This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Scott Stirling. Original Post: 'The Way of Zazen' online Feed Title: Blaug Blawg Blog Feed URL: http://users.rcn.com/scottstirling/rss.xml Feed Description: Java Testing, Tools and Engineering Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Scott Stirling Latest Posts From Blaug Blawg Blog

I decided to add a Zen category to my blog. This is the first entry. Future entries will probably only be added to the Zen category/page.

Every description of zazen (sitting meditation, the essential practice of Zen Buddhism) is pretty much alike. The Way of Zazen is yet another zazen "HOW TO," but in a nice, free, online reproduction of a translated Japanese text from the early 1960s, which goes into some nice details (as much as any verbal description can) about the relation between physical posture and mind. This is at least as good (and longer and more elaborate) as the description in the first essay of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which was the one that got me started with zazen. I offer it here just as a link to a nice online resource, which happens to be at cuke.com, the Web site of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki.

One element in this essay/booklet (26 pages) by Rindo Fujimoto that I think has been, probably fortunately, lost (or maybe clarified) since then (at least in the "American" Zen tradition since the 1960's) is the emphasis on the left hand, which I suspect is an artifact of bad translation. For example: "shikantaza (14) [. . .] means devoting oneself solely to sitting; by quieting the mind and putting it in the left hand." Basically shikantaza means "just sitting." I don't know where the part about emphasizing the left hand came from. But it appears in several sentences in the essay.

The line later in the essay that seems more "correct" to me and more in keeping with my experience and most other Zen things I've read (Japanese and American) is this: "We should sit in zazen forgetting the mind and the left hand." Yes -- not just the mind and left hand, but pretty much anything you can name.

That there may be a translation flaw seems supported by this line: "There are various ways of 'quieting' the mind. The first way is 'putting the mind In the left hand,' which means projecting the mind into the inzo, or hand position. The inzo symbolizes the Buddha. When our mind is in the inzo, the body and breathing will be right."

As a former Classics major, having translated lots of Latin and Greek, the contexts of "left hand" in phrases like "putting the mind into the left hand" in this essay make me feel more like it's a poorly translated idiom. It might have better to simply say "hand position," referring to the the "universal mudra" in zazen maintained by resting the left hand in the right and touching the tips of the thumbs together, instead of saying "left hand."