Zazen Has No End
When I began to read Buddhist commentary, years ago, I encountered the idea that you could reach a point in meditation when the insight you had acquired no longer had to be maintained. I may have encountered this idea in one of Chogyam Trungpa’s talks, but I cannot find the reference now. In any event, I took the idea to mean that if you became enlightened, you no longer had any need to meditate.
Enlightenment is the dropping of the sense of “I” and the consequent experience of non-separateness. This event may occur within zazen or another sort of meditation, or outside of it. Also, the event may be more or less profound for the experiencer. It may slip from his or her awareness eventually, or he may encounter all sorts of difficulties as he tries to adjust to it. A good source for the experience of a person after enlightenment is Adyashanti’s The End of Your World.
Enlightenment aside, the practice of zazen itself brings a growing sense of non-separateness. “Purpose of Zazen,” an essay in this group, explains the view of Kosho Uchiyama in Opening the Hand of Thought, that deepening the sense of non-separateness is an ongoing process in the experience of a zazen practitioner. Uchiyama says of himself, “. . . The longer I practice, the clearer it becomes to me that nothing is separated from me.”[1]
So in truth, as the title of this essay says, zazen has no end. The sense of non-separateness continues to deepen as one persists in the practice.
Footnotes
- Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought, Boston, 2004, p. 155.