An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice Via Deleuze

An exemplary operation: Shikantaza and articulating practice via Deleuze

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a chapter published in Transcendence, immanence and intercultural philosophy:

Pont, Antonia 2016, An exemplary operation: Shikantaza and articulating practice via Deleuze. In Brown, Nahum and Franke, William (ed), Transcendence, immanence and intercultural philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp.207-236.

The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43092-8

This is the accepted manuscript.

Reprinted with permission.

Downloaded from DRO: http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30088287

DRO Deakin Research Online, Deakin University’s Research Repository Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B An Exemplary Operation – Shikantaza and articulating practice via Deleuze

Dr Antonia Pont

Deakin University

Introduction

Practice, we could say, is the strange behaviour whereby actions thoroughly of the everyday are precisely constellated in order that a register, which itself operates in the interstices of the day-to-day, becomes glimpsable. Put another way practice tends the spaces in which grace, accident, the new and another future might be able to appear.

The practitioner does not, and never does, make anything happen. The practitioner accompanies. She courts. He goes-along-with in a precise (and, as argued here, articulable) way, one that does not shut out the singular instance that opens onto the universal.

Gilles Deleuze, a theoretical mainstay of this enquiry, writes in relation to the true problems upon which we depend for any solution: '[s]uch focal points or horizons are

Ideas—in other words, problems as such—whose nature is at once both immanent and transcendent' (2004: 2015). We could venture considering, then, whether the field of the problem, as conceptualized by Deleuze, is that which transcends a dualism of immanence/transcendence, or at least contributes to its reconfiguring, to the complexity of our thinking on this question.

In his work Difference and Repetition (2004), Deleuze launches a full-scale engagement with representational thinking, offering a far-reaching critique that continues to nourish the conceptual landscapes of philosophy proper and the whole

1 spectrum of the creative arts nearly half a century after its publication. Pertinently,

William Franke in this volume makes the following observation:

Transcendence is what cannot be represented, whereas representations are what

make up the world as it is pictured and conceived. (Franke, current volume

CHECK PAGE)

If we follow Franke's offering, I believe we can say that there is at least a point of fertile intersection between thinking the mechanisms of what does not feature in the register of representation (Deleuze) and the broader question of transcendence and immanence.

We can additionally note that inquiring into immanence and transcendence--of employing their delineation in order to think more, and perhaps even to do differently--itself constitutes a robust example of a practice. In that sense too, serious scholarship falls clearly within the definition of practicing set out below.

To work within what can be deemed the 'generative constraint' of the terms

'immanence' and 'transcendence' satisfies the 1st criterion of practice, namely the requirement of a 'bounded set of behaviors'. To set oneself the task of questioning of the registers of immanence and transcendence over a long period, sincerely and rigorously, as the community of authors in this volume do, is clearly to engage in practice. It provides the structural requirements for not-precluding the emergence, into this world, of something entirely unexpected: grace, accident, or miracle (to use a term from Deleuze 2004: 3).

In what follows, we will propose a new theory and delimited definition of practice, where the latter can be understood as a "strange" (but not uncommon) register of action. It aims to clarify a conceptualization of what practice is and how it works, as

2 well as to introduce a more assured vocabulary for its articulation. Understood simply, practice can be approached as a "strange" mode of more usual doings–a mode that is woven into the quotidian fabric of living but not technically 'of' that register.

Furthermore, the definition of practice proposed here, while delimited, also arguably works to include differently. With not every mode of action satisfying its criteria, and with other surprising examples falling within its definition, this approach brings out of solution a clearer understanding of what practice for our purposes does or does not include, why, and what kind of machine (to borrow from Deleuze1) practice might be.

Why, we could ask, do we need an additional theory of what practice is? Motivating this chapter and related research is the need to provide an account for those ubiquitous but often-unacknowledged modes of doing that produce a counter-intuitive, or perhaps oxymoronic, outcome. Practice, as we'll explore it here, corresponds to a mode of doing or register of action that simultaneously tends to cultivate stability and court transformation. To date, there appears to be little, if any, scholarship attempting to account for or theorize rigorously about this atypical constellation. One would expect that certain doings would stabilize, while other–perhaps different–doings would operate transformatively. Practice, however, unsettles this simple assumption and merits our interest due to its cultivation and courting of these dual "effects" that we might typically assume to be mutually exclusive, hardly likely to arise in tandem.

It is for this reason that the term "strange" features throughout this chapter. Practice, it will be argued, is wonderfully strange, but not impenetrably so–especially in the wake of the work of thinkers such as Deleuze, who provide the philosophical scaffolding for exploring more precisely this common, but often vaguely wielded, term.

If practice, according to this definition, is capable of producing such "strange" precipitations, what then–within the very structure of what practice tends to involve–

3 might account for this? This chapter takes up Shikantaza (a staple practice from the

Zen traditions) as exemplary for this query, and will approach it as a kind of laboratory for distilling the criteria peculiar to practice. These criteria, I contend, allow us to account for the latter's counter-intuitive combination of effects, in part due to their resonance with ontological operations.

By noting what practice precipitates, and then the very precise criteria that account for the former in terms of the operations it consistently involves, I hope to make visible and include under this denomination a number of disparate forms, which normally one might deem either unrelated or too humble to merit the dignified label of practice

(for example: knitting, ceramics, serious appreciation of music, even cleaning.)

By aligning various 'doings' that might initially appear unrelated, by dint of these revealing criteria, we refine a vocabulary for, and appreciation of, a community of doings–doings which enact "doing" in a precise mode. This potentially allows us to hone the practices that we attempt and devote ourselves to, those that pertain to the realms of art, politics, mathematics, love and more2, to articulate them more clearly and to have an understanding of what they unleash.

After long years of my own practice across a number of modalities, my observation has consistently been that practice displays the noteworthy tendency to court both change and stability–its dual "outcome.” When one practices consistently, seriously and over a long period of time–to borrow the phrasing of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

(2013)3–the fabric of things, or one's experienced relation to it, is both steadier, and radically changed in an enduring, rather than haphazard, way. What has attracted my attention is that the steadiness or stability that arises in the wake of practice tends to be one that is almost completely independent of regimes of identity (as Deleuze has

4 unpacked the latter). This kind of stability does not cling to or rely on notions of fixed identity, on thinking through oppositions, on analogy in relation to judgment, and on seeking to find resemblances in relation to objects.4 It is not (a seeking of) stability of identity or within representation (bolstered by oppositions, analogies and resemblances). The steadiness that arises from practice is of an altogether different order. The question I explore below considers which kinds of mechanisms allow us to posit a theory about this. Shikantaza, as our example, will assist us to uncover these systematically, and they will be explored closely in what follows. Termed the Four

Criteria of Practice, they can be summarized as:

i. Structural Form / Set of Behaviours

ii. Intentional Repetition of that Form iii. Relaxation iv. Repeating Repetition.

But before we embark on our theoretical discussion, let's consider some concrete examples of what we might be looking at when it comes to practice in everyday life.

Practices

Many activities have the potential to function as practice as I am defining it, but these same activities if inflected otherwise can simply be things people do–entertainments in some cases, distractions, compulsions or routines. For my purposes, practice is something that we find everywhere, but which is in no way pedestrian or arbitrary. As mentioned, it distinguishes itself from certain inflections of habit5, firstly because, although it may be acquired unintentionally or contracted, it is more usual that its form has been intentionally acquired and cultivated. Think of people who embark upon learning qi gong. They cannot accidentally acquire its form. They must

5 approach the activity with intention and some commitment. The same goes for lithographic practice, contemporary dance, or ceramics. Practice is acquired, then, rather than contracted–the latter being the typical language we use for habits, and for good reason. Practice, in other words, is not unplanned, although it may curiously serve to not-preclude accidents. Practice, for all its deliberateness, does not shut out the contingency that marks the "something else", or newness per se. (This contingency is reminiscent, arguably, of the one that characterizes the event for a thinker such as Badiou. 6) Furthermore, practice may be marked by a kind of heightened ordinariness, and this very quality, too, signposts its unusual character. It does not–to put it another way–reproduce the contours and operations of the spectacle. (It may even arguably expose the insistence of the spectacle, perhaps even deflate it.7)

We could go so far as to say that practice displays a number of softly paradoxical aspects of its mechanisms and effects. In The Logic of Sense (2004), Deleuze makes clear that 'paradox' is not to be simplistically aligned with contradiction (as it often is in quotidian usage). The two cannot be considered interchangeable since their relation is a far more interesting one. He writes:

The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow

us to be present at the genesis of the contradiction.8

The paradoxicality of what practice 'prompts', 'courts', 'does-not-preclude' or

'engenders' (these verbs only approximate its working), has something to do with the fact that its mechanisms operate at a register that is logically prior to the order of representation, the order within which something like contradiction operates and is determined. Deleuze states plainly: paradoxes allows us to be present at a genesis. At

6 the genesis of what? This is also a question into which practice experientially (in real- time) offers a glimpse.

But let's consider what might be included in this proposed inflection of practice.

Activities with the potential to satisfy my criteria include (but are definitely not limited to): knitting, yoga, cooking, cross-country skiing, writing, close listening to music, close reading/study, walking, zazen, practicing an instrument, sex

(sometimes), wood-work, meditation, golf, dancing, flower-arranging, calligraphy, prayer and so on. I wrote "sometimes" after sex to flag that it is only certain modes of this activity that would align with my definition of practice; however–in fact–this qualification applies to all of my examples above, bar one. Knitting in a usual mode might be something one does to get a garment made, but it can also–when inflected in a certain way–align itself with what I am identifying as practice, satisfying aptly the criteria for the latter and generating its curious spin-offs or side-effects. Practice, in this way, tends to exert its action indirectly, and this in no way implies an impotent or lesser mode. Instead, the logics of practice do not easily slot into causality, as we typically understand it.

You may have noted, then, that my list just now included both the activity known as meditation as well as something called "zazen", which translates most obviously as

"seated meditation" but which distinguishes itself–I will contend–from general meditation in noteworthy ways. Sitting silently in a stable posture is often and not- inaccurately termed "meditation". However, we can consider meditation to be already plural–that's to say: meditations. There are many modes and types of the latter, and the structure of the word as it's used in English, for example, can imply transitivity–a transitivity which is accurate for a certain moment or register of this undertaking–but

7 one which shifts. Transitive verbs, as grammarians know, are ones that take an object, either a direct or an indirect one. As such, meditation, as it is commonly understood, is usually transitive, since one meditates on something. Intransitive verbs on the other hand, even within grammar, are more unusual and attract our interest. English, in fact, has very few strictly intransitive verbs and a comparison with other languages would be interesting, although it falls outside of the scope of the discussion here. It might suggest, in the case of English, however, that in its contemporary form, this language offers fewer ways to articulate and therefore to think "doings" (verbs) that don't operate on, or produce, something material and nominal, as their primary outcome.

This chapter specifically takes up a strange doing "among" strange doings called

Shikantaza, which might be most simply understood as the mode taken by zazen (or seated meditation) in Zen generally, but even more centrally in the Soto lineage. The methodology of this chapter is to use Shikantaza as the exemplary mode in which the criteria of practice-in-itself can be seen to be operating transparently. By closely observing what "happens" in Shikantaza, I argue, one is able to distill what is operative beneath the surfaces of other more layered or complex activities similarly deserving the designation of practice. We will find that the latter also reliably demonstrate the same crucial and consistent criteria of practice-in-itself, but due to the

"content" that they involve, the mechanisms of practice–which are displayed more transparently in Shikantaza–can, in their case, tend to dissolve into the background. (It is always more difficult to observe the quieter workings of verbs compared to the louder, more apparent substantiality of nouns and things. Practice is about modes of doings, and as such, it addresses at a meta-level the question of ways.)

If Shikantaza is mostly associated with the Soto line of Zen, in the zazen of the Rinzai school, to offer a contrast, the sitting practice (zazen) may also involve the extra

8 activity of letting a koan go to work on the practitioner. I am not a koan practitioner, but I learned from my discussions with Rinzai practitioners that the koan works to train the student in a valuable fluency or nimbleness in relation to two of the three bodies–or kayas–of the Buddha: the nirmanakaya and the dharmakaya.9 I will not dwell on this difference, but I would simply like to acknowledge the shared emphasis in both lineages of Zen on zazen, but the Soto lineage's emphasis, in particular, on a kind of bare zazen–shikantaza–which means 'just sitting'.

Shikantaza is true to its name, with the latter having a rich and layered etymology that can only be gestured towards in this chapter. If zazen, as I'm suggesting, is arguably distinct from other forms of meditation, then the zazen of the Soto line, in particular, is more minimal again, involving as it does no techniques or supplements at all. It is a form that contains only the pithiest specifications to constitute its repertoire of actions. In this way, it calls to mind an asymptote–that strange curve in calculus whose equation approaches the x-axis but never coincides with it. Shikantaza, I contend here, is that exemplary action, which gets as close to non-action as possible, while still technically satisfying the requirements of a structured "doing".

One way to think the lived experience of practicing Shikantaza, or to articulate its singularity as not quite one meditation practice among others, is to approach it in terms of transitivity/intransitivity. Following discussions along this line at the conference that birthed this volume, correspondence with scholar Hans-Rudolph

Kantor, who had the following insightful observations, was extremely helpful. I cite him here:

[One] translation ... comes from Master Sheng Yan, a famous Chan/Zen master in

Taiwan who passed away a couple years ago. He calls it "mind yourself just

9 sitting." If you look at these four characters in Chinese, the way in which they

express that meaning roughly sounds like this: "Just mind to hit the sitting." (It is a

Chinese phrase originally, later adopted as an idiom by the Japanese!) The

transitive feature would be then "to precisely hit the sitting" (the character 打 da, ta

= “hit” consists of the two ideogramatic components of 'hand' and 'nail/spike', thus

to “hit” or to “hammer”!)10

After noting this transitive way of reading the original characters, Kantor goes on to consider another angle:

However, I think this kind of intensified awareness is dynamic rather than simply

transitive, according to my reading of Buddhist texts. Both the object as well as the

agent in such a state mutually engage with one another; both sides undergo a

transformation so that their relationship is not transitive any more, that is, there is

no real object and no real agent! Maybe it is a transformation from a transitive

relationship into a dynamic mutuality which is comparatively intransitive. The

actual event of sitting modifies the state of mind in the same way that this mind

focuses on and realizes a specific sitting according to the incessantly changing

circumstances that effect both sides.11

Shikantaza, then, might be read and seen to operate as a kind of intransitive verb, a verb with no object (but also, as Kantor emphasizes, no subject!). If, for example, the practitioner meditates on a candle flame in trataka, or on the sensations of the body in

Vipassana, in shikantaza one neither meditates- nor concentrates-on anything at all.

(One of my early Soto teachers asked the room at sesshin: are we here on a concentration camp or on an attention camp? Insensitive analogies aside, the emphasis involved an evocative distinction between concentrating-on and attending.

10 The use of the term "attention", in this context, is an attempt in itself to surmount an inadequate vocabulary in the English. Attending, usually itself a transitive verb, seeks in this context to gesture towards an action-without-clear-object, a kind of state, rather than a doing-to-something. (Another common lay description of what zazen involves is "a state of absorption".) On a related point, I cite Kantor's observations one more time:

... some modern scholars believe that the Zen-Soto shikan might also address the

traditional "calming and contemplation," maybe as a kind of combination,

specification, or practical suggestion of this historically earlier term. In the earlier

Tiantai teaching (which influenced Caotong/Soto), "calming and contemplation"

are interpreted as such a dynamic, or a transformation from the transitive into the

intransitive, called 絕待止觀 juedai zhiguan, settai shikan, which could be

translated as “calming and contemplation suspending correlative dependence

[of/between agent and object].” Tiantai contemplation commences with

“contemplation/meditation on something” and constantly modifies itself during

this practice to finally culminate in the suspending of the initially transitive

relationship.12 (emphasis added)

This suggestion of a progression within the practice itself, which might begin with a more transitive inflection, only to gradually unfold towards intransitivity, is both informative and fertile for our purposes here. In a similar way, the difference between concentration and attending is not only a curiosity for scholars, but has potentially nuanced and far-reaching repercussions for actual practitioners trying to articulate better what is at stake in their commitment to this form. Attending, for the purposes of shikantaza, eschews, then, any narrowing–such as might be central to dharana in Raja

Yoga (or the transitive part of 'calming/contemplation'). In zazen, to be distinguished

11 from concentration, attention is a state, a doing-without-object, that works intentionally in a liminal mode between inclusion and exclusion. Attention "includes" more and more–a "strange doing" tending (also asymptotically) towards excluding nothing, and more aligned with the stage, in the Raja system, of dhyana that

"precedes" samadhi (zazen being the Sanskrit term Dhyana taken up into the

Japanese13).

So, although meditation definitely belongs on my list of activities that are potentially practices, and satisfies the criteria that I will propose, it is specifically and precisely around the practice of shikantaza–a "meditation" that does without objects and entails a strictly minimal form for its action–that this current discussion turns. My contention is that shikantaza is the exemplary practice that allows us to us to bring out of solution the criteria of practice per se–or of what we might, taking our cue from Deleuze, call practice-in-itself. This is due in part to its unusual structural intransitivity and the self- referentiality that tends to emerge from it.

Assisting this wager, and arguably rendering it a contemporary one, is the fact that during the last third of the 20th century, Deleuze, in certain salient parts of his oeuvre, furnished us with a robust and precise vocabulary for the current query. My quest to articulate rigorously the realm of, and mechanisms for, practice-in-itself is indebted to his extensive labor of conceptual precision in a number of works, but most crucially in Difference and Repetition, published in France for the first time in 1968. In this way, the discussion that follows here is one that draws on twentieth century continental "ontology" (for want of a better word14) and practice-led research into practice itself. This chapter queries what happens when one applies concepts and vocabularies made available by the former as fresh lenses for examining and articulating the latter. Ideally, then, we would find clearer ways to say practice–both

12 how it works and why it is central to art, love, politics and science–so as to recruit and attend to its mechanisms more deftly. If, as I would claim, practice changes everything without destruction, then it has something urgent to offer any ethics inquiring into non-violence and the making of a shareable world.

Exemplary practice

Let's turn now to what I'm choosing to call the "exemplary practice" of shikantaza–the zazen of the Soto lineage, and by default of its founder, Dogen. Not one practice among many, but rather–as I see it–that which serves to render perceptible the criteria common to practice per se.

In the 13th century, in Kyoto, Eihei Dogen writes:

Having adjusted your body in this manner, take a breath and exhale fully, and then

sway your body to left and right. Now sit steadfastly and think not-thinking. How

do you think not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.15

And in the next paragraph:

The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of

enjoyment and ease. It is the practice-realization of complete enlightenment.

Realize the fundamental point free from the binding of nets and baskets.16

(emphasis added)

Arguably compelling, Dogen's cryptic poetics don't always clarify the matter for someone seeking an accessible account of what this zazen of shikantaza involves.

Zazen, as mentioned earlier, involves something that looks like meditation–that is, one usually sits in a stable posture with a straight-enough spine for a defined amount of time–but the moment one asks coyly, but what is the practitioner doing?, answers

13 become harder to corral. Other styles of meditation might use the same recognizable posture as the base upon which to layer one or another more activities (counting the breath, concentrating on the point between the eyes or root of the nose, cycling through parts of the body and noting sensation, or repeating a mantra, for example).

Shikantaza, however–true to its translation–begins and ends there. One just sits. In terms of all the things a human would do with their time, shikantaza is potentially the most baffling17. It is intentionally and completely without aim, ambition, or obvious usefulness, as we will see when we look further at this issue of intention soon. In

Dogen's version of Zen, curiously enough, practice and enlightenment can also be deemed to coincide–as in the above quote–so that any assumed path, or causal relation, between the two, is undermined. This effectively precludes the action of zazen from having enlightenment as its goal, thereby diffusing the tendency for practice to be logically positioned as prior to enlightenment and as some kind of strategy mobilized to reach or attain a desired state. Shikantaza remains its own raison d'être and not a means to anything.18 This raises the issue of its self- referentiality The point of doing it is the point of doing it is the point ... and so on.

Furthermore, although in Dogen's ontology of practice (and in the contemporary communities that align with it) the two may be deemed to coincide, I've also encountered the position that considers enlightenment to (counter-intuitively or strangely) precede practice. The latter, by implication, may be inflected as a mode of expression for realization. We practice because there has been realization, and not the other way around. The only realization, perhaps, then, would be that one sets about practicing. I note that in trying to compose the last sentence I bump into all kinds of grammatical options that do not quite fit the sentence were it to state clearly what the "realization" is. It is not that practice becomes "necessary", nor that it is

14 something that a "subject" does. It is not even "the only thing"; it is not "preferred".

Practice does not "become central". Maybe it becomes no longer a "choice" ... but this is still not apt. The difficulty is itself a revealing one about the limits of everyday language, and perhaps stands as one justification for the seemingly–at first glance– arcane vocabularies of thinkers like Deleuze and of the canons of Zen.

What, then, are the criteria that shikantaza allows us to distill? What mechanisms can be perceived to be operating in this very minimal kind of 'doing', the kind described– in Dogen's and other's writings–almost solely in "negative"19 terms? This reliance in the literature on terms that arrive in the English negatively is perhaps further support for my argument that there has been until Deleuze's work a real dearth of ways, within so-called Western paradigms, to begin the work of conceptualizing how practice operates. In the popular perception (of non-practitioners), zen can swing from being either the transcendent practice par excellence, where one supposedly strives for a

Nirvanic Somewhere-Else, to being a quietist, passive way to avoid intensities and desire. For engaged practitioners, zen—and Shikantaza in particular—align with neither of those caricatures.

Relevant to finding ways to say practice, Deleuze has made forays into the difficulty of thinking the virtual plane of the problematic, the register which arguably offers the best analogy for the field of shikantaza. We will touch on this more below. Let's turn now to the first criterion of practice, one from which, and upon which, the other three criteria will cumulatively build.

Repertoires of doing–form as structural requirement

15 Students who attend Zen centers to engage in the practice of shikantaza may–if the centers adhere to the texts and resist making the explanations too palatable for the newcomer–be instructed along the following lines:

• sit quietly in a stable posture with the spine aligned (half or full lotus,

Burmese or seiza position, or on a chair if necessary)

• place the hands in the zazen mudra (upturned, left on right, thumbs barely

pressing but not separate)

• allow the eyes to let in a minimal sliver of light

• do this for a period of time specified in advance

Often no other instructions are given. Instructions as to the breath are mostly offered to stabilize only very new practitioners and are relinquished when possible.

Notably minimal, the instructions for shikantaza are clear in relation to form, and for our purposes, conspicuously devoid of "content". Whereas other practices have forms and contents–such as knitting, golf, or writing sonnets–the form of shikantaza is arguably sheer form: that is to say, the instructions only give information regarding the shape or posture that the practitioner assumes. In Dogen's version above, the practitioner sways side to side in order to find the center, and then the body stills, but this is, arguably, less a "doing" than an arranging, a pre-action to the strange activity of doing-nothing, "just sitting". The practitioner's action is solely to attend to this

"scaffolding", for want of a better term, or to this empty form, and to cultivate (if this is the right word) a kind of disinterest as to content which might arise within the container formed by the bodymind. It is not, in other words, that the content is there but hidden from the neophyte, only to be revealed with adequate experience. Zazen in this way is not esoteric. It is simply that there is no content that is relevant, or–to put

16 it more technically–any content exists in a subtractive relation to the practice. Or, a further way to say this is that zazen attends to the field in which content(s) will arise, with its sole activity pertaining to the cultivating of that field, rather than to coercing or coaxing any particular, identifiable content.

This is one way to unpack Dogen's instruction of non-thinking. Shikantaza is not busy with content, although content will inevitably inhabit its structure (the heart will pump blood, the brain will generate images, ripples of sensation will traverse the whole body, emotions will gather like clouds and disperse, and so on). Shikantaza, furthermore, translates into English as simply a qualified gerund. In "just sitting", arguably, one establishes the space or the scaffolding within which a kind of pure, intransitive verb will operate. This starts to clarify our first criterion–namely, that practice-in-itself, as distilled through the "lens" of this exemplary practice of shikantaza, is a strange doing defined solely in structural (or contextual) terms. The practitioner, in other words, becomes a context for something-happening. The practice, hence, is constituted by a sheer kind of form, with the latter and any instructions pertaining to it, whittled down to the bare minimum. In this way, I would argue, it highlights the importance of the fact of form's operation, rather than any particular case of the latter. This accounts for shikantaza's capacity to contribute to a thinking of practice-in-itself through a stripped back or transparent observation of its mechanisms operating.

In a sense, the "content" of shikantaza is both nothing and everything. As a practice, then, it is resolutely non-discerning. (We could rephrase our description above by saying that in "just sitting" all content is strictly (and) equally relevant. It has a similar effect to no content being relevant.) Shikantaza's preoccupation–if it has any at all– might be with that which precedes quality, as such, or which pertains to a register that

17 is logically prior to the emergence of qualities. It cannot therefore be apprehended via any inventory of qualities. This lack of direction often infuriates a new student of shikantaza, as implied above. It is never clear in zazen what "standards" would indicate that the practice was improving, or what might indicate its inadequacy! Given that many of our usual actions are invested in some form of potential improvement as motivation for undertaking the action, this makes shikantaza, for some, unbearably slippery and confounding.

Returning to the centrality of structure for practice, or the fact-of-form's-operating, in the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze states unambiguously and, for our purposes, startlingly:

The reality of the virtual is structure.20

Now, the notion of the virtual is an area within Deleuzian scholarship that remains in any case contentious, so I will not, as mentioned, labor its detail here. However, what we can say confidently about the virtual is that for Deleuze, it is thoroughly real.

Further along, using the work of art as an example, he elaborates:

When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in a virtuality, what is

being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely

determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, its

"virtual" or "embryonic" elements. The elements, varieties of relations and

singular points coexist in the work or the object, in the virtual part of the

work or object, without it being possible to designate a point of view

privileged over others, a centre which would unify the other centres.

(emphasis added)21

18 This brings us back, among other things, to that peculiar stance that I am tentatively gesturing towards in the term "non-discerning," which I'd claim operates for the duration of the shikantaza practice and is inherent to it. Deleuze's depiction of what constitutes the virtual involves a subtraction of the usual mechanisms that tend towards a particular point of view being privileged over others. To practice non- discerning in shikantaza, a certain "beyond" of perspective arises (echoing the

"beyond" of the Dogen translation). For the duration of the practice, one refrains from prioritizing a center (and if such a prioritizing arises, then one refrains from being interested in this ... and so on). In the process of the subject's action of refraining- from-action, this same subject effectively undoes or thins out the very stuff of its own subjectivity, or becomes part of a vaster subjectivity that transcends this nomination.

This calls to mind the Buddhist principle of anatta–non-self. If arguably the bounded self is partly constituted through the repeated actions of adopting a "position" on, and

"attitude" towards, the world, then there is some weight to querying a valid and productive alignment between shikantaza and the register of the virtual. In shikantaza, then, the usual activity of a separate self-ing is suspended for a period of time22. With content thus de-emphasized, structure itself serves as the sole "content", and there is a kind of dispersed point of view. Without a self asserting its perspective so fiercely, shikantaza echoes the operations of the virtual register as set out by Deleuze, and might therefore offer one avenue for investigating this register further, and–I'd contend–experientially.23

Practice, then, in this sense, through an unusual kind of "doing" that has as its consequence an undoing of that-which-does (the verb's subject), and a kind of access to a register in-itself is opened (although to whom it would open becomes indeterminate). If this coincides with the register of the virtual, then it is the plane of

19 the problematic proper, from whence, for Deleuze, Ideas emerge, generating their cases of actualization, solutions, and incidentally the shadows of problems–the so- called negative24.

In what we've just been exploring, we have passed via, and invoked, the specific criterion that raises the first criterion of the structural requirement to a kind of second power. We've been discussing the strange approach to doing specific to practice that treats its content (and results) as extraneous or irrelevant. In the set of criteria for practice-in-itself, this aspect aligns with the 3rd criterion: relaxation. When any goal and all extraneous "doing" is surrendered in practicing (usually after a deep familiarity with the form is in place), then the structural aspect moves away from its habitual mode towards something else. This abandoning of usual intentions regarding

"doing"–namely wanting something to result from our doings, then brings us back to the intransitive aspect, discussed with Kantor. Practice, we can say, can be spotted when a set of structured actions operate intransitively (as opposed to routinely)–they have as their secret and precise intention only the carrying-out of those actions. Or, to say it the other way around, when a regular kind of doing (such as cooking) begins to be important in-itself rather than simply for what it produces, it may flip from being a usual kind of doing into the category of "strange doing", or practice. This implies that in life, when not practicing, most of our actions are directed, and are framed as being for something. When we fold that transitivity back on itself and render the activity for itself, this goes some of the way, I argue, to the activity shifting register and becoming practice.

To summarize generally, we can say that according to the 1st Criterion:

20 • "doings" that may be deemed practices involve a structural emphasis–a shape

to the action itself that can be identified across time as being "that form of

action or behavior". (The form is usually one that has been acquired

intentionally, but not always.)

And, if operating with the addition of the 3rd Criterion of relaxation25:

• when these same doings are no longer done for any result, that is:

intransitively–and begin to be done 'thusly' (without exaggerated effort or

imprecision), we are approaching the realm of the regular "doing" becoming

the "strange doing" of practice.

For the purposes of the first criterion, if it's practice (or we could moot here the use of the term 'practicing'26), the activity will contain a structural aspect – a prescribed form. Depending on the modality of practice, content may be present and also deemed important or even focused upon (often in the service of learning/acquiring the form of practice). However, such content will be, in fact, irrelevant to the doing's inflection as practice, as I'm delimiting it here. A way to say this is: it is practice that comes in the shape of golf. Or it is practice that comes in the shape of knitting. The forms of knitting and golf will be crucial, not in-and-of-themselves, but rather because they are forms.

The aspect that will make the practices of golf and knitting transformational and stabilizing will initially depend on this very emphasis on a structural requirement, and will have little to do with the content, which may be interchangeable (up to a certain point) with other contents. That said, this must be distinguished from a swapping between forms, which is usually a sign that one is not moving in the realms of the more interesting registers of practice (as many experienced practitioners will

21 confirm). Consequently, with regards to meditation, it is thus at a certain level irrelevant what "denomination" one chooses, since more crucial is the fact of practicing it. This is reinforced by the fact that meditation, by its nature, is less determined by what unfolds within it, and more determined by the fact of a structuring (and, as we'll see shortly, a repetition)27. It doesn't matter, in other words, what thinking/sensations/rhythm of breathing, or other "doings", go on. These effectively become a background to, or a decoration of, the operation of what I'm calling a structural requirement, or emphasis on form. What Dogen and his lineage noticed, we can speculate, was also the effect of the attitude of practice. Zazen, in this way, is known for this baffling aspect, whereby it is crucial that one not aim for what might unfold, becoming indifferent to the "what". This overlaps with the third criterion, as indicated above, that of relaxation–set working in practice in a far- reaching and quite radical way.

In summary, my contention is that the operation of a structuring, or structural emphasis, is the first criterion for a 'doing' to qualify as 'practice' as I am defining it. A practice, for these purposes, is a 'doing' with the potential to enable the strange co- arising of transformation and stability. Practice-in-itself, then, involves a structure that can be identified, and more importantly, this structure will be that which remains consistent each time the practice is undertaken. That is to say, the structural requirement (a shape for the doing) remains fairly consistent in the practice, and practice is done with the intention of this consistency. It is what enables any particular practice to be identified as happening over time, and it is that which is repeated. This brings us to the second criterion of practice–repetition–which is also raised to another

"power" via the fourth and final criterion which we'll encounter below.

Repetition

22 When a person embarks on the practice of golf, as opposed to playing the odd game for amusement or business, in addition to the aspects common to golf–its repertoire of walking, swinging the club, directing balls towards the green, and completing rounds of 9 or 18 holes–essential to recognizing it as practice would be the golfer's repeating of this specific (and limited or clearly bounded) series of actions. We see here that the second criterion of practice takes up and builds upon the first. There are actions (the form of that particular practice) and these serve as a structure that can be repeated.

In the case of shikantaza, the relation of the first criterion to the second is also clear. A practitioner of shikantaza is someone who decides on a sitting schedule

(daily, every second day, once a week at a zendo), and the practice becomes a practice when its stipulated form (as explored above) is operating and is that which is repeated28.

Another way to say it is that practice is something that involves a bounded set of actions whose definition as practice depends on that set of actions being of a kind that can be repeated (2nd criterion), and each time 'closer to itself' (4th criterion).

What I'm implying here (and not yet unpacking) is something of the miracle, as

Deleuze will phrase it, of the other (mode of) repetition29. This repetition, real repetition-for-itself (as Deleuze calls it), is rare. It is, despite our casual assumptions, not at all the stuff of our daily lives, which tend to consist of small differences integrated into a continuity designated as "sameness".

The curious thing, then, about practice and its repetitions, as opposed to those of routine or compulsion, is that the potential to unleash something new, to shift established patterns, to unsettle and recast the status quo, is not in spite of, but

23 rather due to, the "miraculous" operation of repetition. This is perhaps contrary to an casual expectation that newness must obviously arise due to an avoidance or eschewing of repetition.

In Chapter II of Difference and Repetition, the one called 'Repetition-for-Itself',

Deleuze casts light on how repetition–in its usual mode, and in relation to habit– stabilizes change into continuity. (We can recall here that, among other things,

Difference and Repetition unpacks two kinds of repetition). We read:

Habit draws something new from repetition–namely, difference. ... In

essence, habit is contraction.30 (emphasis original)

What is important here is that in our usual mode of habit–habitual ways of moving through the world, completing tasks more efficiently, engaging with others and so on–the world, as continuously changing and stable in time, can be shown to be a function of the play of repetition and difference. Faced with the swarm of discontinuous instants–all different– the contemplating mind serves as the space in which these will be contracted into a stretch, within which a new player will appear: namely, repetition as operation.

Repetition, to explain it otherwise, will be the shape in which the first kind of differentiation (difference) makes an appearance.

The contraction of which Deleuze speaks here is called the passive synthesis of time–the subjective retention in the mind, but not by the mind (hence the term

'passive') that contracts the sheer succession of disappearing instants to engender time as a living ("changing") but also stable present. The contraction of the first synthesis wonderfully pertains to the habits that we are, and is not the gateway to transformation but rather the crucial basis of any kind of continuity. This mode of

24 time is bound up with "normal" repetition, rather than the miraculous kind. In fact, what we see is that these instantaneous moments, which cannot 'repeat' in themselves, only "become" repetition in the imagination of the contemplating subject, which is able to 'retain one case as the other appears,'31 thereby drawing off something that wasn't there before: the operation of repetition (as first substantial "difference"). Deleuze clarifies that “the imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate'32.

The conception of practice proposed here distinguishes itself both from routine and compulsion, going via habit without stopping there. One way of framing practice is to think of it firstly as the intentional acquisition of a habit, which then proceeds to fold the habit back on itself by putting the mechanism of repetition to use in a strange way. This happens when the acquired form is able to be repeated in such a way that difference in identity is not-pursued: that is, the practitioner repeats the habit exactly; purposely refraining from any attempt at innovation or variation. This corresponds to the final criterion–repeating repetition.

We now find ourselves with the following criteria, in order:

1. Practice involves the acquisition of a habit, or set of structured

behaviors/actions;

2. It enacts them repetitively and intentionally, evading the modes of

routine and compulsion;

3. It enacts them with a disinterest in their outcome and with a precise

amount of effort (just what is necessary). In other words the form is

then performed with radical relaxation;

25 4. In this state of "doing" which is relaxed, intentional and also repeated,

practice may "miraculously" find itself repeating nothing except

repetition itself–due to a disinvestment in variation. Content and form

fall away.

This final criterion may read as a strange thing. We can explain it in relation to the

3rd criterion. With effort reduced to a mode with no excess or deficit, via the criterion of relaxation, this thus-ness works to reveal–more and more explicitly– the bare structure of the practice. The verb (set up in the 1st criterion) is therefore left to work, exposed almost, and subtracted from that which normally accompanies a verb in the usual orders of temporality and regimes of identity. In other words, normally verbs come with a subject and specified temporal mode, which then determines the way the verb will be conjugated and pinned down.

What repeats in practice, however, is sheer verb–a verb seeking to coincide with itself, as closely as possible.

Later in Difference and Repetition, in his notoriously brilliant and difficult chapter that speaks of the virtual, called 'Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference', Deleuze writes:

... it is thought which must explore the virtual down to the ground of its

repetitions.33

My question would be: how would thought do this, and what kind of thought (and doing) would be suitable for the task? And why this imperative to explore it? Without second-guessing Deleuze, I wonder whether exploration is imperative due to the urgency of finding opportunities to change our entrenched ways and worlds–to come

"unstuck" without annihilation–along with the companion desire to build our

26 stabilities on something other than regimes of identity (and increasingly, spectacle).

Shortly after this passage, we read Deleuze again:

Repetition is everywhere ... in the Idea to begin with, and it runs through the

varieties of relations and the distribution of singular points. It also determines

the reproductions of space and time, as it does the reprises of consciousness ...

Repetition is never explained by the form of identity in the concept, nor by the

similar in representation.34

What these two quotations expose is the way that repetition, for Deleuze, has ontological significance as an operation (it 'determines the reproductions of space and time'). If practice–as I am arguing, contentiously or otherwise–is specifically a mode of action that does-not-preclude change happening in the fabric of the status quo, and additionally has a stabilizing effect on it, I see it as–by necessity–operating at another register. If the virtual, for Deleuze, is real, but different to the actual, and it is in relation to this register that actuality is "generated" (to put it most simply), then practice is the doorway to the unrepresentable, but very real, mechanisms that constitute us and our worlds before they appear as such. If we are habits, then it may well be that via habit, but one of a strange kind–habit wielded on purpose and strangely–we may reverse engineer that through which our "selves" (and worlds) are made. When habit's usual repetitions are harnessed, taken up very precisely, and set into motion informed by a Deleuzian "ontology", it may be that we can both preserve what habit is known to make (the stability of worlds) but without the accompanying entrenched stuckness that tends to accompany its often relentless regime.

And this does clearly align with simple, shared perceptions of what practice is.

Someone who tends to go regularly into the forest with pen and paper to undertake

27 drawing there would generally be considered to have a drawing practice. If this rhythm and regularity of doing were to continue over many years, the person would almost certainly be regarded as a practitioner of drawing. What has been harder to explain is why, when engaging in this drawing practice–whose form involves the use of pens, paper, pencils, light, seeing, bodily movements, and so on–the person knows that other aspects of their lives (perhaps conflicts, worries, impasses in thought) will both be loosened and be able to shift while simultaneously ushering in a new kind of stability. Practice, in other words, takes the best of habit without succumbing to its more pernicious expressions. We also know how often practitioners are admired without being fully comprehended. This admiration might be explained by the fact that, as well as being extremely hard to sustain, practice matters.

This chapter is not long enough to unpack these finer mechanisms of habit with sufficent thoroughness; however, this is part of a larger project, and more detailed work elsewhere continues this discussion here.

To return to my initial contention, shikantaza helps us to reveal the workings of practice in-itself, since it is an exemplary kind of laboratory for observing practice unadorned, so to speak. In "just sitting", there is an explicit structural requirement–a minimal "doing"–that has almost no content, is sheer scaffolding. It is, however, sufficient that this shape is able to be repeated, and indeed it becomes practice when it repeats as closely to itself as possible–that is, when it approaches that other kind of repetition that Deleuze describes, and accounts for, so astonishingly, in Difference and Repetition . To conclude this necessarily cursory overview, I will mention briefly the role of intention for practitioners (in a lived rather than technical way), which may also create a clearer picture of how this approach to practice distinguishes it from modes of action such as routine or compulsion.

28 A final word: intention

Perhaps operating less explicitly, and sometimes slow-to-be-grasped by new practitioners, intention accounts for the way in which practices can be distinguished from the non-harming habits they may otherwise closely resemble. While we can see this operating explicitly in shikantaza, we can also see this operating in all activities that obtain to the register of practice.

As well as the 1st criterion of the structural requirement–practice's form or shape, or set of behaviors–which can then be repeated (2nd criterion), this repetition is of an arguably unusual kind. Counter-examples that come to mind are the compulsive yogi, or perhaps the addicted runner, and someone doing housework on auto-pilot. The former would be an example of a compulsive engagement in a set of bounded and repeated behaviors, and the latter an example of a routinized one. In these cases, we can see clearly that they fall outside of, although have interesting relations to, practice. Practice, in this way, accompanies habit's trajectory,as Ravaisson and Grosz describe it, for example, 35, but departs from it in several ways, which can be understood in relation to the specific intentionality that, from a practitioner's point of view, can be seen to inform what's happening in the 3rd and 4th criteria.

The compulsive yogi or runner is a salient example. Even though yoga would generally be deemed as having the potential to be practice, in cases where it is undertaken compulsively, I'd claim that it falls outside of my definition, and is therefore less ripe for generating non-destructive change and stability together. Of course, it produces other effects, which the person doing the activity may be seeking.

(This definition of practice is not a moral filter of any kind!) Compulsion similarly forgoes the dual effect of stability and transformation at an ontological level (but may

29 well be very stabilizing), due to the absence of the workings of intentionality, which support the shift towards the 3rd and 4th criteria, and that are crucial to the constellation of practice-in-itself.

In the case of shikantaza, the practitioner of zen must form a clear, if strange, intention: which is to engage in the structure, repeatedly, and to decide in advance that she will do this despite the fact that the behavior produces no outcome at all, that it is utterly divorced from poiesis. The "in-advance" might be minutes or even seconds beforehand, although more common with established practitioners would be an intention formulated with a very long-term view. There is a kind of devotion that resembles very strongly the of relationship (marriage, friendship etc.). Recently I've asked myself whether I still love yoga and sitting practice. I couldn't really answer the question since the infatuation that was once there is far less prominent as years pass, but my intensity of engagement is no less for that lack of infatuation. This arguably reflects the attitude at work in marriage-as-practice, another possible way to inflect

"strangely" an otherwise ubiquitous institutional bond. It would go some way to accounting for why marriage can be both (and either) deadening and routinized or a gateway to transformation and innovation in relations between subjects.

In any case, it is the curious operation of intention in practice, and in particular in shikantaza, that marks where practice comes to distinguish itself from both routine and compulsion, thus extending and complicating the astute reading of habit by scholars such as Ravaisson and Grosz. That said, and by way of conclusion, I'd like to qualify that most practices will be compromised, contaminated (to borrow from

Derrida), always a little bit compulsive, or sometimes a little bit automated. We persevere despite this inevitability. The moments, however (if they can be considered as happening within time, which I'm less sure about), when practice generates

30 transformation and steadiness without contradiction, occur when the criteria distilled here are operating–which can feel like a kind of grace, to use a less-secular term.

Deleuze calls it miracle. There may only be brief glimpses of this "grace" for much of our practicing life, or there may be periods of concentration of the criteria's operating.

As practitioners know, practice is never about forcing, and although we cannot make the criteria operate in alignment, we can understand their mechanisms, and at least not work against them. In part this research pursues this clarity–not in terms of control, but in terms of a cultivation of conditions for transformation, and the allowing-for stability. It's more akin to learning a choreography of 'Being-becoming' than of domesticating the latter.

In any case, we must–as they say–show up for practice, with "they" being the artists, the mystics, the scholars, the lovers, the revolutionaries. We must show up for our imperfect practices, which sometimes, when the criteria align, can court a combination that may make life, not theoretically, but affectively, worth living.

Practice, I would like to claim more polemically, is that place where, irrespective of class, "race", age, gender, etc. (that is, "beyond" our assigned or claimed identities), we can pursue an ethical dignity that does not exclude others since its stability does not shore itself up via operations of inclusion and exclusion. Due to this subtractive relation to identity, the "subject"–another kind of subject–can be less afraid of change, since "they" are losing nothing.

Practice, as I once heard quoted, is a very unusual (since at once sober and joyous) process of losing.

REFERENCES

31 Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by O. Feltham. New York & London:

Continuum, 2007.

–––. Logics of Worlds. Translated by A. Toscano. London: Continuum, 2009.

Barad, Karen. "What is the measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice." 100

Notes – 100 Thoughts | No. 099. documenta (13). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. (No translator listed). Detroit, Michigan: Black and Red, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane London: Continuum, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. London & New

York: Continuum, 2004.

–––. The Logic of Sense. Translated by M. Lester. London & New York: Continuum,

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Dogen, Eihei. Enlightenment Unfolds. Edited by K. Tanahashi. Boston & London:

Shambhala, 2000 (NB: this edition has numerous translators contributing)

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us." Body and

Society, June & September, 2013: 217-239.

Kasulis, Thomas P. Zen Action, Zen Person. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

1985.

Leader, Darian. What is Madness? London: Penguin, 2012.

Ravaisson, Félix. Of Habit. Translated by C. Carlisle & M. Sinclair. New York &

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32 Sen-Gupta, Orit. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Jerusalem: Vijnana Books, 2013

Williams, James. "Immanence and Transcendence as Inseparable Processes: On the

Relevance of Arguments from Whitehead to Deleuze Interpretation." Deleuze Studies,

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1 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), 1ff. 2 The alignment of these categories with those of Alain Badiou's conditions for philosophy is not accidental. This is the focus of other work and cannot be covered in detail in the present chapter. See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 9-33. 3 Orit Sen-Gupta, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (Jerusalem: Vijnana Books, 2013), 28. See sutra I.14. 4 These four terms correspond to the elements specified by Deleuze as marking the world of representation in general. For Deleuze, the dogmatic image of thought is one that can "think" only on the basis of these categories, or rely on and assume these categories, rather than via a thinking of category-as-operation itself. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 174. 5 The term 'habit' in this chapter is mostly intended in the Ravaissonian sense. See Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008). 6 See, for example, Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007), 191ff, and further 173ff. 7 Spectacle, in this instance, can be read in the Debordian sense. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Michigan: Black and Red, 1977). As an example of that to which practice does not relate, we can cite Debord: 'In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing

33 system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself.' Thesis 6. 8 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), 86. 9 My thanks go to painter and zen practitioner, Paul Boston, for discussions on this question. 10 Email correspondence, 11-16 June, 2015. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 My further thanks to Kantor for discussions on this topic. 14 This 'ontology' would not be one that asks 'what life is' or inquires so much into its origins, but rather reframes the question as 'how life is' and is preoccupied with speaking rigorously about its movements and processes. Deleuze takes this up in later works with his collaborator, Félix Guattari, for example in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia duology, which includes the paired volumes of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. 15 Eihei Dogen, Enlightenment Unfolds, ed. K. Tanahashi (Boston and London: Shambhala), 33. This edition has numerous translators contributing. 16 Enlightenment Unfolds, 33. 17 We see, however, arguably, other creatures engaged often in what looks remarkably like zazen. Cats appear to spend much of their "still" time–when not sleeping–in an activity that, to a casual observer, strongly resembles zazen. It is activity at the edge of itself. It bears no relation to sleeping. It remains a "doing" but of a most minimal form. 18 This is also why its relation to the yogic system of Patanjali is complicated, since the latter can be read as a set of stages, and thereby better aligned with Dvaita or 'dualistic conclusions'. Dogen's zazen, especially, abstains from any such separation, and from the logical causalities this implies. 19 In this vein, we note Deleuze's painstaking efforts in Chapter IV of Difference and Repetition (2004) to step his reader through the difference between non-being–a negative of being–and (non)-being or what he writes as ?-being. This is not a negativity, but something which 'corresponds to the form of a problematic field' (p. 253). One can read the 'non's that litter translated descriptions of zazen in an

34 analogous way. Zazen is not a negation of action, but rather "beyond" it (to borrow from the Dogen translation) or simply a strange operation subtracted from a register mapped by acting or not-acting. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum 2004). In her essay, 'What is the measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice', written for documenta (13) in the series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts | No. 099, Karen Barad writes: 'Virtuality is not a speedy return, a popping in and out of existence with great rapidity, but rather the indeterminacy of being/nonbeing, a ghostly non/existence.' (emphasis original) (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2012), 12. 20 Difference and Repetition, 260. 21 Ibid. 22 It is important to emphasize here, in the opinion of the current author, that this dispersal of point of view is not an end in itself, in so far as it would promote a kind of quietism as desirable outcome. Rather, another way to understand practice is as part of a rhythm between doing and non-doing that modulates and refines both of these modes. Off the cushion of Shikantaza, then, the subject returns to a position of taking responsibility, taking a position, but informed by the disinvestment of position involved in the periods of "sitting". 23 This is an aspect of the practice-led research that constitutes my broader investigations. One could also argue that Shikantaza constitutes an example of a practice-led research into the relationship between transcendence and immanence as explored by Deleuze. For a good discussion of the latter in relation to Whitehead's philosophy, see Williams (2010). 24 See Difference and Repetition, 259-60. 25 The criterion of relaxation deserves far more elaboration than can be achieved in this short chapter, and is only cursorily explored here. Other works of the present author take up and unpack this crucial aspect, a kind of hinge, in what constitutes practice. 26 My thanks go to Roger T. Ames for this observation regarding the noun-gerund form, with which I fully concur.(Could this reference to Ames be explained in terms of immanence?) 27 On this point, see a fascinating and pertinent discussion by Darian Leader of the role of structuring in therapy for patients with what he calls "a psychotic structure",

35 after Lacan, and others. Darian Leader, What is Madness? (London: Penguin, 2012), 305ff. 28 Curiously enough, this formulation 'that which is repeated' also coincides with a description in Deleuze's work of the future itself. See Difference and Repetition, 117. 29 Difference and Repetition, 3. 30 Difference and Repetition, 94. 31 Difference and Repetition, 90-91. 32 Difference and Repetition, 90. 33 Difference and Repetition, 273. 34 Difference and Repetition, 273. 35 For an excellent and concise discussion of habit in Deleuze's lineage, see Elizabeth Grosz, "Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us." Body and Society, June & September, 2013: 217-239.