A Dojo of One
In Zen, you train alone. And that has been true long before we had the self-isolation needed during a pandemic. When Bodhidharma brought his Indian Buddhist training into the Daoist culture of China, Zen began to emerge as a distinct line of training. How did Bodhidharma foster that? Tradition says he sat facing the wall of a cave for nine years, high on a cliff face above the Shaolin Temple. Carry-out food delivered to his door. Self-isolation.
Our particular line of Zen comes out of the monastic Rinzai Zen temple traditions of Japan and that history has created the impression that training at a temple (or a Dojo) is the most important form of training and anything other than that is second-best. But there are two counter-narratives to that story: the history of home-bound, family-bound, women who attained the highest levels of Zen realization; and the history of lay people like Yamaoka Tesshu who trained on their own far from their own teacher. Even my own teacher, Tanouye Roshi, once told me that the only people who should live in a monastery are those who cannot be cured of dualism any other way.
To reinforce this idea that training on your own can be significant, Adrienne Hampton, Cris Nakano and I are committed to developing a weekly series of stories, interviews, essays in a variety of formats, all under the umbrella of “A Dojo of One.”
We are a good team for this project since we come at the subject from different directions. Adrienne can describe how powerful she has found her self-training to be over the past several years even though she lives just a few miles from her teacher. I, on the other hand, had many years of struggling with the discipline of self-training, thinking that my only option was the difficult work of creating a local Zen training group. Cris lives in Switzerland, far from her Zen teachers, both in space and in time zones.
That collective experience speaks to people who have already begun their practice, spending most of their training time alone, apart from a group and any teachers. But we also recognize that there are many people who have been introduced to Zen, are likewise far from a group and any teachers, and who are asking for help in finding ways to begin training on their own. For some people, that means jumping straight into the practice of zazen. For others that could mean finding meaningful ways to begin to use their breath and their body as the starting point for developing a Zen practice.
And, even more basic than that need, we want to help people whose first goal is to simply get more of their attention away from their thoughts and into their bodies and their senses, the foundation of all of our Zen training. Examples would include suggestions for using your breath while doing something you enjoy, like dancing, or bicycling, or swimming.
Let us work to resolve the paradox of training alone together.
