Home Sitting

Nurturing Your Home Practice

During these stressful times the importance of having a strong home practice is invaluable. Follow these simple steps and you will find that sitting at home is something you will look forward to doing every day.

First: Make a designated area your practice place. Clean it thoroughly every day. This is your zendo, treat it like a sacred place and gassho when you enter the space. If you have a robe at home you should wear it or use special comfortable but neat sitting attire. Getting on your sitting clothes prepares the mind and helps to focus.

Next: Place a Buddha or Bodhisattva figure or a picture in your zendo. Adorn the altar (shelf or desktop) with incense and candles, a green living thing and fresh fruit and tea or water. Replace these as often as needed, tea needs to be changed every other day. An apple can often last more than a week whereas other fruit may not last. Grain and water also work as offerings.

• Incense: Is an offering of gratitude, in the Vimilikirti sutra it says that in some Buddha lands
incense “feeds” the Buddhas.
• Fruit & Grain: Signify sharing our practice with others, as in a meal.
• Water: The purity of our True Nature.
• Greenery: The sign of living things and longevity.
• Tea: Sustenance.
• Flowers: Blossoming of our true nature.

Thus, these offerings realize or help make your practice real and enhance your affinity with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

The first time you sit every day you should start by reciting The Way of the Bodhisattva and end each sitting with the Four Vows.

Do prostrations and also a chanting service either daily or as often as you can. Begin each service -as we always do, with the Three Treasures and Prostrations and end with four vows and prostrations. A good daily service includes Prajna Paramita, Ten Verse Kannon Sutra, Dharani for Removing Disasters (Sho Sai Myo) and any one of the longer chants, Affirming Faith in Mind or Dai Hi Shin, or Lotus Sutra Scripture or Mantra of Bhaisajaguru. These can all be found under the chanting section on the Zen Centre web site.

QUESTION: Doesn’t doing all this take the time that could be better spent just sitting?

RESPONSE: Actually, these practices will make your sitting deeper, more welcoming and remind you that you are not just sitting for yourself. Devotional practices help us get past ourselves.

Guidelines for Sitting On-line

As we do for home practice wear—it is best to wear your robe and rakusu, if you need to get them from the Centre, ask us to put them in the back entry for your pick up.

This is most important when requesting to come to dokusan.

Also try to be sitting in advance of the actual sitting start time, (i.e. before the han begins!) not joining after the formal sitting has started. Since you do not need to actually travel to the Centre you should be ready earlier—not later.

When you are coming to dokusan be sitting at least 20 minutes before the start of dokusan. Since the number of people that have signed up is usually more than we see in regular evening sittings we need to start earlier so do not rely on the start of the sitting being enough time.

People are seen in the order they sign up, whenever possible so if you have signed up the night before you can be sure that you will be one of the last to be on the list, so do not fall asleep!

All of these procedures will help enhance your experience of sitting in a virtual zendo.