It's a trick

Since I'm moving to the ends of the earth, I recently went to Wind in Grass for the last time.  The others were nice enough to throw a party for me and invite me to say a few words about what I'd learned from practising with them over the previous three years.  I guess it was my first dharma talk.  It went something like this.

'I wanted to tell you what I'd learned from being a part of this group, and a number of answers immediately sprang to mind.  I've learned what Zen is, what Sanbo Kyodan is, what koans are.  I've learned that to have an effect on how things are done in a group you have to step up and participate.  I've learned that it's possible to have a group of young people come together to meditate in a way that's somehow both deeply committed and playfully irreverent.

Somehow none of these answers felt right.  I'll tell you what I think I've really learned from Wind in Grass in a moment, after a long digression or two.  Because I also wanted to address something Michael brought up the other night.  I'm referring to the strange fact that as Zen students we're meant to be doing two things at once: practising meditation earnestly, and giving up all thoughts of gain.  But if we're already Buddhas and don't need to progress, why do we go on week-long retreats?

First off, I want to give you a sense of what progress in meditation feels like.  I took up meditation after my first year at college, near the end of which I started having a lot of pain in my face.  The doctors all told me I was stressed, but that obviously wasn't right.  After a while I realized that it might be, and cast around for things that might help me.  I found a website with some instructions on meditation for beginners and went at it.

The meditation I was doing involved focusing on your breath, and labelling thoughts as they arose.  It's not our practice here, but it was helpful.  After four months or so of sitting every day, I felt significantly better, like I was finally on top of my pain.  If I have any allegiance to Buddhism, it's to a great extent because of the way, over those few months, the practice just picked me up and set me on my feet again.  It's hard not to feel grateful to something that has that effect. 

That was progress.  And it wasn't the only time I've felt I got somewhere through meditation.  It happened again about a year after I'd come to Stanford.  I hadn't been practising much, but started doing guided meditation with a grad student from Thailand.  This involved focusing on a visualized sphere of light in your belly - not out practice here, but helpful.  Within a couple of months I felt more both sharper and more relaxed, better able to cope with things.  That was progress.

A final example of progress came when I went on my first few PZI retreats.  I'd never really gotten koans until I heard John Tarrant speak, guiding us to follow the koan wherever it led, the way you follow an old overgrown track in the forest.  This is our practice here, and it helped me.  I just fell into the practice, and it was transformative.  That was progress too, I think.

So that's one side of the antinomy.  We just do feel that we're progressing, and it's probably true to say that none of us would be here tonight if we didn't have some sense of what that felt like.  At the same time, there's also a sense in which approaching meditation with some aim in mind is exactly the wrong way of doing it.  And this is where we come to the two tricks I've put into this talk.

The first way I'll talk about a trick is to say that meditation has a trick to it.  It's not a trick like the one all the 11-year-olds knew back when I used to play SimCity, where you could type FUNDS and the game would give you more money.  It's more a trick as in a knack, a style of doing things, like when someone tells you how to turn a key in an idiosyncratically sticky lock.  The trick of meditation is summed up in the old koan: 'If you turn towards it, you turn away from it'.  The paradox is that the only way you can progress in meditation is by giving up all thought of progress.

The other trick is meditation itself.  Meditation, I can tell you, is a trick.  It's a familiar one.  It's like when you book a hotel online through a website which shows pictures of a room with magnolia flowering outside your window and a pool with an infinity horizon on the patio.  When you get there, there's a shitty plastic plant on the windowsill and a deck next to the parking lot with a filthy little plunge pool.  You thought you were getting one thing but you got something else.

Meditation is like that, except instead of getting the plastic plant and the plunge pool you get to the hotel only to realize that there's an ocean right across the street and out the window a tropical rainforest.  You would lay on the bed and flick through the 14 million available free channels, but the forest is much more interesting; the amenities of the hotel don't seem to matter any more. 

Meditation is like that.  I started doing it to cure my toothache and came to feel I'd started a relationship with some inexhaustibly fascinating person who somehow was the same as the table and chair in my room.  It did help my pain a great deal but perhaps only because the pain had ceased to seem so relevant; and by the time it had helped my toothache, it just seemed to matter less whether I was in pain or not.

That's what I had to say about Michael's antinomy.  I also hoped you'd indulge me with another digression, one that might make Elana throw something at me, since it's about how much I like Christianity.  I was raised a Christian and it's always interesting to see how people in my family react to me being a Buddhist.  When I went to Canada for Christmas my aunt asked me very respecfully on the first night whether I wanted a beer; they would be going to a church for a service, and I was free to come or not.  I said I loved Christmas services, and was especially keen on beer.

I've also been dating a Catholic girl for the past couple of years, and I've been going to church quite a lot.  At first this was only out of solidarity, but it made me think a lot about what I prefer about Buddhism and what I still like more about Christianity.  My main issue with Christianity is having to believe the story about a guy who rose from the dead, but there's one way relevant to this talk in which it things right.  When I went to Rockridge the other weekend to visit PZI's new center, I passed some Korean evangelical church.  It sounded like there was some kind of sacred 80s disco going on inside, involving equal measures of synthesizers and songs of praise.

That strikes me as exactly the right way of reacting to the universe.  As Buddhists I don't think we celebrate enough.  People come to Buddhism because it offers a way out of suffering, but this sometimes has the unintended consequence of making Zen centers feel like particularly grim hospitals.  Our tradition always tries to remind us that there's really nothing to be healed; but even if there were, the right reaction might still be worship.  If the only way of experiencing the rainforest is with a headache, I'll take it, and I'm taking pictures too.

All of this was just a roundabout way of getting to what I've really gained from Wind in Grass.  I've gained nothing.  Instead, I've enjoyed every second: staring at the grain of the floorboards, getting splinters in my socked feet, looking over at people during meditation and wondering who's getting it on with whom.  I've just enjoyed being here with you, and I want to thank you for being here with me while I did it'.

As leaving presents I brought a book by Alan Watts, an English Anglican who turned into a Californian Buddhist.  I also brought a little owl figurine.  I spend much of my life studying classical Athens, so I guess in some sense I've always been an acolyte of Athena.  She's the goddess of wisdom, so she's in the same line of work as Buddha.  She's there on the altarpiece now with outsize eyes, symbolizing mindfulness and serving as a reminder that it's a good idea to look at things squarely - even when things go wrong, as they sometimes do in Zen groups. 

Breaking the spell

This weekend, rather than spending my Saturday cycling up an enormous hill, I decided to sit on my ass all day.  The Stanford Zen group (loosely affiliated with the Buddhist Community at Stanford) had organized a one-day meditation retreat in the inter-religious center on the top floor of the Old Union.  Since I was going to be in the South Bay that weekend anyway, I decided to go along.

I don't really know the people in the Stanford Zen group, since their regular meeting is on Wednesday nights, the same night that Wind in Grass meets.  They seem to be run by two or three serious-minded and dedicated undergraduates who organize the regular weekly sittings and the odd one-day event on campus.

I don't know what kind of crowd attends the weekly meetings, but the crowd that turned up yesterday was a mixed bunch.  There were naturally a lot of students, both undergrads and grads.  There were also a few people who lived in the local area and had come in for the day.

There were more Asian people than I see in the meditation groups I go to in the city.  I've read that a feature of Buddhism in America is that so-called 'ethnic' (Asian) and 'convert' (European) Buddhists tend to gather in different groups.  But the group that I saw yesterday seemed evenly mixed.

Seated opposite me were a Chinese mother and her son, who looked about 11.  Every so often she notice him fidgeting and give him a sharp tap with her hand.  I thought of how unused I am to seeing this sort of thing in a Buddhist context, whereas I grew up in a world where parents forcing their children to church was very familiar.  There was a way in which the mother encouraging her son to meditate was sweet, but it reminded me how easy it still is in the West to forget about the more customary, religious aspects of Buddhism.  I've met very few Buddhists in the US who didn't come to it voluntarily.

We had three periods of meditation with breaks in between.  The meditation periods consisted of half an hour of seated meditation plus about five minutes of walking meditation.  The breaks were ten minutes long.  During the meditation periods people went for one-on-one talks with a visiting teacher, Max Erdstein.  At one o'clock Erdstein gave a talk, followed by a Q&A.

In my interview with Erdstein, I talked to him about my experiences over the past few years: the initial experience of falling in love with a new group, my disagreement with John Tarrant, and then my increasing disillusionment with institutional Buddhism more generally.  He told me that the inclination to test out a teacher was worth honouring, but reminded me that not all groups were the same.  He told me to trust my instincts.

In his talk, he told the story of why he started meditating.  When he was an undergrad at Stanford, he contracted a chronic illness that left the doctors perplexed.  Out of desperation, he bought a meditation book and CD by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  After a while, his health began to improve, and he stopped practicing.  A few years later, while working at Google, the stresses of the job brought him back to it.

He said he remembers considering two paths through life.  The first was trying to be so successful in business that he'd never be at a loss for anything.  The second was trying to moderate his wants.  He looked at people he knew who'd embarked on both paths.  While he was often impressed by the top people in his company, it seemed to him like they'd acquired more skills than wisdom.  Conversely, although his meditation teachers weren't perfect people by any means, they appeared to have a kind of depth, an level of insight about their own lives that seemed valuable.

He passed on a few similes that some of his teachers had used to describe what a meditative practice might bring.  It was like when you're in the movie theatre, and you're entirely immersed in the world of the movie.  Then, for some reason, the spell is broken, you look around you for a second and see how everybody else in living the ups and downs of the characters on the screen.  You remember, just for an instant, that none of it's real.  But then you return to the movie anyway, and somehow your pleasure in it is enhanced, not ruined, by your knowledge that it's all an illusion.

Or it was like going up in a plane to do sky-diving for the first time.  You jump out of the plane, and for a moment it's exhilarating, you can fly, float, do somersaults.  Then you're falling, it's horrible, and you realize that the parachute you'd been depending on is missing.  Buddhism, Erdstein said, wasn't like being handed a parachute.  It was like realizing that there isn't any ground to hit, that you'd go on falling forever, and that the falling really was like the flying you'd taken it for the moment after you jumped.

I found myself very moved by Erdstein's talk - but not so much by the analogies as by the personal narrative.  That was partly because it was so much like mine.  But there was something else, something I've noticed about dharma talks.  When people offer advice, instruction, or admonitions, I usually find something within me resisting (which is a healthy enough reaction).  When people just say plainly why they started meditating, I almost always hear in their experience an echo of mine, an echo that somehow confirms mine or at least keeps company with it.

I had to leave half-way through the Q&A, but it had been a great morning: twenty or so people in a simple room meditating together and talking about it afterwards.  There weren't any statues, or robes, or all that much bowing.  There was a teacher, but nobody demanding prostrations when I went to talk to him.  The event was free: the first meditation retreat, in my three years in SF, at which nobody asked me for money.

Good morning

 
The first time I went into San Francisco Zen Center I showed up early on a Saturday morning for their introduction to meditation.  I'd been meditating on my own for seven or eight years, but I thought the introductory session would be the best way to see what SFZC was like and to get further into practice there.  I also thought I would learn something, not just about their own particular style of zazen or Zen meditation, but about meditation in general.  You see, a key concept for me is 'beginner's mind' - the idea, as SFZC founder Shunryu Suzuki put it, that 'in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few'.  This valuing of the tyro's perspective is part of the reason I started this blog, trusting that my ignorance of Buddhist practices would be welcomed by some as a form of knowledge.  Hence the name of the blog, which means 'Beginner's mind', also as it happens the official name of SFZC City Center, or Beginner's Mind Temple.

So even though I'd had some experience of meditation, I turned up to the introductory session with Beginner's mind.  There was a crowd of about twenty people in the lobby, the cross-section of the SF population that I've grown used to seeing at SFZC: thirtysomething women, bearded hipsters with thick-framed glasses, a few older people looking determinedly open-minded.  We were joined by a tallish woman in black robes who welcomed us to the Zen Center and then almost immediately broke off to explain, 'I'm nervous!' as if she were slightly surprised and somewhat disappointed at the return of this childish habit.  She told us she'd come to the Zen Center a decade or so previously because 'suffering lay so thick' around her and she couldn't find any way out of or beyond it.  She said she'd been struck by something Leonard Cohen had said about Zen touching places that Western civilization couldn't reach.

She led us into a spacious room with tall windows on two sides and a mat of closely-woven reeds on the floor which made me look out for karate kicks and judo throws.  She talked a bit about the statues arranged around an altar on one side of the room, especially the central 'museum-quality' one of a stone Buddha chilling on what looked like a tree-trunk.  He rolled deep: his posse of four or five other enlightened types were strolling along beside him, one of them serene and white and apparently rather fancying herself, the guy on the far side effortfully hideous, making a face like he'd just taken a swig of a beer can someone had peeed into.  Our guide was telling us about zazen, how you had to make sure your hips were higher than your knees and that your hands were touching in a mudra and that your thumbs didn't get lazy (she showed us the arc of her joined hands collaping like a badly-made bridge).

She told us how an important moment had come in her meditation when she saw that she was about to start thinking about a subject that upset her and realized she didn't have to go there, that she could leave it aside.  She talked about turning up to her first retreats in a pink jacket, and told us that it was important to wear muted colours and to avoid wearing perfume (something they're also big on at the Spirit Rock center).  She actually talked for quite a long time - about never liking Zen, about realizing she was a Zen student when on a Tibetan retreat, about becoming a priest...It was a bit like a dharma talk.  Finally she struck the bowl-bell with the holy smacker and we sat in silence for about five minutes.  Five minutes!  I felt cheated.  I would have asked for my money back but of course I never donate any money.

The actual dharma talk followed slowly.  First all the grown-up meditators had to come up from the real meditation hall downstairs and press into the Buddha Hall where we were sitting (there were maybe seventy people).  Then the other monks had to file in, bowing constantly, as if they were mechanical donkeys extracting oil, and adjust their mutltiple layers of robes around and on top and from under themselves: the black sheets over the white sheets, the brown towels tucked under the armpits.  Then the speaker could come in, clutching a crooked little stick that he'd presumably nicked from a miniature shepherd: he bowed at us, he bowed at the Buddha, he bowed at us, he bowed at his friends, he bowed at the Buddha again, he sat down, he bowed, he adjusted his robes, he took a really close look at his little stick.  I can't remember much about the talk, except he read it off a print-out he had in front of him on a lectern, and that it was, perhaps as a consequence, painfully boring.

After the talk a handsome young monk stood up and began talking in a cut-glass English accent - something that seemed entirely unexpected at first, and then immediately afterwards, entirely appropriate.  He told us what would be happening for the rest of the day: there was a queer dharma group, dharma en espanol, a writing group in the lounge.  There was also 'Zendo forms', which I went to.  A mousy-looking woman led us shyly down to the meditation hall and showed us the local hokey-pokey: you put your left foot in, you bow to nothing in particular, you go to your cushion, you bow and turn yourself around, and that's what it's all about.  She was wearing a blue bib or rakasu that seemed to denote the lowest level on the Zen Center food-chain and looked like a flimsier version of the black bullet-proof vests with curtain rings that I'd seen some of the older people wearing at PZI retreats.

That first trip to the Zen Center was typical, in some ways, of my experience of Zen.  It was very boring, excruciating on the lower limbs, and almost offensively caught up in parrotted Sanskrit and aped japanoiserie.  At the same time, there was a peace about the place, the kind of out of touch formality you meet in old people whose faces are creased with smiles and who you just want to hug but dare not.  They also had tea and cookies for a dollar, which I can't believe I've so far failed to mention.  On the whole, it wasn't half as scary as some people I know had made out - certainly, nobody had told me off for clearing my throat or sneezing during meditation.  And something about its size and relatively long tradition gave me a feeling I'd never had before in the West, that I was in a Japanese Buddhist temple, meditating and chanting with others, and that it was the natural thing to do.  

Sesshin accession

Before I write more about the peculiar dangers of spiritual authority, how not to join a cult, and ways to test the purity of your Kool-Aid, I wanted to give you a sense of what a wonderful thing a spiritual community can be; since without some sense of the immense value groups of this sort can offer, and given the pitfalls and dangers that are associated with becoming a part of one, it might seem perverse that I am persevering on the particular path I've found myself following.  I also wanted to continue the story of my growing identification as a Zen student and of my increasing involvement with PZI in particular.  And there seemed to be no better of way of doing both these things than by continuing my narrative of my experiences at PZI retreats in Santa Rosa.

The first time I'd been there for the weekend, only two days, though it felt like far longer.  The second time - Spring sesshin - I decided to increase my stay by one day, making it a slightly longer weekend.  I got a lift up with my friend Sara, and when we arrived at the site of my first PZI retreat, just outside Santa Rosa, I realized that we would be staying in a different building on the same site, this one also apparently designed with Christian retreats in mind (the room where I met David was actually a chapel).  The meditation hall was much smaller this time, with only around thirty people in it; there were the familiar alien artworks hung on the walls and the same old twisty well-armed deities chilling on the white altar, the incense curling around them like cigarette-smoke at some Parisian cafe.

This time round we each had our own rooms, so that I felt less guilty about going back to it when I was tired of meditating.  I even did a bit of work on my laptop, reading an extraordinarily helpful and boring article on the finance behind the construction of the Parthenon in fifth-century Athens; I may regret this.  I skyped with my then-girlfriend at night, which was sweet then depressing, as all her anxieties poured into the room, overwhelming my most earnest efforts at Zen mopping.  Naughtier still, I slept well beyond the jangling bells at four thirty in the morning.  Instead, I set my alarm for shortly before seven, and then skulked around in the corridors waiting for the good meditators to emerge before joining them in the queue for breakfast, with sleep gumming up the corners of my eyes and my face leaden with weariness and shame.

On the first day I ate breakfast, cheerfully acknowledging the hungry ghosts; I meditated through the morning, guiltily reverting to my visualizations; and I went out for a walk to the lake, which hadn't moved.  In the afternoon session somebody suddenly announced 'Prepare the hall for sutra service'.  Everyone swung their mats round so they were facing the corner of the room, or dragged them closer.  In the corner of the room was one of the stern-looking men I'd seen talking about Christianity, now with a tambourine; Socrates, pressing a rather unexpected trumpet to his lips; a young man I'd felt a pang of sympathy for when I'd first seen him, bent double with back trouble; and an extraordinarily beautiful woman, eighty years old at the youngest. 

They were providing cheerful - if occasionally somewhat disjointed - accompaniment to the liturgy we were chanting or singing from the floor of the room.  This, apparently, was a Sutra Service, and I hadn't encountered it on my first retreat only because the Winter sesshin is a pared-down version that focuses on almost entirely on meditation.  We recited Hakuin's praise song of meditation just like we sometimes did at WiG - you see, meditation can't be praised enough - as well as a series of other pieces in any number of unidentifiable Asian languages.  The old lady led the chants as the Cantor, but her voice was frail, and broke down completely at the point where 'Guanyin finds us on the dark and br--o--ken roads'.  She was the worst cantor of all time, and also incomparably the sweetest.

I've since been told that this is one of the most mould-breaking and experimental aspects of PZI, that there's a makeshift jazz band (with occasional forays from a didgeridoo) leading the chants, which are often set to rather catchy tunes.  (One returning member was so shocked by the change she even began reciting the diamond sutra on her own - so I have heard.)  If experiment it is, I have to say that I like it.  Much of the sentimental attachment I have to Anglicanism is mediated through hymns that I had to sing week in, week out, in the school chapel, and which are now an inextricable part of my spiritual and emotional fabric.  And I'm beginning to feel a similar tenderness towards the lilting melody that carries the three refuge vows, the way we do them: 'Buddham saranam gachami/ Dhammam saranam gachami;/ Sagham saranam gachami:/ Buddham, dhammam, sangham.'

John encouraged us all through the retreat to imagine (that is, realize) that every event that occurred and every thought that arose was for us, for our benefit, and only for us (though that last formulation seemed to me to go a bit too far).  The koan featured two friends washing bowls when they saw a crow tearing apart a frog.  'Why does it always have to be this way?' one said to the other; and he responded, 'It is for your benefit, Master.'  It was not quite like the dream in The Magic Mountain, where there's a city whose members treat each other with respect precisely because they know that in the temple, old hags are tearing apart an infant.  It is more like sitting there realizing that my life has been blessed not in spite of headaches, but because of them: perception, like community, is a coin with two sides.

Night community

I used to prefer cats to people, but recently I've been coming round to the human race.  When I first starting meditating, I saw no reason to do it with anyone else; actually, since it seemed like kind of a weird thing to be doing, I prefered nobody else to be around when I was doing it.  I remember reading a passage in one of Christmas Humphreys' books where he says that Buddhists don't really do community; they just read books and meditate at home on their own.  I found that reasuring, since I never really liked having to talk to people after church.  Once when I went to a Quaker meeting with a friend he said, 'We like to think of coffee after Meeting as an integral part of Meeting, but I'm not very good at that'.  So we left without talking to the welcoming older people, and I was glad: they looked boring.

At some point I realized that I was so busy with working, playing, and drinking that I wasn't anywhere near meditating every day.  I thought that joining a group would provide me with some extra motivation or will-power, and I was right.  Even though I didn't take to the group in Oxford in a big way, I met some apparently normal British students who were into meditation and weren't shooting for a certificate in yogic flying.  I talked every now and then to the teacher about meditation, and that made me want to try out the advice he'd given me, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  And when we sat, I couldn't get up and absent-mindedly start perusing books as I sometimes found myself doing at home.  I had to meditate, and that reminded me that I liked meditating, actually rather a lot.

When I moved to Battersea I found that there was a very good chess club down the road and a very ornate Buddhist temple.  There was an altar or three at the end of the meditation hall, any number of snarling deities or half-deities wielding all manner of blades, candles and flowers and mandalas and gilt-framed photographs of reincarnated Rinpoches.  There was a complex series of bells, deep bells and tinny bells and jangling bells, to tell you to start meditating or stop, to start walking or stop, to make tea or drink it or listen to the dharma talk or do one yourself.  The people were the kind of Western Buddhists who started sentences with phrases like, 'When I first started down The Path...'  A man from Toronto gave me some useful hints about meditation, but it wasn't enough to keep me going back more than once or twice a month.  The chess club was great though: I went every week.

At Stanford the chess clubs was rubbish: everyone was analyzing and talking about math.  It was only in my second year that I started turning up to the meditation sessions advertised online in the Old Union.  There was guided meditation offered by a young man that looked to me like your typical Stanford grad student - clean-cut, Asian, serious and pragmatic - except that he had a certain calmness about him.  After a few sessions stubbornly doing my own practice, I decided to give his visualizations a try, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  I ended up coming every week, even during breaks when I'd be disappointed to find no-one there.  Sometimes it was just the two of us; usually two or three others came.  There was a medical student, an tiny Indian girl, a middle-aged woman in philosophy.  We talked a little bit after the meditation about how we'd felt, and all the things we'd thought.

The year after Sith graduated I found what I'd thought was my ideal group.  There was no hierarchy, though there was a Religious Studies student who'd been a novice monk and answered my questions about monasteries in South-East Asia.  We'd meet, sit in our own ways for half an hour, and then disperse without saying much more than hello, goodbye, and thank you.  The following year afternoon sessions were led by a happiness researcher who drew something of a larger crowd.  There was a young techie who told us how meditation sometimes made him burst into laughter for no reason, a chilled-out Brazilian with an afro who just couldn't stop smiling, an anxious undergraduate who said looking at the contents of her own mind terrified her.  And all these groups were my sanghas; this year I've started staying for dharma circle in the same space.  Another year, another community.

If I'd been given the power to create my own ideal meditation group, it wouldn't have looked like Wind in Grass.  There wouldn't have been any koans, for a start, since I've always been a small-vehicle guy when it comes to meditation.  There wouldn't have been discussions or Zen games or dharma talks.  There certainly wouldn't have been statues of the Buddha, candles, or incense, not to mention disembodied heads, energy eggs, or Zen crickets.  But part of joining any community is being with people who have different preferences than you do, and different ideas.  If they didn't, it wouldn't be a very interesting group to be in, since you'd never learn anything.  Sometimes when I'm sitting in Wind in Grass I come across a rich tenderness in myself towards our altar, a drawer with a table cloth over it loaded with paraphernalia.  I didn't realize I would like it; thank goodness someone else did.

Once when I was on retreat one of the more severe looking students told me I should bow when approaching the teacher's room, bow after I'd gone through it, and then bow to the teacher before sitting down.  The next time I went into the room I did just that, and David looked at me and said, 'Dan probably told you to bow - which is sweet, since he's trying to make younger students feel at home.  But you should know that I couldn't care less.'  Since then, I don't bow to David (I shake his hand).  But for the rest of the retreat I still bowed to Dan.  You bow to Dan by bowing before entering the room to speak with the teacher.  I know Michael likes bowing too, so sometimes I bow to Michael.  You bow to Michael by bowing before sitting down, before serving tea, before lighting more incense.  And it seems fair enough, after all the bowing he's done for us by organizing Wind in Grass.

Once a month we have Community Night, when our practice is even less formal than usual (which you'd think would be difficult, but somehow we manage it).  There's a beautiful baby girl stumbling headlong around the zendo, gooing and gaing and aiding our meditation - she's a year old, the same age as my niece in distant England.  Our artist friend Mick, who left for Mexico last year, is here in the form of a wax energy sculpture on the altar - he is disguised as an enormous translucent egg.  My friend Ashley is sitting across from me cycling through memories of sticking needles into people therapeutically, which is her day job.  Marika is here with her boyfriend, Michael is here in his business suit, Raffy is looking clean-cut.  We are huddled in our wooden hide-out like revolutionaries or terrorists dedicated to doing nothing.  This is my secret society of friends, my sworn conspiracy of meditators, my night community.

Sesshin session

The day after I came back from my first retreat, I knew I could thank the man who offered to smack me with a stick, the tea that almost scalded me, and all the serious people who didn't speak to me, for the high that I was feeling.  I was hiking back up Potrero Hill with two bags full of cheap and heavy groceries from Trader Joe's, singing under my labouring breath and composing in my head an umpromising poem I would never write down.  How had I gotten there?  It had started with Wind in Grass organizer Michael urging me to go (on retreat, or as he called it, sesshin), and making it easy for me by telling me I need pay only what I could and arranging a ride for me from the city.

The drive up to Santa Rosa was quiet - there was a man next to me that we'd picked up from the airport who gave one-word answers to my friend Ashley's attempts at conversation, and who I decided must either be very Zen or very rude (or both).  When we got to the Angela Center (usually used for Christian retreats) we went up in the elevator and stepped out into an inchoate zendo.  There were two stern-looking older men talking about Zen and Christianity and complaining about how the people materializing out of the elevator were wearing shoes in the meditation hall.  Almost immediately I was coopted by a tiny Asian man who directed me like a mechanical crane to hang several of his paintings high up on the walls.

I was shown to a room where I met my room-mate, a physics professor who seemed anxious about his allotted task of ringing the bells for the week.  The bells?  I was soon familiar with them, since they woke me at 4:30 the next morning.  I stumbled into the meditation hall where there was a man who looked like Socrates bowing and pouring tea to the people seated next to me, one at a time.  He was pouring steaming tea into my cup in the dark, and suddenly I realized the cup was filled to the glowing brim, the hot liquid about to spill over and scald my hands.  Later Socrates approached me in the hallway and whispered the convention: you're meant to hold your hand out until you've gotten enough, and then pull it sharply up.  Why hadn't anyone told me?

After the first two hours of meditation, I went back to my room, but then glanced at the printed schedule and realized that everyone else must have gone down to the dining hall for breakfast.  When I got there there everyone was muttering evilly in guttural tones about demons and hungry ghosts.  I stood by the door, awkwardly.  After breakfast I was put to chopping carrots and told to do it mindfully and above all quickly.  Then there was an hour of free time.  I followed a path past statues of Mary and Jesus out to a grassy hill.  I went over the hill, over a wooden fence, through the woods and stood staring for a while at a lake steaming in the early morning like hot tea.  When I got back to the zendo I realized that my socks had been soaked through with dew as chilly as dawn lakewater.

In the meditation hall there were probably forty or fifty people, with one long row along the walls and another smaller rectangle of mats in the centre of the room.  Most of the silver-haired solemn people that made up the majority of the group were wearing the black bibs with the curtain-rings that I'd seen Chris wearing at Wind in Grass.  Were they all chaplains or priests or masters of some sort?  To my left there was an altar covered with a thick white cloth and topped with three gilt statues of gyrating Eastern deities with limbs to spare and loaded with slicing weaponry.  There were tall candles burning tall fat flames and vases stuffed with flowers and a stalk of incense trailing an elaborate wake of smoke.  I looked across at Ashley seated opposite me and prayed that she would know what to do when the time came.

After a while there was an announcement: the Head of Practice would soon be stomping around and we had the choice of either getting a shoulder massage or being whacked with a stick.  Excuse me?  It seemed like a joke, a choice that wasn't really a choice at all.  Who would choose to be whacked with a stick?  As it turned out, a majority of the serious elderly people wanted the rod on their shoulders: they bent down ceremoniously to the left, whack whack, they slid down to the right, whack whack.  I'm told that this is to help meditators avoid falling asleep during the long afternoon sessions.  I went for the shoulder rub and have never looked back.  But I needed it: sitting cross-legged for eight or nine hours a day is tough on your body, especially if you're already in chronic pain.

At the end of the first day someone said, 'Prepare the hall for dharma talk'.  Everyone gathered into a crowd, there was a boing sound like when Wile E. Coyote runs into a cymbal, and in walked another man with an extra silly Buddha bib like David's.  He talked for a while in faded antipodean cadences about how most of our lives consist of killing zombies, one after the other, but there were always more.  After the talk we all stood in the candlelight and David came in.  He said, 'A man walks into a restaurant and orders the soup.  After a while, he calls the waiter over and complains that the soup is unbearably salty.  When the waiter looks incredulous, the man says, "Taste it yourself".  The waiter replies, "But you don't even have a spoon"'.  And that was life too, complaining of how bitter things were when we hadn't even made an effort to taste them.

The next morning I began to notice the trees outside through the window of the meditation hall.  At breakfast as we grumbled our grace, their deltas of rich wood began to distinguish themselves from the darkness.  I talked illicitly with the tiny Chinese man: it turned out he'd been a Christian minister, then had gone an various voyages to India, and now practised Zen.  I walked out to the lake, filled to the glowing brim with cool water.  I was whisked away by Chris to see David and do work in the room.  I chopped vegetables efficiently, and ate and slept.  The next day it was time to leave my first sesshin (I could only stay for the weekend).  The night before David had said, 'It's when I'm on retreat that I start to notice myself building the house of pain.  It doesn't stop me doing it, but I notice myself doing it, and somehow that's enough'.

Zen people are assholes

Once there was a temple that was destroyed by fire; its great library was completely destroyed.  Priests from a nearby shrine came to the great temple concerned about the loss of ancient Tang and Sung dynasty texts.  The master told them, 'None of them have been harmed'.  'Where are they then?' one of the priests asked doubtfully; 'Would you show us the Tang edition of the Mahavairochana sutra?'  The master held up one hand.  The priests didn't know what to make of this, but another one asked to see the later translations of the Lotus Sutra.  Again, the master held up one hand.  He said, 'The covers were burned, but you can still hold the texts in your hand'.

That was one of the first koans I heard at Wind in Grass.  When it came to the discussion, everyone put their interpretive pennies into the hat.  When the Zen bug (which preceded the disembodied Buddha head) came to one hipster girl though, she just put up her hand.  She looked kind of pissed off.  Later on I got to know her better when she ended up being up at retreat the first time I went to one.  Before you eat a meal on retreat there's a weird ritual where a plate is passed around every table and everyone puts a morsel of food on it.  Then one person from each table takes the plate up to the altar and offers the food up.  The whole while everyone in the room is muttering a dark twisted form of grace in which we invoke all the demons and hungry ghosts, asking them to take our food and be at peace.  One of the first times I was involved in this I took a particularly plump raspberry and put on the offering plate.  A few seconds after the rite had been concluded the girl whispered harshly over at me, 'I can't believe you gave a whole fucking raspberry to the hungry ghosts!  They don't even exist!' 

Zen people can be assholes.  I don't mean that in a complaining way; it's just something I've noticed and appreciated.  It's part of what makes me feel at home at Wind in Grass, since there's a certain normality there.  The hipster girl told me how she'd been on a vipassana retreat for a whole month once.  It had changed her permanently and made her happy and all that, but one of the things that stuck in her mind was that it was impossible to go through doorways, because whenever you tried there'd be a smiling Buddhist on the other side inviting you to go through first (at which point you'd obviously have to smile back and insist that the smiling Buddhist go through before you).  That doesn't seem to be a problem at Zen retreats.  I was definitely intimidated by some of the people I saw at my first retreat, but then I got to know them better, and now they just scare me.

Ultimately, the practise is about compassion (like all true religious paths, perhaps).  But there's a lot of emphasis at the outset on authenticity, too: you never get the impression that people have plastered smiles on their faces, which has sometimes been my suspicion at meditation events of different persuasions (not that having a smile plastered on your face isn't better than having most other things plastered on your face).  If you're pissed or randy or distraught, the Zen prescription seems to be to just be pissed off or randy or distraught (and maybe: notice that you're pissed or randy or distraught).  Don't criticize yourself for it.  After a while you'll realize that being pissed, randy, and distraught are all fine states of mind to be in, and you won't be so desperate to change your state of mind or the state of the union.  And from below the surface of that equanimity compassion will bubble up naturally.

That's my understanding of the teaching at this point, and I don't like it all that much.  (So my understanding may still be imperfect, or the teaching may just be crap.)  But it does raise an interesting and obvious point about Buddhism: that's it's a capacious and varied set of practices, and it shouldn't be surprising that different emphases in terms of the ethics will lead to practitioners who react differently when they meet each other at doorways.  This also links up with the recent posts on meditation and neuroscience, since it's often amusing to me to read of studies that show how 'meditation' has this or that effect in the brain.  What kind of meditation?  Often they'll stipulate it's 'Buddhist meditation'.  Thanks.  (My former teacher Mike Hagerty's work is an exception in this regard, often describing in detail the particular type of meditation that's being studied).

It's pretty obvious, though, that different types of mental exercise will lead to the development of different features of personality, just as different physical exercises lead to the development of different muscles in the body.  That actually seems to be one of the starting assumptions of lots of meditative practices: people who do metta for example, are aiming partly to cultivate a generous attitude that will issue in right deeds and good action.  So it's no surprise that meditators who concentrate on an object of meditation will develop a certain one-pointedness, and that Zen types who just fucking sit for hours at a time will become increasingly badass.  I don't want to emphasize this too much, since in the end there seems to be something common to all types of meditation which just grants you peace in an unpredictable way (maybe in the way that all types of exercise make you feel slightly better somehow).  But it's worth noticing, and worth bearing in mind: be careful what you sit for.

Some light on me

Since I'm writing under a pseudonym, maybe it's a good idea if I tell you a little about myself and how I reached this wonderful end point of being a bewildered beginner at Zen.  Well, I was born in Calgary but never really lived there.  I lived in England but I'm not really from there.  I study ancient Greece from hypermodern California.  And I know a thing or two about Augustine and Aquinas but couldn't really tell a Dogen from a Hakuin at this stage.  Despite that, there are two main things that have apparently made me well-suited for a Buddhist practice: being a Christian and being in pain.

What kind of Christian was I?  Several.  My first great teacher was my mother, who seems to know nothing about Christian doctrine and cares even less.  My earliest memories of organised religion are of stuffy churches in army barracks that we went to as a family every Sunday as an obligation.  But once I remember we were swimming in the lake outside our family cottage, the sun was laying down a line of light on the water like a blurry path, and my mother was telling me that this was what was wonderful about Christianity, that it wasn't about any particular God but just enjoying being in that light.  Even then the comment struck me as pretty obviously false, but I sensed that behind or beside it was something interesting.

When I moved to England I went to a traditional Anglican boarding school where we were made to go to Chapel three times a week, sometimes four.  There was also an optional candlelit mass on Friday nights that I would go to.  I remember sitting in a pew at one of these and looking up at the light falling on the stone arches opposite me.  At some point the Reverend asked us in Theology what being a Christian was all about.  We suggested love, kindness, going to church, but all those answers were wrong; apparently the core of the faith was to believe that Jesus redeemed our sins by dying on the cross.  I decided that I either didn't understand that or did and didn't believe it, so I must not be a Christian.  It didn't make me sad, because I was sixteen, but later I'd miss that moment in chapel.

Near the end of my first year of university I started feeling pain in my face.  The doctor told me I needed to relax, so I went to Italy for the summer, drank lots of red wine, and started meditating after reading an article about it on the internet.  I did it in secret and pretended I was doing something different if someone caught me in the act, like wanking.  After a while my facial pain got better and I felt like something interesting was just behind or underneath the light falling on the wall in my room.  Then I got hit on the head playing rugby, and have had a headache ever since.  I stopped meditating because it scared me to think of what might be happening to my concussed brain.  I tried exercising three times a day, not drinking tea, drinking a bottle of wine every night, switching girlfriends.

And somehow I was still meditating, not every day or every other day, but occasionally.  I joined a group the term I did my final exams at Oxford and didn't like it much, but felt lighter walking home hugging my cushion.  I went to a temple in London and didn't like that much either, but remember once noticing the way the light was falling on a tree outside and kind of enjoying it.  When I moved to California, I found myself studying what I loved with a group of close friends in a land of eternal sunshine, but for some reason I was still suffering.  I tried taking more pain medication, using anaesthetic patches on my neck, getting a tooth removed.  And somehow I kept meditating, off on and on, and then suddenly on and on, every day, with a new technique another grad student taught me.

I still use that concentration practice, but there was something about it that pushed me more towards discipline than freedom.  I spent a year being unhappy but calm and wondering if I was simply calm but unhappy.  When I walked into Wind in Grass I found a bunch of nutcases in party hats who seemed neither calm nor happy but keen on wondering.  I didn't take to some of the traditional koans - I couldn't care less about whether the dog had buddhanature, whatever that was.  I didn't like the liturgy, especially when we chanted about people like Guanyin - who was he?  But every so often I'd find myself sitting there, wondering at the pain and the play of light, and I'd be in the lake with my mother, the chapel in England, and also no other place but here, after all this time the only real place to be.

Ordinary writing

Whenever I join a new meditation group, the first thing on my mind is resistance.  I didn't like the way the group in Oxford shackled my mind to counting individual breaths, instead of letting it roam off in search of the place it started from (as had been my private practice).  I didn't like the way my first teacher at Stanford invited us to visualize a ball of light at the centre of the body - what about the breath?  The doubts I had about the various styles of meditation extended to the guiding philosophies of these different communities.  The temple in London was too ornate and decorated, too distracted by liturgy and ceremony.  The neuroscientist who led my second group at Stanford sometimes seemed a shade too secular for my tastes.  Where was the religion?

For several weeks after my first visit to Wind in Grass, I didn't like it (and not because of continuing death threats, which I did like).  There was an older man who preached to us in a black bib adorned with what looked like a wooden curtain-ring.  Was he a priest?  The tall confident businessman kept talking during meditation, and rather than offering guided relaxation he usually provided an anecdote about a student's barely comprehensible question and a master's spectacularly unhelpful answer.  ('Does a dog have buddha-nature?' 'No' - though in the other version of that one the master answered, 'Yes').  And when the older man spoke to us, he would sometimes inform us  that we were all - including yours truly, who'd walked in the door three weeks previously and who was secretely still visualising balls of light - buddhas.

This post is for the people who ask me what Zen is.  Since they are asking me, the answer they'll get isn't going to be learned, or even well-informed (after carefully avoiding studying it, I have so far succeeded in preserving a virtually unsullied ignorance).  But it's an answer of sorts, and here it is.  What I've found most distinctive about the approach of the Americans in party hats (that is, the Zen buddhas) are two things.  The first are koans, riddles or anecdotes or poems or prayers that originated as scraps of conversations involving the old Chinese or Japanese masters that somebody somewhere found helpful (or unhelpful) and wrote down.  The second is the emphasis of direct perception, the constant reminders that we may be on a path, but we're also already at our destination and just need to realize that by looking up.

Nobody really told me what to do with the koans the first few times I went to Wind in Grass, though I've since discovered there are two rules: (i) there is no wrong way of working with a koan, apart from thinking that you're doing it wrong; and (ii) there is no right way of working with koans.  The first few koans I heard went into one ear and burned up in a ball of light.  My first ever reaction to a koan was to laugh, which it turns out is the most respectful way of taking them.  The one that made me laugh was the one about the student who goes to the master complaining of being anxious, unhappy, the lot.  She tells him to spend the next year greeting everything that happens to him with the thought, 'Thank you very much; I have no regrets whatsoever'.  He tries it and it fails miserably.  He goes back to the teacher and tells her.  She says, 'Thank you very much; I have no regrets whatsoever.'

There are lots of koans that get us to the second thing I've found characteristic of this approach, the affirmation that we're already here.  In one, a student asks a master, 'What is right speech?' and he replies, 'Your question'.  In another, the student asks what the way is (which seems like a good question); the answer is 'ordinary mind'.  The student wants more guidance; 'How do you turn towards it?' he presses.  And the response comes, 'If you turn towards it, you turn away from it.'  (Thanks.)  Sometimes the koan seems to be hinting that even when you're searching for something, you might already have found something in the searching.  One student told his master about the brilliant, beautiful light that was on the margins of his conception, but that receded from his grasp whenever he reached for it.  'Forget about the light,' said the master; 'tell me about the reaching'. 

When Chris told our group that we were all buddhas, he was working along these lines.  But I admit that at the time I was scandalized.  The arrogance!  I suppose that somewhere inside I had been thinking of Siddhartha Gautama as unapproachably virtuous, almost divine, like Jesus (even though I stopped believing Jesus was divine when I was 15, and was attracted to Gautama because he wasn't like Jesus).  But of course all 'buddha' means is 'awake'.  There's a story that they asked Gautama if he was a god and he said, 'No, I'm human'; and then they asked, 'So what makes you different', and he said, 'I'm awake.'  That's all.  And it makes you wonder what makes your sleep so sound, and why you're apparently so convinced you're always dreaming.

Sometimes I worry whether this approach isn't slightly too empowering: if we're perfect already, and only have to wake up and realize it, why bother being honest or kind, or with any of the ethical precepts in the Eightfold Path?  The response I've heard is that once we come to realize that nothing needs to be added to this moment (yes, this one), there won't be any desire to cheat or take.  I'm still working with that answer, letting it be a koan.  In the meantime, I think of the lines from the Japanese master Hakuin Ekaku that we sometimes speak together, that 'this very place is paradise/ this very body the buddha'.  It's like what my Baptist grandmother used to say in New Brunswick, that whatever we did, God still loved us.  And it's like the words I read in a book that some freak gave me one day on Oxford Street, by a Hindu guru: 'There will come a time when you realize that all you want or need is Krishna, and Krishna is already here'.

Beginning Post

About a year ago, I walked into a community centre in San Francisco and made the acquaintance of some nice young people wearing party hats who threatened to kill me.  I'd just moved to the city from the South Bay, had been practising meditation for about seven years, and wanted to find a group in my neighbourhood - Potrero Hill - that I could sit with.  Luckily, I didn't have to look very long or very hard, since I soon saw flyers for a Zen group that called itself the Wind in Grass Sangha.  I jotted down the details, even though I'd never been attracted to Zen among sects of Buddhism.

Actually, I'd never been that attracted to any of the sects of Buddhism, thinking of myself primarily as an agnostic with a Christian background who liked meditation.  But if I'd been forced to choose one school it would have been a strain of what I considered the no-nonsense orthodox tradition (Theravada), rather than one of various florid offshots of the Mahayana tree that took root later on.  I looked up the website of the group advertised on the flyer and was put off by all the activities they seemed to be engaging in: group discussions (not what I was looking for), Zen games (pretentious-sounding), and koan practice (which looked like a distraction from the concentration meditation I was used to).

Nonetheless, the group did meet almost unbelievably close to my new room - a less than five minute walk up to the crest of the hill, from where you could see the whole city lying spread out and sparkling before you, and down again to Carolina Street.  It actually took me a few weeks to find the place, but when I did, I felt immediately at home, possibly just because the people there were near my own age, clearly not Buddhists from birth, and obviously the kind of people who had other things going on in their lives.  That night we sat outside on the balcony, with the Bay Bridge standing behind us in the distance like some mechanical caterpillar petrified in the act of clambering across the bay.

A tall confident man in a business suit was telling us a story about a student who wanted to reach enlightenment.  He went to a teacher who told him to meditate for a year and come back then if he hadn't reached enlightenment.  After a year of disappointed application, the student came back to the master to report his failure.  The master told him to try again for a month and see what happened.  Surely enough, the student returned again, dejected, and fared no better after another week of practice and then a single day.  Finally, the master said, 'Meditate for the next hour, and if you don't reach enlightenment, I'll kill you with this knife'.  Lo and behold, the young man had an awakening.

It just so happened that the night I walked in was the group's one-year anniversary, and that's why everyobdy was wearing paper party hats.  Since nobody had reached enlightenment after a year (or maybe since they all had, and just wanted to have some fun), our practice that night was to meditate with a a stalk of burning incense in our hands, imagining that our lives would end when the incense burned out.  I wasn't sure if I knew how to wake up completely in such a short span of time, so I concentrated on the glowing tip of the incense as it moved down towards my fingers.  In the discussion, a clean-cut man with German accent said that he'd given up meditating before the end, and had surrendered to enjoying the moment, just being on the balcony above the bridge and the bay.

I got away without anybody killing me, but then, I hadn't reached enlightenment either - at least, I didn't think so.  I'd also decided that the people in this group were unserious, crazy, and possibly dangerous.  Some part of me had also apparently decided that I'd be going back the following week, and that's exactly what I did - and I've been back virtually every week since then, with a break while I was away in Europe over the summer, until now, when we're again nearing a group anniverary.  The people in that group have become my community, and some of my most trusted friends in the city.  And Zen has become the path I took and have walked down for a year - a route I know little about, from a country whose language I don't understand, but which seems to lead somewhere interesting.

I'm starting this blog for a range of inter-related reasons.  One is that it's a central idea in Zen - stressed by Shunryu Suzuki - that there is much to learn from the mind of a beginner, even for a master, and I hope that the thoughts and impressions of a tyro in the practice will be interesting to others.  Another is that it's often difficult to explain to my friends and family exactly what I'm up to when I go to Zen, and this will provide an account of my activiites and reflections for those who want one.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want this blog to help make our group the best that it can be, transparent to outsiders and comfortable with  internal criticism.

Over the past year, Wind in Grass and Pacific Zen (the institute of which we're a chapter) have given me an inspiring glimpse of the value of a religious community.  But too many communities of this sort have been corrupted by the failure of members to speak frankly to each other and to outsiders about the sort of problems that occur naturally in any human group.  I feel immensely lucky to be among a group of people who are as committed to open-minded experimentation as they are to valuing the religious traditions they have taken as their own.  And I think that the best way I can help out is by putting into public space a frank record of my ideas and experiences as someone approaching an ancient practice with a beginner's mind.