Is my Zazen working???

[Rich]

Defecate on the zafu? That’s extreme. Like fraternity hazing. That type of militaristic training sitting 15 hours a day is not for me and not necessary imo



Sat/lah


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[Jundo]

Defecate on the zafu? That’s extreme. Like fraternity hazing. That type of militaristic training sitting 15 hours a day is not for me and not necessary imo

I am sure that military guys in foxholes have been their countless times too.

I went to find the story. It is from an interview. He was at Tofukuji, a Rinzai monastery ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Tofukuji, you get up before 3am. Then you do sutra chanting from 3am-4am. Then breakfast at 4.30am. Then there’s zazen and the first dokusan meeting with the roshi. You do zazen until the sun rises, in the winter it’s longer than the summer. After sunrise, you clean the whole temple precincts. That can take two hours, because it’s huge.

Then you do takuhatsu [mendicancy] until 10am. Then it’s lunch. After lunch, the newest monks do toilet cleaning, while the older monks can take a nap. From 1am there is samu or, if the roshi has guests, you have to cater for them. Dinner is around 4.30pm and then around 5pm, there is zazen again until 9pm.

Officially, at 9pm, you lie down and sleep but that is only a show. You lie down for a minute or two, then get out of the futon. You take your cushion and then sit outside under the hondo roof facing the garden until 10pm. Then the oldest monk leaves. Then, every five minutes, the next in the hierarchy can leave. In my time, there was around 11 monks, so it took one hour until I could go to bed – so 11pm. That means you only have four hours to sleep.

Also, you have to memorise the sutras for chanting. In the first few months. The sutra-chanting is done in a ridiculously fast way – like a machine gun. It sounds like gurgling. So you try to imitate these sounds. And they say, hey you’re not chanting fast enough. They are also quite free-wheeling with slapping you in the face. Or sometimes they will punch you, if you get the chanting wrong. Basically, you have to stay up after 11pm and use a flashlight to memorise the sutras. But if you only have four hours to sleep, even if you stay up until midnight, the next morning it’s all gone. Your brain doesn’t absorb anything in that situation.

For any mistake, if your slippers are not straight by a millimetre, you get punched for that. Also, you can’t go to the toilet without permission. And if things are busy, or your senpai is in a bad mood, he says no. Then you have to eat this ridiculous amount of stuff. These three bowls filled with rice and three bowls of soup. The lowest one in the hierarchy has to eat all the leftover rice, and the second lowest has to drink all the leftover soup. In the beginning, I had to eat all the rice, which was a lot. And in the summer, I drank all the soup. I was lucky it was that way round. If it’s the opposite, you have to eat all this rice in the heat and drink all this liquid when it’s cold.

When you have to eat all the left-overs, you have to go to the toilet quite frequently and sooner or later you’d get diarrhoea. Each time you have to ask your senpai for permission. If you’re not allowed to go to the toilet, you have no choice but to shit in your pants. But then it’s not, “oh please go take a shower and change your clothes!”. You have to somehow escape behind the hondo and dispose your pants and wash yourself at night in the pond. Ofuro [bath] is only every two weeks. And ofuro for the monks at the bottom of the ladder means you have to wash the backs of your senpai. They enter the ofuro for 10 to 15 minutes, they finish, look at their watch and say, oh there’s no more time, get out. So you don’t even have your ofuro.

This means that when you go for takuhatsu, and it’s the rush hour, you enter a train and it’s normally like a sardine can. But because we were stinking so much, we would enter a train and have more than enough space to stand.

[Interviewer]: Like a blast radius?

Muho: Exactly. We didn’t notice it any more. You’re always in this stink. I only have respect for the roshi meeting us during dokusan.

Then in zazen you are always sleeping because you’re so tired. Everything is so surreal that you pass out the minute the bell strikes. But there’s always one person patrolling with a stick. And when you sleep, you get hammered on. Usually, it’s four strikes in the summer, and eight in the winter. Half on each shoulder. People take pride in how many of these sticks they can break. In sesshin, it could be five or six sticks they break.

For the people that get beaten it means that after a while, the shoulders swell up and the skin breaks and you start to bleed. When you bleed, it means they don’t hit you on the shoulders anymore, they hit you in the belly. You sit facing the room and the guy is hitting you in the belly like he’s playing baseball.

At first, I thought this can’t be real. It was like some crazy movie. But after six months, I was still alive – surprised but happy to be alive. It was an experience that was completely new to me because I was always a melancholic depressive when I was young. I was like, why did my mother have me? How much less suffering would it have been if she had aborted me when I was born?

After six months at that place, I realised it is actually a miracle that I am still alive. Wow it is great; there’s the sun out there and I can breath. I have to ask my senpai each day if I can take a pee but, at the end of the day, I can even take a pee here. Isn’t that wonderful?

https://antaiji.org/en/essays/1-13/

[Rich]

Oh because of my age I would get an afternoon nap. That’s cool. Where do i sign up ? Lol

Sat/lah




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[Jundo]

Oh because of my age I would get an afternoon nap. That’s cool. Where do i sign up ? Lol

Sorry, that probably refers to Ordination age, i.e., seniority by Ordination time. You would still be at the bottom.

By the way, I know you have an interest in Korean Zen. Korean Rinzai sesshin are about as intense. They go for a week without sleeping ...

During yongmaeng chôngjin, the monks in meditation hall do not sleep for seven
straight days, breaking from their practice only for meals. They even skip the
dinner ritual in the main Buddha hall so as to devote themselves completely to their
meditation. In this intensive period, the monks face one another in two separate
rows down the middle of the meditation hall, rather than facing away as they
usually do. ... Otherwise the meditation sessions take place pretty much as
always, with fifty-minute sitting periods followed by ten minutes of walking. But if
the succentor feels people are tiring, he might quicken the pace to twenty-five
minutes sitting followed by five minutes walking, walk for longer periods, or try
any number of other stratagems to keep his charges vibrant (or at least awake).
Other than its obvious interminableness, the major difference between
yongmaeng chôngjin and regular meditation periods is that the large warning stick
(changgun chukpi) is in use constantly throughout each sitting period....
If the drowsy monk does not react to the guard's presence, the guard taps
him on the shoulder with the stick and gives him one round of blows.

As grueling as yongmaeng chôngjin might seem to the uninitiated, its purpose is
not to torture the monks. Rather it provides an incredibly intense, but still carefully
controlled, environment in which to meditate. The hope is that several days of
sleeplessness will apply enough pressure on the meditators that they will be able to
have a genuine breakthrough into their meditation topics, or hwadu ("critical
phrase" [of a Koan, such as "MU"]). Just before yongmaeng chôngjin begins, the Son master tries to impress
upon the meditators that the only way they will be able to survive the week is to
remain concentrated at all times on their hwadu and to arouse the sensation of
doubt. From my own experience, the sheer enormity of the task of remaining
awake for seven straight days was enough to frighten me into focussing on the
hwadu, as if I were clinging to it for dear life. The instant the mind wavers, you are
bludgeoned by bone-numbing fatigue, so the only hope you have of getting through
the week is to maintain your concentration.

... I remember several times being
totally confused as to whether the guard carrying the stick was actually
hitting me, or whether I was dreaming the whole thing. During walking
meditation I might as well have been walking in space, so ungrounded
and amorphous did I feel. I was not alone in that. During one walking
session, one of the other monks fell asleep while rounding the corner of
the room and walked straight through one of the wood-and-paper doors
along the side of the hall. He was rudely awakened as he toppled onto the
wooden veranda outside. At the end of the retreat when we were finally
allowed to sleep, I collapsed at my seat, utterly exhausted. Although we
were supposed to awaken at three in the morning to begin anew our reg- ular meditation schedule, I could not be roused. The monks left me laid out on my cushion and sat and walked around me. It was not until just
before the late-morning meditation period began at eight that I finally
awoke. Fortunately, in subsequent retreats my practice had matured to the point where I could maintain extended periods of concentration on
the hwadu. Then it really was quite remarkable how effective—even al- most refreshing, in a bizarre sort of way—such intensive practice could
be.

https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/buswell-experience.pdf

Gassho, J

STLah

[Rich]

Maybe that’s in Korea. The American version is watered down with 6 hours sleep and the stick is voluntary. But usually welcomed




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[Tomás ESP]

I find that the Buddha pointed towards the middle way for a reason. From my own perspective, extremes aren't what the Buddha taught, and having to defecate on a zafu after sitting for 15 hours with almost nothing else to do sounds extreme. That's not to say that I am against retreats with many hours of sitting, I am sure that the zazen that is good for nothing sinks even further into your marrow, but one must be able to go to the bathroom if needed, since we are humans after all

Gassho, Tomás
Sat

[Tairin]

This discussion reminds me of why I found The Three Pillars of Zen to be such a turn off. Different strokes for different folks but I don’t feel that this sort of intensity is necessary.

I agree there is benefits to sitting long but pooping on the Zafu?


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[Gregor]

This discussion reminds me of why I found The Three Pillars of Zen to be such a turn off. Different strokes for different folks but I don’t feel that this sort of intensity is necessary.

I agree there is benefits to sitting long but pooping on the Zafu?


Tairin
Sat today and lah

From what I understand from reading the long multipart memoir on the Antaiji website, "In my Teacher's House", those extreme experiences as the Rinzai monestary were part of his "searching" days. Now it seems he is talking about coming full circle.

I know the Zazen sessions as Antaiji seem extreme to us but definetly a middleway in relation to Zafu pooping or extreme astecism (think emaciated Buddha).

Hopefully I can share a more informed opinion about their style of practice once the snow melts and I make it up the mountain to Pioneer Valley Zendo for a Zazenkai. 1/2 a day I think I am up for. A five day Sesshien there, not likely.

Gassho,

Greg
STlah

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[Tai Shi]

Personally, I get carried away with my posting. I love my Sangha and what it has done for me--my last post of the day. Too many words. Treeleaf has taught me a tradition starting in China, carried out in Japan with master Dogen. I have been reading master Hongzhi who brought in Yin Yang and taught others to let the self drop away. I am grateful that after 7 years something makes some sense. Let us practice acceptance. That's what I am trying to do. Perhaps, the Buddha saw loving kindness and advised I find ways to make myself a more loving and kind person.
Gassho
sat/lah

[Getchi]

Good thread!. Foxholes can be calming too, even if that's hard to believe.
I'd have to say,the older I get the more I see that zazen is koan, and words are a poor seconds for emotion .

Thankyou jundo for this way of method acts. It seems to be working ��

Leah
SatToday

Happy lunar new year!

[Getchi]

So,I just realised this is like "buddha-way is not difficult, it merely needs you to not pick-and-choose", mirror mind sutra.

Gassho,
SatToday,
LaH.

[Onrin]

Muho's story reminds me a bit of some of the more old school martial arts teachers I've encountered. I'm a zen newbie, but have been around Japan and have seen similar approaches in arts and business. Training karate here in Japan 25 years ago my teacher would sometimes have us do some rather stupid things (injuries resulted), and recall our common calligraphy teacher, who was around 80 at the time, ex-WWII pilot, telling the karate teacher he was missing the point of practice and doing a disservice to the students. More reasons why I appreciate Jundo.

Gassho,
Chris
sat

[Jundo]

More reasons why I appreciate Jundo.

... Just don't ask me to teach you either Karate or calligraphy!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onrin]

... Just don't ask me to teach you either Karate or calligraphy!

Gassho, J

STLah

I get a better beating on the zafu than I ever did in the karate dojo, so thank you!
Gassho,
Chris

[shikantazen]

I sit in the mornings for 15 minutes and stare at the wall. It does however just feel like I am just spending 15 mins sitting quietly while I carry on my normal thoughts. I then go about my day not feeling any difference than a day I do not sit.

So am I doing something wrong or is this it???

Sat today

Hi Andrew,

Please do not worry about making progress or seeing changes. Just sit and keep letting go of thoughts (as described in "opening the hand of thought" book). The moment you notice you are thinking, let go of the thought train and continue to just sit. That's all there is to it. The changes will come. Just have faith.

Also in a way there's nothing to change. There is nothing wrong about how we are. Nothing to be fixed. The "change" (if any) is to come to the understanding that nothing needs to change about us.

The attitude towards the practice is less of "self improvement" and more of an "offering to all beings". Something we do to benefit all beings. As our bodhisattva vows say, we vow to free all beings. Even though you may not understand it now, please do the practice as an offering to all beings.

It is okay even if you approach it as a "self-improvement" for now. Just continue to sit and have faith it works. It will all be fine

Gassho,
Sam
STLah