185 Correspondents

At the end of the month I received an email from Ivan. He was trying to understand why we did sesshin and he thought I might be able to help. Ivan had attended the most recent sesshin only on Saturday; altogether he had participated in the sum total of three one-day sesshins. For Ivan sesshin seemed an endurance contest. In sesshin he felt groggy much of the time struggling just to stay awake. He could not sit as long at one stretch, he said, as he could when he sat just an evening at the temple. Ivan suspected that over the long haul there would be a price to pay in pain and damage to his knees and legs. To sit fifteen hours seemed forever, Ivan complained, yet he knew that sesshin was a fundamental part of the practice; and the master had told Ivan that he needed to sit a two-day or three-day sesshin.

"Why do you sit sesshin?" Ivan asked.

Even just asking this question might betray some gaining idea on his part, Ivan conceded, but the question still came up for him anyway and he said he would appreciate any help I could give him.

"Why do you sit sesshin?"

I responded at length and I began with the statement I had heard the master make several times.

"Monastic practice is like putting a snake into a bamboo stick," he said.

Dramatic pause.

Then—

"When it gets out it feels really free!"

The purpose of sesshin is to force a confrontation with your own mind. Everything is strictly scheduled and organized. You can't talk, you can't write, you can't read, you can't listen to music, you can't watch television, you can't play cards, you can't entertain yourself, you can't nap, you can't complain, you can't do your own thing, and you can't run away. There is only one correct way to do everything. There is a right way to sit, to stand, to walk, to breathe, to eat, to chant, to bow, to position a mat, to fluff a cushion, to part a curtain, to approach an altar, to offer incense, to extinguish a candle. You are trapped in the silence with your own mind and with ten or twenty other people each trapped in the silence with their own minds and you are supposed to live and to eat and to work and to practice with them in harmony.

Zen.

I was certain that Ivan was familiar with the effect of all of this on the individual.

The ego comes up quickly front and center and it whispers into the ear anything it can think of to free itself from this rigid discipline. It is what the mind does when we try to quit drinking or to quit smoking or to diet or just for an hour every day to exercise. The mind can and it will invent an infinity of logical and convincing good reasons, each supported by incontrovertible evidence, why we should be doing something else, why we should in fact be doing anything else but what we are supposed to be doing at sesshin, which is one thing only.

To be present and to be fully present in the present every moment moment by moment.

Yet what we feel is resistance and more resistance and then still more resistance and more still.

Me!

That's what I felt in sesshin.

What about—

Me!

I had been to enough of them that I no longer felt anxiety so resistance arose for me now as boredom and fatigue because from sesshin there is no escape. It is hard to be watched all of the time, to be expected to be awake all of the time, to be all of the time fully present and awake and alert.

Vigilant.

It's like trying to stay up all night only harder.

Ivan had missed the informal concluding discussion on Sunday when Dean and Irene and the master and I had all mentioned our drowsiness. Dean, Irene, and the master said they had even fallen asleep.

Yes.

They had "sat" and slept.

But no matter what comes up the practice is to let it go, to return to the breath, and to follow the breath.

To sit.

For me, I explained, sesshin is a letting go of everything.

Surrender.

Past, future, family, job, plan, agenda, obligation, salvation, everything.

Death practice.

Renunciation.

Of course all kinds of life demands do not want to permit me to do that and they continually arise and as I sit they try to pull me up and away but I just keep letting go, letting go.

Letting go.

This is the practice as I understand it.

It is the same as sitting at home but it is a lot easier obviously to give up everything and let go for just an hour a day than for an entire day or two days or for the seven days of Rohatsu.

Eventually, though, it becomes clear to me that the only thing I can do is give up and just sit.

"I take care of my knees as best I can," I said.

Indeed.

Nananda's knees and the master's were shot. Neither now could sit or do full bows as they once had.

To baby my knees—I had one bad one—I used both hands to help me get down and get back up in full prostrations and I walked kinhin at any time I felt concern about the pain in my legs. I had not forgotten the tremble and pain I suffered for over a month in my bad knee when I tried for just four days to perform full prostrations—without my hands to steady myself—as Eleanor had once demonstrated for us at the request of the master.

I told Ivan:

"Don't feel embarrassed about sitting in a chair if you need it."

I liked sitting half-lotus very much and I would miss it if I had to give it up but, hey, if it happened I would just have to give up my attachment to it.

I had gone to my first sesshin because I was curious.

I did not enjoy it.

Then I participated in more sesshins only because it was obvious that participation in them was expected of all serious students and I considered myself a serious student. I did not understand sesshin but I did not think understanding it was the point, really, just as conceptual understanding is not the point in most of the rote and ritual activities of Zen—oryoki, chanting, bowing, walking, sitting. Zen is a body practice, a breath practice, practice in letting go, practice in confronting, studying, and knowing the self, knowing no self, practice in trusting the teacher—the hardest one for me—and practice in priority.

From one point of view it is a game.

Pretend.

The master could at any time if he wanted just break it off and end it and tell us all to go home.

"Out!"

From one point of view nothing we do at sesshin has any real importance whatsoever.

From another point of view everything we do, the tiniest detail, carries immense significance.

Meaning!

But only because we impute meaning and importance to it. It is both utterly meaningless and ultimately meaningful at one and the same time. Buddhism resembles existentialism. Seeing that happen and experiencing it—the transformation from the meaningful to the meaningless and back again—shows us what we do every day in ordinary life. We make little things big and we make big things little. We turn life upside down and inside out.

From within the bleak universe of atheistic Existentialism I had walked through the door named Nothing and discovered on the other side nontheistic Buddhism and its mystic and radiant alternate universe.

Tao.

Ho.

To Ivan I apologized.

"This is the first time I've tried to articulate this."

I hoped I had helped.

What the master would say of sesshin I could guess.

"Just do it!"

From the recent sesshin for me there lingered more memory.

In mid-afternoon of the first day of the sesshin I had noticed that Ellen was experiencing difficulty. I thought it was physical pain. More than once Ellen seemed to be crying and on several occasions Eleanor, senior ino, had tried to console her and offered instruction that might help—or so I inferred. The sesshin had been her first and, like Ivan, Ellen had attended only the first day. For a year Ellen had attended almost every Sunday morning and in the spring and summer she often volunteered to weed the flower gardens around the temple. When I arrived to prepare the zendo for evening zazen in the master's absence I often found her alone in the yard pulling weeds from the flowerbeds with her fingers and knuckles and stuffing the weeds into a brown paper bag. I had been much impressed. Ellen was absent from the temple for weeks after the sesshin and I did not see her again until we met by accident one evening after the college graduation ceremony. Ellen and I spoke only briefly at graduation but when I got home I sent her a short email to say how pleased I had been to see her and that I was both concerned and curious about her absence from Heartmind.

In her reply Ellen said she missed the temple, missed sitting, missed the dharma talks, and missed the sangha. Ellen said she thought she was beginning to understand the Three Refuges.

"Without the practice," Ellen explained, "I feel as though someone has changed the counterweights of my internal clockwork. Its parts are still moving but they do not keep time."

When she thought about Heartmind, Ellen said, she knew that a large part of her "missing it" was simply attachment. But her regret for the hole that practice left in her life she believed was valid.

"In everything else I have loved and in everyone else I have loved there is attachment."

I understood.

"Zen is such a demanding practice!" she explained. "It seems all-encompassing."

Indeed.

"I am not sure I am up to that."

Her issues with sesshin were mental and emotional.

"Not physical."

Ellen did not feel ready to deal with them.

"Sesshin is extremely disturbing to me and I don't really know why," she confessed.

Ellen could not force the issue, she said, and she knew that it would take some time before she was ready to consider another sesshin. Yet like Ivan she knew that sesshin was central to Zen.

If she avoided sesshin, Ellen asked herself, was she truly practicing?

It seemed not.

If her teacher wanted her to sit sesshin, Ellen wondered, how could she say no?

"But am I to follow a teacher blindly?"

No.

I could say it.

Ellen wondered if she could ever reconcile herself to such a difficult practice.

Not just sesshin—

Zen itself.

She was still Buddhist, Ellen insisted.

The precepts were framed and stood on a countertop in her apartment so she could see them several times a day but Ellen felt she needed to explore other schools. She had come first to Heartmind because it had seemed her only option.

That I understood.

There were things about practice that she truly loved, Ellen said.

Perhaps one day she would return to it.

"With things like this I move like a glacier," Ellen said.

To her that seemed all right.

"After all," Ellen asked, "how do you rush Zen?"

But life is short, she added, and it gets shorter by the day. Going into a week's sesshin, removing herself from the world to learn how to be in the here and now seemed to her counterproductive. Cloistered convents and sesshins made perfect sense, Ellen explained, if you were a contemplative.

"But," said Ellen, "I'm not a contemplative."

Zen practice helped her to see the world, and herself, and herself within the world, in a frame much more—Ellen said she struggled to find the right word—livable, bearable, fruitful.

"That's all the enlightenment I want," she said.

Yes.

I understood.

"That's probably all I can handle," she added.

Ellen had not yet figured out how to fit sesshin into her practice but she did expect to come back to practice at Heartmind though she was not sure when or how often. Ellen felt grateful, she said, and she thanked me for giving her what she called "this opening." It was difficult enough to talk about such things even within the sangha, Ellen explained, and almost impossible with her friends who were Christian.

Understood.

I knew Ivan would not mind if I forwarded to Ellen what I had written to him of sesshin.

So I did.

I added a personal note.

The master says sesshin is hard because it is hard to sit up straight and to stand up straight and to be constantly watched by a teacher and by other students who know that "getting straight"—as we hippies and would-be hippies said in the late '60s and early '70s—is what we have solemnly vowed to do; we fail and people see us fail, people we love and respect, and they fail, too, and we see them fail, and we see even the master fail, so we have to face who we are, really, who we really are, and what we are, and to accept who and what we really are, and we must surrender to this reality and let it go and start fresh and new and keep right on going.

Forward.

It's just practice, just "me," no big deal.

Right?

Uh—

Or is it huge?

"I dunno," I confessed. "I just sit and let all this rise and dissolve and rise and dissolve again."

Zen.

I reminded Ellen of the commencement we had attended.

Dull.

"Sitting for three hours in that mob last night?"

Uff da!

"Now that was hard sitting!"

Ellen sounded good and I thought Ellen was doing good.

I told her so.

I did not even consider the possibility that my correspondence like this with Ivan and Ellen might be wrong.

It never entered my mind.

For thirty years I had offered this kind of encouragement. The Way had rescued me, I was a true believer, and my learning from the master how to sit and, our conflict notwithstanding, my four and a half years of practice at Heartmind had helped me. I was not able to say exactly how and why it had helped me.

But it had.

In just six short months, however, I would learn from the master the term "triangulation," I would be accused by the master of "malicious gossip" and of "poisoning" the sangha, the master would terminate our relationship, he would expel me from the temple, at a meeting of the board of directors to which the master had made it clear to me that I was not welcome the master would publicly charge me with gross violation of the precepts, and to make my excommunication complete the master would delete my name from the temple email recipient list.

Jesus!

But in the middle of May 2006 of all this I had not an inkling.

None.