Common sense will tell you that practice is something you do with your body and mind. But that’s backwards. Your body and mind are things you do with your practice. In fact, your everyday sense of body and mind might be doing you more harm than good. From some perspectives, like the Buddhist and philosophical perspectives I’ll introduce here, it’s advisable to reflect on your habits and question them. The instruction is to rethink who and what you are. In other words, don’t take your physical and mental habits for granted. It may even be sensible to practice undoing your body and mind altogether.

Indeed, undoing your body and mind is exactly what the great Zen master Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253) prescribes. His Genjōkōan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point) describes the practice of Zen as a falling away or casting off of body and mind. It’s a body–mind drop off (shinjin datsu-raku). What does that mean? Appreciating the practice of casting away one’s body and mind requires an understanding of the nature of Zen practice, which opens up a few more general questions about philosophy and the nature of wisdom, or questions about the relation between wisdom and practice, that are worth exploring.

The practice of Zen, oriented first around seated meditation (zazen), also includes one’s daily activities. In Zen, enlightenment is the actualization of one’s Buddha nature, the realization of the myriad things as they are, not as bodies or minds but simply as themselves. The point isn’t that Zen practice leads to an enlightened realization. Rather, the point is that practicing Zen is realization. It’s one integrated practice–realization (shushō-ittō). You’re always already enlightened, but it’s only in practice that you can realize that. Wisdom is not something attained by practice. Wisdom is practice. It’s a practice of actualizing your deepest potential by emptying yourself entirely, letting go of body, mind, and everything, letting go and letting things come forth as they are, just being together, interdependently coexisting.

“To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.” Letting go of bodies and minds means inhabiting your place in the interdependent web of coexistence, finding your place exactly where you are right now. Whether sitting in meditation, cooking, walking, washing dishes, or doing any activity whatsoever, your practice is always somewhere, extending into the world around you through the air you breath, the food you eat, the ground you walk on, the screens you use, and everything else with which you interact. Realization is practice, and practice is nothing more than being where you are, finding your location within the web of being. Here is Dōgen’s Zen, “When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.”

---

This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here. 

---

Dōgen is talking specifically about Zen, but he is saying something that applies much more widely. Zen is one among many schools of Buddhism, but it relates even more widely than that. A person for whom wisdom is an ongoing practice of realization is known as a philosopher, who ancient Greeks knew as a lover of wisdom (philosophos). Philosophers like Pythagoras and Socrates did not claim to be wise but to practice wisdom. They declared that they do not possess wisdom but are possessed by it. They are in love with it, enraptured and entranced by it, devoted and dedicated to it, charmed and captivated within it.

Hacks are for people who want shortcuts to becoming more efficient and productive, in other words, shortcuts for getting around practice.

Although the word is derived from its usage among ancient Greeks, philosophy is not restricted to Greece or to Europe or to any particular region or continent. Sloughing off its ethnocentrism, philosophy is increasingly cognizant of its cross-cultural scope. As the twentieth-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers put it, philosophy is world philosophy (Weltphilosophie), with roots all around the planet and not only in Europe. Philosophy emerges anywhere people engage wisdom not as a given but as a question, as a quest maintained in vigilant practice. This doesn’t mean that there is one underlying philosophy that shows up in different cultural clothing. Philosophy is not a single perennial plant (philosophia perennis) that springs up in different soils. Comparisons, intersections, and overlaps abound, but philosophy is not one. Different cultural contexts and different practices yield different thoughts, feelings, and actions. Different places afford different practices, different loves of wisdom.

We can discern two basic tendencies across the vast diversity of world philosophy. To put it simply, sometimes love works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. When love works out, philosophy is what Jaspers calls a loving struggle (liebender Kampf), wherein the lover says a hearty “Yes” to life, celebrating the ongoing struggle of practice, amorously devoted to letting go and letting things exist as they are. To realize such an affirmation of the practicing life is to enter into a profound acceptance of one’s place in the web of coexistence. Friedrich Nietzsche describes this kind of affirmation as a love of fate (amor fati), which means maintaining an active engagement in the practicing life. However, keeping up that kind of existential affirmation is immensely challenging, improbable at best, and it’s easy to give up.

When love doesn’t work out, the lover resents the burden of practice. Love grows bitter, aversion and coercion take over, and the active “Yes” is displaced by a reactive “No.” Whether it’s Buddhist or Christian, Greek or Mesoamerican, African or Chinese, philosophy must always negotiate its way through active and reactive dynamics. Currently, reactive apathy and antipathy run rampant on the planet. Loving struggle is the antidote, but we seem to be in short supply. Some lament that institutionalization and professionalization have drained philosophy of its loving struggle, as if centuries of bureaucratic organization have dried up the well of authentic wisdom. That is a cynical lamentation. Recall that you are always already enlightened. Institutional and professional dimensions of practice are a mixed bag, but they do not need to be cast away—you do. Let go of your body and mind instead of blaming the other. Letting go might even provide some spaciousness in which you can collaborate on the construction of better institutions.

If there is a lack of philosophers who are actively committed to the practice of wisdom, it isn’t because institutions are getting in the way. It’s because of a lack of exercise. We’re all enlightened. We just need constant reminding, which means we just need to train. You could say that we need to philosophize like life depends on it. More accurately, life doesn’t depend on it. Life is it. Your life is philosophy—practicing wisdom, affirming the struggle—or your life is not really much of a life at all. It’s more of a nihilistic reaction against life, like the “lives of quiet desperation” to which Henry David Thoreau saw most people confining themselves.

Practicing a philosophical life may sound like a life hack, but it most certainly isn’t. Hacks are for people who want shortcuts to becoming more efficient and productive, in other words, shortcuts for getting around practice. A philosophical life doesn’t give you a shortcut. Instead, it demands that you take up the burden of affirming your fate, of loving your place among the multifarious things in the world. The practice of wisdom is not about helping, improving, or streamlining. It counters the carelessness and violence wreaking havoc on people and the biosphere, but it doesn’t make life any less of a struggle. If anything, practice intensifies the struggle by bringing amorous dedication to it. Living philosophy does not make life any less of an emergency. It lets the emergency of coexistence more fully emerge, so that we might be together, such as we are.