JIJUYO-ZANMAI

The criterion of the Buddha’s true teaching is a state of being that Master Dogen expressed by quoting five chinese characters. In Japanese they are pronounced JI-JU-YO-ZAN-MAI. JI means the self. JU means to accept. YO means to use. ZANMAI represents the sound of the Sanskrit word samadhi.

Gudo Nishijima has taken a definite view on the meaning of samadhi, identifying it with the homeostatic function of the autonomic nervous system. According to this view, accepting the self corresponds to the function of the parasympathetic nerves, and using the self corresponds to the function of the sympathetic nerves.

Each person is free to make up their own mind about the usefulness to them of this view of Gudo. Some may feel that this view is useful for their Buddhist practice, just as some people feel it is useful in Alexander work to study anatomy and physiology. Later they may come to understand that the original teaching of both Gautama and FM calls upon us to relinquish all such views. Or they may not.

Either way, what one can say is that Gudo Nishijima, because of a lifetime spend reading, thinking about, translating, and lecturing on Shobogenzo, clearly understood the central importance of JIJUYO-ZANMAI in Master Dogen’s teaching. This centrality is not a view; it is the essence of the Buddhist tradition, as Master Dogen endeavored to describe and record it in Shobogenzo. It is just the pursuit of this centrality that requires us to stop holding views, to stop all our holding.

In his original instructions for Zazen, Master Dogen wrote, “When something arises in the mind, just wake up.” The question I have been asking on this blog, mainly of myself, is: What did Master Dogen mean by “just wake up”?

The true answer to this question does not lie in the dictionary, or in any post or comment that we might make on this blog. The true answer might be in the asking of the question itself. The supreme answer might be to ask the question with one’s whole being sitting in full lotus.

So the true answer might be the asking of an open question, or the open asking of a question. At the same time, the answer/question has a criterion for whether its asking is truly open or not. And that criterion is the samadhi of accepting and using the self.

As I have written in previous posts, I have come to see samadhi as having to do with stillness. Stillness in the sense of not, at least momentarily, being disturbed by unconscious reactions.
The habit of holding oneself still, of fixing, is the most pernicious of these unconscious reactions. What I want in Zazen, or what Zazen requires of me, is not this kind of unconsciously held stillness. What is called for is stillness without fixity.

Some bright spark will doubtless comment that I have relinquished one view of samadhi (autonomic balance) only to replace it with another view (stillness without fixity). Maybe that is true, but I haven’t experienced it like that. Rather, my experience has been that, as I have formed one view after another, the combination of Zazen and Alexander work has invited me to recognize every such view as just an impediment to freedom, an impediment that I should drop off.

When one sits in lotus and drops off all views, what is left?
Detachment -- “a bit of nothing.”
The true Dharma teaching itself.
Stillness without fixity.
The Samadhi that is King of Samadhis.

So JIJUYO-ZANMAI means to me something like “stillness (without fixity) in accepting and using the self.”

Accepting the self means accepting the head/spine, torso, arms, and legs, all together. Using the self means using the head/spine, torso, arms and legs, all together.

Waking up in Zazen has to do with not accepting and using the head/spine, torso, arms and legs in a habitual, automatic, instinctive, unconscious, way; and thereby allowing a new, non-habitual, consciously directed acceptance and use of the self.

The habitual way of accepting and using the self is a way that is bound up with old, obsolete views. The new way is the way of relinquishing all views, which is the way of samadhi, of stillness without fixity. To have realized this way is, as FM Alexander expressed it, to have experienced detachment in the basic sense.

Balance of the autonomic nervous system is a new idea in Buddhism, an innovation of Gudo Nishijima. But I do not think that I have expressed above any idea of my own that is new in Buddhism.

I would like to bear witness to the fact that the teaching of FM Alexander caused me to understand that I should not subscribe to any new idea in Buddhism, but should just drop off my own views and opinions about everything.

My first real understanding of this teaching came in the context of Alexander work. Then, when I came across this exact same teaching in the words of Master Nagarjuna, as translated by Michael Luetchford and quoted in Floating Weed’s blog, I was grabbed by them. It is one and the same teaching.

As a Buddhist, I should drop all views, including views whose holding I do not recognize. Because I hold, and am held, like this by views, there is nothing for it but to intend just to sit. Then, in that sitting, when something arises in the mind and I am tempted to react to it, the secret is not to react to it blindly on the basis of my habitual pattern of viewing/holding; but instead to allow something else.

Not to be perturbed by surface movements, be they raging surf of gentle waves; to acknowledge the deeper possibility of something else.