Gate of Ease and Joy: Zen Beyond the Aesthetics of Rigor
When I was in my early 20's I was proud that I was a Zen student. I wasn't proud of being compassionate, flexible, or understanding... those would have been strange things to be proud about. I was proud that I was doing something difficult, something impressive.
If I encountered people who reduced the practice of Zen to “peace and bliss”, I quickly corrected them with how rigorous is it, how early I wake up, how my room at the monastery was cold and lit by kerosene lamp. I'm still a little bit like this, I may think I've grown up, but I notice I rarely fail to mention the time of the wake-up bell at my old training temple.
Last week, at Hokyo-ji Zen Practice Community, we had a retreat. One part was rather informal and relaxed with less silence than a usual retreat and the latter part was a more traditional sesshin. Two guidelines established for the week made this retreat different from any I've ever done. One was that teachers and senior students were asked to refrain from offering corrections in zendo forms and etiquette. Two was that you were encouraged to rest whenever you were tired. In the world of Zen, these are pretty revolutionary guidelines. The practice of non-correcting has the potential to help students feel safe to make their mistakes and to correct... or not correct... in their own time. Seeing us succeed and, on occasion, fail at keeping this guideline was very illuminating. At the end of the retreat I felt recommitted to having interactions with students that aimed at helping them feel good about themselves rather than feel pressure to perform the part of "Zen student." My teacher once said to me, "it would be nice if we could do all of this stuff without making people want to die." Not giving unsolicited corrections seems like a step in the right direction.
Secondly, the practice of resting when you're tired made the retreat a source of ease rather than strain. It offers students the opportunity to feel the dignity of having their intention trusted and their boundaries respected. To feel like adults with autonomy and agency. In my experience, compulsory zazen has a limited benefit, in the long arc of our spiritual life, we need to develop our own love affair with stillness in order for it to take root in our daily life. Even with flexibility in the schedule, we saw how often most of us chose to come together and sit.
On the way home my student, Yūgen, used the phrase, "beyond the aesthetics of rigor" to describe an ideal Zen practice.That phrase stuck with me. For years now, since leaving residential practice centers and meeting more practitioners who've trained in the "marketplace," as we sometimes call the non-monastic world, I've been thinking that the "hard" part of orthodox Zen training is mostly to satisfy one's longing to have done something hard. As someone who knows plenty of people who've practiced intensively in environments with minimal rest and few comforts I can say I'm not sure it does much apart from generate a self-congratulatory pride or a trust that we've accomplished something which we haven't accomplished.
The text we studied at the retreat is Sekitō Kisen's Sōanka. The first lines are "I’ve built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value. After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap." I understand this as a plea that we make a home for ourselves in radical non-acquisitiveness. That the joy of practice is sidelined when we try to become heros. So next time you're on retreat, I encourage you to do something wrong, take a nap, be late to zazen because you were watching fireflies or rabbits. Enjoy yourself.
by Koji Acquaviva Dreher (he/they)
Koji is a Dharma Transmitted priest and teacher at Clouds in Water
