One Time, One Meeting

One afternoon in August I waded into the ocean at Dewey Beach, Delaware. Under the hot sun, the waist-high breakers crashed against me. To steady myself, I adopted a T’ai Chi stance, keeping my center of gravity low. Wading just behind me was my wife, Robin, who is sometimes quite excitable.

“Oh, my God!” Robin exclaimed.

Thinking that she had seen something unusual on the beach—a three-legged dog, perhaps—I  looked over my shoulder. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back in the water, looking up at the blue sky. A mighty wave had struck me down.

However startling, my experience was not uncommon. Nor is it unusual, in these times, for people who thought they were on a steady footing to be knocked flat by an unexpected force, whether the mighty wave take the form of a lost job, a foreclosed home, or a frightening diagnosis. When such things happen, of what use is the practice of Zen?

If you have tried meditation and found it foreign or difficult or boring, your answer might well be “very little.” But as a longtime practitioner, I would suggest three ways in which Zen and other forms of meditation can help us cope with adversity.

First and most obvious, meditation steadies the mind. That is particularly true of the concentrative forms of meditation, which include concentration on the breath, an image, or a mantra. Even a few minutes of concentrative meditation can leave the practitioner feeling calmer, steadier, and more in control. The effect may be temporary, but over time this form of meditation, diligently practiced, engenders stability of mind. In Zen teachings, meditative stability is likened to that of a mountain, which remains immovable in all kinds of weather.

Beyond the cultivation of stability, meditative practice tends to promote a realistic outlook. Having trained ourselves, day after day, in seeing the impermanence of all conditioned things, we are not so surprised when something that appeared to be permanent proves otherwise. Having learned to be present without expectations, we are better prepared for the unexpected.  And having cultivated an openness to all experience, pleasant and painful, we can deal more realistically with the latter when it comes our way. So it was with Darlene Cohen, the author of several books on living with chronic pain, who had practiced Zen for six years before she was diagnosed with crippling rheumatoid arthritis. “I turned toward the disease,” she explains, “and its impact on my body/mind as a mindfulness practice”.*

In keeping with the realism that daily practice encourages, Zen meditation can also help us see that what occurs is often not so personal as it first appears. In a well-known Zen story, a man is rowing his boat on a lake when a fog sets in. He continues to row, maintaining his course as best he can. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, another vessel crashes into his. Furious, he curses. “You fool!” he yells into the fog. “Look what you’ve done to my new boat!” But moments later, he discovers that the other boat is empty. What happened simply happened.

The point of that story is not that we have no responsibility for the damage we cause or incur. We do. But what the story illustrates—and what meditative practice teaches—is that much of our suffering is self-inflicted. We cannot always control what happens to us, but through continuing practice we can recognize the role that egoistic delusion plays in our responses. It is enough to have one’s brand-new boat damaged by another. To assume, reflexively, that the circumstances were personal only adds to one’s distress.

In my own case, a mighty wave struck me down, not because Providence, Fate, or some other force had singled me out, but because I was in a certain place at a certain time, and I wasn’t paying attention. As it happened, I was listening to my wife, which under most other circumstances would have been a good thing to do.

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*Quoted in Buddhadharma (Fall 2009), 47