Yearbooks: 2025(full) 2024 2023 2022(full) 2021 2020 2019
Part I
I wrote a much longer version of this yearbook – over 30,000 words.
The detailed version contains extensive documentation of other’s actions, words, and vulnerabilities. Publishing the full text could end my time at Antaiji and emotionally harm people who appear in the text regardless of how “fairly” I tried to present them.
Writing the full text helped to process what happened and create coherence where life offered only fragments. The full version served its purpose by existing.
There’s a part of me that wants to publish everything as proof of radical honesty, but the real honesty doesn’t require an audience. The following version keeps what I learned without making other people pay for my education.
Part II
The last yearbook ended with a cliffhanger – a potential for a love triangle. The triangle became real and then disappeared. The text had two parts – part N and part A (for people identified with the letters instead of the real names). For more than one year I’ve been trying to decide how to close the story, but eventually the story decided for me – N-san announced that she has graduated her Master’s degree, started living more socially active so having me as a partner doesn’t worth a deal. That’s not a beatiful move, but along the way I haven’t been perfect as well. After I’ve processed and discarded the feelings left – I’ve recovered my contact with A-san which was cut once: now doing so is not even morally questionable.
In the beginning of the year I was emotionally busy – which did hinder my stay in Toshoji. To solve the problem I’ve been even proposed to go to a strict Rinzai temple Engakuji by Docho-san, but the plan has failed because I found that I had to receive a knee surgery and spend almost three months out of capacity to even walk decently – not to say anything about practicing. The trauma was a consequence of a car accident from ten years ago.
In February I’ve received a surgery. In April – another one. At the end of July I’ve consulted to Docho-san and decided to leave Toshoji to return to Antaiji. After about one month of a break – which I’ve used to meet some people in Japan and return for a couple of weeks to my homecountry – I have been eventually back to Antaiji. I feel that I’m too awkward even for Antaiji, but I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
What else? Trying to find a balance between practice and personal relationships. Dogen Zenji in Zuimonki gives an example of a military general whose mother was living in the country of enemy. To prevent her son from being suspected in betrayal, she took her own life. The example is used to convince Zen practitioners to cut off every possible connection with people from “outside of the practice”. It makes sense but it doesn’t – having 100% of the time to practice here and now is the purpose of the whole Antaiji game, but depending on the method cutting the connections is also losing the game of the whole Universe (in a bad way). To use an analogy: I don’t understand Abraham sacrificing his son and I refuse to try to understand him.
Even in Dogen Zenji’s example it wasn’t the general who sent the troops to kill every relative of him to clean himself from any suspicions. From my side living in Antaiji is not an act against people I know, while having something or someone outside of Antaiji is not an act against the monastery.
Usually staying in Antaiji implies a purpose of becoming better. I don’t feel like I’m getting any better – I cannot even safely publish my thoughts (unlike the last years), so – although I am trying to learn new things and details daily – it is not the core of the answer I’d give for “Why are you here?”
This is my seventh year of Zen practice and it is hard to say, if I am a dedicated practicioner or just keep failing to graduate being a monk and start a life of a normal adult. Does the world outside look frightening or maybe just too boring to seek for anything except for zazen? Still despite all the rationalizations I generate to explain myself the importance of practice, I regret hugely that I cannot just live the life the way decent people in the usual world can live – I cannot see how that life can be taken as something possible to enjoy while not dying from boredom. Paradoxically, I do not regret being like this: being someone who is not bored by the life itself is too boring – I don’t want to be such a person. As a conclusion: desiring to be two opposite things (completely accept life while acutely denying it) is not easy.
I am back to Antaiji but I have no idea what to expect from this new season – I might have to leave due to visa complications or due to being a person of negative value for the community even before this season starts. Well, being unable to see any future is a common experience for me now.
“Time doesn’t stop even subjectively. Every moment has an aftertaste. Some seeds of the future which set me and everything into the motion. Maybe the time is not a cross-section of a static universe, nor a different name for the entropy growing – but an act of will and I just never actually wanted it to stop wholeheartedly.” This is literally the only way for me to think that I am in control now.
The only thing worse than that for a decent leaving-the-game-zazen-practitioner (aka Buddhist) is that I’ve never even 100% wanted to cease to exist. My ceiling is want to want to die, which never brings any results.
This yearbook is dry and empty. That’s what being a monk is about, right? Sweeping all the problems and emotions I actually have under the carpet. Am I okay with it? No one asked. Whatever.
Itei 2025 Antaiji
