The end of moral superiority?

Jeff

 

It’s getting harder and harder to be a self-righteous curmudgeon.

 

For years I’ve congratulated myself on being physically active – getting regular exercise and standing, rather than sitting, at work – and been mildly, privately critical of those who let themselves go entirely.

 

Mountains of data confirm that our bodies evolved to move and that the sedentary lifestyle so prevalent in, and, increasingly, beyond, the west is sapping our personal health and vitality.  (The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, and Live Longer by Gretchen Reynolds, the fitness writer at The New York Times, provides a very good, very accessible survey of the research, if you’re interested.)  The body is a temple, after all.  Treating it like a clothes rack will be the ruin of our healthcare systems, and so our economies.

 

Turns out there’s a genetic component to liking exercise:  there’s a gene that influences how we respond to fatigue, and one that affects how easy and rewarding exercises feels, and one that influences how the body regulates energy.  Etc.

 

It’s still quite possible to acquire the taste.  Once you do, you won’t want to stop.  The problem is, starting is harder for people whose genes don’t predispose them to enjoy, or at least better tolerate, the work required to become and remain fit.

 

I don’t know whether I have any of these “exercise genes,” but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I do.  Regardless, the exercise gene notion has bucked me right off my high horse.

 

There is, of course, at least a partial genetic component to many forms of addiction, from alcoholism to overeating.  I suppose that makes it hard for one to be too snooty about being moderate.

 

There’s no single gene for anything, as Richard Dawkins, the famous biologist and atheist, rightly reminds us, but genes apparently have a big influence on many of one’s dispositions and behaviors.

 

Here’s one that completely blows me away:  our genes significantly influence whether we are conservative or liberal!  You heard it:  that idiot, _____________ [Obama or Romney, Maddow or Limbaugh], may view the world the way he or she does at least partially because of his or her genetic makeup.  Same with you, oh you-who-fills-in-blanks.

 

A handful of important values undergird our social landscape, each of which has an opposite: caring/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.  Conservatives actually are tuned to give each of the positive values their due, whereas liberals tend to pay heed mostly to just two of them (caring and fairness).

 

(As for me, I’ve long been center-left – a compassionate moderate, if I do say so myself – and so I feel well justified in continuing to feel better than the remaining 94% of us – that’s 47% + 47% – who are hopeless ideologues.)

 

I learned about the genetic basis of our morals while reading a fabulous new book by my favorite social scientist, Jonathan Haidt, whose academic research on the psychology of morality I’ve tracked for 15+ years.  It’s called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

 

Haidt actually is pretty convinced that moral righteousness isn’t going away anytime soon, and he successfully (in my non-expert estimation) shows how it’s essential to our survival to this point in history and our continuing evolution.  He recognizes the need for people of different orientations/perspectives to be able to talk to one another civilly and work together productively, and the ultimate goal of his book is to help us do just that.

 

I can’t recommend Haidt’s book highly enough.  It’s easily the most important book I’ve read in, well, since I last declared a book “most important” (which I probably do every few years).  You absolutely must read it.  If want one very open-minded, big-hearted, incredibly creative social scientist’s view of what it is to be evolved members of our interdependent physical and social environments, you’ll be well rewarded for reading this short, engaging, insightful book.

 

And if you don’t read it, there can be no excuse.  You’re clearly an apathetic misanthrope.

 

There’s surely no genetic profile for that, is there?  🙂

 

“Look, Ma: No hands!”: Technique and No Technique in Zazen

Jeff

 

We just removed the training wheels from my son’s bike.  He’s still more than a bit wobbly, but he’s making progress.

 

For many reasons, learning to ride a bike is a terrible analogy for learning to mediate.  Among other problems, it suggests that there are those who are proficient at it, and those who are not; that there are novices and adepts.

 

Our son is an expert at wobbly bike riding.  His wobbly bike riding is perfect just as it is.

 

And, yet, his bike riding form is changing, and changing in a way we recognize as progress, as part of a natural progression in bike riding.  His training wheel-free bike riding likely will become less wobbly; or, rather, the wobbles will become less pronounced.  His instinctive recovery from an endless string of little wobbles will be almost imperceptible to him and to others, and he’ll recover more easily from the less frequent, bigger wobbles.

 

(Except when he doesn’t.)

 

Meditation practice tends to follow a progression, as well.  In our little branch of the Zen family, those new to meditation practice are encouraged initially to use one’s breath as a sort of stabilizing device.

 

The basic instruction for meditation practice, as James Ford is fond of saying, is simply to “sit down, shut up, and pay attention.”  Doing that for 25 minutes can be surprisingly difficult as one takes up this practice.

 

Paying attention suggests paying attention to something, and, for most of us, ordinary “paying attention mode” tends to require a focal point something.  A something we attempt to attend to continuously, or at least that we return to when we feel our attention has drifted.

 

I pay attention to the ball in soccer.

 

I pay attention to the words on the page as I read.

 

I pay attention to you when we’re conversing.

 

Enter the breath in early meditation practice.  We’re not encouraged to concentrate on it, to dissect and discern all its subtle features, but it serves as a point of reference to which we can return when we seem to be drifting away from other features of our experience.

 

(In some Buddhist traditions, one attends to one’s posture, or to the rising and falling of one’s diaphragm with the breath, or to something different still.  Same idea.)

 

Initially, we invite people to count each breath gently until one has counted to ten, and then to repeat.  One might then count only in-breaths for some number of months, and then switch to out-breaths.

 

Eventually one drops the counting altogether.  We’re invited to give up this attentiveness to one’s breath entirely, and not to fill in the blank with some other reference point.

 

To push the bike riding analogy a bit further before exhausting its usefulness, we might think of this transition not as dropping the training wheels, but as letting go of the handlebar.  Letting go of the handlebar, we’re no longer capable of steering toward or away from something with the same decisiveness and agility.  Bike riding becomes a less directed experience, in which we’re more vulnerable to what may come, even if we feel a paradoxical sense of stability poised upright on the seat.

 

Shikintaza, or “just sitting,” as this later approach to meditation is known, is the practice to which one typically progresses within BoWZ and some other Zen streams.  One way to think of it is as meditation without the steering mechanism – or, better yet, meditation without a preference for steering or not steering.

 

Shikintaza is not a technique.  Oh, I suppose there are elements of technique in this practice, but the technique is very spare, and very practical.

 

As with counting-the-breath practice, one sits in a stable position (normally on a meditation cushion, though a chair also is fine, as is standing).  One remains reasonably still.  Eyes are open – mainly so we’re not closing that window on the world, as closing ourselves to the world is the antithesis of what we’re doing in meditation – but one doesn’t look around.

 

That’s pretty much it for technique.

 

So, what if one’s mind drifts while “just sitting”?

 

Well, for starters, now we know we’re human.

 

But, what should one do about it?

 

There’s no need to do anything.  We’re not seeking any particular experience in shikintaza – certainly not an experience of “25 minutes in which my mind doesn’t wander,” as if that were possible, and not even some experience of “not seeking any particular experience.”

 

Noticing our attention was “there” and now it’s “here,” we don’t bring ourselves back to anywhere or anything in particular.  The noticing, and whatever follows it, and whatever follows that:  that’s it.

 

The rain falls.

 

The baby cries.

 

The mind wanders.

 

Life.

 

Here is all there is.  Here isn’t some void we need to fill in anxiously.  (The void is full, in case one hasn’t noticed.)  Even when we’re in “fill in anxiously mode,” we don’t need to overwrite that.

 

Shikintaza, just sitting, is simply being here, now.  Our breath is part of what’s here now, but we don’t privilege it in shikintaza.

 

Shikintaza is simply letting one’s experience be its own reference point – trusting this, wobbles and all.

 

There are wobbles after we let go of the handlebars.

 

And even the wobbles are rock solid.

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

Jeff

Rilke, Rumi, cummings, Mary Oliver . . .

So many poems are wonderful teishos.

I’ve been reading poetry to Carys, our four-year old, at bedtime lately.

Rediscovering poems I loved as a child.

Like this one by e.e. cummings:

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

 

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

 

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

 

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

 

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

 

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find at the sea

 

 

Mourning the loss of a master of the middle way

Jeff

 

We have lost a true master of the middle way — not of meditation (as far as I know), but of mediation.

 

I am incredibly fortunate to have known and learned from Roger.  He was one of a small handful of people who inspired me to devote two graduate degree programs (one at Harvard Divinity School and the other at Harvard Law School) to the study of conflict resolution.  When I began teaching in the field at the law school, I first co-taught with Roger.

 

Roger was wise, gracious, and incredibly big-hearted.  He had an irrepressibly positive, “can do” orientation that enabled him to walk into many of the most desperate situations of his era and help create an aire of possibility that, more often than not, made the seemingly impossible happen.

 

Roger was a generous mentor to scores of younger people who are carrying on his work around the world.

 

Thank you, Roger.

 

Roger D. Fisher, Expert at ‘Getting to Yes,’ Dies at 90

 

Harvard Law School Prof. Roger D. Fisher often told his students, “Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises.”

 

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

 

Published: August 27, 2012

 

Roger D. Fisher, a Harvard law professor who was a co-author of the 1981 best seller “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In” and whose expertise in resolving conflicts led to a role in drafting the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel and in ending apartheid in South Africa, died on Saturday in Hanover, N.H. He was 90.

 

The cause was complications of dementia, his son Elliott said.

 

Over his career, Professor Fisher eagerly brought his optimistic can-do brand of problem solving to a broad array of conflicts across the globe, from the hostage crisis in Iran to the civil war in El Salvador. His emphasis was always on addressing the mutual interests of the disputing parties instead of what separated them. As he would tell his students, “Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises.”

 

It did not matter to Professor Fisher whether the warring parties reached out to him or not; he would assume they needed his help. “Most of the time he was not invited. He would invite himself,” Elliott Fisher said. “Our sense growing up was that he would read the newspaper and think, ‘Oh, shoot, there is something to fix.’ ”

 

For example, when a rebel group took hostages at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1997, his son recalled, Professor Fisher found a way to contact the president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, and gave him suggestions for how to dampen the sense of crisis, including restoration of the power and water in the embassy. This strategy won the freedom of the majority of the hostages. In the end, however, Peruvian forces stormed the embassy, killing all 14 of the rebels and rescuing all but one of the 72 remaining hostages.

 

Professor Fisher is credited with helping initiate the summit meeting between the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan in 1985, convincing Reagan staff members that just meeting to brainstorm and build relations was more important than settling a specific agenda.

 

In 1979, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance went to Professor Fisher’s house on Martha’s Vineyard before the meeting at Camp David that would lead to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. Professor Fisher suggested to Mr. Vance the “single negotiating text” method that was used to bring the parties together, said Bruce M. Patton, who wrote “Getting to Yes” with Professor Fisher and worked on many diplomatic projects with him. The strategy involved having President Jimmy Carter alone be responsible for writing solutions and letting the other leaders shape the treaty through a back-and-forth critiquing process.

 

In 1991 in South Africa, Professor Fisher and former students led workshops with both the Afrikaner cabinet and the African National Congress negotiating committee leading into talks to end apartheid and to establish a new constitution.

 

His upbeat approach to some of the world’s most intractable problems led some critics to assert that he was unrealistic. But Mr. Patton said Professor Fisher recognized and relished the “complexity and irrationality” of the situations he addressed.

 

Although Professor Fisher mostly worked behind the scenes, he did create and moderate a series on public television called “The Advocates.” A court-style program that took on one policy issue at a time and examined it in detail from different perspectives, it ran for several years on PBS and won a Peabody Award.

 

“Getting to Yes,” which he wrote with Mr. Patton and William Ury, has sold millions of copies and been translated into 36 languages, and has been used by leaders in business and government. Professor Fisher also wrote other books and co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, which teaches conflict resolution skills to students and to international parties in the midst of a dispute.

 

Roger Dummer Fisher was born May 28, 1922, in Winnetka, Ill. His mother, Katharine Dummer Fisher, had relatives who had ridden the law circuit with Abraham Lincoln; his father, William T. Fisher, a lawyer, was the son of Walter L. Fisher, secretary of the interior in the Taft administration.

 

On the eve of World War II, Professor Fisher attended Harvard University. Upon graduating he volunteered for the Army, where he served from 1942 to 1946 doing weather reconnaissance in both the North Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Four of his eight college roommates died in combat; that, as well as seeing the aftermath of battle, persuaded him to dedicate his life to helping avoid war.

 

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1948, he served on the Marshall Plan staff and as assistant to the solicitor general in the Eisenhower administration before joining the Harvard law faculty in 1960.

 

In addition to his son Elliott, Professor Fisher is survived by another son, Peter; two brothers, John and Frank; and five grandchildren. His wife of 62 years, the former Caroline Speer, died two years ago.

 

Professor Fisher stayed active in advising diplomats until about seven years ago, when illness made him too weak. His constant advocacy was a force many of his friends found comforting.

 

His family recalled that when Professor Fisher celebrated his 80th birthday, his colleague John Kenneth Galbraith toasted him by saying, “Whenever I thought, ‘Someone should do something about this,’ it eased my conscience to learn that Roger was already working on it.”

 

A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Roger D. Fisher, Expert at ‘Getting to Yes,’ Dies at 90.

 

Zen metaphysics

Jeff

 

This koan (case 29 in The Blue Cliff Record) comes about as close to expressing a Zen metaphysics as anything I’ve seen or heard:

 

A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly destroyed in the kalpa fire—I wonder whether this perishes or not.”

“This perishes,” said Dasui.

“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other?”

“It follows the other,” said Dasui.

 

Enough said.

Bowing Down to Pick Up Stones: A Reflection on Torei Enji’s “Bodhisattva’s Vow”

Jeff

 

This post is an approximation of a Dharma talk I gave tonight at the Greater Boston Zen Center.

 

I’d like to hold up and offer a few thoughts about a short passage from Torei Enji’s Bodhisattva’s Vow, a beautiful text that’s sometimes part of our liturgy.

 

Before I get there, let me say a bit about Torei Enji.  The reason for this mini biography will be clear in just a moment.

 

Enji was an 18th century Zen teacher. When he was just five, he met Hakuin, one of the most important Zen teachers of all time.  Among other things, Hakuin revived koan practice within the Rinzai tradition, and so contributed significantly to our own koan tradition.

 

Upon meeting Hakuin, Torei Enji resolved to become a monk.  It took a couple more years for him to convince his parents, so he was perhaps seven when he entered Hakuin’s monestary.  He eventually became its abbot, after Hakuin died.

 

Torei Enji’s Bodhisattva’s Vow includes this short passage:

 

“If someone turns against us, speaking ill of us and treating us bitterly, it’s best to bow down:  This is the Buddha appearing to us, finding ways to free us from our own attachments — the very ones that have made us suffer, again and again and again. ”

 

When I was five or six, about the age Enji was when he met Hakuin, my aunt Pat gave me a small cloth pouch full of polished stones.

 

Perhaps less dramatically, but still not altogether unlike Enji’s first encounter with Hakuin, this little offering was a signal event in my life.

 

I was fascinated by these stones; absolutely rapt by their rounded edges, brilliant colors, and high gloss finish.  They were the most unusual, beautiful objects I had ever seen.

 

I loved playing in the dirt when I was a kid, but these stones bore little resemblance to the stones I knew.  Most of the stones I’d seen had jagged edges, with dull finishes and colors.

 

Where did these stones come from? Pat brought me to her basement and showed me the little tumbler where, perhaps a month earlier, she had added a batch of the ordinary stones with which I was familiar, a few handfuls of sand, and a copious amount of water, and then flipped the power switch to start the cylinder turning day and night.

 

For weeks the stones collided, the sand agitated, the water lubricated and washed clean.  And those lackluster, ordinary stones became the exceptionally smooth, luminous objects that I found so captivating as a child.

 

Today I have a collection of small and mid-size stones that I’ve gathered from rivers and beaches around the world. I have stones from Maine and Rhode Island, from Oregon, from Greece, and elsewhere.  They sit in little glass containers or serve as paper weights around my office and home.  They’re among my most cherished possessions.

 

None of the stones I’ve collected are as smooth or shiny as the rocks Pat tumbled for me.  These days I’m more interested in the features of rocks that have been hewn by their normal environments.  I’m interested in their extraordinary ordinary features.

 

I selected each stone carefully in some special place.  Each is interesting to me for some quality it has:

 

It’s shape.  Some stones are quite angular; some are incredibly symmetrical; some are almost cylindrical.

 

It’s texture.  Certain larger, reddish stones on Block Island are a nearly-perfect oval shape, yet their surface is quite coarse.

 

It’s mass.  Small stones can be quite heavy, large ones quite light.

 

It’s color — or colors. Some are white as clouds, and almost glow from inside. Stones come in almost every shade of gray.

 

Veins within the stone.  My favorite stone so far is small and dark grey, is rounded and sort of triangular at the same time, and has a single brown ring around the circumference of one point.

 

What fascinated and inspired me about Pat’s stones, and what fascinates and inspires me about the stones I see everywhere today, as an adult, is the fact that all of these stones — each unique — is the product of countless meetings.

 

Of collisions.

 

Of friction.

 

Just like each of us.

 

Torei Enjei writes about our most challenging encounters and reminds us of their value.  They’re grist for our mills, for our tumblers.

 

Some of my most challenging encounters have come in the context of my most intimate relationships, including family relationships, like my relationship with my parents.  The depth of the love in these relationships can be so palpable, so solid and unquestionable, yet there also can be tension, perhaps because we live in such close quarters physically and/or psychologically.

 

(I imagine this sounds familiar, at least to some of you.)

 

My parents just spent two and a half weeks with us.  Extended visits in the recent past occasionally have had some stressful moments, in part because of some personal challenges some members of our family have faced in recent years, and the ways in which we’ve found it challenging, individually and collectively, to deal with this.  Normal life stuff, to be sure — and challenging, to be sure.

 

I wanted this visit to go well, but I was a bit anxious.  I was determined to keep an even keel if there were tension, working with and through it, and yet I knew how that can be hard for all concerned, including me.  There were any number of ways tension could arise — any number of potential triggers.

 

Like discussion of politics.  It’s funny how some topics, like politics or whatever, can be proxies for other topics, how they can be vehicles for circling around the heart of the matter.

 

As we entered the house after I picked my folks up from the airport, my parents walked through each room, observing what had changed since their last visit.

 

My dad noticed an Obama campaign poster hanging in one room — Shepard Fairey’s large “Vote” print.  “Oh, no, here we go,” I thought in a flash.

 

I saw my dad grimace, tilt his head slightly, and then seem to begin to speak.

 

And then something wonderful happened:  silence.  He just moved on.

 

I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

And there was no mention of politics during their entire visit.

 

We had a lovely time together.  Sure, there were little moments, but they really were little.  There were mostly lots of really pleasant moments.

 

I’d like to think we’ve each learned something from past moments of tension.  My dad and I sometimes have banged heads metaphorically since I was a kid, and I think some of our rough edges are becoming smoother as a result.

 

Incidentally, during my parents’ recent visit, my wife, Esther, and I were musing about parents generally.  Esther walked past our seven-year old son after this exchange and playfully said to him, “You can’t choose your parents, Ellis.”

 

To which Ellis replied, “Yeah, and you can’t even choose yourself!”

 

What a wonderfully disarming thought.  Many of us spend a great deal of time judging others by our own idiosyncratic standards.  We might also judge ourselves against some cosmic standard of perfection we’ve inherited or constructed.

 

But we are all products of conditions, and many of the conditions that influence who we are now preceded our birth.

 

We’ve each certainly made countless choices since our births, and those choices and their consequences are now part of our karma — the past conditions that influence the conditions of our present.  We can “choose ourselves” to a meaningful degree in this moment, and yet we’re always playing the hand dealt by prior moments.  Our capacity to influence the course of events large and small, great as it sometimes is for some of us, is doubtless less great than some of us often imagine.

 

Perhaps mindfulness of this can help us all be more gentle with ourselves and with others.

 

Encounters that are painful, where we feel misunderstood, judged unfairly, even maliciously attacked — they sometimes can be great teachers.

 

People’s behavior toward me often can provide clues about where my own rough edges lie.

 

Hard as it can be to accept, this can be the Buddha appearing to me, finding ways to bring my blind spots into view; or to make me own up to and work to transform those shortcomings or forms of selfishness or inclinations toward indifference of which I’m aware, but which I’d rather not address.  The very ones that have made me — and others — suffer again and again and again.

 

And sometimes they also provide opportunities to see others’ rough edges and to respond skillfully in ways that respect the fundamental dignity of all concerned, including oneself.  They can be invitations to some form of constructive engagement about what I know is not right, much as I might prefer to avoid conflict — to avoid any type of engagement that creates the risk of more uncomfortable feelings.

 

One way to read Torei Enji’s guidance that “it’s best to bow down” is that we should be passive, avoid confrontation, let it slide.  Letting it slide often is a good response, perhaps particularly for those of us with a tendency to fight fire with fire.

 

But I hear Enji saying something more nuanced: that it’s best to bow to this moment that has presented itself, just as it has presented itself, much the way we bow reverently here in the zendo.

 

Or the way we bow to pick up a stone.

 

It’s best to recognize these challenging moments as something precious, as gifts, as opportunities to respond creatively and skillfully — hard as that can be, particularly in the moment.

 

Each moment, including the very challenging ones, is a vast ocean of meetings.

 

Of fragmentation.

 

Of combining.

 

Of friction.

 

And of possibility.

 

And polishing.

 

There’s nothing to polish, and therefore no polishing, from one perspective, of course.

 

And, yet, in an equally valid sense, the to-and-fro of daily contact provides constant grist for our individual and collective mills.

 

In and through the rough and tumble of life — and regardless of whether one has smooth edges or jagged edges, a glossy finish or a dull one — we can’t help but shine like those stones my aunt Pat gave me.

 

The real question for each of us is whether we’ll open our eyes, open our hearts and minds, open our arms and hands, to that reality.

 

Sesshin

Jeff

 

I didn’t attend Boundless Way Zen’s weeklong sesshin this year.  It ended today.

 

I found myself “participating” sympathetically throughout the week, sometimes almost telepathically.

 

I was really missing our sesshin-attending sagha-mates at Tuesday night’s sit at the Greater Boston Zen Center.  My legs became strangely tight and painful, much like they would after days on retreat, and not at all like I normally experience after 20+ years of 1-2 25-minute sits most days.

 

Sitting at home during the week, I sometimes felt like I was sitting in the zendo at the Boundless Way Temple, where our sesshins occur.

 

Lying in bed one night, I could almost hear the day’s closing chants, which end with this stark, ghostly reminder of how precious this life-time is:

 

“Let me respectfully remind you: Life and death are of supreme importance.  Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.  Each of us should strive to awaken… awaken!  Take heed!  Do not squander your life.”

 

Long sesshins are wonderful.  I have benefitted immensely over the years from the many week+ retreats I’ve attended — intensive practice periods, during which one sits and meets with teachers from early morning until late at night.  I look forward to attending more of them in the future.

 

And extended, leisurely periods of time with family and friends, or with oneself, also are wonderful.  For many Zen practitioners, and perhaps mainly for those of us with younger children and/or spouses who are not Zen practitioners (sympathetic, like my wife, though they may be), devoting a full week to sesshin each year can be a real challenge.

 

Most people still in the workforce have limited vacation time, and vacations may need to be coordinated with school schedules and a spouse’s schedule.  Even if one can arrange time for sesshin, a week at a Zen retreat may mean a week of family vacation lost.

 

This is my current reality.  We have school-age kids.  I have missed a week of family vacation time for the past several years by attending our weeklong sesshin.  My family is truly supportive of my Zen practice, and yet this just feels like too much.  It certainly feels like a huge loss from my perspective, even though I know there’s much to be gained from intensive periods of practice.

 

One of the big projects inherent in Zen’s migration west — one of the big opportunities we’re presented — is about adaptation of the traditional forms and practices to this new context-era.  Numerous features distinguish this new context-era from those in which the traditional forms and practices evolved, but perhaps none is more prevalent and salient than the relative leveling of lay life/practice and the path of priestly and/or monastic life/practice.

 

This leveling has many causes and many implications.  It is bound up with other progressive trends, like democratization and increasing gender equality, in ways that make them impossible to separate entirely.

 

The practice of sesshin developed in context-eras in which there were sharp distinctions between the laity and monastics, whether they be lifelong monks or young men spending some months or some small number of years in a monastery as a rite of passage.

 

And these monks were mostly childless men.  If the monastic life was their permanent vocation, it was their livelihood, their work.  They begged and contributed to the institution’s other income producing endeavors throughout their lives.  If they were passing through, they begged and contributed to those same endeavors while they were there, knowing they would eventually return to lay (and likely family) life and some form of work less conducive to spending weeks or months on a cushion all day.

 

Fast forward to today . . .

 

On the one hand, a week isn’t a long period of time, particularly compared to the month+ retreats that are common in many Asian monasteries, even still.

 

On the other hand, see above.

 

From one perspective, perhaps there is something to be said for making a stoic effort to attend longer retreats, despite family and work obligations and opportunities, but I’m not much moved by that perspective.

 

These sorts of discussions and thoughtful experimentation are happening within BoWZ, and I’m very excited to be part of this organization and this project.  In addition to our annual weeklong sesshins, we have several shorter sesshins each year and numerous daylong intensives.

 

The weeklong (or longer) retreats truly are wonderful.  For some, “shifts happen” in these longer, intensive periods of practice, and perhaps would be less likely to happen for them in another context.  Bonds develop.

 

And, I must say, in recent years I have found my most profound shifts happening, and my most transformative bonds developing, within the context of family life.  Of course, Zen practice, including the weeklong sesshins I’ve attended, has been hugely supportive of this.  That’s the point, as BoWZ’s teachers continually remind us.

 

One of the really exciting and heartening things about this BoWZ project is the community’s recognition that Zen practice needs to work in the context of people’s ordinary lives.  Indeed, that Zen is our ordinary lives.

 

And, yet, there is a tradition that we have received, and that tradition transmits to us a treasure trove of forms and practices that people have found powerfully useful for awakening to the full richness of this ordinary life.  The adaptation/experimentation project is tricky.

 

It’s important not to cling slavishly to traditional forms, holding up intensive practice — the longer and more frequent and more ardent, the better — as “real Zen.”  And it’s important not to dilute the forms down to nothing.  They’re nothing in one sense, of course, and yet most definitely not nothing.

 

At least until our youngest (who’s now four) goes to college, I suspect my rhythm will be marked by frequent short retreats and daylong sits, and only very occasional long sesshins.  I settled down relatively late in life, and I am fortunate to have participated in many longer retreats before starting a family.

 

Every Zen practitioner should experience longer retreats.  If one feels one benefits from them and can swing it, one definitely should participate in them regularly.  Looking over the arc of my 20+ years of sitting practice, I now see them not as more valuable than other forms of practice, but as differently valuable — and as having been differently valuable particularly at specific points in my own journey.

 

For those who find that hard to do or otherwise legitimately undesirable, however, I’m very interested in seeing us continue to develop adapted forms of intensive and/or extended practice that offer folks some of the immense benefits of longer intensives in more flexible packages.  Not as a substitute for sesshins, but as a complementary sort of opportunity.  The wonderful, much westernized, “drop in and out freely” Ango practice period that’s occurred at the temple (and, simultaneously and by extension, at many of our homes) the past couple of years is a marvelous example of this.

 

I look forward to the time when longer sesshins fit more comfortably into the parameters of my life.  And, in the meantime, I really look forward to those family vacations.

 

And to continuing to be a part of this living, communal project of ours . . .