“Penetrate Life” – Taisen Deshimaru on Living in the Here and Now

The grandson of a retired samurai, the Japanese master Taisen Deshimaru‘s Zen teachings often related to the practice of martial arts. In his book, The Zen Way to the Martial Arts, Deshimaru – who was a student of Kodo Sawaki – writes about Bushido, which he explains as a practice that brings together the strength cultivated through martial arts with the wisdom embodied in the practice of Zen and the meditative practice of zazen. In this excerpt from the chapter titled Here and Now, Deshimaru hones in on the importance of full, concentrated, energetic engagement with the present moment, and how we can wake up from being half-alive most of the time. Now is the moment, Deshimaru says, ‘that life and death are determined, wholly.’

---

YOU AND I ARE NOT the same. If you cannot find the solution for your own life, you will be paralyzed, unable to move.

How do you create your life, here and now?

A reel of film unwinds; if you stop it, the image becomes stationary, motionless.

Creativity and concentration of energy are elements common to the martial arts and Zen. If you concentrate “here and now” and are in touch with the fundamental energy in your body, you can observe what is happening and store up energy to deal with it.

If you open your hand, you can take hold of anything; if you close your hand, nothing can enter it. In the martial arts the point is to penetrate elements and phenomena, not skim alongside them; so the martial arts are essentially virile, because man penetrates woman.

But in our day and age, everybody wants to save energy and is only half alive. Always halfway, never complete. People are half alive, like a lukewarm bath.

You must learn to penetrate life.

The secret of the martial arts, thus, is to learn to direct the mind, ryu gi, to school it in right action. That is the basis of the physical techniques. The mind must become the substance. The mind is a substance without form, but sometimes it has a form.

“People are half alive, like a lukewarm bath.”

“When the mind’s activity fills the whole cosmos it can seize opportunities, avoid mishaps, attack all things in one.” What that means is that in a contest our mind cannot be influenced by any move of the opponent, or by any action of his body or mind. One’s own mind must move about freely, without any desire to attack the adversary, yet without ever removing one’s attention from him. We must be completely attentive to him, always, at every instant.

The same thing is true in our everyday lives. Some people think about nothing but money because it is supposed to satisfy every desire, so for money they lose their honor. Other people want “honors,” and for them they lose their money. Some people have their minds fixed on love and for that they lose both money and energy. And yet happiness is never on just one side.

We must create our lives, free ourselves, become detached, simply attentive to here and now: everything lies in that.

“The moon’s reflection on the surface of the water moves incessantly. Yet the moon shines and goes no-where; it stays but it moves.” A very short poem on the secret of Zen and the martial arts, and also a great koan.

The stream never flows backward. The water slips past, past, past… but the moon doesn’t move. In a contest the mind must be like the moon, while body and time slip past, past, past like water in the stream.

Now never returns. In zazen every breath out is that one, the one now, and it never comes back again. Of course, you can “catch” your breath but what you catch is never what went before. The breath that comes after is never the one that came before. Yesterday was yesterday and today is today. Different.

I am always saying we must concentrate “here and now,” create “here and now.” That way, we become fresh, new. Yesterday’s zazen is not the same as today’s.

“If you try to spare your energy in a fight, you cannot win. That’s one secret of the martial arts.”

Zazen must always be fresh, “here and now.” You must not rest during zazen, nor while you are training in a martial art. Doing it halfway is no good; you have to do it all the way, give yourself wholly to it. We must not have any energy left in reserve.

Concentrating means “all out,” total release of energy; and it should be the same in every act of our life.

In the present-day world what we see is the opposite: young people half living, half dead. Their sexuality is half way, too, yet they think about sex at work or during zazen, and the other way round as well, and so it goes with everything they do.

But if you have exhausted all your energy, you can take in fresh energy, flowing like the water in the stream.

If you try to spare your energy in a fight, you cannot win. That’s one secret of the martial arts. We cannot count on wasa, on technique alone. We have to create.

If a rich man gives his son money, the son will never learn to earn it for himself, while a poor man’s son can invent some means of self-support.

The martial arts are not theater or entertainment. That is not the true Budo. Kodo Sawaki used to say that the secret of the martial arts is that there is no victory and no defeat. You can neither win nor be beaten. It is not the same as in sports.

In sports, time exists. In the martial arts there is only the present. In baseball, for instance, the man at bat has to wait for the pitch, he has time; his action is not instan-taneous. The same is true of rugby or football or any other sport. Time passes and there is time, if only a fraction of a second, to think about something, while waiting. In the martial arts there is no time to wait. Victory or nonvictory, life or not-life, are decided in no time.

You have to live now, it is now that life and death are determined, wholly.