By: Bob Zeglovitch
While Dogen describes “nonthinking” as the “essential art of zazen”, it can also be said that “body-mind dropped off” is the practice of shikantaza, or just sitting. In the Fukanzazengi, after Dogen advises learning the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself, he says that “body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.”
The Japanese words for body-mind dropped off are shinjin datsuraku. Shinjin is a compound word for body and mind. You will sometimes see the translation as “body and mind”, although more frequently as “body-mind.” Dogen used this compound to express a unified and holistic phenomenon. Dogen scholar Hee-jin Kim describes body-mind as “one’s whole being.” Additionally we can let go of our sense of the ordinary boundaries of what we take to be “myself” as we express, experience and become intimate with our “whole being.”
Datsuraku is a compound word that is variously translated as dropped off, cast off, sloughed of. One commentator has suggested “shedding”. Steven Heine (another leading Dogen scholar) says that the term refers to the moment of spiritual release or liberation and that it suggests an activity that is at once passive/effortless and yet purposeful/determined. Datsu means to remove, escape, or extract. Raku means to fall, scatter or fade. Heine points out that datsu has a more outwardly active sense, even as it points to a moment of withdrawal from, omission, or termination of activity. Raku implies a passive occurrence that just happens, as in the scattering of leaves by the breeze.
I appreciate this description of the complexity of dropping off, which we might call “the letting go gesture of zazen”. It takes resolve and determination and is not something we can do halfheartedly. In another short text titled Zazengi (“Rules for Zazen”), Dogen tells us: “Be mindful of the passage of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire.” At the same time, it involves doing nothing and yielding, surrendering, acquiescing to our insubstantial and impermanent nature. Heine says that: (1) the decision of datsuraku is one of discarding; (2) its impact is a matter of release, and (3) its immediacy lies in unburdening. We let go of the “I”, the sense of separate self that grasps at itself and the objects of experience.
The dropping of body-mind is not something that is the result of shikantaza practice, as in a before and after causal relationship. Instead, shikantaza/just sitting practice is the ongoing activity of dropping off body-mind. We are not aiming to arrive at some exalted “enlightened” state—it is this subtle activity of dropping itself that is the enlightening. We can approach practice—and enlightenment (which Dogen does not separate from practice)—and ourselves—as a verb rather than a noun.
Of course, just sitting practice won’t always feel like a release, an unburdening, a liberation! We may often be lost, asleep, stuck, or grasping. We can think of these moments not as problems but as opportunities—in Dogen’s words, through “studying the self” and “forgetting the self.” In those moments, we can practice this gesture of release, letting go and dropping off “body-mind.” Relatively speaking, we might perceive a moment of dropping as simply relaxing and releasing a bit from an obsessive train of thought, a critical self-judgment, or a bodily sensation. Or, the dropping may feel more dramatic as a deep ease in the body and spaciousness in the mind manifests. Ultimately speaking, however, there is no need to measure these moments of dropping. The practice is not one of improving—in itself a great relief! Just the dropping gesture itself, and ultimately dropping the concept of dropper and even dropping itself. I recognize that this last line sounds like improvement, and I confess that I don’t have an easy answer for that conundrum.