Performing your life. Can you fully occupy the role you find yourself in? Barry Magid January 16th 2016

For Dogen, zazen is a performance. Not in the way someone might play hamlet for three or four hours and then go back to being john. But more in the way a minister performs a wedding ceremony or a surgeon performs surgery. The performance itself is the actualization of a capacity. It allows it to express itself in action. For Dogen, zazen is the performance of realization. For most of us though, this performace can be more like acting - we sit and pretend to be Buddhas for an hour. How else can we approach this? What is actually enacted in zazen? How does this relate to Shakyamuni's realization?

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