By Joseph Hall
It seems that Zen is a bigger part of American culture than we often imagine when we sit in a temple. While it’s not something that people can quite place a finger on, they sure do seem to have some clarity that they want more of it. Given the number of book titles, products, and tech startups that contain the word “zen”, it’s something people appear to have a relationship to. And then there is the whole mindfulness movement. Walking around in American culture, zen is an idea of simplicity, a way to reduce clutter, find peace, and possibly to achieve such a deep sense of inner peace that all other problems will evaporate.

All three of our sitting groups sit in right in the middle of downtown traffic. Construction seems to be an ongoing aspect of our meditation and always there are people in the midst of their workdays in lively discussion passing by, and even a few people shouting on the street at one another on the other side of the glass. This is where we sit in search of silence and often, I think, little fantasies arise in the midst of meditation about sitting at a mountain temple where there is nothing but birds and the gentle sound of rain.

Pop Up Zendo is about finding Zen in the midst of our life and work. While a person might think finding a quiet place would be the first step in finding silence, we intentionally do our meditation in the very same place where challenges arise, in the midst of our life and work.

Without a doubt, it would be easier not to sit in front of a window facing a workspace or a downtown street. At the temple, especially a mountain temple filled with experienced practitioners, it is easy to fall into silence. I have a great fondness for sitting amongst a group of serious Zen students in a big zendo where the energy of the room and the intentions of people honed over time creates a magnetic pull into silence. But at the end of every retreat, most of the participants will talk about sadness as they contemplate the sense of loss that occurs when the silence is lost.

When we talk about making Zen relevant to people, I think the most fundamental question is: how are we ever going to deliver awareness of and connection to stillness to people when and where they need it.

This is why we gather downtown and meditate in the noise. We could go to the mountain, relieve our stress, and get some rejuvenation, but then when we go back to work on Monday we tend to dream about a place where enlightenment is possible and forget that it is always with us. And as it turns out, this is nothing new or the result of the peculiar facets of our modern lives. If fact, in the year 1227, Dogen warned his readers that traveling around looking for peace somewhere else was problematic at best, and suggested that the real noise problem was the sound of all the liking and disliking that we do. It seems that the source of our trouble has nothing to do with the sounds outside.

This noise we hear, does not actually take place outside of our heads. Without getting into the arising of phenomena, the twelvefold chain of causation, or any of the sutra, we can understand the cause of the noise we hear by answering a simple question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The answer is also simple. The tree falls, air moves, eardrums registers it, and a mind creates a sound for it. There is no intrinsic sound that the tree makes. The sound we hear is actually little more than a symbol, much in the same way something we call “BAM” arises from three letters. And it might be helpful to notice the little visceral response that arises just from seeing BAM.

It’s not the sound that makes a bad or good noise, it’s our not wanting the sound that makes the difference between noise and music. Music happens when we allow ourselves to sit back in wonder and let ourselves glide along with harmony and syncopation.

In the midst of sound it is easy to forget about the silence. In forgetting the silence, the sound loses meaning and its ability to connect us to a larger world.

So Pop Up prefers to meet downtown, right in the middle of our challenges. We do it here because whatever we can learn here, we get to keep. There is no place you need to go to find silence and there is no better silence than the silence in this moment. Although our teachers have written many words and sutra’s, Zen was never about the ink marks on the page, it was always about the white space. Where else would a person find stillness? Zen is about letting go of our obsession with the foreground and letting the eyes open to see the background, experiencing them both together. Around you, there are myriad things happening right now and in them there is always great beauty and wisdom. It is a simple matter of seeing and listening. To get there, it helps to practice.

Now, I’ll admit that sitting in the midst of our challenges can turn into a challenge all of its own. Sometimes in the middle of meditation, I start wondering what the new people are thinking and how it would be easier to move these groups to a room that was already silent. But we stay in the conference room or cafe and sometimes when a backhoe starts dumping concrete into a dumpster across the street, we talk about the fish.

Since this is Zen, it’s all about the fish and also the fish are not the point. Sounds, like fish, appear in many forms. They have many qualities, some are bright and pleasing, others come in huge schools that swarm around us. With them arises our dislikes, which create a world of fish. But if we pay attention, we notice that the fish are moving through an ocean of water from which they appear out of and fade back into. This water, this ocean, is endless and silent. The silence reaches beyond the water through the ocean and into space. As fish move by us, we can feel the ocean and our awareness of it’s silence deepens. If we sit quietly in this ocean and keep looking at the water, we begin to notice brevity, the diminutiveness of our reactions in an ocean of stillness. Naturally, the world grows quiet.

Sitting in this way, there is a lot that fish can tell us about water and it occurs to us to wonder what the value of water would be were not for the fish. With full awareness of the water that we live in, we can begin to swim, to move through life knowing that our challenges can exist only in an ocean of stillness and that silence is always with us. So we sit here, not reaching for our own place where the silence is golden, but learning and sharing the stillness with the world that we know.

Silence in the midst of noise

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