A monk asked, "What is the basic meaning of Buddhism?"
The Master gave a shout. The monk bowed low.
The Master said, "This fine monk is the kind who's worth talking to!”
Master Línjì Yìxuán
(?–866)
By Joseph Hall
I think Zen is more attentive to echoes than noises. While it is true that there is a lot of shouting taking place in the koans - there is even a specific term for it, Katsu, which was once said to ‘expose the enlightened state of a master’- what we notice most in our day and age is the way these ancient outbursts softly reverberate in the curious form of Americans sitting in a zendo. If we are truly in the moment, we discover that an explosion of noise is brief and in the echoes each sound waves is a different experience. So, while Zen may have announced its birth with a series of vociferations, our practice today is more concerned with kindness and feint ripples moving across water revealing a path we might follow into stillness.
It will come as good news to most aspiring students of Zen that most Zen teachers no longer expect to earn your respect by yelling at you. (And, by the way, striking your teacher is no longer considered evidence of attainment, which I personally believe is a major advancement in the study of Zen.) In our time, the better approach is to lower the volume so we can look for the traces of these ancient echoes together.
Through trial and error since Linji was alive, Zen has become less about expressing our knowledge and more about paying attention. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t express yourself, just that we teach swimming rather than running. It is true that swimming will get you in better shape and is likely to benefit your running, but in order to swim we need stay in the water. Even Leonard Cohen who was both a Zen monk and a musician of some note, received the dharma name Jikan, meaning silence, when he entered the monastery since Zen had nothing to teach him about music directly. We simply immerse ourselves in our practice and try to learn grace by moving in ways that carry us through the water of silence.
The Katsu, this shouting that makes people jump from their seats, has fallen by the wayside in modern Zen along with the whole idea that there is some sort of special need to bow to anyone who intentionally upends our practice. While there can be real value in lively spontaneous response to moments as they arise from the peculiar environment of our practice, expressing our compassion through rage is like a joke that quit being funny somewhere around 1387 AD. Instead we try to follow the example of the farmer who keeps musing, “is that so?”, and keeps quietly honing his practice through a long series of events. The Katsu, we notice, mostly disturbs the water and gets in the way of our seeing the ripples as they arise naturally from the world.
While we are here on the surface, we notice that speech often becomes as disruptive as shouting. It is no wonder that four out of ten precepts in Zen are about trying to limit the turbulence that arises when we speak without real reflection on where these sound waves are going. Inevitably, this leaves us alone with our thoughts. Now we notice that there is noise arising from unexpressed thoughts in our heads. Even this causes enough surface disruption to conceal the more ephemeral ripples and currents that we are trying to follow and explore. Since a good part of the reason we arrived at these waters in the first place was the sheer number of thoughts in our heads, it’s enough to make a person scream. Naturally, as Kobun said, this is a good time to sit down for awhile.
Despite all these words, Zen has nothing to do with any of these myriad ideas. Zen is an embodied practice. Understanding of it takes place somatically, in our bodies, rather than in our heads. Thus, once we manage to still the surface of the water, it is time to dive in. Silence is found in the depths. A few paragraphs back I said we teach swimming so in the paragraphs we have left, let’s talk about movement.
The thoughts in your head will never quiet as long as you are in your head. That’s the part of your body that is exquisitely designed to produce evaluation, narrative, and judgment. There is no direct experience and no true peace to find on cable television, social media, or inside your head - all three of which serve basically the same general function. If you want to be happy, or at least understand Zen, you're going to have to leave this place.
But wait, since you are there, aren’t we really just some sort of amalgam of thoughts and consciousness?
According to Zen, this is true. The good news is that this is only true right now. There is another moment coming just around the corner. The opportunity in this moment exists in that who you are, your experience, arises from wherever you are. The thoughts in your head will quiet and the ripples will appear the moment you move into your body. And the great thing about embodied practice is that to do it, all you have to do is be there, get curious, and the rest will happen on its own. There is no technique or theory involved, stepping, diving, and falling in all work to get into the water.
To practice embodiment, all we need to do is completely immerse ourselves in what we are doing. There is no need to stop our thoughts. If we keep leaning into the work in our hands, the more our thoughts and emotions will arise from the moment we are in.
What we are trying to do here is simple. Instead of learning, hearing, seeing, or figuring out the meaning of life, we go about experiencing the nature of life. We will have little use for extensive learning of the concepts of natural law, since even that arises and is already contained within the natural world. Don’t take this last idea into anarchy, though. Stop signs arise from the natural world and ignoring them is ignoring nature. We just don’t need to spend our time studying the legal code.
There is nowhere that we need to go to find the dharma. The teachings of Zen are closest to the surface in our everyday activity. In this water of Zen, which seems formless, we are looking for its geography. Looking down, it seems opaque, but if we swim delicately and avoid creating turbulence, we begin to sense that the water has currents, texture and flow. Pretty soon we discover that we are in a still moving body of water with inlets and outlets and we soon will discover that this lake is fed by warm springs and cold springs. The water moves quickly in some places and virtually not at all in others. By paying wholehearted attention to the subtleties of our practice, an unseeable map can appear within our psyches. We might not be able to control anything in this water, but by becoming intimate with its elemental details we can learn that everything we need is here. The way to discover the geography of this world is to swim around in such a way that you can feel the nature of things as they are.
In the monastery, there are the forms. Forms are simply proscribed methods to do things and a way to move as you pass through them. There is nothing special about these forms and rituals and the more you observe them, the more you notice that they are nothing more than the simplest way to move through a zendo and keep a sense of reverence intact. They exist to guide you along a path where you are guaranteed to brush up again the things that seem to be revelatory. No one ever became a great Zen master for their mastery of these forms. The point of making the effort to do them well is simply so that one’s own intentions can be forgotten and a monk can fully experience the depth and nature of the world in each moment. Of the myriad Zen forms and cermonies, there is only one which is thought to offer the possibility for a complete experience of the dharma, a means by which to access everything needed to understand the true nature of life and a path to freedom. That form is called everyday activity.
So the apex of Zen is brushing your teeth.
This works out very well for most Zen students, who were going to do that anyway. And so the news is good, your next opportunity to become a buddha is already on your schedule. The key, however, is not to remove a certain amount of plaque. It is in the performance of brushing completely. And this word, completely is the gateway to everything Zen has to offer us. It means to dive into the water.
To do something completely means to show up when it is time to show up. To do this requires that we pay attention to everything that is happening in the world around us, for there will come a moment where the things in the world will come together in a perfect confluence that tells us it is time to brush our teeth. We can dive into that moment with a full heart. We can show up for it and see this moment as a vista from which we can look out and feel the simple wonder of karma, that an entire universe came into being with such force that we are now on a planet rocketing through space with a whole evolutionary system which in this moment leads to us. Somewhere along the way, these teeth mysteriously appeared. These teeth allow us to eat, uncovering a thousand ethical questions, and sustain our life, allowing us to affect the lives of the people we love and the lives of others. Realizing the miracle of teeth, we can care for them and clean them, not for ourselves, but for the world from which they arose. Seeing this vista, a sense arises that all truths are present in this moment. Realizing this, we can commit ourselves to not waste this precious moment and to observe every detail that turns up in the foaming of the bristles, the nature of the light in the room, and the vibrations that move through the house as a car passes by. Brushing teeth in this way, savoring every piquant nuance of this experience, a definite sense arises that while we are not at all sure what just happened we can leave this room with knowledge of a greater depth to life. This is all it takes to enter the practice of embodying Zen. As your hand reaches for the light, afire with curiosity about the texture and movement of the switch, you have a choice. Will you follow this little path through the next thing you do or will you simply open your mouth and go back to your head?
There is actually nothing special about brushing your teeth, it’s just a common opportunity that Zen people started talking about after the shouting in the zendo died down. This practice of wholehearted everyday activity is always available and worth your consideration in every moment. To get embodied, some activities offer a clearer path than others. Complex situations usually seem to result in the body sending an SOS to the intellect for help but we can always take a deep breathe and make the effort to try not to let the anxiety seduce the mind into shifting into high gear. On the other hand, any repetitive chore is already in the realm of muscle memory and offers us a simple way to transform an experience of drudgery into moments of deeper connection. These are moments that are just begging for completion and this why Buddhists in every culture love to talk about washing the dishes. Embodying yourself at the kitchen sink may not be spectacular, but in its own little way, it’s still a slam-dunk spiritual transformation. A sink is a good place to teach ourselves that our experience in the water of life is primarily up to us.
Anything mundane is fertile ground for transformation and anytime we are alone we can do anything we want. So we may as well embrace our chores and change our lives along with our shoes.
Alas, Most of life seems to take place not in the solitary mundane but in places where there are deadlines, stories, and norms to consider. Getting lost in every step on the way into the bosses office may not be the answer and getting ‘Zen’ to the point that it confuses people is not actually what we are trying to do. All the same, there are always opportunities to practice intentional embodiment in the midst of everyday activity that we still haven’t mastered. Two handed practice can be included as a kind of anchor that can hold our intention even while the mind is still spinning and provide a place for the mind to settle when the intellect relaxes its grip.
Two handed practice is not an official form in the Sotoshu manual, but it is one of the oldest guerrilla practices (or private practice) in Zen. It is extraordinary simple. All you need to do is decide that instead of proceeding willy nilly through a particular stretch of life, a person could dance. Two handed practice is an easy dance to do. There are no feet and no steps, a person simply decides to use the hands together. This of course requires a simple shift in awareness.
Instead of moving the objects of your world in a series of jabbing motions, just keep aware of what the other hand is doing. And while this may not feel like a great deal of work, this simple shift requires that both hemispheres of the brain are simultaneously engaged and goes a long way to reducing the dualistic swinging back and forth that the self seems to love but eventually finds painful. There is nothing to strain, because the intellect naturally takes a step back and awareness leans forward whenever both hands get engaged with the same task. Our hands are intrinsically wired to the brain so why not use them to tame the monkey mind? Oh, and the one rule is that anytime you give someone something, hand it to them with both hands. Without a hand to use as a makeshift counterweight, the body finds its own center of gravity naturally, guiding you towards a sense of balance. Be curious and pay attention.
When you hand something to someone with two balanced hands, more often than not you will notice a small piece of magic. In these moments, a slight feeling of reverence naturally arises. It’s a bit of karma that human beings recognize below the conscious mind. By simply assuming this simple posture, one notices a small pause containing a natural gratitude and a palpable moment occurs between the person offering a credit card and the one receiving it. A momentary glitch in the hurried nature of our lives appears and through this crack we can feel that there is something deeper. The beauty of this, is that it passes almost too quickly to notice and we can watch something enter the unconscious while the rational mind continues unperturbed. People tend to feel this but not to notice. You are free to practice Zen when you are off the cushion.
This is one of those moments. How you hold life changes your experience and deepens your relationship to it. This is the essence of what Zen is trying to teach you. Why not take a moment, why not this moment, to place your two hands together, close your eyes, and feel into the water of life? Doing so, we sense a subtle current calling us deeper.
We can embody Zen in every moment. This is not to say there is an obligation or an attainment here, just that life has a constant invitation for you to dive in. We always hold a deeper experience of the nature of life in our hands. The deepest teachings of Zen require no knowledge or intellectual understanding but are revealed in the way we move through the world. In any moment, we can realize that we have never been here before. In full knowledge of this, we can take our first steps in this world which has never before existed. If we allow a sense of reverence to arise, allow the sweeping arch of each movement to flow in balance, and follow our curiosity to allow the sensations of the world to guide us, we are embodying the teachings of Zen. If that doesn’t feel quite the way you thought that it might feel, just remember that these lessons were never really there for the purposes of mastery and that all you need to do to understand them is to fully feel them moving through you.
Let subtlety be your guide. We follow the echoes of the shouts of the ancestors and the whispers of the world into the depths of silence. The secrets of Zen will brush against you like a fish under water. As you move, here and there, you will notice a feeling of lightness. Follow that feeling and it will show you a universe.
