This is transcribed from the first dharma talk I ever gave, on Oct. 26, 2000 at the Hazy Moon Zen Center. Perhaps this will speak to where you are right now.
Often I reflect on what my arrival to the practice years ago might have looked like. I’m particularly chagrined to imagine what Maezumi Roshi might have seen. I believe he saw a woman who was obsessed and distracted by her passing youth, her love life, her pursuit of fame and fortune, and most importantly, catching the next flight out. Years later, I suspect that Nyogen Roshi sees substantially the same thing. I have spent years trying to forge a permanent hall pass from practice. So I have a deep respect for those who commit themselves to practice in a physical way. There is no other way to practice — or live — than in a physical way.
I say that since every time I come here, you are all here. I naturally assume that every time I don’t come here you are all here too. I’m uplifted by the strength of your practice, as opposed to the merits of my own. I do have great faith and sincerity but I’m really rather an artful dodger. Today I want to pass along some of the avoidance mechanisms I’ve used so well. Perhaps I’m suspecting that I may not be able to use them for much longer. I don’t know. I don’t know what lies ahead, but this is nonetheless what I’m going to talk about.
When we talk about distance from practice, to me that has always been a literal thing. Miles and miles, glorious miles between me and my chosen place of practice or teacher. As my life and residence has changed, that distance has shortened only slightly, figuratively speaking. Once I lived half a country away, now I live 19 miles north. Then I was single and independent. Now I’m married with a one-year-old. I recognize that those circumstances are the result of the choices that I make and priorities that I set, but nonetheless I set them. So I have plenty of responsibilities and commitments to keep me comfortably at bay.
At the same time, I am not so naïve as to believe that practice is the business of perfect attendance. There will always be those who seem to relish the practice, take up the robe, revere the tradition and appear to be expert and authoritative but never really practice in a transformative way. There are many ways to preserve distance even while you’re here, and believe me I do. Even by manifesting great devotion to the practice in terms of the time expended you may still be far, far away from being selfless and compassionate and actualizing the dharma. Perhaps students like that come faithfully for a long time until they never come at all.
My involvement is more intermittent but I keep going and going. I’m kind of a permanent part-timer. There are a lot of ways that you can semi-commit to your practice. They’re insidious; they’re crafty. All of them represent ways to keep an arm’s length, or more, from true acceptance and surrender.
One of them is to take preexisting ideas about our limitations and elevate them into facts of life. You may encounter this. I can’t meditate because my mind’s too busy. I can’t do it because my legs aren’t limber. I could never bow because of my cultural conditioning. Meditation is fine but the services are too religious for me. I can’t possibly eat rice two times a day. I can’t play the instruments because I’m not musical.
I have a lot of those self-limiting notions. The first time I was ever asked to play a bell, or inkan, it was at a sesshin at ZCLA. As had become my custom, I arrived at mid-week. The person who had been playing the bell had become ill. Someone said to me, “You can do this, would you do this?” I was quickly shown what to do and I, of course, assumed that it was of vast significance. I would go to my room at every break and after every meal to practice the cue and timing, and yet I consistently got it wrong. This was for three or four days, three services a day. I was tortured by it. At the end of that week, in a dokusan, Nyogen asked me if I had ever considered taking up koan practice. I was shocked and overwhelmed at the very idea. I said, “I can’t possibly do koans because I’m doing the bell.” I was truly sincere in that the bell was too much for me to deal with to try and do anything more!
At the time he told me that I had a little problem with my work ethic. It’s true. I make everything work instead of fun. It’s just one way of keeping things very comfortable, with all the windows and doors open so I can detour around unfamiliar ground.
Another way that I think we distance ourselves from our real practice is by engaging in “Zen Vogue.” You begin this practice and are intrigued by many of the elements of it but perhaps digress into the more entertaining aspects, like reading or talking about Zen. You can pursue Zen arts or buy Zen clothing, participate in the whole merchandising of Zen which gives you all the flavor and none of the calories. It’s all out there and I still do it, getting distracted from what the practice really is.
Another of the myriad ways to distance yourself is by choosing to practice what I call “Celebrity Zen.” You choose a teacher who is a celebrity and thereby ensure that you will never really have a teacher. You may say you follow Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama or any number of other teachers who have worldwide followings. The problem is, your faraway teacher will never insist on face-to-face accountability for your practice.
I have cultivated any number of ways to be here without really being here. Sesshin is a perfect opportunity for me to confront that. I settle in for a block or two, but before too long, I find myself scheming an early exit. I have to make an important phone call. I have to go back to work for that important meeting. This cuts into my family time. I really have to have that important cup of coffee. I recognize what I’m doing even as I do it. It even affects the process of signing up for sesshin. I adopted a strategy where I would commit early to a sesshin because I knew my habit for stopping short. I would commit early for the full week but bail out by a couple of days on the front end or by a few days on the tail end because something important would come up. Who knows what? There is always something that comes up that can prevent me from doing the whole drill. Of course by the time I arrive I usually have a raging bronchial infection, with my hair on fire, spinning out of control. I get that way because of all the mental and physical exertion that goes into avoiding what is really the right thing to do.
The upshot of all the delays, distractions, avoidances and complications is still a life that demands nothing less than continuous practice. The pressing deadline at work or the demanding client is simply asking that you use your practice. Your daughter’s fever or tantrum is teaching you to practice. The weeds in the garden, the messy kitchen, the cooking, the shopping, the laundry, the hungry cat, are all demanding that you pay attention, attention, attention.
I know full well without a doubt that the more I hold myself away from the dharma, the more the whole world suffers. My relationships with friends and relatives and loved ones, my work, me, and my precious, precious little girl who asks nothing more than that I be fully present for every fresh new moment of her life. And that is so hard to do.
Years ago, I ran across a self-styled Zen group in Northern California. This is a group that publishes books and t-shirts that have pithy phrases and titles that really hit the nail on the head, like the book I ordered: “How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything.” I never finished the book but I never forgot the title. For me now, it reminds me that how I practice is how I live. They are not two things. There is no separation. And that is all the correction, direction and encouragement I need.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash