Master Kosen has been invited to the 2013 congress of the Federation of Professional Schools of Sophrology, in France (www.sophro.fr).
00:00 • Zen is very simple
01:40 • Posture is a thought
03:06 • Sitting posture
06:56 • Walking posture
08:49 • 2 disciples of Buddha
12:23 • Hands and brain
14:44 • Our Earth
16:46 • Prostration
19:47 • Religion before religion
22:21 • Zazen is good for nothing
Zen is based on fundamental human postures. In Zen, there's the posture of Buddha. It existed before the Buddha, they speak about it in the Bhagavad-Gita. To stand upright in this posture, you have to push the earth with your knees. It requires an effort to be dynamic and to have a good posture.
The more you relax, the more dynamic you are, the straighter and stronger you are. It has nothing to do with relaxing in a chair or bed. It's a way of abandoning the body to itself. While being perfectly awake. Buddhism's postural aspect is very important in Zen, says master Deshimaru.
In Zen, we abandon everything and don't move at all, he says. In walking, we do something, we move forward to catch something, rhythm our breathing with walking. The hand is extraordinary. We're the only animals to have hands, they're connected to our evolution, and they also meditate, says Zen master Shao-ying Chen. The postural details exist since the Buddha and were transmitted to China from India.
Zazen is a form of meditation practiced by many religions, including Buddhism, according to Buddha. The technique involves holding hands together in a concentrated pose, which builds a bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres. Walking, sitting, lying and sleeping are all forms of the same pose. Buddha says our evolution comes from our posture, from the spine up to the brain. He says we live on a small Earth, and the fragility of the planet Earth can be seen in the movie Gravity, which shows the Earth's fragility.
The Buddha says we have a big thing between our ears that we're underutilizing. We all have our feet pointing to the same center, the center of the Earth. But our head is unique, no one is pointing in the same direction, so we practice "prostration" It's not just a question of humility, or bowing down before statues, it's a magical, fundamental thing, a shaman's thing, maybe. It reformats the brain, to touch the ground with it, to connect to your root, to your brothers. It's good medicine. It relativizes the evil that we unintentionally do around us.
Traditional zazen isn't practiced alone. It isn't a wellness technique. Shakyamuni Buddha once said: "The study of sutras and teachings are incapable of extinguishing human desires, fears, and anxieties" "Zazen is the religion before religion as we know it. Before, humans couldn't even speak. So they were already taking this posture. These are prehistoric postures," he says. "Even the Buddha says it's useless!"