Summer Shuso Goes Spelunking
As the current Shuso (head student) at Clouds in Water Zen Center, I offer these highlights from the Summer Practice Period class that I am co-teaching with our Guiding Teacher, Sōsan Flynn. “Enter the Cave: How to bring resolve, courage, and sincerity to collective practice” opened with the assertion that for Zen practitioners, the cave is a desirable destination, not a sordid place of illusion or deprivation (as in Plato’s Cave). Like a womb that generates life, a Zen cave’s vast emptiness promises spiritual growth. Though pursuing the dark unknown is actually something we want to do, this kind of spelunking is rarely straightforward: we talked about the visceral, gory aspects of entering and leaving the cave that are represented by the ancient sage Huike’s self-amputation, or by a harrowing experience of self-injury narrated by Gyōzan Royce Johnson, a 21st-century priest who also worked as a butcher.
Encountering a modern-day Zen practitioner who worked a significant amount of time preparing meat for human consumption while he was also on the priest path raised a fascinating and disturbing set of questions about rules in Zen and what it means to be “aligned” in one’s practices and values. Reflecting on the butcher/priest paradox, we asked ourselves: Can we name moments when we experience separation between our ordinary everyday activities and our inner, spiritual quest? What does integration or alignment feel like? What degree of patience and confidence would be needed to allow a moment of greater alignment to emerge?
The beauty of Wednesday nights at Clouds in Water is that a handful of people come in at 5:30 pm for zazen (sitting meditation), and at 6:30 pm more arrive so that often 8-10 people join in for a simple dinner, prepared by one of the class participants. By the time 7:30 pm rolls around, not only have all these people finished zazen and dinner, they have also completed a few soji (temple cleaning tasks) as well. Indeed, the class itself can only happen with so many helpers washing the pots and pans and dinner dishes, rearranging cushions in the zendo, setting up chairs and TV tables, plugging in computers and screens and microphones, and making sure all the cameras work, then doing everything in reverse at the end of class to make everything ready for the next early morning service.
While we sometimes forget and think that we enter the cave all by ourselves. Maybe as the teachers, we think that we alone deliver the content. Maybe as the students, we think that we alone show up to receive the content. Maybe we sit in the zendo and think we are all alone on the cushion. But the real truth is that we are never alone! Our practice is always collective and collaborative at some level, and the qualities of resolve, courage and sincerity are cultivated in the presence of others.
Respectfully submitted, Rev. Keika Karín Aguilar-San Juan
