One Time, One Meeting

Not so long ago, the journalist Michael Crowley, who was covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the New Republic, reported a conversation with the “makeup artist” in charge of preparing the candidates for the debates. Was Hillary a basket case, he asked, in those final moments before she went on? On the contrary, the makeup artist replied. “Sitting in the makeup chair seems to be one of the few moments of zenlike peace the candidates ever get.”*

Of all the images projected by the current presidential race, the spectacle of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the others sitting in “zenlike peace” in their makeup chairs is one of the more diverting. Yet if that image highlights a certain absurdity in the present campaign, it also reflects a popular view of Zen meditation. According to this view, to sit in zazen is to abide in perfect peace, untroubled by such things as one’s perilous standing in the polls. In the serene mind of the Zen practitioner, such worrisome thoughts—and thoughts in general—have ceased to exist, leaving a space as blank as an unmarked ballot.

Prevalent though they are, such perceptions of Zen attainment have little to do with the daily practice of Zen meditation. To be sure, Zen masters through the centuries have described the state of satori, in which ordinary, dualistic consciousness dissolves, and self and world become one. But as the modern Zen master Kosho Uchiyama warns us in his book Opening the Hand of Thought, “to think that people become great by doing zazen, or to think that you are going to gain satori, is to be sadly misled by your own illusion.”** For the aim of Zen practice is not to attain a state of continuous bliss or permanent contentment. Rather, it is to cultivate a clear and open awareness, within which transitory mental states, however calm or vexed, are recognized for what they are.

When practicing zazen, we adopt a stable, upright posture, aligning ourselves with the earth’s gravitational force. We settle into stillness, and we rest in awareness. Within that sky-like awareness, thoughts arrive and depart, as if they were passing clouds. Some are luminous and wispy, others dense and dark. But if we remain in awareness and do not pursue them, our thought-clouds leave as readily as they came. Uchiyama calls this process “opening the hand of thought,” and he describes it in this way:

When we let go of our conceptions, there is no other possible reality than what is right now. . . Dwelling here and now in this reality, letting go of all the accidental things that arise in our minds, is what I mean by “opening the hand of thought.” ***

Uchiyama contrasts this state of open awareness with our usual state of mind, in which we grasp at the objects of our thoughts, fashioning scenarios to suit our needs.