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Instructions to a Samurai
Even if wonderful things like sudden enlightenment or immediate illumination could happen by sitting as if dead in silent awareness, still the lords, grandees, knights, and common people have all sorts of public duties and family affairs to attend to where can they find even a little free time to sit? Even if you take time off from your job and leave household duties undone on the pretext of illness, then shut yourself in a room for three, five, or seven days with a pile of cushions and a stick of incense to sit, you’ll be so tired from your everyday worldly duties that for every inch you sit you’ll sleep ten feet, and in every three cups of sitting meditation you’ll collect ten million bushels of wandering thought. Now if you glare and grit your teeth, clench your fists and straighten your spine and sit, all sorts of hallucinations will crowd your head.

At this point, with furrowed brow you find yourself weeping, “Official duties obstruct spiritual practice. A career in service interferes with meditation. It would be better to retire from office and go to some quiet uninhabited place by a river or in a forest, in order to practice meditation at will and escape a perpetual cycle of misery.” This is very much mistaken.

Generally speaking, being someone’s subject means eating food that belongs to your lord, wearing clothes that belong to your lord, and carrying swords that belong to your lord. Even water is not brought from elsewhere. You eat without farming, dress without weaving-your body, hands and feet, hair, nails, and teeth are all products of your lord’s benevolence. Having thus grown up to reach the age of thirty or forty, a time when you should be assisting your lord’s administration, concentrating on bringing out the ability to assist a ruler, making your lord into a lord like Yao and Shun, making the people a people like Yao’s and Shun’s, intent upon repaying your debt to your lord, instead you secretly finger prayer beads in your sleeve, mumble incantations to yourself, show up late for work, slack off on the job, and you may even claim illness and retire with no thought of repaying your debt to your lord. With will and behavior like this, even if you spent three to five years in retreat practicing austerities, it might seem as if your ideas had ended and your thoughts had stopped, but your guts will be frazzled and your mind will be fearful. Even the sound of a rat crapping will make your chest seem to burst.

Whether a commander or a common soldier, in a national emergency, when it is imperative to take charge in some way, if you get people like this to secure a door in danger, when they see and hear the enemy troops rising like the tide, banners like clouds overhead, guns booming like thunder, bugles blasting loud enough to make the mountains crumble, swords drawn in rows like icicles, then they won’t be able to swallow, they’ll tremble all over, unable even to hold the reins, clinging flat to the saddle, shaking so hard they’re about to fall. As a result, they’ll be captured by foot soldiers. Why are they like this? Simply because of the three to five years of dead sitting in silence. Even a brave man would quiver if he had done this kind of practice.

If you think dead sitting in silent awareness is enough, you’ll waste your life and deviate greatly from the way of enlightenment. Not only will you deviate from the way of enlightenment, you’ll neglect worldly truth too. Why? If the lords and grandees gave up government to sit deathlike in silent awareness, if the warriors ignored archery and horsemanship and forgot martial arts to sit deathlike in silent awareness, if the merchants closed up shop and broke their abacuses to sit deathlike in silent awareness, if the farmers threw down their plows and hoes and stopped tilling and weeding to sit deathlike in silent awareness, if carpenters discarded their plumb lines and tossed away their planes to sit deathlike in silent awareness, the nation would Wither, the people would weary, robbers would rise up repeatedly, and the state would be in peril. Then the people would say indignantly that Zen is extremely inauspicious.

There are two kinds of selflessness. Suppose there is someone who is always timid and weak in body and mind, afraid of everyone, mortifying his feelings so that in dealing with myriad situations he does not become angry when hollered at, doesn’t mind if he’s beaten, is always absentminded and doesn’t learn from experience, but he thinks he has attained selflessness and considers that sufficient, This is being a broken rice bag, a fat bellied pig in the mud, as if entirely ignorant and void of intelligence.
It is not true selflessness.

If you always have your mental energy filling your navel sphere, ocean of energy, elixir field, and the space between your waist and legs, and you do not let it recede for a moment even when you are busy working or meeting guests, then basic energy will naturally fill the elixir field, and the lower abdomen will be slightly rounded like an unribbed ball. If people can cultivate this state, they can sit all day without tiring, recite all day without wearying, write all day without fatigue, speak all day without getting worn out. Even if they do myriad good deeds day in and day out, they never show any sign of flagging. The mind becomes broader, the heart becomes bigger, energy is always vigorous. Even in the hottest summer one does not sweat, even without using a fan; even on the coldest winter night one does not need to wear socks or use a warmer. Even if one lives to be a hundred years old, one’s teeth will become even firmer. If one does not slack off, one attains long life.

There are three places in the body that are elixir fields. What I refer to as the elixir field is the lower elixir field. The ocean of energy and the elixir field are both below the navel, as if they were one reality with two names. The elixir field is two inches below the navel, the energy ocean an inch and a half. When pure energy always fills here, body and mind are always equanimous. Even if you live to be a hundred years old, your hair won’t thin and your teeth won’t loosen. Your vision will get clearer and clearer and your skin will gradually become lustrous.

Spirit is like the ruler, vitality is like the ministers, and energy is like the people. Now then, caring for the people is the means of keeping the country intact. To be sparing of your energy is the means of keeping your body intact. When the people flee, the country perishes; when energy runs out, the body dies. For reason, a sage ruler always focuses his mind below, while a mediocre ruler always indulges his heart on high. When the heart is indulged on high, the nobles rely on personal favor, the officials are arrogant with power; they never pay attention to hardship among the people, while importunate ministers greedily skim and cruel officers deprive by deception. There may be plenty of vegetables in the fields, yet people are collapsing from starvation in the countryside. The intelligent and the good go into hiding, ministers and commoners are angry and resentful, the masses of people are ultimately reduced to abject misery, and so the pulse of the nation dies out forever. When the mind is focused below, never forgetting the toil of the people, the populace is well nourished and the state is strong; no ministers or commoners violate the law, while no enemy states invade the domain. So it is with the human body. The perfect people always have mental energy filling below, so the emotions do not act within, while the material world cannot invade from without. With the camp guard fully supplied, the mental spirit is strong. Ultimately the body doesn’t know the sting of acupuncture or moxabustion, just as the people of a powerful nation don’t hear cries of alarm.

From Thomas Cleary’s Training of the Samurai Mind.