(Hara as the seat of vitality and the one-point of equanimity)
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. -Friedrich Nietzsche
By strengthening the “one point” in the Hara (roughly two inches below the navel and about one inch inside), by breathing from here, and by cultivating Hara Awareness or Haragei, a human being can attain equanimity along with abilities that some might call “mystical” I merely call them mysterious, in the sense that the sound of the bamboo flute is mysterious, or that the origin, duration and ultimate end of this universe itself is mysterious and inexplicable.
Can Hara training help you succeed in battle, in business, in your personal relationships — in life as a whole? Yes. Absolutely it can and will, if by success you mean no matter what happens “never leaving the Tao,” which is said to be “great and dignified.” This is not a method bound to any ideology, although it is part and parcel of the “nonverbal” philosophical approach of old Japanese culture. The Seika Tanden is the same as the Chinese Daoist Dantien, or “cinnabar field.” It is the seat of life and wellspring of the body’s vitality. When you commit Harakiri, you don’t cut your stomach — you cut your lower intestines. This is to open your Tanden to the world and show your sincerity. (Not that I suggest this to anyone.)
Note that Hara training shades into Zen. There is no real division between them. In Hara-training, one learns to attain “the thoughtless reality” at will — not by means of some special power or talent, but via a cutting away or negation of “discriminatory consciousness.” This “cutting off” enables one to perceive “the original Being.” Spontaneous ability then rises in a natural way and makes life a joy. What sounds mystical is direct and clear. As Hakuin said of his kensho, “It was like looking at the palm of my hand. The rhinoceros of doubt fell over dead.”
“Strive on! Strive on! Sentient beings must save themselves! No Buddhas can do it for you!” — Huang Po.
(Hara breathing: dropping awareness into the belly cave)
In Taoist meditation, Hara is connected to the forehead via breathing and the result is the “circulation of the Light.” If you sit still, shut your eyes and let your in breath sink to the depths like a tile falling into a deep pond, the Hara is the lowest point it hits before it rises and expands in exhalation.
As Master Harada said, “You have to realize that the center of the universe is your belly-cave!”
The reason this kind of “one point” mind training in meditation works so well to cut off anxiety is that it brings the awareness, energy and attention down from your upper body where it’s getting knotted up as “thoughts” and very uncomfortable emotions (in the neck, jaw, head, and shoulders especially) and constricting the circulation of Ki. Each time the attention wavers, which it will, you bring it back to the “one point.”
Seiza is by itself a powerful and stable posture, and even more so if you completely relax into it by dropping your energy downward — always downward to the Hara, to the lower body, the knees, the feet, the hands. Always drop Ki downward, because in anxiety attacks the body’s energy rushes upward and overloads your head (or, even worse perhaps, gets choked and knotted up painfully in the chest and/or throat).
(Walking meditation: absorption into sound and the arena of infinity)
But the real adventure began when I started to pay attention to sounds. Listening with clear awareness to a burst of birdsong, wind blowing in a treetop, a truck horn blaring on the street, I sometimes felt projected out of my body into the sound. Sometimes it went even further, and I lost all sense of time and space and entered what I called “the arena of infinity.” It had taken me two or three years of hard walking, an hour and a half or more every single day, to be able to feel balanced and relaxed while moving forward in
a state of clear alertness. At the peak of alertness, I stopped paying attention to details: but if another person even glanced at me from across the street, I felt the glance. I dodged obstacles without noting them consciously or slowing my pace. I could come out of these walks sweating lightly, refreshed, with my mind bright.
A few days later, as I sat on the edge of my bed with my shoes on, getting ready for a walk — I remember that I had just straightened up after tying the laces on my left shoe — I felt a sudden intense flow of energy through my body, up from a vortex below the navel to the shoulders and then the neck and the head — and then I suddenly felt as if I were streaming light from the forehead (the dime sized spot there actually became painfully hot). This startled me. I had been trying to get the “empty mind” of Zen, but there seemed to be nothing empty about the blissful, clear, very strong energy that was now flowing up through my body, from my feet to the crown of my head, with a particularly intense vortex just below the navel.
At some point, I lost all sense of anyone doing the walking. It was just a body moving through space without any special effort, not trying to get anywhere, untroubled by any thoughts, and this was a blissful experience in which linearly ordered “time” seemed to disappear. Everything that offered itself to my senses was vivid, direct and brilliant. It seemed that the energy flowing “in” and through my body was no different than the energy that was the all beings and things in the “outside” world. It was instantaneous and it was also blissful.
I had the sense that I was blazing with light.
It was not long after this that I began doing Misogi to test and develop the “internal heat” of Ki.
When suddenly it starts working you will find yourself laughing. For surely meditation through non-meditation becomes true meditation. Too much meditation must be said to be heretical meditation.
The more Ki you give out, the more flows in. Up from the earth, through the feet. Down from the sky, through the top of the head. And what about dropping it all, cutting through with one blow, and becoming the whole universe?
(Ki and Hara Zen: freshness, knowing others’ hearts, the full human)
Once the ordinary mind gets annihilated, the universe regains its vivid, glistening freshness. Every day I do Hara-breathing. I drop everything in my mind into the “belly cave.” The effect is magical and shocking. Most people live everyday life in a state of “flatness” and dullness imposed by the thinking head. Hara makes life fresh again.
With Hara Zen, one instantly “knows others’ hearts” and is able to act and communicate in the most direct way possible. Even though there is no doer, everything gets done.
Hara no okii hito is the man who is fully developed as a human being and can “swallow the pure with the impure” — he is all-accepting, all embracing. He not only speaks with the belly (Haragoe, “belly voice”) but even thinks with his belly (Hara de kangaeru).
It is overflowing, not existence.
Ki training saved my life, but it would be a worthless life if I hadn’t also turned into the spirited, joyful person I am now. As Master Hua often said, Zen without Ki is a stagnant pond.
(Dropping everything into the Hara: starting from zero each time)
Scrap everything, every thought and every inclination, drop it all into the Hara with total resolve and visualize it as being obliterated. Then go even further — drop your whole experiencing mind and the whole universe into the Hara and see it all as instantly obliterated. “Start from zero every time.” You’ve tried in the past to master reality by deliberating, anticipating, reflecting, projecting, obsessing — in a word, thinking. Drop all that, seeing that your instinctive reactions to events are always finer, fresher and all around more effective (“wiser”) than your considered ones. Admit the total defeat of any attempts to corral, compel, force and measure reality in terms of your system of expectations and ideas. “The unexpected will always happen, while the anticipated may not ever come.” (Nisargadatta)
“Exhale to the ends of the universe; inhale to concentrate the universe in the ‘one point’ in your lower abdomen.” (Inoue)
Physical reality is mystical. The head doesn’t see itself. In what mirror do “you” appear? Who was watching you swim in the sea that hot summer day?
Sit “like a great bronze bell, mouth contemplating eyes.” (Master Hua)
One day I saw it as it is, without any conceptual fog or emotional grasping at this or that isolated straw. I saw that you cannot cut it into parts. Of course, I had always known this. But had it ever been so clear? My head felt as light as space. “Walking at ease under the blue sky.” (Tesshu)
Headlessness is the freedom to be a nothing that makes space for everything to be. So, in a sense, Haragei is just generosity. It allows “all things” to spring up in their original purity.
Empty, the jar can be filled. Filling and emptying again — only the empty state is everlasting. Empty is the primordial state of openness.
This ink painting is by Miyamoto Musashi and expresses his penetrating insight into the essence of Zen. It’s just a shrike sitting on a branch. Although the shrike is sitting still, totally relaxed, one feels that it is also ready to move fast in any direction at any instant.
When the “immovable mind” moves, it isn’t caught by a net. It doesn’t fall into forms. It doesn’t cognize “the ten thousand things.” It is “the true flower” — mushin, emptiness, clarity, freedom itself. When the clouds of bewilderment clear away, when the mind is free from all confusion, that is the true Void. -Musashi.
(Samadhi through one-point mind: from abiding mind to empty clarity)
Taking a strong, stable posture sink “mind” into the “one point” in the Hara. Every time mind starts to move toward a thought or an external form, keep “it” fixed resolutely in the Hara. When the untrained mind moves it becomes “partial.” As Takuan Soho told us, it then “sticks” to an object, a movement, a sound. It becomes the “abiding mind,” the mind of delusion and ignorance. This form of mind brims with internal struggles and thought-discriminations. It’s the painful mind of emotional conflicts and regrets, of rigid and proud ideas, of “unease” and “anguish.” It’s distracted and enslaved by external “events.” It causes endless suffering.
If you learn to resolutely put your “mind” into the Hara, you will find that you can make your thoughts vanish. When your thoughts vanish, you no longer cognize “forms” as separate things isolated in space. Subject and object disappear. The mind becomes empty and its perceptions clear and vivid. This is samadhi. Once you can attain this state at will, you can also relax and let the mind be everywhere and nowhere.
But it will also liberate your mind to move, unfettered and unobstructed, throughout the whole body in a lightning quick, natural and responsive way, just as Master Takuan Soho recommended in his famous letters to Yagyu Munenori dealing with the Zen sword. “Stamp quickly and pass through a wall of iron.” -Yamamoto Tsunemoto. The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter — one has only what one needs to have. -Nietzsche.
The “Ki one-point,” which one can locate in the Hara, is the definitive no-place where there is nothing. It’s the no-point that gives all energy. In Hara Zen one sinks “mind” into this point, the Tanden. This leads to clear perception, naturalness in breathing and action, and a lightning-like ability to handle confusing situations.
(Body-mapping emotions: tension above, release by dropping energy down)
Negative emotions correlate with tenseness in the chest, shoulders, neck, and jaw. Note how feeling “anger” instantly makes your ribs feel tight. Note how feeling “scorn” makes your lips purse and eyes narrow, and how in a disgusted “sneer” your lips draw back from your teeth. Note how “worry” furrows your brow. Note how longing makes your eyes moist. Note how sadness causes your solar plexus to tighten and cut off your breathing.
By dropping “energy” downward and relaxing your whole upper body, you will feel an immediate lightening of your “spirit.” Try it. Isn’t that amazing? Focus on your eyelids. Put all your concentration there. Suddenly a light feeling of calmness spreads through your face, doesn’t it? Did you laugh? Some people start laughing happily as soon as they try this experiment.
Everything happens in the Absolute. You are already in the fourth dimension living your life timelessly. Only thinking plunges you into despair. Nothing else is necessary but to learn how to drop body and mind.
(Shedding body and mind, then shedding the shedding: cheerful samadhi)
If you can “shed body and mind” in this way then you can also instantly “shed the shedding,” and at this point “inside and outside will spontaneously unify” and “all your false ideas will be destroyed as if in a conflagration.” You will feel like “a dumb man who has had an amazing dream.” You will be like someone who has seized the Green Dragon sword of the great general Kan’u. If you meet the Buddha on the road, you kill the Buddha. If you meet the Patriarchs, likewise you kill them. And you live out the rest your life in a cheerful and relaxed samadhi.