The Practice of Undivided Life
A Zen Recipe for Living with Naturalness and Sincerity
One of the things I like about zen practice, once you strip away all the tricky, tough-to-master forms and rules, is just its bare, humble simplicity. Zazen, the technical term for zen meditation, just means “sitting zen,” and the fancy-sounding technique of shikantaza literally translates to “just sitting.” When we sit meditation we’re not adding some special spiritual element to the basic physical posture of being seated; we’re actually stripping away everything unnecessary and really sitting. Just sitting. As Alan Watts once wrote of meditation: “Just sit! You need to sit sometime, so when you do, you may as well really be there!” To me, that’s the right way to think about it: not as anything deep, complicated or pretentious, but just a way to take something we all have to do, and doing it fully, with total presence and devotion. Doing it naturally.
What happens when you approach every simple activity of your life that way? If you answered the question, you’d probably have an approximation of zen training in its monastic form. Between sessions of zazen, you stretch your body and keep the blood moving with the more vigorous practice of kinhin. That means simply “walking meditation”: walking very mindfully and with great awareness, undistracted by your thoughts, paying perfect attention to your steps and everything around you. And when it comes time to break from meditation to sit down with your fellow practitioners and eat, you practice oryoki, the word used to designate the highly intentional, and slightly ritualized and choreographed, way of serving and enjoying a meal together. Oryoki means, poetically, “just the right amount,” which is a wonderful reminder when it comes to not only eating, but everything else as well. Take just enough. Leave just enough for others too, and of course, waste nothing. Those are good rules for life.
Of course, zen practice also includes bowing, chanting, beating drums, and ringing bells, and a lot of the other traditionally churchy Buddhist rituals and ceremonies. But those aspects all feel a bit extraneous. Sitting zen, walking zen, eating zen—those are the important ones, the major pillars of the religion, the ones that really lead to transformation, and there’s nothing mystical or even really especially meaningful about any of them. It’s just sitting, just walking, just eating. But doing them in an incredibly present, often very graceful, and committedly selfless way. Or, as Cristina Moon writes, doing them with sincerity. If you actually practice it, and don’t just read books about it, zen is a highly refined and not-always-easy training in the art of everyday life, with the paradoxical goal of eventually becoming perfectly normal. Zen is education and etiquette that aims to make us completely natural.
I’ve read a lot of philosophy books and also, over the last decade or so, a lot of books about spiritual practice. Most of them were either intellectually stimulating or inspiring in some way, but I don’t know if I learned much from most of them. The ones that stuck with me, and actually offered me a glimpse of how to make my life better, were the ones that included some practical application of wisdom. How can philosophy and spiritual practice inform the everyday activities of cooking an incredible meal, of being a thoughtful friend, of hiking more mindfully through the forest? How is meditation practice going to make me a better teacher, a better boyfriend, a better ally? A more mindful, humble and helpful human being? Society encourages us to be exceptional—to raise ourselves up above what’s common, unglamorous, and everyday. But I think for many of us, what’s actually healing is coming down: putting our feet back on the ground, getting our hands dirty, sticking with things we’re not immediately good at, speaking plainly, and striving to be simple, social, decent people. Being not just normal, but perfectly normal. Perfectly natural.
Strangely, that takes a lot of training. Meditation can be a good place to start, not only because it instills patience and presence, but also for its humbling quality: it’s hard to think you’re so much better than other people once you’ve taken the time to observe the chaos and out-of-control-ness of your own mind and thoughts. It also provides a model of awareness and absorption that can be spread over all the other everyday practices of your life: cooking and cleaning and stretching and writing and most of the other unremarkable activities of our days. With meditation as a template, these can all be done in silence, in a stripped down, curious, and totally devoted way. Just cooking. Just cleaning. Just stretching. Just writing. Doing anything with full presence makes it part of our path, part of our practice. It also forces us to let go of our expectation of always being distracted and entertained during the dull moments of our existence. Because at the end of the day, there is no real avoiding those moments, and it’s only the need to distract ourselves from them that makes them seem dull.
One of the zen lessons I’ve learned, and am still trying to learn, is that you can’t divide your life. You can’t split it into the parts you like and the parts you don’t like, and try to be present for the ones you enjoy and fast-forward distractedly through the ones you don’t. It just doesn’t work that way; if you can’t be fully present doing the dishes, you probably weren’t able to be fully present while you were eating the meal, either. We have to learn to embrace the dull and mundane moments as integral, alongside the rich and meaningful ones. And try to, if not enjoy, at least accept and be present for them all equally. Avoiding any of it is also avoiding some aspect of our potential growth and maturation—or in the language of religion, avoiding enlightenment.
In the same vein, you can’t only be understanding and compassionate towards the people you already love, the ones you’re attracted to in one way or another, or those who are easy to get along with. You have to have empathy even when it takes effort and creativity; you have to embrace the ugly and difficult personalities in your life as well. Not to mention in yourself. Because you can’t divide yourself, either: you have to include all your sparkling and flawed parts in your self-image, and in your sphere of acceptance and compassion. Then you can stop being so hindered and conflicted, and learn, finally, to become completely natural. Completely sincere. Completely yourself.