Zen Buddhism used to weird me out. I longed for the perceived minimalism and contemplation, but Zen also felt barren and inhuman, both passive and far too demanding.

Still, I kept encountering it. When searching for a motivator beyond self-flagellation, Zen cropped up. When talking with my philosophically and spiritually minded friends, they gently nudged me toward it. And even a short survey of buddhism suggested that out of the different schools, Zen was definitely the best fit for my personality.

So I actually reading about Zen, and restarted basic zazen (sitting meditation). I studied Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, Takuan Soho’s The Unfettered Mind, Dogen Zenji and Uchiyama Roshi’s How To Cook Your Life, and Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen and Nothing Special.

As was predictable, my aversion mostly dissolved when confronted with the actual teaching of Zen, instead of memeified tropes. My friends were correct: Zen was what I needed, the right stretching for my stage of life.

At the risk of “reeking of Zen”, that is talking too much about Zen instead of practicing it, I’d like to share my confusions, how they got dissolved, and how the Zen teachings actually helped me.

Observing To Live

My deepest error about Zen was about attitude.

When I had meditated before, I had endeavored to distance myself from my thoughts and emotions. That helped me for a time. But it eventually felt like a crutch keeping me separated from life, not a way to the good life.

Similarly, the vague pictures of Zen floating in my mind suggested hiding from the world, even if physically in the middle of the world. Keeping at bay pain and misery but also joy and beauty, and simply being non-emotional, non-committed, completely inside oneself.

Which not only sounded boring as hell, but also clashed with my desire to be helpful to the world in some way. I have not spent all my waking hours helping everyone, but I’ve consistently tried to work on problems that matter to the world at large, instead of pure academic nerd-snipes.

So Zen suggested the caricature of Epicureanism drawn by Seneca to puff up the Stoics: “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency.’ Zeno says: ‘He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him.’”

But then, I read Zen. Watts emphasized that Zen was not meant as a buddhism only for full-time priests: it was intended as a buddhism for everyone, including people who had little time to retire in contemplation.

Other Zen practitoners applied Zen to concrete activities, finding enlightenment through them: Takuan Soho wrote about martial arts, and Dogen Zenji wrote about cooking for the monastery (the role of tenzo).

I was still blocked on my distaste for the expected result of Zen, especially the detachment, when I finally studied Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. That did it:

All practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in zazen but in every moment of our life. As we sit we grasp that our conceptual thought process is a fantasy; and the more we grasp this the more our ability to pay attention to reality increases.

[…]

Zen practice is to see through our desire to cling to our history and to reasons (thoughts) for why we are as we are, instead of working with the reality of what we are.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989)

I’ll come back to this distinction later, but the point is to observe your judgements or conceptual thoughts about life (“I need this”, “They attacked me”, “I will never be that”), not life itself.

What Zen promises is that through strengthening your ability to observe your added thoughts and judgements, they eventually wither away. And when they do, you are free to just experience what is in front of you. You play with your little brother instead of wondering if you sound wise enough. You appreciate the sunset instead of worrying about how many you’ll still experience. You do the work instead of railing against its demeaning nature.

Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose. Zen is about a life of action, not a life of passively doing nothing. But our actions must be based on reality. When our actions are based on our false thought systems (which are based on our conditioning), they are poorly based. When we have seen through the thought systems we can see what needs to be done.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989)

Thinking Allowed

Another of my misgiving about Zen concerned thinking: I had the impression that Zen was deeply anti-intellectual. Zen masters seemed to spent their whole day sitting without doing anything, and doing chores the rest of the time.

As an intellectual who values the life of the mind, this hardly sounded like the good life.

Sure, I have benefited from getting out of my head and doing practical things, from chores to hikes. But denying all thinking and intellectuality sounded like obliteration at the altar of enlightenment.

This mistake was cleared right away, by the first Zen text I read, Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. Watts explained that that no-thought did not mean not thinking at all; it meant not blocking, not sprinkling meta ego-driven thoughts on top of whatever you were doing (including thinking).

But reflection is also action, and Yün-men might also have said, "In acting, just act. In thinking, just think. Above all, don't wobble." In other words, if one is going to reflect, just reflect — but do not reflect about reflecting. Yet Zen would agree that reflection about reflection is also action-provided that in doing it we do just that, and do not tend to drift off into the infinite regression of trying always to stand above or outside the level upon which we are acting. Thus Zen is also a liberation from the dualism of thought and action, for it thinks as it acts — with the same quality of abandon, commitment, or faith. The attitude of wu-hsin is by no means an anti-intellectualist exclusion of thinking. Wu-hsin is action on any level whatsoever, physical or psychic, without trying at the same moment to observe and check the action from outside.

[…]

“Blocking” is perhaps the best translation of the Zen term nien as it occurs in the phrase wu-nien, “no-thought” or, better, “no second thought.” Takuan points out that this is the real meaning of “attachment” in Buddhism, as when it is said that a Buddha is free from worldly attachments. It does not mean that he is a "stone Buddha" with no feelings, no emotions, and no sensations of hunger or pain. It means that he does not block at anything. Thus it is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself. It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

(Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1957)

This frame is analogous to the Stoic separation between perception and judgement. For the Stoics, first you feel the sensation in your body, then you add verbal and conceptual judgement on top of it.

For example, when my wife tells me “Remember to put the washing liquid when doing the laundry”, I might add the judgement that “She thinks I’m stupid/incompetent”, and then feel offended. The Stoic point is that the offense sprouts from my judgements, not from the mere sensation.

Similarly, the kind of thoughts that Zen endeavors to dissolve are “second-thoughts” or “conceptual thoughts”, judgements about who we are, what we want, what we need. You can even say that Zen is partially about taming thought, so that it does not run wild, constantly judging and tangling itself in self-centered thoughts.

So reading deeply or thinking about a complex problem is a good use of thinking. the problem appears when adding the worry about being educated enough, or the hope that solving the research problem will unlock respectability.

No-Self Includes You

Even if thinking was ok, I still felt queasy about the oft-repeated point that there was no self, no I. I could understand the value of reining in the Ego, of not making everything about I. But obviously, I have talents (abstract combinatorial thinking), interests (reading weird academic books about random subjects), preferences steeped in history (liking McDonalds in part because my Dad brought me there every Sunday as a kid).

Zen sounded against all of this. Worse, it sounded like it wanted to destroy all of this. When I vaguely glanced at Zen masters, they seemed without personality or passion, merely dedicated to exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.

I kept this confusion until I studied Charlotte Joko Beck. It turns out, my error was a classic one: duality was still hidden in my reasoning.

Zen tells us that the separation between me and the world is mostly fictious, invented. We take porous boundaries like our skin, and we erect them into barriers. We split ourselves from the stream of the world, and desperately try to protect that small diminutive self.

We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life. In flowing forward, a river or stream may hit rocks, branches, or irregularities in the ground, causing whirlpools to spring up spontaneously here and there. Water entering one whirlpool quickly passes through and rejoins the river, eventually joining another whirlpool and moving on. Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself. The stability of a whirlpool is only temporary. The energy of the river of life forms living things—a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants—then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the whirlpool is swept away, reentering the larger flow. The energy that was a particular whirlpool fades out and the water passes on, perhaps to be caught again and turned for a moment into another whirlpool.

[…] However, we want to think that this little whirlpool that we are isn’t part of the stream. We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. Our whole energy goes into trying to protect our supposed separateness. To protect the separateness, we set up artificial, fixed boundaries; as a consequence, we accumulate excess baggage, stuff that slips into our whirlpool and can’t flow out again. So things clog up our whirlpool and the process gets messy. The stream needs to flow naturally and freely. If our particular whirlpool is all bogged down, we also impair the energy of the stream itself. It can’t go anywhere. Neighboring whirlpools may get less water because of our frantic holding on. […] When it gets all clogged up, we create troubles—mental, physical, spiritual.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special, 1993)

When you realize, even passingly, that the separation between you and the world, duality disappears. But that does not mean that you become “everything but I”. This is keeping duality under another guise, only replacing me-centeredness with world-centered.

No, I am obviously part of the world too. So these preferences and histories and all that makes me me, are part of the world, and not to be crushed or ignored or destroyed, even by enlightenment.

The mental move, as far as I have understood and experienced it, is far more subtle: flowing from oneself without grasping onto oneself. It’s reading my academic books without being proud of reading difficult books or feeling guilty about reading obscure books. Once again, it’s mostly about dissolving the second-thoughts that maintain the separation, and flowing.

Shoulds Are Also Illusions

I encountered Zen repeatedly because I had burnedout. After a sabbatical and a lot of reflection, I eventually realized that my tendency to whip myself to do thing was a major factor in my self-destruction. So I endeavored to unclench, to stop relying on shame and self-violence, and instead to find another path.

Zen seemed about unclenching. But at the same time it had the strong smell of discipline, and almost the reek of shoulds.

Once again, this confusion was cleared by studying actual Zen. Joko Beck is particularly emphatic that shoulds are just as much about escaping reality, and so not the answer.

To move from being selfish and greedy to trying not to be that way is like taking down all the drab and ugly pictures in your room and putting up pretty pictures. But if that room is a prison cell, you’ve changed the decorations and they look a little better; but still the freedom you want isn’t there; you’re still imprisoned in the same room. Changing the pictures on the wall from greed, anger, and ignorance into ideals (that we should not be greedy, angry, or ignorant) improves the decoration, perhaps—but leaves us without freedom.

I’m reminded of an old story about a king who wanted the wisest man among his subjects to be his prime minister. When the search finally was narrowed to three men the king put them to a supreme test: he placed them in a room in his palace and installed an ingenious lock in the door. The candidates were told that the first person to open the door would be appointed prime minister. So two of them started to work out complicated mathematical formulas to discover the proper lock combination. But the third man just sat in his chair for a time—and then, without bothering to put pen to paper, he got up, walked to the door, and turned the knob—and the door opened. It had been unlocked the whole time. What is the point of that story? The prison cell we live in, whose walls we are frantically redecorating, is not a prison cell. In fact the door has never been locked. There is no lock. We don’t need to sit in our cells and struggle for freedom by frantically trying to change ourselves—because we are already free.

Merely to say this doesn’t solve the problem for us, of course. How can we realize this fact of freedom? We’ve said that being selfish and having a desire to be unselfish are both based on fear. Even the desire to be wise, to be perfect, is based on fear. We wouldn’t chase the desire if we saw that we were already free. So our practice always comes back to the same thing: how to see more clearly, how not to go down blind alleys, such as that of trying to be unselfish. Instead of going from unconscious selfishness to conscious unselfishness, what we need to do is to see the foolishness of the second stage—or, if we play around in it, at least to be aware that we are do. […]

[…]

So our practice is about making fear conscious, instead of running around inside our cell of fear, trying to make it look better and feel better. All of our efforts in life are these escaping endeavors: we try to escape the suffering, escape the pain of what we are. Even feeling guilty is an escape. The truth of any moment is always being just as we are. And that means to experience our unkindness when we are unkind. We don’t like to do that. We like to think of ourselves as kind people. But often we’re not.

When we experience ourselves as we are, then out of that death of the ego, out of that withering, the flower blooms. On a withered tree, the flower blooms — a wonderful line from Shoyo Roku. A flower blooms, not on a decorated tree, but on a withered tree. When we back away from our ideals and investigate them by being the witness, then we back into what we are, which is the intelligence of life itself.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989)

Replacing my usual shoulds with the shoulds of meditation was never going to help. Instead, Zen encouraged me to deconstruct the shoulds, to see through them and their unreality. And in doing so, to realize that I never really needed the shoulds anyway. I could just do the thing.

Don’t Search For Yourself

Which brings us to my last confusion. This one was not about Zen; it was about life.

You see, when I was around 13, I realized I was going to die. So I decided to find what to do with my life, and to excel at it. I’ve spent much of the following 20 years desperately searching for who I truly was, and what I needed to do.

Thankfully, I also acted and learned and put myself into situations where I had to do stuff, not just worry about my true self all day long. But the questions kept recurring, and any professional commitment eventually felt stifling, a trap against my true, yet undiscovered vocation.

Joko Beck got me out of my deadlock, by showing me that I had trapped myself in an impossible situation. She acknowledged and praised living according to oneself, to one’s life. Yet at the same time, she kept reminding me that you don’t find that life by conceptualizing it. You find that life by pouring yourself into it, and growing like a plant grows, without reflecting on it.

People want a mechanism for making decisions, for solving problems. There can be no fixed mechanism. But if we know more and more who we are, out of that we will make our decision.

[…]

So when something in our life looks insoluble, it means that we think that there’s a problem out there that we look at as an object, like a grapefruit. We have not viewed that problem as ourself. And one way to get a problem to change into a decision is to sit with it, doing zazen. […] If I feel completely muddled it isn’t that there’s a problem that I have to find some way to solve; I just don’t know who I am in connection with that problem.

[…]

We have to know for ourselves what is central. Then we know how much is appropriate to do. Of course this knowledge of who we are is always fragmentary, incomplete, even elementary. Nevertheless as we practice, more and more, life isn’t about problems or complaints.

[…]

The knowledge of what needs to be done slowly clarifies with practice. And decisions become just decisions, not heart-rending problems.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989)

I personally took a long time to start to get it, so I want to restate the intuition differently. The point is not to not be yourself, it’s to not worry about being yourself. It’s to fully embrace what is your life right now, what is your reality right now, and what the combination of you and your reality suggest as the next action. Then you just do that.

Let’s say that you have a lot of ideas, and you like to share them. Then you might sit down and start to draft a blogpost. In that action, in playing out your life, you are expressing that true self more than if you attempted to figure it out rationally for hours and hours.

And that’s not just true of artistic creation. In fully getting into your work, or your relationships, or your reading, you become yourself, unaware of the growth. That’s true of your triumphs and your disasters. That’s true of everything that is your life.

Then you might look up one day, and be astonished at where you arrived. Just like the golfer that was so focused on the process, on the moment to moment action, that he didn’t even realized he had won the championship until his wife jumped to meet him on the green.

After what, if you are true to the practice, you will just get back to acting, letting the growing take care of itself.

We never grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or by remembering past feats. We grow by being where we are and experiencing what our life is right now. We must experience our anger, our sorrow, our failure, our apprehension; they can all be our teachers, when we do not separate ourselves from them. When we escape from what is given, we cannot learn, we cannot grow. That’s not hard to understand, just hard to do. Those who persist, however, will be those who will grow in understanding and compassion.

(Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, 1989)