One Time, One Meeting

If you have spent much time in a Salvation Army store, you may have heard a peculiar sound.

I heard it one afternoon when I accompanied my wife, Robin, to the Salvation Army Depot in Hornell. As Robin eagerly examined the dresses and blouses, hoping to find something from J. Jill or Eileen Fisher, I cast a desultory look at the polo shirts and tee-shirts, the vests and forlorn tweeds. Finding little to whet my appetite, I turned my attention to the sounds in the store.

What I heard was a low, continuous scraping. Was it a knife being sharpened? A blade removing paint? The sound was metallic, arhythmic, and vaguely abrasive, but it held my attention, in a way that the polo shirts had not. What was I hearing? Was it someone pushing a rusty cart down the aisle?

A few moments later, the answer dawned on me. What I was hearing was the sound of metal hangers—as many as a dozen—being pushed along metal rods, as the shoppers looked for bargains. From time to time the sound would diminish, as someone found a promising item. Then it would pick up again. The more I listened, the more varied and pleasing the sound became. Although it had probably always been there, I had never noticed it before.

Quite possibly I was listening because I had nothing better to do. But to listen to what is occurring, within and without, is an important aspect of Zen training. And to listen without immediately knowing—or trying to know—what one is hearing is itself an instructive practice.

It is natural, of course, to want to name what we hear. Unidentified sounds, particularly loud or sudden sounds, can be disconcerting, as Alfred Hitchcock well understood. When something goes bump in the night, it unnerves us, at least until we discern that it was not an intruder but the snow shovel falling and hitting the deck. Having solved that mystery, we can go back to sleep.

In Zen practice, however, the point is to be awake: to be aware of whatever is going on, moment by moment, and to be intimate with our experience. Our accumulated knowledge, however valuable, can stand in the way of that objective, as can our habits of defining, naming, and comparing. To have a concept of a sound is one thing, to have an experience of that sound another. The concept may give us comfort, but the experience returns us to the reality of our lives.

Waking at six in the morning, we hear the song of a bird. Is it a house wren? A Carolina wren? Some kind of warbler?

Listening again, we drop the effort to know what we are hearing—or to show off our knowledge to ourselves. We enjoy a moment of wonder and pure listening. In the language of Zen, we savor the “suchness” of the song, its transitory presence in the stream of time.

If you have been reading this column, perhaps you have noticed that it sometimes appears across from the Classified Ads. Perhaps this has given you pause.

Zen is a meditative tradition of high purpose and great antiquity. What is a column on Zen doing across from an ad for Happy Jack Skin Balm? (Happy Jack “promotes healing and hair growth on dogs & cats without steroids!”).

Zen is a late flowering of an even older spiritual tradition, whose foundational principles are known as the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. What is a column on Zen doing across from an ad for Brown’s Septic Service? (“Septic tanks pumped. Repairs and installations. . . Visa and MasterCard accepted”).

Zen is concerned with the interdependence of all living beings, the impermanence of all conditioned things, and the suffering caused by a fundamental ignorance of reality. It is especially concerned with the Great Matter of life and death. What is a column on Zen doing across from ads for a floral-pattern love seat priced at $ 350, “I Love Alfred” bumper stickers at $ 1.50 each, and power scooters at “ABSOLUTELY NO COST TO YOU!!”?”

Nothing, one might say. If this column ends up across from the classifieds, it’s because the editor of this paper, who was kind enough to include the column in the first place, had to put it somewhere.

A more accurate answer, however, is that Zen has everything to do with the classifieds—or, more broadly, with the mundane business of daily life. For unless one chooses to renounce our materialistic culture and become a monk or nun, Zen practice must somehow be integrated with a world where cats and dogs develop allergies, septic tanks need be pumped, and love seats are bought and sold.

To be sure, meditative training is traditionally conducted in tranquil surroundings, where the lights are dim and the distractions few. Sitting quietly in the zendo, or perhaps at home in a space reserved for meditation, we settle into stillness. We learn to rest in simple presence, or what Zen calls the clear open sky of awareness. Thoughts cross our minds, but if we do not pursue them, they pass like clouds in the clear open sky. And when our sitting ends, we return to our lives feeling cleansed and refreshed.

Picture, if you will, a horse and rider. The horse is galloping down a road, and the rider is hanging on for dear life.

“Where are you going?”calls a man from the side of the road.

“I don’t know,” answers the rider. “Ask the horse.”

According to Zen teachings, the horse in this story represents the force of habit, or what Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “habit energies.” Whether we’re aware of them or not, those energies drive our lives, even when we’re sleeping. They rush us into the future, and we may feel powerless to stop them. In his poem “Habits” the American poet W.S. Merwin acknowledges as much. “Even in the middle of the night,” he writes of his habits, “They go on handing me around.”*

I suspect that most of us are familiar with that experience. In my own case, I recall a Saturday afternoon when I found myself heading toward Wegman’s, though I was supposed to be driving to the Valu Home Center to buy some paint. My horse was a Honda Accord, but the pattern was much the same.

Habits may be pleasant, healthful, and productive. They may also protect us, or comfort us during a crisis. But habits of mind can dull our sensibilities and distort our perceptions of other people. And in the arts, they can harden into stylistic tics and conceptual cliches, impeding the creative spirit. Perhaps that is why Nadia Boulanger, the legendary teacher and composer, once declared that she loved tradition but despised habit.

In Zen practice we do not despise habit or consign it to a mental perdition. We do not try to transcend it. Rather, we sit still, cultivating an awareness of our breath, our bodies, our changing mental states. Over time, we may notice that certain patterns of thought and feeling arise again and again. We acknowledge their presence, as we might acknowledge bits of songs that come and go.”Hello, habit energies,” says Thich Nhat Hanh to his own.

This is a simple but potent practice, and as it deepens, we may find that the force of our habits diminishes proportionately. Where before there was only the habit, now there is both the habit and our awareness. And as we become ever more mindful, we empower ourselves to form new and more wholesome habits—and to drop those that do us harm.

If we continue to cultivate such awareness, we may discover that our habits have roots deeper and broader than the personal. They are grounded in our histories, familial and social, and they are fed by contemporary culture. In totalitarian countries, people live with the habit of suspicion. In our own, we are living with the habit of fear, whether its object be sickness, aging, a destitute retirement, or a terrorist attack. Every night, the news and the Big Pharma ads nourish that habit of feeling.

If you are a homeowner in Alfred, New York, you may have heard of Orangeburg pipe. Widely used for drainage and sewer lines, it is best described as ten layers of tarpaper rolled up to form a pipe. Orangeburg takes its name from Orangeburg, New York, its point of manufacture. Properly seated in a bed of sand, Orangeburg might last fifty years. Or it might not.

Last month, I learned these facts the hard way. With little warning, our sewer line backed up, and our basement flooded. We called a plumber, and when his power snake brought back dirt, we knew we were in for some serious digging. Twenty-four hours later, in a trench where our lawn had been, we laid eyes on the cause of our misery. Sure enough, it was a length of Orangeburg pipe, flattened and degraded. Calling it a name not fit to print, I wondered why anyone would choose such a product, let alone trust it to last.

The answers weren’t far to seek. Orangeburg pipe gained popularity in the decade after World War II, when iron and steel were in short supply. Contractors liked it because it was user-friendly and readily available. Homeowners liked it because it was cheap. By the standards of its day, it was a serviceable product, if hardly top of the line. That it would one day fall apart was the future homeowner’s problem.

Whatever its merits as a plumbing component, Orangeburg pipe well illustrates a central focus of Zen training. For in Zen teachings we learn of “the impermanence of all conditioned things,” whether those things be our sewer lines, our bodies, our thoughts, our relationships, or our very lives. And in Zen practice, we come to know the truth of impermanence through direct experience.

That all things change is hardly breaking news. A few years ago, as I was waiting for a TV show to resume, the words “Embrace change” flashed on the screen. While that sounded like something a Zen master might say, the purveyor of this advice turned out to be Rochester Gas and Electric. It would seem that awareness of impermanence has at long last entered the American mainstream.

Yet it is one thing to have a conceptual understanding of impermanence and quite another to experience it concretely. In Zen meditation we cultivate a continuous awareness of impermanence not through the contemplation of lofty verities but through an intimate contact with changes as they are unfolding, moment by moment and breath by breath. We notice that no two breaths are quite the same. And if we are really paying attention, we notice that everything is changing, including our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and states of mind. Neither we nor the world’s bright things are as solid as we’d supposed.

Or, if we prefer, we can contemplate Orangeburg pipe

Not so long ago, the journalist Michael Crowley, who was covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the New Republic, reported a conversation with the “makeup artist” in charge of preparing the candidates for the debates. Was Hillary a basket case, he asked, in those final moments before she went on? On the contrary, the makeup artist replied. “Sitting in the makeup chair seems to be one of the few moments of zenlike peace the candidates ever get.”*

Of all the images projected by the current presidential race, the spectacle of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the others sitting in “zenlike peace” in their makeup chairs is one of the more diverting. Yet if that image highlights a certain absurdity in the present campaign, it also reflects a popular view of Zen meditation. According to this view, to sit in zazen is to abide in perfect peace, untroubled by such things as one’s perilous standing in the polls. In the serene mind of the Zen practitioner, such worrisome thoughts—and thoughts in general—have ceased to exist, leaving a space as blank as an unmarked ballot.

Prevalent though they are, such perceptions of Zen attainment have little to do with the daily practice of Zen meditation. To be sure, Zen masters through the centuries have described the state of satori, in which ordinary, dualistic consciousness dissolves, and self and world become one. But as the modern Zen master Kosho Uchiyama warns us in his book Opening the Hand of Thought, “to think that people become great by doing zazen, or to think that you are going to gain satori, is to be sadly misled by your own illusion.”** For the aim of Zen practice is not to attain a state of continuous bliss or permanent contentment. Rather, it is to cultivate a clear and open awareness, within which transitory mental states, however calm or vexed, are recognized for what they are.

When practicing zazen, we adopt a stable, upright posture, aligning ourselves with the earth’s gravitational force. We settle into stillness, and we rest in awareness. Within that sky-like awareness, thoughts arrive and depart, as if they were passing clouds. Some are luminous and wispy, others dense and dark. But if we remain in awareness and do not pursue them, our thought-clouds leave as readily as they came. Uchiyama calls this process “opening the hand of thought,” and he describes it in this way:

When we let go of our conceptions, there is no other possible reality than what is right now. . . Dwelling here and now in this reality, letting go of all the accidental things that arise in our minds, is what I mean by “opening the hand of thought.” ***

Uchiyama contrasts this state of open awareness with our usual state of mind, in which we grasp at the objects of our thoughts, fashioning scenarios to suit our needs.

About ten years ago, I wrote a check for $ 57.00 to the Village of Water. At the time, I was attempting to pay my water bill. Oblivious of my oversight, I mailed the check, and somehow the Village of Alfred managed to cash it. When the bank returned the canceled check, as banks used to do, I discovered my blunder.

What was I thinking? I asked myself. Or as my mother would have said, Whatever possessed you? The script was neat, the handwriting definitely mine. The check bore my signature. But whoever wrote the “Village of Water” was miles away at the time.

However extreme, my error was not uncommon. Nor was it peculiar to professors. Quite possibly, the chickadees at our feeder and the deer who eat our dogwoods live continuously in the present. They have to. But we human beings have the option of being elsewhere, and that elsewhere is often the future or the past. And when we are not revisiting the past or rehearsing the future, we are often absorbed in abstract thought.

To return us to the present moment is the first purpose of Zen meditation. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes the practice in this way:

Meditation means you have to be present in the present moment. If the body is here but the mind is wandering elsewhere, in that moment you’re not present—you’re not present for yourself, and you’re not present for your husband, your children, your brothers or sisters, your nation, or your people. That is the opposite of meditation. Being present in the present moment means you are not being imprisoned by the past or sucked up by the future.

As Thich Nhat Hanh further explains, being present in the present moment does not preclude reflection, planning, or visionary thought. Rather, it returns the wandering mind, which doesn’t know it is wandering, to an awareness of whatever it is up to.

In Zen teachings, this capacity for being present is known as mindfulness, and it is an essential component of Zen discipline. Mindfulness may be cultivated in many ways, but at the beginning we can best develop it by sitting still, with our spines straight and the rest of our bodies relaxed. Maintaining that posture for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, we bring a gentle, non-judgmental attention to our breath, our feelings, our passing thoughts, our changing states of mind. We become present for ourselves.

But can we also become present for other people? Beneficial though it is, the mindfulness cultivated in seated meditation is of limited value if it does not extend into our daily lives, where our presence—and often, our absence—profoundly affects others around us. “When you walk,” Zen teachers tell us, “just walk.” That admonishment directs us to give undivided attention to the one thing we are doing, be it cooking dinner, or writing a check, or listening to a friend. Mindfulness of this kind grows naturally from the habit of daily sitting, but it it may also be practiced by anyone at any time.

By way of demonstration, may I suggest that if you are drinking a cup of coffee while you are reading this column, put down your coffee and give full attention to the column. Or better yet, put down the column and give full attention to your coffee. Hold the cup in both hands, as Zen monks do, and inhale the aroma. Contemplate the origins, the history, and the nature of the drink you are about to ingest. Then drink your coffee, giving full attention to its taste. Continue this practice for a week or more, and see what you discover.