Throwing out the baby
The proverb which warns us that we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some of our undertakings is an old one but always timely. When Zen came to the West with the baby and the bathwater, understanding what is the essential meaning of Zen became important. For example, is zazen the baby, that is, the meaning of Zen, or the bathwater? Are Zens various rituals and observances which, by the way have never been unique to Zen, the baby or the bathwater?
Certainly, it is a fact that there have been periods in Zens history when Zen has undergone a reformation: something getting tossed out, in other words. As we might expect, the reformers have always maintained that their intentions were of the noblest kind. Still, inadvertently, they may have tossed out the baby with the bathwater in their zeal.
Modern Zen has not escaped the problem of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you check in at your local Zen center, you may not be aware that your modern Western Zen center may have thrown out something resembling the baby with the bathwater insofar as seated meditation or zazen appears to be the centerpiece. But real Zen, according to contemporary Zen master Joshu Sasaki, is not about sitting (cp. Zen Notes XX, No. 8).
Looking back to the early history of Zen it was not regarded as a school based on seated meditation. During the Sung period, a number of Zennists argued that Zen or Chan was a synonym for the Buddha Mind (fo-hsin). Zen has nothing to do with sitting and everything to do with realizing Buddha Mind. In fact, dhyana from which the words chan and zen are derived is not about sitting. Sitting is not contained the the accepted Buddhist Sanskrit definition of dhyana.
While still alive, be therefore assiduous in practising Dhyana. The practice consists in abandonments. The abandonment of what? you may ask. Abandon your four elements (bhuta), abandon your five aggregates (skandha), abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness (karmavijnana), which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see into the reason of it. As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe. The experience is incommunicable, though you yourselves know perfectly well what it is (Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (1933), p. 8).
As the reader can see, true dhyana (the baby), to a large extent, has been tossed out of modern Zen (read, for example, the books of late Zen master Joko Beck). Furthermore, dhyana has nothing whatsoever to do with sitting. It has everything to do with abandoning our psychophysical body and the material world to which we cling so that we might behold pure Mind thus realizing that all things are illusory and unreal. There is only Mind, in other words.
