Zen offers nothing

And that's more than something.

Sometimes, I write a post and ten people unsubscribe. This is one of them.

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Yesterday, I went to sit with a local Zen group for half a day¹. One of us was a practitioner with over 40 years of experience sitting zazen² who is also mentoring others.

After the sit, one of his students came to him and jokingly said:

— I saw your posture was not perfectly still during the sit³.

— Now that you learned how to sit properly yourself, I don’t have to demonstrate it to you anymore. — smiled his teacher warmly.

Later, over a communal lunch, he told a story of having killed a mouse who fell into his bathtub with a cup plunger.

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Once, I was struggling to fall asleep, so I listened to this text by Zen teacher Kōdō Sawaki.

“When somebody asks me what zazen is good for, I say that zazen isn’t good for anything at all. <…> Often people ask me how many years they have to practice zazen before it shows results. Zazen has no results. You won’t get anything at all out of zazen.”

— Kōdō Sawaki

What I appreciate about Zen is its complete and utter lack of promises. If you expect anything at all from sitting on your backside for 40 years, you’re doing it wrong. The point of sitting is just sitting.

Yet there’s a difference between someone who sat on a meditation cushion for 40 years and someone who sat on a sofa.

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When I’m coaching, I sometimes make a mess. It’s nearly always because I say something when it would have been better to say silent.

In an way, in coaching, it’s precisely the lack of words or actions that can be most powerful, when used skilfully.

It’s not the powerful questions that are most powerful in coaching, it’s silence combined with precise attention.

Aren’t they meditation skills? Or poetry skills?

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In my mind, there’s a link between ayahuasca, The Brothers Karamazov, meditation and Jungian dreamwork. I don’t think I ever touched these four topics in one conversation with anyone.

I just read Original Love⁴ by Henry Shukman⁵, where he touches on all four in a single chapter. It made me want to fly across the ocean to see the author in person.

The link between ayahuasca, meditation and dreamwork is obvious: they all help us go deep into the subconscious and shake the snowglobe a bit there. But why Brothers Karamazov?

I couldn’t care to read it in school where it was on the reading list, but I read it after one American meditation teacher said that it has the best description of awakening he ever read.

In my Russian school my teachers didn’t mention awakening when discussing Brothers Karamazov, but maybe I just slept through it.

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I suspect the Third Patriarch of Zen knew what he was talking about when he said:

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences

<…>

Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

Verses on the Faith Mind

I think the word “preferences” here is a bit misleading. Every living thing, down to bacteria, has preferences, in a way. But our mind’s attachment to some imaginary outcomes is a different thing.

But that’s six words. Maybe “preferences” is a good translation, after all.

1. Which is why this email is on Monday and not on Sunday as usual :)

2. Zazen is the practice of sitting meditation in Zen tradition.

3. In Zen, meditation is done with the eyes open and in complete stillness. His student was sitting near the entrance facing the room, while everyone else was facing the wall.

4. A great introduction to meditation. The author is a Zen teacher and professional writer, which helps.

5. His first book on Zen, One Blade of Grass, is also exceptional.