By Eshin Brenda Shoshanna
One afternoon, when I was a sophomore in high school in Brooklyn, as the class was over one day, my history teacher slid over to me. Then he secretly handed me something wrapped in a brown paper bag.
“This is just for you,” he murmured under his breath. “Don’t tell anybody I gave it to you. Take it home. I know you’ll love it.”
Scared, I took the hidden package and ran with it right home. Once safely inside, I went to my room and shut the door tight before carefully opening it up. Inside I found a little book, On Zen by D.T. Suzuki. This has to be a dangerous book, I thought, wondering why he felt it was just right for me. Completely unaware of what it could be about, I flipped through the pages and started to read.
The book was filled with odd little stories based on questions and answers that had taken place between Zen Masters and their students, some of them thousands of years old. The questions and answers, called mondos or koans, were inscrutable. Like life itself, they were impossible to figure out. None of it made any sense at all.
But I was fascinated, anyway. Even though I had no idea what any of it meant, I couldn’t put the book down. Soon, waves of joy washed over me. The more I read the more I was filled with unexpected happiness. This is it! I thought, delighted. This is right, fantastic, amazing! But of course, I had no idea why I was so happy, or what the koans were all about. I also didn’t realize that it was fine not to understand. In Zen having ready-made answers was just the booby prize.
Excited and thrilled I couldn’t let the book go. Wherever I went, I carried it with me and read it again and again. When people asked why I loved it so much, I said, “I have no idea.” And I didn’t. When they asked me what the koans meant, I said, “I don’t know.” All I did know was that in an instant something in my life had turned around.
As the years went by I kept reading that book, but made no progress. I poured over the inscrutable questions, dwelt upon them, read commentaries, and even wrote poems about them at the beach. But I still didn’t understand. And yet, whenever I engaged with these koans, my world opened wide. Emotional pain often dissipated, and I learned what it meant to be a friend. Out of nowhere, life made sense. What kind of sense? Don’t ask me. I don’t understand.
A few years later I got married and kept reading the book whenever I could. Often I’d ask my husband if he thought my Zen teacher would be coming to this country, or if I would have to go to Japan.
“He’s coming here, I’m positive of it,” my husband reassured me, hoping I would stop asking him the same question again and again. I’m sure he also hoped that this inscrutable teacher I was waiting for would arrive soon.
Time has its own way in Zen practice. Fourteen years later I met my teacher. Unbeknownst to us, my husband and I had moved into an apartment two blocks away from where he was every day. For two years I walked by that building day in and day out with no idea that he was inside, giving every ounce of his energy to getting things ready, preparing for us, and waiting for me.
One day, a friend returned from sesshin in Litchfield, Connecticut. “There’s someone you must meet,” she smiled at me and immediately showed me how to do zazen.
Zazen was hard, it hurt. I squirmed as my knees stuck up and wouldn’t go down into the cross-legged position. I just did the little I could each day and couldn’t understand how even a short time of sitting in the morning and evening became so precious it turned my day around. Soon, my sittings grew longer and my knees slowly relaxed and came down.
Finally, I was ready. The zendo was in a beautiful townhouse in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side. Thursday night was beginner’s night, and I lined up outside with all the other new students, waiting for the doors to open. Who knew what would happen then? Little did I realize that now I would receive the teachings in an entirely different way. They weren’t hidden in a secret book. Just the opposite.
At exactly six fifteen the doors opened and the line started to move. The doors didn’t open a minute sooner or later and remained open for forty-five minutes. At precisely seven o’clock they were closed. If you arrived a minute later the door stayed shut and you couldn’t get in. Time mattered here.
As soon as we walked into the small entrance vestibule, we were told to take off our shoes and place them onto the shoe rack, carefully. “Don’t throw your shoes on the rack helter-skelter,” we were instructed. “Pay attention. The way you treat your shoes is the way you treat everything in your life. Messy shoes, messy mind!” I gasped. Oh, it became so clear.
Then we were instructed to put whatever we were carrying with us into a small room on the side. “We don’t carry packages with us here. Empty-handed we come, empty-handed we go.” What a relief to let things go, one package at a time.
As it was our first time here, we were directed upstairs to the second floor and ushered into a long, beautiful, empty room, with flowers on the altar and cushions lined up on the floor. Then we were told to sit down and wait. Wait for what, I wondered. “Wait without waiting for anything,” Jonen, a resident, instructed.
She told us to keep our eyes down. “Don’t look around, don’t look for something.” Out of the corner of our eyes, we peeked at each other anyway. Vinny was there, Harold, Peter, Sara, and two Catholic nuns. This particular group kept returning day after day, week after week, year after year. We became inseparable, and even though many of us are gone now, we will never be apart.
The moment came to do zazen together. “Just sit still with your spine erect, pay attention to your breath, and don’t move until you hear the bell, no matter what.” My mind raced wildly, this couldn’t be it after all those years of waiting. Just this? Where was I really? Was my teacher truly downstairs, sitting like the rest of us?
Finally, the bell rang and we got up from our cushions and bowed in thanks. We were led downstairs to the main zendo, to join other students sitting there. Walking through the wooden zendo, I was transported to ancient Japan. The intense silence, simplicity, and beauty were overwhelming. Suddenly wooden clappers were struck, indicating that it was time to stop at a cushion and sit again.
Was that it, I wondered? Sit down, breathe, get up, walk, listen to the bell and clappers, and then do it all over again? Wasn’t Zen mystical, mysterious, hidden? In the silence that enveloped us all, I kept questioning, who are these people? Who am I? Why am I here? What happens next? It seemed as though nothing happened except what was natural and inevitable. How could that be? And what did my endless thoughts really want of me?
When the evening was over a powerful Japanese monk who’d been sitting at the front of the line stood up and moved to the center. I stared at him and shivered. Here he was after all these years! There was no doubt in my mind.
“Thank you for coming,” he spoke in a deep, resounding voice. “You are welcome to join us for zazen at other times now as well. After zazen tonight, there will be informal tea served upstairs. Other times after zazen there is zendo cleaning.”
Cleaning? Why did he mention cleaning, I wondered. What did it have to do with anything? I wanted to shout out, “When it’s time for cleaning, what do we do then?”
He smiled and glanced at me suddenly as if he’d heard exactly what I’d just thought. “And when it’s time for cleaning,” he continued, “it’s very simple. Just grab the dust rag and dust.”
A gong rang out and the evening was over. That was it. I was completely jarred. What did all of this have to do with the wonderful stories I’d been reading for years? I left quickly and walked back to my apartment, dazed.
My husband, waiting at home, couldn’t wait to hear the news. “How was it?” he asked.
“It was strange, easy, difficult, beautiful, and my legs hurt terribly,” I uttered.
He was startled. “Well, at least you tried it,” he said. “You don’t have to go back.”
“I don’t know if I will or won’t go back,” I replied.
But at four o’clock the next morning, as if electrocuted, I suddenly awoke and sat bolt upright in bed. My God, I thought, morning sitting at the zendo was at five thirty am. There was no way I could go back to sleep. I had to get out of bed immediately and get back to the zendo.