Dogen and Zazen
An essay I posted soon after I began this website, “Zazen and Enlightenment (What Dogen meant)” proposed a view about what Dogen meant by saying that to sit zazen was to sit in enlightenment. I said that by enlightenment, Dogen meant the state of oneness or unity.
After reading a remark in Heinrich Doumolin’s Enlightenment (Boulder, 2007), I would like to revise my view. Doumolin says that Dogen urged those sitting zazen to “cast off body and mind” (p. 94). Doumolin comments, “The state in which body and mind have been cast off – i.e., in which the ego has completely disappeared from consciousness – is a most exact characterization of the enlightened mind” (p. 92).
So Dogen, following Doumolin, is speaking accurately in saying that sitting in zazen is sitting in enlightenment, enlightenment occurring when a sense of self (mind and body) has left awareness.
To expand a bit, when a zazen practitioner has successfully put thinking aside and is focusing solely on breathing, his or her awareness of self has dropped from his mind, and he is quite literally sitting in enlightenment.
Thanks to Heinrich Doumolin for helping me get Dogen’s meaning straight.