One Time, One Meeting

John Daido Loori

In his poem “New Hampshire” (1923), Robert Frost broods on the meaning of a place name. Listing the names of small towns in that state, he pauses at the name Still Corners, remarking that the town is “so called not because / The place is silent all day long, nor yet / Because it boasts a whisky still—because / It set out once to be a city and still / Is only corners, cross-roads in a wood.” Whether Frost is pulling the reader’s leg, as he was known to do, or is making a serious point about stunted growth, his riff calls attention to the suggestive ambiguity in the name he’s elected to contemplate.

A kindred ambiguity surrounds the phrase “the still point,” which Frost’s contemporary T.S. Eliot brought into prominence in his poem “Burnt Norton” (1936). In that expansive meditation on “time present and time past,” Eliot alludes to “the still point of the turning world,” a coinage that has since found its way into the mainstream of English discourse. At least three American wellness centers are known as The Still Point, and the British writer Amy Sackville chose the phrase as the title of her debut novel, identifying the “still point” with the North Pole. More pertinently for Zen practitioners, John Daido Loori (1931-2009), founder and abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery, invoked the phrase for his book Finding the Still Point, a basic manual on Zen meditation. For Loori, finding that point was an essential component of Zen practice, if not its central aim.

Broadly speaking, the “still point” might be defined as the state of mind we experience when we have stopped rushing into the future: when we have come to rest in the present moment. Loori notes that “every other creature on the face of the earth seems to know how to be quiet and still. A butterfly on a leaf; a cat in front of a fireplace; even a hummingbird comes to rest sometimes.” By contrast, “humans are constantly on the go. We seem to have lost the ability to be quiet, to simply be present in the stillness that is the foundation of our lives.” The practice of Zen meditation is, among other things, an eminently practical way of recovering that ability.

Yet, as Eliot observed, and as Loori clearly implies, the still point is more than a stopping point from which to observe the “turning world.” It is also the “foundation of our lives.” From the still point, Loori writes, comes “all the activity of your life.” More lyrically, Eliot reminds us that “at the still point, there the dance is . . . . Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” Those who practice yoga, tai chi and other meditative arts endeavor, as a common motto has it, to “find stillness in movement, and movement in stillness.” For if the still point is the antithesis of movement, it is also its core: the axis upon which the “turning world” revolves.

“The zendo is a place of stillness and silence!” barked the jikijitsu (head monk) at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, the Rinzai Zen monastery where I was undergoing Zen training. It was 5:00 in the morning. A group of us were sitting in our robes, practicing zazen (seated meditation) in the darkened zendo. One of us (it wasn’t I) had rustled his robe and loudly cleared his throat, and the noise had echoed throughout the hall. In keeping with his role as disciplinarian, the jikijitsu uttered his stern reminder.

By so doing, he called attention to another dimension of the still point, namely the complete cessation of sound. The still point is not only a place of rest; it is also a place of silence, external and internal. When we have established ourselves in that place, our interior chatter may diminish or disappear altogether. But even if that inner noise remains, we experience it against a background of prevailing silence. Just as stillness is the core of movement, so is silence the foundation of sound. And, having grounded ourselves in that foundation, we can learn to observe and eventually to release ourselves from our inner monologues, our fixed ideas and our most corrosive notions.

For Daido Loori, the still point had a physical location: the region just below the navel, known in Zen as the hara. But whether or not we concentrate on the hara during meditation, as Loori recommends, the most auspicious conditions for “finding the still point” are those created and sustained by a daily meditative practice. The zendo is indeed a place of stillness and silence, but the still point can be found wherever one practices, be it a zendo, one’s bedroom, or a busy airport. As Loori notes, “Reaching the still point is not something unusual or esoteric.” But it is “a very important part of being alive.”

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John Daido Loori, Finding the Still Point (Shambhala, 2020), 5-6, 24.