Buddhism without Buddhism

After we decided to break up, my girlfriend and I turned to the question of when.  Her preference was 'right away', whereas I favoured waiting until I was actually leaving, in June.  In the end, we compromised.  We would break up over spring break, at the end of a short road-trip up the California coast.

Part of the reason we could agree on the timing was because I'd signed up for a week-long sesshin at SF Zen Center that same week.  I thought it would help me deal with the break-up.  I had to write to the Ino to ask if I could only come for three days, and I did so with trepidation, because the practice at SFZC is strict. 

I got an answer almost immediately: 'We will be happy for you to join us whenever you can'.  It wasn't from Shundo but from the new Ino, Valorie.  I also told her that I'd injured my knee and couldn't sit half-lotus.  She said she'd arrange for a chair to be provided in the meditation hall.

We got back from our road trip at about 11pm.  I got up the next day at 4am and walked to City Center.  But I don't live in the Lower Haight anymore; I live on 24th Street in the Mission.  So the walk had expanded since my last retreat at SFZC from five minutes to a bit less than an hour.  But the pre-dawn hour is a fine one to be up in San Francisco.

This was my first retreat with a chair, and it was much more enjoyable because of it.  I felt I could concentrate on my meditation rather than on simply making it through the next period without changing my position too many times because of the pain.  I also joined the invalids no doing full prostrations in the various ceremonies, and that also helped a great deal.

I quickly got back into the rhythm of sittings, services, work, and eating.  I was surprised to discover that I had a certain fondness for the Zen Center, even though I've never really liked the formal style of practice there.  I even enjoyed the formal oryoki breakfasts, once I remembered how to do them.  The night the sesshin ended I went to my first Passover seder at a friend's house, and took to it like a duck to water (or, as the Zen poet says, like a tiger making for the mountains).

There were two teachers, City Center Abess Christina Lehnherr and lay teacher Marsha Angus.  I met with Marsha and talked to her about fear.  She had a background in various types of therapy, and struck me as very Californian.  When I asked her about whether to accept thoughts or try to get beyond them, she said she'd need to have known me for longer to be able to answer that question.

In one of Christina's morning talks she told us her own story.  Until she was 30 she was almost always depressed.  She moved into the Zen Center and liked it, but left it for a year to make sure she wasn't simply trying to avoid life.  She worked at a care home for catatonic patients.

It was hard.  Her job involved feeding, cleaning, and clothing adults who couldn't move or communicate.  One day she was about to undress someone to clean them when she was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of love and awe.  Changing a grown man's diaper had sparked some sort of realization.

In another talk, she told us about someone she knew who married herself.  At first I thought she had mis-spoken (her native language being German), but no - her friend had given herself a ring and taken herself as wife.  Why?  As an experiment in treating herself with as much forbearance and patience as someone she loved. 

When I went to speak to her I talked about whether when I moved I would continue to think of myself as a Buddhist, or go back to just meditating on my own.  She said I didn't need to make declarations one way or the other; I could just follow the path wherever it led me.  'Would you consider yourself a Buddhist?' I asked.  The head of the San Francisco Zen Center, dressed in her ceremonial robes and in a room with at least three statues of the Buddha, thought for a moment and said 'no'. 

I told her I wasn't upset about my break-up, which worried me.  But we quickly found reasons why it might not have been so hurtful: the fact that it was mutual, and a product of circumstances rather than a falling-out.  The main thing I remember was her saying to me that it was okay to be sad sometimes without a reason, but that it was also okay to be happy.

I didn't have any spiritual breakthrough during that retreat.  Nor did I marry myself, although I may have come a little closer to engagement.  I didn't get better at zazen.  But sometimes in the half-hours between sittings, I would get a cup of tea and just sit out in the courtyard with the fountain and the flowers.  I wouldn't try to meditate.  I would just sit there, with the birds chirping and the thoughts tumbling over one another, and the water in the fountain splashing over and over on the stone.

Green galaxy

About a year and a half ago I had to go to the hospital because there was sand lodged behind my eyeball.  I'd spent the day with my then girlfriend at Stinson Beach.  It's a lovely place, the perfect Californian seaside town.  Unfortunately the beach was rather windy the day we were there, and we spent a lot of it huddled under various shawls trying to keep the pebbly granules from assaulting the flesh on our faces. I lost that particular battle, and spent a few hours at San Francisco General getting my eyeballs bathed,  a process which is less pleasant than normal bath-time, and not because of the absence of a rubber ducky.  And I also lost that particular girlfriend a few months down the line.  Funny thing though - about a year after that I was in Mill Valley for a friend's wedding and set off for the nearest beach with my current girlfriend.  I'd forgotten the name of that beach-town, so you can imagine my bewildered sense of déjà-vu as we drove up a rather familiar winding road and then down to a windy beach.  I didn't get sand in my eye that day, but I did notice something I hadn't the first time - the sign to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, pointing down the green hill into a secluded valley.

I'd heard of Green Gulch before, of course - it's one of SF Zen Center's three sites, the other two being the City Center I've written about here before and Tassajara Mountain Monastery.  I'd looked into getting to Tassajara, but it's very remote, and also amazingly expensive to stay there as a guest (we're talking hundreds of dollars per night - in the range of four-star hotels).  So I called Green Gulch and asked if there was any availability in August.  They said I could stay for two days only - they were otherwise completely booked up.  There are two types of guests - guest retreatants and guest students, and we got ourselves in the wrong place a few times by mixing the two terms up.  Guest retreatants pay $60 a night, stay in very pleasant private rooms, and each day they meditate for two periods of 40 minutes and work for three hours.  Guest students pay $20 a night, stay in less pleasant shared rooms, and their daily schedule involves four periods of meditation and six hours of work.  Why pay if you're working?  (Or, why work if you're paying?)  I suppose there are overheads, and besides, I felt that $60 was a pretty good deal for the guest room that I got.  

Since I don't have a car, I put my name up on the rideshare part of the website, but perhaps unsurprisingly it seems to be common for people to ask for rides there and not so common for people to offer them.  I planned on getting public transport into the city and then making the three-hour hike across Golden Gate Bridge up to the retreat center, but the night before I was booked to arrive someone offered to give me a lift up.  She was a ballerina working in San Jose who'd trained in Winnipeg and been raised by Washington state hippies as a devotee of a Hindu guru called the Hugging Saint (got that?)  The other person in our carpool was a lady from New York State who was starting an MA in transpersonal psychology at Sofia University in Palo Alto (no, not Bulgaria).  These are the the type of people you meet when you go to meditation retreats in California, and very pleasant they were.  The ballerina wanted to get to Green Gulch for the public Sunday session, which features meditation and then a talk, and turned out to be almost exactly like a Saturday session at City Center, if slightly less well attended.

I can personally attest that the meditation hall at Green Gulch is the coldest place on the face of the earth.  I proved this by shivering through a 40-minute meditation session and a 45-minute dharma talk, shivering even though I'd just bought a 'Green Dragon Temple' hoodie for $50 from the office.  (I'd forgotten to bring a sweater in sunny Palo Alto, but it gets cold and foggy that close to the ocean.)  The speaker that day happened to be Linda Cutts, the current Abess of Green Gulch.  ('Abess' is a lovely word I learned in California for a female Abbott - one of the best things about American Zen is that the women get to practice and take up positions of authority on an equal basis with the men.  There was even a Japanese female monk at Green Gulch, and I wondered whether she'd had to come to the US to be able to take a full part in the spiritual tradition of her native land.)  Linda Cutts talked about turning 65 and thinking of things she now felt able to let go of, first on the list being boxes and boxes of old letters, some of them Mother's Day letters from her children.  

She also talked about how the first time she went to City Center and everyone started bowing to statues of the Buddha she'd felt a strong reaction as a Jew raised never to worship graven images.  She said she'd asked Reb Anderson about it and he'd replied, 'Oh don't worry about that - you're just bowing to your true self'.  A crap answer (why would you need to put a statue of the Buddha at the front of the room if you were bowing to your true self?) but apparently she'd accepted it.  And the liturgy at Green Gulch is very similar to that at City Center - lots and lots of bowing and lots and lots of chanting.  I heard while I was there that they actually bow 9 times every morning rather than the traditional 3 because their founder, Shunryu Suzuki, had thought it would be good for Westerners to 'get their heads down'.  Good or not, Zen Center types certainly get their heads down.  Whether they can get their heads around the Japanese syllables they chant every day is another question - but the chanting certainly has a hypnotic quality which is powerfully tranquilizing, and that can be calming or worrying, depending on your point of view.

After the morning program we walked around the compound, which is beautiful in a slow, quiet way, with simple wooden buildings connected by boardwalks and walkways snaking through foliage and darting between huge trees.  It's kind of like the secret camp they make in 'Robin Hood Prince of Thieves' that looks like a city of tree-houses, except this time with more of a Japanese touch.  North of the meditation hall you walk down an avenue lined with flowers of every size and hue, followed by orchards, greenhouses with Buddhas seated cheekily among the potted plants, and finally the fields, scored with long rows of fat green stars pushing upwards.  Then there's a gate, and you're back into ordinary beautiful California: a farm with horses, the predictably windy beach, and then a long path winding along the ocean.  I walked to Pirate's Cove and back both days I was there, and it took about three hours.  At night I'd hit the saunas, which are of a weird modern variety without steam but with infra-red rays instead.  They're outside where the pool used to be, but it's been covered over with planks of wood to make a deck, who knows why.

Even with the three hour walk, the work, and the sauna (not to mention the meditation), I had a hell of a time getting to sleep the second night.  That happened the first time I went to a sesshin at City Center.  It's probably mainly to do with the jolt in your schedule you get from suddenly waking up at 4:30 rather than 8 every morning, but it doesn't feel like that.  It felt both times as if two things had happened: 1) all the time I'd spent trying to be 'awake' had led me to be permanently awake; and 2) I'd lost all control over myself.  On the first count, it was as if I was playing out some ghastly parody of the Buddhist ideal, always aware, constantly conscious.  Every time I went into a half-dream I'd step back, cooly analyze it ('Oh look, you're falling asleep') and then automatically pull myself back into awareness of things around me, which I bloody well didn't want to be aware of any more.  On the second count, after an hour or two of this I put some clothes on, stepped very briskly into the kitchen in the guest-house, and devoured an entire loaf of bread with the ruthless efficiency of pure want.  An elderly Japanese man who was staying in the guest house came in as I was scoffing the loaf and looked rather bemused. 

I actually liked the Green Gulch schedule more than the schedule at your typical sesshin, since there are only two hours of compulsory meditation each day, and that means that my legs hurt less.  It also, unfortunately, means that there's more time for work, but I must say (and, amazingly enough, I can say) that work at Green Gulch is actually rather pleasant.  Everything is highly ritualized.  Every room, including the kitchen, has a little shrine in it, and before every period of work the whole team assigned to a particular task gathers in front of it to bow a few times, offer incense, and learn the names of newcomers.  We even had a reading of about a page from Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind one morning.  I am generally an ambivalent bower, but the little ritual seemed to endow the entire process with mutual respect and a kind of holiness - we weren't just dicing potatoes, but chopping them for our co-workers, for the Buddha (who likes potaotes every now and then), and what's more doing it with Beginner's Mind (or I certainly was, since even simple cooking tasks are genuinely entirely new to me).  The man running the kitchen, Phil, was one of those religious people you like, with a smile constantly playing on his lips and around each eye.  He even asked us not to talk in a way that didn't make us want to punch him.

The other nice thing about going up to Green Gulch rather than going to a sesshin is that you can talk to people at meals.  The thing it seems natural to ask people as an opening gambit is always 'how long have you been here?' and there's a lot of variation in the response.  One girl, who'd dropped out of college in LA, had been there a year and a half, basically since Stinson Beach had made its assault on my retina.  Then there was a student who'd been there one day, like me.  She was finding college stressful, and had turned to meditation for that reason, which neatly recapped my experience.  There was also a classic old-style East Ender (of London, I mean) - he had the tattoos and the accent and the whole look.  Apparently he'd fallen into a job at a meditation center in the Westcountry run by, wouldn't you know it, John Crook and Simon Child, the Western Chan people, the latter of whom gave a talk at Stanford only a few months ago.  He told me how John Crook was one of those stiff-upper lipped Englishmen from the distant recent past and ran Zen retreats like a military training camp.  At retreats he'd get everyone up in the morning to do jumping-jacks in the rain.  I laughed a lot because I'd found out that John Crook had been at my school in England and I remember seeing a video of the place in the 1930s.  Every morning at break they'd make all the students do jumping-jacks.

Pretty soon my two days at Green Gulch had come to an end.  On balance I think I like it slightly more than City Center, and I may well go back as a $20 a night Guest student.  Two hours of meditation a day is plenty, and getting some farm-work in between sits would certainly help me physically.  Their style of Zen is as rigidly formal there as it is at City Center, but I'm slowly realizing that they don't kill you when you're slightly out of step.  I know because I lived through a Zen disaster.  After we went to the beach the first day I went to the meditation hall for the evening sit and service.  I bowed to the Ino, I put my left foot first, I bowed to the Buddha or whoever that statue is, I put my hands together and in front of me like I had a stomach-ache.  I bowed to the room and to the wall, and swung myself clockwise (clockwise!) to face the wall.  As I pulled one of my legs into half-lotus, a thin but persistent stream of sand flowed down out of my turned-up trouser-leg.  I'd carted it all the way there in the fold of my khakis - the beach had gotten me again.  There was a long swirl of sand on my black mat like a galaxy.  When the bell went I got up like any other po-faced Zen student and briskly swept my mat with a stern hand.  

 

Knees/up

'Do not look around the meditation hall. Do not make eye-contact with others. Do not speak to others. If you must communicate, write a note. Sesshin starts now.'  There were four black-robed monks sitting in a line.  The Ino - the head of the meditation hall, who in this incarnation had an impeccable upper-class English accent - had just finished reading us the instructions that would govern the seven-day retreat I'd signed up to at the San Francisco Zen Center.  After my conversation with John Tarrant, I'd decided not to go on retreats with his Pacific Zen Institute anymore, though I was continuing to practice on a weekly basis with his student David Weinstein.  But I had undertaken to attend other retreats available in the area, and since SFZC was only a couple of blocks away from my flat, and is an important reference-point for American Buddhists, what better place to start but there?

From the beginning, I knew that these guys were serious.  We were instructed to make an effort to turn up to every compulsory session of meditation and to every service, in order to support others in their practice.  There was to be no use of phones or computers, and no reading or writing.  (One woman asked at the beginning what we would be allowed to do in rest periods, given that these activities were forbidden.)  Unlike at PZI retreats, where people would often talk quietly together and greet newcomers with a hug, here practioners followed the rules strictly.  The whole experience reminded me of nothing so much as being at boarding school in England.  All activities were forcibly communal; a great regularity prevailed; and the whole eccentric endeavour was presided over and punctuated by the periodic ringing of bells.  At the end of the day I returned to my room feeling like my mind had been nuked with quietness.

Nowhere was the attention to etiquette more marked than in the traditional oryoki breakfasts.  Oryoki is a ritualized form of eating involving a small bundle of kitchenware wrapped in a cloth.  It looks like the kind of thing you bring on a picnic, or that a kid running away from home would hang from a stick he would then carry jauntily on his shoulder.  When you unwrap it there are chopsticks, a spoon, a spatula, a cloth, and three bowls (or five if you're a priest - apparently ordination in Zen is partly about getting more bowls than everyone else).   There was a special hour-long instruction session on the first day to ensure that we all lifted our bowls at the right times.  At one point a controversy arose among the clergy about when we should be allowed to serve oursleves the gomasho, a poppy-seed condiment you sprinkle on your food.  In the end, the Senior Dharma Teacher announced, 'The Abbots have met about this, and have ruled that the gomasho will be served after the third bowl'.  So it was decided.

I enjoyed oryoki only to the extent that it gave me a glimpse into Japanese monastic practice, and if I'm honest that's the only way I could really put up with several of the other aspects of practice at SFZC sesshin.  Every day we spent a couple of hours chanting, sometimes texts that had been translated into English, like Dogen's enlightening 'Fukan-zazengi', but just as often meaningless strings of Japanese syllables, 'to yota mitsu bishi ka rate to kyo', and so on.  Now, I don't mind being made to repeat words that will stick with me and may eventually sink into my heart ('Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord'), but I do object to reciting phonemes that are simply not intelligible to me (or anyone else in the room) and are unlikely to become so in the future.   Presumably the SFZC response would be that they are honouring the ancestors, but the ancestors in question were Japanese, and so presumably understood the Japanese text they were chanting.

Worse than the bowing were the prostrations.  At about six o'clock every morning we'd file into the upstairs hall, bow once or twice in one direction (you can't go anywhere in that place without there being some statuette to kowtow to somewhere behind you), and then put our hands in gasho (prayer-position), kneel down, fall forward, softly head-butt the reed-matt floor, and then lift up just our hands so that we looked like caterpillar with curious antennae.  Then we'd get up, and do the whole thing again, driven repeatedly forward and downward by a serious-looking young chap with an extra-large sacred bonker and a supersized bowl-bell.  It was like a static pacifist version of the scene in Ben Hur where all the slaves rowing are being taken up to ramming speed by a man banging a drum.  I don't really see the point of falling on the floor for a bunch of statues, or for Siddartha Gauthama: the man died in 483 BC, so it's hard to see why he would care.

I also had to bow when doing dokusan (personal interview) with the Senior Dharma Teacher, although she was such a humble person that it was easy for me not to think of it as an act of obeisance to her personally.  In general I have to say that SFZC, for all its liturgical conservatism, has a much less top-down approach to teaching than PZI.  When I went to speak to Victoria Austin, the retreat's other leading teacher, I asked her about Richard Baker and accountability, and she welcomed my questions, before responding to them in a straightforward manner.  She said that SFZC Abbots served at the pleasure of a board of governors, that spiritual teachers should be expected at the very least to live up to the ethical convention governing other organizations, and that unusual insight should never be used to justify teachers' transgressions.  I felt reassured by her response, not only because it confirmed my instincts, but because it made SFZC seem like a safe and sane place to practice meditation.

All the same, after four days the rigidity and strictness of the practice there - during a sesshin which was supposed to have been specially designed for the ailing - was making my usual low-level pain intolerable.  I sat left foot over right, I sat right foot over left, I knelt with a cushion, I knelt with a bench.  I went home the fourth night and couldn't sleep because my legs and back were in such agony.  I stayed awake until five, wrote a note to the Ino, and then went and handed it in.  It read: 'I am ending my sesshin a day earlier than planned due to excessive pain'.  (Later I got an email back, saying 'I was sorry to hear of your pain; I hope you found the retreat a valuable experience nonetheless'.)  I walked back along Page Street, thinking 'Well, that didn't work'.  I stopped for a long time by a tree to listen to a blackbird singing; but that, of course, is something you could do any day.   

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.  

Half lotus land

There's a story about an old monk with a withered leg who couldn't sit in what's traditionally seen as the ideal position for meditation, with legs crossed and both feet on the top of the opposite thigh (a posture called 'full lotus').  On his one hundredth birthday he came into the meditation hall, sat down on his cushion, looked at his leg and declared, 'All my life I have been at your service.  Now, for once, you will be at mine!'  With that, with a quick and determined heave, he pulled his crippled limb up, breaking it off, reaching enlightenment, and dying all at the same time.  Robert Aitken has a characteristically laconic comment on this, advising the newcomer to Zen not to attempt such an energetic practice, at least not until they are ready to die.

A lot of books on Zen still state that full lotus is the ideal position for meditation, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who could demonstrate it for you.  I saw one of my friends at school doing it once outside of the hall we were about to go in to do some important exams (and afterwards he went to Cambridge to study medicine, so it must have done the trick).  I saw somebody do it next to me at San Francisco Zen Center the other week.  And that's about all the people I've ever seen actually sit full lotus in any of the half-dozen or so meditation groups I've been a part of over the years.  There was one other guy doing it in the group I sat with in Oxford, and the teacher looked at him and said, 'Wow, I've only ever seen one other person who could sit full lotus before'.

But there are many people who say that you can get to full lotus eventually with a little application; okay, a lot of application.  The Dutchman Janwillem van de Wetering, who lived at a Zen monastery in Japan for a year in the early 1970s, tells of being forced to sit in full lotus for as many as fifteen hours a day.  They say that after a few months of that kind of practice, anyone can sit in full lotus pretty comfortably.  There are people who even see the excruciating pain caused by sitting - or trying to sit - in full lotus as a key part of the Zen practice of achieving detachment from your mental states and observing them with something approaching objectivity.  I've seen quotations from medical scientists appealing to the 'training' the posture offers to explain the success experienced meditators have in controlling pain or their reactions to it.

If you come to meditation as a Westerner, especially if you start out practising in either the secular or vipassana styles, it's likely your teacher will encourage you above all to be comfortable, giving you the choice of sitting on a cushion, on a chair, or even lying down.  This is actually in line with Buddhist tradition, in which there are four classical poses for meditation - sitting, standing, lying, and walking.  (I've tried all of these except for standing, though it sounds like a good approach.)  If you don't believe me, just consider any of the millions of depictions of Siddartha Gautama meditating lying on his side, for example the colossal statue at the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok.  All the Zen places I've been to, and the Tibetan temple in London I once frequented, alternate longer periods of sitting with shorter bouts of walking, usually in a line, slowly (though the Rinzai sect people like to race around).

One of the things I like most about my main Wind in Grass group is that we're always told, and always tell newcomers, to meditate in whatever position makes us feel most comfortable.  Most people seem to go for seiza, kneeling, either with their bum on a cushion and their legs to each side of it, or with their calves on the floor and their bum on a small bench.  This freedom is also extended on Pacific Zen Institute retreats, where you do see a lot of people sitting in half lotus (an easier version of full lotus, where only one of your feet is up on the opposite leg), but where an equal number of people sit on chairs.  One of them is the teacher David Weinstein, whom I've never seen meditating in any other position than seated on a chair.  Once when I was complaining of back pain David sympathetically told me about another student he'd had who had such serious spinal trouble that he used to meditate stretched out flat on his back or on his stomach.

But though the trend seems to be towards a more generous conception of how your limbs might be arranged when you meditate, there are signs of a holdout in some quarters, or maybe even a backlash.  Brad Warner, the onetime punk rocker who is now a Zen priest, is hardly the type of guy who stands on formalities.  And yet he's repeatedly insisted that 'sitting in chairs is not zazen' (that is, Zen meditation).  His reasoning is that zazen is at least partly a physical practice, like a yoga posture; doing zazen in a chair is like trying to do downward-facing dog standing up.  People who really need to sit in chairs because of spinal issues should be allowed to do so, but most of us don't really need to sit in chairs for that kind of reason.  We should keep pushing ourselves just a little bit, because getting used to discomfort is one of the main things we are doing when we engage in Zen training.

I don't want to add to the comments below Brad's post by people who've been encouraged to sit zazen and who've hurt themselves as a result.  But I do wonder whether physical posture defines zazen in the same way as it defines downward-facing dog; after all the yoga asanas are called postures, while zazen is a word for meditation.  Siddartha Gautama and hundreds of other masters after him seem to have done just fine meditating without their crossed legs reminding them of the first noble truth.  If pain and suffering are a part of life, it seems rather obnoxious to seek them out ourselves, as if we didn't have what's in our heads to keep pushing us towards endurance every second.  And what happens when we greet moments of awakening in everyday life?  Do we have to take up half-lotus in the restaurant?

I myself can't meditate in a chair for more than five minutes without falling asleep, even if there are people stomping about offering to whack me with sticks.  For some reason I can't even discipline myself not to let my back touch the back-rest, which is when the slumber comes.  I like half lotus, and find it most comfortable when my foot isn't all the way at the top of the opposite thigh, but just resting over the opposite foot.  But for some reason I do try to sit full half lotus, and have a vague ambition to one day sit full full lotus.  I could fuck up my back, like my friend Dan, who now sits in a chair with straps to help him stay upright.  I do have pain in my lower right back and near the right groin, but that may have as much to do with working on an archaeological site this summer than with Zen Buddhism.  But I go on sitting that way, and also practising meditation in the running, working, eating, meditating, playing squash, and watching a play positions.  I heartily recommend them all.