One Time, One Meeting

Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi, Abbot,
Dai Bosatsu Zendo and the Zen Center of Syracuse

The practice of Zen contemplation, Zen teachings tell us, is the “action of non-action,” grounded in silent awareness. At the same time, the “non-action” of Zen is best described in active verbs. In her essay “What is Zen?” Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi offers this description:

What is Zen? Stop now. Stop trying to get an intellectual lock on something that is vast and boundless, far more than the rational mind can grasp. Just breathe in with full awareness. Taste the breath. Appreciate it fully. Now breathe out, slowly, with equal appreciation. Give it all away; hold onto nothing. Breathe in with gratitude; breathe out with love. Receiving and offering–this is what we are doing each time we inhale and exhale. To do so with conscious awareness, on a regular basis, is the transformative practice we call Zen.

It would be difficult to find a more lucid or concrete description of Zen practice. Follow Shinge Roshi’s instructions, and you will not go wrong. Yet, for all its clarity, this description is at one point ambiguous. “Hold onto nothing,” Shinge Roshi advises. “Give it all away.” But what is the antecedent, a grammarian might inquire, of the pronoun “it”? What, besides our breath, are we giving away?

To begin with, if we are to undertake the practice of Zen in any serious way, we must be willing to examine our ingrained habits of mind, most centrally the habit of intellectualizing our experience. Almost from the cradle we are taught and conditioned to “try to get an intellectual lock” on whatever we encounter: to define, compare, categorize, and analyze our immediate experience. To this process we bring our memory of past experiences, our language (or languages), and our powers of discrimination. For better or worse, we may also bring our fixed ideas, preferences, and expectations, our notions of how things ought to be. All of this is necessary for our survival. By such means we keep our bearings and navigate a complex social reality. Unfortunately, our familiar concepts and our conditioned habits of mind, however useful or productive, can prevent us from being present for what is occurring in the here and now. If we are to meet the present moment on its own terms, and if we aspire to open ourselves to what is “vast and boundless” in human experience, we have first to relinquish our calcified views, our comfortable assumptions, and our habitual patterns of conceptual thought.

Among the views that bind us, none is more prevalent or conducive to suffering than the notion of a separate self. In our culture of individualism, that notion is often taken as axiomatic and reinforced at every turn. We drive, often alone, in separate vehicles; we guard and maintain our private fiefdoms; we celebrate the successful, independent man or woman. In reality, however, we are at once independent and interdependent, autonomous and enmeshed in the dynamic web of life. In Zen teachings, the interdependent self is sometimes likened to a wave on the ocean or a whirlpool in a stream. An impermanent thing-in-itself, it depends upon other selves, which is to say, on other people for its continuing existence. And just as the self is interconnected with other human beings, it is also interdependent with the natural world, of which it is an inextricable part. “Wherever you are,” wrote Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, ” you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars that you see.You are still one with everything.” By renouncing the notion of a separate self, we open ourselves to the realization of this abiding oneness. No longer confined to our separate precincts, we manifest the boundless depth of our true nature.

By cultivating awareness of the impermanence and interdependence–what Zen calls the “emptiness”– of all conditioned things, we also cultivate our innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. “Realization of emptiness,” wrote the Tibetan sage Milarepa (1040-1123), “engenders compassion.” When we practice zazen (seated meditation), regularly and diligently, bringing our hearts as well as our minds to the practice, we are not only giving away our cherished likes and dislikes, our proclivity to judge and discriminate, and our dualistic notion of “self and other”–itself a source of untold suffering. We are also, in the phrase of Zoketsu Norman Fischer Roshi, “training in compassion,” moment by moment, and carrying that training into our daily round. Breathing in, we endeavor to appreciate our precious human lives. In a spirit of gratitude, we gather our energies and our sense of a stable self. Breathing out, we “give it all away,” offering to suffering humanity, near and far, whatever insight we may possess, whatever equanimity we might embody, and whatever help we might provide.

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Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi, “What is Zen?”  Zen Center of Syracuse website.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, quoted by Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Seeds for a Boundless Life (Shambhala, 2015), 34.

Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion (Shambhala, 2013).