One Time, One Meeting

During her recent visit, our nine-year-old granddaughter learned to send Morse code. Having found the code in her activity book, she printed it out in her own, precise hand on a 4 x 6” notecard. As it happens, I learned Morse code myself when I was not much older than Allegra is now. Tapping a pencil on our dining-room table, I taught her how to translate the printed dots and dashes of the code into rhythmic patterns of sound. By the end of her stay, she was able to send “I love you, Dad” to her father. And to her grandfather (who was still in his pajamas), “Have a nice shower, Grandpa.”

The ability to transmit Morse code was not the only skill Allegra acquired during her visit. With a little guidance on my part, she also learned to play a C-major scale on her child’s-size classical guitar; to write her full name in longhand with a fountain pen; to deploy multiple metaphors in a lyric poem; to earn a little money by sorting, counting, and wrapping Grandpa’s coins; to feed the wild birds; and even to sit, silent and still, for three minutes (maximum). But, in contrast to these potentially useful skills, the sending of Morse code stood apart, in the respect that it has little or no utilitarian value. For all its importance in world history, as a practical matter Morse code is now next to useless. Her newly acquired skill will not help her compete in high-school sports or gain admission to an elite university or bolster a future resumé.

Much the same might be said of zazen, or seated meditation, the central practice of Zen Buddhism. In fact, it has been said—and by authoritative voices within the Zen tradition. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a foundational text for Zen practitioners, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi employs the phrase “no gaining idea” to characterize both the nature of zazen and a precondition for doing it all. “We say our practice should be without gaining ideas,” writes Suzuki, ”without any expectations, even of enlightenment.” More playfully, the contemporary Soto Zen master Shohaku Okumura Roshi (b. 1948), recalling the words of his teacher Sawaki Kodo Roshi, describes zazen as “good for nothing.”

For practitioners and observers alike, it is important not to misinterpret these bold assertions. As Suzuki Roshi puts it, sitting without a gaining idea “does not mean . . . just to sit without any purpose.” Nor should the statement be taken to mean that you can sit in any which way—in a Barcalounger, for example—and call it zazen. Likewise, to assert that zazen, a practice to which Okumura Roshi has dedicated his life, is “good for nothing” is not to reject that practice or dismiss it as a meaningless ritual. Rather, these provocative statements call our attention to a deeper dimension of the practice.

What these statements are saying, to begin with, is that zazen should not be practiced or understood solely as a means toward an end. Over time, disciplined Zen practice can bring transformative benefits to the practitioner, including clarity of mind, heightened ethical awareness, emotional stability, insight into the nature of reality, and a deeper capacity for empathy and compassion. But to pursue the practice for the sole purpose of reaping those benefits is to engage in what Japanese Zen teachings dismissively call bompu, or merely utilitarian, Zen. And to do so while actually sitting is to undermine the practice entirely.

That is true for two reasons. First, by focusing on goals and expectations while engaging in zazen, we shift our orientation, consciously or unconsciously, from the here and now to some future, unrealized state of mind. Rather than experience the present moment in its totality—the pains in our bodies as well as the deep sense of balance, the noises in the street as well as the sense of inner peace—we expend our energies imagining and expecting a purer and more agreeable state. More crucially, by treating zazen as merely a useful tool, we reinforce the duality, already so pervasive in Western thought, between things as they are and what we would like them to be. By so doing, we distance and deny our present experience. As Thich Nhat Hanh put it, we “miss our appointment with life.”

By contrast, to practice zazen without a “gaining idea” is to cultivate what the contemporary Zen teacher Christian Dillo has called “uncorrected mind,” in which we allow our “experiencing to be exactly what it is at this time.” Rather than reflexively approve, disapprove, or attempt to “correct” our experience, we simply acknowledge it and allow it to be. In this way we can not only free ourselves from excessive thinking, judging, and wishing things were otherwise. We can also open ourselves to the beauties and mysteries of our everyday lives, not the least of them being the wonder of a nine-year-old child discovering a language and the world.

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Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 1970), 41.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Our Appointment with Life (Parallax, 1990).

Christian Dillo, The Path of Aliveness (Shambhala, 2022), 57.