ABOUT ZAZEN

Zazen develops the ability to settle the mind and begin to enquire directly and deeply into your life and the actual nature of reality.  Weekly practice sessions are vital to developing and sustaining a daily practice of 20-30 minutes or more, and honing an ever more instinctive and subtle reflex of calm, practiced awareness in response to what life throws up.

As you establish a strong base of practiced meditative awareness, you will discover a far greater resilience in stressful circumstances.  When life seems difficult, you will find reserves of calm open-heartedness to draw on, and a response of curiosity and interest – Oh, what is this? – that can, with sincere practice, begin to intercept old reactions – I know what this is, and I don’t like it! – before they cut in and close down other ways of responding.

As you become more established in practising calm awareness, you may choose to refine your insight through the spare, open, non-judging form of Zazen called Shikantaza, or ‘Just Sitting’. 

This demanding practice enriches both you and itself daily, and for life.  It takes everything you are.  It can be compared to an ego-less state of prayer in which you make yourself available to what is, moment by moment - a richly receptive state of not presuming anything but ‘listening’ through every pore, coming into ‘true’ with all things and yourself.  It is an enquiry into reality from a ground of needing nothing, shrinking from nothing, judging nothing, allowing insight to deepen of its own accord. Just to sit this way with the self grown quiet is already enlightened behaviour that will change the quality and insights of your life around it.

Another practice that may open up through close engagement with the teacher is the path of Koan study .  Koans are powerful, life-transforming questions held as close to your life as you dare until old knowing both gradually and suddenly falls away in favour of a profound and visceral direct seeing of reality that is unmediated by any ideas at all.As you sit and live with a koan it gradually appears more clearly, uncluttered by your views or apprehensions of it.  The koan beats in your heart and lives deep in your belly; it gets up to walk with you, lies down to sleep with you, haunts your dreams, wakes up with you. 

The first koan you are given by a teacher may take months or years to open into a direct and powerful experience of the real, but time is immaterial to the Way, which, by its nature, is a matter of countless discoveries and realizations, some small, some vast, all of great value. And then?  Well, fortunately then there are literally hundreds more koans ahead of you to test, refine and deepen your prajna - or wisdom born of direct and gradually seasoned insight into reality.

Our particular lineage brings thetraditionally separate Soto (Shikantaza) and Rinzai (Koan) forms of practice back together.  Zen Open Circle regards each of these paths of practice as profoundly valuable, and both as essential. They are mutually enriching.  Many students move between the two at different times under the guidance of a teacher.

Choosing one practice,, you really choose both in time, for genuine shikantaza is prajna actualized, and prajna realizes what shikantaza really is.

Zazen is quickly taught but endlessly mastered. That is why it is good to walk the ancient Way with a trustworthy teacher in the company of people committed to supporting each other in sincere practice, and to waking up in this unrepeatable life, in its mystery and brilliance.

ZEN FORM

Becoming a Zen student gradually leads to an awareness of lineage and a deep appreciation of tradition as an indebtedness to the spirit of all past teachers, extending back through the generations to the Buddha. The forms (and translations) used in ceremony and teaching strongly reflect its Yasutani-Aitken-Tarrant lineage but is also quite naturally evolving and settling into its own distinctive local forms of the fundamental tradition as time goes on.  This is how revered but not rigid tradition conducts a live conversation with the present.

It also leads to a reverent love of the form in which practice is conducted and held – not form for form’s sake, but form as a skilful means of holding and supporting our own effort, extending courtesy and care towards the presence and effort of others, protecting the silence and stillness that allows deep practice to open up.  Zen form embodies a ritual of care for the other, asking of us a continual practice of mindful awareness.

... ZEN FORM USED ON SITTING EVENINGS