On Dogens Phenomenology of Zazen

(Excerpts are from Zen Action Zen Person by T.P. Kasulis and are commentary on Dogen’s “Zazengi” or Principles of zazen. (Italics will be mine)

      “Once you have adjusted your posture, take a deep breath, inhale and exhale, rock your body right and left and settle into a steady, immobile sitting position. Think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Without thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen.
      The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma-gate of repose and bliss, the cultivation-authentication of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the presence of all things as they are.”
      Though they are not Dogen’s creation, Kasulis writes, “To understand these terms (thinking, not-thinking, without-thinking) is to enter into the heart of Dogen’s thought. So let us attempt to do justice to these ideas by starting with a question presented to him by a student. 'How does one think about not-thinking?' asked the student? To which he replied, 'Without thinking.'"
      “What we call thinking is considering with the intent of weighing ideas.”
      “No-thinking is simply the negation or denial of thinking which would be an act of thinking in an attempt at negating that thinking; an act, the subject of which, is itself."
      “Without-thinking however goes beyond thinking and not-thinking. One may affirm (through thinking) or negate (through not-thinking) the value or relevance of the products of (one’s) ideations…..Yet (without-thinking) implies…accepting the presence of ideation without either affirmation or denial.”
      Kasulis gives us examples.
             Thinking: Includes all that we regard as consciousness, i.e. any mental act or ideation wherein we assume, explicit or implied, a posture toward some entity. The posture may be emotional, judgmental, or real or imaginary, believing or rejecting. In short, all ideational attitudes.
             Not-thinking: In the intentional aspect of not-thinking we attempt to negate, deny, or reject an object of thought. With regard to the present exposition, the intention of not-thinking has itself as object. In other words, not-thinking is a “negating attitude toward” the act of thinking. Although this mode of consciousness might sound esoteric, it is quite common to the man who, having difficulty falling asleep due to thoughts of his girlfriend, takes a deep breath and resolves to make a conscious effort to stop his thinking and make his mind absent of the disrupting thoughts. This effort is an actual mental act: there is not only an intentional attitude but also an object of his intentional not-thinking. There is a process of conceptualization that is the object of his will.
      Dogen rejects the notion that Zen meditation is a form of not-thinking or an effort to make one’s mind blank or stop all conceptual processes. He prefers to characterize the goal of zazen as without-thinking.
            Without-thinking: Without-thinking assumes no intentional attitude; there is no affirmation or denial, there is neither acceptance nor rejection, there is no objectification of any experience.
      Kasulis writes, “Without the objectifying activity of thinking, there is in zazen only the experience of universal flux, the flow of temporal events….If zazen is interrupted however, if reflective thought (thinking or not-thinking) is superimposed onto the experience, temporal categories arise and the realization is lost.”
      Referring again to without-thinking, he goes on to say that, “it is still a mode of consciousness, and through reflection upon a without-thinking act (experience), one may isolate aspects of its formal content. The point….is that at the time of without-thinking’s actual occurrence, those contents were neither affirmed nor negated – they were merely an un-objectified presence without any conscious or unconscious attitude directed toward them. In short, it is a non-conceptual or pre-reflective mode of consciousness." But what do we mean by a “pre-reflective” mode of consciousness? Kasulis offers a clear statement on this very important mode of being in the world. The following excerpt is from Zen Action Zen Person, pg. 75.
      “In ordinary life, pre-reflective experiences are often only fleeting breaks in the continuity of thinking. After mowing the lawn, an exhausted man leans his arm on the lawnmower and rests. For a moment or two, his eyes gaze downward and he thinks and feels nothing specific whatsoever. Since for that moment he is not doing anything, we cannot even say that he is making implicit…. assumptions: for that brief period, it is not even an issue whether the grass, or even he himself, is real. He simply is as-he-is, with no intentional attitude at all. This does not imply however that the experience is devoid of content – even the simplest reflection on that moment would reveal, for example, that he had been gazing on the green of the grass rather than the blue of the sky. Still, the content was not originally an object of consciousness: the grass was there – (however) it assumed meaning – only through reflection on the original experience. In other words, pre-reflectively there had been a continuity of consciousness or awareness even with the lack of intentional directionality. Even though the reflection on the act later revealed a content of which one had been conscious at the time of the act, there was, pre-reflectively, no assumptive, unconscious intentional attitude to constitute that content into a meaning-bearing object.” (Italics are mine)
      I find this paragraph very explicit about the nature of pre-reflective consciousness and it allows me to see why Dogen posits “without-thinking” as being upstream of both thinking and not-thinking in terms of understanding his perspective on zazen, i.e., that it is at once, both the practice and the realization. We also now can see the logic in his seemingly esoteric answer to the student when he said “without thinking.”
      If “without thinking” is the alpha and omega of zazen as he suggests, it stands to reason that it (without-thinking) requires, and can sustain, no enrichment through reflective analysis. Reflective thinking, objectifies – assigns meaning to – the contents of a moment of pre-reflective consciousness, and in so doing, limits it to a specific number of components.
      Initially the pre-reflective experience is complete. It is upon reflection that it seems lacking in some way, and this is due to the nature of objectification. Objectifying is the process of creating boundaries or distinctions that will allow the contents of our “thinking” to fit into prescribed categories. In other words, by retrospectively objectifying the contents of pre-reflective consciousness (without-thinking), we create categories for the “thinking” mode of consciousness and lose sight of the fact that “without-thinking,” -as experienced- makes no judgments, categories, or objectifications at all. The pre-reflective experience (without-thinking) as-it-is, “literally leaves nothing (no thing) to be clarified, analyzed, or enriched.”
      All this would lead us to the notion that “without-thinking” must have some form (an act of objectification in itself however) of its own. Yet this seems to bring us to the other side of a familiar coin - Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form. Without-thinking, initially a pre-reflective wholeness, is made into an object in order to “think” (or talk or write) about it as one particular object among many. Yet the pre-reflective experience is, in-itself, the Emptiness of Zen; oneness.
      In Dogen’s view this is the equivalent of what Buddhism calls “enlightenment,” realization, or Satori. So it is no great leap to understand that when the Master directs his student to “sit without-thinking” he is directing the student to experience the enlightenment, the Buddha Mind, the “realization” to which he is naturally heir. “To practice zazen is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is not a static state of achievement; it is the active undertaking of the (W)ay (as )exemplified in zazen….proper sitting authenticates the enlightenment already there. (Kasulis pg.78 – parentheticals are mine)
      In summary, Dogen argues that proper sitting meditation, in order to realize one’s inherent Buddha-nature, is called Shikantanza, or “just sitting,” wherein the meditator achieves, or rests in, the state of consciousness which is part of everyday mind and herein referred to as without-thinking (pre-reflective mind). “...but reflective thought, insofar as it objectifies and transforms experience into static, inflexible categories, prevents the Buddha-nature from being experienced as it is: as impermanence.” (Kasulis, pg. 82)
      This resonates for me, with other statements that are repeated over and over throughout Zen and Buddhist literature; that enlightenment or realization is not about acquiring something from the outside, but rather by removing the delusory layers of thought that separate us from the nature of our True Mind. I am always reminded of Alexander Pope’s poem where he wrote, “Presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man….”
      In the Zen experience we are asked to delve deeper into the study of self and this is reinforced in Dogen’s oft repeated, “To study Buddhism is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” I read the notion of forgetting the self in this statement, as equivalent to the state of “without-thinking” and its application to our everyday affairs. And by extension the proper study of ourselves is likely to enlighten us to the interconnected nature of ourselves with our world.
      What is it exactly, that severs this interconnection? And if one is able to achieve this pre-reflective, without-thinking state, it seems to me someone might ask, “How do you know when you are there?” But this question about realization asks for an act of objectification which will require one to be removed from without-thinking. A more basic question might be, “How does one know something, the very nature of which, is beyond an act of knowing?” But in asking, we would find ourselves back at page one and our study to proceed once again.