A just and loving gaze

I should like to quote again from Iris Murdoch in this connection. She suggests that the prime need, if we are able to reach correct moral decisions, is to develop the capacity for attention: “I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.”

“Attention,” she writes, “is rewarded by a knowledge of reality”; and again: “The love which brings the right answer [to moral problems] is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair. The refusal to attend may even induce a fictitious sense of freedom: I may as well toss a coin. Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is.”

Kazuki Sekida . Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy (p. 23).

This quote well illustrates the idea that attuned presence is essential for moral action. The source is a classic Zen text by Kazuki Sekida (h/t Liz!) that I haven’t seen written about much before. Published in the early 80s, it’s a fascinating book itself worthy of some loving attention. It’s notable for being an early example of what we now call “Buddhist Modernism” — specifically, it draws on contemporary (at the time) cognitive science and Western philosophy in contextualizing Zen practice. What I find particularly interesting is that the sources it utilizes are notably different from the scientific and philosophical which we draw upon today - a very different set of touchstones. Sekida draws on William James (specifically on the dissociation of sensation / perception as evidence for the mind-constructed nature of experience), as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger. Consequently there are aspects of practice in this book that I’ve not seen written about other places.

One example - the chapter on posture describes in detail the effects of good posture on the development of concentration based in a subtle contraction of the tanden / dantien: “Our contention, then, is that controlled respiration generates spiritual power, and that attention, which is actually spiritual power, can never be exercised without tension in the tanden.” There’s also an entire chapter on the physiology of breathing and how it effects practice. Like any text, particularly such an old one, you can find some nits to pick — I found the way it frames the goal of practice around the achievement of certain states (samadhi) less than ideal. Nevertheless, this is a book worth your time, particularly if you are in a stage of practice where the development of concentration is your focus.