Reclusland

I’ve been hoping to have some little moments or stories to share with you from my trips to the monastery, some wisdom to bring back from the mountain so to speak, but I have been having a hard time coming up with anything good.  I suppose I could make attempts to summarize what the various teachers and monastics say in their talks, playing the good reporter and bringing you all along with me into the meditation hall, as much as my memory will allow, but that seems empty to me.

Because what would I be offering you by doing so?  If you wanted to go listen to talks at a zen monastery, you’d be in one, I hope.  Besides, there’s plenty of places on the internet where dharma talks are freely given, and there you can get them exact, not partially recalled.  Instead, since you’re here, I have to assume you have some interest in hearing my take on the particular perspective on the world I happen to inhabit.  That being so, I’d much prefer to pass on the little moments and experiences that really struck me as somehow capturing the spirit of teaching.

Besides, don’t they always say that Zen is a direct pointing to and realization of one’s own true nature? Beyond words and scriptures, and concerned with the direct experiencing of things such-as-they-are?

Well, with that in mind, here’s a little story for you:

Back in April, when I attended my first sesshin (meditation intensive), I was part of the crew that was cleaning the zendo out during the periods of “work practice” (other work practices I’ve been involved with are planing wood, installing insulation in a attic, digging drainage ditches, laying stone pathways in the garden, and, of course, cleaning the bathrooms.)  In order to do so, we had to pick up all the zabutons and zafus throughout the whole zendo, stack them up carefully, vacuum and mop the floors, and then put everything back in the same order.

This picture is why I love the internet…

That’s the actual meditation hall at the Monastery (picture links to source).  Anyway, as you can see, the cushions are supposed to be lined up pretty nicely.  It being my first time, I was a little worried about having to line them back up after the floor had been cleaned.  Not only did we have line them up pretty much perfectly perpendicular to the walls, but all the rows had to be parallel to each other as well. This an not easy thing to do on any occasion, and particularly not in the middle of three silent days of 4:00am~9:30pm meditation.

We’d laid out a few rows, and I was stepping back to eyeball them, when the supervisor, a senior student, came back from putting the mops and vacuums away.  He pulled me aside and pointed out the hardwood floor, and the perfectly parallel lines that the wood made naturally, just by being laid out the way it was.  All we had to was find the correct line on the floor (the ends of the rows were marked with tape), and adjust each cushion up so the front was barely touching the line.   Walk up to each cushion, look at the cushion itself, match it to the line that was already perfectly in place, and then move on to the next cushion.

Needless to say we were able to line up all the cushions properly within minutes, without ever having to step back or eyeball anything…