It was 4:30 AM on a cold, rainy morning in early March, I rolled out of my futon, dressed to meet my guide, and walked to the zen temple, Zuihō-in, two blocks away for morning meditation. I had been warned that it was going to be extra chilly inside the temple, so I layered up. We also shoved some of the amazing ‘hokkairo’ (the same glove and boot warmers that you use when you go skiing) into our pockets to keep us warm as we sat. I've heard that enduring the discomfort (cold, pain, etc) is part of the practice, but we weren't strictly adhering to that this morning.
My experience with meditation in the past has always been around ‘sangha’, or groups of people who gather to meditate. Afterwards, we’ll socialize, share tea or a meal. The meditation meetups often feel like potluck dinner parties in the way that connecting with other like-minded people can feel spiritual. But on this morning, we didn’t arrive to a packed meditation hall, it would just be the two of us and the priest.
I’m a person who smiles a lot, makes eye contact, says hi to strangers when we pass on the street. But when I saw the Abbott (head priest) that morning at the entrance to the temple, I realized this wasn't the time for effusive greetings. Wordlessly we went into the meditation hall, bowed, and settled onto our zafus (cushions) for a 45-minute chanting session.
When you chant you repeat ancient sutras (or sacred texts), the priest bangs a drum and rings bells that help keep the pace and add emphasis. I grew up going to Catholic mass, if it hadn’t have been for the cantor singing as loudly as possible, even with the whole church singing it would have sounded like a whisper. I remember always being worried about singing off-key. But that morning, at the temple, the sound of chanting and drumming was so loud, it could have been heard from the street outside the gates. The vigorous chanting had the effect of caffeine, I could feel the blood pulsing through my body, and by the end, when we settled into meditation I wasn’t worried about dozing off. I was nervous about how long we would sit for, having assumed monks and priests meditate all day long. But it was only after a few short minutes, maybe 10 or 15, that the monk rang his bell to let us know that we were finished. We bowed and retired to a small room off the hall to have tea. Our chatting was interrupted when the sound of stomping, running, and some tears filled the hallway. The priest with the biggest smile pulled open the shoji (sliding paper door) and told the children to get rags and start cleaning the wooden floorboards. He turned back to me and explained that the kids were all home from school due to coronavirus and that they’d be spending the day with him at the temple. The pride and joy of a grandparent is unrivaled. I realized I was keeping him from his beloved grandkids, so I excused myself and headed back to my accommodation.
As wonderful as the morning had been, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. After reading so much D T Suzuki, I wanted the opportunity to chat more. Once I returned home to Tokyo, I decided to call my friend, Ian, who had been a Zen monk in Japan for three years in the early 2000’s. You can listen to Ian and I’s conversation via the link below.
For the first few years I knew Ian, I had no idea of his previous identity as a monk. He’s an artist, his photographs are like Zen paintings or haikus—beautiful homages to nature, expressions of miniature moments of ‘enlightenment.’ I’ve also never heard him complain or talk poorly of someone. On our call, he explained that people who trigger him are just Bodhisattvas (beings that stay on earth to help others reach enlightenment). By triggering him these humans give him insight into the places he lets his mind go, and give him the option to choose not to go there. He lives zen.
I can only begin to imagine how much Ian stood out during his time in Japan, he’s tall—like basketball player tall—has blue eyes and fair hair. He moved after he graduated from college hoping to be able to study zen and sumi (ink) painting. Ian was able to do both! And actually his ink paintings won quite a few prizes in competitions here in Japan. It was a bit harder to access the zen. The first time Ian tried to enter the monastery he found a list of the schools in the Kyoto area, called, and politely asked to be admitted. He was swiftly rejected by all of them.
As you can imagine with a society so old, there are traditions and rules that guide everything you do, most especially entering a monastery. But these rules are never openly discussed. It’s not that people are specifically withholding information, it’s just that for thousands of years there’s been a way things are done, for someone who grew up in the culture it is common knowledge, and they aren’t able to diagnosis the gaps in our own personal knowledge to know where we need additional guidance.
One of the people that answered the phone took pity on Ian and encouraged him to first attend a Zen Center, Hosenji, also in Kyoto, and study there.
Ian trained at Hosenji for a year. During that time he learned the rhythms of daily life and the different roles and responsibilities of members in that kind of closed community. He was able to visit a few different monasteries around the country to see if any would be a good fit for his next stage, once decided he was ready to re-approach. This time he had the insight into how it was done. He traveled directly to his desired monastery’s doorstep and humbled himself in a half twisted “child’s pose” kind of position, and called out as loudly as he possibly could “Tanomimashyou” which basically is a word to ‘request or petition’. He did that for three days before he was allowed inside. And then once they let him inside, he had to sit completely still for another five days—out in the open where all the other monks could see him—before they would accept him into the brotherhood.
Training at Zuiganji
For the next 18-months, Ian was in deep zen training at Zuiganji Temple in Miyagi (about 2.5 hrs from Tokyo by high-speed train). There are two major sects within the Zen family, Rinzai and Soto. While based on similar foundations they differ in their practices. Both do meditation, but Rinzai also employs mind puzzles called, koans. These koans are what had attracted Ian to zen in the first place, even though the koans are thousands of years old they still felt spontaneous and alive.
Ian’s days training in Rinzai Zen started similarly to the young grandkids I had encountered at the temple. Someone would slide open the shoji doors to the zendo (meditation hall) and ring a bell, telling the monks to get up, they’d jump out of their futon, run and get hot rags and wipe down the floors so they could transition the space from a sleeping space to a meditation space. After morning chanting and meditation he’d meet with his Roshi, or Zen master, to discuss whatever koan he was practicing, and then carry on with his chores around the compound.
Working with Koan
I asked Ian which koan had the biggest impact on him and he said it was the first he was ever assigned. He explains his experience with it below:
“Joshu's Mu….It's the first one I (and any monk under my Roshi) received and it's said that if you truly grasp Mu, then there are no further koans that can meet its power. It reads,
"A monk once asked Master Joshu, 'Does a dog have Buddha nature?'
Joshu replied, 'Mu'."
You're likely familiar with this koan but in case not, I'll expand a little. Buddha Nature is our True Nature, something that all sentient beings have access to at any and all times. So certainly the dog has buddha nature but when Joshu replies with ‘Mu’, (nothingness, emptiness) is he negating that? Or is he confirming it? If you're asking that question, you've already missed the point!”
Unfortunately, I was asking myself those questions, and have definitely missed the point. But that’s okay if I ever choose to study zen more seriously, I know I’ll have the opportunity to revisit it and contemplate the meaning of ‘mu’.
Beyond chores, chanting, meditation, and meeting with the Roshi, Ian’s life as a monk also included twice-weekly begging rounds where the monks would go out into the community and collect money for the temple and perform services in people’s homes.
They’d also regularly perform services for members at the main temple. One of the most common services they did was funerals. We always think of temples as being spiritual places for contemplation. And they are, but they are also businesses and have had to figure out how to support themselves over the years. That’s why some temples open themselves up to tourists to see their gardens, but for most, these kind of funerary services are their main source of income.
Thirteen out of the fifteen monks training at Zuiganji, were studying in order to take over their family temple. The temple has become a family business, passed down from generation to generation. They had actually been grooming Ian to take over a zen temple in Maui that was looking for a new priest. Ian declined. For him, the study and practice of zen had always been the appeal, not necessarily getting involved in the day-to-day of running a temple. It was probably for the better to have this kind of forcing conversation to decide what Ian’s future looked like. He realized he could spend decades studying and still not reach awakening, plus he had been five years away from his family and friends in America and he wanted to be able to spend time with them.
He said goodbye to his life at the monastery with the plan to return to America and continue his zen practice from there. With my understanding of zen, it’s focus on truth, on direct-action, on not overthinking -- I think Ian’s created a very authentic Zen existence in his artistic, professional, and personal life. He continues to sit regularly, employing the practices of breathing and presence. He works with organizes like Wildtender to lead practitioners on meditations in the wild. He is teaching his daughters the inroads into themselves as well as the zoomed out picture of their relation to the greater world. He can reframe limitations in a way better than any motivational speaker.
“There were so many times when training at the sodo that I felt, “I can’t”. So many times when either the physical pain or mental strain felt like too much and in any other circumstance, I would have stopped what I was doing in search of relief. But because a ‘sodo’ is a very rigid place and there are others there who aren’t succumbing, you don’t either. And what you find is that the limitations you thought you had were boundaries created by yourself, and they can just as easily be moved or eliminated altogether.”
I had asked Ian about his feelings about the new mindfulness movement that is independent of any specific spiritual tradition. I had expected him to say how inauthentic they were but he didn’t respond that way at all. For Ian, he believes that these practices are so helpful that they should be made accessible, and hopes that “there are teachers of the old school that can work as stewards to bridge it with the new.” In my mind, Ian is definitely one of those teachers. Big thank you to him and to all my teachers for sharing their wisdom with me.