Skip to main content

Zen and the Martial Arts: Zazen as Physical Practice

 

Zen Master Kodo Sawaki (known affectionately as "Homeless Kodo") sitting Zazen*



Zen and the martial arts have a complex history.  And it is one that is (a) almost completely misunderstood by all martial artists, especially practitioners of the Japanese martial arts who seem to talk about it the most but also seem to understand it the least, and (b) not even understood at all by the modern "zennist".**


In this short little post, I'm not going to get into all of the reasons both A and B above are true, but simply want to express how similar both Zen and the Japanese martial arts are, and maybe this will give a good reason for the budo-ka to take up zazen, and while I expect even less zennists to take up budo, it does help for him/her to understand the martial arts better.


Zazen is a physical practice.  It's at least as much a physical practice as it is a mental one.  I think this is vastly - and I do mean vastly - overlooked by most people, even practitioners of Buddhism, and, yes, even zennists themselves!


As a teenager, I knew this only because I was first taught to sit zazen while in the karate dojo of my youth.  We would sit zazen for the last ten minutes of class.  You may not think that is very long, but we were often covered in sweat from a hard hour and a half workout, and not only were we sweaty, but our muscles often ached (from head to toe nonetheless) in quite a bit of pain.  On top of this, my sensei expected for our spines to remain in proper alignment for the entire 10 minutes of sitting.  And then, even though he would talk about mushin or "no-mind", you knew it was a physical practice just from how painful it could often be.  Now, in addition to the very physical nature of the brief sitting we karate-kas endured, we also intuited Zen to be a physical practice because it was seen as a very extension of the martial arts practice we had just trained in.  In other words, it was part and parcel of all the physical training.  It was of one whole as the rest of the class, not something just set aside for the very end of the training. It was physical training.


In Zen author Brad Warner's book "Don't be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master", Warner briefly discusses Dogen's "FUKANZAZENGI" or "The Universal Guide to the Standard Method of Zazen" (damn, wasn't that a mouthful), Warner has this to say about the physical nature of Zen:

     One of the most important messages of this chapter is that zazen is a physical practice as much as it is a mental one.  He (Dogen) calls it "the vigorous road of getting the body out."  It seems that in Dogen's time, just like in ours, people thought meditation was something that happened with the mind and that what you did with your body while meditating was arbitrary or unimportant.

     But Dogen spends much of this chapter describing in detail the physical practice of zazen and comparatively little what to do mentally.  When I teach zazen I often tell people that it's kind of like a yoga class where there is only one posture and you hold it for a very long time.***


If practiced in this manner, it's easier to understand the physical nature of zazen!



*from the public domain on Wikipedia

**I'm using the term "zennist" instead of Buddhist because I think the practice of zazen is of a "universal" nature, and can be practiced by anyone regardless of belief (or lack therof).

***From chapter 2 of Warner's book "Don't be a Jerk" entitled "How to Sit Down and Shut Up"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

Movements Over Muscles

Muscle-Building Tips and Advice for the Natural Bodybuilder      In my last essay on how to gain mass fast, I mentioned that the secret just might be getting stronger on a handful of exercises.   (This essay, I suppose, is just an extension of that last one.)   In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m right.   If you’re a natural bodybuilder, then the one thing more important than any other is to get strong on a dozen or so exercises, with your strength-focus in roughly the 5 to 10 rep range.      One approach is to achieve this is to focus on movements over muscles .   In other words, instead of going to the gym and “obliterating” or “destroying” (why do bodybuilders always seem to use military-sounding jargon for a lot of their training) your quad muscles with endless sets of leg extensions, leg presses, and machine whatever, how about just trying to get stronger on the squat?   Same goes for the...

Classic Bodybuilding: Don Howorth's Massive Delt Training

Don Howorth's Formula for Wide, Massive Shoulders Vintage picture of Don Howorth in competition shape. I can't remember the first time I laid eyes on Howorth's massive physique with those absolutely friggin' awesomely shaped "cannonball" shoulders of his, but it was probably sometime in the late '80s and early '90s, when I read about him in either IronMan Magazine  or MuscleMag International .  IronMan  had regular "Mass from the Past" articles written by Gene Mozee that had a couple of articles about Howorth's training*, and he was also mentioned fairly regularly in Vince Gironda's column for MuscleMag  not to mention in some of the articles of Greg Zulak for the same publication. There is no doubt that genetics played a big role in just how fantastic Howorth's delts looked, but to claim Howorth's results were just because of genetics or anabolic steroids - as I've read claimed on some internet forums - is a l...