‘Zazen is much bigger and much deeper than the territory of conscious grasping. Its size and depth is beyond our imagination. Its subtlety is beyond our scope. When we do zazen, we should put a higher priority on what is quietly happening beyond our knowing by perceiving and thinking than on what we can experience consciously. This is very distressing for us who live with the assumption that what we can perceive is all that exists. As humans we deeply desire to know everything, to be satisfied by understanding everything. Therefore, it is unbearable that, however hard we practice zazen, we cannot expect to see the results and effects of the effort ourselves. Usually we can only feel satisfaction, fulfillment, pride and so forth only when we can clearly see the results and effects of our effort. Nevertheless, in the case of zazen we cannot do it. So zazen is exactly “to have all our efforts for nothing.” So we have tremendous difficulty in finding a positive reason to do zazen. Then how can we motivate ourselves to do zazen? Nothing to gain. Nothing to enlighten. Nothing to satisfy us…. There is absolutely nothing in zazen. We can never find the meaning or reason to sit zazen when we look at zazen from a bonpu’s viewpoint.
We feverishly and busily move around, always figuring out how to manage things so that we can get the maximum profit with the minimum effort and gain what we want with the least labor. But we should ponder on how much happiness we enjoy by gaining those “profits” in that way. Shouldn’t we calm down and deeply reflect upon this matter? We cannot help but feel empty and lonesome in living out our whole life restlessly like that.’ (From the Soto Zen Journal)
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