In zazen we are all nude models for ourselves.
Concentrate! Stretch the backbone. Head presses the sky. When we say “concentrate,” this has nothing to do with thinking. It is not like studying for an exam. It is more like making a fist, except that it is effortless. It is more like a yawn or a sneeze or laughter: whole-hearted, spontaneous, yet silent and invisible. Mind is concentrated in the body like tea in hot water, infused.
Last night I was reading Notes of a Nude Model. The author talks about the amateurs, those models who don’t last, the ones who are self-conscious, who have an inflated sense of themselves, modesty or shame or pride. Or the lazy ones who think sitting for an artist is just sitting and relaxing on the dais and collecting a check. No, real models work up a sweat by just sitting, just like bodhisattvas in the dojo.
During zazen, like modeling, although we just sit, we never relax into our posture. In shikantaza we constantly stretch the backbone, head pressing the sky. Like an artist’s model, we hold the pose like a pro. We don’t fidget; we are not here to make ourselves comfortable, to self-soothe, to suck our thumbs.
We are here to concentrate. To strip ourselves naked and to observe the beauties and blemishes, unmoving and unmoved, without pride or prejudice. Zazen is neither analysis nor appreciation. It is observation but without a mirror and without an artist to reflect or interpret us. We are a mirror of ourselves, our own artists, our own interpreters, like empty plaster casts on a balcony aware of the world around us.
Reading Notes of a Nude Model I was reminded of when I lived in London and sat for an artist friend of mine in his freezing studio in Hackney back in 1980-81. The cold never affected me until I tried to move. After a couple of hours of “just sitting,” I recall how on the bus ride home to Victoria I would feel emptied out but exhilarated too. I would catch a glimpse of myself in the reflections of the windows with the London cityscape in the background and hardly recognize that person, my so-called self: who was that “self” anyway?
Twenty years later, when I began to come to the dojo and strip myself naked morning after morning, I would recognize that feeling of being emptied out after zazen. It was as though I was sitting for my portrait, except that it was a no-self portrait. In zazen we are all nude models for ourselves. We sit like pros, emptied out and sweating.
— Richard Collins
