Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Around early 6th century CE a strange Buddhist monk came to China from South India. Unlike other visiting monks, he did not bring any new Buddhist scriptures or commentaries. He did not translate nor give lectures on Buddhist scriptures, either. He did nothing that could be called “missionary work.” What he did was just sit all day long facing the wall in a room at Shaolin temple. So people gave him a nickname, “wall- gazing Brahman” (an Indian monk who indulged in meditation facing the wall). This monk was Bodhidharma who is now revered as the “First Ancestor of Zen”. 

Except for his own disciples (small in number), very few could understand the true meaning of what he was doing by facing the wall. For example, a famous Buddhist scholar-monk, Nanzan Dousen (Tang dynasty, a founder of Nanzan Vinaya School), classified Bodhidharma in a shuzen section when he complied The Sequel of Biography of Eminent Monks. That implies that Dousen thought of Bodhidharma as a shuzen practitioner, one who engaged in meditation to attain a special state of mind called “dhyana” (Skt.; Jhana, Pali). But Dogen criticized Dousen, saying that such an understanding is completely wrong and irrelevant because zazen encompasses the whole Buddha Dharma, not a part of it. In Shobogenzo Gyoji he wrote, “This was the utmost stupidity, which is lamentable.” According to Dogen, the sitting zazen facing the wall that Bodhidharma practiced in silence is totally different from what had been practiced as zazen to train (shu) a meditative state of dhyana (zen). What Bodhidharma did was authentic zazen, which had been correctly transmitted through generations of ancestors from Shakyamuni. “The ancestral teacher (Bodhidharma) alone embodied the treasury of the true dharma eye transmitted from buddha to buddha, from heir to heir”. Zazen is not a training of dhyana (shuzen) which is one genre of Buddhist practice, like the Three Studies (sila, samadhi, prajna) or Six Paramitas (dana, sila, kshanti, virya, dhyana, prajna) . It is a quite different practice from zazen. In other word shuzen is a personal training to achieve a human ideal (small vehicle, hinayana) and zazen is an expression of something transpersonal or universal (great vehicle, mahayana). 

I believe that it is crucially important for us as zazen practitioners to distinguish zazen as the entirety of Buddha Dharma from shuzen as one genre of it, even though these two practices look similar at a glance. We should avoid confusing them. That is why Dogen repeatedly emphasized this point (zazen is not shuzen) in his writings (Fukanzazengi, Shobogenzo, Eihei Koroku, etc..). It could be said that the bulk of his writings were written to clarify the criteria for discerning authentic zazen.’ (Footnotes on Zazen)