Twisty Sitting & Shobogenzo Katto.

There's a nice clip of Nishijima Roshi being questioned about shikantaza over on Gustav's blog.
He talks briefly about how sitting is perfect as it is and how the aim of sitting is just to sit.

Simple, but not always easy in the doing of it maybe.

We are rather complicated beings in a rather complicated situation you see. Master Dogen acknowledges this in many places but particularly in a chapter of Shobogenzo called Katto. He there uses the traditional image of entangled vines to explain the complicated-ness of reality, of our lives.

The image of entangled vines was broadly used to describe something that was too complicated, convoluted or unclear (such as a complex teaching), but, as we might expect at this stage, Master Dogen saw it a bit differently. He seemed to consider that such complications can also be the direct cause of the realisation of complications as what they really are; that we must engage complication, both teachings and acting in the actual complicated real situation, to realise that every twist and turn is IT... and/or WHAT?

This is a view unhindered by, and comfortably at home in, the entangled vines of this big overgrown patch of the garden. It's the view of zazen, of dynamic sitting and non-thinking actualised.

Countless entangled vines result in this life and are nothing other than the very stuff of it, and so I'm not sure that going at them with a machete is such a good idea even if we sometimes allow 'em to wreak a bit of their twisty weedy havoc!

Regards,

Harry.