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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.
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).
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
AI Summary
The Little Book of Zen & Haragei by lao hu presents key insights from the Zen tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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