I believe the ox-herding pictures were originally eight, in China. The last two, the blank slate and the marketplace scene, would therefore be later additions. Speaking of uncertainty as to what constitutes the light...
Tommy, I'll bet you could relate to my latest post--here's the first part of it, and a link:
“The Place Where You Stop and Rest”
In one of his letters, twelfth-century Ch’an teacher Yuanwu wrote:
Actually practice at this level for twenty or thirty years and cut off all the verbal demonstrations and creeping vines and useless devices and states, until you are free from conditioned mind. Then this will be the place of peace and bliss where you stop and rest.
Thus it is said: “If you are stopping now, then stop. If you seek a time when you finish, there will never be a time when you finish.”
(“Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu”, tr. Cleary & Cleary, Shambala p 99)
In my teenage years, I became keenly aware of the “creeping vines” of my mind. I read a lot of Alan Watts books on Zen, thinking that might help, but I soon found out that what he had to say did nothing to cut off the “creeping vines”.
I was looking for something Shunryu Suzuki described in one of his lectures, though I didn’t know it at the time:
So, when you practice zazen, your mind should be concentrated in your breathing and this kind of activity is the fundamental activity of the universal being. If so, how you should use your mind is quite clear. Without this experience, or this practice, it is impossible to attain the absolute freedom.
(Thursday Morning Lectures, Shunryu Suzuki; November 4th 1965, Los Altos; emphasis added)
I began to try to sit zazen, based on the illustrations in the back of “Three Pillars of Zen”, by Philip Kapleau.
Zazen is almost always taught to beginners as sitting with a straight back and paying close attention to inhalation and exhalation. With regard to the straight back, Moshe Feldenkrais wrote:
“Sit straight!” “Stand straight!” This is often said by mothers, teachers, and others who give this directive in good faith and with the fullest confidence in what they are saying. If you were to ask them just how one does sit straight or stand straight, they would answer, “What do you mean? Don’t you know what straight means? Straight is straight!”
Some people do indeed stand and walk straight, with their backs erect and their heads held high. And of course there is an element of “standing straight in their posture.
If you watch a child or an adult who has been told to sit or stand straight, it is evident that he agrees that there is something wrong with the way he is managing his body, and he will quickly try to straighten his back or raise his head. He will do this thinking that he has thereby achieved the proper posture; but he cannot maintain this “correct” position without continuous effort. As soon as his attention shifts to some activity that is either necessary, urgent, or interesting, he will slump back to his original position.
(“Awareness Through Movement”, Moshe Feldenkrais, p 66)
For many years, whenever I sat at a zendo with a teacher who walked the room during a sitting, the teacher would invariably stop behind me and correct my posture. I generally couldn’t maintain their correction to the end of the sitting.
With regard to close attention to inhalation and exhalation, Shunryu Suzuki described such attention as only a “preparatory practice”:
… usually in counting breathing or following breathing, you feel as if you are doing something, you know– you are following breathing, and you are counting breathing. This is, you know, why counting breathing or following breathing practice is, you know, for us it is some preparation– preparatory practice for shikantaza because for most people it is rather difficult to sit, you know, just to sit.
(The Background of Shikantaza, Shunryu Suzuki; San Francisco, February 22, 1970)
Shikantaza, or “just sitting”, is emphasized in the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, the school to which Shunryu Suzuki belonged.
(“The Place Where You Stop and Rest”)