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Dharmette: Harmony of Zen and Vipassana (2 of 5) The Dharma's Body

So one of the surprises and treasures of practicing Buddhism for me has been a growing—and still growing—delighting or valuing the body, the experience of the body. And there's a difference between the body and the experience of the body. I think at the heart of what is most significant for Dharma practitioners is the experience of the body more than the body itself. And it's hard to separate out these two things: the body and the experience of it. But this is at the center of the tremendous appreciation that the Buddha and much of Buddhism has with being really centered or connected to one's body. It's not the body as a physical object, as a physical thing, but rather the experience the body has of itself. And we see in the ancient teachings of the Buddha that he used at times different words if he was referring to the physical body in and of itself, or the experienced body, the body that we can experience.

So the physical body, one of the words for this physical body in ancient languages is sarira^[3]—and in Sanskrit, it's sharira. It's often translated into English as a relic, a relic of someone who's died, and that bone or some kind of little something left over from the cremation. And it's a long custom in different schools of Buddhism to save these relics and maybe put them on the altar. And sometimes the word sharira is used actually to refer to a corpse. But what it refers to also for a living person is the physical, the pure physical body itself. The word that's used for, especially in meditation practice, that's used for body is kaya^[4]. And people who do Zen practice know this word because it's often chanted. There's nirmanakaya, the sambhogakaya^[5], and this word kaya. In the earliest teachings when it's talking about the meditator, it refers to the body as it's experienced. And how we experience the body is partly dependent on the state of our mind. And this is a fascinating part of being a meditator, is to feel how the state of the mind changes, and the experience of the body changes. And sometimes even the posture will change, depending on how concentrated the mind becomes, how focused and still and quiet. And the mind stops becoming claustrophobic and caught up in its thinking and thoughts, but becomes spacious and open and more quiet and soft. It can have a huge transformation in how we experience the body.

And the experienced body too, it often becomes soft and transparent, or very soft boundaries, or no boundaries at all. And even sometimes the feeling of the body can disappear entirely in meditation. And I've actually opened my eyes in meditation to see if the physical body was still there, because with the eyes closed, there was no evidence of it. The mind was so still and so quiet.

And this interplay between the mind and the body is so intimate that in Buddhism, there's a tendency not to make a strong duality between the mind and the body, but to see them kind of as a unified whole. And one of the places that unified whole plays out is that emphasis on being present for the body's experience of itself, an experience which is conditioned on the state of the mind. And of course, it goes the other direction as well, that the state of the body affects the mind. If we're in a lot of pain, that can have a big impact on the mind. We can get contracted, we can get caught up in certain thoughts and judgments and fears and projections and all kinds of things. But it's not necessarily so.

And one of the great lessons I had from sitting Zazen^[6] at Zen Center where I wasn't supposed to move, I would have a lot of knee pain. And I noticed after a while that the pain actually got worse if I had self-pity for myself. I think what was happening was these little micro-muscles would tighten up when I had the self-pity, and the only way that I could manage with the pain was if I let go of my self-pity. And then these micro-muscles would relax, and then the pain was manageable. And I found that the less I got caught up in my thoughts and my reactivity in my mind and my projections into the future about what this all meant, that the pain in and of itself got simpler and simpler and simpler. And to have a simplicity of physical pain without the add-on of reactivity showed me how much the experience of pain was a product of the state and activity of my mind. Not all of it, of course, and the Buddha himself said that when there's extreme pain, then it's the pain of the sarira, the pain of the corpse, of the pure physical body. But many times these two are real. The mind and the body have such a big interplay with what we experience as pain and discomfort and all kinds of things in the body.

And so one of the things we do in Vipassana practice is learn to center ourselves in the body, to really allow ourselves to experience it, and the body's experience of itself. And as we do so, it has an impact back on the mind because these two are so closely related, and it has a huge impact on the mind. In fact, the conditioning and the shifting and changing of the bodily experience is a reconditioning of the neurotic mind or the fearful mind or the traumatized mind even. And so to begin to soften and relax.

So the Buddha was very explicit about this. He talked about cultivating a mindfulness of the whole body. Opening up, becoming aware of the whole body, not just the body that's breathing, but the whole body, kind of like a global experience of this body's experience of itself. And a global experience is one where the mind is not contracting or fixating on any particular thing or creating a boundary to the body, but just kind of open to experience it all. The Buddha also talked about, as the mind does get settled and concentrated, that if there's any feelings of well-being that well up, feelings of joy and happiness, to take and spread that throughout the body, and allow those feelings to spread. And so the experience of the body begins shifting dramatically, and I think this is partly in Mahayana^[7] what's being referred to in the three bodies of the Buddha, that there are three different ways of experiencing the body depending on what's happening in the mind and the mind state that we have.

And it becomes such a delight, such a joy, to rest and experience these kinds of bodies. The body becomes freer and freer, a liberated body. There is an ancient Mahayana Sutra^[8] that emphasizes that liberation doesn't happen in the mind; it happens in the body. That the awakening is an embodied experience more than a mental experience. But in fact, what we know now is that you can't really separate these two, the mind and the body.

So in Vipassana practice, there are many ways in which the mindfulness of the body is practiced, but one of the ways is to bring the kind of attention that I suggested to you in that exercise with the hand, to bring that to whatever is the compelling physical experience of the moment. If there's some predominantly compelling experience in the body, either pleasant or unpleasant, that's more compelling than the breathing, then it's fine to let go of the breathing, not keep that focus, but bring the same kind of careful attention, careful kind of sensing and feeling, into that part of the body that has these strong sensations. And what happens is, over time, different parts of the body will speak up and show itself. And it's kind of like doing bodywork over months and years, and by bringing this careful attention—just opening the attention, open, allowing the sensations to be there, not reacting, not forcing them, not spending too much time relaxing around it either, just feeling and sensing—slowly the body begins to wake up and become more aware and more sensate, a sentient body, as opposed to a conceived body, a body that we're thinking about. So much of our physical self-consciousness has to do with ideas and images about what the body should be like or can be like, and comparison of my body with other people's bodies. And there can be so much pain that goes on in our society around body and skin color and all kinds of things having to do with the body. And meditation is one of the ways to free ourselves, at least personally, from all these ideas, comparative thinking, and concepts, and allowing the awareness of the body to arise from the inside out. And we find out the body is much happier than often we are, much more content when it flows, and we have the experience from the inside out.

So mindfulness of the body is the body's awareness. And one of the things in meditation practice is to learn to abide or rest in that experience of the body. And when it's the most compelling part of it, or the center of it, we can stay with the breathing because it's an embodied experience to breathe and breathe with all things. Breathe with the body, all of the body.

So I hope this made some sense, and I hope it also points to one of the places where Zen and Vipassana overlap in some ways: this emphasis on body and the importance of it in the practice, and in the kaya, and maybe what we can call our own dharmakaya^[9]. So thank you all very much.