Zazen

Listening to Bernie and Genpo talking about what, if any, were the absolutely essential ingredients of Zen, it disturbed me when they seemed ready to let zazen go. For me, zazen is one of the two things that make Zen Zen. I was relieved that neither had quit sitting. Raising the question, though, was important; being willing to consider the possibility, being willing to let everything go, is vital to keeping our practice alive.

Here’s the dilemma: we have this vow to free all sentient beings and yet we know from experience that zazen is not for everyone. Bernie had the experience at Greyston, working with formerly homeless people some of whom, he could see, were not going to practice zazen. I had the experience as we were building our charter network: so many young educators searching for inner peace for whom zazen was not the pathway. How important is zazen? Do you have to practice zazen to achieve inner peace, enlightenment, anything you want to call it, to realize and actualize the oneness of life?

No, there are many pathways. From the time I met him, Bernie was embodying this. His vision for the House of One People, his multifaith practice, actualized this. Zazen is only one way. It’s not for everyone. Zen is not the only path. There are many beautiful pathways. Bernie had a wonderful story about how he came to this realization.

Maezumi sent Bernie when he was still new to the practice to teach zazen to a group of Catholic nuns who’d requested instruction. Bernie was sitting with them – many were older and had been practicing years longer than Bernie – thinking to himself how pathetic it was that with all their practice these sisters still believed in God when the arrogance of his certainty hammered him. Bernie was transformed by this experience. He would say, “This is my practice. It’s not everyone’s practice.” He was accepting, embracing the differences, the wonderful variety of life.

Zen is my path. I am grateful to have found it, fortunate that my search was rather easy. Zen called to me in a suburban bookstore when I was 16 years old. It just took me a long time to get down to practice. I didn’t ignore the call, but I didn’t really listen either. For 30 years, I bought Zen books and soaked up Kurosawa films. It took 30 years for me to finally practice zazen for more than a day or two on my summer vacations. It is a blessing, good karma – call it what you’d like – to have found my path.

It takes some people much longer, years of searching, before they find their path or, perhaps more precisely, before their path finds them. You can’t choose your pathway. Your pathway chooses you. I quote the Harry Potter wand merchant from the first film. “The wizard doesn’t choose the wand; the wand chooses the wizard.”

But how do you know? The only way you can find out if a pathway is for you is to walk the path for a while. Taste the peach. Walk the walk. If Zen is calling to you, try Zen. If you want to taste Zen, you must sit down, try zazen. That’s my opinion. If you’re not sitting, you’re trying something else. “Introduction to Zen” discussions may entice or encourage you to taste the peach, but eventually you must bite the peach if you want to get a taste.

You don’t have to go on an only-peach diet. I'm a householder, not a monk. All the students I’ve worked with have been householders. Householders need to fit their zazen practice, even on a trial basis, into complicated lives. I say that sitting a half hour a day is enough -- I have a routine for helping people build themselves up to the half hour -- and then sit a half hour a day, every day or at least six days a week, for six months: that will give you a taste. Then you may know if this practice is for you. At least at this point in your life. If Zen is for you, you feel it. You know it once you’ve gotten a taste.

But there’s a related question: is zazen enough? There are many schools of Zen. The Japanese Soto Sect founded by Dogen Zenji, through which I trace my lineage, has been known as the “just sitting” school. Bernie added many additional practices. He had a great gift for developing upayas, skillful means, supplementary practices to help students move along the path. Jishu called it, “To go deeper.” The Ox Curriculum – I was privileged to do three courses with Jishu, in the skandhas, in the precepts, and in the paramitas – before the world shifted and Bernie moved on to other upayas – were most important to me. The Street Retreats and the Auschwitz Retreat, what Bernie called “plunges” – a better word, he thought, than “retreats” – were also great accelerators; but they had their limitations. A plunge can bring you suddenly to what Bernie called an immediate awareness of the Oneness of Life, but the more important thing was what you did with that awareness experience.

Bernie clearly saw the limitations of the plunges. On the final evening of the first Auschwitz Retreat, he asked the assembly, “When you get home, what difference will this experience make in your life?” If nothing changes as a result of my Auschwitz experience, what’s the point? Is there anything other than vacation photos remaining? What’s the after-Auschwitz practice?

That plunge ended without our sharing our responses to Bernie’s question. There would have been many answers. We came together at Auschwitz from many paths – Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Sufis – and would return to many different practices. But would anything be different? By then, I’d been through the after-sesshin glow several times: for days after a sesshin, the world was a different, sunshiny place, but the glow wore off, usually within a week. Would Auschwitz make a lasting difference?

Bernie was right: the plunge could take you dramatically deeper. For a moment, it was exhilarating. It felt life changing, but was it? By itself the plunge was not enough. It was the post-plunge practice that could make the difference, but would it? Back to the cushion, back to zazen for me. But was I retreating to my cushion, or was I going forward?

It is so easy to get stuck in nostalgia, in that moment in the plunge when everything shifted, too easy to get stuck in the vacation photos. They used to ask us on the first day of elementary school, “How did you spend your summer vacation?”

Would I answer, “Oh, I went to Auschwitz”? There needs to be more than that.