Embodying the Present

When we experience the path toward a goal mainly as a burden, we want to get it over with as quickly as possible. We regard the individual activities along this path as tasks that need to be completed promptly. This appears in small and large matters alike and has much to do with our conditioning and views: After vacuuming, at the end of the workday, on the weekend, on vacation, or in retirement, I will finally have time for myself and be happy.

When we realize that this doesn’t really work, we may seek our happiness on a spiritual path and run the risk of perpetuating the same patterns of thought and behavior: reading one more remarkable book, attending a lecture by that famous teacher, receiving this initiation, or reaching that level of realization. To describe this, the Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa coined the term “spiritual materialism.”

If we do not view the spiritual path merely as a way toward a goal, we learn to regard each moment as a goal in itself and to accept—and, if possible, enjoy—everything that arises within it.

These two emphases—gradual progress along a path and immediate realization in the present moment—also shape Buddhist traditions. The Tibetan Gelug school, to which the Dalai Lamas belong, exemplifies the first approach. It understands Buddhist practice as a path of stages: Through sustained practice, often over a long period of time, the conditions for liberation and awakening are gradually developed. Its influential teacher, Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), authored the Lamrim Chenmo, the “Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment,” a systematic guide to Buddhist practice.

Texts from the Chan and Zen traditions, by contrast, place greater emphasis on immediacy: awakening is not just a distant goal but is also realized in the present moment. To me, these two emphases do not contradict one another. Continuous practice and immediate realization in the here and now are two aspects of the same practice.

Already in the Bāhiya Sutta, an early Buddhist discourse, the Buddha gives an instruction to the ascetic Bāhiya in which this immediacy is expressed. Upon hearing the following words—which I translate as follows—Bāhiya attained immediate liberation: “When you see, just see. When you hear, just hear. When you smell, just smell. When you taste, just taste. When you perceive bodily sensations, simply perceive them. And when thoughts arise, simply perceive them as well.” This very immediacy is an expression of awakening.

Later, Chan masters in China and Zen teachers in Japan articulated similar statements. Mazu Daoyi (709–788, Tang dynasty) taught: “Trust that your own mind is Buddha; this very mind is Buddha.” Linji Yixuan (died 866), from whom the Linji school and later the Japanese Rinzai school descend, said, in essence: “The more you seek Buddha and Dharma, the farther you move away from them.” And Dōgen (1200–1253), the founder of the Japanese Sōtō school, formulated it this way: “In Buddha-Dharma, practice and realization are one.”

This understanding is distilled in the Sōtō practice of shikantaza, which roughly means “just sitting.” Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi translates shikantaza as bearing witness. In German-language editions, this has been rendered as Zeugnis ablegen—“giving testimony.” I propose “embodying the present” instead. In shikantaza, sitting itself is an expression of wakefulness—as the immediate realization of reality (dharmakāya). In Zen, however, this practice is not limited to sitting; it also manifests in standing, walking, and everything we do.

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