Treace - Wake up: how to practice Zen Buddhism

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ISBN: Print 978-1-64152-390-5 | eBook 978-1-64152-391-2

For Peter Matthiessen, whom I first met when hed forgotten his bessu (Zen priest socks with ankle snaps). He borrowed mine, which were way too small, and flapped about while he processed and bowed conducting a very formal ceremony in front of hundreds.

You were the deepest smile, unflappable even when flapping. May all our Zen be just so.

Contents

TO STUDY ZEN IS TO STOP RUNNING. You sit down with yourself, take a deep breath, take off the mask usually used to hide your pain, and begin to get real. You begin to devote yourself to waking up from what can only be called the trance of habit. Zen practice is a confrontation with the persistent dream that certainty is possible; it is an invitation to relax into a vast unknowing. You begin to see how intoxicating opinions and objects are and commit to a spiritual sobriety informed by spaciousness and silence.

With Zen practice also comes a direct experience of your life as not separate from all other life, which means a tremendous yet tender strength becomes your own. As you stop running from every discomfortyours or othersyour relationship to suffering is transformed. Compassion and kindness become more natural than fear and anger.

In this book, well open up how Zen practice works. Well look a bit at its history, as well as the place it occupies in Buddhism, world religions, and culture more widely. Well look into its traditional shapes and forms but emphasize how to bring it home, to keep it intimately real in this moment. Well do this because, essentially, Zen can only be understood by practicing it. Everything else is description. And though knowing something about Zen may be interesting, until we put our own body and breath into it, it doesnt really begin to address our lives.

I found that true for myself. After years of a kind of noodling around with meditation on my own, I hit a point when I wanted to drench myself in its deepest waters, and I moved to a Zen monastery. Zen has a tradition of cutting through sentimentality, and monasticism implies a single, deep intention shaping a communityboth spoke to me. And I liked that working with a teacher was central to Zen study; I wouldnt be allowed to drift or hide. It was 1983.

Twenty-plus years later, I had lived decades as a monastic, become a priest, and been designated a Zen teacher (Sensei). I completed formal study with my teacher, was named the first dharma successor in my order, and then continued study with several other teachers. I founded a lay Zen center in NYC and oversaw the purchase and renovation of a building (temple) there. After teaching in the city for about ten years, I started a nonresidential training program called Hermitage Heart with students throughout the United States.

All to say, Ive had the great honor (and challenge!) of studying with many wonderful teachers and thousands of students in varied situations for almost 40 years. Ive seen people change the way they live and die, face illness, and experience the incredible stressors of our time. Ive watched as prisoners find the freedom implicit in their mind and patients with debilitating disease find uncommon peace. For all of us, though, it begins with a commitment to wake up. What does that look like?

Most people will find that their enchantment with ego is like a spell that gets broken each time they engage in genuine practice. An alternative begins to wake up in the heart-minda glimpse of something truer, more honest. Breaking from the ego-trance, even momentarily, wakes up a bone-deep calmness: The tension of pretending can be let go, again and again.

If you find yourself drawn to explore Zen practice, you have likely become aware of, or even deeply despaired, the opposite of waking up: the quiet, pervasive sense of being disconnected, stuck in some shade of trance. Its all too easy to waste this unique, precious, and wild life searching in vain for something, anything, to make it better or easier. We run ourselves ragged trying to improve, trying to get to one goal after another, none of which really does the trick. Were always striving and restless, and nothing quite satisfies. No matter how we try to avoid it, the question Who am I? finds us on sleepless nights, or in moments of grief or awe.

Come to these pages as you might to a monastery: with your deepest existential questions alive in your heart, forming the great matter at hand. Be ready to sit down in the center of your life, see clearly, and release the patterns of fear that hold you back. I offer my complete support and faith that you can. Awakening is your birthright.