This is the second of three talks I gave at our weeklong sesshin, held from August 24-30, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, a monastery. Our theme was “Chop Wood, Carry Water”: Everyday Form and Formation on the Householder Path. A recording follows the text, which is edited for clarity and conciseness.

This is Case 2 in The Sayings of Layman P’ang:

One day, Shih-t’ou said, “I’ve come to visit you. What have you been doing?” 

The Layman said, “If you’re asking what I do every day, there’s nothing to say about it.”

Shih-t’ou said, “What did you think you were doing before I asked you about it?”

The Layman made up a verse:

“What I do every day is nothing special.

I simply stumble around.

What I do is not thought out.

Where I go is unplanned.

No matter who tries to leave their mark,

The hills and dales are not impressed.

Collecting firewood and carrying water

Are prayers that reach the gods.”

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So, are you going to wear black or white?”

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha.

Today I want to zero in on the final three lines of this case:

Shih-t’ou approved saying, “So are you going to wear black or white?

The Layman said, “I will do whatever is best.”

It came to pass that he never shaved his head to join the sangha. 

So what might Layman P’ang have been deliberating about at this moment he was considering leaving home; joining a monastery or living a hermit’s life? I’m not sure that, when we meet Shih-t’ou in this case, he even would have had a monastery yet. Ancient Zen masters were often named after the place they sat, like a certain mountain. If I’m not mistaken, Shih-t’ou means flat rock. He apparently just sat on top of a flat rock and eventually built his monastery at or near that spot. The flat rock was where people found him. 

P’ang is thinking about taking up this life himself. Why might he want to do that, we can ask? I can sort of relate to him at this moment in his journey. Probably like many of you, I have long had what we might call a contemplative orientation. When I was very young—probably before, certainly in, first grade—I did some things that were kind of weird for a little kid, I suppose. I created a little monk’s cell on the floor of my closet. I would go in there and shut the door, turn on a little light and read the Bible, and The Hardy Boys, and Maurice Sendak. It was a comfortable little place.

We lived in a suburb of Denver at the time. It was still developing. We lived in a track home community; we were the first occupants of our home there. And there was a lot of construction around us. I created a little shrine in a nearby construction site; a little cavity in the side of a large pile of dirt where I put some religious objects. I can’t remember what. I was raised Catholic, so probably a little Jesus statue or something. I’d go there periodically to pray.

Fast forward to my 20s and early 30s—so about the age when we meet P’ang in our story—and I was doing what P’ang did. I was traveling around meeting teachers. I learned to meditate in my mid-20s, though I think even that little kid was doing something we might call meditation. But formal meditation: Maybe I’d read about it and experimented with it earlier out of books. I certainly read a lot of contemplative literature and Dharma books when I was in college and graduate school. I took classes that were relevant to what we do here. But my first formal instruction in meditation was with Tibetan Buddhist teachers in Berkeley, California, when I was a young lawyer in working in San Francisco.

I lived in Berlin for a while after that, and I made the rounds in Germany and Europe meeting teachers and sitting with different groups. I read a lot of Dharma books there and I sort of began to settle down and mature into two primary forms of practice. Back then I was still centered in Catholicism, I suppose. I discovered the contemplative strain in Catholicism, and the Trappists specifically. I used to go on retreat to a Trappist monastery and to a Carmelite hermitage. I also began sitting with his Zen community led by Kanjuro Shibata Sensei XX, the imperial bowmaker of Japan—practicing Zen archery with him and sitting Zazen. 

I rarely went on a normal vacation for many years. All my vacation time—all the vacation time I could get, and many weekends, too—I would spend on retreat, often at monasteries. I was in the same kind of period of discernment as P’ang was when we meet him. I was considering entering a monastery.

Why didn’t I do it? Why did I even consider it? Why I considered it is clear, and I’ll get to that in a moment. Why I didn’t do it is less clear to me. Or is still becoming clear to me, even today. So why may P’ang or you or any of us consider taking up monastic life? Well, let me suggest some reasons. This is not an exhaustive list. 

As we experience when we’re here, on sesshin at a monastery, it’s a very structured life. Time is structured. Space is structured. Many of the decisions we must make on a day-to-day basis outside of a monastery are made for us. The forms, the norms, are very clear and regularized. We just follow them. We’re midway through sesshin, and we’re kind of in that groove now. What do we gain from that? What does it afford us?

All these forms are designed to support us in a particular way; to support our spiritual development, or what we might imagine to be spiritual development. They take away certain types of burdens from us. The burden of making a decision. The burden of endlessly negotiating things with others. They resolve conflicts in advance, if you will. There’s a Chinese proverb that I think is interesting: Like minds make peace. When we align our minds around a set of norms or behaviors, it tends to unify us and makes peace in a sense. 

What does this word “spiritual” mean anyway? Well, etymologically, it’s associated with breath. We can get metaphorical about that; the breath of God, breath of life. But it’s also about basic, physiological breath. Lots of words related to “spiritual” are really interesting too, like aspire. It’s no coincidence that in Zen practice, and lots of other spiritual practices, we focus on or regulate our breath in certain ways. In Zen practice, we just learn to breathe naturally.

These norms and routines in an environment like this make it easier just to live naturally in every way, including physiologically. To catch our breath. To breathe in a steady way. Steady breathing slows our heart rate; settles or calms our nervous system. That helps us find a kind of still point, and this tends to make it easier to to show up with ease and harmony—as we’ve been chanting about. If we can meet life that way, things tend to go better, and we tend to tune in to the frequency of life; to what life is always trying to offer us.

These are some of the opportunities that the structures and rhythms of monastic life offer. I think many of us come to a place like this, observe monastic life, and think of it as very rigorous and otherwise hard. But I want to turn that notion on its head. Many of us initially experience these sort of routines—the rigor and the forms— as hard and probably novice monks experience things that way. But from the perspective of a seasoned practitioner—and I know this from talking to people who have spent their whole life in a monastery, like my teacher, Kevin Hunt, who has been a monastic since his late teens and now is 93–one ultimately comes to experience that life as easier. It’s designed to remove challenges and burdens of life outside the monastery. I think it’s fair to say that Kevin sees life outside the monastery as harder.

Kevin’s Dharma heirs and those of his teacher, the Jesuit Bob Kennedy, are mostly householders. They have told me they see the kind of life we live as where the real action is at in this era. The future of practice. And in fact, Bob’s teacher, Bernie Glassman, who trained with Maezumi Roshi in more of a monastic model, eventually gave up the pretense of monasticism entirely to begin to tinker with and pioneer a new way of approaching and thinking about Zen practice that was more focused on householder life. I know from talking to people familiar with his thinking that Maezumi Roshi thought and dreamed about that, too, but felt constrained by the old norms and the expectations of the Soto authorities back in Japan. He felt constrained from taking any bold steps in that direction. Bernie waited until after Maezumi Roshi’s death to begin to take those steps.

So Why enter a monastery? Why consider entering a monastery? Well, maybe there are better and worse reasons for doing it. And maybe some of the worst reasons are, in a sense, inevitable for many who do enter a monastery. I think a lot of people probably enter to escape. And some likely enter because they imagine that, to be spiritual, to be holy, they need to do this. That it somehow will make them more spiritual or make them more holy.

Kevin’s example is interesting. I think he represents the best reason to enter a monastery. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be as close to God as he could be, and, for him, that meant living a monastic life. His orientation is theistic; an interesting brand of theism that is married with Zen. It was about intimacy from his perspective. His karma was such that monastic life was how he could feel closest to God.

I want to suggest—and I hope—that Layman P’ang chose not to shave his head to join the sangha out of a similar impulse. I sense he made the same kind of decision Kevin made, having explored these different options for living a whole bunch. I don’t know whether the Ten Ox Herding Pictures existed yet. Regardless, I think he understood that ultimate image of returning to the marketplace with empty hands. Somebody, you know, “in the world,” as we say, living life intimately.

So what’s lost when we enter a monastery? Well, certain types of freedom and choices. These days, Kevin really loves to leave the monastery. He usually wants to go to a restaurant and have a piece of red meat, which is served less in the monastery. He might even have a beer or a martini, not a common occurrence in his life generally. Most of us in this part of the world, who are insanely fortunate compared to most humans, almost have the opposite problem. We must make the choice not to over-indulge. Kevin is part of the Trappist order, which is the most hardcore of the monastic orders. People have very few possessions; they take a vow poverty. There are certain pleasurable experiences we take for granted that they don’t have.

Of course, something is gained by that. They strip away what is not essential, so they discover simple pleasure—like we have right here, now, if we notice the gentle breeze blowing through the Zendo. They experience how incredibly sweet a mandarin orange is if we’re not comparing it to sugar cookies and sodas. With our constant access to amplified pleasure, novelty is lost. We get to have new experiences all the time. Surprising new experiences; experiences that come out of the blue. Of course that happens in monasteries, too. It’s always happening everywhere, but we might not notice it if we’re compulsively seeking novelty and peak experiences all the time.

Our settling practices can help us encounter every moment as new. You’ve heard me say Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” got it completely wrong. I say you can’t step in the same river once. Everything’s always in flux and changing. Our settling practices can help us notice that experience and appreciate the novelty and the newness of every moment.

But there are some types of newness, like the concert I’ll see in October with one of my new favorite bands, that monastics probably aren’t going to have. Key relationships: they don’t have free access to family and friends. They don’t speak to them as regularly. They certainly don’t text with them 14 times a day, as we’re used to doing. 

What else is lost? Certain types of impact potential. This is what I think Kevin and Bob are getting at; why they think the kind of life we live is really where the action is today. It must be sort of hard at times to sit in a monastery with so much suffering in the world and only be able to pray; only be able to interact with the people who come visit. We have much more opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to intervene, as we’re called, and as we skillfully can, in situations where we can be helpful.

The last thing I’ll mention—and, again, this is not an exhaustive list—that you’re giving up by becoming a monatstic is many important training opportunities. As householders, we train amid intimate relationships with partners and family members. We train in a torrent of choice and change that they don’t experience. Their physical needs are met. They brew beer or make chocolates to help subsidize their material needs, but, in general, they can’t be fired from a job, and they mostly don’t have to deal with demands of unreasonable clients and bosses. They don’t have to meet those circumstances as practice opportunities as we do. All this is why many of them would say the life we live is a harder life. They mean it’s harder to practice amid all that. They know we have the same aspiration; the same breath, the same spirit—at least those of us who occasionally visit places like this and strike up relationships with people like them.

They know they have something to offer us, but we also, they see, have something to offer them. They know we’re seeking what they’re seeking; what brought them to the monastery. And they recognize that it is harder, in a way, to walk this path, in our form of life than it is in their life form, whatever they might have thought about that when they entered the monastery.

Let me offer a little metaphor here that may be useful. What we’re doing in spiritual practice is a lot like surfing, as I understand it. Things are impermanent, always changing. Life, our experience, has a visible form, like the form of a wave, but don’t think that wave is stable or substantial. It’s ephemeral and it’s moving. What the expert surfer does is amazing, when you think about it. They learn to ride, to find their balance on top of, the crest of that wave. What they’re doing on the crest of that wave is falling a thousand times the second. Always adjusting, recovering to maintain their balance on the crest of impermanence. Getting to the point where you can do that is going to look really choppy. The first time the expert tried to do it, it didn’t look anything like they make it look now.

I think many monastics look at our lives, and they think, “Man, you’re out there in the big waves. Yeah, we’re maintaining our balance here in the monastery, but this is like skimboarding; what we’re doing. We’re in the shallow water. You’re in the deep end, where the big waves are.”

Their practice opportunities, are, in many ways, more manageable than many of ours, at least much of the time. In our householder lives, we are dealing with all sorts of challenges that are, well, genuinely challenging. Relationships are top of mind for me. Relationships with aging parents or aging partners or peers. Relationships with intimate partners whatever our ages. Monastics are intimate with one another, but not quite the same way many of us are intimate with somebody. Another person with whom we literally lie naked, and with whom we are naked spiritually and psychologically. That’s an extreme level of vulnerability. It’s as hard to manage as some of us might think maintaining silence all day long, every day of the year, is hard to manage.

 I mentioned work and having to deal with material reality and money and scarcity and abundance. Things are kept very level for them in a material sense. My family went through a period of economic vulnerability when I was in high school and early college. I didn’t know it at the time, because my parents insulated us from the details pretty well, but we had just $300 to our name as a family at one point. I am certain my parents, with three children, were worried in ways that monks seldom worry.

We also contend with difference more than monastics do. Different norms, expectations, perspectives, worldviews, moral codes. We just confront more difference than they do. People bring these things to monastic life, but, to some extent, they are normalized or suppressed. You hue to a common moral vision and code that is essentially imposed on you in a monastery. Christian monasteries have the Rule of St. Benedict. Many Buddhist monasteries have some version of the Vinaya. And you reconcile yourself to that somehow.

Also Distractions: I don’t think I need to say more about that.

And the last thing I’ll mention from our long list of greater challenges is risk. We all deal with risks that are more frequent and present and, well, risky. Many people who walk this path, and who might consider entering a monastery, are tuned towards introversion. But outside a monastery, we must meet new people all the time and compel ourselves to venture forth in ways that you just do not in a monastic environment. There are many other forms of risk in our lives: for one of us, who is commuting to this sesshin, driving here early in the morning with lots of people driving too fast on the road; driving away from here at night with poor eyesight. Monks drive, but less frequently.

This isn’t a comparison for purposes of declaring one life form good and another bad. It is a comparison for purposes of noting and being honest about what is different about the life we live and the life that, perhaps, the Buddha and some people in his era and since then have thought people need to live to express the best versions of themselves, leaving home supposedly to grow or meet life fully or seek truth.

I submit that, in this day and age, as we read in that lovely Judith Collin poem, or as Kevin Hunt and Bob Kennedy would say, the major turn of the Dharma wheel is about broadening our sense of sangha to include the kind of life we live. I submit that it is as hard as life here in a monastery; that looking at our lives from this monastic perspective, which we tend to think of as harder, there’s reason to think it is the other way around: that it’s harder to walk the Zen path “in the world,” so to speak.

It may be easier to cultivate attention in an environment like this, but this is not ultimately a practice about attention. It’s a practice about intention and action; about how we show up, how we meet the world. The quality of our attention and the capacity to maintain it is an important condition for consistently meeting the world as our best selves. But a lot of the world lies beyond the four walls of a place like this. And the rest of the world needs what has historically and traditionally been cultivated primarily in places like this to be brought beyond these four walls and out into the world.

That’s why we’re here for a time, ironically. To realize this more fully. That’s who we are. That’s why we’ll leave here on Saturday.