Zazen and Self-Trust

Zazen is extraordinary in working almost entirely by itself. No agency is required of the practitioner other than shifting from distracting thought back onto breathing.

I remember years ago when I was listening to a talk by Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center. After speaking of the Buddhist idea that the world was proceeding toward enlightenment, he was asked whether there was indeed a teleology in the universe that would eventually wake everyone up. Reb, of course, said “Yes.”

If this awakening direction is part of the universe, it is too vast a process to require anyone’s intervention. It seems to me that the same is true of zazen. The changes it is causing in a practitioner, and the rate of them, are not affected by any intention to shape them on the practitioner’s part. Zazen is a process that needs to be let alone. The practitioner just needs to accept wherever it is going.

So is one going in the right direction? To think “yes” requires trust in the basic goodness of oneself. A particular book of Chogyam Trungpa’s talks is helpful and inspiring concerning this issue of basic goodness. In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Trungpa says, “Basic goodness is what we have, what we are provided with. It is the natural situation that we have inherited from birth onwards.”[1]

So in zazen, and in the inner life that stems from it, it is best not to try to push or pull for any particular outcome, but just to trust in oneself and to trust that, of itself, the process is going in the right direction. In any event, this is the advice that I give myself.