My late Master, the Olden Buddha, said: "Zen practice is body and mind dropping off, and just sitting has got it from the beginning. It is not necessary to burn incense, to perform prostrations, to contemplate the Buddha, to practise confession, or to read sutras."
Clearly, the one who has gouged out the Eye of the Buddha-Ancestor and sat inside the Eye of the Buddha-Ancestor, for the past four or five hundred years, is my late Master alone. Few in China have matched shoulders with him.
Rarely has it been clarified that sitting is the Buddha-Dharma and that the Buddha-Dharma is sitting. Even if some understand with their bodies that sitting is the Buddha-Dharma, no-one has known sitting as sitting. How then can there be any who let the Buddha-Dharma be the Buddha-Dharma?
So then, there is mental sitting as opposed to physical sitting. There is physical sitting as opposed to mental sitting. And there is sitting as body and mind dropping off, as opposed to sitting as body and mind dropping off.
Actually to have got what sounds like this is the practice and the understanding of the buddha-ancestors, in mutual accord.
Allow this awareness, this thinking, this reflection.
Investigate this mind, this intention, this consciousness.
Translated off the top of a demon's head on the morning of 22nd April.
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I would like to recognize the role of Gudo Nishijima in the above translation. The role of Gudo Nishijima has been to obstruct this translation, to prevent it from emerging, to get in its way, by (1) upholding and narcissistically attaching to his irrelevant theory of the autonomic nervous system, and, as a consequence of this narcissistic behaviour, (2) turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the discoveries of FM Alexander in regard to mental sitting, as opposed to physical sitting.
A demon translator cannot add to what is already perfectly expressed in the words of olden golden buddhas, but, if he understands it, then he can translate it, off the top of a demon's head, from a foreign language just straight into his own language. That is what I have just done.
If thus the marrow is knocked from an old bastard's bones, so be it.
Love me or hate me, I am the ONLY ONE for 750 years who has clearly understood what Master Dogen is saying in the above paragraph. I say that in the knowledge that there is no sitting-zen master who has understood the existence of mental sitting, as opposed to physical sitting.
There are those like Gudo who practise physical sitting as opposed to mental sitting, and there are those who practise, while seated, mental meditation. But there is none who practises mental sitting as opposed to physical sitting. How then can there be any who understands the true meaning of sitting as body and mind dropping off?
It is because Kodo Sawaki was not able to clarify the true meaning of the above paragraph that the wrong teaching of pulling in the chin has been transmitted by his disciples, like Taisen Deshimaru, by his non-disciples, like Gudo Nishijima, and by his grandchilden, like Issho Fujita -- who, as recently as 2005 still was evidently of the view that FM Alexander invented some kind of bodywork.
http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/documents/v24InsightJournalSpring2005.pdf
It is because Gudo Nishijima was not able to clarify the true meaning of the above paragraph that he violated the Dharma in 1997, breaking the "fifty-fifty" rule that he proposed to me, and poisoning our translation partnership. See you in hell, you old bastard.
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