Shinzan Palma: Silence without Self-Consciousness: How to Not Get Attached to the Empty Field – Fall Practice Period 2022 (7 of 11)

“It seems that you’re all getting attached to the empty field!” Sensei Shinzan Palma jokes when he asks the community in the zendo and online how they’re doing and gets only silence in return. Upaya has been studying the Hongzhi’s teachings on silent illumination as compiled in Dan Leighton’s Cultivating the Empty Field. Shinzan’s guiding question in his insightful exegesis of Hongzhi’s “The Cloud’s Fascination and the Moon’s Cherishing” is: How do we practice silent illumination or just sitting unselfconsciously? As soon as we try to practice silence and try to keep thoughts from occurring, we are only practicing self-narrative; the narrative of, “I want to be a good zen practitioner, and I want to be free of painful thoughts, and I want to gain enlightenment.” And all we are actually gaining is more thinking.

Drawing from his own decades of experience sitting zen, and more specifically sitting sesshins, as Upaya is doing at the moment, Shinzan provides guideposts for how to practice the silence of silent illumination without self-consciousness and without the dullness that can easily accompany concentration practice. When we are all able to now only sit but also go about our daily lives resting in the moment as it arises and changes rather than trying to control anything, we’ll experience true silence, and out of this silence we may get a glimpse of what Hongzhi calls illumination.

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Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field