“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.”
Dōgen’s words in the Genjōkōan are probably familiar to all of us, and they open something vast. They are not a description of a distant goal. They point directly at what happens when we sit down on this cushion and turn our full attention inward.
To study the self. We say this as though it were simple. But most of us have spent our entire lives studying everything except the self. We study how to be useful. We study how to be liked. We study the particular performance that will get us through the day without too much difficulty. We become very skilled at this. We have been practicing it since we were children.
And in all of that practice, we have accumulated quite a wardrobe.
The Wardrobe
Think of what we wear every day. Not just the clothing on our bodies, but the clothing of who we present ourselves to be. The clothing of profession, of status, of social role: the one who holds things together, the one who is steady, the one who does not ask for too much. We put on these garments in the morning and we carry them all day. Sometimes we forget we are wearing them. We begin to mistake the garment for the body underneath.
Uchiyama Roshi speaks to this directly. He said: “In zazen we let go of all the various ‘clothes’ we wear in everyday life and return to the naked self.”
Return to the naked self.
That phrase is worth sitting with for a long time. Not construct a better self. Not perform a more enlightened self. Return. As if what we are seeking has always been here, beneath the layers.
This is what zazen asks of us. This is what zazen requires of us. Zazen requires us to strip ourselves bare.
The Backward Step
Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi, or Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen, the first text he wrote after returning from China in 1227, begins with what sounds like a contradiction. The Way, he says, is originally complete and all-pervading. Why, then, would we need to practice? The whole body of reality is beyond the dust of illusion. Who, then, would believe we need to sweep it clean? It is never separate from where you are. So what is the use of training?
And then he turns.
“However, if there is a hair’s breadth discrepancy, the Way is as distant as heaven from earth. If the slightest like or dislike arises, the Buddha mind slips out of sight through confusion.”
This is the whole picture. Both things are true simultaneously. We are already complete, and we must practice. The Way is right here, and we miss it constantly. Not because we are broken, but because we are distracted. Because we have layered so much over what is already present that we can no longer feel it.
Dōgen’s instruction is not to add something new. It is to stop:
“Rest from following words and narratives, and learn the backward step of turning the light within, illuminating the mind. When you do so, body and mind will drop away naturally and your original countenance will manifest.”
The backward step. This is not a metaphor for retreat. It is a description of what happens in zazen. We have spent our whole lives stepping forward, reaching for the next thing, the next identity, the next proof that we are adequate. The backward step is the reversal of that habit. We stop reaching outward and turn the light inward. We stop performing and start attending.
And when we do, Dōgen says, body and mind drop away naturally. Not through force. Not through willpower. Not through the kind of determined striving we have been trained to bring to every task. Naturally. Like leaves falling from a tree when the season turns.
What We Carry to the Cushion
We come to the cushion carrying everything, and it is heavy. The meeting that did not go well. The conversation that is unfinished. The worry about tomorrow, the regret about yesterday. The role we played this morning at breakfast, the role we will play tonight. We carry our sense of who we are.
And then we sit down, and face the wall.
In zazen there is no audience. There is no performance required, no reputation to maintain, no role to fulfill. We are not here to be seen. We are not here to succeed. We sit, and in that sitting, who we really are beneath all of that begins to surface. This is what we are actually turning toward: not a wall, but our own true nature. Our Buddha nature. The thing that has been here all along, beneath everything else that usually comes up. This is our training. This is what we must do as bodhisattvas.
But it is not easy. Anyone who has sat in zazen for more than a few minutes knows that the mind does not simply fall quiet when we ask it to. There are coverings within us that do not fall away so easily.
The Five Hindrances
Shakyamuni Buddha taught of five hindrances that obscure the natural clarity of mind.
The first is desire: the reaching out toward something pleasant, something we want, the constant forward lean of a mind that believes it will be satisfied when it gets what it is grasping for.
The second is aversion: the pushing away, the contraction around what is uncomfortable, the subtle or not so subtle refusal of what is present.
The third is dullness and sleepiness: the sinking mind, the heaviness that pulls us down and away from clear presence, the fog that descends when we would rather not be here.
The fourth is restlessness: the agitation, the scattered mind that jumps from thought to thought, unable to settle, unable to land.
And the fifth is doubt: the gnawing uncertainty. Not the honest questioning that opens us up, but the doubt that paralyzes. The voice that says this practice is meaningless, that we are not capable, that nothing will change.
Every practitioner knows these visitors. They show up reliably, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in combination. The first ten minutes of sitting might bring restlessness. The next ten might bring dullness. And then, just when you think you have settled, doubt arrives: Why am I even doing this?
What the Buddha understood, and what our practice confirms, is that the five coverings are not enemies to be defeated. They are coverings. They are weather. They arise and pass, arise and pass. What we practice is learning not to be swept away by them. Not to believe that they are who we are.
Because they are not who we are.
The Vacant, Wide Open Field
Hongzhi Zhengjue, the twelfth-century Chinese Chan master whose writings helped shape the practice of silent illumination, wrote extensively about what lies beneath the coverings. These teachings are collected in Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. His language is direct and startling in its beauty:
“The field is vacant and wide open. It is something intrinsic from the very beginning. You must purify and correct it; clean it off, and get rid of various deluded conditioning and illusory habits. Naturally, you arrive at a place that is clear and pure, perfect and bright; totally empty, without any image; solitary and independent, not relying on anything.”
This is the field that zazen uncovers. Not a special state we manufacture, but something that has been here from the beginning. Hongzhi is not asking us to create clarity. He is asking us to stop obscuring it. The deluded conditioning, the illusory habits: these are the garments Uchiyama described. Remove them, and the field is already there. It always has been.
Hongzhi goes further in his Practice Instructions:
“The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions. This empty, wide open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating.”
Simply to sit serenely. Four words that contain the entire practice. Not to sit and do something. Not to sit and achieve something. To sit serenely. To let the wide open mind do what it does when we stop interfering with it.
And then he adds a crucial detail: “Spacious and content, without confusion from inner thoughts or grasping, effectively overcome habitual behavior and realize the self that is not possessed by emotions.”
This is not emotional suppression. It is the recognition that there is a self beneath the emotions, beneath the habits, beneath the grasping. A self that is not possessed by these things. The naked self. The one we are trying to return to.
The Sleeping Monk
There is a story that sits at the heart of Soto Zen, one that touches directly on what it means to strip away body and mind.
In 1225, Dōgen was training at Tiantong Monastery in China under Master Rujing. During an intensive summer meditation period, Rujing was walking behind the rows of sitting monks in the darkened meditation hall. One of the monks, seated right next to Dōgen, had fallen asleep.
Rujing took off his slipper and struck the sleeping monk, shouting: “To study Zen is to cast off body and mind! Why are you engaged in single-minded sleeping rather than single-minded sitting?”
Hearing these words, something broke open in Dōgen. He rose immediately, went to Rujing’s room, and burned incense. Rujing asked why.
“Body and mind have been dropped off,” Dōgen said.
Rujing replied: “Body and mind dropped off. The dropped-off body and mind.”
Dōgen hesitated. “Do not confirm me so easily.”
Rujing said: “The dropping off is dropped.”
This exchange is so compressed it can seem opaque. But what happened here is not abstract. In the dark hall, hearing Rujing’s shout, Dōgen experienced what the Genjokoan describes: the self was forgotten, and myriad things came forward to actualize him. The garments fell away. What was left was not nothing. What was left was everything.
Rujing’s final phrase, “the dropping off is dropped,” matters deeply. It means that even the experience of liberation is not something to hold onto. Even the act of stripping bare must itself be stripped away. There is no trophy at the end. There is only this.
Sitting with the Weather
When we sit in zazen and the mind quiets, even briefly, even for a moment, what remains? What is there when we are not performing? When we are not protecting? When we are not arranging the furniture of our personality to look its best?
This is what Dōgen is pointing to. What he calls shinjin datsuraku: the body and mind dropping away. It is not something that happens to us once, dramatically, like a thunderclap. It is something that happens again and again, in small ways, in the gap between one thought and the next.
When the clouds part, the mountain is there. Then the clouds return, and the mountain is still there.
The five hindrances will come back. Desire will lean forward again. Aversion will contract again. Dullness will descend, restlessness will scatter, doubt will gnaw. This is not failure. This is weather. Mountains do not complain about weather. They stand in it.
Hongzhi, in one of his most vivid passages, describes the practitioner who has learned to sit in this way:
“Patch-robed monks should wither away and freeze the deluded thoughts of the mind, and rest from remnant conditioning. Single-mindedly restore and cultivate this field. Directly cut down all the overgrown grass throughout the boundary of the four directions. Do not allow a single speck of dust to defile this field.”
And then, characteristically, he softens:
“Wandering around, accept how it goes. Accepting how it goes, wander around. Do not be bounded by or settle into any place.”
There is no rigidity in genuine practice. We cut through the overgrown grass, yes. But we also wander. We also accept. The field does not need to look perfect. It needs to be tended and lived in.
Vulnerability
To strip ourselves bare is to be vulnerable. And we human beings have a very hard time with that. Even when it is just ourselves, sitting alone on a cushion. Even then, we resist. We would rather be armored. Vulnerability feels like exposure. It feels like weakness.
But is it? What if what we call weakness is simply the feeling of setting down something very heavy that we have been carrying for a very long time? What if the nakedness we are so afraid of is not exposure, but openness?
Dōgen addresses this in the Fukanzazengi when he writes that zazen has nothing to do with intelligence or stupidity, with being sharp-witted or dull. “Making a wholehearted effort is in itself practicing the Way.” There is no prerequisite for vulnerability. You do not need to be qualified. You do not need to have your life sorted out. You just need to sit down and stop pretending for a little while.
Something else we discover when we return to the naked self and set aside roles and reputations and accumulated stories is not emptiness in the sense of lacking. It is emptiness in the sense of the open sky.
Silent and Serene
Hongzhi wrote of this in his “Inscription on Silent Illumination,” perhaps the most important poem in the Soto tradition:
“In stillness and serenity words are forgotten. What is before me appears in bright clarity. Looking closely things become spacious. Feeling deeply life becomes vibrant.”
This is not a description of blankness. It is a description of what opens when we stop filling the space with our usual noise. Bright clarity appears before you. Not manufactured. Not achieved. What was always present becomes visible.
And then:
“Through darkness things are bright, and through concealment they are ever more manifest. A crane dreaming in the winter mist, autumnal waters, sounding from afar.”
There is something breathtaking in this. Hongzhi is saying that concealment itself reveals. The darkness makes things bright. The coverings, the layers, the years of accumulated habit: when we finally sit with them instead of fighting them, they become transparent. The crane dreams in the winter mist, and the mist does not prevent the dream. It holds it.
This is what the practice of silent illumination teaches. Silence is not the absence of noise. It is the presence of something deeper than noise. And illumination is not a spotlight we aim at ourselves. It is the natural radiance that appears when we stop generating so much static.
Myriad Things
When body and mind drop away, when we have, even briefly, set down the performance of who we are, we are not erased. Something opens. Myriad things come forward and actualize us. The sound of rain on the roof. The pressure of our knees on the zabuton. The breath moving in and out like a door swinging. We are not separate from any of this. We are not the isolated self we have been so carefully maintaining. We are this. We have always been this.
Hongzhi points to this in the tenth of his Practice Instructions:
“Simply drop off everything. Silently dwell in the self, in true suchness, abandon conditioning. Open-minded and bright without defilement, simply penetrate and drop off everything.”
And then, having described the dropping away, he immediately describes the return:
“Stepping back with open hands, giving up everything, is thoroughly comprehending life and death. Immediately you can sparkle and respond to the world. Merge together with all things. Everywhere is just right.”
Everywhere is just right. This is not resignation. It is not passivity. It is the lived experience of someone who has set down the wardrobe and discovered that the world does not require them to be dressed. The world requires them to be present.
This is not something we achieve. It is something we allow.
The Perpetual Return
And so we return to the cushion. Again and again. We return. We take off the clothing, one layer at a time. We sit with what is uncomfortable. We sit with the desire and the aversion and the dullness and the restlessness and the doubt. We do not fight them. We do not feed them. We breathe, and we let them move through.
Dōgen understood that this is not a one-time event. In Fukanzazengi, he writes: “Constantly comport yourselves in such a manner and you are surely becoming this; the store of treasure will then open naturally and you will be able to receive and use it at will.”
Constantly. Not once. Not on a retreat. Not during some peak experience that fades by Tuesday. Constantly. The treasure house opens not with a single dramatic unlocking but through the steady, daily practice of showing up and taking off the layers.
Hongzhi says much the same thing: “If you practice the state like this for a long time, you will surely become the state like this itself.”
This is the promise and the challenge of our practice. There is no shortcut. There is only the repeated willingness to sit down, face the wall, and let what is false fall away. The field is already vacant and wide open. The bright clarity is already here. We just have to stop covering it up.
A mountain does not try to be still. A river does not try to flow. They just do what they do.
And we must do what we do. We simply sit. We simply strip ourselves bare. We return, again and again, to the naked self that has been here all along.
The next time you sit, as you set down whatever you have been carrying, whatever you have been wearing, ask yourself:
What is still here when I have set everything down?
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