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Form and Emptiness In Our Practice
By Nigel Dawes
Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness are likewise this.
Maka Hannya Haramitta Shingyo (Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra)
In the healing, martial and fine arts of Japan , close attention is paid to Kata (form). The shape and emphasis of the Oshide (support hand) and Sashide (technique hand) in acupuncture and Shiatsu ; the importance of correct Hara (mind/heart/guts) and Koshi (low back/hips) in Karate , Judo or Aikido ; the significance of a single deft stroke of the brush in Shodo (calligraphy), of the wrist in Chaji (tea ceremony) or of the secateur in Ikebana (flower arrangement). Each discipline demands patient, diligent and precise attention to form. In most traditions this is referred to as Keiko (practice).
But Keiko is not what is ordinarily referred to as practice in the sense of endless preparation for some future event. It is a form of practice precisely without purpose (in any future time). To the student greeting the master's return from 20 years of meditation in a cave, the response to the question, "What did you gain?" came simply, "A sore ass."
In Zazen , seated meditation in the Zen tradition, the practice is one of centering oneself in the here-and-now through breath. This single-minded focus of our entire being in the moment is called Joriki (mind power/concentration). The result rather than the purpose of developing Joriki is for the practitioner to access a dynamic power, which, once mobilized, enables us even in the most sudden or unexpected situations to act instantly, without pause for reflection, in a manner wholly appropriate to the circumstances at hand. This is the nature of qi (vital energy), to flow unceasingly without regard to its past or future course in a truly upright manner. In Zen, thought is referred to as the "stream of life and death" and includes all manner of ideologies, beliefs, opinions and pints of view, not to mention the factual knowledge accumulated since birth. It is these fixed concepts, rooted as they are in the past or future that distort the natural flow if qi and obscure the light of truth. Satori-awakening is the realization of the Essential World as it exists from moment to moment, referred to in Zen as Kensho Godo (self-realization/enlightenment).
Yet we are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time. Our so-called present is that tiny spec of time that exists between an alternately nostalgic and regretful past and an obsessive and grandiose future. We have no "now." Our present moment is completely flooded with the memory of yesterday and the fantasy of tomorrow. We are entirely ignorant that there never was, is or will be any other experience than present experience. We are, in the truest sense, out of touch with reality. Our sickness of mind is self-delusion out of which our sickness of body is the inevitable result. Our behavior follows the contours of our mind and, burdened by the distortions of qi created by practices informed by past and future habit or intention, our body becomes sick.
As practitioners of Oriental medicine we are concerned with detecting such qi distortions and finding ways to encourage the natural homeostatic principle to reassert itself. Such may be the definition of healing. Yet saddled with our own good intentions and discriminatory education, how are we truly to discover what lies directly before us? We confuse the world as it is represented, described and measured with the way it actually is. We are sick with reverence for the expedient tools of nomenclature and theory, glowing as they do in our field with the radiant authority of antiquity. Yet how often do we suspend our verbal and symbolic thinking to simply empathize with our patient in the moment (and with our own fears of inadequacy)? Is there a space of mind and body that would allow us more easily to remain present in this moment?
A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness, "Has a dog Buddha nature or not?" Joshu said: "Mu. "
Mumonkan (Gateless Gate), Wumen Huikai (1183-1260)
In the practice of Zen Shiatsu , a style developed by the late Masunaga Shizuto (1924-1981), I have found one such path. Masunaga studied psychology at Kyoto University before coming to Oriental medicine and was a committed Buddhist practitioner all his adult life. The Shiatsu style he evolved incorporates the mindful intensity of both disciplines emphasizing above all the importance of cultivating empathy in our practice. For him empathy is a state of mind, of being, not merely doing, and is attained through the systematic development of Joriki , the power or strength which arises when the mind has been unified and brought into one-pointedness through concentration. In the context of Shiatsu practice, such one-pointedness can be attained within the Kata , or practical form, through specific principles of pressure. These include the principle of perpendicular pressure, allowing the giver's natural body weight to be transmitted at right angles toward the center of the meridian or point being worked on; continuous pressure that involves sustained, uninterrupted pressure that flows smoothly throughout the session, stimulating the parasympathetic response in the receiver and activating the meridians; and equal pressure, the use of two or more points of connected contact that merge together in a sensation of "oneness." Pressure that is truly "equal," according to Masunaga, is pressure that is not experienced as such at all, rather as a deep penetration of one person's qi merging with another's. In such moments there may be the subjective experience of what he terms "disappearance," a loss of sense of time and place, a merging of roles between giver and receiver, an absence of the feeling of "doing" or "being done to." For the practitioner this is akin to a momentary loss of ego; for the patient it is the dissolving of all barriers of fear or expectation, in both cases energetic blocks that can prevent effective outcomes in treatment.
Zen Shiatsu form, when repeated from a place of mindful meditation, can be experienced as a kind of emptiness in which there is no form, no mind, no absence of form and no absence of mind. Such a state has a real possibility of creating a transformative experience for both giver and receiver. In such moments we may have the sense that all around and within us is dropping or falling away. Everything of weight is surrendering to gravity, our mind and body is as light as the air surrounding them, our contact with our partner as soft as a leaf on the ocean, no effort, no doing, only energy taking the path of least resistance. Paradoxically perhaps, to make real and meaningful contact with another human being we have only to let go. But of so much! As practitioners, healing is in our hands but rarely do we grasp the importance of letting go.
A story is told of a man who comes to the Buddha with offerings of flowers in both hands. The Buddha said: "Drop it." So he dropped the flowers in his left hand. The Buddha said again: "Drop it." He dropped the flowers in his right hand. And the Buddha said: "Drop that which you have neither in your right hand nor in your left, but in the middle!" And the man was instantly enlightened.
Quoted by Alan Watts in The Way of Liberation
This is one translation for the Zheng Qi , Qi in its correct, proper or undistorted form.
In many Zen texts, this word is translated as "emptiness" or "nothingness." However, in the Mumonkan a more ambiguous interpretation is offered: "For subtle realization it is of the utmost importance that you cut off the mind road. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, if you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses . So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word ' Mu. ' Day and night, keep digging into it. Don't consider it to be nothingness. Don't think in terms of 'has' and 'has not.' It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can't . Exhaust all your life energy in this one word ' Mu. ' If you do not falter, then it's done!"
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