Why I Quit a Class on Zen
In 1999 I took a Zen class in Garrison, NY. This photo, which I took in Garrison last weekend, shows a path on which I struggled to be here now. Pretty, right?
Hoboken, June 11, 2024. In 1999, when I was still married and living in Garrison, New York, someone mailed me a flier for a class on Zen meditation. If I believed in synchronicity, this flier’s arrival would have been a clear case of it. I had just begun researching a book on mysticism, and I had decided that for the book’s purposes—and my own well-being--I needed a spiritual practice. Zen was my first choice, because its metaphysical minimalism seemed compatible with my skeptical scientific outlook.
A dozen students showed up for the first class, which convened in the basement of Garrison’s library. The teacher, whom I’ll call Sumi, was a middle-aged Asian woman with short dark hair and a paradoxical expression: When she smiled, her eyes crinkled, but the corners of her mouth sagged sharply, as if she were being tickled and stabbed at the same time.
After we settled onto our mats and cushions, Sumi picked up a bronze bell, walked up to a woman in the front row, and asked, “What is this?” The woman, smiling uneasily, said nothing. With the same grimace-grin, Sumi asked someone else: “What is this?” I knew the answer: The bell is a bell, but it is also Ultimate Reality, Nothing, Everything. But I didn’t want to show off, so I remained smugly silent.
Pete, a rock-jawed karate enthusiast with a mane of heavy-metal-style hair, brayed, “Are you asking, like, what’s the metaphorical meaning of the bell?” Sumi jerked backward, as if slapped by Pete’s words. Collecting herself, she spoke haltingly about how words and concepts keep us from seeing things as they really are. Zen helps us see “this”—she held up the bell—for what it really is. She added mournfully, “It’s very difficult to talk about these things.”
True knowledge comes through meditation, Sumi said, before giving us basic instruction: Find a comfortable posture, relaxed but not too relaxed. Back straight. Keep your eyes open, focused on a spot a few feet in front of you. Pay attention to your breath going in and out. As thoughts, sensations, emotions arise, watch them come and go without reacting.
Sitting back on my heels, I felt itches on my face and scalp, a tickle in my throat. I wanted to cough, to scratch my head, but I remained silent and still, like Sumi. As other students squirmed and coughed, I felt a pleasant surge of superiority. After ten minutes or so, the air glowed and hummed with energy, and faint auras appeared around Sumi and other objects in the room. Cool, I thought. Satori, next stop.
At Sumi’s command we rose and walked around the room, once, twice. A muscle knotted in my lower left back. I trudged along, wondering if the guy behind me noticed me listing right. I watched the short, sturdy legs of the woman in front of me go back and forth, back and forth.
In subsequent classes, Sumi’s teachings began to annoy me. She described retreats during which she meditated for up to 14 hours a day without speaking or making eye contact with others. After two weeks or more, these retreats left her wobbly-legged and averse to human contact. To dramatize how she felt, Sumi scowled and pushed her palms outwards, as if fending off a repugnant suiter.
What, I wondered, is the spiritual benefit of being repulsed by your fellow humans?
Sumi said Zen seeks to restore us to a state of child-like innocence. She showed us a photograph of Ho Chi Minh sitting on a beach surrounded by kids, one of whom was pulling the despot’s beard. This child was acting spontaneously, Sumi said, with no self-consciousness or anxiety. “Just do it,” she summed up, smile-frowning.
Is this the goal of Zen? I thought. To regress to the mindless hyper-kineticism celebrated in sneaker ads? And who said childhood is so great? My young son and daughter had plenty of anxious, miserable moments.
Sumi told us about a master who kept asking a monk “What is dharma mind?” and whacked him when he tried to answer. Why, Sumi asked us with a mischievous glint in her eye, did the master hit the student? I started to speak, but Sumi cut me off with a loud “Ahh!” Someone else spoke, and again Sumi interrupted: “Ahh!” Her expression was tremulous, triumphant. Eventually Sumi explained the master’s point: Language prevents us from seeing the world as it truly is.
I wondered how many millions of words Zen masters have spouted commanding us to get beyond words.
Sumi liked telling us about the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma. He stared at the wall of a cave for weeks on end, waiting for enlightenment. He became so enraged with himself for falling asleep that he tore his eyelids off; this was the origin of the Zen technique of open-eyed meditation. Bodhidharma tested the commitment of would-be students by making them wait outside the monastery. One young man chopped off his own arm to demonstrate his fervor. He became a great master in his own right.
These guys sounded like masochists and sadists.
My fellow koan-heads also distracted me. The worst was a guy I called Cellphone Man, because the first time he came to Sumi’s class his cellphone kept beeping. During meditation he also kept yawning, sighing, and twisting his head with a crunching noise. When Sumi asked for questions or comments, Cell-phone Man invariably piped up, loudly, as if he were hard of hearing.
Once he said something “amazing” had recently happened to him. All the thoughts in his head began spontaneously turning into songs, and he realized that creation is nothing more than God turning silence into song, which is really just vibrations, and, you know, like, energy.
As Cellphone Man described his epiphany, I watched him coolly, thinking how foolish and loathsome he was. Then I realized how loathsome I was to loathe him, and I loathed him even more.
The voice in my head kept carping when I tried to practice mindfulness outside of class. Waking one winter morning to freshly fallen snow, I strapped on cross-country skis and headed into the woods behind our house. The sky was sunless, white, lacking features or depth, and the light was omnipresent, it left no shadows. Trees and rocks looked finely etched, drained of color. The leaves of the mountain laurel were black, like wet stones.
Sliding through the trees, pushing through my own exhalations, I thought about falling stock prices, about my wife’s spat with a town official, about our daughter’s cold, about my Zen class. I realized I wasn’t being mindful. My monkey mind was running wild, swinging through the trees, hooting and chattering.
Stop! I chided myself. Pay attention! Be here now! I leaned on my poles, expelling plumes of mist. I gazed at the snow-dusted trees, the gnarled mountain laurel, the animal tracks crisscrossing the trail. What are those? That’s deer. That’s rabbit. That’s...what, raccoon? Stop! I ordered myself again. You’re not being here now!
Then I rebelled against the drill sergeant in my head. This exercise in self-discipline is absurd. Every time I order myself to be here now, I’m not being here now. I’m thinking about being here now. It’s self-defeating from the start, like trying to remember to forget. In heeding the command, I violate it.
My rebellion spread to other spiritual truisms, like Sumi’s injunction to be child-like. Children’s spontaneity and joy reflect their ignorance. What do they know of death, suffering, the woes of the world? A spirituality that denies these realities is shallow, escapist. And what’s so great about being in the moment, anyway? We should revel in the power of our minds to range through space and time rather than being trapped like animals in the here and now.
Wait, another voice countered. Am I just rationalizing, justifying my mental habits out of laziness and timidity? So that I can stay sealed inside my cozy intellectual perspective and avoid a deeper confrontation with reality?
As this argument raged in my head, my body stood silently. Blood pulsed in my temples, beads of sweat inched down my forehead. A tree creaked, and the chill, colorless air hissed into my lungs and out again, in and out.
Soon after this episode, I stopped attending Sumi’s class. I no longer have a spiritual practice.
Further Reading:
A Buddhism Critic Goes on a Buddhist Retreat