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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Saigyo (1118-1190), known in Japanese history as one of the finest poets of waka, or thirty-one syllable verses, was a member of the elite corps of imperial palace guards before he became a Buddhist monk, disillusioned by the social turmoil in the last days of the Heian period. Saigyo traveled extensively while composing wakas. One example of the wakas he composed during his travels is the following, which was included in Shin Kokin-shu, or New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern:

On the road along
A stream with clear water and
In the shade of a willow,
If only for a moment,
I take a break from my walk¹

Living as he did in one century before Dogen (1200-1253) spread his teachings in Japan, Saigyo was not directly influenced by Soto Zen, or Dogen’s brand of Zen Buddhism. Nevertheless, it is clear from this waka that Saigyo was well aware of the state of samatha (serenity) and vipassana (insight) sought by practitioners of Zen meditation. As a mater of fact, Saigyo manages to skillfully combine walking meditation and standing meditation in a single waka, which are two of shiigi, or “four forms of meditation”—zazen (sitting meditation), gyozen (walking meditation), jyuzen (standing meditation), and gazen (lying meditation)—recognized in Zen Buddhism, especially in Soto Zen.

The four forms of meditation appear to have evolved out of the Zen tradition established by Huineng (638-713), the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism in China, who stressed the idea that every act at every moment in our daily living should be treated as a practice that could potentially lead us to samatha (serenity) and vipassane (insight). As for Dogen, it is well known that he singled out zazen as the only effective form of meditation in Zen practice as represented by his idea of shikantaza, or “just sitting”, or his words recorded in Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendation for Zazen): “The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma-gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment.”² In this, Dogen was following the form of practice set up by Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan Buddhism, who is said to have lost the use of his legs after sitting in meditation for nine years facing the wall of a cave. This is also the form of practice inherited by Nyojyo (1163-1228), who was Dogen’s teacher while he studied and trained in China.

Dogen’s insistence on zazen as the only effective form of meditation in Zen practice naturally raises the question of how to conduct that sitting meditation. Here again, Dogen is quite specific as to how to sit and meditate: “At the site of your regular sitting, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it. Sit either in the full-lotus or half-lotus position. In the full-lotus position you first place your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. In the half-lotus you simply press your left foot against your right thigh. … Then place your right hand on your left leg and your left palm (facing upwards) on your right palm, thumb tips touching. Thus sit upright in correct bodily posture, neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward or backward.”³

While allowing a choice between the full-lotus and the half-lotus position for legs and feet, Dogen does not allow a similar choice for hands and fingers, for his instructions for the positioning of hands and the forming of fingers are quite specific. Why is Dogen so fastidious about the way our hands are positioned and fingers are formed? Looking at the Buddha statues found in many countries in Asia, including Japan, we find wide variations in hands and fingers gestures, known as mudras. Some statues show the Buddha with his right hand raised and his left hand placed on the left knee, some two hands joined in the middle of the body, some one hand placed on top of the other, and others both his hands placed on the knees. Of the two famous Buddha statues in Japan, the one in Kamakura shows the Buddha’s two hands joined in a mudra known as samadhi mudra (concentration gesture), while the one in Nara shows the Buddha’s right hand raised in a mudra known as abhaya mudra (fearlessness gesture) and his left hand placed on his left knee.

Wide variations in hands and fingers gestures are what is to be expected from the fact that human hands have been made redundant in the process of evolution when our ancestors started to walk on two legs, making it possible for us to use our hands for other purposes than just for locomotion. While hands thus freed from locomotion have found many usages, both beneficial and harmful, hands in zazen serve as another example of the flexibility that redundancy allows, for the state of meditative concentration can be accomplished with a variety of hands and fingers gestures. Redundancy can thus be considered good news for practitioners of meditation, as each practitioner is able to choose a specific gesture that is most comfortable and conducive to concentration.

Translated from: 「道の辺に清水流るる柳陰しばしとてこそ立ちどまりつれ」
Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendation for Zazen), from The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza, edited by John Daido Loori, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002.
ibid.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Redundancy is bad news for workers in the U.K., for to be made redundant there means to be dismissed from their jobs. Redundancy occurs when a business enterprise decides to reduce its workforce due to a slowdown in its business or the introduction of a new technology that replaces labor. Once made redundant, workers join what Karl Marx (1818-1883) called “the reserve army of labor”, which is an unavoidable feature of the capitalist mode of production in which those who possess capital have the power to hire and fire those who do not.

There are actually two kinds of redundancy—voluntary and compulsory. It goes without saying that compulsory redundancy is the worse of the two, as those workers who are made redundant compulsorily are forced by their employers to leave their jobs against their will unlike those workers who, having found alternative employment opportunities or having decided to retire from their jobs, quit their jobs voluntarily. For example, Honda UK, a carmaker that produces cars for European and UK markets at its Swindon plant, cut 38 workers as compulsory redundancies and 554 workers as voluntary redundancies in 2013. With the prospect of further slowdown in European markets, Honda UK wants to cut another 500 jobs in 2014 and announced, according to the BBC News reported on April 24, that it needs to make some 150 compulsory redundancies for lack of those workers who are willing to take voluntary redundancies.

Whether compulsory or voluntary, there is no question that redundancy is bad news for workers. To alleviate the misery of workers who are made redundant, the UK government makes sure that workers are entitled to redundancy pay and consultation with their employers in their search for alternative employment opportunities. But the government does not go all the way to banning redundancy altogether, recognizing, it seems, that redundancy may not be bad news for the economy as a whole in the capitalist society. But how can redundancy be good news for the economy? Useful insights into this question may be obtained by investigating the meaning and function of redundancy in areas of inquiry other than economics.

The concept of redundancy appears in many scientific disciplines—from engineering to information theory, from biology to linguistics. In engineering, for example, redundancy means duplication of critical components of a system. Engineers create such redundancy because it plays a positive function in that having extra components reduces the possibility of a system failure. Linguists also note the useful function served by redundancy in language, namely, the presence of extra components, even extraneous repetitions, in a phrase or a sentence. The reason redundancy appears in language is to facilitate communication: “Communication would be extremely precarious if sentences lacked all redundancy, since the loss of merely a sound or two through inattention by the listener, mispronunciation by the speaker, or background noise might make the entire sentence unintelligible.”¹

Of particular interest to us in relation to the concept of redundancy in the capitalist society is to be found in the area of biological evolution. While biologists only roughly understand the meaning of redundancy in biological systems, they do know that “systems with some kinds of redundancy are almost certainly far more readily evolved than those without redundancy”, as Stuart Kauffman observes in his At Home in the Universe.² Redundancy, in other words, gives certain advantages to biological systems such as robustness and structural stability.

In addition to giving robustness and structural stability, redundancy enables biological systems to perform new functions that have not been possible without it, leading to what Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan call “redundant innovation”. Human hands are a good example of such a redundant innovation, for “the potentialities of hands would never have occurred were they not freed from the redundant tasks of locomotion.”³ But the potentialities of hands could be exploited for beneficial as well as malignant purposes: “those animals with their heads up ultimately freed their hands to dig for roots, to throw rocks and wield sticks as weapons, to build and explore.”⁴ Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the rise of civilization that has give rise to the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution was made possible when our ancestors started to walk on an upright posture, enabling them to use their hands for tasks other than locomotion.

While many tasks still require the use of hands, the Information Revolution has introduced robots that can perform the tasks that used be done by humans, especially those tasks on the assembly lines on the factory floor. Redundancy innovation is thus a double-edged sword in the case of human evolution, for it introduces ever-sophisticated machines that would raise productivity on the one hand but make workers redundant on the other. To be sure, creating redundancy is the way the capitalist society transforms itself, with an old industry being constantly replaced by a new one, the process which Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1960) characterized as the process of “creative destruction”⁵. But as far as the workers are concerned, redundant innovation is a painful reminder of their vulnerability in the capitalist society: they are after all “factory hands”, like the Coketown Hands whose misery Charles Dickens (1812-1870) vividly described in his 1854 novel Hard Times, who are under the constant threat of being made redundant by the capitalists who own the means of production.

Farb, Peter, Word Play: What Happens When People Talk, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 273-274.
Kauffman, Stuart, At Home In The Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 153.
Margulis, Lynn, and Sagan, Dorion, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, New York: Touchstone, 1986, p. 207.
ibid., p. 207
Schumpeter, Joseph A., The Theory of Economic Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.

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Redundancy (II): How to meditate with our redundant hands?

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