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description= 6 posts published by koun during May 2012;
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tact koun franz support what is nyohō zen practice principles of zazen shōbōgenzō zazengi universally recommended instructions for zazen fukanzazengi monthly archives may 2012 post navigation older posts it really is who you know may 29 bryan on the right me on the left i came to zazen through a series of fortunate accidents the right encounters at the right times near the end of high school my best friend s dad was cleaning out his attic and found an old dusty copy of philip kapleau s three pillars of zazen that he had read in college he tossed it in a garbage can but my friend thought i might like it so he fished it out and gave it to me i d read some books about buddhism by then but they were dry series of lists so dry that i wondered if anyone actually practiced buddhism anymore or if it had died out growing up in montana one can wonder such things three pillars of zen was a revelation to me it s been so many years now that i remember almost nothing about it so it s difficult to explain but reading that book was the rare experience of encountering my own unarticulated ideas articulated for me by someone else years later i suspect i would find much to disagree with in those pages but at that moment in my life my cup was just empty enough for me to swallow it whole to let it seep through my skin that book changed everything about what i thought i wanted to do the second happy accident took place about a year later after i d graduated and probably read that book twenty times on a trip out east to see my brother s college graduation i d had the opportunity to visit the rochester zen center just for a few minutes i showed up unannounced but they were kind enough to give me a tour philip kapleau was in the building but i didn t get to meet him i was telling the story to my high school english teacher of all people and he informed me that he had actually organized a zazen group there in my hometown and invited me to join a few days later i went to his house where he gave me a 5 minute explanation of how to sit then we went together to a tiny room and he rang a tiny bell one of the members was a psychologist we sat in the waiting room of her private practice it was just the two of us that time and many times after i remember that an ant climbed up my sleeve and took a leisurely tour of my arms torso and face for the next hour i d been told not to move so i just tracked that bug it wasn t zazen but it was exhilarating and i wanted more i like to say that the little group in helena montana was basically the zen version of fight club i got in because i knew someone but it was basically a secret once in a supermarket i bumped into one of the members she was with friends and though she smiled and said hello her eyes pleaded with me not to mention how we knew each other a couple years after i started i tried to do a journalism project for a class interviewing the members about how they each came to zen some refused and every single one that agreed to the interview did it on the condition that i not use their name things are changing that group now the open circle sangha with their own website and everything has changed locations and faces over the last twenty years but in the process it has become not only more stable but also more open it s a different time but i suspect that across the us especially in more conservative states and smaller towns invisible little zen fight clubs are everywhere one of the pleasures of driving through rural america is knowing that i am at all times surrounded by closeted buddhists in the years after i first sat i was constantly re negotiating my relationship to the practice like most beginners i had bursts of sitting once or more a day followed by a month or more of nothing just a dusty cushion zen and zazen informed my sense of self in all sorts of self serving ways whether i was really sitting that month or not i identified strongly as a zen person a guy with the inside track on spirituality and discipline and college being the confusing time that it is friends were happy to reinforce this image i had of myself by coming to me with their problems looking for some zen wisdom i handed it out freely i sincerely believed that i was sincere but i was just as interested in my story of myself as a zen person as i was in zen practice after college i moved to japan for the first time meanwhile in a different tradition and across the world in philadelphia my older brother bryan had been turned on to meditation he was completely hooked we d talk about it on the phone verbally high fiving congratulating each other on our discovery then he came to visit me in japan twice a day he would lock himself in the bathroom to meditate it drove me crazy we were arranging our schedule around it and at some point i complained a little or at least suggested that maybe he could skip it once in a while he thought about it and looked at my little buddha statue and relatively untouched zafu in the corner and he said something like this the thing is if you really believe these teachings are true then by definition you believe they re the most important thing in the world you have to respond i have to meditate if you don t feel you have to act on these teachings then by definition you don t really believe them he raised his eyebrows and looked me in the eyes for a little too long am i right bryan claims he doesn t remember this conversation but for me it was a big moment one i doubt i ll ever totally shake off by that time i d been identifying with zen for about four years and actually sitting for almost as long but i had never once put myself in a situation where someone could call me on my self serving approach to it all i d never once put myself and my ego in a situation that was the least bit unsafe at least not in relationship to practice i d created a story about myself and i liked it and i invited no one to challenge it this is what teachers are for we need to make ourselves vulnerable to that gaze that honesty we need to decide that we want that when i was twenty one i didn t have a teacher only a few people could have said what needed to be said and my big brother was one of them maybe he was the only one it was perfect it almost made up for all those times when we were kids and he sold me my own toys or made me eat chocolate chips wrapped in american cheese or left me to watch the shining by myself in the dark at two in the morning but probably not quite share this tweet share on reddit opens in new window reddit email a link to a friend opens in new window email more print opens in new window print share on tumblr like loading 4 comments posted in uncategorized tagged fight club three pillars of zen that s not zen may 25 not long ago i was part of an e mail exchange among soto zen priests about the possibilities surrounding a new monastery being built in the us one prominent american teacher suggested it was a wasted effort and when pressed on it basically said to each his own but a monastery has nothing to do with zen laypeople in the us might be surprised to hear how much disagreement there is among american soto zen teachers not just on this point but on everything many aspects of zen practice from the bowing to the outfits to the chanting to the overall aesthetic can seem foreign at first so from the outside it may seem that most zen centers are embracing traditional forms even to a forbidding degree it can look as if everyone s basically doing the same thing but they re not not at all it s a strange thing about zen that we seem unable to define it to anyone s satisfaction the world of buddhism is huge and some directions it has taken can be surprising to say the least but removed from the question of this sect or that i think that most informed people could sit down in a room and find remarkable agreement about what defines buddhism what makes you not a buddhist by dzongsar khyentse is one example of someone attempting a basic definition and doing it quite well there would be dissent but a majority could probably come together zen just isn t like that the buddhism section and the zen section at the bookstore are so often not one and the same i have many times ranted about how ridiculous that is but it s not hard to see how it happens even many people in the zen world might not be able to see the connections in high school i wrote a paper about zen in which i referenced the buddha s four noble truths then showed it to an actual zazen sitting person to get his opinion the only comment i got was in the margin next to the noble truths part but in zen these don t apply so we can t even agree on something as seemingly basic as that for many people zen zazen period everything else is window dressing a support at best a distraction at worst it s very seductive this idea except in order to say that zen is zazen we have to then ask what is zazen what is it is it a mental exercise a physical one both neither some people say zazen includes everything while others say that if you re distracted during zazen then that s not really zazen is zazen something you do something you participate in something you express what does it even look like if you do it in a chair is that zazen when we talk about zazen reaching into every moment of the day is that a kind of resonance an influence an echo or can ordinary activities themselves actually be zazen we could probably get most people to at least agree that zazen is critical to any definition of zen but if we took that next step to define zazen it would all fall apart there s another strain of zen people who talk less about zazen and more about practice in the case of the teacher who said monasteries have nothing to do with zen part of his argument was that everything is zen it s everywhere i think what is meant by this is that zen practice is always right under our feet that practice is the practice of this moment wherever we are if so i agree completely but how do we arrive at that this is a huge idea too huge to be accepted on face value even if zen practice is always ever present implicit in that idea is the more complicated suggestion that zen practice actually is something distinct something we can learn to identify in some kind of context so that we can then recognize it outside of that place where we first discovered it that is to say even if we agree that zen is everywhere that does not mean that everywhere is zen zen is something otherwise why do we keep using the word i had a friend who used to complain only half jokingly about how much she hated dharma friends dharma friends are a kind of buddhist friend who is always jumping right over the relative to the absolute my friend my boyfriend broke up with me i m feeling so sad dharma friend who is this i who is sad but an ever changing aggregation of components which are themselves both impermanent and empty of inherent self and what is this sadness in attaching to this false idea that i am sad you re just perpetuating your own dualistic delusion here i ll lend you these great dharma talks i just downloaded to me everything is zen sounds like advice from the dharma friend even if it s true it s not useful not right now it s too removed it s an insincere response to a sincere question when i first got interested in zen i would have used these kinds of words to describe it cool rational simple creative the only word i d still use is cool i still think zen is pretty cool even if i d hit the mark these are just adjectives descriptors of a thing but not the thing adjectives don t mean that much and zen when used as an adjective means even less than most the thing called zen that i have found through teachers and training and my own inquiry is an immersive world of ritual enactment one in which we sit not like the buddha but as buddha taigen leighton s zazen as an enactment ritual from zen ritual should be required reading along with the rest of the book we don t just chant the words of our teachers teachers but we say those words as our own we bow over and over again offering ourselves not symbolically but literally completely we hold a teacup not as if we are holding all beings but as a complete act as our point of contact with all beings in that moment it is a practice with no explicit goal except to do what we are doing without reservation without hesitation completely it s deeply physical both in its requirements and in its expression the things that we hope might come from practice deepened compassion awareness mindfulness concentration whatever are not goals they are side effects that s a very different thing if this thing we call zen and more specifically the soto side of zen is definable if it is a thing then historically it has been something like what i have experienced in monasteries it has been the cultivation and preservation of that atmosphere and those traditions mostly by monks that doesn t mean that zen has not changed over time it has in significant ways that doesn t mean it won t continue to change it will nor does it mean that all the things we say about zen being relevant in ordinary modern life are untrue or that zen is everywhere is missing the mark but again when we say that we re talking about something that starts somewhere that has a shape that is recognizable for myself i am amazed when i hear zen is everywhere and then in the same breath monasteries have nothing to do with zen if you were to ask me what dance is and i told you that dance has nothing to do with dance studios or stages you might not bat an eye after all one can dance anywhere but what if i told you it had nothing to do with the body what if i told you dance was ineffable and all pervasive and part of our ordinary experience and also something that most people know nothing about i can imagine someone with a deep feeling about dance making this kind of argument but is it meaningful in this case even if this comes from a deeply felt sense by the teacher the message is that dance is just that a feeling it s something that lives only in the world of the mind an aspect of experience we either recognize or we don t you don t see dance in going to the toilet you don t see it in opening a bank account well then i guess you re not a dancer yet keep working on it that s not good enough i am hesitant to define zen to say that it is this any adequate definition will be complicated and full of words like sometimes and but also and not just limiting it by saying what it is is not the point but i will say that zen is not what we think it is which is to say zen is not the experience of zen just as zazen is not the experience of zazen it s not our ideas about it if it is something then it really is something it starts somewhere it has a taste and a feel and a look if i tell you that it s the taste in your mouth right now the feeling in your hands right now the look of what is directly in front of you right now in this moment if i tell you that i m n...
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