Wake Up
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For Peter Matthiessen, whom I first met when he’d forgotten his bessu (Zen priest socks with ankle snaps). He borrowed mine, which were way too small, and flapped about while he processed and bowed conducting a very formal ceremony in front of hundreds.
You were the deepest smile, unflappable even when flapping. May all our Zen be just so.
Contents
Introduction
ONE
What Is Zen?
TWO
Zen Mind, Awakening Heart
THREE
Sitting Zen
FOUR
Moving Zen
FIVE
Waking Up
Epilogue
Dharma Talk
Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
TO STUDY ZEN IS TO STOP RUNNING. You sit down with yourself, take a deep breath, take off the mask usually used to hide your pain, and begin to get real. You begin to devote yourself to waking up from what can only be called the trance of habit. Zen practice is a confrontation with the persistent dream that certainty is possible; it is an invitation to relax into a vast unknowing. You begin to see how intoxicating opinions and objects are and commit to a “spiritual sobriety” informed by spaciousness and silence.
With Zen practice also comes a direct experience of your life as not separate from all other life, which means a tremendous yet tender strength becomes your own. As you stop running from every discomfort—yours or others’—your relationship to suffering is transformed. Compassion and kindness become more natural than fear and anger.
In this book, we’ll open up how Zen practice works. We’ll look a bit at its history, as well as the place it occupies in Buddhism, world religions, and culture more widely. We’ll look into its traditional “shapes and forms” but emphasize how to bring it home, to keep it intimately real in this moment. We’ll do this because, essentially, Zen can only be understood by practicing it. Everything else is description. And though knowing something about Zen may be interesting, until we put our own body and breath into it, it doesn’t really begin to address our lives.
I found that true for myself. After years of a kind of noodling around with meditation on my own, I hit a point when I wanted to drench myself in its deepest waters, and I moved to a Zen monastery. Zen has a tradition of cutting through sentimentality, and monasticism implies a single, deep intention shaping a community—both spoke to me. And I liked that working with a teacher was central to Zen study; I wouldn’t be allowed to drift or hide. It was 1983.
Twenty-plus years later, I had lived decades as a monastic, become a priest, and been designated a Zen teacher (Sensei). I completed formal study with my teacher, was named the first “dharma successor” in my order, and then continued study with several other teachers. I founded a lay Zen center in NYC and oversaw the purchase and renovation of a building (temple) there. After teaching in the city for about ten years, I started a nonresidential training program called Hermitage Heart with students throughout the United States.
All to say, I’ve had the great honor (and challenge!) of studying with many wonderful teachers and thousands of students in varied situations for almost 40 years. I’ve seen people change the way they live and die, face illness, and experience the incredible stressors of our time. I’ve watched as prisoners find the freedom implicit in their mind and patients with debilitating disease find uncommon peace. For all of us, though, it begins with a commitment to wake up. What does that look like?
Most people will find that their enchantment with ego is like a spell that gets broken each time they engage in genuine practice. An alternative begins to wake up in the heart-mind—a glimpse of something truer, more honest. Breaking from the ego-trance, even momentarily, wakes up a bone-deep calmness: The tension of pretending can be let go, again and again.
If you find yourself drawn to explore Zen practice, you have likely become aware of, or even deeply despaired, the opposite of waking up: the quiet, pervasive sense of being disconnected, stuck in some shade of trance. It’s all too easy to waste this unique, precious, and wild life searching in vain for something, anything, to make it better or easier. We run ourselves ragged trying to improve, trying to get to one goal after another, none of which really does the trick. We’re always striving and restless, and nothing quite satisfies. No matter how we try to avoid it, the question Who am I? finds us on sleepless nights, or in moments of grief or awe.
Come to these pages as you might to a monastery: with your deepest existential questions alive in your heart, forming “the great matter at hand.” Be ready to sit down in the center of your life, see clearly, and release the patterns of fear that hold you back. I offer my complete support and faith that you can. Awakening is your birthright.
This book is about how Zen practice can inform and inspire your everyday life—even as it is filled with jobs, family, friends, art, and humor, and takes place amid the civilizational crises of climate chaos, war, racism, misogyny, and the excesses and injustices of capitalism. Every moment delivers a question about who we really are. I have found tha
t the deepest water is this very life and that it actually doesn’t require a geographic shift—only and utterly that we dive in completely right where we are.
ONE
What Is Zen?
The word Zen is provocative in a number of ways. This is a good thing, especially for those who are hoping to not just gather another vocabulary word but to actually address existential suffering, both our own and that of others. One might think, given the way the word is bandied about in popular culture, advertising, and design, that Zen is simply about simplicity. Zen has even been bizarrely appropriated to sell everything from perfume to wine to cars. But an old teaching says, “Zen is not what you think it is. Of course, neither is it otherwise.” Though mainstream culture seems to have satisfied itself that Zen means chill out, please be encouraged to delve in more thoroughly.
Zen began as a tradition that doesn’t “rely on words and letters.” From the get-go, Zen has had this bold insistence on getting through to the truth and not getting waylaid by mere descriptions or names for that truth. Many say Zen is about coming back to the moment, but the question remains constant: What really is the moment? How is the past—our history of failings and strivings—included in this raw moment? How is the future—our personal and civilizational consequences and obligations—included in how we wake up, moment by moment?
For centuries in varied countries and cultures, Zen has been embraced as a way of realizing who we really are, what this life is, and how to live it with vibrance, courage, and subtlety. Yet we’re in a particular and critical time in human history: a time when even the continuation of sentient life on our planet beyond the next 100 years depends on how we understand who we are and how we serve life. How might Zen help us to clarify our own lives and priorities and support this new understanding? We’ll start by dispelling some false notions, review a bit of Zen’s history, traditional teachings, and basic methods, and then take up how Zen might come home to where we each sit.
What Is Zen Not?
One big key as we arrive at the threshold of Zen practice is to notice that we’ve likely brought along our bag of expectations. Each of us arrives with all sorts of ideas. Zen is this, not that; liturgy is relevant for the monks, not laypeople; a teacher should work this way, not that way; I should feel better, not worse . . . and hey, isn’t this about being imperturbable? As genuine practice begins, the bag will get turned over, spilled out (many times!) so that we can see what we’re carrying, what unessential ideas we are dragging along with us. It may hurt when this happens—the poetic descriptions of Zen don’t always let us know that. Yet as the burden of expectation begins to release, there is a kind of lightening up. We find we can lean into the journey, without needing it to be exactly what we thought it would be. We get out of our heads and into our lived experience.
So, the caveat: Be careful not to go into Zen practice to gather up new things, new concepts, new ambitions. And when you notice that is what you’re doing (because this is the way our minds naturally work), pause and set down your bag for a moment. Notice that the idea of “getting something” or “going somewhere” is likely beginning to weigh you down and is taking you away from where you are.
Let’s look at some of the misconceptions you may run into. As Zen began being taught and practiced on American shores in the 1950s and ’60s, its cut-no-corners, gentle-cum-fierce, and generally iconoclastic character appealed deeply to a culture undergoing revolutions of antiauthoritarianism. American converts flocked to Zen centers. Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese teachers of Buddhism seemed to embody both gentle confidence and spiritual depth, which attracted students into committed study.
This is also how the limiting image of Zen wisdom being a male, Eastern elder in monk’s robes formed in popular culture. The Asian teachers came from lineages refined in monastic community; in America, most convert students were lay householders, combining career and family with Zen practice. Almost all the Asian teachers were monks and came from countries where male privilege was normative.
For decades in the United States, heavily hierarchical administration of training centers, with one “authority” at the top making all decisions, went largely unquestioned. This happened partly because it was difficult for American students and teachers alike to distinguish skillful teachings from the teaching styles imported largely unintentionally with them. So, Zen in America has had some significant growing pains over its several decades as this Eastern tradition became rooted in Western soil.
As always, however, it returns to where each one of us stands—honestly facing whatever barriers lie in our path, ready to take up our freedom.
Master Wu-men, known for his koan collection The Gateless Gate, spoke to this:
Gateless is the ultimate Way;
there are thousands of ways to it.
If you pass through this barrier,
You may walk freely in the universe.
Also, take note that there is no issue with integrating Zen into what may already be your religious or spiritual practice. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk known for exploring Zen along with his Catholicism, famously wrote that comparing Zen to Christianity is like comparing tennis to mathematics. They are different playing fields. One can play tennis and still be a mathematician. Christians can practice Zen, without leaving their Christianity. You don’t need to get rid of your “tennis shoes” or your “quadratic equations”—just be a mathematician playing tennis, if you will. There are many Jewish Zen practitioners (hence, JewBu is a thing), as well as meditators from many other religious traditions.
WHAT IS KARMA?
Karma is not a synonym for consequences, though pop culture tends to use the word that way. Karma is actually the universal law of cause and effect. It links an action’s underlying intention to that action’s consequences; it equates the actions of body, speech, and thought as potential sources of karmic consequences.
In other words, as one of my teachers used to say, “What you do and what happens to you are the same thing.” Intentions matter. What we do matters. If anyone is harmed, we are harmed. (And more positively, if anyone is relieved of their suffering, we are likewise.)
In other words, there is no separation. Life is intimate.
Awakening and morality cannot be separated.
Early on, as Zen first began taking root in the United States, misconceptions about karma ran rampant. Statements that “Zen is beyond morality,” made by distinguished scholars, directed people away from the reality that, in this one great universe, we sink or swim together, not alone. No one person or thing is apart from this shared reality and responsibility.
The study of karma is intrinsic to genuine Zen study. In training, the study of the Buddhist Precepts (moral and ethical teachings) is taken very seriously, and the implications of karma are explored throughout one’s lifetime.
What Is Zen?
All the teachings of Zen are called upaya, or skillful means. They are designed to help us see and realize that the truth we are seeking is already present. Because the truth is non-dual (not two, not either/or), we can say there is no one to give and no one to receive. This is why you’ll sometimes hear it said that “there are no Zen teachers”—only the truth itself. Because of this radical oneness, there is never a time that truth does not exist that is separate from a time when it does. There is never a time realization exists separate from when it does not. This moment touches and interpenetrates with all moments. This is why a Zen teaching may ask: “Past, present, and future meet in a body: What is that body?” It is also clear that there’s a huge difference between believing in the non-dual (and its implications) and fully, inarguably experiencing it. So, upaya evolved to evoke the realization of truth, rather than to explain it.
Zen has been called a peculiar religious tradition. There is even long-standing debate about calling it a religion at all. It doesn’t require worship, belief in doctrines, or devotion. It isn’t theistic, but it’s not atheistic or agnostic either: It simply do
esn’t take up the subject of God. The Buddha is understood as an ordinary human being who freed himself from the burden of quintessential suffering and then taught others about the possibility of doing likewise.
In one sense, Zen traces itself back to Siddhartha Gautama, who was born over 2,500 years ago into a royal family in Nepal. He led a very sheltered life and then one day traveled outside the palace gates—and all his assumptions were fundamentally disrupted by the realities of old age, sickness, and death. No longer sure of what life was actually about, he left his home, gave away all his belongings, shaved his head, and put on simple robes. He lived in utmost simplicity and studied with the great teachers of the day. He was not so different from, though perhaps more thoroughgoing than, those of us today who start our spiritual search in earnest and then hit the road seeking answers, teachers, and methods.
But nothing that Siddhartha learned fully addressed the deepest questions he had. Eventually, he decided to sit as he had long before as a child: under a tree, without reaching for anything, without restricting himself in any way.
He would stay there until he felt genuine peace. And, the story goes, one night, after many days and nights, as he saw the morning star, he realized anuttara-samyak-sambodhi—great and perfect enlightenment—and would then be known as Buddha Shakyamuni (Greatly awakened being of the Shakya clan).
Initially, all Shakyamuni said was how incredible it was that “all beings have awakened nature . . . in one moment, I and all beings together have entered the Way (of enlightenment).” He had no inclination to create a new religion. But his fellow long-suffering monks saw his transformation and begged him to teach. Being asked by heartfelt companions, he was called to begin the impossible task of “teaching what cannot be taught.”
Another juncture when Zen can be said to “begin” is about 300 years after the buddhadharma (Buddha’s true teaching) crossed from India to China and was invigorated by the great sage Bodhidharma. It was around the year 520 CE when Bodhidharma introduced the specific teachings that are regarded as the taproot of the Zen school. Much of Bodhidharma’s biography is likely the stuff of legend, yet there are numerous early records of a wise monk who brought the Buddhist tradition back to its authentic vitality.