100 Churchy

By the beginning of March of my first year, six months since my meditation classes, I considered myself a regular at the temple and I settled into a routine that with only minor variations continued for five years. At home I sat forty minutes, cutting back from an hour to fifty minutes and then to forty each day, usually the first thing in the morning on work days and at various times of the day in the summer when I was not teaching; and depending on weather, job, and family I also incorporated a fast five-mile walk both meditation and exercise. My regular household chores I considered mindful work practice, the grocery shopping, the dishes, the laundry, the lawn in the summer, the sidewalks and driveway in the winter. At the temple every Tuesday I served as doan for evening zazen. Once a month on the evening of the Wednesday nearest the full moon I participated in the precept ceremony, Ryaku Fusatsu, and every Sunday morning each week I attended regular morning activities, often serving as jisha, shoten, doan, or zazen instructor for new people, and eventually even as ino, the chant leader, during Ryaku Fusatsu. Each year I also participated in most of the scheduled one-day and two-day sesshins and in most of the special two-hour dharma study classes that the master offered on four or five consecutive Saturday mornings during each of the two annual practice periods at the temple. In addition I continued to volunteer for temple jobs. From one to two hours a week I vacuumed the temple mats and cushions, I dusted and swept, I wiped down floors with a damp cloth, I cleaned the two bathrooms, I cleaned the four large and the six small altars, I sifted the remains of charcoal and incense from the koros, I took care of the flowers and the bouquets, and I worked in the office. I was elected to the board of directors and in my fourth and fifth years I was elected vice president, a position thankfully without duties. On Mondays, the master's day off, the temple was closed, but at least one week a month it was not unusual for me to be at the temple for one thing or another on every day but Monday—on Tuesday evening, zazen; on Wednesday evening, the precept ceremony; on Thursday afternoon, my temple job; on Friday morning or evening, zazen; on Saturday morning, dharma study or sesshin; and on Sunday morning, frequently from 8:00 to noon and after, zazen, service, dharma talk, practice group meeting, coffee and conversation. My involvement at the temple and with the master had in a very short time become a big part of my life.

My wife was amused.

"Zen is perfect for you," she told me.

I smiled.

But she had set me up.

"You're obsessive compulsive, you're anal retentive, and you like to sit and do nothing."

I laughed.

There was just enough truth in her observation that I told the master what she had said.

"Tell her that I am none of those things," the master responded, "and that Zen is perfect for me, too."

When my practice and temple commitments interfered with our family and our social life, Ruth was annoyed. Frequently in front of me and our friends, half serious, half teasing, Ruth complained.

"Bob has gotten all churchy on me."

Hmm.

Her jab both tickled and hurt and I would smile in confusion and chagrin. Suddenly having all this religion in my life surprised and embarrassed even me. I had put it out of my life at eighteen and out of my life it had stayed for forty years. I would have bet my life that religion would never play a part in my life again.

Little had I known.

"I don't understand what you get out of it," my wife often told me.

I hardly knew myself.

In 1975 I had experienced a profound inner transformation within three months of my first studying and then seriously trying to apply to my life the principles and practices of Buddhism as I understood them from the books and tapes of Stephen Gaskin and from the example of my friend John and—though I had sat and lain down and walked in my efforts at meditation—it was foremost the practice of honesty and trying always to tell the truth that had unlocked and then opened for me the door of perception; later it was my commitment to the principle of nonviolence that permitted me to pass through and to enter a nameless realm of wonder, awe, and joy. For one full year I had played and explored like an innocent child before ordinary life returned to me and I to it. Then for twenty-five years I had struggled to understand what I was supposed to make of my experience and to do with it. Buddhism, its masters all seemed to agree, is above all the practice of meditation. On my own I had tried, but not until my friend Billy encouraged me to find a teacher and I met the master had I found rest. My sitting zazen had plugged in my bucket a leak I'd not even known I had, or so it felt, and now I loved zazen, and at the temple I liked all the people I met.

I liked the master.