On doing

I want to take a minute to respond to Steven Underwood’s kind words and questions after my last post. I’d also like to offer some tentative notes on the problem of doing as opposed to being.

I spent much of yesterday beginning to acclimate to the daily schedule at the Zen Center. Prior to becoming a resident — technically I am now a “guest student” — I had come sporadically for zazen (sitting meditation) and communal meals. I volunteered a few times in the kitchen and got a little taste of what it’s like to be part of a Sangha. But this week marks a whole new level of commitment. Here’s what the daily schedule looks like for guest students:

Monday through Friday

5:00 am wake-up bell

5:25 zazen

5:55 kinhin (walking meditation)

6:05 zazen

6:40 service

7:05 soji (temple cleaning)

7:20 breakfast

9:00 work meeting

12:30 end work lunch

1:30 pm work

3:00 end work tea with a practice leader (once a week) or informal study

5:40 zazen

6:30 dinner

My problem with being a lone practitioner is that I could never commit myself to this kind of structure. I have been meditating for a few years now, usually in the morning for fifteen or twenty minutes. But it’s easy to fall off when no one’s looking but yourself.

The Zen Center makes life very simple. You get up, walk down to the zendo, and sit at the appointed time each morning. The day unfolds from there. Yesterday my two work periods consisted of a lot of sweeping and mopping, emptying and refilling. My co-worker and I developed a method despite our language barrier (he just arrived from Japan). And, for brief moments, I felt absorbed in the flow of simply working.

This flow is what some people call being. It is intimately connected to breathing, the moment-to-moment passage of in-breaths and out-breaths, the expansion and contraction of the diaphragm, which literally frames all our experience.

Most of the time we miss this passage because we’re focused on some object of mental striving, like whether I was following the right pattern with my mop. But then there are those brief moments when the goal, and concern about reaching it, falls away.

From what I’ve gathered so far, Zen practice is about cultivating these moments instead of chasing whatever we think we must do to arrive at an imagined destination. Habitually returning to the present is what the structure and daily schedule here are designed to support.

Even as we move from discrete activities to concrete tasks, awareness of the breath remains constantly available. The challenge is to recognize and remember this through the surrounding mental chatter.

We start and end each day by sitting zazen, intentionally doing nothing. But the mind’s strivings are never fully extinguished. Part of the point of sitting is to see this truth clearly.

* * *

To most of us the idea of turning off conscious striving seems like a form of ego suicide, if not outright career suicide.

It’s worth recognizing that we’ve been trained to think this way, in part as a means of self-defense. The doing mentality — working always to be better, faster, stronger, more impressive, more accomplished, more deserving of social status and other ripe rewards — is effectively hard-wired in American culture, if not global culture.

It’s also telling that we tend to cling to the belief that there’s no way out. Even contemplating alternatives has the whiff of navel-gazing heresy. So we’ve grown adept at discrediting the swamis, the hippies, and the Buddhists.

But at what cost?

What if all this doing is a disease, a delusion that keeps us mired in a perennial cycle of chasing, wearing ourselves thin, and diminishing the quality of our actual experience?

Are all our efforts and apparent rewards worth it then?

Buddhists contend that human life is defined by impermanence (perpetual change), suffering (all satisfaction is fleeting), and the illusion of selfhood (who are you, really? What happens when you try to prove it?).

I’m trying on this way of thinking as I’m sweeping and mopping floors these days. There are fleeting moments when I remember that I used to be a scholar and a writing instructor, that I used to live in my own comfortable house, dictate my own schedule, and often, it seemed that people thought highly of me. Then I remember where I am and why I’m here.

I used to live according to a system of to-do lists, sticky notes, agenda items, an obsession with email and a tidy inbox, and an approach to daily life that was progressive and linear to the max. This served me well for the purposes of writing and finishing a dissertation. It has not served me well beyond that point.

So today I’m inclined to side with the Buddhists.

Doing with an intention to get somewhere — usually somewhere else — is the mind’s hoax. It sucks us in and captivates us with the promise that all our longing for satisfaction might finally get fulfilled. But it never does. And no employer ever tells you that. Except maybe the San Francisco Zen Center.

Surely San Francisco is not the only place to try to live out some, or part, of what the ’60s made possible. Probably there are lots of worthy experiments going on all over the place. But I am hard-pressed to think of a modern U.S. equivalent. Probably because I still think I’m getting somewhere.