To stop being in relationship with others
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"In the beginning it is natural that we want to understand what is written or what the teacher is saying," Okumura Roshi explained, "but after a certain time, it becomes less important. If we practice with way-seeking mind, we will reach a certain point when we see that because of this desire to attain something, our practice is different from what Uchiyama Roshi is describing." In fact, his sesshin is a space in which we have a very limited opportunity to rely on others. He demonstrated this himself by facing the wall during zazen like everyone else, which was a departure from the usual arrangement in which the head of the temple, as well as a few other practice leaders, faced into the room, keeping an eye on the practitioners as they sat. With no authorities watching, they had to make up their own minds to maintain the posture, keep their eyes open, breathe deeply and open the hand of thought. If they chose instead to sleep, daydream, play with delusions or write stories about themselves, there was no one to stop them. There was no us-and-them, subject-and-object relationship between the people in the zendo. Everyone was alone.
In a way, this style harkens back to Buddhist India, where practitioners did not gather in a sodo to practice but did their sitting in their own huts or hermitages. Likewise, Sawaki Roshi's disciples. including Uchiyama Roshi, carried on their sesshin practice when he wasn't there to keep an eye on them. Uchiyama Roshi felt that the quality of the practice changed and they lost touch with their internal aspiration when they depended on someone or something else to force them to wake up. "Uchiyama Roshi’s idea of sesshin was to be really focused on ourselves, just facing the wall, facing ourselves, and facing the Buddha with no distractions or relationship with the person walking behind or with the teacher watching," recalled Okumura Roshi. "No one helps us to wake up, so we have to make effort, and we have to face ourselves. No one forces us to wake up or even to sit. In our everyday life we define who I am and what I should do in terms of our relationships with others, but during sesshin there are no others, so we are released from this relation between self and others. When we are released, we have responsibility to be alone and wake up." If the teacher is facing the wall and not keeping watch on everyone else, he doesn't give up doing his own zazen for the sake of leading others. He's not in that sort of relationship with them. Likewise, practitioners are not concerned about being watched by someone else, and they are not in a relationship with watchers. All practitioners, from the teacher to the newest beginner, are taking care of their own practice. Uchiyama Roshi's instruction to sesshin participants was that you apply yourself to your own practice regardless of anyone else. Others are not evaluating you, and you are not evaluating others. You are simply practicing alone together. This approach to sesshin is a direct manifestation of Sawaki Roshi's understanding of Dogen's teachings about jijuyu zammai, or the complete functioning of the universe. Sawaki Rochi explained it this way: “Zazen is the self doing itself by itself.” In zazen there is no separation between self and others, or subject and object. Okumura Roshi said that this is an essential point of this kind of sesshin, as well as of our practice of zazen overall. "According to Uchiyama Roshi, our life as a whole from birth to death is the same: self doing the self for the self with the self. Our entire lifetime, from our birth to death, is in a sense one period of zazen." Seeing the sesshin, from the first set of three bells on Day 1 to the last bell on the last day, as one continuous period of zazen is absolutely necessary if we're to understand why our immediate ancestors were so enamored of this unusual form -- and why choosing to break the container is such a hindrance. Uchiyama Roshi pointed out that there are two things that make this kind of sesshin unusual. One is that there is no talking at all, and the other is that the teacher faces the wall. The point of these two elements was to make it more possible for participants to experience becoming what he called “the self that is only the self” (jiko giri no jiko). This is the self we recognize when we awaken from the daydream of "I." Sesshin helps us encounter that self by minimizing our interactions and relationships with others and leaving us alone with our practice. Facing the wall, we are only facing ourselves. We have no choice but to see that no one is compelling us to practice, and no one can do our practice for us. If we can see that in sesshin, we can also realize that we always have to live our own lives, make our own choices, take responsibility for ourselves and walk on our own legs. This is one aspect of the self that is only the self. The other aspect is that of the self that includes everything. There is nothing which is separate from the universal self. As Okumura Roshi has said, "There is no interaction with others, but this self that has no interaction with others includes everything within it. One is the self without relationship to others, and the other is the self which includes everything." During sesshin, when we're not operating in a world governed by our relationships with others, our definition of our selves can drop away. I am not a teacher and you are not a student. I am not a senior citizen and you are not a young person. I am not clergy and you are not a layperson. I am not American and you are not whatever nationality you are. There's no comparison, categorizing and separation going on. If we don't have to put energy into keeping up appearances and perpetuating the fiction of ourselves, even to ourselves, we can rest in this moment and simply be the self that is only the self. Embellishments and images are not necessary. We model practice not by having some idea that we manage our oryoki bowls better than others but by dropping all ideas that that sort of comparison is real. This is what it means to move beyond subject and object, according to Okumura Roshi. "When we are just sitting, without talking, without interacting with anything, we feel that we separate ourselves from the rest of the world and become alone. Is this what Buddhist teachings teach? To live in this way? It is not. When we sit alone and are really by ourselves without any separation or interaction with others, what we find in our zazen is that when object disappears, subject also disappears, because subject is grasped within the relation with others. When object disappears, subject also disappears." Thus the self is completely alone, completely together with all beings, and functioning conventionally in society. |
Realizing the self without relationship to others
(non-reliance) which includes everything (interconnectedness) 
by Tonen O'Connor
When we first read the statement above, our reaction may be that it makes no sense to suggest we can be without relationship to others and simultaneously interconnected. To arrive at an understanding of how this can occur it will be helpful to take a moment to think about what we mean when we use the word "self." The self I commonly recognize is primarily a response mechanism that is in constant relationship to the occurrence of the moment, whether it is someone else's opinion of me, my closely held image of myself, my conceptual formulations or the demands of my physical environment. What we commonly call "I" is a bundle of reflections and never without reliance upon something else for its momentary existence. Kodo Sawaki Roshi, on the other hand, speaks of "the self that is only the self" or "the self selfing the self." This "self that is only the self" is our fundamental self that emerges when we remove the relationships through which we customarily fabricate a "self." The "self selfing the self" is this same fundamental self that creates itself without reliance upon anything else. But how does this somehow create a self that includes everything? The answer is that our everyday self's relationships to others create baggage that piles up as a wall that prevents a connection with the wider world of interconnection. Remove these barriers and the self that appears is the self of interdependence that includes everything. It is through our practice of shikantaza that we realize this interconnected self. We sit facing the wall, which offers nothing we can rely upon, and we open the hand of thought, releasing our reliance upon mental constructions. As we just sit, we gradually become open to our surroundings in a new way, feeling the membrane of thought and reliance on others gradually grow thinner so that we sense ourself as integral to the whole, interconnected with everything. This is why shikantaza is sometimes referred to as the place we feel at home.
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