ALL DAY IN GREY RAIN HOLLYHOCKS FOLLOW THE SUN’S

INVISIBLE ROAD

BASHŌ

SO COME, SO GONE

COMING TO TERMS WITH CHANGE

In its scant, poignant depictions of the changing seasons, Japanese haiku perfectly captures the nature of our “hollyhock journey” along the “invisible road.” Whether appearing as golden sun or as grey rain, the change inherent in passing time is a relentless reminder of our fleeting “grassroots” existence. We don’t know where we came from or where we’re going, but we never want to stop. We cling for dear life to our little patch of ground, yet the more we cling, the more we suffer. We just can’t seem to make peace with changing conditions. Only when we find ourselves out of breath and unable to go on, do we come to a stop. One day it hits us that change is inescapable. Change means there’s nothing to hold onto. Change is what brings us to Zen practice.

EVERY BREATH IS DIFFERENT

Nowhere does change become more evident than when we sit on our cushions following the breath. Because we don’t usually pay attention to what feels like an automatic process, we fall into the illusion that our breaths are all the same. We think only opera singers and asthmatics have to be aware of breathing. Suddenly we notice that every breath is different, that each inhalation and exhalation is unique and unrepeatable. Broadening our attention, we look at our hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, and smelling and notice that they too are unreplicable. Each step we take, each morsel we taste, each sound we hear is unlike any other. Jolted out of our stupor, we find everything is changing, unfolding from moment to moment. Over and over again, yet always fresh and new, never stale, never routine, we ourselves are coming and going as change.

This isn’t a one-time realization. It must be experienced anew every time we sit down on our cushions. We tend to sink back into our old mental habits, so we keep returning to the breath, to this changing moment. We need to allow ourselves to let change happen. Only when we realize that the universe is itself nothing but change, and that it’s going on all the time, can we begin to experience ourselves as change.

CLOSING THE GAP

Meditation abates the fear of change. It loosens our clutch on the wish for permanence. We no longer take refuge in the idea of an essential soul, an everlasting identity tag that’s perfect, unmoving, unchangeable, and therefore “real.” The self at one with change is more like a drop of water flowing over a rock, changing shape and form as it assumes the face of the rock, perhaps stopping from time to time, until it grows dense and is once again pulled down by gravity into the stream from which it came.

Really allowing yourself to become one with change means you no longer think about change. Instead of separating yourself from changing conditions, emotions, expectations, and goals, you simply disappear into them. They’re always new. Life is never boring. Having closed the gap between the changing universe, the moment, and the separate entity you think of as your “self,” you can at last come and go in peace.

PRACTICING THE ART OF CHANGE

There’s a wonderful Pali term for the Buddha, Tathagata. Literally translated, it means “so come, so gone.” In other words, Buddha is nothing but change. Always present, the Tathagata is continuously manifesting the many things of this world. Nothing is excluded, nothing is separate from this bountiful harvest. Everything is change. When we sit zazen, we practice the art of change, getting a whole new perspective on the passing of time. Instead of fearing change, we can even begin to enjoy our changing conditions. Growing older, letting go of children, reuniting with friends from far away—all these are part of our practice, part of us. We are continuously changing and being changed, living as change. Any condition, no matter how painful or joyful, inevitably gives way to another. But it’s only by immersing ourselves in the moment that we fully realize this, experiencing over and over again what it is to grow and unfold.

It all begins with the breath. Inhaling this moment, exhaling the next. When you drift away, just bring yourself back. This is what’s happening right here. Now. The last breath is gone; here’s a new one. A thought comes, fine. Let it pass through. Gone. Back to the breath. Inhale. Exhale. Another thought comes. Okay, too. Let it pass through. The brain generates thoughts in the same way that the liver generates bile. That’s the way the brain works. That’s the brain’s job. You don’t sit and worry about your liver doing what it’s supposed to do. You don’t get angry with it. Apply the same easy acceptance to the function of your brain. Let it send up thoughts. Just don’t get carried away by them. Don’t get too interested in them. At the same time, allow them to come and go, without monitoring yourself. Eventually, mind and breath become one. This is the quickest entry into discovering yourself as change.

Chinese traditional doctors believe that breath and mind are connected. Those of us who’ve had acupuncture treatments have experienced this firsthand. As soon as the needles are placed at the meridian points, you simultaneously feel your breath and your thoughts slowing down. The mind actually starts to relax. That’s why so many patients fall asleep. It’s even better for patients who meditate; instead of falling asleep, they go into a relaxed but alert state that helps the body attend to healing.

Just breathing. Nothing more. Yet the experience of just sitting and attending to the breath brings us back to the basic fact of our existence. It’s not that we’re illusory. That’s a mistaken idea some people have about Zen practice—that there isn’t anyone there at all. You only have to slam your finger in a door to know that’s not true. There’s a difference between illusoriness and transience, though. The self, like everything else in the universe, comes and goes, isn’t fixed, isn’t ever the same from moment to moment. When we’re hurt, we bleed real blood and cry real tears. But only momentarily. That’s the self being hurt now. In the space of a moment, it will be transformed, become totally new. The self is real, manifesting as the changing moment. The only illusion is that the self is solid, fixed, and that change is somehow assaulting it from the outside.

Real intimacy with change means we don’t automatically cling to the “lovely” moments and reject the “ugly” ones. Rain comes, we’re soaked with rain; sun comes, we’re soaked with sun. That’s all.

Zen people often talk about “accepting the moment as it is.” That’s okay, but what we like even better is “caring for the moment” with the same lavish tenderness you’d bestow on a newborn. Cici, a nurse-midwife acquaintance of ours, is a perfect example of what we mean. On call at all hours of the day and night, she may get tired, but she’s never bored by her practice. Privileged to be bringing newborn life into the world, Cici devotes equal attention and care to every baby she delivers. It’s the same with Zen practice. Once you’ve experienced each moment on your cushions as “newborn,” how can you not treat it with care?

O SPRINGTIME TWILIGHT ... PRECIOUS MOMENT WORTH TO ME

A THOUSAND PIECES

SOTOBA

DON’T BE USED BY THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

SPECIAL MOMENTS

Time is the grid human beings impose on change. It’s the way we Westerners in particular measure “progress.” Even though Einstein has told us otherwise, we still picture time “marching on” in a straight line toward some destined goal. We see it as a friend when it’s “on our side” or when we can “buy ourselves” some, or as an enemy when it’s “against us” or when we “run out of it.” Knowing that death will inevitably cut our “time line,” we spend most of our lives denying it, pretending we’ll go on “forever.” In other words, we are captive to our own self-created illusion of permanence.

We go through our daily routines creating special moments and discarding the time in between. When we’re not enjoying those special moments, we want to move on quickly—but we can’t, because we’re carrying time like a dead weight. We want to be done with that annoying chore and hurry on to our lunch break or our favorite television show. We want the drudgery of the week to end so that the weekend will come. Then we can lock ourselves away in the workshop and putter all day long, or maybe relax in the recliner with a beer and do nothing. But when the weekend comes, we want it to be Thursday, because we go bowling Thursday nights, and so it goes. Setting up these special moments, time’s little stolen pleasures, makes life bearable. Looking forward to the time that isn’t here yet becomes the “natural” thing to do.

The problem is that the special moments don’t seem to be in as abundant supply as the not-so-special ones. As soon as our special moment is over, we must create another one, and another, and another. Always chasing after these moments, consuming them, greedily taking them in without even chewing or digesting them, we’re like the legendary Chinese hungry ghosts, devouring imaginary food and never feeling full. There’s no rest. Pushing ourselves like this makes us edgy. We get angry with people for getting in the way of those special moments. We get angry at ourselves and push even harder. Soon we start to hate the hours that somehow have to be filled, the ones that aren’t special. We develop little tricks to avoid them; we live in dreams, projections, memories. We don’t want to deal with what’s going on now, because it’s not exciting. It doesn’t feel good. Living like this, we never really find fulfillment, because there’s no stopping to ease the mind of its burdensome task.

STANDING TIME ON ITS HEAD

In one of his famous talks, the great Chinese Zen master Chao-Chou admonished his monks, saying, “Don’t be used by the twenty-four hours.” If Chao-Chou’s monks needed a reminder not to be used by time, imagine how much more difficult it is for today’s Grassroots Zen practitioner. Chao-Chou’s words may inspire us, but we must put them into practice if we really want to experience the true nature of time for ourselves.

The way we see it, Chao-Chou is saying that we’ve got to turn time upside down if we want to stop being used by the twenty-four hours. We have to make a radical change in perspective and start looking at life in a whole new way. Only when we stand time on its head will we be able to see that every single moment is special!

Anyone doing a headstand knows how different time feels in that upside-down position. You can’t go anywhere and you’ve got to steady yourself to keep from falling over. You literally have to come to a full stop. In this unaccustomed position, you have no choice but to pay attention to what’s going on, otherwise you might topple over. Gradually, everything in the room, including your body, becomes one with the living moment. The clock on the wall reads three, but on the other hand, it could also be a quarter past twelve. Is that twelve noon or twelve midnight? Standing on your head, it’s impossible to tell. What’s more, it doesn’t really matter. You are too absorbed in every little vein on the leaf of that rose in the upside-down vase on the upside-down coffee table to care what time it is. Or maybe going eye to eye with that little red spider on the floor in front of you is the most important thing you could be doing with your time.

It’s the same with sitting zazen on your cushion. Only instead of standing on your head, meditating reverses your relationship to time by shutting down your “special moments” machine and bringing you to a full stop. Once you’ve stopped, every single moment, whatever it’s made of, becomes an adventure. Life is suddenly interesting because each moment invites you to participate in what’s going on right now. You become totally absorbed in the moment, submerged in its radiant “suchness.” Bathed in the powerful glow of your attention, every mundane activity becomes special; picking up a pen and filling out a form become “enlightened” acts. Instead of carrying time around like a dead weight or dreading it as something to be gotten: over with, you actually start enjoying yourself as you disappear into your chores. What used to be boring becomes light, shiny, brand new. Your mood becomes light and shiny too. There’s a new respect for the “little things” you tended to overlook before. As you let more of the world in, you begin to interact more generously with other people. No longer obsessed with your own special moments, you find yourself actually listening to that colleague at the coffee machine as she describes her trip to Tuscany.

MICRO-ZEN MOMENTS

We feel more poised and confident as the old adversarial relationship with time disappears and we enter the “timeless” realm of the moment. We go about our daily routines with a peaceful mind. There are no extraneous activities, no additional duties to fulfill in order to get somewhere else. Even obstacles become opportunities for realizing ourselves in the moment. The deeper our attention, the more vivid the moment. Relieved of its grid, time melts into change.

Becoming one with the changing conditions of the moment is like becoming one with our breath when we sit. The only difference is that we’re focusing on daily activity as our practice, eliminating the artificial barrier between the zendo and the marketplace. Practice isn’t just what we do on the cushions; it’s what we do on the cushions and everywhere else in the course of the twenty-four hours—but not as a duty or a chore, something extra that we must fit into our lives. Of course nobody succeeds in being attentive one hundred percent of the time, but, as one of our Japanese Zen teachers used to say, “Five percent very good!” You just keep trying, and when you fail, there’s no need to blame yourself. There’s always the next moment.

Sitting regularly reminds us to return to right now when we start straying in pursuit of that special moment. And even when we’re not sitting formally, it’s possible to bring that “re-minding” into our busy lives by practicing what we call “micro-Zen moments” Here’s how to do it.

When you feel you’re pushing yourself, chasing after an imaginary goal or a special moment, just sit back and take a breath. Let everything go. After a few breaths, you’ll notice that you’re already right in the middle of your special moment. Sit back, gaze out the window, and let the light bathe you. Let the sounds become one with your breath. Relax completely into your surroundings, and it’s a sure bet you’ll experience that special moment. There’s no need to chase after it, only to open up to it at any time, because it’s always here! Practice often enough and these micro-Zen moments will become as natural as brushing your teeth or having your cup of morning tea.

AN END TO SUFFERING

Being present to the moment allows us to rest in the dynamic unfolding of being—not as separate, isolated individuals, but as the universe itself. It’s what the Buddha meant when he said, “Below the heavens, above the earth—only I, alone in the universe.”This may sound philosophical, but the way the Buddha got to that understanding was very pragmatic. He simply sat down under a tree and meditated. Driven to search for an answer to suffering, he discovered neither the end of pain nor a void that too often passes for “enlightenment” but the end of suffering. He no longer experienced himself as an atomistic, isolated self that’s battered around by time. Suffering dissipates when we no longer make meditation another “special moment” on the cushion, but live it twenty-four hours a day.

Seeing that everything we could ever want is already here transforms the world into our grassy field of practice. Living consciously as we come and go immediately translates into peace of mind. Everything else grows from there: Confidence. Poise. Joy. Understanding. Tolerance. Openness. Interdependence. Compassion. Sympathy. That’s the Zen ethic: not a set of commandments etched in stone, but a mind freer than air and more fluid than water. Just the myriad blades of grass, bending in the wind. Can you feel it?

SILENT THE GARDEN WHERE THE CAMELLIA-TREE

OPENS ITS WHITENESS

ONITSURA

DWELLING IN TIME

A VIRTUAL WORLD

We were recently sitting in a cafe in the lobby of a newly-opened cineplex, having a cup of coffee. While waiting for our film to begin, we watched a couple pass our table. They had just come out of one of the theaters together and were holding hands, but the woman was talking to someone else on a cell phone. It was a weird sight. Here was a woman engaging in conversation with someone who wasn’t there while holding hands with a man she was ignoring. It set us to thinking about how people spend their time in an increasingly “virtual” world, one in which our immediate experience of the moment is being overtaken by gadgets. In the twenty-first century, dwelling in that timeless “garden where the camellia-tree opens its whiteness” will take a lot more effort. In order to clear our way through the weeds, we’ll have to make more time for meditation retreats.

SESSHIN

Zen retreats, or sesshin, are orchestrated to help us concentrate on the experience of the moment, on what it is to be alive in this world, right now. By living for three, four, or five days together in silence—away from the telephone, our jobs, our families, newspapers, books, television, radio, and car—we truly come to know the unencumbered joy of seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and thinking. Meditating, eating, sleeping, and walking in silence teach us the wonder of dwelling lightly in time. It’s similar to that good feeling we get when we clean out a closet: we get rid of all the junk we don’t need or use and that serves no purpose but to collect dust and attract moths. It’s the opposite of the letdown you get when you buy something. Maybe you’re excited about what you bought for a day or two, but usually after a week, it doesn’t excite you anymore. That’s because shopping is often used to fill an emptiness inside. People shop to ease their loneliness and to find “community.”They shop to escape the buzzing chatter in their minds, which is also the reason people glue themselves to their cell phones or keep their television sets on all day. They’re afraid of the silence and afraid of the void in their hearts.

In sesshin, the more you let go, the better you feel. It’s common, in fact, for people not to want sesshin to end. The first day is usually hard; you’re still shaking off the dust of the world, still have one foot in the zendo and the other outside in the busy life you’ve left behind. But soon enough, you are immersed in the silent delights of the “garden where the camellia-tree opens its whiteness.” Time flies by. Each period of zazen leaves you feeling lighter. There’s a sense of completion in that feeling, of everything being perfect as it is without any need for ornamentation or embellishment. If it’s autumn and the “camellia-tree” is shedding its leaves, you don’t feel sad that it

isn’t spring. So it is with the mind. There’s no need to sweep away thoughts, merely to unburden yourself of the baggage they carry with them. There’s no need to pile them up or to collect them, either. If they’re autumn thoughts, let them be autumn thoughts. Let them fall. Meet everything that comes into your path with an uncluttered mind.

LIKE A CLOUD OVER WATER

In Japanese, the word for Zen monk is unsui, or“cloud-water.” It means living like a cloud over water, traveling with no worldly possessions and leaving no traces. For the Grassroots Zen practitioner, it means living very lightly on the earth, unburdened by extraneous possessions, concepts, habits, and fears. Traditionally, becoming a monk meant leaving home and joining a monastic community. But how do we householders practice “home leaving?” What does it mean to live like a cloud over water in the midst of our grassy field of family, work, school, freeways, taxes?

To begin with, we can “leave home” every morning or evening when we sit zazen. By taking leave of our cluttered lives and entering the path to our“true home” in every breath, our true home is always with us. We can’t buy this home from a realtor; we don’t need to shop for it. It only appears to be beyond our reach when we bury it under a mountain of stale notions. We’ve got to cut through this mountain in order for our true home to reveal itself.

Frequently depicted in Buddhist art as idealized figures, archetypal bodhisattvas represent women and men who have postponed their own liberation from suffering for the sake of helping others. On every traditional Zen altar, there are two bodhisattva statues. On one side, there’s Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. On the other, there’s Manjusri, the sword-wielding slayer of delusions. With one swift blow, his sword cuts through the mountain of mental clutter that keeps us from our true home. Kannon and Manjusri are really one and the same; they manifest the two faces of compassionate wisdom wielded by the bodhisattva—that is, by us, when we sit down and meditate. There is no compassion distinct from cutting through; there is no cutting through without compassion.

When we clutter our minds and our lives, we are not dwelling compassionately in time. We learned this firsthand when we joined an organic food cooperative run by local farmers in Central Illinois. As city people accustomed to shopping in supermarkets for produce, we were disappointed when we got tomatoes only three or four months in spring and summer and when we couldn’t get imported cherries or strawberries in winter. A visit to the farm and a little education from the organic farmers taught us about the “unnaturalness” of growing things out of season, of how much the soil suffered from the planting of fruits and vegetables that weren’t compatible with the time and region. Suddenly, the fact that the soil was a living thing became real, and compassion for the earth more than just a metaphor. The proof of the pudding was in the eating. We began to notice that when we craved fruits and vegetables out of season and, bypassing the co-op, bought them elsewhere, they tasted strange. Tomatoes tasted like potatoes; peaches tasted more like apples—especially now that the genetic engineers have gotten into the act. What a pleasure it was to bite into a piece of organic melon straight from the farm—in season! What a difference in taste! It was an excellent lesson in living lightly, like a cloud over water, right here in our grassroots world.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE ARE ONE

When we clutter our minds, we are not being compassionate toward ourselves. When we clutter the earth with products borne of our desires regardless of the season, we are not being compassionate toward the universe. “Inside and outside are one,” goes the Zen saying. What we do and think and buy and eat aren’t done in a vacuum. When we sit on our cushions and clutter our minds with the poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, when we don’t meet and honor the moment, we cheat ourselves of truly living—not just lightly in the economic sense, but also in the sense of being truly alive. We are wracked by our heavy burden of acquisitiveness. Worry, too, is a form of acquisitiveness that reveals itself when we collect grievances, harbor envy, and fixate on venomous feelings toward those we feel have injured us. We unnecessarily add to our suffering when we ruminate about the past and fantasize about the future. All this stuff in the closet of the mind keeps us from treading the earth lightly; we have to pick our way through a mountain of junk—both inside and outside. Life itself becomes an obstacle. When the mind is filled with accumulated thoughts and worn-out desires or fantasies, we can’t confront situations and people clearly, whether at home or at the office.

Zazen is the activity of continuously clearing out the mind. It leaves us free to go into the world unburdened, clear-eyed, and light. Meeting the moment, we carry nothing extraneous. Like the cloud over water, we leave no tracks. Freed of those possessions by which we are ourselves “possessed,” we can truly taste the delicious fruits of the season. Just twenty-five minutes of zazen a day is enough.

THE OAK TREE STANDS NOBLE ON THE HILL EVEN IN

CHERRY BLOSSOM TIME

BASHŌ

RIGHT TIMING

DHARMA DANCING

Most of us associate Buddhist equanimity with the serenely smiling statues of Buddha seen in museums, so we think enlightened people must always be perfectly tranquil. But every now and then, in those same museums, we encounter a totally different version of Buddhist equanimity; it might be a scroll featuring a buck-toothed fellow in a shabby robe wielding a broom or a statue of a thick-necked, fierce-eyed monk leaping with joy at the moment of spiritual awakening. Unlike the ethereal, transcendent Buddhas, these fellows are rooted in the earth, alive. Their eyes are open; their bodies appear to be moving. You’d swear they were breathing. Here is Zen equanimity at work in this grassroots world, “even in cherry blossom time.”

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever attain the serenity of the ancient Buddhas. But it’s said that the Buddha himself is still practicing, so we can take heart. And like the Buddha, we have to work with what we’ve got. No matter where in life we find ourselves situated, the practice is endless. It’s not just a question of one blissful burst of enlightenment—no matter how great or small. It’s a question of continued practice, of applying what we do on our cushions in every area of life—experienced sometimes as joy, sometimes as failure; sometimes as gain and sometimes as loss. Practice consists of becoming one with this ceaselessly changing life-flow. It’s interacting with the cashier at the supermarket checkout counter, the mail carrier, the bus driver, the guy at the newspaper kiosk, the woman who fixes our latte-to-go in the morning as we head to work. This is our own particular Grassroots Zen rhythm.

It’s hard to find equanimity in this swiftly flowing current of contemporary life. We don’t have the luxury of sitting in monasteries or in caves. We’re called upon to live our Zen right here and now. More often than not, we’ve got to do it in the midst of hectic activity, dance not only to the rhythms of our own immediate situations, but to events in the fast-changing world around us. We’ve got to dance to other people’s rhythms too. There’s a great opportunity for practice here—especially when those rhythms clash and everything seems to be going haywire.

The old Chinese Zen poet Yung-chia says that being mature in Zen is being mature in expression. How do you express your Zen maturity when you’re preparing for a houseful of dinner guests, and your contact lens rolls all the way up into your eye, and you can’t get it down no matter what you do? What does being a “spiritual” person mean at such a moment? Perhaps just spending ten minutes in front of the bathroom mirror until you finally get the lens out.

Each of us is unique in the way we “dance.” Some are laid-back and easygoing; some are quick and impatient. Others are broad and spacious in their movements, while still others are compact and economical. All of these are perfect as they are. Think of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Twyla Tharp—all very different kinds of dancers, all brilliant and a delight to watch. There’s no one way of dancing. Just because you’re easygoing doesn’t mean that your rhythm is any more “spiritual” than that of the high-strung person on the cushion next to you. Zen maturity isn’t reflected in your disposition so much as it is in how you deal with situations where the rhythm of your life grows chaotic. It’s so easy to be tripped up by the rhythm of events that seem to be happening to you, flung at you from somewhere outside. You’ve just established a nice, comfortable rhythm for yourself and—BANG!—you’re knocked off course. It’s like the “fundamental koan” established by the great twentieth-century Japanese lay Zen teacher Shin’ichi Hisamatsu: “Nothing you do will do. Now what will you do?”

You either dance as the new rhythmic pattern of each moment, or you get hurt. This means you’ve got to be so concentrated, so attentive to the moment, that you no longer distinguish between your own personal rhythms and those of the people around you. You open yourself up to the unexpected. And when you don’t label the moment, it loses its threat. Still, in order for this to happen, you must lose yourself in the moment. It’s hard enough to do on your Zen cushions, when the rhythms of your breath and mind are flowing harmoniously. But it’s still harder when rhythms clash, say, when you and your partner are struggling over who is going to lead and who is going to follow.

FINDING THE RHYTHM OF YOUR LIFE

A good place in which to locate the rhythm of your life is your body. Those of us who have worked out around other people in a gym know exactly what this entails. A case in point: we like to work out together. We’ve developed a program that suits us both. It consists of the treadmill, the stationary bicycle, and a few weight machines. We’ve divided up our time so that one of us is on the treadmill while the other is on the bike, and so on. Except when it comes to being on time, we find little difficulty adjusting to each other’s very different rhythms. Manfred likes to do his routine for no longer than an hour; Perle likes to spread hers out for well over an hour. Usually, our rhythms clash only when we’ve got someplace to go or something to do together afterward. That’s when Manfred seems to be “rushing” and Perle seems to be “dawdling.” We used to drive ourselves crazy trying to change each other’s workout rhythms until one day we discovered that it wasn’t necessary to change anything, only to stop arranging joint appointments before or after working out! The solution was so simple, we almost missed it. We wasted a lot of energy in struggling—first in trying to force each other to change, and when that didn’t work, in trying to accommodate to each other. It was only when we stopped trying to do anything at all and just experienced every work-out anew that we discovered the harmony in our clashing rhythms. Now when we’re thrust into situations that seem impossibly daunting, we often find the best opportunities for “moving alone together.” But it only works when we stop being self-conscious and allow ourselves to dance with the moment.

So, what do you do when the easy, smooth breathing established in zazen gives way to the unexpected intrusion of an accident or an illness? What happens when a familiar situation suddenly turns unfamiliar? Do you live in constant anticipation of disaster? Do you become neurotically obsessive about the weather, for example, when (like us) you live in “Tornado Alley?” Or do you find the opportunity to really practice your Zen by becoming one with the rhythm of your situation no matter what it might be?

As soon as the mind is challenged by an unexpected turn of events, it will go into a tailspin. It’s like a monkey, habituated to only one way of doing things and hating to be thrown off course by something new. This “monkey-mind” instantly grows resentful, takes everything as a personal affront: “How could this be intruding on me?” “Here’s a new situation. I don’t like new situations I didn’t create myself.” “I hate disruptions that force me to alter the rhythms of my carefully-choreographed daily dance.” Whether it’s an accident or an illness, or rejection by someone you counted on, or a nasty e-mail message coming at you first thing in the morning at work, or a phone call from school announcing that your child has a reading disability, these are the haywire rhythms that call for maturity in Zen where it counts—not on a mountaintop but right here, responding with the appropriate action. As reflexive and rhythmic as the breath, it can take any number of forms: swerving the car into a ditch to avoid a head-on collision, leaping to avoid that in-line skater rolling right onto the jogging track in front of you, or negotiating your rebellious twelve-year-old’s allowance.

In order to find the rhythm of your life, you’ve got to close the gap between yourself and everything you do—not by following the steps in your head, but by dancing it with your entire bodymind. Zen doesn’t distinguish between the physical and the spiritual. It doesn’t claim that an enlightened person isn’t going to have a black-and-blue mark on her shin after falling down on the ice. Yet at the same time, zazen does reveal the busy monkey-mind to be an unreliable arbiter of reality. It also proves that meditative absorption isn’t exclusive to the cushions and that we’ve got to keep practicing in order to become better dharma dancers, more adept at improvising. When we’re not making distinctions between strange rhythms and familiar ones, we’re less likely to be thrown off by abrupt changes. Most important, we’ve got to leap into the moment—whatever it has in store for us—if we really want to dance.

I MUST GO BEGGING FOR WATER... MORNING-GLORIES

HAVE CAPTURED MY WELL

CHIYO

JUST KILLING TIME

SPIRITUAL STALENESS

After a few years of Zen practice, we sometimes feel staleness creeping in. Our minds are “captured” by an insidious undergrowth that leaves us “begging for water.” We’ve given our practice so much time and effort, and now, just as we’re managing to incorporate that twenty-five minutes of daily zazen into our busy lives, we discover that we’ve lost the enthusiasm that brought us to sitting in the first place. We take to the cushion regularly, but we aren’t really concentrating. Our intentions are fine, but somehow we never manage to separate ourselves mentally from our busy lives. We’re so used to accumulating one chore after the next that meditation itself becomes part of that list of chores. We get up in the morning and immediately fall into a robotic pattern so that we can get through our routine tasks. We stop paying attention. We aren’t really sharp. We perform one chore in order to move on to the next. We finish the next one in order to move on to the next, and so on. Before we know it, the day’s over, an accumulation of chores ready to be stored and forgotten. We’re just killing time.

Why do we get diverted by such hypnotic, boring stuff? Why don’t we find the moment interesting in itself? Say you’re doing nothing but sitting on your cushion, breathing. You’re not engaging in some activity, some interesting ritual designed to bring about an elevated state of consciousness. Just sitting and being right there in the moment feels too stark, too uneventful. It can even be painful, as when we call something “painfully boring.” Where does boredom leave off and pain begin? Some people might liken it to being in the dentist’s chair. Sitting for twenty-five minutes can be boring. It can also be physically painful. In zazen, there’s no dentist’s music to divert you from the soreness in your knees, for example. Yet, like the dentist’s chair, it offers a perfect opportunity for understanding the impulse to close the mind to any experience that isn’t “pleasing.”

It’s a very sneaky, artful dodger, this mind. It can appear to be so innocently intelligent or emotionally sensitive, so probing. One of the things that it always does, regardless of how it works its deception, is try to take you away from the moment. And it always seems to work overtime during zazen. Like that incessant talker sitting behind you at the movies, it totally diverts your attention from the main attraction and puts you at the mercy of a boring, ongoing narrative. Isn’t it odd that we get so angry at that talker at the movies and yet let him have full sway over our zazen? We’ll do anything to escape the boredom.

Instead of sitting, we read about old Chinese Zen masters tweaking each other’s noses and throwing snowballs. It’s so much more interesting. Why not vicariously partake of the entertaining stories of the masters when your own practice feels so stale?

THE SHARPEST SWORD

Paradoxically, zazen itself is the only way to cut into that staleness. Zazen sharpens the sword of attention and brings us back to the moment, which is never stale. Whether appearing as the evening breeze coming through the window or the backfiring of a truck, each moment provides the spark that “lights your dharma candle,” as old master Wu-men puts it. No occasion is too great or too small, and zazen encompasses them all.

There’s a koan that shows us the way in the form of a simple question: “What is the sharpest sword?” We try to keep this koan with us at all times. Right now, for example, where is that sharp sword? Reading these words, where is it? Turning off the light, where is it? Fluffing your pillow, where is it? Coughing, where is it? We ought never let go of that sharp sword—that is, unless we’re to remain satisfied with an existence that simply drives us or one in which the twenty-four hours rule us. We can’t let sitting become just one more chore, quickly getting our twenty-five minutes over with and then moving on, finishing our task, our zazen chore for the day. We must see this one period as a wonderful opportunity, a world filled with the potential of being, for its own sake.

NO GOAL AND NOTHING TO ACHIEVE

Take that twenty-five minutes of zazen to simply let yourself bask in the delight of breathing. Allow yourself that heart-stopping moment of experiencing a peaceful mind. Just sit down and, in the first few moments of your meditation, simply count your breath. Let everything drop away. Consciously dive into that well of vast space. One ... two ... three. There’s nothing you need to know, nothing you need to accomplish. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to hold onto. In those twenty-five spacious minutes, neither means and ends nor rationality apply. You don’t separate, you don’t differentiate, you don’t conceptualize. You simply flow forth like a mighty stream. One ... two . . . three. And then, you just stop counting and let the breath itself be your vehicle. The breath itself becomes the whole universe, everything that exists. Unfolding naturally, breathing leads you into that vast and boundless space. You forget yourself, and by forgetting yourself, you awaken to the moment. Or, rather, the moment awakens to itself. For there is no one who awakens and nothing to awaken to. Awakening is just now. Just the sound of the car going by outside, just the clock ticking, just the fragrance of the incense. It’s a oneness, an intimacy, an immediacy that is its own purpose, goal, and objective.

We can’t emphasize strongly enough how important it is to let go of the goal-oriented, objectivist way of thinking, the state of mind in which you do something in order to get things done. Living like this, you remove yourself from the moment, which has no goal and nothing to achieve. Really, the moment has nothing to achieve! Yet at the same time, as the moment manifests itself, everything is achieved. Achievement occurs; it simply happens. The breath is achievement. Warmth is achievement. Sound is achievement. Just things unfolding, that’s how we sharpen the sword. That’s how we make of our zazen what the Buddha called a “skillful means” for realizing the moment, our original minds, and ourselves—which, of course, are all one and the same.

COMING TO A COMPLETE STOP

Our former teacher Robert Aitken used to describe zazen as “coming to a complete stop.” This is so important, because if we don’t stop, we’re doomed to wander around in our world of distinctions pulverizing every experience into little pieces. In this distinction-making world where everything becomes a chore, we live by knowing rather than by being. We’re always on the move but never actually arriving. The distinction-making world is important, but it needs to be complemented by the purposelessness of the clock just ticking for its own sake or the breath inhaling and exhaling according to its own rhythm. We need to put these two worlds together. But we can only do this if we work at being in the moment, which is what zazen is all about. There is no need to worry about the world of chores; we know it only too well.

Don’t let zazen deteriorate into a chore. Don’t objectify it by putting it on your checklist of things to do. Treasure your zazen. Make it a celebration of returning to the one moment. See it as a catalyst that helps you bring the same freshness to all the other activities in your daily life. Sharpen your sword and let it shine. Sharpen the moment and enjoy its radiance. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Don’t be contented simply to drift. Don’t cheat yourself of the “real thing”—the fascinating, living experience of the moment—by trading it in for a dry, stale, secondhand life. Don’t waste your precious twenty-five minutes of zazen. Let every moment on your cushion be the glorious manifestation of the Tathagata.

OVER THE RUINS OF A SHRINE, A CHESTNUT TREE

STILL LIFTS ITS CANDLES

BASHŌ

HARD TIMES, BIG CHANGES

THE FACE OF LOSS

Until we are hit by big changes, we don’t usually notice how life and we ourselves are changing from moment to moment. Especially in the face of loss, even people who’ve been meditating for years find themselves thrust into a new relationship with time. We realized this after a conversation with a friend who had suffered a traumatic change in her life when a tornado swept away not only the physical environment that was so dear to her—the house, garden, trees, and lake where she’d grown up—but also her sense of herself as an artist. She said she felt that her entire identity had been “uprooted.”

Listening to her brought tears to our eyes, not because the house couldn’t be rebuilt and the trees replanted, but because of our shared human attachment to those things we all hold dear. What does it mean, for example, when we speak of returning to our “true home in the moment” in the face of such disaster? What does it feel like to be smashed to smithereens by change?

Let’s look at this on a less monumental scale. We all have personal “treasures” that we’re loathe to part with, such as that pair of shoes we don’t have the heart to throw away even though they’re falling apart. They feel so good that they become extensions of the relaxed, happy self we like best. Our neighbor, for example, had a pair of sandals he loved. He wore them every day. Then, the very day he came back from a trip and left his sandals out on the porch, they were stolen. He joked about it, but his sense of loss was evident even as he laughed. There’s no comparison between having your sandals stolen and losing your childhood home in a tornado, of course, but both involve the feeling of having somehow been personally violated by change. It’s this feeling that we have to deal with when our sense of self, our “shrine,” has been “ruined.”

Do we allow our personal crises to become so all-encompassing that there’s no longer any time for zazen? You could argue that it makes good sense to cut back on your usual activities in the face of hard times, particularly when they involve big life changes like unemployment, divorce, illness, or the death of a loved one. It’s understandable that we need all our energy to deal with the pain and loss brought about by such events. We don’t want to be “diverted” by other activities. It seems natural to say, “I don’t want to be bothered by this right now. I have really serious problems to cope with; I have to focus on them.” This seems like a natural response, but it’s really a strategy for increasing pain and suffering. Why? What is it that we’re doing?

ZEN AND PERSONAL CRISIS

When we say, “There’s a problem in my life, so I don’t have time for practice,” we are separating ourselves from our practice, turning it into an object “out there.” In fact, we’re objectifying both our practice and our problem. “I am getting divorced,” for example, becomes a thing outside, opposed to the self. Zazen, too, is just another external, disconnected object at loggerheads with our sense of self. By separating or disconnecting ourselves from this thing called “divorce” and this thing called “Zen practice,” we’re actually increasing the pain that’s already been brought about by the divorce. We can’t really deal with our situation because we don’t enter it fully. By externalizing it, we don’t truly become one with what’s going on right now, so we’re always a step too late. We start thinking in endless circles, mulling over our crisis, trying to tackle it, as if it were an obstacle blocking our path. Because we’re spending so much energy wrestling with it, we have no time for other“external objects,” such as Zen practice.

This happens when we haven’t yet become truly intimate with Zen; we haven’t understood, down to our very bones, that it isn’t incidental to our lives. We don’t see that—like shopping for groceries, fixing the car, buying a new home or losing the old one—our personal crises are not external things. They are instead the very context of our Zen practice; in fact, they are our Zen practice. They’re all little threads in the gigantic web of grassroots we call our life, which is beautifully revealed in the act of sitting.

Try the following when you are experiencing an intense moment of crisis. Simply focus on your breath as you inhale and exhale, and you’ll find that what you thought of as the external, solid form of your crisis isn’t solid at all. You’ll see that it’s not a rock in the middle of the road but a fluid, changing, transitory event. Let the breath show you that the pain you experience as a response to your crisis is not absolute but relative; it is part of a vast web of interdependence that consists of breathing, sitting, talking, walking, and, yes, feeling pain. Let the breath reveal the skein of interwoven moments that make up your karmic tapestry, the patterns of experience, the likes and dislikes. You’ll find out soon enough that Zen is not an extracurricular, fair-weather practice.

Grassroots Zen—ordinary life—has no external referent, nothing outside of itself. This is especially true during moments of personal crisis, when we most need zazen in order to enter the moment.

ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER

Chinese painting is famous for its natural landscapes. Mountains, valleys, and rivers often take up most of the canvas. But sometimes there’s a tiny wandering sage in straw sandals carrying a backpack, trudging gaily from the peaks to the valleys, from the riverbanks to the mountains. At times he’s clearly having difficulty climbing. At other times, he’s taking it easy, sitting on a raft and floating down the river. In some paintings, it’s raining and in others, the sun is shining. Yet, regardless of the external circumstances (context) the wandering sage always continues his journey. Although they’re always changing, circumstances and journey are really one.

We have to be like that wandering sage, allowing ourselves to feel the pain and exertion that comes with climbing the mountain, and not stopping with the excuse that it’s too painful to continue. Putting one foot in front of the other and moving on is the same as paying attention to one breath after the next. That’s zazen. That’s our practice. Personal crisis is Zen. Zen is personal crisis. Always transforming, personal crisis is just one context in the ever-changing picture of life’s patterns. Only by fully entering into the picture, by knowing that the context is always a plurality of things, are we able to let go and see that change. Only then are we able to transform ourselves and our crises. It’s essential to keep on walking, never to stop practicing. If we are to open fully to the event that has become the context of our practice, instead of using a crisis as an excuse not to sit, we need to pay attention to the moment and to the breath—now more than ever.

There is nothing we can do to the “external environment.” Transformation comes by itself. We just have to allow it to happen. This doesn’t mean being passive or fatalistic about things. Rather, it’s being watchful, careful not to slip into the abyss of despair. On the other hand, we may think we’re being “spiritual” or “detached” by refusing to identify ourselves with the hard times. But we’re really fooling ourselves. That’s just another way of closing off to the context.

What emerged from our conversations with our friend who’d lost her home to the tornado was no false detachment, but a basic centeredness, the refusal to be dragged around by the event. It was a mark of her commitment to her Zen practice. In the middle of her troubles, she knew that her true home could never be destroyed. Six months later, she called to tell us that she and her husband and sons were planting new trees on the property around the lake. “It’s amazing how the grass has grown back even thicker and greener than before,” she said. Then, after a slight pause, she added, “After all these years of painting, I feel I’ve finally come to understand what ‘green’ is.”

AT THE ANCIENT SHRINE TARNISHED GOLD-FOIL . . . AND GREEN LEAVES

AWAKENING TIME

CHORA

TRUSTING THE MOMENT

SEEING FOR THE FIRST TIME

While Grassroots Zen has no “goal,” it is true that the practice has its rewards.

It’s just that these aren’t immediately visible. They don’t show up after a couple of weeks or months of sitting, but only gradually. Sometimes it takes years. It’s as though a fog is slowly lifting, allowing us to see more clearly the contours of rivers and mountains, houses, animals, trees, and people. After decades of zazen, we awaken to the “tarnished gold-foil and green leaves” for the first time.

Too often the word “Zen” still conjures up images of stone-faced men in black sitting unmoved in a void. The house blows down around them, but, “So what? We’ll build another one. Everything is transient anyway.” Someone dear to them dies, and it’s, “Oh, that’s life and death. It doesn’t concern me.” Stricken by illness, they wave it off with, “That’s the natural way of things. Why should I be disturbed by it?” This is living death; it has nothing to do with our human, “grassroots” existence. If this were Zen, we’d be the first to run from it.

GRASSROOTS EQUANIMITY

Although it’s come up a few times in these pages, “equanimity” is a word we don’t use very often. We prefer to speak of trust. “Grassroots equanimity” is a fundamental trust in everything the Tathagata brings forth: all the events and, most important, all the moments that make up our daily lives. We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to trust the moment if we are to change our anxiety-ridden relationship to time. We must start by tearing down the wall that our conceptual minds erect between ourselves and the moment. It’s about eliminating divisions and experiencing interdependence: simultaneously changing, and being changed by, the moment. To enter into such an intimate relationship with the moment, we need unconditional trust. We need to trust life itself. Again, we don’t mean naively accepting external events as they unfold. Not at all. We’re saying that we’ve got to trust the fact that our identity, what we think of as a static “self” is actually a dynamic event that is always changing.

Breath is the vehicle of our existence, and it is the only means for developing fundamental trust in the moment. When we sit on our cushions and simply drift, let ourselves be swept away by the past or the future, that’s not trusting the moment. It’s the opposite of equanimity. Trusting the moment means trusting the breath, melting into it. By losing ourselves in each breath-moment, we set up a boundless mutual flow. We trust the breath and the breath trusts us. Every breath we give is returned, fulfilling us completely. There’s nothing more we need; goal and purpose become one. At that moment, our breathing fully expresses everything that exists. The whole universe is part of the process, literally.

When breath and moment merge, there’s no one standing outside commenting, “Well, is the whole universe breathing now?” That narrator, too, trusts the breath enough to let go of his privileged position. Nothing, and no one, remains outside. It’s what the Japanese Zen master Dogen meant by “a green mountain walking.” Not a person taking a walk, but the whole universe walking.

When we really trust in the moment, carried by our breath as lightly as cloud vapor, our minds can finally stop and rest. This is not the petrified, frozen rest of the living dead, but the dynamic, living ease of inhaling and exhaling, expanding and contracting. There’s no end to the changing flow. We ride it, like the carefree boy riding the ox in the famous Zen ox-herding pictures. That’s equanimity, that’s trust. Simple enough? Maybe during zazen, but not so often in daily life. We’re riding along smoothly, and circumstances change suddenly. A red flag appears, the ox goes wild, and we’re dragged along, clinging to its horns for dear life. It is then that we must learn to trust even the moments we dislike.

TRUSTING MOMENTS WE DISLIKE

Sometimes in the middle of a frenzied day at work we find ourselves looking forward to an evening of zazen. We actually long for the moment when we can finally sit on our cushions and drop everything. No sooner are we nicely arranged, however, than we’re beset by thoughts. Our crazy day has followed us into the zendo, and no amount of breath counting can chase it away. The thoughts are too strong, and we can’t relax. We can’t seem to generate enough effort to let them go; our thoughts are so powerful that they overwhelm any little trust in the moment we can muster. Yet it’s precisely because we dislike them so intensely that such jarring moments offer the best opportunities for cultivating trust. Because there’s no place to go, nothing we can do to escape them, we simply sit and breathe as those frenzied thoughts. By trusting the frenzied-thought-moment, we recognize that there’s no distinction between “me” and “it.” There isn’t anyone having frenzied thoughts, there are only frenzied-thought-moments popping off like firecrackers. Zazen affords us the trust to fully enter those moments, whether they please us our not.

Let’s assume you’re planning an intimate, candlelight supper to celebrate your husband’s birthday. You’re just walking out of the door of your office when your secretary tells you that your boss is calling. Taking the call, you learn there’s a problem in a computer program that only you know how to deal with, and you’ve got to stay on for at least another three hours. So much for your husband’s birthday dinner.

What do you do now? Just because you practice Zen doesn’t mean you won’t be disappointed or even feel terrible. The point is to let that wave of disappointment go right through you, acknowledge it, be there with it, become one with it. It’s important to acknowledge it.

Very often, we don’t acknowledge our disappointments and instead choose to gnaw on them for hours, days, weeks, however long. It’s best to acknowledge them right away, and then move on. So, you call your husband and explain the situation; you trust the moment by dealing with it. You become one with that phone call, open to the interaction, to your husband’s disappointment, and you turn back to the computer and trust that moment as well. You don’t separate yourself from the next three hours of work because you want to be somewhere else. You don’t spend the next three hours cursing your boss. You take care of the matter at hand, completely and fully, with all your attention, and then you move on. You trust the moments of correcting the hitch, of putting together the list of clients you’ll have to call, of standing up and stretching every so often.

By acknowledging your disappointment as it arises, you are trusting the moment; but when that moment comes to an end, you don’t refuel it again and again, you simply trust the next moment as it arises, and so you go, gliding through the moments you dislike.

LINKING UP WITH LIFE

Contrary to what most of us are led to believe, equanimity includes the ability to express anger when it’s there—but without violence. We have to express the truth of an angry moment with the same honesty we lavish on a moment of love; otherwise we won’t be able to focus on solving problems as they arise. As Grassroots Zen practitioners, we seek to experience and express the truth of all moments. To play with a cat, tell our child a story, make love to our partner, play our favorite piece of music, feel the cold of a November morning on our skin, express “green”on the canvas—all of these are true expressions of Zen equanimity. They show how we establish an intimate relationship with the moment. Inevitably, this give-and-take leads to a genuine experience of interdependence.

When our identity is no longer separate from that of the moment, we link up with all those moments we call “life.” We don’t have to turn ourselves into gods or to detach ourselves from what it is to be human. But remaining aloof from the moment and trying to manipulate it isn’t being human either. This is what’s called suffering. It stands directly opposed to the interconnectedness of things. Every great spiritual tradition tells us that there is a way out of suffering, and that it has something to do with fundamentally reconsidering our human existence. They all stress the need for a transformation from egotism to selflessness, which doesn’t mean totally relinquishing individuality. It means the full realization of the individual in the act of uniting with everything else. It’s a transformation in that the self opens up and, in reconnecting to a vibrant whole, becomes one with the entire universe. All it takes is trust in the moment.

SNOW WHISPERING DOWN ALL DAY LONG, EARTH HAS VANISHED

LEAVING ONLY SKY

JOSO

BEYOND TIME

BECOMING TIMELESS

These days, with all the talk of genetically engineered human beings, people often ask us if we think zazen will become obsolete. Why would a perfect, computer-driven android feel the need to awaken to a world where “earth has vanished leaving only sky”? We answer by referring them back to the moment. Right now, we’re still made of flesh and blood, still vowed to end suffering, and still committed to the Buddha Way. Nevertheless, changing conditions necessitate an ongoing examination of that commitment. Particularly in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century, what makes Grassroots Zen practice, grounded as it is in ancient Chinese Buddhism, timeless?

PRACTICING THE BUDDHA WAY

We start with the Buddha. Granted, ours is an unorthodox interpretation of the “Buddha Way” It’s inspired by Western democratic principles. It’s practiced by laypeople with no monastic experience, and, religiously speaking, it isn’t even really Buddhist. We don’t take “refuge in the Buddha” as the founder of Buddhism or as a figure of salvation. Despite the Buddha’s warning to his students, that’s exactly what happened in India after he died. His disciples turned him into a god, and today most Asian Buddhists pray to him in the same way Westerners pray to their god. They take refuge in him as a higher power; they don’t believe in their own ability to become Buddhas themselves—that is, to meditate and find salvation on their own, as the Buddha instructed.

In many Asian Buddhist countries, laypeople see doing good deeds as their sole religious duty. They support monasteries, temples, and clergy in order to gain merit. They do this so that in some future life they will be reincarnated as monks, since they believe it’s important to take a man’s body in order to become enlightened. This is a religious letting go of the self, allowing the Buddha and those who make a profession of the religious life to do the spiritual work for them. In return, these good laypeople support the monks. After they have gone through enough reincarnations as householders, they hope they will have earned the right to practice the Buddha Way. Until then, they consider their “practice” to be attending services, praying, supporting religious professionals, and performing religious rituals.

Living in Hawai’i, we discovered how different our American Zen Buddhist practice was from that of the Asian-Americans who had been born into Buddhism, instead of acquiring it, as we did. We’re good friends with a very special Vietnamese Zen monk, Reverend Thich Thong Hai, the abbot of a temple on a lovely mountainside in Honolulu, and we always go up to visit him when we’re there. When we were first invited to his temple, we expected to be sitting zazen and maybe doing some chanting. Afterward, we knew there would be a traditional vegetarian Vietnamese community lunch. It was a surprise to find that there was no meditation, that even Reverend Hai’s two young attendant monks were too busy performing a variety of rituals to sit, and that Reverend Hai himself led a lengthy service and delivered a Sunday sermon, just like all the other clergy in the Honolulu churches. The temple was largely given over to serving a sizable Vietnamese lay congregation with no meditation experience. So, after the service, we and Reverend Hai and his two monks went into the Buddha Hall, lit incense, and sat zazen for ten minutes before joining the others in the dining room for a scrumptious vegetarian feast.

In talking to Reverend Hai, we discovered that the congregation did not expect to be led in meditation, that his duties had less to do with the Zen practice he’d been performing since he’d been ordained at the age of five, and more with providing community service. In this, he has been remarkably successful. As a “boat person” who came to Hawai’i with nothing, he established a job training and health care center for newly arrived immigrants, and he recently had managed to create a Vietnamese Buddhist school for children and a nursing home for the elderly. When asked who did zazen, Reverend Hai smiled and said, “Mostly Westerners, people like you two, and an occasional Western Buddhist monk passing through on the way back to the Mainland from Asia.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. In fact, he was pleased that the Zen practice he’d been taught in the monastery in Vietnam was being carried on by Western laypeople.

Traditional Asian Buddhism is very similar to our own Judeo-Christian style of worship. The religious community, composed of laypeople, gathers in a temple to celebrate holidays, births, and marriages, and to commemorate the dead. No different from what we grew up with. So, what does all this have to do with experiencing the Buddha Way? What’s so timeless about this practice? Two minutes of silence is all you’ll get on a Sunday in any Buddhist temple. It’s pretty much the same as the two minutes of “meditation” you’ll find in any church or synagogue. Is this what we mean by Grassroots Zen?

Even if we shear away all the Asian symbols and rituals, we can’t deny that Zen is a meditation practice rooted in Buddhist spirituality. Everything about it points to the Buddha’s experience of the true nature of the self. Therefore, the essence of Grassroots Zen is zazen. If we enjoy performing Buddhist rituals, that’s fine. But it’s our daily commitment to sitting on our cushions that really counts. It’s taking our place as the Buddha sitting in meditation under the Bodhi tree, looking up and seeing the morning star and awakening to our true nature. This is the “grassroots” way of taking refuge in the Buddha. It’s commiting ourselves to awakening in this very body, knowing ourselves as Buddha, bearing our own salvation. Ours is not a religious practice in the traditional sense. Rather than worship the Buddha, we continue his practice of awakening to every moment—whether formally, on our cushions, at work, or at home. In every facet of our lives, we are taking refuge in the Buddha.

BE A LAMP UNTO YOURSELF

The practice of zazen in time is itself timeless. Why? Because it isn’t aimed at gaining anything, it doesn’t chart the number of hours, years, good deeds, lifetimes it takes to gain Buddhahood. We only need to be awake no matter where we are or what we’re doing, as committed as the Buddha himself to breathing, eating, talking, sitting, feeling, loving. The Buddha never asked anyone to believe in his experience. He advised his students to “be a lamp unto yourselves.” Don’t follow, don’t take anyone’s word for it. Don’t let anyone be your savior. It’s difficult for people to assume this responsibility. It’s so much easier to live vicariously through great religious teachers—especially when, given the distance of time and culture, we put them on a pedestal. It’s so much easier to take refuge in someone else’s experience. We human beings are oddly parasitical that way. Yet, we are told by the Buddha to be our own authority, to stand on our own two feet. We’ve got to have the courage to take a leap out of time, to plunge into the practice with no guarantees other than our own determination to walk the Buddha Way. It takes guts to strip yourself of all your concepts, notions, rituals. It’s very stark, this practice of “nothing special.” Maybe that’s why so many people would rather read about it than do it. They’re attracted by the “Zen aesthetic,” only to find when they actually do sit down on the cushions that there are no “aesthetic” experiences, only sore knees and a merry-go-round of thoughts.

Becoming a lamp unto yourself means melting into the changing moment. It’s sharing the very same experience that the Buddha is having at this very moment on this very same cushion. There are no distinctions between you and Buddha. That’s why, unlike the more traditional Buddhist sects, Zen advises us to “kill” the Buddha when we meet him. What we’re killing is the idea of the Buddha that keeps us from being Buddha. How do we do this? Only zazen will point us in the right direction. Once we sit down, all goals fade. Time becomes timeless. Peace of mind emerges all by itself.