What is attachment to practice? Probably a lot of you have witnessed it. I'm thinking of people who are a little too obsessed with getting the rituals exactly right, or a little too proud of the amount of time they spend on the meditation pillow. Attachment to practice can be as much a hindrance as any other attachment. Plus, it's obnoxious.
Nathan at Dangerous Harvests and Andre at Zen and Back Again bring up the role of zazen, Zen meditation, in Soto Zen, as presented by our Japanese patriarch, Dogen. In Dogen's writing, time and time again he comes back to zazen as the activity of a Buddha and the manifestation of enlightenment.
Andre writes that Zen teachers often caution people to not attach to this or that aspect of practice, "But we seldom hear that said about zazen; instead, meditation, especially in Soto Zen, is regarded as the holiest of holies."
With the caveat that I'm neither a teacher nor a Dogen scholar -- My response to this is to reinforce something that Zen (and other) teachers emphasize, which is that attachment is duality. And non-attachment is non-duality. As long as you are relating to an activity or object as something "I" am doing, or possessing, there's attachment.
Put another way, in order to attach, you need two things -- an attacher, and something to attach two. There's your duality. "Attachment" in the Buddhist sense might be defined as any habit of mind that reinforces a belief in a separate, intrinsic self.
Sometimes people will suggest that maybe it's better to let go of rituals, robes, and other objects of practice so we don't attach to them. But thinking that way is attachment, also. It's "I" not doing something, or not possessing something. It's still duality.
Getting back to Dogen -- in his early work Bendowa ("Wholehearted Practice") he said,
"In the Buddha-dharma, practice and enlightenment are one and the same. Because it is the practice of enlightenment, a beginner's wholehearted practice of the Way is exactly the totality of original enlightenment."
To Dogen, and most Zen teachers, meditation is not something you do to become a Buddha. It is instead an expression of your essential nature, which is Buddha-nature. In Zen, Buddha-nature is already present; it is not something we create with our practice. This view is not held in all schools of Buddhism, but it is central to Zen.
Zen teacher Josho Pat Phelan wrote,
"Because we are already Buddha, our practice is not a technique or a method of cultivating enlightenment. Rather, practice is a manifestation of our enlightened nature; it's the function or activity of enlightenment. Therefore, it's not even we who do the practice, but the Buddha we already are who practices. Because of this, realization is the practice of non-dual effort, not the result or accumulation of some earlier practice. Dogen said, 'Realization, neither general nor particular, is effort without desire.'"
"Therefore, it's not even we who do the practice, but the Buddha we already are who practices. ... Dogen said, 'Realization, neither general nor particular, is effort without desire.'" In other words, it is not something "I" am doing.
Now, I'm not even going to pretend li'l ol' me has fully realized the nature of nonduality; I'm just saying this is how I understand Dogen.
This is a really difficult point in Soto Zen, because on the one hand, we're told that practice is enlightenment, so practice is all that's needed. But on the other hand, Dogen time and time again tells us to "thoroughly investigate" this or that, which suggests to me that just sitting in a fog blissful ignorance isn't the point, either. There is something to be clarified.�
So on the question of attachment to zazen, the next question is, who attaches? Thoroughly investigate that.
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