One Blade of Grass by Henry Shukman
Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say: to retreat in order to leap better. And sometimes we’ll find what we’re looking for only when we stop looking. If what we’re looking for lies outside of imagination or calculation, we can’t know what it is until it hits us.
In our quest for efficiency, the old ways of proceeding through a slow, patient training over many years under an experienced guide may go the way of the dinosaurs, replaced entirely by short-term methods, even surgery or new, as yet unknown neurological interventions. Will something be lost? Is meditation merely an instrument to induce desired changes? For one thing, in its paradoxical way, it tends not to work so well if we are too directly seeking its benefits. For another, the chance to apprentice with a teacher, to entrust ourselves to an authentic guide, is a privilege like no other. And if the modern approaches end up supplanting the ancient, transformative insights into what it means to be human, they will have lost their true power to help our world.
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT HOW I found a path when I didn’t even know I was looking for one. For a long time I didn’t know where I wanted to be; I just knew I wasn’t there. I tell this story not because it holds any special interest. Far from it; my challenges have been unremarkable. It’s a tale of everyday desperation, such as many know, that healed through meditation practice. That’s why I hope it may be helpful: to show that the practice can steer and jolt even a common dolt into kinder, better ways of living, without divine intervention though with moments of grace. For those who feel, as I once did, like giving up on life, perhaps this little narrative may incline them to think again.
ONE NIGHT AT THE TAIL end of summer, when I was twelve years old, there was a thudding on the back door of our family home, a dilapidated cottage up the Cherwell Valley. Our mother opened up, and we heard her cry out in surprise and delight. It was a rainy night, and we gathered round to see what was going on. "Come in, come in," Mum called, and out of the weather stepped a windswept heap of a man wrapped in a damp, hairy overcoat, with two dogs at his heels. I guessed it must be Speedy. We’d all heard of Speedy, and even caught glimpses of him on the far sides of fields, in his shaggy greatcoat, the same color as his spreading ginger beard. Staff in hand, he’d be pressing along, his two dogs weaving in and out of hedgerows in his wake. But I’d never seen him up close before, face-to-face.
This was the mid-1970s, when there were still bona fide tramps stalking the byways of England, old-school "men of the road" such as had been beating the footpaths for at least a century, or maybe much longer. We’d heard of tramps, with a mixture of fear and fascination. The autumn evening Speedy rapped on our door, rain was lashing down. He stood under the little porch, his hairy coat dripping. He brushed himself down, opened up his front, and pulled out a little puppy.
While she was gone, Speedy looked down at us kids. We’d never seen a face like it. First off, hidden between his beard, hat, and hair, it was hard even to see his cheeks. Then when you realized you were looking at them, it was a shock to see skin so brown and ruddy. It looked more like animal hide. Then you landed on the eyes, shimmering, alive. They shocked you when you stole a glance at them, there was so much life and light in them. It was like having a wild animal in the room. Only when I did did I realize he was smiling.
BY THE TIME SPEEDY WALKED away that night, I realized there was another way of being human. It was unlike anything I’d known. It was as if the room itself had just been shocked, and a stunned peace fizzed among the furniture. An aliveness that was new, and not my own, welled up inside me.
It was also the summer we got to know Speedy for real. He befriended us, and taught us some of his tricks. How to make a rabbit snare out of garden twine and set it on secret rabbit paths. How to catch and smoke fish. He told us of his winters on the south coast, his life on the open road. Roped in his hairy overcoat, stringed into his boots, he liked to sit still and watch things, he said. You could learn a lot if only you just sat yerself still. Everybody else, the whole world, is rushing about all day long, they don’t have time to learn nothing, if they just stopped still a moment they’d be amazed what they’d learn.
The young dog would always come with us when we slept out. She couldn’t resist the pull of the old fields she’d known as a puppy. She would disappear into reeds by the riverbanks. We’d hear her thrash through them, then burst out in excitement. She came alive on the land. This was the life she had been made for: tramping the fields, rivers, and woods of her native territory. She didn’t have to think why. She was made for it, and it for her. At the end of a day she would sit at the foot of my sleeping bag, a pale triangle, looking out across the dark land into the night, and not curl up until everyone else was asleep.
Had we ever hated? he wanted to know. He said how hate could be strong—like love in some ways. It made you think about the person all the time.
Meanwhile the simple food, the fitness, the hard work, the trekking, the mental work of recording it all changed me. It was all so different in South America. To be among people who had grown up in close contact with the mountains, streams, llamas, potato fields, and earthen homes where they lived—it seemed to make them more at peace with themselves. The infants were constantly on someone’s back, whether an older sibling, aunt, or mother—a bundle in a blanket, eyes gleaming at you from over a shoulder. What would it do to a child to live unseparated from a human body the first year or two of its life? What kind of security in its own being would a child imbibe, growing like a tree in the mulch cultivated by generations of its own kind? Was that the difference? These people had less irritability and anxiety. They were calm. They had a depth you could feel. They were friendly and hospitable.
He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always. A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes. A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water. And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matt black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing?
Back in my cabana, I lay on my bunk in the gloom with the wooden ceiling just overhead while a flame burned in my chest like the flame of my kerosene camping stove, which was fierce but ghostly. It was a fire of love, and it kept pouring out of me. I’d never known anything like it. Yet somehow it was familiar, as if it had been with me all my life, just unnoticed. The walls of weathered plywood gleamed in the dark. I lay listening to the rustle and murmur of water outside. Previously there had always been a limit to beauty, but now it was everywhere. Nothing was left out. All I had to do was lie here, with love pouring out of my breast in a swift, silent stream, like a Roman candle. I felt like I’d been claimed by immemorial love. That night I lay awake a long time, the watch fire in the heart burning long into the night. It seemed I would never need to sleep again. I’d found something larger than the world, and didn’t need to.
Sometimes a kind old friend from school days would drag me out of my lairs into his network of conviviality, where I would skulk and long for the events to be over. Or else quaff potations and think I was the soul of the party. In time, alongside Mr. Morbid I evolved another personality: Mr. Fun, who was flirtatious and gregarious, but brittle and oversensitive, and emerged during bouts of drinking, arranging his clothing and hair to hide any ailing skin to the point where he could banish it from consciousness, and despise it almost as someone else’s blight. My friend introduced me to a series of achingly desirable young women, reared at expensive schools, after whom I’d hanker. But in spite of Mr. Fun’s bonhomie, they picked up an untrustworthy shadow of oddness on their radar. They could tell something was off, they just weren’t sure what.
These days psychologists say a traumatic event can trigger not only the fight-or-flight response but also a freeze. We go into lockdown, all the more likely in the case of a nervous system already debilitated by an ongoing stressor, such as a chronic ailment.
THE BEACH: BY NOW I knew others had been there, too. In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, for example, I had been astonished to come across this passage: Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!
Thirty years later, when he came to compose his great play, O’Neill was still writing about it. It still tugged at him. Well, why wouldn’t it? What could matter more?
At the time it happened to O’Neill, once his ship docked he went straight to the nearest dive and drank himself nearly to death. The experience had not delivered him from despair. Like me, he had had no way to deepen or stabilize it or make it intelligible, or link it to his life. For me, too, it had been a random windfall, a sudden, marvelous rend in the fabric of life. Then it blew on and left the tear behind, flapping in the breeze.
Only the odd twinkle of sun to guide you. I remembered what it was like to figure out where a stream was, and to find it after pushing through dark undergrowth—a babble of clear light in the gloom of bushes. Days turned into weeks, following the footpaths, pounding out twenty-five-mile days that had me laying my exhausted limbs on the hard ground each night. I kept going, and picked up the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Poems started to creep up from the ground, and a flicker of life rekindled somewhere near the heart. I remembered what Speedy had said about "old roads" you couldn’t see but which were there, spanning great distances across the land, and now and then I wondered if I wasn’t catching a glimpse of one.
After a week in the refugee camps, then another driving around in the back of a stripped-down Land Rover with a squad of guerrillas, sleeping under the stars, spying on enemy positions with binoculars, drinking tiny glasses of strong tea, smoking fierce tobacco out of small bronze pipes, eating strange stews cooked over open fires, and coming under occasional artillery fire—we’d hear a pair of thuds somewhere in the distance, followed a few seconds later by two crashes or booms, depending on how far away the shells landed—I came back to life.
The strange thing wasn’t just that the sleep debt came in with such force, but that it cleared just as suddenly. On the seventh morning, I woke up, made breakfast, and had coffee, fully expecting to need to stagger straight back to bed, but instead I felt clear, luminous, refreshed in a way I couldn’t remember feeling since being a boy—actually, since I couldn’t remember when.
Often while meditating, after a few minutes of restlessness a sense of soothing would come on, as if I were being salved inside and out. In neurophysiological terms, this was the parasympathetic nervous system engaging, turning down the dial on the stress response. I had lived with a dysregulated nervous system for so long that I hadn’t considered the possibility that maybe the anxiety I ordinarily felt wasn’t 100 percent necessary.
He sabotaged himself: that was the diagnosis. Deep down he felt he didn’t deserve to win. There is a legendary moment in the show. During a therapy session, the racer, quietly goaded by Harvey, leaps off the couch, flies across the room, and pulls Harvey to the floor. The producer jumps into the frame and tugs him off, you can hear the cameraman shouting in the background, and the sound guy leaps in, too, and it was all on film. That was the turning point in the young man’s therapy. The moment he let his rage out, he could no longer deny his pain. On-screen he collapsed, sobbing, while Harvey straightened his glasses and put his hand on the client’s shaking back. The driver went on to become British GT champion. One day I tore Harvey’s door off its hinges. Instead of trying to stop me, he sat and watched. He was very pleased. He had been goading me. "You’re basically a piece of shit," he kept murmuring in his mellow Californian tones.
I was white-hot inside. I could barely walk. I was a two-year-old. I pushed against the door, I hit it, pummeled it, then fell, got up again, shaky on my legs, and beat harder, rattled the handle, tugged it, fell again. Then up and at it, then down on the floor in a raging, hopeless heap. This went on for a while. Harvey said nothing. He wanted to see what would happen. In the end I pulled the door down, then tore it to pieces. "Good therapy," Harvey said, and he got out his Polaroid camera to commemorate the two of us standing on top of the heap, me holding the remains of the door handle like a trophy.
The incident with the door became my doorway. I could no longer pretend. Whatever my parents had done or not done, it had hurt. Dad was an amazing man, but not an amazing dad. He was half right about being a bastard. He hadn’t provided all a boy needed by way of love. Mum had done her best, but her own early history cast its shadow, and the marital circumstances had been so hard.
The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life? On top of that, in fits and starts, my skin was getting better.
I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of its symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at the symptoms—the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular. But the new cognitive-behavioral approach was actually helping. I never knew what diabolical habits of mind I’d had. It turned out that as long as I could remember, I’d been thinking myself into misery. I beat myself up, put myself down, shoulded myself to death, catastrophized and awfulized. I was an inveterate musturbator: I must do this, that must work out, et cetera. As I exposed and gave up these habitual cognitions, to be alive became stranger and more interesting.
It reminded me of Derek Walcott’s poem where he meets himself in the mirror: You will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome … You will love again the stranger who was your self.
In fact, the reason I was a travel writer myself was that I had read Lawrence in my teens, and his writing about place had burned a hole in my imagination. When I went abroad at eighteen, it was his writing that inspired me to try my hand at it.
Her approach came from Zen. She called it "writing practice." Zen was popular in American letters. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen—many writers made no secret of their affiliation with Zen. Natalie was another. "First thought, best thought" was the maxim. Get the page covered, outrun the internal censor. There was something about her—a stillness, a quiet radiance. I’d never known anything exactly like it. As if some kind of jewel shone inside her.
ONE DAY NATALIE AND I were sitting on the porch overlooking her small lawn, enclosed by an adobe wall that was just beginning to glow as the New Mexico afternoon thickened toward evening. Cottonwood trees with long silvery leaves overhung the neighborhood like willows, silent in the late air. A cat sprang onto the broad, rounded top of the wall and sat down to lick its paws. I watched the cat. The trees, the shadows, the waning light, the quiet sounds of a neighborhood concluding its day, and the cat fluffing itself up and resting—all caught me with their beauty. Things seemed to go slower when you were around Natalie. They took the time to show themselves to you. It reminded me of how in my teen years, as an aspiring poet, I’d learned to see beauty in ordinary things. A white cat sheltering from rain under a dark bush. A streetlamp illuminating stucco at night. The hiss of traffic on a wet street heard from a second-floor window.
Natalie opened up a book on Zen and read aloud from it. It was a passage by Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen master from the thirteenth century.* In her slow, Jewish New Yorkese (a "Lorne Guyland" accent, as Martin Amis called it), she read: Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking. She put the book down and looked around, a little dazed, and said, "Wow," shaking her head. "Isn’t he mind-blowing?" I hummed noncommittally. I couldn’t make head or tail of what I’d just heard. Was it supposed to be nonsense, like Edward Lear or something? Mountains walking? I asked her for the book and took a look myself. The chapter was called "The Mountains and Rivers Sutra." Whatever that meant. I reread the paragraph to myself. Then she asked me to read it out loud, so I did. I couldn’t understand it at all, and said so. She said she couldn’t, either, but loved it anyway.
As soon as I thought of it, I felt it had to be right. What else could make sense of Dogen’s apparent nonsense? But the beach moment would make complete sense of it. Not that I could exactly explain why. But everything had been there, all at once, in the empty fire I had seen, that single seething, ghostly reality in which all time and space were present. Anything was possible there—everything was possible. How could it not be, if the universe were one single fabric and one was made of that fabric oneself?
It was a nice room. It hit you immediately: a peace about it. It was pretty much square, made out of thick adobe, like most of Santa Fe, and was cool and quiet. There was no furniture, the whole space bare except for a row of black mats lined up around the walls, about a dozen of them, each with a small black cushion in the middle. The room ought to have felt spartan. Instead it felt thick with peace, with restfulness. A small Buddha made of wood sat on an altar with a candle. As Robert lit the candle and made a bow to the altar, I noticed a shaving nick on the back of his scalp. Then he pulled out two of the black cushions. There wasn’t much to zazen. He showed me different possible positions for the legs, and I settled on what he called "quarter lotus." He taught me the correct alignment of the spine, and the way to hold my hands in my lap, and told me to start counting my breaths in sequences of ten. And that was it. "Nothing else?" I asked. "Not really," he said. "That’s about it."
As I walked away down the path into the trees and down a drop into the little gulch of the stream along which ran the track where I had left my bike, it came to me that what I had just tasted was the reality of being alive. It was frightening, as it should be. Normally, I realized, I pulled away from the bare fact of being alive. I didn’t know how not to. But now I did. It was zazen. Meditation in the Zen style. It somehow was no surprise that the other form of meditation I had been doing did not offer this kind of taste. The TM was restorative, ameliorative, medicinal almost. It helped you relax and sleep and restore. But this zazen—it didn’t seem to be interested in those things. Instead, without any deliberation on its part, it simply let you know what it was to be alive.
I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on. Zen was done with the eyes open, which made one’s sense of the world while meditating more vivid. I’d feel a warmth, a pressure in my chest. Sometimes, for no reason, I’d start crying. Sometimes a strange wind seemed to riffle through me and through the surroundings as I sat, reminding me of Sappho’s famous line about love shaking her the way the wind shakes the oak trees on the mountainside.
I fell in love with the hills around Santa Fe, hills of chunky red earth, fragrant with small pines and juniper. I fell in love with the town too, its ocher mud buildings sitting squat and hunched under the sky, fragrant with the woodsmoke that began to be burned as autumn rolled in, overseen every day by sunsets that were apocalyptic, with pillars of cloud smoking over the city, and late sunlight flooding the streets. Thick as concentrated orange juice, it was light you could have scooped up in your fingers. It was palpable, you could feel it in your chest, it enveloped you.
Eventually I fell in love for real, with a woman from Wisconsin, a singer-songwriter recovering from the recent cancer deaths of both her parents. She was the kind of woman I could never have imagined being with, a sensitive, wheat-haired, long-limbed goddess from the album covers of my youth, when American country rock took over the English airwaves for a few summers in the mid-seventies. Andi was a little older than me. It was a relief. She had been through more, she was ahead of me in care of the soul. I trusted her. I didn’t have to prove anything. She showed me it was okay to be open to one’s wounds. One didn’t constantly have to be outrunning them.
He told me about the discipline of living as an artist, the need to practice your art every day without fail, how you should get up early each morning to work before you did anything else. You needed to trust your instincts and cultivate wonder.
"It’s okay to take care of yourself, you know." Frankly, I didn’t. I lived in fear of being self-indulgent, and was confused about where to draw the line between that and self-care.
I had heard that sesshin retreats were the heart of Zen training. The word—ses-shin—literally meant "encountering or touching the heart." Natalie explained that in Japanese the word shin meant both "heart" and "mind." That right there was the difference between East and West, she said. We cut off the heart from the mind. Not so the East. And according to Zen, our true heart-mind was infinite, knowing no bounds or limits, and included everything.
The Japanese word zen derived from the Chinese ch’an, which in turn came from the Sanskrit dhyana and meant "meditative absorption." But unlike other kinds of meditation, it was short on detailed instructions. The advice Robert the Zen priest had first given me—to count breaths in sets of ten—was about as elaborate as it got. Zen had "lineages" of masters who had "confirmed" one another down through the ages. What they had confirmed was that the student had had the same insights into the nature of consciousness or reality that the master had, and had learned to live by them in daily life. It was weird: it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.
ZEN IS NOT EASY. ZEN is baffling. Zen is impossible to pin down. On the one hand, it’s easy to pin down: it’s about sitting on a cushion every day. You try to be aware of what is going on. Breathing, mostly, and thoughts that come and, you hope, go. It’s nice when they go. You can find yourself in a state of exhilarating peace. Zen is a journey back to radical simplicity. No mantras, no "sacred syllables," no sacred anything.
The emperor asked Bodhidharma how much merit he had acquired through his support for Buddhism. Bodhidharma said, "No merit whatsoever." Not a reply the emperor had been expecting. According to George, Zen didn’t believe in reincarnation, let alone a cosmic moral bank account. Then he asked the holy man to expound his highest, holiest teaching. Bodhidharma answered, "No holiness. Vast and void." In Zen there was no such thing as holy. It didn’t separate sacred and profane at all. This was more like it. I found myself starting to like Zen again, and Bodhidharma. In frustration, the emperor then asked Bodhidharma who on earth he was, this man standing before him. To which Bodhidharma answered, "I don’t know."
ZEN CALLED ITSELF THE "SUDDEN school," George explained. You didn’t have to go through a gradual process, through stages of practice. Instead, in one sudden leap, you could find all you were looking for. Bodhidharma said the practice wasn’t based on scripture or words, but rather "directly pointed to the human mind." "Sudden teaching." You didn’t have to travel by stages. Some how, in spite of the torment, I recognized that too. The answer to life was right here already.
THE FOURTH DAY WAS WARM, and in the afternoon George decided to have us sit outside in the long grass. "Let the wind give us a dharma talk," he said.
On the other hand, a principle of Zen, George had told us, was the discovery that we had been wrong about everything. There was great relief in that, he assured us.
According to George, Zen’s view was that we were busy being wrong all the time in ways we didn’t realize. "Awakening" was nothing other than to see this.
I had found the answer to the teacher’s question. Who was I? I was no one. I had made myself up.
Not only that, but without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure. The rest of that day I was in bliss. Peace suffused everything. A love burned in my chest like a watch fire. I could hear the grass growing, a faint high singing sound, like the sibilance of a new snowfall coming down. I remembered the Jewish saying: "No blade of grass but has an angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’" Every blade of grass deserved that. Each blade was an angel. I cried. My heart was mush. Somehow it felt as though the grass were growing in my own chest. Every object contained an inner lamp, and now I could see it.
But I was doing the same thing with Zen. I thought the point was to get cooked by it so you no longer needed it. The plan was to do it, "get" it, and discard it. I had trouble getting my head around the maintenance model: that you might keep doing things for their own sake.
"What was your original face before your parents were born?" This is a famous "barrier" koan in Zen, the teacher explained: a question given to novices that may help precipitate a breakthrough.
Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kensho. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone. John gave me my first koan there and then, the original ur-koan described by Zen master Mumon in the thirteenth century as "the Gateless Barrier of the Zen sect": A monk asked Joshu* in all earnestness: "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?" Joshu answered, "Mu." I’d heard about this koan in talks given by various teachers in other centers. Literally, mu means "not." But the real meaning of the koan is something else, something unspeakable.
Mu is traditionally the first koan. The student uses mu as a kind of mantra. On every out-breath, while sitting, they silently voice the sound mu. The student is encouraged not to think about its meaning. The koan has work to do. Its work cannot be done by the conscious mind. Only mu itself can work on the practitioner, releasing them from a kind of prison they didn’t realize they had been caught in. While the conscious mind is kept busy attending to the sound "mu," the "real" mu can slip in unnoticed through the back door.
But a few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology (though the practice itself should help with that), and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide. I used to think I shouldn’t need a teacher. I should be able to handle things myself. Wasn’t that the measure of a competent, responsible adult? To the extent you didn’t handle it, life would knock you around until you did. It would teach you the lessons you needed to learn. But it was between you and life. It was a long time before it occurred to me that one of the lessons life had been trying to teach me was that sometimes you needed a teacher.
Zen’s demands were few: daily sitting, occasional retreats, being open to what life brought in each moment. It had benefits for others: It made me more attentive, less fretful. It opened up more love, and I’d return from the retreats with vivid eagerness to be with the family.
The room is suffused with the last of the sunlight. I bend down to give her a plate, fork balanced on the rim. "Thank you," she says. I stand up straight for a moment, my own plate in hand. I’m about to sit down but get arrested by a scene in the movie where Roger Rabbit’s tail is singed on a stove, and he proceeds to accelerate faster and faster round a kitchen, trying to outrun his flaming rear, turning the kitchen cabinets into a centrifuge, like a biker on the Wall of Death. I remember loving this scene years ago when the movie first came out. I start laughing. Something happens. A tingling, a whirring inside me. I notice how malleable the apparently solid surfaces in the cartoon are. The tingle becomes a flywheel in my belly, spinning faster and faster, until it is almost unbearable, a sweet agony. It’s in my chest now, and at once my heart just about breaks and the sensation whips itself into a cyclone, a dust devil, a whirlwind, and spins up the throat into the skull. My head explodes. A thunderbolt hits the room. I black out—except I don’t; I’m still standing. Everything else blacks out. All the circuitry that keeps the world going snaps off. A fuse blows. I find I’m not standing on anything. Below, a chasm; above, a void; all around, in every direction, nothing. Dark, radiant nothing. I let out a whoop and start laughing. Clare looks up from the bed. "Oh, God," she groans, "it’s not that Zen again."
"Not one speck of cloud to mar the view," an old Zen saying has it. Not one thought in the whole universe. Nothing exists! All this earnest training of the mind that we did in Zen—or thought we did—and there was no mind!
IN THE ROOM, EVERYTHING IS bathed in rich light, a dark, lucent limpidity drenching the bed, the window, the TV, the three other people sprawled on it. Giddy, dizzy, I totter downstairs with my untouched plate, delirious with joy, feeling like any moment I might topple into the abyss and not caring. How is it even possible to take a step, to be suspended on this imaginary surface called the floor? It’s all a dream, a floating illusion, a mirage-like reflection, a ghost of something on nothing. The food looks magnificent on my plate, like a still life from a seventeenth-century master. I can’t imagine what to do except admire it. I can’t imagine what to do at all. Everything is one glorious abyss of peace that fizzes with energy. I pull a cushion off the sofa, fold it in half, and sit down in zazen. I can’t think what else to do. At the end of twenty minutes, the carpet, sofa, and cushions are all still alive with energy. A flicker of alarm: Am I going mad? Will this never end? I let myself out and go for a walk around the dusky neighborhood. Billows of smoky energy seethe everywhere. The houses hang still and quiet in the gray-blue dusk. They, too, are smoky and alive, poised between being there and not being there. The mind is a wisp of smoke, the remains of a blown-out candle. Not just the houses but the seeing of the houses is the same: there and not there. I could go up and knock on their doors, tap on their windows, but "being there" isn’t what it seems. The world "out there" is a reflection quivering on nothing, even when you rap on a door.
ONCE AGAIN, EVERYTHING ANSWERED AND fulfilled. I still can’t put into words what it was—indeed, words were one of the principal devices for screening this reality—but when you saw it, when it appeared, it folded up everyday reality like a piece of paper and dropped it in a furnace. This reality, unbearably real, loved us fiercely, it loved all things—it was like discovering that the whole world was one heart. Yet at the same time it wasn’t anything.
I had no answers. Only what I felt. Which was that, by some miraculous power, I had just been granted a glimpse into reality, into the true fabric of the universe—into its DNA, as it were, and what I had seen there implicated me too, so that it was clear that, like everything else, I was a child of the universe. I wasn’t separate from it.
Then he started plying me with odd questions about the koan mu. They seemed like nonsense, yet I found responses stirring in me, and when I let them out, John would smile at my ridiculousness and agree, and tell me that I had just given one of the traditional answers.
THERE WERE SEVERAL "FIRST KOANS" to work through. One of them was about a "distant temple bell." I don’t want to give too much away—koan training is an intimate thing, not to be bandied about in loose talk—but I can say a little. The koan about the distant bell is pivotal, in that it’s the first of the major "presentation" koans, meaning a koan where no amount of discussion will help. The student has to come up with a wordless "presentation" of the koan, to show it, embody it, be it. It’s no use talking about it. The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language. The great silence of all things opens up, where words are just flotsam and jetsam. I sat with the koan about the bell for quite a few weeks. Already the recent experience was turning itself into a metaphysical understanding in my mind, and that held me up with the new koan. Had John not been there, had he not known so instinctively how to work with me, it would probably have gone the way of the other experiences and become a troubling memory. But here he was, and he’d given me the strange koan about the bell. "Stop the sound of the distant temple bell," it runs. How on earth do you do that? "There’s no place for discussion," John kept telling me. "We have to do it. Trust the experience you had. Let it show you how." After several dokusan, with John probing and prodding me, finally one evening in the dokusan room, after I thought I’d exhausted every imaginable possibility, an urge came and I randomly trusted it. As soon as I did, I fell into a groove of centuries of practice worn smooth by others. I no longer cared if I was making the "right" presentation. The koan disappeared, a great expansiveness opened up, as I did what I did.
Dad was not just a bright-burning intelligence, as well as a warm and sometimes quite lazy man whose laziness did not trouble him, but he was domestic: he loved being at home. He was solid. A mensch. His priorities were straight. He loved people—people were his great pleasure. He would be fast friends with new people so quickly I used to wonder if he already knew them, and ponder how he possibly could.
Dad and I had had our ups and downs. But one way or another, through therapy and Zen, through being partnered with a clear-eyed woman, things had changed for me. Perhaps I had finally done enough of what Harvey had said: "give yourself the parenting you didn’t get as a child." I’d have the odd flare-up of rage or sunburst of shame, but I had learned to meet him as he was, and on those terms we enjoyed ourselves together. After all, we were still two literary-minded Jews who enjoyed a good bit of argumentation and debate together.
In other zendos where I had sat, I had sometimes sensed a chilly trace of fear discernible in the room. But in this humble house in Oxford, although the sitting was the deepest and stillest I had yet encountered, I felt a warm responsiveness. The teacher conveyed the teachings in such a human way, not as a cold formality to be enforced but as a way of living to be shared.
JOHN WAS A DILIGENT, LOVING teacher. It was unlike any relationship I’d had before. He was unlike anyone I’d known. No sense of being exceptional, no claims to anything remarkable: just an ex-lawyer with a deep devotion to the dharma and a clear conviction that, while it was nothing special, while it was here all the time and was the intrinsic nature of life, Zen was also precious.
I understood more clearly why Zen had its historical affinity for poetry. It accentuated the senses, it opened up a capacity for cherishing the things of the world—a curtain stirring in a breeze, an unpeeled potato waiting patiently on a counter, a bar of soap in a beam of sun. The part of us that loved things Zen revived. It also helped with our manifest inadequacies. Or mine, anyway. Since Zen accepted everything as it was, it accepted us, too, as we were. Procrastinating, letting the bills pile up, drinking too much coffee, acting selfishly, stubbornly—whatever our shortcomings, Zen liked us just the same, and enabled us not to mind ourselves so much, and because of that, it made it easier to roll up the sleeves and work on what needed working on. One old master, when asked what Zen really was, thought for a while and said, "Zen is doing what needs to be done."
In kensho, consciousness is plunged into a bath of formless, nameless love. That we afterwards fall short of what we "realize" can be an incentive to train with our teachers until we do find durable peace. At least we know that it might be possible now. Kensho is the inverse of trauma. Here, unlike in trauma, the shock is of love and belonging, not pain and hurt. Researchers in psychology are now finding that a true epiphany can leave a beneficent shadow on the psyche, a positive counterpart to PTSD.
It’s a famous koan of Master Unmon. "I don’t ask about before the fifteenth day; bring me a phrase about after the fifteenth day," he says. None of the monks can respond, so he answers for them: "Every day is a good day."
Nevertheless, having had at least a few upheavals in my sense of reality by now, I wonder why I’m still as prone as I am to unease, still a bit dysthymic, and I can’t honestly say that every day is a good day. Often, in fact, I think just the opposite. Sometimes I’ll catch myself thinking not just that a day is anything but good but that it’s positively bad, even that a whole week is bad, even a month. Even a year. Yet I’m a moderately "advanced" Zen student.
Joan has given hundreds of talks over the years. Maybe thousands. She is formidable. Quiet, slight, silver-haired, gentle, tender, but made of iron. She is a powerhouse, a treasure house, a storehouse of human energy and clarity. Yet modest, unassuming, outwardly unremarkable. This is how mature Zen practitioners should be, they say: indistinguishable from an ordinary person.
Both Joan and John are manifestly at peace. Both are ready to give up inordinate amounts of time to help others in this strange training, with minimal ostensible reward except for the joy of sharing it, and both seem to have given up their own agenda in favor of others’. And they enjoy their lives more than anyone else I know. You feel it when you’re with them. You see it in their eyes. They’re at peace, free, full of quiet energy, acutely intelligent, and loving. That’s another thing. This dharma training seemed to make people uncommonly articulate, engaging, sensitive, intuitive.
WOULD GET THIS FEELING around Joan, that everything near her flourished. Her world was one of gentle well-being. It was one of the happiest things I’d ever known. At first I’d feel it in her house, then it would spread to the garden outside, then the neighborhood.
Dogen said that ordinary beings have no illumination in their consciousness, but Buddhas have no consciousness in their illumination. Awareness has to be extinguished, all trace of a witness gone, for the path of Zen to flourish.
By chance I had recently met a maverick dreamworker from Vermont, brilliant, controversial, confrontational. A former mailman with an MA in philosophy, Marc Bregman had stumbled into a workshop led by the Jungian James Hillman long ago and never looked back. He had developed his own potent form of dream therapy. Dreams were guiding us. We had to surrender to them and receive their guidance: that was the basic message. Nine times out of ten, they wanted us to open to our long-buried wounds. That was the way to healing of the soul.
I had learned that the secret to a happy relationship was not believing that it must be with the right person, but that your partner was the right person.
Then, hard on the heels of the first two days, this morning, the third, you wake up so clearheaded, so fresh, awake, and lively to the new sensations of the day—the soft dawn filtering under your curtain, the rich shush when you turn on the basin tap, the delicious creaking outside your room as someone walks down the corridor—that you forgo even your morning cup of tea. You don’t want to disturb the sumptuous peace with anything, not even tea. The zendo seems so beautiful your heart almost breaks—the black cushions, the gray twilight, the single star of a candle on the altar. When the bell rings for the first period, its note is as clear-throated as a nightingale’s. The faint dawn breeze from an open window brushes over your bare hands. You taste it in your skin, sweet as ice cream.
Then things get weird. You’re in Egypt, in an ancient temple. There’s some kind of stone plinth, and the foot of a giant statue. You’re in the statue’s shadow, there’s sandy desert all around, dry air, the scent of dust. Then you’re in a theater. Paris or London in the 1890s. A gold proscenium arch rises high overhead, with the shaded stage pit before you, the glow of footlights. You sense the quiet expectancy of an audience. A slow joy rises like yeast in dough. It’s wonderful to be sitting in the glow of past centuries. Then you become superconscious of your breathing, but it’s no longer yours. It’s like watching an animal breathe, as if through a lens. You ask, Who is it breathing? There’s the rustle of inhalation followed by exhalation. Whose breath is it? You switch your attention to your sight. The question spontaneously arises: Whose sight is it? And there’s hearing: some kind of faint hiss in the room, and a soft rumble perhaps of a boiler in the basement, deep under the floor. Again: Who is hearing? It’s as if some unknown being has usurped your senses. As you receive these sense experiences—breathing, seeing, hearing—you try to find out who it really is sitting in the middle of them. What is there, in the space between hearing, seeing, breathing? There must be something there, because that’s where you are. But the more deeply you examine this space in the middle, the harder it is to identify who’s in there. Suddenly it’s clear: there’s no one there. Just empty space. Breathing is happening, but there’s no one breathing. Where there ought to be a breather, only space. There’s hearing, but no one hearing. Where there should be a hearer, just space. It’s this again: no one. Like on the mountain in New Mexico. Except it’s not the same. This time it’s a flattening. Breathing, hearing, seeing: they flatten against one another, two-dimensional. Whatever was in the middle is squeezed out. Somehow, as a result of that, where "I" should be, there is nothing but space. A rush of joy. Why joy? Because it’s like putting down the heaviest burden, a weight as absolute and dreadful as Jehovah. It was a lie all along. One tweak in the angle of vision and it’s gone. No me.
This is what the famous "just" of Zen means. Zen often says: Just sit. Just walk. Just eat. But "just walking" doesn’t mean: keep your mind only on walking and don’t think about anything else. It means: there is no mind to put on walking. There is only walking. There truly is just walking. Right now, it’s just seeing, just breathing, just hearing.
Everything gone. All the hard work of holding together the world as Henry knew it—gone. No more Henry, no more world. Nothing. No more Zen. Truly, nothing. True nothing. Everything annihilated. Nothing left. Nothing at all. It’s hard to know what exactly happened, but when I look back on it, there’s simply nothing. Not even awareness of nothing. A gap. But not even a gap. Blackness. But not even that. It’s hard to know what to call it. Death, perhaps. "Death" seems the aptest term. One impossible fact: nothing at all. Not emptiness, which might still suggest space with nothing in it, but nothing. Nothing to see, no one to see, no seeing. It was like a boot kicking out the lamp that had illuminated all things. Not vast space: that was still something. Not everything being one: that was still something. Not no-self: somehow there was still an awareness of that. This was reality at last. Nothing. Not even a witness. The ultimate joke.
I WALKED ABOUT IN A daze of gratitude for days, weeks, months. At first I assumed it would all wear off. But gradually it dawned on me that it was never going to. This last shift hadn’t been so much an "experience" as just that—a real shift. Years on, it still hasn’t really faded. Zen had actually done the impossible: it had changed me. Over time, I stopped being able to tell whether it had "worn off" or not. It no longer mattered.
In Japanese they say: mu ichi motsu—mu ju zo. "Not one single thing—an inexhaustible treasury." They also say: shin ku—myo u. "True goneness—wondrous being."
I had found what seekers through the ages had sought. There was a resolution to human life. It wasn’t easy to find, even if we had the good fortune to stumble across teachers who could point us down a path to it. But it existed, and it was true. All it took was to give ourselves up. Previously, the teaching of the various kensho experiences hadn’t penetrated deep enough. Now it was as if the very I who experienced them had been dug out at the root.
Gradually it became clearer how this reality got obscured: it was through thinking and then believing the thoughts. It was a subtle process, but ubiquitous. But once this dark, radiant fact opened up, we had an alternative. It was possible to see the obscuring process in action, and cherish it without being caught by it. It, too, was empty, after all.
I DON’T MEAN TO BRAG about any of this. A real danger in practice is to seek, then become proud of, our "awakenings." The Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa dubbed it "spiritual materialism," and it’s just another form of self-serving egotism.
"Kick out the bottom of the black lacquer bucket," goes an ancient Zen saying. Lose every last bit of consciousness.
No need to achieve: all was achieved already. The great project of this life had been to realize that. Dogen said, "The great Way is intrinsically accomplished; the principle of Zen is complete freedom." All that came next was service, love, trying to be helpful and open. I sat a lot each morning and evening. It was like walking through a pine forest, the earth soft underfoot, the canopy high overhead, and a quietness, a limitless twilight among the trees that went on forever: neither light nor dark, both light and dark. Time, day, night, and epochs opened like petals, and the "mind-flower" bloomed.
I MADE A HABIT OF sitting through the night, usually on the last night of a retreat, not as a feat of endurance but because it was easy. Something was alive in me, and when I sat it could fulfill itself and grow stronger.
Somehow, with seemingly inexhaustible energy, Ruben would find time between other commitments for one or two or sometimes more long dokusan per day, unleashing his passionate Zen wisdom from a multitude of angles, firing koans at me, expecting instant mind-free responses, wearing down any lingering "stickiness" of mind, again and again blowing away the dust, as he put it, quickening my sluggish Zen activity, battering the encrustations of self-clinging, opening new vistas of unencumbered dharma. He once called it "romping through the universe together."
At the annual teacher training retreats there would be awe-inspiring seminars where powerful masters did "dharma combat" over a koan, until gradually the circle settled down to the most salient truth the koan opened up.
One reason for writing it was that I was concerned it would soon all be gone. "I was here—once and no more." Before the land disappeared entirely, I wanted to make a record of the old road I’d found and followed, in case it might help anyone else searching for a path like this.
Zen opened an unknown wellspring that gushed like the watch fire of love, the Roman candle in the heart I first tasted many years ago on the beach in South America: a fount of love that never ceased welling up. As Juan de la Cruz said in the sixteenth century: How well I know that fountain which gushes and flows though it be in the dark of night. After which there is nothing to do but share and serve. In the end it’s all a fairy tale. In the end, all Zen saves us from is ourselves. It may be a little inaccurate but not unreasonable to say that in the end, all Zen is is love.
SO IS "ENLIGHTENMENT" REAL? I’VE no idea, but: Experiences wherein space and time disappear and all is revealed as one infinite consciousness; or as utterly without form and void; or where we ourselves vanish into empty sky; or where no trace of anything, including any witness, remains—real. Experiences that leave indelible, beneficent changes in the psyche—real. Becoming more filled with love, more concerned for others—real. Lasting, positive character change, meaning less aversion and anger, less craving and clinging, more ease with the arising and passing of things as we live with less domination by self-centeredness—real. Perhaps we can claim the personality can get just a little bit better through practice, that’s all: small improvements, but they’re enough.
Second, some of us are going to need other kinds of help, along with meditation: dream therapy, cognitive therapy, somatic work, yoga, whatever it may be. The more the different approaches understand and respect one another, the better. Third, one common misunderstanding of meditation in the West is that it’s an individual undertaking. I fell for that, and fell foul of it. In fact it’s collaborative and relational, at least if you want to make real progress.
Updated: Jan 10, 2024
He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always. A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes. A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water. And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matt black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing? As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field of sparks. A fire kindled in his chest, his fingers tingled, in fact everything tingled. The fire was not just in his chest but everywhere. Everything was made of drifting sparks. The whole universe turned to fire. He was made of one and the same fabric as the whole universe. It wasn’t enough to say he belonged in it. It was him. He was it. The beginning and end of time were right here, so close his nose seemed to press against them. Suddenly he knew why he had been born: it was to find this. This reality. His life was resolved, the purpose of his birth fulfilled, and now he could die happy. He could die that very night and all would be well. Two arms of black lava enclosed the little beach. They lay like lazy iguanas with their noses to the water, and they too were implicit in this truth. That it was true he knew beyond doubt. It was more true than anything else. This was the way things always had been and always would be.