Is Zen meditation just a ritual?
Zennists, sometime in the future (or hell, right now), are going to have to investigate the effectiveness of Zens rituals as they concern Zens ancient injunction to realize Buddha Mind or the same, realize our true nature. I say this because rituals may not work as intended, that is, they may fail to evoke the necessary realization of the Buddha Mind. A ritual might be, in fact, impractical when it comes to attaining gnosis of our true nature, but not entirely useless as far as beginners are concerned which is another topic.
This leads me to a troubling question, is zazen just a ritual? The answer shouldnt be automatically, no. Those who believe that the performance of zazen is completely without ritualistic underpinnings have, I would argue, not sufficiently looked deep enough, for example, into the impact of Confucian ritualism on the formation of Chinese Buddhism, including Zen, and also, Japanese Buddhism. Given that zazen emphasizes the external performance of sitting za, and much less the esoteric zen or dhyana (P., jhna) side, should be a warning flag that a ritual is being enacted.
Filled with some thought provking essays by ten Buddhist scholars the book, Zen Rituals, might open up a mini Pandoras box by bringing to light the problematic of ritual as an effective means for bringing about realization of Buddha Mind among other things. Here are just some examples from the book that might open a few eyes.
For the Confucian ritualists, as for the later Zen Buddhists, ritual practice ranged in quality and depth from introductory levels to the most profound, and these differences were thought to be evident in the difference between an ordinary human being and the great sages. At the outset, they assumed that ritual practice would entail discipline. It would restrain the wayward inclinations of ordinary, undisciplined minds. In this sense, ritual acted as an external constraint or pressure on the natur! al desir es and uncultivated habits of those who had not yet been shaped by this order. Confucians realized, however, that as ritual practitioners matured, they would internalize these constraints, altering the ways they understood themselves and the ways they lived in the world. For the sages dwelling at the most humane level, Mencius claimed, ritual practice effects a profound joy, one that accords with the deepest nature of human beings. In this sense, ritual was the Confucian means for transformation and enlightenment, both of individuals in a culture and the culture as a whole (p. 7).
The ritual most frequently associated with Zen monastic practice is zazen, seated meditation. Indeed, it is from this longstanding Buddhist ritual that Zen (Ch'an/Son) gets its name. Although variations of Zen meditation rituals are substantial, most Zen monks engage in this practice at least two times each day, once in the morning and once in the evening. During my brief stay at Eiheiji, we engaged in zazen ritual for approximately six hours each day divided into sitting periods of roughly forty-five minutes each, but this was an unusual amount of time at the temple in which lay people were invited for introductory training (p. 8).
Ritual practitioners proceed in the ritual "as if" things were different than they seemed before entering the ritual. They imagine a state of affairs other than common sense would dictate and proceed as if something other than that were true. Zen practitioners engage in zazen as if they were enlightened Buddhas, and in that act of imagination, something really changes (p. 12).
We might say that these forms of Zen meditation ritual are essentially the exercise or practice of attention in which abstracted states of mind, including important states like purpose, are set aside. In order to stress this goal in meditation, some Zen masters claim that meditative rituals are "nonpurposive," that is, they are not done for any reason beyond ! the act of doing them. Therefore, when asked what they are doing or what they hope to accomplish when they are sitting in zazen, Soto masters will often say that they are "just sitting" (shikantaza), and nothing more (p. 14).
Westerners interested in Zen, by the same token, are often attracted to the "practices" of seated meditation (zazen), manual labor, and doctrinal study but uncomfortable with the "rituals" of offerings, prayers, and prostrations made before images on altars (p. 23).
The East Asian Buddhist tradition itself has no words for discriminating what Westerners are apt to call "ritual" as opposed to "practice." The Japanese term that comes closest in semantic range to "ritual" is gyji, which I translate as "observances," but the term encompasses a very broad range of activities that Zen clergy engage in, some of which we might prefer to call "ceremonies," "procedures," "etiquette," "training," "study," "meditation," "work," or the "ritual sacralization of everyday activities" (such as eating, sleeping, and bathing) (pp. 2324).
The last excerpt is rather interesting. If there is one term Western Zennists use almost ad nauseam it is practiceyet, strictly speaking, there is no such notion in Zen. I have to laugh when I think about this. Western Zennists would be terribly uncomfortable saying, Well, I have to get back to my ritual. They much prefer saying, I have to get back to my practice. This brings me back to my comment at the beginning of this blog that rituals may fail to evoke the necessary realization of the Buddha Mind. At least in my own experience rituals, including zazen, prove inadequate when it comes to gnosis (jna).
