Each Thing Matters

So much depends
upon the red wheel barrow
glazed with rainwater
standing beside the white chickens.

- Williams Carlos Williams

Zen is an intrinsic practice, whatever we do is done for it’s own sake and with a sense of total commitment. The ‘chop wood carry water’ ethic of Zen applies to the routine of every day life, from brushing teeth and washing dishes to raising kids and earning a living. Meditation practice and serenity help us awaken the import of alert commitment. Each activity is as important as the next, each contains the dynamic workings of the whole universe and our universal nature.

Often we prioritize activities by importance. Although this is accurate in a practical sense, in the big picture of mindful living,- each thing matters. Putting your clothes away is of equal value to rescuing a drowning person. A Zen story tells of a Zen teacher who would dine alone as if he had company and dine with company as if he was alone. Our contribution to life is made right this instant-activity.

Zazen, sitting peacefully and mindfully, is the practice of non-attainment. Sitting in stillness with an open mind allows life and experience to exist in fullness each moment. Zazen is the simple practice of complete commitment to now. With some attention to exactly what is going on in our body and mind, we can discover the inter-relatedness between ourselves, our activity, and the world.

Your Innermost Request

What is it that makes us seek the Way of Truth? For thousands of years there are those who have followed in the footsteps of Buddha, who have sought wisdom and understand outside of convention, conditions, and words. Why have they done this? More importantly, what is our own motivation for picking up Zen meditation and practice? This question is vital, because it influences our sincerity and perseverance, two essential ingredients on a goalless path.

People develop 'Way seeking mind', or bodhicitta, for different reasons. I think each person is probably unique in what brings them to practice. Some of the more common reasons people practice Zen: they have suffering and seek a solution; they are spiritually curious about Reality and living and dying; they feel good when they meditate; there is a philosophical bent to Buddhism that they appreciate; they know somebody who does it; they want an organizing principle in their life; they want to know themselves better; they want to live close to their own experience. There are many others as well.

There is one point on which most teachers, past and present, tend to agree. The sincerity of the student is the most important aspect of practice. Their sincerity is even more important than their understanding or wisdom. For all of us this raises an important question: Are we clear about our intentions and what is the depth of our sincerity? Are we taking a stroll down the garden path or walking deep into the mountains? Are we fair weather sailors or are we willing to meet the ocean in all conditions?

I encourage people to sit quietly in a beautiful place and reflect on what they want out of this quickly passing temporal life, and whether or not there is a deep longing within to be at peace or to learn wisdom. What is your innermost request?

Getting Real

Zen is about many things, but perhaps the most important is 'getting real'. Even Zen can be a cover story for getting real. Sometimes I think of people as an ancient forest floor, only instead of beautiful organic dietrus and leaves and transformation going on, there are thousands of years of accumulated conditioning, of the garbage we have all been fed about who we are and who we should be and what the culturally conditioned standards of real are. How many of us choose to get up out of the dung heap and look around with fresh eyes, with a very important and big question: What is real?

Some people sleepwalk their entire lives without asking if they are really themselves, and what does this mean. I like the word authentic...am I authentic? Is there a congruence between how I experience and express myself, is there a sense of relatedness to people and plants and animals and all things existent? Do I stay close to the miracle of being alive with gratitude and humility. Like Lao Tzu suggests, do I flow downstream toward the great ocean of life?

Of course, this are some of my notions about real, you will have your own. I appreciate Zen meditation because it is an everyday encounter with Real. What becomes clear when I sit is the impossibility of adding or taking away from the experience and reality of the moment. This attitude of just accepting things as they are seems to filter into my bones as life flows on.

Awe and Infinity

I am awed by infinity....and the many ways of touching the circle of the mysterious, inconceivable, and beautiful: the full moon, stars above the desert, and endless horizon over the pacific, descriptions of quantum mechanics and the world of invisible particles, igneous rocks and cockroaches and tables and chairs and frogs, ....everything!

Buddhists often use infinity to point at our universal self. We say 'beings are numberless', and we talk about kalpas and billions of eons. Buddha said that it is as rare to be born a human being as it is to have dirt stick to a fingernail. The endless past and the endless future.....Lao Tzu says that 'from wonder into wonder existence opens'.

Touching the infinite is a reminder that life can't be put in a box, and that our tendency to explain reality and live in certainty is futile. The Zen axiom of 'Only Don't Know' is the way of infinite improbability and things existing simultaneously this very moment. I find that touching the infinite awakens humility and gratitude, and quickly reminds me about the lightness of being and the dignity of all forms of life.

Death as a Teacher

When I was nineteen I was shaken at my core by the awareness of my own mortality. This troubling encounter with the truth of impermanence sent me in a bee line to Zen and has stoked the fires of my practice ever since. I recognized early on the Zen was an exploration of living and dying, and that not only great truths lie at the center of Buddhism, but one's own life hinges on the resolution of the mystery of existing. I also had some feeling that mature Zen students were able to find some deep insight into Reality and that this influenced how they lived.

Tibetan lamas have suggested contemplating death three times a day. In his brilliant work 'The Denial of Death", Ernst Becker suggest that Freud was mistaken in putting libido at the center of his work, and that death is King. Viktor Frankl developed theories and therapies with death as the context of Meaning. Throughout all cultures and all times, people found ways through myth, ritual, and spiritual activities to account for the inexplicable mystery of Life and Death.

Most of us have blunted our awareness of death. We can ignore it, be cavalier, intellectualize it, live in anxiety and depression around it, minimize it, aggrandize it,....we can do all of the psychological maneuvering human beings are capable of in relationship to death. Zen makes a simple request....look into the mouth of the whale and explore your relationship with living and dying, live a life that continually stirs the bottom of the soup. I have learned much about gently meeting fear, anxiety, loss, grief, meaning, joy, love, family, stillness, nature, flow, solitude, community, commitment. Humm........everything that matters to me!

Above the old Zen temple gates in Japan hung a sign: Don't enter here unless you are willing to face the great matter of Life and Death. I think that sign is a naturally arising truth in all of us each moment.