Hello everyone,
I haven’t written anything of length on here for a while, but I felt like it today, partly because it’s Ango, and partly just to say hello to everyone. So, since it’s Ango, I wanted to post a little something about struggling with practice. Kaishin recently posted a talk by Eshu Martin about unpleasant zazen and about commitment to practice. To me, Eshu is basically addressing the kind of practice that doesn’t penetrate, that is maybe what Jundo would term “watching the clock” zazen, a kind of sitting that is sat so one can talk about how they are sitting, that they are being a good Zen Buddhist, that they’re really going deeply into life. I can write that previous sentence because that’s me, too – that’s not a judgment of any others, that’s something I know about myself. I easily slip into lazy practice. If I’m too tired, maybe I’ll just skip sitting tonight, I tell myself. Maybe instead of a half hour, I’ll just sit twenty minutes. This, of course, isn’t the right attitude to have. This is practice that’s all about gaining, all about being a good Zen person, in a really lazy way. Like Eshu says, we just go around and around and around, never changing, never really confronting the reality of ourselves.
(At the same time, I think it worth acknowledging that we all have different ways of practicing. Some can be very committed and only sit once a day – maybe this is wrong, but I sincerely believe that. Some of us can have a cell phone and not be distracted by it; that’s not me, so I don’t have a phone. Also, in the same way, I know I need to push myself in practice, and what’s strange about that, is when I do that, there’s an effortlessness that arises in the sitting, and practice itself expands.)
But what I wanted to add is this thought: along with the idea of lazy practice, there’s another type of practice that I think is a little off, a little wrongheaded, and it moves in an entirely different direction. It’s a kind of practice where everything is Buddha this and mindfulness that and giving advice to everyone and feeling that one has it all figured out. It’s that idea of judging others from the place of being a capital-B Buddhist. It’s the same kind of judging we do in everyday life, but since we’re Buddhists, we can’t be judging, we see things as they are, we really get life, we really understand it. It’s a kind of arrogance, in other words. And again, like Eshu says, it’s easy to just go around and around and around doing this. I’m guilty of both these types of practice, which aren’t really practice, just selfishness disguised as practice. One of the reasons I appreciate Ango, and my practice partner, John, is that there are reminders everywhere that ground my sitting, that show each of us we’re just regular people sitting and staring at a wall. And that’s all we need be, all we are.
Yet, struggling with practice in these ways is not unnecessary. It may actually be necessary. And I find that understanding such a thing can be an encouragement, a push to recommit.
Anyway, I say all this as a little precursor to this story I wrote called “The Buddhist,” which you can read here on Granta’s website: http://granta.com/buddhist/
The story is about a young white, Canadian Theravadin monk, and it’s about struggling with practice (also, there’s a significant part of the story that was inspired by a story Jundo told us, many years ago; the story is transformed and changed and probably unrecognizable now, though maybe someone can spot it). It’s a long story and just a thing I’m sharing; maybe it’ll be helpful to some at the, as Jundo might say, beginningless beginning of Ango.
Gassho,
Alan
sattoday
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; it's good to hear from you again 
