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2. Ichigo ichie

19 February 2009 by Ben Howard

MatchaFor the Westerner who might wish to enter Zen practice, one of the most accessible points of entry is the way of words. Over the centuries Zen teachers have warned against reliance on language, likening it to a finger pointing to the moon, but they have also offered pithy sayings, ranging from the most intelligible to the most arcane. “Not always so,”  Suzuki Roshi observed. “Only don’t know,” the Korean master Seung Sahn declared. “Live as if you were dead,” exhorted the seventeenth-century Rinzai master Shido Bunan. Taken to heart, any one of these sayings might initiate the newcomer into the practice of Zen. For my own part, however, I have found the Japanese motto ichigo ichie to be one of the most helpful, both for the novice and the seasoned practitioner.

Pronounced each-ee-go each-ee-ay and translated as “one time, one meeting,” this motto is closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony. Ichigo ichie enjoins the host and guests in the tea hut to regard their gathering as unprecedented and unrepeatable. Though governed by custom and tradition, each meeting is unique. It will not occur again.

Ichigo ichie is said to have originated with Ii Naosuke, tea master and chief administrator of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Every morning, Naosuke, who had many enemies and feared assassination, made himself a bowl of tea, pronouncing it ichigo ichie: unprecedented and unrepeatable. In 1860 Naosuke was indeed assassinated, but the phrase he coined survived him, becoming a motto for students of the Way of Tea.*

“One time, one meeting” is also a motto for students of Zen meditation, but in Zen practice the context extends well beyond the drinking of tea. For in Zen training we learn to regard all encounters as unprecedented and unrepeatable, however similar they appear. In her essay “There Are No Repetitions,” the Rinzai priest and concert pianist Maurine Stuart puts the matter this way:

We are always at the beginning. It is always the very first time. When I play the piano I often come to a repeat sign. Can that passage be repeated? If I am teaching a piano student and we see a repeat sign, I tell the student that there are no repeats. We return to the beginning of a certain passage, but it’s never the same. It’s always fresh.**

At first glance, these assertions may seem to defy common sense. Would that the menus of certain restaurants might be unrepeatable! Would that our waiter, putting our food on the table, might say something other than “there you go.” Would that Garrison Keillor’s tone of voice might vary even a little, or the village siren play a new tune. Same old, same old, we complain. Been there, done that.

To the Zen practitioner, however, such dismissals only mask an underlying reality. The menu may not change, but other conditions will, and no two meals will ever be the same. By marshaling such phrases as “same old, same old,” we strengthen our preconceptions and bolster our sense of security, but we also erect a verbal screen between ourselves and the world before us.

To pierce that screen is the task of the Zen practitioner. And to return to the ground of being, where we may experience the world afresh, is a central aim of Zen discipline. Sitting still without thought of attainment, we relinquish our preconceptions and renew our attention to whatever is occurring, right here, right now: the flow of our breath, the rumble of a truck, the thought of an errand left undone. In so doing, we free ourselves from our habitual patterns of thought and feeling, our sometimes painful attachments to the past. And we allow the things of this world to reveal themselves as they truly are: vibrant, unprecedented, and unrepeatable.

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*See Eido Tai Shimano and Kogetsu Tani,  Zen Word,  Zen Calligraphy (Shambhala, 1995), 35.

**Maurine Stuart, Subtle Sound (Shambhala, 1996), 16.

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1. Let’s get meditating

19 February 2009 by Ben Howard

Twelve years ago, some friends and I formed a sitting group in the community of Alfred, New York. Our intent was to provide a place of stillness and silence and  to cultivate the practices of sitting and walking meditation, as taught by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of us brought prior experience in Eastern meditation. All of us brought our Western conditioning.

So it was with one of our number, an anxious former New Yorker, who arrived one Sunday evening looking unusually impatient, even for him.

“Well,” said he, rubbing his hands and bouncing from one foot to the other, “let’s get meditating.”

As we later learned, Barbara Walters was interviewing Monica Lewinsky at nine o’clock that evening, and he didn’t want to miss a word.

In his general outlook if not his specific motive, our friend was not alone. On the contrary, American culture has been described as always en route to somewhere else, always busy and always in a hurry. And with the advent of e-mail, Twitter, and other forms of advanced technology, our habitual rush into the future has grown more furious than ever. Meditation is supposed to be about “stopping and looking”—or at least about slowing down. But to those attached to ceaseless forward movement, even an hour devoted to stopping and looking can become one more step on the way to somewhere else.

The desire to be in some other place, and to get there as soon as possible, is both a symptom and a cause of a general anxiety, driving us into the future even as we fear it. Over the past decade a wide variety of people, including students, faculty, social workers, police, and clergy, have attended our Sunday-evening sessions. Some have come out of boredom, curiosity, loneliness, or a desire to find a deeper meaning in their lives.  But the root motive is often anxiety, which Thich Nhat Hanh has called the endemic illness of Western culture. Better get moving, its voices tell us. Better get meditating.

Zen meditation is not a panacea for anxiety, as sometimes thought, nor is it a drug-free cure. But the practice can provide an antidote, a countervailing force in our busy-busy lives. In the simplest form of Zen meditation, we sit as still and upright as we can manage, doing nothing but following the flow of our breath and paying attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us. We note the tensions in our bodies, the eruption of a voice down the hall. We note a passing thought—where are my car keys?—or a remembered image. And we observe those impulses that urge us to keep moving—to get meditating—and hurl us into the future. When we have sat for awhile, our bodies begin to settle, and our thoughts arrive at a slower pace. And as we stop trying to control our environment, our immediate surroundings present themselves with greater clarity and vivacity. We feel more alive as well as more relaxed.

Such are the immediate benefits of Zen meditation, which may be felt in a matter of weeks. But it would be a mistake to think of Zen practice as merely a stress-reduction technique, or a mode of self-improvement, or a way of escaping from the world. The reduction of stress might better be viewed as a point of entry–a portal into an ancient contemplative practice. Over time, that practice teaches us to appreciate our lives, however hurried or fragmented their present state, and to align our anxious minds with things as they are, not as we would have them be. And rather than isolate us, the practice deepens our connection with other people.

I intend to say more about these matters in future essays. In the meantime, let’s get meditating.

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