The Power of Zazen

Ordinarily I don’t think much about my own life. However, I was rereading Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action the other day. A section in this book spoke of the importance, in spiritual matters, of finding things out for oneself. Reading this, I remembered when in my own life I also decided to find things out for myself.

I became interested in Buddhism some 50 years ago (I am writing this in 2024) after I read Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Following the guidelines in that book, I began practicing zazen. However, I seemed to think that mastery of Zen Buddhism was mainly an intellectual activity, and I began to read voraciously about Buddhism in general. Without trying to list the books I read, let me say that eventually I came to feel that all this reading, even though often inspirational, was not going to move me closer to the Zen goal of waking up.

I had been practicing zazen on my own since reading Suzuki Roshi’s book. I did discontinue the practice for a period of 15 years when I participated in a traditional Sufi order and followed its very different rituals and routines. I took up zazen again when I left the Sufi group. By this time, I had virtually stopped reading in Buddhism. Resuming zazen, I put my faith solely in that practice.

Zazen is a completely non-intellectual process. It involves simply focusing on breathing and putting aside any thinking that occurs. Even if so-called enlightenment does not occur within a zazen session, the practice does facilitate an awakening experience outside of the practice. It is not uncommon to have such an experience. It happened in my own case, as I describe in an essay on this website entitled “Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of ‘I’)”

Zazen is also, ultimately, an effortless process. A practitioner will discover this when he or she realizes that his breathing occurs of itself and does not require any will or effort on his part. The essay on this website entitled, “Breathing,” may help to clarify this. When the practitioner realizes that he can drop the effort to breathe and just watch his in-out breaths, the full power of zazen is released.

In my case, this release has occasioned strong energy to flow into my chest area. As I simply watch the flow of this energy, time passes without my being aware of its passing. I “blank out,” so to speak. I am not asleep or I would fall off the chair I meditate on. Eventually my awareness of time comes back, and the signal (I use a timer on my celI phone) for the end of my 40-minute zazen session goes off.

I can’t say that I know what is taking place in my chest or what is happening in the “blank out” period. I do know that something powerful is going on, and I can just await the result.