Shikan-taza (Just Sitting) by James Shammas

Sitting in zazen, one learns to focus
On a number of variables: the breath,
Your belly bellowing like a thin balloon,
Maybe the sights and sounds within the room.
In shikan-taza, one just sits, back straight,
Legs crossed, totally erect, nothing left to do.
The mind will waver under certain pain, till it
Settles like a feather, etherized, fearing

Nothing's more or less than what it seems,
Fearing the "it" before the seeming,
Fickle in its flitting, its coy inertness
Spitting back your all too human gaze,
Refusing all your desperate offerings
To sense it wholly with eyes and ears,
A porous skin, a tongue that tastes
And talks of it and all it is (or seems?).

That things could exist outside of seeming,
Independent and devoid of this yearning you;
That the sterile stars, pinned and pointed,
Would not want to gaze at you: those eyes
Longing with their look of consternation;
That the ambitious earth-- a forlorn mother
Spinning off its mass of musk and matter--
Would not also want to taste of you: this lie

You fear, sitting like a coiling, winding vine
Turning toward the sun; a churning, yearning
Living wine, wafting all its pregnant fruit,
Young but aging, rising like a lump of bread
Fully formed in fleeting flux, more than earth,
Hard, yet efflorescent. The thought is much:
Sitting there: that all you are is all there is,
Full yet hollow, like the sound of the Roshi's bell.

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Shikan-taza (Just Sitting)
by James Shammas (Age: 44)
copyright 04-23-2006

Age Rating: 10 to 127

Prose-n-Poetry.com

Shikan-taza (Just Sitting) by James Shammas (Age: 44) copyright 04-23-2006 Age Rating: 10 to 127

Shikan-taza (Just Sitting)
by James Shammas (Age: 44)
copyright 04-23-2006

Age Rating: 10 to 127