The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still
228
The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still
228eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565128514 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 01/10/1997 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
BUDDHA 101
Stumbling Up Monkey Mind Mountain
ZEN MOUNTAIN MONASTERY is an impressive stone structure tucked neatly onto the side of Tremper Mountain, in the Catskills, in eastern New York State.
I arrive there with a fair degree of trepidation on a Friday evening and am directed to a second-floor dorm room. There are eight bunk beds and a sink crammed into the small area. When I stumble in, Harold, a sixty-something attorney with a neatly trimmed white beard, has already marked out his territory by spreading his expensive luggage in a wide circle.
He introduces himself amicably enough, but only as an excuse, it seems, to make it clear to me within seconds that he knows more about Zen, Buddhism, and meditation than anyone, other than perhaps the Buddha himself. He mentions the many zendos where he has studied, the Zen koans (riddles, more or less) he has contemplated, the teachers he has spoken with, and throws around an impressive array of foreign-sounding words.
I am stuck listening to the boasting because Harold has blocked my way to where I hope to make my bunk, and because Wayne, the only other roommate to have arrived at this point, has wisely retreated to his bed, where he quietly reads a book.
It takes some work, but I manage to extricate myself from Harold's lecture and find a corner bed. From there, all I have to do is watch the room fill up and wonder what the heck I am doing in a monastery anyway. It has been ages since Brother Damien took me aside, and it feels odd to be back.
SOMETIME AFTER DARK, I join a handful of other spiritual greenhorns for dinner, a tasty assortment of vegetables, spiced and stir-fried, served over rice. We are next herded into the Buddha Hall, a small room with no chairs, no tables, no real furniture, just an altar topped with framed photos of old Asian men, probably deceased Buddhist teachers, and lots of round black pillows scattered across the carpet.
There is discernible anxiety in the room, though we have all come willingly — in fact, we have paid for the privilege. Many in attendance have come from New York City, just a few hours to the east. Other have come across state from Ithaca, Albany, or Rochester. I have driven six hours from Central Pennsylvania.
We range in age from early twenties to mid-sixties, and except for our loose cotton clothing, it strikes me that we would not look much different if we had come for a business seminar, or a weekend of bird-watching.
With our shoes left out in the hall, we sit on the thin carpet and nervously check out one another's socks, lost in our individual fears. How long, I wonder, can I sit in silent meditation without going totally nuts?
At the front of the room, a Japanese woman settles onto a pillow, carefully arranges the hems of her flowing black robes, then slowly tucks the hems under her knees. She is quite compact, barely more than four feet tall, but sturdily built. Her head is shaved.
"My name is Jimon," she says, in a soft, pleasant voice. There is no trace of an accent, so she probably isn't Japanese after all. She is probably Japanese- American. It doesn't matter, of course, except that I am full of curiosity. Buddhism is an Asian religion, the monastery is run for American students, and I'm already wondering where the two cultures are going to gently intersect and where they are going to slam right into one another.
"I'm here to introduce you to Zen practice," the woman continues. "The most important part of that practice is sitting, and there are a few good ways to do this."
She tells us that the round pillows on the floor are called zafus, and describes the various ways they can be used for support, then outlines the different postures — full lotus, half lotus, and kneeling. For those of us who can't handle the pillows, she points to small, individual wooden benches — you sit on the slanted bench, and tuck your legs underneath, so there is less pressure on the knees. She calls them seiza benches.
"And for anyone who can't handle that," Jimon says, smiling, "you can sit on a chair."
The weekend newcomers breathe a collective sigh of relief. Jimon's voice, her very manner in fact, is reassuring, and now that she has promised us that we won't be forced to dislocate our knees, we are feeling pretty good. Gee, I can almost hear a few people behind me thinking, who said this was going to be hard?
"More important than how you sit is what you do with your mind," she informs us, and that turns out to be the difficult part.
During meditation, the mind is supposed to be still. But the mind doesn't want to be still. In fact, left to its own devices, the mind would prefer to babble, jabber, and prattle all day — rushing from thought to thought, worry to worry, and generally keeping us as far away from enlightenment as possible. Buddhists call this Monkey Mind, Jimon says. The path of human thinking can be thought of as being like a monkey in the jungle, constantly swinging from vine to vine, tree to tree, seldom lighting for more than a second before it is off again.
She suggests we count our breaths as a way to combat the mental anarchy. If you focus on the count, she promises, it will distract you from the inner dialogue. And if that doesn't work, she adds, there is always the stick.
"During the long periods of sitting tomorrow, if you feel that your shoulders are too tight, someone will come along with a stick, and you can request that they hit your accupressure points," she explains softly. "You make this request by bringing the hands together in the prayer position and bowing."
The anxiety in the room instantly resurfaces. Someone behind me whispers "Ouch" at the thought of being smacked with a long piece of lumber. A small, nervous laugh ripples from pillow to pillow. We have probably all read stories along the way about Zen masters who punch their students in the nose, cut off their ears, or somehow do them bodily harm because they lack diligence.
Jimon, though, just smiles her reassuring smile.
"Oh, it doesn't hurt," she promises. "The kyosaku stick is made of soft wood."
We are released to our bedrooms with that thought on our minds. Tomorrow we will "sit zazen" — meditate — in earnest, so for now, we all need a good night's sleep.
SATURDAY
Thanks to Harold, though, I barely sleep at all.
He is tucked into a Polartek sleeping bag barely two feet from my metal bunk, and all through the long chilly night, he chants "Zaaaaazzzzeeeeeeen ... zaaaazzzzeeeeen."
The snoring is insistent, steady, as if the glottal vibrations were his secret mantra. If I was any sort of Buddhist at all, I probably would not have spent the wee hours entertaining so many murderous thoughts about the man, but I'm not any sort of Buddhist, and I want to choke him.
At precisely five A.M., a sudden bell clangs along the darkened hallways. Wayne fights himself free of his covers first, then shakes the still-snoring Harold by the shoulders. Wake-up time.
We have been told to maintain full silence until after the dawn meditation session, and everyone in my room complies. There is no time for small talk anyway. No time even for a morning shower. Like zazen zombies, we pull on our cold, wrinkled clothes and spill out into the monastery's massive meditation hall.
Then we sit.
In a big open room, on squat black pillows, with incense swirling past our noses and all manner of cluttered thoughts jumping through our unaccustomed brains, we sit.
And sit some more.
THE SITTING PART does not turn out to be particularly difficult. So early in the morning, my bones are more than happy to hold perfectly still. My brain though, is another story.
Jimon warned us about Monkey Mind, and she was right on the money. My inner dialogue erupts almost before my bottom hits the zafu: Oh, I am doing meditation, how relaxing, oops, I shouldn't be thinking so much, my knee hurts, wait, just focus on the breath, is that a woman in front of me or a guy with long hair, pretty hair anyway, wonder what's for lunch, hey, wait, count your breath, one, two, three, four, did I turn off my car lights?
Jimon not only warned us that our minds might do this, she also warned us that we would find it discouraging. This racing mind stuff trips up many beginning meditators. They find that they can't quiet the stream of distraction, and so, discouraged, they give up on meditation altogether.
Stick with it, she advised.
So I persist, but the truth is, I turn out to have a particularly unrelenting monkey. He not only swings from tree to tree, he rips off big green leaves and chatters at the top of his monkey lungs, an angry baboon somehow set loose in an espresso bar.
Following Jimon's instructions, I try to bypass the monkey by counting my breaths. The first "in" breath is one, the second is two, the third is three, but my Monkey Mind is stubbornly uncooperative. More often than not, I lose track around five or seven. Needless to say, nirvana completely eludes me.
The sitting meditation ends eventually, and we all stand by our pillows. Pretty soon, a bell rings.
Along with the thirty or so of us newcomers, thirty or so others in long gray robes are seated further toward the middle of the monastery's large meditation hall. They are the advanced students, I assume. Most of those in gray robes don't have shaved heads, but a handful of more serious-seeming types in black robes, with shaved heads, sit in the front rows. I'm focusing on hairstyles here, because I am still trying to figure out who is a monk, who is not, and where it all fits together. None of this has been explained.
Suddenly, those in the know begin chanting in Japanese: "No mo san man da moto nan oha ra chi koto sha sono nan to ji to en gya gya gya ki gya."
I am handed a card with the words, so that I can chant, too, though I have no idea what the words mean, and no one attempts to explain. Off and on during the ensuing service, we bow from the waist, and then, following the gray robes in the row ahead of me, I learn the full prostration bow — falling to the knees and bowing on the floor.
At various points, assorted black robes and gray robes approach the main altar, then back away. Sometimes they carry incense boxes, other times they carry items I can't identify.
It begins to seem awfully familiar: the seemingly pointless walking back and forth, the retrieval of various objects only to put them right back where they started out, the chanting in a foreign tongue — it reminds me of morning mass at Good Shepherd Catholic Church when I was a boy. I never understood what was being said then either, not knowing Latin, and though I knew what the priests were up to in a vague sort of way — they were consecrating the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — they seemed to have found perhaps the most inefficient manner imaginable to accomplish this sacred task. The old priests reminded me of amnesiacs in a kitchen, always turning back to the cupboard to get something they forgot, putting things down in the wrong place, and then later having to cross the room to get those same things.
To say this about Catholic Mass is a sacrilege, and if I had expressed these thoughts in front of one of my grade school nuns, I surely would have felt a sharp rap, and not from the soft wood of the kyosaku stick, either.
I don't know enough about Buddhism yet to know if I'm being sacrilegious here, too, or, if so, what I'm supposed to do, or say, or think about it. Jimon has mentioned nothing about venial sin.
Eventually, though, I relax and begin to enjoy the Zen liturgy for what it is — rather interesting, exotic, and nonthreatening. No one is going to make me take communion. No one is going force me into the confessional. Sister Mary Catherine is not coming up behind me to pull my ear.
And anyway, the chants are invigorating, and we are able to move around finally — stand and bow, stand and bow twice, turn, stand and bow, deep bow — instead of just staring at a blank wall.
WHEN THE CEREMONY finally concludes — for no reason clear to me except that another bell rings and everyone stops — we are herded down narrow, winding steps to the monastery's massive dining hall. Our breakfast is steaming on long tables, but first the head cook lights incense at another small altar and leads us in yet another chant, this time in English:
First, seventy-two labors brought us this food We should know how it comes to us Second, as we receive this offering We should consider Whether our virtue and practice deserve it
My virtue and practice have been pretty inconsequential to this point, but I'm hungry. The oatmeal is hot, and we are finally allowed to talk.
Five of us end up at one table, including Harold, my snoring roommate, complaining that, in fact, it was he who didn't get much sleep at all.
"Someone's watch was going off all night," he says, looking pointedly in my direction, raising a gray eyebrow. "Does anyone know whose watch that might have been?"
We all shrug.
"Kept me awake," Harold complains, shaking his head from side to side. "Damn thing beeped all through the night."
He looks around the table at each of us, again resting his eyes on me a bit longer than on the others. "Anybody know whose watch that was?"
I am truly and absolutely clueless. My watch did beep, as a matter of fact, once every hour, but not only was the sound nearly imperceptible, especially when hidden under a pillow and squashed by my large Irish head, but I know for a fact, since I was wearing the watch, and checking it on occasion, that old Harold was snoring from two-thirty to five A.M., uninterrupted snoring of the deepest and most annoying kind. He wouldn't have heard a bomb go off. He didn't even hear the loud bell that was supposed to awaken us before dawn.
Yet he heard my Timex?
It was my first Zen koan.
CHAPTER 2ONE BRIGHT IDEA
My American Buddhism Project
AFTER SEEKING THE tranquillity that comes through Buddhist meditation for roughly half a day or so, only one conclusion makes any sense: I have Attention Deficit Disorder. I am too scattered, too undisciplined, too easily distracted, to focus on anything.
True of me certainly, this is true as well of most of the people I know. One uniting characteristic of our times is that we skitter from thing to thing, eating while we talk, reading while we eat, chatting on the phone while we watch TV, thinking about work while we dress our kids for school, daydreaming about our weekend while we work. We put phones in our cars, install televisions in our bathrooms, pipe music into every shopping mall and public space, erect flashing signs along every roadway. We seem to be fleeing stillness as if it were some curse, yet ironically, many of us are starting to actively seek it out.
I am not the only one exploring Buddhism right now — there is, in fact, a modest surge underway. The interest that has been rooted for quite some time in cultural centers such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco is starting to spread inward. Zendos, monasteries, and meditation centers are popping up in every state, in the cities, in the college towns, and even in rural corners such as Floyds Knobs, Indiana, and High View, West Virginia. Start paying attention, and you'll notice more and more references to Buddhism, Zen, and mindfulness on television, in the news, in the casual speech of those around you. Vice President Al Gore visited a California monastery just before the last election, though he may regret it now.
Hollywood is playing its part with a string of recent and upcoming movies, such as Little Buddha, Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun. Richard Gere is a Buddhist, and makes it known. So are Tina Turner, Oliver Stone, and Chicago Bulls head coach Phil Jackson. Rocker/actress Courtney Love took the ashes of her dead husband, Kurt Cobain, to India, to be embedded in a Buddhist shrine. Walk the streets of any medium to large city these days, and you will see faddish Buddha T-shirts, om mani padme om tattoos, and Tibetan folk-art boutiques.
While a good number of Americans are embracing serious religious Buddhist practice, many, many others are engaging in "vaguely" Buddhist practice, much of it part of the New Age movement. Business Week hails meditation as "the new balm for corporate stress." Even beat cops are being taught to breathe, for relaxation. Beer-maker Adolph Coors reports that meditation has helped lower the company's mental health costs 27 percent since 1987.
And still other Americans are engaged in wildly shallow and seemingly absurd Buddhist practice. Elle magazine, of all places, ran a recent series of articles promoting the meditative lifestyle. In one article, Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein endorses a group of New Yorkers who have begun chanting for parking spaces. "It definitely works," he offered. "I always get a parking place that way, just by asking for one."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Accidental Buddhist"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Dinty W. Moore.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prelude (1)PART 1: ZEN MIND, MUDDLED MIND
1 Buddha 101: Stumbling Up Monkey Mind Mountain (7)
2 One Bright Idea: My American Buddhism Project (16)
3 Just Sitting: I Obsess a Lot, and Then I Get Distracted (21)
4 Zen Gardening: ME and My Green -Thumbed Monkey (35)
5 Why Do Tibetans Have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners? They Lack Attachments (39)
PART 2: PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
6 Catholic Boy Zen: Was Jesus a Bodhisattva? (57)
7 You Can Change Your Mind: And Your Karma, Too (72)
8 The Work Koan: Life Without a Cushion (90)
9 The Plain-Spoken Theravadan: A High View from a Low Seat (103)
10 Buddha Bug, Buddha Being: You Are What You Eat (124)
PART 3: REAL BUDDHISTS DON'T TAKE NOTES
11 Destroy Your Neighbor, Destroy Yourself: The Dalai Lama and the Action Hero (139)
12 Trying to Hit the Ball: Fruitless Searching on the Fruited Plain (160)
13 Eat Your Rice, Wash Your Bowl, and Just Sit: Studying with the Seven-Year-Old Master (171)
14 What Kind of Buddhist Am I? A Lousy One, Thank You (186)
Basic Buddhist Terms (199)
Suggested Further Reading (207)