You have been told to breathe.
To breathe deeply. To breathe consciously. To use the breath as an anchor. To make the breath your practice.
Each instruction assumed you were the one breathing.
Stop reading for a second.
The breath continues.
You did not authorize it. You did not remember to start it again after you stopped paying attention. It has been going the whole time, including the years you did not know it was something to pay attention to.
Who is breathing you.
This is not a rhetorical question.
Look.
You will find lungs. You will find a diaphragm. You will find the small movement of the chest. You will find a faint awareness of air at the nostrils.
You will not find a breather.
The breath is doing itself.
It has been doing itself since the first one, in the room where you were born, when no one had taught you anything yet.
It will continue to do itself until the last one, in whatever room that turns out to be, after you have stopped being able to do anything.
The thing you have been calling you did not start it and will not stop it.
The thing you have been calling you has only been claiming credit.
Notice how strange this is.
The most reliable activity in your entire life, the one without which nothing else happens, the one happening right now as you read, is not being done by anyone you can locate.
A seventeenth-century Japanese teacher named Bankei made his whole teaching out of this.
He had spent years searching for what he called the Buddha-mind, the original mind underneath all the seeking. He found it, eventually, in a kind of collapse. And what he found was this:
Everyone has the unborn Buddha-mind, only that.
The unborn.
He meant something specific. Not the soul, not the spirit, not the inner self. The simple fact of awareness, of breathing, of being. The thing that did not have to be born because it was never made, and does not have to be sustained because it was never produced.
The breath is unborn in this sense.
No one made the first breath. It happened. The body started, and breath was part of what a body did, and you arrived already breathing.
This is not poetic.
This is the actual physical situation.
The seeking mind reads the unborn and tries to find it as a thing.
It looks for the source of the breath. It looks for the one who is breathed. It tries to locate the unbornness as a special quality the breath has, which could be experienced if approached correctly.
The looking is what hides it.
The breath does not have a special quality of unbornness.
The breath is just breath.
The unbornness is that no one is doing it.
You can verify this without doing anything.
Right now, breath is arriving. You are not pulling it in. You are not pushing it out. The body is doing what bodies do. The breath is being breathed.
By what?
Padmasambhava, in eighth-century Tibet, called this self-arising.
The same word in Tibetan, rang byung, meaning that which arises by itself, without a maker. He used it for the nature of awareness. It applies just as well to the breath.
The breath is self-arising.
You have been pretending to operate it.
Notice the relief in this.
If the breath is doing itself, the heart is doing itself, the digestion is doing itself, the cells are doing themselves, then the question of who you are gets a different shape.
You are not the one running the operation.
You are not even the one watching the operation.
You are something the operation is, briefly, doing.
The breath includes you.
You do not include the breath.
This is the reverse of how it has felt for as long as you can remember.
You felt like a self who had a body. The body had functions. One of the functions was breathing. The breathing belonged to you the way a car belongs to its owner.
The car was always driving. You were riding.
The car did not ask you for directions.
The car has been getting where it goes.
Sit for a minute. Do not breathe deliberately. Do not breathe shallowly. Do not breathe at all, in the sense of doing it.
Let the breathing happen.
It will.
After a few breaths, the mind will get nervous. It will say, am I breathing right. It will say, should I be doing something. It will say, this cannot be safe, to not be in charge.
Notice each thought.
Notice that the breathing continued during each thought.
The mind was worrying about the breath while the breath was breathing the mind.
The hierarchy is upside down.
The breath is not a function the self performs.
The self is a pattern the breath, among other things, sustains.
Without the breath, the self does not appear. Without the self, the breath continues just fine.
You can guess which one is more fundamental.
This is not metaphysics. This is anatomy.
The thing you have been calling you is downstream of the breath. It depends on the breath. It does not produce the breath. It is produced by the breath, among many other things, none of which it controls.
When you sit and watch the breath, you are watching the parent.
The thing watching is the child.
The child has been pretending to be the parent for years.
Notice the breath leaving you right now.
It will come back.
It always does.
It comes back because of nothing you are doing.
It comes back because it is the kind of thing that comes back, and no one in the system knows why, including you.
This is the mystery that is not a mystery.
It is too plain to be mysterious. The breath comes. The breath goes. No one is in charge.
You can spend the rest of your life adding things to your practice.
You can spend the rest of your life not adding anything.
Either way, the breath will do what it has been doing.
The breath is the practice that was already happening before you ever heard of practice.
It is the practice that will continue after you forget about practice.
It is the practice that does not need you.
You can rest now.
The thing you were doing was already being done.
Sources: Bankei Yotaku, recorded sermons, 17th century. Padmasambhava, Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness, 8th century.