Zen and the Martial Arts: Entering Deeply into Practice

Entering Deeply into Practice

Bodhidharma (a.k.a. Da Mo), first patriarch of Zen*

      “While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life.  The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas.  In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture.  Do not think about anything.  Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything.  Then eventually you will resume your own true nature.  That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.”

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

     In a past blog entry on Zen, martial arts, and building muscle mass, I made a brief mention of entering deeply into practice.  But what does this mean, to “enter deeply into practice”?  First, and for some odd reason this seems to be a point that practitioners are apt to miss, it means that you must have a daily practice that you continue week after week, year after year.  The progress of time becomes almost a ripening, and your practice years later, even though it is in some ways the same as the 1st day, it is also different on the 1,000th day.  In this way, to enter deeply is to mature.  Your punch, your kick, your kata, or your power clean, your squat - they may all look the same (at least to an outsider) on the 1st day as the 1,000th day, but you know the difference.  You feel the difference in the very marrow of your bones.

     To enter deeply into Zen entails that one is also having a daily practice of zazen that continues day in and day out until the days become months and the months become years, and then to allow zazen itself to seep into the cracks of daily living.  Slowly, maybe ever so slowly, zazen practice works its way into the cracks until the whole of life is filled.  First it is filled while sitting, and then it is filled while doing “Zen stuff” such as martial practice and daily lifting, until eventually all of your day - typing at the office, working at the restaurant, laboring on the construction site, cooking dinner, washing dishes, tucking the little ones into bed - is filled with the sap of zazen.

     That is entering deeply into practice within time.  But what about the timeless?  What about the here and now?

     Zazen is also not concerned with time. It has its fruition within the realm of time, that is true, but zazen itself is the simple act of being.  And, yes, perhaps that being is best understood as being now and being here but we must realize that “here” and “now” are also constructs and something that we are adding on to that act of simply to be.  In this understanding, to enter deeply into practice has nothing to do with anything other than the practice while it is being done, and it has no interest in the outcome of the daily practice at some future point where it has suffused all of life.

     The mind must let go and the practice must simply be done.

     This is, in many ways, the essence of zazen, or, at the least, the essence of the practice of zazen.  But it is also - unless the practitioner is only playing at Zen - the essence of martial arts practice, and, thus, the essence of the Zen lifter.

     In this way of understanding, and of practicing, zazen means that for the practice to enter deeply within time it must also enter deeply in that one area of our lives - that only area of our lives - where the timeless meets the realm of time: the present moment.  The first kick, the ten-thousandth kick; these are the same because when they occur they are always occurring, always kicking, in this instance, in the timeless.  The place where doing occurs, where simply being occurs, is in the timeless.  Time is before, time is during, and time has to do with the ripening and the maturing that we have already mentioned.  But the timeless is in the now, and that which is timeless comes out of time and leads to time, occurs both in time and outside of time.

     Perhaps this is one way in which martial arts succeeds, in a sense, better than the act of zazen itself.  In martial arts, you are performing movement, and even though movement has a beginning and an end (and all points in between), it allows the practitioner’s mind to step out of time, being present with the body and with the movement.  Whereas, when sitting zazen, one doesn’t have that luxury.  The zennist is always having to bring that present moment of awareness to non-movement, non-doing.  The realm of the timeless can often seem completely out of reach while on the cushion where your legs itch, your head hurts, your mind races with events of the day, past and present.  However, a certain calm, even if it's calm within time, does occur on the cushion, and it is this placid peace and calm being that is hard to bring into daily life.  But it must be done.

     Here is another quote from Shunryu Suzuki’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

     “Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, "It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.”

     So if we sit on our cushion - following our breath, being with our koan, or simply following Dogen Zenji’s advice (and my first sensei’s) to “think not thinking” while practicing zazen - whatever calmness arises must carry over into our practice of martial arts or of lifting, even when our punch or our lift is a forceful one.  Even then it must be filled with the calm of zazen.

     Even though many more points could be made about entering deeply into practice, I want to make just one more for the sake of the brevity of this post: to enter deeply is to also not have a goal.  So far, it sounds as if I want you to gain something through zazen, however erudite or “spiritual” that gain might be, but this shouldn’t be the case for the true practitioner of either martial arts or zazen.  Taisen Deshimaru (one of the few Soto Zen masters who was also a true practitioner of Budo) once commented: “In the martial arts too, as in Zen, one must be mushotoku, without any goal or desire for profit”.

     This last point can often be the hardest, and not just for beginners but for seasoned practitioners of zazen.  It’s perhaps the hardest for the martial artist who spent years practicing his/her art form but is new to the practice of zazen.  Unless, of course, that martial artist practiced a truly “artless art”, which is rare these days.  And even though it has always been rare, perhaps now it is rarer still.

     The hardest thing for myself, even after years of practicing zazen and martial arts, is to have no goal, to enter deeply into don’t know mind.  But perhaps, just perhaps, when one truly enters deeply into practice, “don’t know mind” simply occurs on its own, and the zennist becomes timelessness itself.

     And perhaps not.

*By Yoshitoshi - 1. en.wikipedia 2. [1], Public Domain