Zazen Strapped To A Locomotive
There was a memorable online zazen one morning, right at the start of the COVID pandemic. Before sitting I had read an email from a nephew describing his past three days with little sleep, working as a physician in a hospital in a Native American community as the first people infected with the virus started crowding into a very small intensive care unit. His description was so vivid that it burst my usual zazen. There came a moment during the sitting when I was no longer in my tatami room with a panoramic view of our prairie and oak savanna. Instead, I felt myself strapped to the front of a locomotive speeding down the track toward a black tunnel.
And I realized how different it was to have my view be that of a rapidly approaching tunnel instead of the view for those back in the passenger cars who could calmly watch the scenery passing by without any sense of a threat. Those passengers were on the same train as me, moving at the same speed in the same direction, but with a different view. My zazen has never been the same since.
Instead of the usual focus on my breath, my posture, and my senses in a safe environment, I now sit as if I am in my nephew’s ICU, as if I was in that Buffalo grocery store during yesterday’s tragedy, as if I am in the devastating heat wave that is crushing India at the moment.
My teacher, Tanouye Roshi, would often speak of the Nio Zen of an obscure 17th century Zen man called Suzuki Shosan. That “Nio” refers to the two guardian deities found at the entrance of most Zen temples and Nio Zen was meant to embody that same fierce attention demonstrated by the two figures.
I now understand something of what that Nio Zen means – the ability to sit facing impending disaster. But why is that important? What’s the point of that approach to zazen?
As you know, we sit zazen with our eyes open, meaning that our senses are open. Instead of attending to the usual swirl of thoughts, attempting to calm them, we open our senses more and more so that we can feel our way into the world outside our own everyday boundaries. Your sense of what is you and is not you starts to shift and you come to better understand the translation of the Sanskrit name for the Boddhisattva of Compassion: “the hearer of all the cries in the world.”
Sitting in this way, there is less and less of “you” present and more and more of those cries audible. As a result, once you stand up from your cushion, your actions, your words, your decisions are sharper and clearer and more likely to make a useful impact. And if you feel your way into those cries, you start to take responsibility for the causes of suffering. If you are not separate from those, how can you not be responsible for those?
I am not alone in this Nio Zen. This is how people train within the Chosei Zen community. We don’t sit to find inner peace. We sit to end suffering, to end fear, to end ignorance, to end a sense that we are separate from all that surrounds us. A demanding goal, but it doesn’t matter. This is why we train.
