Most people, he posits, will notice that it becomes hard to maintain discursive thought and will find it replaced by a growing awareness of what one is experiencing. He suggests a simple exercise of sitting still, holding your breath for as long as possible (he suggests trying for about 1 minute), and seeing what happens to your mind during this time when you invite it to rest. It's a deceptively hard instruction to follow, but Sekida provides a nice way to see how it can work. The traditional, short instruction for how to do zazen is to "just sit" and do nothing else. Although Sekida touches on some other topics like koan practice and stages of maturity in Zen practice in the book, we'll focus only on his models as they relate to zazen. The primary meditative practice in Zen is called "zazen" which just means "seated meditation". I've also added some commentary reflecting my understanding of how Sekida's models might connect with other ways of thinking about Zen practice.Īpologies if I end up misrepresenting Sekida. It's fairly faithful, but I've taken editorial license in places to either increase concision (this is a post rather than a book) or to cut out what I consider to be superfluous details. Thus what follows is my take on his models. Thankfully this ends up not being too much of an issue because the models don't actually rely on those details, which is to say Sekida is sometimes overzealous in trying to ground his models in scientific details that are not actually gears within his models. In particular, I think he often gets the low-level details wrong when he tries to ground his models in science because much of his information was outdated even at the time of writing (1960s). Sekida's models as presented in the book have some limitations. I have to cover a couple sections of preliminaries to set those models up, though, so things don't really get going until the section on breathing. In this post I'll share some of Sekida's models that I think are especially useful to have if you're interested in Zen, Buddhism, or meditation more generally. Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida does something similar, but for Zen. Aside from a lot of specific advice and answers to questions, it usefully contains a lot of explicit models built using fake frameworks to give the reader gears for understanding meditation. Probably the most successful attempt to counter this dynamic and get all the necessary instructions in writing is The Mind Illuminated, which offers a book's worth of words and diagrams to teach you how to perform a particular style of Theravada concentration meditation. I think this is because most models of how to meditate are implicit and complex, so written meditation instructions tend to leave out important subtle details. Instead they need to attempt it, talk about what happened with someone more experienced, get feedback, and try again. ![]() Meditation, and Zen meditation in particular, is hard to teach in the sense that most people cannot learn to do it as intended by simply reading or hearing about it.
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