Take Your Seat

The comedian Bill Maher once quipped, “I have nothing against the Catholic religion except my entire childhood.” I tend to agree. Rules and conformity just weren’t, and aren’t, my thing.

The Buddhist path I took in my 20’s was Vajrayana, which was a lot more relaxed than Zen. Retreats started at 8:30 or 9 in the morning, offered generous breaks, and allowed you to adjust on your meditation cushion, to chat on breaks, to take care of your own needs as you saw fit.

I felt some pity for those poor Zen folks I’d see from time to time, dressed in all black with their shaved heads and serious expressions. They just didn’t seem to have much fun. Vajrayana, on the other hand, embraced the fullness of life, in all its dimensions – sex, wine, food, play, practice, death, life, family, and onward. Zen seemed about finding the emptiness behind those parts of life, pushing through attachment with a single-minded devotion. It had an austerity to it that, from the outside, looked downright unpleasant.

I knew that Zen just wasn’t for me. There was only one problem: Junpo was a Zen guy, and not just any Zen guy. He was a Rinzai Zen guy, the most strict, most Japanese of all the versions of Zen. In Rinzai, everything had structure, everything had purpose. The incense was set at a certain angle, the altar done just so, and you walked a certain way, bowed a certain way, chanted a certain way. Rules for entering, rules for leaving, rules for eating, rules for sitting. Rules for the morning and different rules for the evening. There was no room for individual expression of any kind because it was Japanese to its core.

Eido Roshi, Junpo’s teacher, once told him, “There is no Zen outside of Japan,” meaning in order for Junpo to become a dharma heir, he needed to become, in practice if not appearance, fully Japanese.

After 18 months of listening to Junpo’s talks and doing weekend sits with him, I had become hooked despite myself. I decided I would attend my first Zen retreat. Not only that, I also decided to take Jukai, or lay vows, meaning I’d become a kind of informal disciple. I was leaping before I looked (something I’m prone to doing — watch out down there!).

I got to the retreat late, because well, because I’m always late (very un-Zen like), and almost immediately regretted my decision to go.

First off, everyone on staff, and a good amount of the participants, were wearing Japanese robes even though most were decidedly Caucasian. That was just weird to me. The meditation room was formally, rigidly set to some kind of Japanese-level perfection. Then, there was the matter of the schedule.

You were up at 4 am, on your cushion at 4:25, and you meditated on your cushion or walked in meditation for the vast majority of a very, very long day. The last sit ended close to 10 pm, which meant you could never get more than 5.5 hours of sleep. The breaks you got were not designed to give you enough time to do much but what was necessary – shit, shower, shave kind of thing. Meals were taken in silence. Additionally, there was no eye contact, no speaking, no books, phones, journaling, or anything else. Just sitting.

Now, Junpo was very “Japanese,”, but he was also a troublemaker, an ex-federal prisoner and former LSD manufacturer, and once the head of a counter-culture family. With him there was always a tension between the power of a Japanese container and his desire to upend it. For instance, his own Zen order was very clear: you could not take lay vows on your first retreat — which was exactly what I was doing. Additionally, you could not be on staff on your first retreat, and he had put me on staff not in one position, but two (sensei or embodiment leader, and Jisa). The paradox living inside the man was glorious.

The Jisa’s role was to pull people aside if they were having a hard time and talk to them and see if they needed help. You could say we were the feminine to the masculine container. And that Rinzai Zen container was no joke. It broke you down, fast. Fatigue, a lack of familiar things like conversations about small things, strict silence, and rigid sitting all conspired to cause two retreatants of the forty to sneak off in the middle of the night.

By the third day, the retreat was wearing heavily on me. I was in physical agony, having never sat as long or as much in my life. Being on staff, I had even less free time than the participants, which meant really almost no time at all. I was mentally exhausted. On top of all of that, Junpo, like many Zen teachers, hadn’t really given any meditation instruction (it was a few sentences of direction), and so I was also at my wit’s end from “listening” to the endless stream of nonsense that was parading through my head 18 hours a day. I was, in a word, sick to death of myself.

“Junpo,” I said during our afternoon staff meeting, “I get that I’m here, in part, to help if people start to freak out. I know we’ve lost two already. But…” I steeled myself. This was not an easy question for me to ask, and I felt a thick thread of fear run through me. “What happens if I freak out? Who do I talk to?”

Junpo scowled. He looked at me a long time before speaking. “I don’t understand the question,” he finally said.

“Oh,” I replied. “Well…” And I went on to use a lot more words to over-describe my fears, not realizing I had been set up.

“Yeah,” he said, after I’d finally run out of things to say. “Like I said: I don’t understand the question.”

“Oh,” I repeated.

He leaned in towards me, all Rinzai: eyebrows pinching, mouth curled downward at the edges, terrifying in his power and strikingly clear in his presence. He had 100% of my attention as my heart thudded dully at my temples. “You need to freak out,” he said, each word clearly enunciated, “You freak out next week. I need you here this week. You need to take your fucking seat.”

His eyes bore into me. And the most curious thing happened. It was like his words were a clarifying wind that blew through my mind, taking all of my fear and contraction with them. Within a matter of seconds, I was utterly fearless and had not a single concern about my capacity to finish the retreat in full service to him and to those there. Much to my surprise, taking my seat was no more of a challenge than sitting a glass onto a table.

Later that afternoon, I dropped into a state of awareness deeper and stiller than I had ever experienced in my life. I was the vastness of the cosmos itself, before Abrham, before God even. The pain in my body ceased, and there was a residing in a truth deeper than anything I’d yet experienced — not for moments or minutes, but for weeks afterwards.

My life, quite simply, was never the same.