Excerpt
SPIRITUALITY: JUST DO IT
At four-fifteen on a cold, starry morning in California wine country, I slip out of my sleeping bag and into leggings, two layers of fleece, and sandals. Forgoing toothbrush for flashlight, I head up one of the steep, dew-soaked wooded paths that lead to the heart of the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. Once an old redwood barn, the warm, oil-lamplit zendo has the soothing feel and smell of a sauna. A bell rings, and some thirty black-robed people, ranging in age from nineteen to the mid-seventies, commence the rapid execution of 108 full prostrations to Buddha. This is a workout, and by the halfway point, a few simply bow. Outside, the wind howls. At a neighboring farm, fighting cocks crow.
When the grueling ceremony is completed, we file out in barefoot, silent pairs for a short break before getting down to the morning's real business: zazen, or seated meditation, and related rituals that will last until eight-thirty. Down in the farmhouse that's the social center for this community, or sangha, I clutch a mug of herbal tea and consider my mute companions' sleepy faces. The thick gray dawn presses against the windows. As my quadriceps turn to wood and my stomach rumbles futilely, I recall the reservations politely voiced by Jakusho Kwong-roshi, the abbot, about a raw beginner's joining them for three days of a rigorous silent Zen retreat called sesshin, meaning "to touch the mind."
In the fading starlight, a great gong sounds. We troop back to the zendo for two forty-minute rounds of zazen, the practice that's at the heart of this form of Buddhism. When I arrived yesterday, I had a brief tutorial with Kwong-roshi, one of America's handful of Zen masters, whose special authority has been transmitted from teacher to teacher through centuries. With his Chinese features, shaved head, robes, and aura of calm cheer, he could be a Hollywood lama. First he showed me how to sit cross-legged toward the edge of the hard round black cushion, resting my folded knees on a thick cotton underpad. After trying several postures, he decided that the Burma pose, which resembles yoga's half-lotus, suited me best. The thumbs of my nested hands pointed upward too much, he noted, which conveyed tension; I quickly corrected at least the digital component of the problem. Next, Kwong-roshi took a yardstick and measured the right place-about twenty-four inches from the floor-for my half-lidded gaze to fall when meditating. "We don't close our eyes," he said. "That may create other problems." Although this posture was comfortable enough, I knew that it wouldn't remain so.
Next, Kwong-roshi demonstrated the long, slow Zen breathing, which gives more energy to the exhale, "like you do when having a baby or using the rest room." He explained that a fetus breathes only once or twice a minute, and a Zen adept a mere five times or even fewer; with the slower, emptier unborn mind that results, conditioning drops away, "and we are able to see our basic goodness." One night, he said, he was driving with his four sons, now grown, when they came upon a terrible automobile accident. He rushed from his car, only to find one man already dead and another gravely injured, "lying in a pool of blood, staring up. I could hear his breathing, and it was unshu-Zen breathing. The man said to me, 'The stars are so bright tonight.' His eyes, too, were brilliant. Then an ambulance came and took him away."
My body taken care of, Kwong-roshi turned to my mind. I must simply concentrate on counting my breaths, he said, going back to "one" each time I'm distracted. "We usually let our thoughts just go," he said, "and our breath follows them, all over the place. Here, we make our thoughts follow the sound of our breath, so they naturally slow down and drop away. Breath sweeps mind." Before dismissing me, Kwong-roshi said that after doing Zen practice for a while, "you begin to live differently." Comparing sesshin to an express train, he advised, "Just get on and go." I nodded but didn't really understand either of these two comments as well as I would even a day later.
Now, finding my assigned place in the zendo, I perch carefully atop my cushion for forty minutes of zazen. Trying to remember all the roshi's instructions, I inhale and, especially, exhale-the optimum starting point for all activities. The redwood building, too, seems to breathe, creaking and groaning in response to the wind. After rushing around on planes and California's freeways for the past few days, I am relieved at first just to be still in the soft dawn darkness. Sitting tall, I earnestly try to do nothing.
A gong rings, and we rise stiffly for ten minutes of kinhin, or silent walking meditation. As if choreographing Waiting for Godot, we baby-step in single file around the zendo, going no place slowly. Gradually, the circulation returns to my right leg. Outside, songbirds announce daylight.
The gong sounds again, summoning us back to our cushions for the next round of zazen. All novelty evaporates, exposing deep holes in my concentration. As a writer, I'm accustomed to recording what's going on, even if it's only in my own head. Giving up thoughts, which are not only my business but my pleasure and existential defense, seems not only hard, but wrong. Some of this difficulty is cultural. The style of meditation I'm familiar with, as a Westerner, involves thinking about something, whether a bit of Scripture or world peace. Could this Asian thinking about nothing but counting my breaths be "better" than focusing on some worthy concept or image? Kwong-roshi said that his own master had taught that before one uses a calculator, one must clear it. Although empty mind eludes me, just gunning for it slows down and reduces the number of my thoughts.
Suddenly, the electrical outlet slightly to the left of my official gazing locus starts to get on my nerves. What is the point of sitting here in this uncomfortable position at a hellish hour of the morning, staring at a wall plug? I devise a koan, or Zen paradox: Why does Zen seem so smart and simple when you read about it and so dumb and hard when you do it? When the bell rings for morning "work practice," the prospect of chores seems Dionysian.
Time flies until ten-thirty, and the particularly grueling triple zazen. With kinhin, chanting, and a ritual meal, we'll be in this room, mostly locked into one position, for nearly four hours. I feel twinges of panic as I lower myself gingerly onto the now dreaded pillow. Familiar with this reaction from starting a long run, I give myself the same moronic, effective pep talk: If they can do it, I can do it. Because counting breaths doesn't feel right to me, I decide to repeat silently a simple phrase instead: "Here. Now." This is probably cheating, I think, despite trying not to.
By the light of the enigmatic, sound-of-one-hand-clapping Zen literature, I'm not sure that what I sense during zazen is "right." I can best describe it as an experiential version of a perception that helped to create modern painting. The elements of life's background-from breathing to consciousness, the sound of the wind to the zendo's barny redwood smell-come to the surface, revealing themselves to be as vital as the more "important" things that usually occupy the foreground, and our attention. There's an awareness of natura naturans-nature naturing. Then, too, I can't help but notice that my thoughts and sensations come and go, but something else doesn't. Although my zazen state has no religious content in the usual sense, I'm reminded of theologian Paul Tillich's definition of God as the "ground of being."
During the afternoon work period, I invoke journalistic license to break the sesshin silence and talk with Helen, an energetic seventy-three-year-old. The retired director of a school for disturbed and disabled children, she does volunteer work with "people who need . . . things," she says. "When I die, I want to be like an old slipper." Living spaces here are shared, but her years and notorious snoring have entitled Helen to an old trailer in the parking lot. In this cozy home, I ask her why she practices Zen.
After some thought, Helen says, "I do it because I like it.
I don't like to shop or go on cruises. My husband talked me into going on one of those, once. Zen is what I enjoy." She has studied here for ten years, "which is nothing in Zen, but an eternity for an American," she says. "Everything we do seems to last about ten years!" She esteems Kwong-roshi because she's "wary of charismatic teachers who push big causes and Asian teachers who don't understand Americans. Roshi's personal, one-man-in-the universe-right-now-here approach has a lot to offer Western Buddhism. In dokusan [a formal, private student-teacher interview], I don't go to him for answers, but I leave beaming with a sense of peace and comfort."
Although she was long a church member, Helen prefers Buddhism's worldview, which she first encountered as a child in Japan, where her family lived for a time. In the Judeo-Christian West, she says, "there's a hierarchy of God, then man, then nature. In Asia, there's not. We don't like to acknowledge what being a human is-just part of nature, an animal. We could all be killers in an instant!" She laughs
merrily. "Every time you take a step, you kill." Within Buddhism, Helen prefers the Soto Zen tradition to the Rinzai school, which puts more stress on intellectual practices such as koans. "Here, it's what you do, not what you think, that counts," she says. "Marin County Buddhism is too intellectual for me! Here, people aren't always quoting at you. They're busy working and doing."
Asked what Zen practice has done for her, Helen stops to think again. "Rounded my rough edges," she says finally. "Sanded me. I'm not quite as righteous or irritable. I see now that harmony doesn't have to depend on two people thinking alike. With my husband, for example. After I had been practicing for a while, I said to myself, Helen, he's not perfect, but neither are you. We get along better now. I live now in more harmony with . . . whatever." She pauses again, then says, "Zen changes your view of the world from inside. First it turns it on its head, so that you think you're going insane." I laugh in a way I wouldn't have yesterday. "Then," says Helen, "it's just different. You realize that all you can concentrate on is what's in front of you, by being alert every second. There's still fire and flood, but all's right with the world anyway, and you're at peace."
On the second day of sesshin, no rays of light or seraphic voices have poured from my brown plastic wall outlet. Zazen remains extremely difficult. Aching legs and backs have driven a few people from the floor to chairs set against the wall. For me, the toughest part remains emptying my mind. The shifting light outside subtly alters the zendo's atmosphere, just as thoughts and sensations alter my head's. Like the shadows, my internal states-boredom, contentment, frustration-come and go, while I just sit there, trying to pay them no mind. After the second sitting of the midday marathon, it's hard to believe there's a third. Wake up! scream the fighting cocks. Distinctions blur between them and me, there and here, consciousness and reality. Wake up! Wake up! (Later, Kwong-roshi says that the name Buddha derives from buddh, which means "awakened.")
A few months before sesshin, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Picasso portraiture exhibition. Shrinelike, the small, final room held a triptych of three very late self-portraits. One painting, done about a year before the artist died at the age of ninety-two, portrayed that confrontation with mortality that not even the most protean creator is spared. A modern version of an ascetic saint contemplating a skull, it showed the artist with brain raddled and nerves exposed, tongue protruding and sparse hair standing on end. The features of the fragmented face are wildly sprung, as if from the coils of an old mattress. The right eye is upended, flat, as sightless as a dead fish's. Within this desolation, the only vital sign is the left eye: alert, unaccountably blue, and earnestly focused upward. The question is unavoidable: At what? One of art's greatest thieves, perhaps Picasso had appropriated a motif from religious carvings, Asian and Celtic alike, in which contemplation is signified by a face that has one eye open and one closed. A neuroscientist who studies consciousness once told me that our ideal state is this "quiet alertness," which is the goal of a lot of drug use, prescription and otherwise. Amidst his own disintegration, the blue eye in Picasso's death's head remains quietly alert.