Clearing My Foggy Glasses

Zen Buddhism used to weird me out. I longed for the perceived minimalism and contemplation, but Zen also felt barren and inhuman, both passive and far too demanding. Still, I kept encountering it. When searching for a motivator beyond self-flagellation, Zen cropped up. When talking with my philosophically and spiritually minded friends, they gently nudged me toward it. And even a short survey of buddhism suggested that out of the different schools, Zen was definitely the best fit for my personality. So I actually reading about Zen, and restarted basic zazen (sitting meditation). I studied Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, Takuan Soho’s The Unfettered Mind, Dogen Zenji and Uchiyama Roshi’s How To Cook Your Life, and Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen and Nothing Special. As was predictable, my aversion mostly dissolved when confronted with the actual teaching of Zen, instead of memeified tropes. My friends were correct: Zen was what I needed, the right stretching for my stage of life. At the risk of “reeking of Zen”, that is talking too much about Zen instead of practicing it, I’d like to share my confusions, how they got dissolved, and how the Zen teachings actually helped me. Observing To Live My deepest error about Zen was about attitude. When I had meditated before, I had endeavored to distance myself from my thoughts and emotions. That helped me for a time. But it eventually felt like a crutch keeping me separated from life, not a way to the good life. Similarly, the vague pictures of Zen floating in my mind suggested hiding from the world, even if physically in the middle of the world. Keeping at bay pain and misery but also joy and beauty, and simply being non-emotional, non-committed, completely inside oneself. Which not only sounded boring as hell, but also clashed with my desire to be helpful to the world in some way. I have not spent all my waking hours helping everyone, but I’ve consistently tried to work on problems that matter to the world at large, instead of pure academic nerd-snipes. So Zen suggested the caricature of Epicureanism drawn by Seneca to puff up the Stoics: “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency.’ Zeno says: ‘He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him.’” But then, I read Zen. Watts emphasized that Zen was not meant as a buddhism only for full-time priests: it was intended as a buddhism for everyone, including people who had little time to retire in contemplation. Other Zen practitoners applied Zen to concrete activities, finding enlightenment through them: Takuan Soho wrote about martial arts, and Dogen Zenji wrote about cooking for the monastery (the role of tenzo). I was still blocked on my distaste for the expected result of Zen, especially the detachment, when I finally studied Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. That did it: All practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in zazen but in every moment of our life. As we sit we grasp that our conceptual thought process is a fantasy; and the more we grasp this the more our ability to pay attention to reality increases. […] Zen practice is to see through our desire to cling to our history and to reasons (thoughts) for why we are as we are, instead of working with the reality of what we are. (Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989) I’ll come back to this distinction later, but the point is to observe your judgements or conceptual thoughts about life (“I need this”, “They attacked me”, “I will never be that”), not life itself. What Zen promises is that through strengthening your ability to observe your added thoughts and judgements, they eventually wither away. And when they do, you are free to just experience what is in front of you. You play with your little brother instead of wondering if you sound wise enough. You appreciate the sunset instead of worrying about how many you’ll still experience. You do the work instead of railing against its demeaning nature. Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose. Zen is about a life of action, not a life of passively doing nothing. But our actions must be based on reality. When our actions are based on our false thought systems (which are based on our conditioning), they are poorly based. When we have seen through the thought systems we can see what needs to be done. (Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989) Thinking Allowed Another of my misgiving about Zen concerned thinking: I had the impression that Zen was deeply anti-intellectual. Zen masters seemed to spent their whole day sitting without doing anything, and doing chores the rest of the time. As an intellectual who values the life of the mind, this hardly sounded like the good life. Sure, I have benefited from getting out of my head and doing prac