Adult practice: Part 7
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When I first came to Antaiji I was 22. I had been
practicing zazen in several different dojos for 6 years, and when I did
not attend a dojo, I was sitting daily by myself. Still, sitting for an
hour or two daily was not enough for me, practicing in a dojo seemed more
like a hobby than a way of life.
I was 16 when I encountered zazen,
and at age 17 I was pretty sure that this is what I wanted to do for life.
It seemed to be the thing that I always had been looking for, without even
knowing the dimension of space in which I might find it. Anyway, my
original plan was to go to Japan and become a monk right after high
school. Why go to university to study what seemed boring anyway? I used to
be fascinated with mathematics and physics until then, but how do those
subjects really relate to my own life? If anything made sense, it had to
be Zen.
Everybody tried to talk me out of it, but nobody could
really convince me until the teacher who had originally introduced me to
the practice of zazen recommended that I wait a little, study Japanese,
and qualify myself for a job to make a living when I come back to Germany.
I had never really thought about making a living until then, but I was
warned that there were too many cases of people who ended up living in Zen
monasteries for life, just because they had no other choice. They could
not return to social life, because they would not be able to make a living
there. I could not imagine that such a thing could be possible: Weren't
those Zen monks some kind of super-human beings, who understood
everything? Nothing should be impossible for someone who has mastered Zen
- so why worry now about getting a job?
Anyway, I decided to study
Japanese before I was going to become a monk in Japan. As it happened to
be a fashion at the time to think that elemantary particles as well as
galaxies and the universe at a whole obey to the same laws that Shakyamuni
or Lao-tse taught, I decided to also take up philosophy and physics at
university. Eventually I would not only become a Zen master, but also win
the Nobel prize, I thought. After two and a half years though, I realized
that studying elemantary particle physics alone is a life-time vocation.
So I stopped.
In Germany there is no B.A., so you can not graduate from
university until you get your Master's degree. When I was 22, I could not
wait any longer to get closer to what I thought was "real Zen", and I
decided to take one year off to study at Kyoto University. During the
first three months, I attend the weekly Zazen meetings at the Soto Zen
Center in Kyoto, and the monthly sesshins in Sonobe, outside Kyoto.
University life in Japan proofed to be just as boring as in Germany, and
Zen was not a reality in the daily life of Kyoto. It existed for tourists,
but there were not even dojos that would function on a daily basis. Zen
priests were business men with no interest in practice, and temples would
be operated only as cementaries, not dojos for practice. After months at
the university, I even learned that my professor was a Soto Zen priest -
he certainly did not look like one, and at university he taught Kant. The
Soto Zen Center was my only refuge, and during the summer I decided to
spend two months in Shorinji, the sesshin temple in Sonobe.
During
these two months of Juli and August I got a first taste of "adult
practice". I had thought that people at the temple would take me by the
hand and teach me everything. It started promising when they put me in the
kitchen on my first day, as an assitant to the cook. I was supposed to
learn for the first week from the main cook, so that I could do the job on
my own and be the cook during the second week. I had never cooked more
sophisticated food than scrambled eggs, so I was not quite sure if one
week of assisting the cook would be enough time for me to learn the job,
especially when the "main cook" told me that he himself had arrived just a
week ago from Sweden and that it was the first day for him being
responsible alone in the kitchen. Three days later he decided that the
climate was much to hot and humid for him and was gone. So I became the
"main cook" for the rest of the ten days, after only three days of
"training" under a stressed out Swede. I asked the resident priest how he
could possibly expect me to be able to cook for the sangha, knowing
absolutely nothing about the art. Should not someone competent teach me
first? His answer was: "This is what Dogen Zenji calls
'self-realized-samadhi'. You have to read the Shobogenzo!" I had more
lessons in "self-realized-samadhi" during August, when Buddhist temples
around Japan get very buzy with ceremonies for the ancestors of the
parishioners of their temples. The resident priest too was very buzy
helping out at a big temple in Kyoto, and for two weeks he would come back
late at night to sleep at Shorinji, only to be back on his way to Kyoto
early the next morning. Everyone else had taken off for their summer
holidays, so I found myself following the schedule all on my own. Running
through the temple at 5am with the wake up bell, although their was no one
to wake up. Sitting for two hours in zazen, preparing breakfast, cleaning,
doing samu, heating the bath and after dinner two hours of zazen by my
own. For someone who went to a Zen temple to receive instruction in "Zen",
an excellent teaching indeed. "Self-realized-samadhi", or as I call it
now: Adult practice.
It was at my begin of my stay at Shorinji that
I heard from a practioner called George about Antaiji. George had spent
there two weeks during the spring, and although he could not communicate
with the all-Japanese monks, he said that the 24 hours of their daily
lives there were lived "in deep samadhi". The resident priest in Shorinji
also proofed to be a monk originally from Antaiji, and I got exited about
the possibility of getting an introduction to Antaiji and see it with my
very own eyes. Everything I heard about Antaiji sounded like the "real
Zen" I was still dreaming about: Self-sufficiency, cooking without gas, no
heat in winter except from a wood stove, two monthly sesshins. And above
all, only Japanese monks! I had enough of all these Western fake
practioners, I needed to practice with some real Japanese guys. Finally, I
would get some real instruction in "Zen"!
Thinking about it now, I can
not understand how come that I never woke up to all the fake in my own
mind?
Anyway, I got my introduction to Antaiji, and I decided to
stop my studies at Kyoto University to practice for six months at Antaiji.
I arrived on September 30th of 1990, two weeks after a typhoon had washed
away the four kilometer long road that led up to the temple. Some of the
monks seemed to be still in a kind of shock, but I couldn't see why: Isn't
it a matter of course that a "real Zen monastery" lies remotely in the
mountains, unaccesible for normal people, even without mail? I was rather
surprised that they had electricity and a telephone there - shouldn't real
Zen monks be able to do without?
You can imagine how much more
surprised I was when the sesshin started the following day: I had heard
that Antaiji practiced "pure Zen" in the tradition of Dogen Zenji,
shikantaza without any mixtures, sesshins without toys. What did I find?
The meditation hall revibrating with monks snoring, some dropping
backwards off their cushion, others banging their heads in the wall!
(to be continued)
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