Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 4

Working on God
by Winifred Gallagher

(Page 4 of 11)

Like all great geniuses of religion, Buddha was a master psychologist who focused on the human thirst for meaning and on relief from life's inevitable pain. After intense analysis of society and self, he concluded that all our misery results from the illusion of a separate "me" and the failure to apprehend reality's transitory nature. According to his "four noble truths," life is full of suffering, most of which can be traced to desire, which in turn can be overcome, yielding peace. To pursue these truths, one must walk the "eightfold path," living with right views, resolve, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Anticipating cognitive and behavioral therapy by some twenty-five hundred years, Buddha observed, "All we are is the result of what we have thought" and "all things can be mastered with mindfulness." His own grueling spiritual struggle had proved to him that enlightenment cannot be produced by intellect alone, but through something close to what we call a "gut feeling" that must be rooted in experience. To achieve this state, Buddha advocated the direct physical and mental practice of meditation that became Zen's core.

Many Americans think of Zen when they hear "Buddhism," but in fact Zen is an offshoot of the larger Buddhist tradition that began in India in the sixth century b.c.e. Zen's roots also extend to Japan and China, where the third-century sage Lao-tse taught simplicity, nonattachment, and attunement with the tao, or spontaneous, creative power of the universe-concepts that complemented Buddha's "way." Advocating a caveat emptor approach to religion, Buddha urged interested parties not to buy on faith, but to road-test the merit of his teachings themselves: "Come and see." Zen regards even its own sacred literature as illusory, compared to direct experience. When I asked Kwong-roshi how he described his religion to the uninitiated, he said, "I don't usually talk about Zen unless someone asks me a question. Then I may say something. Sometimes you don't speak about religion, but the other person gets a sense of who you are. That's a Buddhist attitude-thinking in terms of what someone else can experience with you."

Despite its Asian trappings, in important respects Zen is as American as apple pie. Like the nation's secular religion of sports, it teaches that peak performance looks simple but requires, as Buddha said, pushing forward like an "ox that marches through the deep mire." If I had to describe zazen in one word, it would be "exercise." On my hard cushion, I appreciate for the first time a systematic how-to approach to spiritual development that one does. Rather than ignoring the body or regarding it as a source of trouble, as in many forms of Western spirituality, Zen uses it. Like sports, this religion has clear rules, coaches, and equipment-a whole technology that helps people to become "addicted" to the activity and benefit from its unexpected side effects. Like working out, this spiritual practice unites body and mind, brings order to life, whispers that this too shall pass, and makes one feel good when it's over.

Zen suits America in other ways, too. It shares her anarchic, playful sensibility, articulated by artists from Walt Whitman to Kurt Vonnegut: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." Like Jeffersonian democracy, it values independence and inter-dependence. Like Emersonian spirituality, it sees "big mind" embodied in each person, and life's beauty and joy contained in everyday moments.

As the millennium approaches, the experiential, individualistic thread remarked so long ago by Emerson runs brightly through America's religious fabric. Among nations, only India is demonstrably more spiritual. Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God. (In what might be a head count of neoagnostics, sociologist Wade Clark Roof estimates that upwards of a third of baby boomers "affirm in one way or another a divine power or presence, even if they admit to uncertainty in their belief," and even though they also entertain "individualistic meaning systems," and remain "highly secularized in their conceptions of the forces governing life.")1 Forty percent of Americans attend services weekly-an astounding rate when contrasted with the United Kingdom's 2 percent, say, or Italy's 5 percent. Interestingly, 90 percent of Americans engage in private religious experience. Of the 70 percent who pray daily, almost half feel that in some way or other God has spoken to them personally. Most Americans also believe in miracles, including more than 70 percent of those who have postgraduate degrees. This do-it-yourself, "privatized" faith is rooted not only in Emerson's "God within" and John Muir's idea of nature as cathedral but also in the political principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Even traditional believers are apt to feel that individuals should decide for themselves what to think, and that being a good Christian, say, or a good Jew doesn't depend on institutional standards, such as attending services.

Of all forms of religious experience, Americans have traditionally been strong on the "community spirit" that's so often missing from postmodern life. On Sonoma Mountain, it's based not on superficial social similarities or weekly attendance at brief services but on the sharing of "big mind" and long-term practice. One of the paradoxes of sesshin is that silence creates solidarity, even intimacy. Soon, imposing chit-chat on others seems almost violent. In the quiet atmosphere, too, one appreciates the few things that do get said. Washing dishes one morning, I'm annoyed by one of my workmates, who rubs at invisible spots on pots I've already cleaned and generally acts the fussbudget. Then I notice the funereal calla lilies framed by the kitchen window, which, because I've been reading the Gospels, make me think of Easter and resurrection. A little chatting is a perk of kitchen duty, so I free-associate aloud, mentioning a thought-provoking biblical detail: Before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus joined the mourners and wept for his dear friend. Towel suspended, my fellow dishwasher nods happily and says, yes, yes, that is interesting. Standing stiffly over a steaming sink on a chilly morning after three hours of meditation, two unwashed, uncombed, barefooted people with not terribly compatible temperaments nonetheless beam at each other in peculiar understanding. Accustomed to "knowing" what someone else is like, or is thinking or feeling, I'm taken aback on the following morning by a brief exchange with a stern-looking, black-robed senior monk. Sure that he considers me a bumbling dilettante, I'm mortified to be caught before zazen, furtively trying to limber up with a runner's stretch against the zendo's outer wall. "It's not moving," he whispers. Much silent Zen hilarity!

Copyright © 2000 by Winifred Gallagher.

About the Author

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.