed. From a more serious point it was a rather unrestrained reaction, but there was nothing to be done about it. The balloon exploded, and we tumbled down to the dining room for the hot noodles which are a tradition at the end of the fourth day of a sesshin.

The jikijitsu or the leader of the meditation schedule is the tiger of the meditation hall. As the most experienced sitter, he is in charge of all the routine announcements during the entire sesshin. He announces the beginning and the end of every activity by signals from wooden clappers and a bell. The course of events is repeated over and over again, so there is no doubts about what will happen next.

The meditation hall is used for both sleeping, eating, and sitting. Everybody gets up at four o'clock in the morning, packs up their sleeping gear and washes, and the day starts with tree prostrations and thirty minutes of sûtra chanting. Then follow four periods of early morning zazen, each period lasting thirty minutes with five- or ten-minute breaks in between. The ten-minute break is used for walking meditation, called kinhin. Then is time for breakfast. followed by the cleaning of the meditation hall and its surrounding and a short rest.

At nine o'clock starts the next block of meditation, made up by five periods of zazen. During these periods there is an opportunity for everyone to meet the Master one by one in the sanzen room for a short interview about one's practice. Afterwards lunch is served in the hall, and then there is one hour of rest. When everybody has gathered in the meditation hall again for the afternoon training, the Master enters to give his taisho, which is not just a lecture, but a presentation of the Buddha Dharma and an admonition to the sitters to do their best and to work hard on the kôan.

The afternoon zazen starts right after: five long periods during which you fight with the goddess of drowsiness. The sanzen meeting with the Master during this period makes one wide awake again and very energetic, so that the last part of the afternoon meditation is beaming with ki. It is now dinner time, served as before in the hall and followed by an hour of rest. At seven o'clock the evening zazen begins, another block of five periods of rough and exhausting sitting. At ten o'clock the light is switched off and everybody retires. But not the real fanatics; they quietly slip outside the meditation hall to some place where they can sit for another couple of hours for the sake for the dharma.

Once in a while during the zazen period the jikijitsu gets up from his seat and walks noiselessly around along the line of sitters with the keisaku on his shoulder to check the postures and correct details. The keisaku or the waking switch is a one-meter-long flat stick used to beat the monks on the muscles of either shoulder or the back. Formerly in Chinese or Japanese monasteries it was used as a punishment, but nowadays it is used only to help a sitter to wake up, to stimulate attention, and to loosen the tight muscles of the neck, shoulder and back.

I like to bring home the fact, that to get a hiding from the keisaku is really a great help on the battlefield of zazen training. It is only painful at the moment of beating, and afterwards it gives a very pleasurable and invigorating stream of sensation through one's entire organism. It raises the ki immediately and revives one's strength to concentrate better on the kôan. In the monastic sesshin the monks will involuntarily get a hiding now and then, but in most sesshins for lay people they are beaten only when they request it. From a pure Zen point of view, there is actually nobody who beats and nobody who gets beaten. but this is an awakened understanding. There is absolutely no personal animosity between the beater and the beaten, which is why they bow deeply for each other's common Buddha Nature before and after the four smacks on each shoulder.

I would like to end this account of the sesshin training with an impression of a very meaningful ritual, which reveals Zen Buddhist culture from its most aesthetic and practical side. I am thinking of the ôryôki tradition, the way of taking a meal with a set of three bowls in the meditation hall and moreover doing the washing-up right where you are sitting. The three bowls lie nestled one inside the other with a linen dishcloth and chopsticks. The whole is covered by a final cloth, which, when unfolded, forms the base on which the three bowls are set.

The meal begins with an offering to the Buddha on the shrine. Food is then served down the line twice and usually consist of a clean, fat free vegetarian diet: miso soup, rice and vegetables, eaten with mindfulness, in silence and speedy. Then the servers enter with the tea, which is used to clean the empty bowels. The bowl-cleaning tea is passed from one bowl to the other, cleansing each in turn, and finally drunk or poured into a bucket. Then the bowls are dried with the dishcloth and replaced inside each other, the linen cloth refolded and laid on top together with the chopsticks, and the outer cloth retied.

This little ritual is quick, practical and simple. It is a ceremony in which the ordinary act of eating, stripped down to its bare essentials, becomes meditation. Very often Zen students leave their first sesshin with the impression that the most important thing they have learned during the sesshin is how to eat and do the dishes in a deeply satisfying and simple manner.

(1) Sôhaku Kobori, The Enlightened Thought", The Eastern Buddhist, vol II no.1 (August 1967, In Memoriam Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, 1870-1966) p. 102.