About Zen — Zen Discipline
The Form of Wisdom and Compassion
The night I first participated with a Zen group, I walked into a large room filled with about forty meditators sitting on cushions that lined all four walls. I approached my contact, who was the group’s leader. He showed me to my spot. As everyone settled, the leader introduced a Zen priest from Japan, who had come to head the seven-day retreat that began the next day.
When the bell rang to begin the first round of zazen, I tried to find my breath, but the proceedings were so foreign and strange that I kept one eye pivoting. I noticed movement in the candlelight from the altar in the middle of the room as the priest from Japan rose from his cushion. He strode to the altar, bowed deeply, and grabbed a long stick. He perambulated the room and started shouting in Japanese. “Dogen Zenji wa…,” “Dogen Zenji no…” The group leader translated the comments as the teachings of thirteenth-century Zen teacher, Dogen.
Suddenly, I heard whacking and saw the circling priest bring the stick down with lightning speed on the shoulders of a meditator who bent forward — three times on one side and three times on the other. The priest took a step back and brought the stick up in front of him as he bowed to the bowing meditator. The priest strode back around the room, with the urgency of a samurai on a mission.
I participated with this Zen group for a couple more years. At the sits and retreats, we practiced with this same fire of commitment. We sat for hours on end without ever moving a muscle. Truly, like stone. People shouted, pounded things, and wielded sticks. Zen holds ancient form, and we fully embodied it.
I had gone through boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot a few years before. In the thick of Zen training, I wondered if I might equate what I was experiencing with the necessary, effective, and tortuous tactics that I endured in the Marine Corps. The difference I noted was that I could leave Zen at any moment. I chose to be there, which was not the situation in the Marine Corps. That fact made all the difference to me.
The Zen path goes back about fifteen hundred years. It follows Buddha’s Eightfold Path and the Buddhist precepts. The purpose of Zen training is to promote wisdom, compassion, and loving-kindness. That was the essential difference that mattered most to me.
Zazen is the vehicle with which we navigate Buddha’s path. All actions in the zendo are intended to deepen our zazen by helping to alleviate drowsiness, pluck us from our dream, and to awaken — to realize who we truly are.
