Itei

Yearbooks: 2025(full) 2024 2023 2022(full) 2021 2020 2019

Part I

This yearbook ended to be a real book-size. It took me a couple of weeks of writing and editing to process all the experiences I’ve had during the last year. It was intense. But exactly for this reason it will not be published – at least now. The summary follows:
“I wrote a much longer version of this yearbook – over 30,000 words, documenting everything in painful detail. I’m not publishing that version.
The detailed version contains extensive documentation of other people’s actions, words, and vulnerabilities. Even with names changed, the people involved would be immediately identifiable. They would recognize themselves. I don’t have the right to process my pain by making theirs public.
Publishing the full version would likely end my time at Antaiji, harm people who appear in the text regardless of how “fairly” I tried to present them, and create permanent digital records that follow every person and every place involved.
I wrote the full version because I needed to write it. Writing helped me process what happened, see patterns I couldn’t see while living through events, and create coherence where life offered only fragments. But needing to write something is different from needing to publish it. The full version served its purpose by existing.
There’s a version of me that wants to publish everything as proof of radical honesty. But I recognize this impulse as performance – the “honest persona” trying to win by being the most honest. Real honesty doesn’t require an audience. This 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, which developed into reality and then disappeared because it is not a stable formation. There were two parts there – part N and part A (for people identified with these letters instead of their real names). For more than one year I’ve been trying to decide how the story will end, but eventually the story decided for me – N-san announced that she has graduated her Master’s degree, started living in society and having me as a partner if I just keep staying in Toshoji/Antaiji doesn’t worth the deal. That’s not very beatiful move, but along the way I’ve made a lot of not such a beautiful moves as well. At the very end – after I’ve processed all the consequences – I’ve recovered my contact with A-san. Now it’s not even morally questionable.
The practice I’m doing has deterriorated and then developed again. 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 my plan has failed because I had to receive a knee surgery and spend almost three months out of capacity to do even practice I was used to with a bit less than a month of time spent hospitalized. The trauma was not even because of zazen practice – just a consequence of a car accident which happened to me almost ten years ago.
In February I’ve received a surgery. In April – another one. In the end of July consulted with 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 was eventually back to Antaiji. The more zazen I sat the more meaningful it looked to continue sitting – so the practice which was almost gone by summer is more or less back by now. I still feel that I’m too awkward even for Antaiji from time to time, but I appreciate all the opportunities I’m provided with.
During the whole story I’m having a dilemma of trying to find a balance between practice and personal relationships. Dogen Zenji in one of his talks gives an example of a general whose mother was living in the country his country had a war with, so 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 except for that with a monastery they stay. It makes sense and it doesn’t simultaneously – it’s completely possible to see how having 100% of the time being directed to the practice here and now is the purpose of the whole Antaiji game, but on the other hand depending on the method it is being achieved it is also losing the game of the whole Universe. After all even in Dogen Zenji’s example it wasn’t the general who sent his troops to kill every member of his family who happened to live in the enemy country to clean himself from any suspicions. I will not continue the analogy – but it goes to both directions: the fact that I am living in Antaiji is not an act against people I know, while the fact that I have something outside of Antaiji is not an act against a monastery.
A usual way to write about reasons to return to Antaiji is to say that the whole point is to become better somehow. I don’t feel like I’m getting even better – comparing to the last years I cannot even publish everything I’ve wriien, so – although I am trying to learn new things and new details of old things on the daily basis – it is not the core of the answer I’d give for “Why are you here?”-question.
This is my seventh year of Zen practice and it is hard to say, if I am really dedicated practicioner or just fail to graduate being a monk and start a life as a usual adult. I am not sure if the world outside looks frightening or just to boring to seek for anything except for zazen, but I do also regret a lot that I cannot just enjoy the life in a bit more usual way. So I am back to Anaiji, while I also have no idea what to expect from this new season – I might even have to leave due to visa complications or some other external factors.
On a certain occasion I’ve thought about time without trying to be consistent with what science or people are saying about it. And I’ve realized that it was never the case that the whole 100% of me would want it to stop. Every moment has an aftertaste. Some seeds of the future which set me and everything into the motion again. The paradoxical conclusion (which does not make any sense obviously) is that the time is not a cross-section of a static universe, nor a different name for the entropy growing – it’s an act of will. I never actually wanted it to stop. I’ve never wanted to leave it either. Some people might be critical: “theodicy”-like intentions of seeing the most outward part of Universe – the time itself – as just a reflection of the inner light. They are not wrong. The thing I see are seeds – seeds of all our past and future, true and false selves.
This yearbook is dry and empty – just the way people want to see a monk like me. A job of providing people with meaning necessarily requires sweeping all the problems and emotions I actually have under the carpet. Am I okay with it? No one asked. Whatever.
Itei 2025 Antaiji