One Time, One Meeting

Shunryu Suzuki

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree,” said Abraham Lincoln, “I would spend four hours sharpening the axe.”

That famous saying is commonly invoked to underscore the value of preparation—or, more precisely, of an attitude of preparedness. Whether we are preparing to cook a meal by chopping onions or preparing for a long drive by checking the air pressure in our tires, preparation is understood to be a necessary part of any serious undertaking. And an attitude of preparedness is regarded as a mark of a mature, responsible person.

All that said, preparation is often seen, consciously or otherwise, as subordinate to the main event. It is what the prep cook does before the chef arrives or what the warm-up band does before the stars take the stage. When I was teaching courses in English literature at Alfred University, I would often spend three hours or more preparing for a fifty-minute class. Yet until I began to practice Zen, I would not have thought of those hours as on a par with the dynamic experience of teaching itself. Essential my preparations may have been, even when teaching a text I had taught many times before, but in the back of my mind I still viewed the time spent locating sources, organizing the discussion, and selecting passages for special attention as mere preparation—the sorbet, as it were, rather than the main course.

Zen teaches otherwise. In his classic text Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi offers concrete instructions for doing zazen, or seated meditation. Focusing on the technique, standard in Soto Zen practice, of swaying from side to side before settling into a period of meditation, he notes that this preparatory protocol, which serves to align the upper body, “is not preparation for practice, or relaxation after practice; it is part of the practice. So we should not do it as if we were preparing for something else.” To a non-practitioner, Suzuki’s point might seem minor, but it has far-reaching implications, not only for committed Zen practitioners but for anyone struggling to cope with the stresses of everyday life.

To begin with, Suzuki Roshi’s admonition implies an attitude of wholeheartedness toward activities easily relegated to inferior status. Zen teachings urge us to go “all in” when practicing zazen: to “combust” ourselves entirely. By so doing, we “burn away” the protective armor of the ego and the corrosive illusion of a separate self. By taking that same attitude toward actions conventionally regarded as secondary, we extend the selfless perspective and the single-minded concentration of zazen into every activity in our daily round.

No less important, by regarding preparation as a part of practice, we train ourselves, in the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, to “live deeply in every moment of our lives.” Rather than practice a kind of attentional triage, in which we apportion our regard in accordance with its object’s perceived importance, we welcome into our field of attention those activities that we might otherwise regard as tedious, menial, or distasteful. Routine domestic chores, such as preparing for winter by raking leaves and stacking firewood, become opportunities for contemplative immersion. Rather than distance ourselves from such tasks, we endeavor to become one with them.

To embrace the mundane in this fashion is, in my experience, a way of enjoying as well as enduring ordinary life. Beyond that, it is also a way of cultivating our capacity for gratitude. The act of walking down the sidewalk, for example, may seem unworthy of special notice—until we reflect that for reasons of age, infirmity, or enforced confinement, not everyone is able to do the same. By regarding walking as a practice as well as a means of getting somewhere, we foster gratitude for that ability—and, by extension, for life itself.  This is more than a matter of counting our blessings. It is also a way of seeing our lives as they actually are.

“If you view everything as practice,” declared the 17^th-century Zen master Shido Bunan (1603-1676), “your suffering will disappear.” That is a large-scale claim, and it might best be viewed as an aspiration rather than a reasonable expectation. But, as the Rinzai Zen teacher Meido Moore observes in his book Hidden Zen, by regarding everything as practice, we can learn that there is a “positive, proactive way to face adversity and live with freedom.” Treating even adversity as an occasion for practice, “we may learn to use the situation to forge ourselves and expand our capacities. The situations of life themselves become the dojo, or practice hall.” Conversely, zazen becomes at once a treasured experience in itself and a necessary preparation for meeting the world: a sharpening of the axe before cutting down the tree.

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Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 1970), 53.

Meido Moore, Hidden Zen (Shambhala, 2020), 81.