Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 5

Working on God
by Winifred Gallagher

(Page 5 of 11)

On the final night during zazen, I'm summoned for dokusan with Kwong-roshi. On the first night, I had walked into the small chamber beside the zendo, plopped down, and said hi. Now, tutored in the protocol, I enter, walk to the left, bow to the shrine, bow to Kwong-roshi, do a full prostration, make another bow, and then sit as if for meditation. On the wall is a picture of his own teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, the late author of the splendid Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, now in its twelfth printing. A Japanese roshi, he came to America on a visit in 1958 and stayed to found the first Zen training monastery in the West. Even in a photograph, Suzuki-roshi exerts magnetism. Earlier, during a talk to the community, Kwong-roshi recalled that before his teacher died of cancer, their customary calligraphy sessions had become an ordeal for Suzuki-roshi, who was "so sick the brush fell from his hand. But we kept making the character for 'same.' He would point to it and tell me, 'We are the same.' I didn't grasp the meaning then, but as the years go by, I'm beginning to discover that it's true. Finally, because he was so frail, I stopped showing up for calligraphy. But that was a mistake. The Zen way is to keep going."

A minute of dokusan makes plain that the medium is the message, and Kwong-roshi is it. The feeling that there's nothing that I couldn't say to him (a sense I'll repeatedly have in the presence of the spiritually advanced) paradoxically makes the discussion of earth-shattering issues unnecessary. On another, surely lower, level, however, I'm a reporter, and I want to get to the bottom of this Zen business. I ask our species' most practical spiritual question: What happens when we die? Wonderfully, Kwong-roshi says, "That's being taken care of." Zen adepts don't fear death, he adds, because they've "practiced for it. Sitting kills the self. You see what that's like, so you're not afraid of it." When I say that I've noticed that the zendo isn't an environment for egomaniacs, he smiles.

The historian Arnold Toynbee predicted that one of the great developments of the twentieth century would be the coming of Buddhism to the West. Kwong-roshi agrees: "The transmission of mindfulness-not just the thinking mind, but the unconditioned one that you might call God and we call big mind or Buddha nature-is a whole new concept here." Rather than seeing mindfulness as a kind of talent, like artistic flair or musicality, he believes that everyone willing to make the requisite effort can attain it. "You wash your face every day, and then it gets dirty again," he says. "The conditioned mind keeps getting tainted, and you have to wash it-that's all. Meditation and physical practice just restore mindfulness." Buddhists don't believe in a god outside themselves-"you and I are Buddha," Kwong-roshi says. Yet he "doesn't have a problem" with theistic religions or their practitioners who increasingly borrow from Zen, "as long as we know we're talking about something that goes back beyond Jesus, Buddha, God-they're all just names."

Before taking leave of Kwong-roshi (I had been correctly instructed that I'd "just know when it's time"), I tell him about my mantra. Somewhat to my surprise, he says it's okay to use words rather than counting breaths, because "it's important that the practice works for you." I shouldn't get discouraged about empty mind: "Just release your thoughts by not entertaining them, and shift your attention to your breath or mantra." Reminding me that in two days it will be Buddha's birthday, "which means it's your birthday, too," he sends me off to sleep.

Late on the next afternoon after the final zazen, we form a farewell circle and offer comments on sesshin. The seemingly severe spiritual warriors smile and laugh; some cry. Kwong-roshi tells us, "Now you know what is available in yourself." Someone offers me the Zen compliment: "I admire your practice." I know that this means, "Even though clueless, you showed up for all the sittings and sat till the bell rang." But I'm pleased anyway.

After the electric atmosphere of sesshin, normal life is bittersweet. On Saturday night, like circus clowns, five retreatants jam into a compact car and head to Sonoma for dinner. The opportunity to bathe hasn't presented itself in three days, but courtesy of oryoki, my jeans are pleasantly loose and my good Italian jacket, pulled from a duffel bag, once again covers a multitude of sins. We eat fine food with forks, drink a lot of local chardonnay, and, unhindered by social posturing, talk about real things. We laugh a great deal, and at one point, the waitress gently chides us, in Californese, "for having such a good time."

On Sunday morning, just before the big celebration for Buddha to which the public is invited, I take a walk in the mountain meadows. My brain is like a room that's just been cleared out, scrubbed, and left with its windows open. Not much is there, but the space is clean, cool, and sunlit. All the things that worried me when I arrived-a sick parent, deadlines, a gripe with a friend-could worry me still. I'm just less inclined to engage with them. When the bustling for the celebration begins in earnest, I take a quick peek at the birthday boy's gorgeously beflowered shrine, and slip away. As I leave, Helen smiles and says, "Have a good . . . whatever!"

One evening after returning from California, I visit B'nai Jeshurun, a Conservative synagogue about a ten-minute walk from my house, for the celebration of Simchas Torah. On this holy day, the "people of the book" give joyous thanksgiving for their sacred Scripture. Although it's Saturday night in New York, there's standing room only, even in the balcony, where I end up among mostly young and middle-aged men and women dressed in casual weekend clothes. Downstairs on the bimah, the congregation's two rabbis, Rolando Matalon and Marcelo Bronstein, chant in sonorous Hebrew before the half dozen Torahs draped in red velvet. Then they invite the oldest congregants to carry the scrolls up and down the cheering aisles. Next, the more robust are invited to take the Torah to the street, followed by twelve hundred congregants. Musicians on a raised bandstand play klezmer tunes against the backdrop of the starry sky and the building's Romanesque façade.

It's a Methodist church. In 1991, the collapse of the original synagogue's ceiling became a blessing in disguise when B'nai Jeshurun's charismatic rabbi, Marshall Meyer, accepted the offer of the congregation of St. Paul and St. Andrew to share its roof. As I look at the crowd, it's hard to believe that just a few years ago, B'nai Jeshurun, like St. Paul and St. Andrew and many other older urban congregations, was moribund. Led by Meyer, and after his death in 1993 by his former Argentinian students Rabbi Matalon and Rabbi Bronstein, B'nai Jeshurun has developed into a booming postmodern congregation.

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.