It might be good to note that if validity becomes obscured, they are all that can be had.

Just a banal question (or not): in my current schedule I only have free time to practice meditation after diner. Immediately after. The question is: is that ok? Are there problems in practising zazen if I my belly is full, or is this really not recommended for some reason? Thanks for any help.

ただゆったりと座る 　Simply Sitting Calmly

くつろぐときには、 ただ無心に座り、あるいは、横たわり、 ただ何のためにでもなく、 何を知るためでも 何を悟るためにでもなく、 無心にくつろぎなさい。

When you are to relax, simply sit down, or lie down, nothing in your mind, not doing this for the sake of something, not doing this to know something, not doing this to become enlightened, be in calmness with empty mind.

起きて動くときにも、ただ無心に行い、 片付けるべきことをなすのみ。

When you get up for action, you simply move, nothing in your mind, and simply clear up the things that need to be done.

何をするべきかが重要なのではない。 何を見るべきかが重要なのではない。 何を知り、悟るべきかが重要なのではない。

What to do, is not the important point. What to see, is not the important point. What to know, and to become enlightened, is not the important point.

静かに座り、また静かに動き、なんであれ、ただ、ひたすら　 どちらにも無心で在ることが大切なこと。

Sitting quietly, or moving quietly, whatever you are doing or not doing, just simply, not minding on yourself and on your actions is the important point.

寺も僧侶も導師も経典も必要ない。 座禅は悟るためではない。 座禅は苦悩や迷いを解決するためのものではない。 ただ、何のためにでもなく、 無心にくつろぐだけだ。

There is no need for temples, for monks, for gurus, for scriptures. Zen sitting is not for gaining enlightenment. Zen sitting is not for solving your mental pains and problems. It is simply being in calmness, relaxing in the sake of nothing.

悟りの結果として、無心となるのではない。 無心に居るだけで、既にそれが悟りと知り、 にっこりと、ほほ笑むだけである。

It is not that your mind becomes empty, as a consequence of enlightenment. Being there having nothing in your mind, you understand that THAT is already the enlightenment, and you just simply smile.

ならば、修行とは一体何であったのか？ それは、ただ無心にくつろぎ、落ち着き、無心に生き、無心に死ぬだけ。

Then, what was all the training for? THAT is simply to relax with nothing in your mind, being in calmness, living with nothing in your mind, dying with nothing in your mind.

ただ、それだけでよかった、 ただそれだけが貴いのだったと知るまで、 不必要な、ただならぬことを追い求めて、 それがどれほど不必要だったかを知るまで 不必要な事をし尽くすことが 修行のすべてである。

Only to recognize that all that was needed, was simply THAT, and until you recognize that the only precious thing was THAT, searching and looking for something that looks unusual and outstanding, trying out and doing everything exhaustively that seems necessary to be done, until you understand that all was really unnecessary to be done, are all the purposes of training.

悟りを開きたければ、 まず無為や無心の静けさと無心の行為を『好きに』なるがよい。 好きこそものの上手なれ、である。 無心を、まず『好き』にならずに どうして無心にくつろげよう。

If you wish to open yourself to enlightenment, you should begin by "loving" the quietness of empty mind, "loving" the inactions and actions with nothing in your mind. There is a well-said idiom, "Love comes around while doing things you like." How could you relax in empty mind, without at first, "loving" the nothingness of your mind?

それを、『まず好き』にならずにどうして無心と仲良くなれよう。 修行、求道、座禅、動禅、みなことごとく、それがつらく、 迷って、苦悩するようなものであったら、 どうして無心と仲良くなれようか？。

How could you get along well with the empty mind, not "at first felling in love" with it? If trainings, spiritual works, Zen sittings, active Zen workouts, and all the other practices were hard, difficult and painful task to do, how could you get on well with the empty mind?

もの思わず、座り、動き、 求めず、期待せず、構えず、 ただひたすらに迷いも悟りなども忘れて、 無知、無力の無心に身も心も任せるがいい。

Sit or move, with nothing in your mind, searching for, hoping for, expecting for nothing, just simply get your mind off from the wandering mind or the enlightened mind, and give your body and soul over to the nothingness of your mind, knowledgeless and powerless nothingness.

その結果、悟るのか、その結果どうなるのか、 その結果いかなる力や知恵が見付かるのだろうかと 思いめぐらし、無心になれないならば、

Will people become enlightened if they follow the advice above? What will happen to them, what kind of power or wisdom will they find? If your mind wanders like that, and could not be empty,

あなたはもっと遠く、 宇宙の果てまで迷うべきだ。 徹底的に、とことん、迷うことが必要だ。

you should wander much further, further away to the end of the universe. It is necessary for you to exhaustively wander all the way.

それがあってこそ、初めてあなたは 我家のよさを知るからだ。

Only after then, will you recognize the comfort of being at your true home.

ただ、無心にくつろぎ、無心に動く。 仏性とはただ、それだけである。

Simply relaxing with nothing in mind, and simply moving with nothing in mind. The Buddha nature is simply THAT.

ただそれだけでよかった、 それだけが最も貴いのだと悟るまでの長い旅、 それが迷いである。

THAT was all that was necessary. The wandering mind is the long journey that will end when you recognize that THAT is the only precious thing.

１９９２年 ７月２０日　無名庵 July 20, 1992 Mumyouan

From The Three Pillars of Zen:

This lecture will deal with shikan-taza. Shikan means "nothing but" or "just," while ta means "to hit" and za "to sit." So shikantaza is a practice in which the mind is intensely involved in just sitting. In this type of zazen it is all too east for the mind, which is not supported by such aids as counting the breath or by a koan, to become distracted. The correct temper of mind therefore becomes doubly important. In shikan-taza the mind must be unhurried yet at the same time firmly planted or massively composed, like Mount Fuji let us say. But it must also be alert, stretched, like a taut bowstring. So shikan-taza is a heightened state of concentrated awareness wherein one is neither tense nor hurried and certainly never slack. It is the mind of somebody facing death. Let us imagine that you are engaged in a duel of swordsmanship of the kind that used to take place in ancient Japan. As you face your opponent you are unceasingly watchful, set, ready. Were you to relax your vigilance even momentarily, you would be cut down instantly. A crowd gathers to see the fight. Since you are not blind you see them from the corner of your eye, and since you are not deaf you hear them. But not for an instant is your mind captured by these sense impressions.

This state cannot be maintained for long - in fact, you ought not to do shikan-taza for more than half an hour at a sitting. After thirty minutes get up and walk around in kinhin and then resume your sitting. If you are truly doing shikan-taza, in half an hour you will be sweating, even in winter in an unheated room, because of the heat generated by this intense concentration. When you sit for too long your mind loses its vigor, your body tires, and your efforts are less rewarding than if you had restricted your sitting to thirty-minute periods.

Compared with an unskilled swordsman a master uses his sword effortlessly. But this was not always the case, for there was a time when he had to strain himself to the utmost, owing to his imperfect technique, to preserve his life. It is no different with shikan-taza. In the beginning tension is unavoidable, but with experience this tense zazen ripens into relaxed yet fully attentive sitting. And just as a master swordsman in an emergency unsheathes his sword effortlessly and attacks single-mindedly, just so the shikan-taza adepts sits without strain, alert and mindful. But do not for one minute imagine that such sitting can be achieved without long and dedicated practice.

This isn't a practice itself per se, but I find it inspirational when I find myself lagging in my own practice. The source is Hakuin's Tale of Yukichi Takayama (translated by Waddell in Hakuin's Precious Mirror Cave):

The accounts that follow describe the difficulties that Zen patriarchs of China and Japan underwent as they pursued their post-satori training.

The sutras tell us that Prince Siddhartha went into the forest of Uruvela beside the Neranjara River and engaged in an austere regimen of zazen meditation for six years, continuing until his body wasted away to the point that it resembled a withered tree, and that finally, while seated on a mat of kissho grass under a Jambu tree, he suddenly attained great enlightenment. He thought, "The Dharma that I have attained is extremely profound and difficult to understand. Sentient beings, finding it impossible to grasp or believe, would surely slander it, and that would cause them to fall into the evil paths."

The diligence of the venerable Mahakashyapa in performing the twelve austere disciplines [Waddell's footnote: wearing only cast off rags, only three garments; eating only food received as alms, taking only breakfast and noon meals, taking no food between them, in only small amounts at each sitting; dwelling as a hermit, among tombs, under a tree, under the open sky, dwelling anywhere without preference; sitting without ever lying down] reached a degree of severity none of today's students could hope to approach

The venerable Parshva, the tenth Indian Zen patriarch, entered the priesthood at the age of eighty, vowing that he would continue his religious practice without lying down until he attained complete deliverance

Hui-k'o, the Second Chinese Zen patriarch, stood throughout the night buried to his waist in snow at Mount Shao-shih.

Zen Master Fa-ch'ang, who practiced zazen in a hut on the pinnacle of Great Plum Mountain, living on pine flowers and wearing a robe woven of lotus leaf fiber, is said to have balanced a ten-inch iron stupa on top of his head to keep from dozing off.

Chao-chou's training hall was not large since he sought no donations from the lay community. When the leg of his Zen chair broke, he mended it by lashing a piece of charred wood to it with some rope. He used it that way for many years, always refusing his attendant's pleas to have it properly fixed.

Zen Master Yang-Ch'i lived for twenty years in a broken-down temple that offered scant protection from the elements: in winter, snow fell inside the room, covering the floor like scattered pearls.

The great teacher Po-chang is famous for strictly adhering to his saying "A day without work means a day without food"

For sixty years , the Fourth Chinese patriarch Tao-hsin never laid down to sleep while engaged in Zen practice

Zen Master Hsuan-sha sat all day long, taking only enough food to keep himself alive.

Zen Master Ling-yu devoted himself to the Way continuously for for forty years at the summit of Mount Ta-Kuei, allowing no temple buildings to be built and no temple equipment to be acquired.

Tz'u-ming was a priest whose great diligence has become a true model for the Zen school: at Fen-yang he sat through the long nights oblivious of the bone-chilling cold east of the river, admonishing himself whenever the sleep demon attacked, "What am I? I'll be useless if I go on living, and no one will notice if I die," and jabbing himself in the thigh with a sharp gimlet. Tz'u-ming attained a strength of spirit that earned him the sobriquet "lion of Hsi-he." Even if you combed the entire world today you wouldn't turn up a single person anywhere like him.

The priest Pao-shih sat in zazen for ten straight days.

Hsueh-feng sat for seven days. A priest who in later life was honored with the title National Teacher sat for forty years without sleeping, keeping warm by covering himself with fallen leaves. One old crock of a priest lived eating nothing but mountain yams, which he baked inside piles of burning cow dung.

Master Daito concealed himself among a colony of beggars for twenty years while maturing his realization.

Master Kanzan, founder of Myoshin-ji, continued his practice for many years while working as a day laborer for the peasant farmers in Ibuka.

Zen Master Basssui was known to engage in five- to ten-day sessions of uninterrupted zazen during which his breath sometimes seemed to cease, alarming his followers, who thought he had passed away. The divine strength he achieved has shined brilliantly throughout the centuries.

When Zen Master Hosshin was studying in China at the monaster on Mount Ching he is said to have done zazen for three years inside a privy behind the training hall, sitting until the skin on his buttocks festered and maggots appeared in the running sores.

National Master Hotto, founder of Kokoku-ji in Yura, studied for nine years in China. He is reported to have constantly done zazen with tears in his eyes.

National Master Hokan, founder of Daisen-ji in Mino province, worked unceasingly at his practice until suddenly "the bottom dropped out of the bucket" and he experienced great enlightenment: "The phoenix broke through the golden net. The crane flew free of its cage." In later years, even after Hokan became a deeply venerated figure in temples throughout the land, he went to continue his practice with Zen Master Yozan at the Shotaku-in subtemple of Myoshin-ji. Yozan examined him, spewed at him several doses of the most virulent slobber - claws and fangs of the Dharma cave, divine death-dealing amulets. As he wrestled with the koans, Yozan showed him no mercy, hurling a storm of verbal abuse, dealing him countless blows with his staff. Hokan escaped into the bamboo thicket behind Yozan's temple and began doing zazen on top a large rock, determined to sit to the death. When night came, dense black clouds of mosquitoes descended on him, greatly distracting his practice, but they succeeding only in spurring him to greater effort. Throwing off his robe he sat completely naked all through the night. At first light his breath seemingly having ceased altogether, he suddenly entered the Great Death, attaining a very profound realization. Looking down at his body in the early morning light, he found his body covered so completely with mosquitoes that he could not even see his own skin. When he stood up and brushed them off, their blood-swollen bodies fell to the ground like so many crimson cherries, forming a thick carpet around him. When he went to Master Yozan and explained what had happened Yozan was overjoyed, immediately confirming his enlightenment.

I do not have time now to relate stories of the hardships all enlightened Buddhist priests - incomparable Zen students of the kind that appear only once in five hundred years - experienced during their training. Every time I start thinking about these men and what they lived through, even in mid-winter my back becomes covered with beads of cold sweat.

Where, my fellow Zen students, do we belong? Isn't it strange that Zen practice was a great struggle for those in the past, while those of today find it to be an easy, undemanding endeavor? if the easy-going attitude of today is correct, the difficulties undergone by those in the past must have been mistaken. Yet if they were not mistaken , the easy-going attitude of today is wrong. Should we adopt the difficult path, or the easy one? My position on this matter goes without saying. I choose the difficult path.

Sorry about any typos, there seemed to be some mistakes in Waddell's text, some of which I left, and I typed this pretty fast so I probably made some mistakes that the spell-checker's not catching.

In Idle Talk on A Night Boat Hakuin sets forth this method of meditation that he claims cured his zen sickness and has supposedly long been reputed in Japan to have many health benefits. In Chinese medical terms, it's supposed to return the heart-fire to the tanden (or Ocean of Chi). Regardless of the merits of that understanding, I've found it to be a good relaxation method that I prefer to the more commonly encountered body-scan meditations.

When a student is training and meditating and finds that he has become exhausted in body and mind because the four constituent elements of his body are in disharmony, he should gird up his spirit and perform the following visualization:

Imagine that a lump of soft butter, pure in color and fragrance and the size and shape of a duck egg, is suddenly placed on the top of your head. Slowly it begins to melt, imparting an exquisite sensation as your head becomes moistened and saturated both within and without, It continues oozing down, moistening your shoulders, elbows, and chest, permeating your lungs, diaphragm, liver, stomach, and bowels, then continuing down the spine through the hips, plevis and buttocks.

At that point, all the congestions that have accumulated within the five organs and six viscera, all the aches and pains in the abdomen and other affected parts, will follow the mind as it sinks down into the lower body. You will hear this distinctly, like water trickling from a higher to a lower place. It will continue to flow down through the body, suffusing the legs with beneficial warmth, until it reaches the arches of the feet, where it stops.

The student should then repeat the contemplation. As the flow continues downward, it will slowly fill the lower region of the body and suffuse it with penetrating warmth, making him feel as if he is sitting immersed to his navel in a hot bath filled with a decoction of rare and fragrant medicinal herbs that have been gathered and infused by a skilled physician.

Inasmuch as all things are created by the mind, when you engage in this contemplation your nose will actually smell the marvelous scent of pure soft butter, your body will feel the exquisite sensation of its melting touch. Body and mind will be in perfect peace and harmony. You will feel better and enjoy greater health than you did as a youth of twenty or thirty. All the undesirable accumulations in your vital organs and viscera will melt away. Stomach and bowels will function perfectly. Before you know it, your skin will glow with health. If you continue to practice this contemplation unfalteringly, there is no illness that cannot be cured, no virtue that cannot be acquired,no level of sagehood that cannot be reached, no religious practice that cannot be mastered. Whether results appear swiftly or slowly depends only on how scrupulously you apply yourself.

Later in the work Hakuin mentions that many of his students affective illnesses have been cured by this method, and mentions a student who came to him in tears because he thought his illness was intractable until he tried this method and experienced a full recovery.

Waddell Notes:

Although Hakuin wrote it for his monastic community, the meditations it sets forth became popular and were used in secular circles as well. Prior to the discovery of Penicillin, many sufferers of tuberculosis in Japan used the techniques, apparently with some success, to judge from the large number of books promoting its benefits that appeared from the late nineteenth century up into the early post-war period.