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"

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