(published in JigsawZen.com in 2005)
This year has been quite complicated for me for a number of reasons. There’s been a lot of pressure at the office and there are other obligations that I have undertaken that just pile up leaving little room for the family and the ‘rest’ of life. There are times when I can really feel the weight of it all and things get difficult to handle. And of course with all the pressure and effort come some nasty side-effects like sleeping and digestive disorders. Are you already feeling sorry for me? I hope so.
So I decided I would set short term objectives just to avoid being overwhelmed out of my wits by quite an intimidating pending list. Here’s what I did: I set no more than two mayor deadlines to pass every week and would focus on those without thinking too much about the trizillion other deadlines that lay ahead after those. It kinda worked. I mean, I had no symptoms of paranoid-schizophrenia so you could say I’ve been reasonably successful so far.
The other night I was driving back home from the University. I was really worn out. I had just sat for a big Economy exam that’s part of the MBA program I’m doing. That had been the last big deadline of the week and it had gone really well. Even with the utter exhaustion and the pain that I felt behind my eyes, I was kind of relieved. One more check in the list. One thing less...
And then a thought hit me so hard that it almost knocked me over: ‘One thing less for WHAT? One thing less and then WHAT?’
As I stared at the strip of road that appeared in front of my headlights while the question still lingered in my mind, I caught a glimpse of what Deshimaru used to call the ‘essence of Zen’: Mushotoku. Sadly, as it often occurs, that glimpse simply trickled through my fingers in spite of my desperate attempts to hold onto it. I should have learnt by now, that trying to hold onto these thoughts is useless. Stubborn old me…
Anyway, this Mushotoku business is pretty interesting, especially in our goal oriented –succeed or bust- culture. Here’s how I think the whole deal works: whatever we decide to do, we do it to obtain some sort of pleasure. This pleasure might be physical (like stuffing a truckload of garlic bread down your throat and washing it down with a good red wine) or intellectual / emotional (like having your highly pitched intellect gloat on a Saturday Seinfeld Marathon.) Of course this pleasure might simply be the omission of something painful. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is the raw impulse behind whatever we do. Our libido, so to say.
As we grow up, somehow our raw impulses are balanced by the notion of the consequence of our actions. In fact, what really happens is that we create an idea about ourselves which we believe will exist in some future time. Hence, it is ‘us’ who will suffer the consequences or reap the benefits of whatever it is we do now. We eventually learn that sometimes we have to do things that are a real pain in the bum in order to avoid further misfortune or to obtain some better gain in the future. We start having obligations.
When the alarm clock goes off on a Monday morning, the needle on my ‘pleasure-o-meter’ is fixed in the ‘I’d rather die’ section. In fact, ‘alarm clock going off on a Monday morning’ rates right next to ‘hammering my toes with a brick’. But hey, I get up anyway. It’s what I have to do. How else could I pay for the cable television service which offers more channels than I could watch in a lifetime? In the end, whenever we do something that is not immediately pleasurable, what is subjacent is the notion that it will somehow payoff in the future. Whether we are aware of it or not, there always has to be a reason to do stuff and that reason is usually a promise of future compensation.
Some things are a bit tricky though. Take zazen for instance. Most people will probably find it very unappealing. I mean, anyone in their right mind would find sitting and staring at a blank wall for about a half hour to be both boring and painful. Perhaps it wouldn’t rate as bad as a session of ‘toe hammering’. I would rather place it near ‘sandpaper licking’. But the real problem with zazen is that the future compensation for this effort is not really that apparent.
That’s why so many people ask the question: Why do zazen? What for? Isn’t it a waste of time? What they mean is that using that time for some other activity will result in more ‘pleasure credits’ to spend later…
At the Dojo were I used to practice (before all this MBA mayhem) most people would step in just once. The vast majority came along after hearing the teacher give a talk at the ‘Japanese Gardens’ in Buenos Aires but then never showed their face again. I can’t blame them really. It’s the utter boredom… But the reason why most people don’t come back a second time is that they find no real reason to do zazen. They can’t figure out what its worth is in terms of some future goal.
Well, some of us do. I don’t really know why but I suppose there’s always a kind of tradeoff at some unconscious level that makes a few of us return to the Dojo. Why others return, I can’t tell. Perhaps they expect some blissful sensation to take over and make them feel they’re back in mommy’s uterus or something. Perhaps they want to get ‘enlightened’ and become super cool Buddhas with wacky super powers. God only knows what crazy motivations I had myself to return and return.
One time a new guy showed up. He managed to sit zazen for a whole 40 minutes with quite a bit of dignity. I was impressed. When zazen was over, the teacher opened the Q&A session. The new guy cleared his throat and asked: ‘the experience was interesting. However, I don’t really know what I came here for.’ ‘Well if you don’t know,’ answered the teacher, ‘how come you expect me to know?’ The new guy was taken aback and tried to explain himself. ‘What I mean is: what is the objective of zazen? What can one expect to obtain with this practice? The teacher’s face softened a bit but he didn’t budge. He said: ‘Nothing. No objective, nothing to obtain. Mushotoku’.
I thought to myself: ‘so I won’t be able to READ MINDS?’ Ok, I’m just kidding. But I must confess I was a bit taken aback myself because I had never heard this idea put so bluntly. The teacher’s answer was unequivocal. What do you obtain? Nothing. Nothing at all. How do you deal with something like that? Needless to say, the new guy never showed up again.
On another occasion, I was early for the zazen session. I think it was because I miscalculated traffic and arrived about half an hour early. The teacher was there sweeping the floor and arranging all the zafus and stuff for when everyone arrived. He’s usually in a rather humorous mood so we just did a bit of small talk to kill time. You know, the weather or how amazing new technologies allow for super fast ping-pong balls. I suppose I somehow brought up the topic of ‘why do zazen’. I can’t really remember how it was. Anyway, the teacher said something quite interesting. He actually laughed a bit and shook his head. ‘Everybody wants to know why they should practice zazen. Why, why, why… Why should there be a why? The reason doesn’t really matter. Reasons are only thoughts and they change all the time. What’s important is action, practice. Any reason is as valid as any other as long as you practice. In every moment there is only action and that’s all there is. All the other stuff is just our imagination.’
I had quite a lot of trouble making out what he really meant. I was cautious, however. I have come to learn that Zen dudes might sound a bit crazy but, more often than not, appearances are deceiving. Of course, to me, there always should be a reason for doing stuff. Setting objectives had always been kind of a compass for me. The objectives you set for yourself define the direction you take in life. Accomplishing your objectives gets you closer to your dreams. Doing things for no reason is not only a waste of time, its nonsense. I was one of those kids who grew up with the fable of the ants and the cricket. Hard work and responsible planning for the future have been part of my ‘self’ all my life (and then I say zazen is boring…) But hey! What am I supposed to do? Just go with the flow and let things be? God no! Hippies have been out of fashion for quite a while now!
But as I have often realized, there’s always a twist to these strange Zen admonitions. Taisen Deshimaru used to say that Mushotoku was like ‘getting in your coffin’. A bit creepy if you ask me. But the idea is that once you’re in your coffin there’s nothing to gain or loose. We spend our life running after objectives we set for ourselves with the secret hope that ‘some day’ we will finally arrive at some imaginary shore and everything will be settled. We tick the goals off our pending list as we accomplish things and have this feeling that we are progressing. We are moving forward. But where to? Once we’ve ticked off all the items in the shopping list; what then? When we finally arrive, where will we be arriving at?
Mushotoku is something quite subtle but quite simple at the same time. I would dare say it’s just a perspective, a way of seeing things. Mushotoku is simply doing whatever it is that you must do, regardless of the gain or loss you imagine will come from that action. The future doesn’t really exist. The self we believe to be and who will suffer the consequences of our actions or enjoy all the pleasure credits we stack in our safety box doesn’t really exist either. The objectives we set for ourselves as intermediate steps for the final big objective we call ‘happiness’ are, at the end of the day, just a bunch of nonsense thoughts. All that really exists is what’s going on right now. And right now there are things we must do. We have to go to work, change diapers, study for a ridiculously difficult Economy exam, drive carefully, sit zazen and watch TV eating salami and cheese. What for? For no reason. None at all. What will we obtain? Nothing. In the end we will just climb into our coffin. And yet it is extremely important that we do all these things even if they will take us nowhere in particular. After all, the succession of ‘things to do’ is no more and no less than what we call life.
But as I said before, this thought trickled through my fingers and vanished into thin air. All these words are just a feeble attempt to capture that thought. I’ll tell you this though. At any other time in my life, having read these words I wrote above would have made me feel a bit depressed and even scared. What do you mean we will never reach that shore called ‘happiness’? But funnily enough, as I kept on driving down the dark highway, a warm feeling came over me. A weight was lifted. And it wasn’t just the relief of having passed my exam…
So I decided I would set short term objectives just to avoid being overwhelmed out of my wits by quite an intimidating pending list. Here’s what I did: I set no more than two mayor deadlines to pass every week and would focus on those without thinking too much about the trizillion other deadlines that lay ahead after those. It kinda worked. I mean, I had no symptoms of paranoid-schizophrenia so you could say I’ve been reasonably successful so far.
The other night I was driving back home from the University. I was really worn out. I had just sat for a big Economy exam that’s part of the MBA program I’m doing. That had been the last big deadline of the week and it had gone really well. Even with the utter exhaustion and the pain that I felt behind my eyes, I was kind of relieved. One more check in the list. One thing less...
And then a thought hit me so hard that it almost knocked me over: ‘One thing less for WHAT? One thing less and then WHAT?’
As I stared at the strip of road that appeared in front of my headlights while the question still lingered in my mind, I caught a glimpse of what Deshimaru used to call the ‘essence of Zen’: Mushotoku. Sadly, as it often occurs, that glimpse simply trickled through my fingers in spite of my desperate attempts to hold onto it. I should have learnt by now, that trying to hold onto these thoughts is useless. Stubborn old me…
Anyway, this Mushotoku business is pretty interesting, especially in our goal oriented –succeed or bust- culture. Here’s how I think the whole deal works: whatever we decide to do, we do it to obtain some sort of pleasure. This pleasure might be physical (like stuffing a truckload of garlic bread down your throat and washing it down with a good red wine) or intellectual / emotional (like having your highly pitched intellect gloat on a Saturday Seinfeld Marathon.) Of course this pleasure might simply be the omission of something painful. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is the raw impulse behind whatever we do. Our libido, so to say.
As we grow up, somehow our raw impulses are balanced by the notion of the consequence of our actions. In fact, what really happens is that we create an idea about ourselves which we believe will exist in some future time. Hence, it is ‘us’ who will suffer the consequences or reap the benefits of whatever it is we do now. We eventually learn that sometimes we have to do things that are a real pain in the bum in order to avoid further misfortune or to obtain some better gain in the future. We start having obligations.
When the alarm clock goes off on a Monday morning, the needle on my ‘pleasure-o-meter’ is fixed in the ‘I’d rather die’ section. In fact, ‘alarm clock going off on a Monday morning’ rates right next to ‘hammering my toes with a brick’. But hey, I get up anyway. It’s what I have to do. How else could I pay for the cable television service which offers more channels than I could watch in a lifetime? In the end, whenever we do something that is not immediately pleasurable, what is subjacent is the notion that it will somehow payoff in the future. Whether we are aware of it or not, there always has to be a reason to do stuff and that reason is usually a promise of future compensation.
Some things are a bit tricky though. Take zazen for instance. Most people will probably find it very unappealing. I mean, anyone in their right mind would find sitting and staring at a blank wall for about a half hour to be both boring and painful. Perhaps it wouldn’t rate as bad as a session of ‘toe hammering’. I would rather place it near ‘sandpaper licking’. But the real problem with zazen is that the future compensation for this effort is not really that apparent.
That’s why so many people ask the question: Why do zazen? What for? Isn’t it a waste of time? What they mean is that using that time for some other activity will result in more ‘pleasure credits’ to spend later…
At the Dojo were I used to practice (before all this MBA mayhem) most people would step in just once. The vast majority came along after hearing the teacher give a talk at the ‘Japanese Gardens’ in Buenos Aires but then never showed their face again. I can’t blame them really. It’s the utter boredom… But the reason why most people don’t come back a second time is that they find no real reason to do zazen. They can’t figure out what its worth is in terms of some future goal.
Well, some of us do. I don’t really know why but I suppose there’s always a kind of tradeoff at some unconscious level that makes a few of us return to the Dojo. Why others return, I can’t tell. Perhaps they expect some blissful sensation to take over and make them feel they’re back in mommy’s uterus or something. Perhaps they want to get ‘enlightened’ and become super cool Buddhas with wacky super powers. God only knows what crazy motivations I had myself to return and return.
One time a new guy showed up. He managed to sit zazen for a whole 40 minutes with quite a bit of dignity. I was impressed. When zazen was over, the teacher opened the Q&A session. The new guy cleared his throat and asked: ‘the experience was interesting. However, I don’t really know what I came here for.’ ‘Well if you don’t know,’ answered the teacher, ‘how come you expect me to know?’ The new guy was taken aback and tried to explain himself. ‘What I mean is: what is the objective of zazen? What can one expect to obtain with this practice? The teacher’s face softened a bit but he didn’t budge. He said: ‘Nothing. No objective, nothing to obtain. Mushotoku’.
I thought to myself: ‘so I won’t be able to READ MINDS?’ Ok, I’m just kidding. But I must confess I was a bit taken aback myself because I had never heard this idea put so bluntly. The teacher’s answer was unequivocal. What do you obtain? Nothing. Nothing at all. How do you deal with something like that? Needless to say, the new guy never showed up again.
On another occasion, I was early for the zazen session. I think it was because I miscalculated traffic and arrived about half an hour early. The teacher was there sweeping the floor and arranging all the zafus and stuff for when everyone arrived. He’s usually in a rather humorous mood so we just did a bit of small talk to kill time. You know, the weather or how amazing new technologies allow for super fast ping-pong balls. I suppose I somehow brought up the topic of ‘why do zazen’. I can’t really remember how it was. Anyway, the teacher said something quite interesting. He actually laughed a bit and shook his head. ‘Everybody wants to know why they should practice zazen. Why, why, why… Why should there be a why? The reason doesn’t really matter. Reasons are only thoughts and they change all the time. What’s important is action, practice. Any reason is as valid as any other as long as you practice. In every moment there is only action and that’s all there is. All the other stuff is just our imagination.’
I had quite a lot of trouble making out what he really meant. I was cautious, however. I have come to learn that Zen dudes might sound a bit crazy but, more often than not, appearances are deceiving. Of course, to me, there always should be a reason for doing stuff. Setting objectives had always been kind of a compass for me. The objectives you set for yourself define the direction you take in life. Accomplishing your objectives gets you closer to your dreams. Doing things for no reason is not only a waste of time, its nonsense. I was one of those kids who grew up with the fable of the ants and the cricket. Hard work and responsible planning for the future have been part of my ‘self’ all my life (and then I say zazen is boring…) But hey! What am I supposed to do? Just go with the flow and let things be? God no! Hippies have been out of fashion for quite a while now!
But as I have often realized, there’s always a twist to these strange Zen admonitions. Taisen Deshimaru used to say that Mushotoku was like ‘getting in your coffin’. A bit creepy if you ask me. But the idea is that once you’re in your coffin there’s nothing to gain or loose. We spend our life running after objectives we set for ourselves with the secret hope that ‘some day’ we will finally arrive at some imaginary shore and everything will be settled. We tick the goals off our pending list as we accomplish things and have this feeling that we are progressing. We are moving forward. But where to? Once we’ve ticked off all the items in the shopping list; what then? When we finally arrive, where will we be arriving at?
Mushotoku is something quite subtle but quite simple at the same time. I would dare say it’s just a perspective, a way of seeing things. Mushotoku is simply doing whatever it is that you must do, regardless of the gain or loss you imagine will come from that action. The future doesn’t really exist. The self we believe to be and who will suffer the consequences of our actions or enjoy all the pleasure credits we stack in our safety box doesn’t really exist either. The objectives we set for ourselves as intermediate steps for the final big objective we call ‘happiness’ are, at the end of the day, just a bunch of nonsense thoughts. All that really exists is what’s going on right now. And right now there are things we must do. We have to go to work, change diapers, study for a ridiculously difficult Economy exam, drive carefully, sit zazen and watch TV eating salami and cheese. What for? For no reason. None at all. What will we obtain? Nothing. In the end we will just climb into our coffin. And yet it is extremely important that we do all these things even if they will take us nowhere in particular. After all, the succession of ‘things to do’ is no more and no less than what we call life.
But as I said before, this thought trickled through my fingers and vanished into thin air. All these words are just a feeble attempt to capture that thought. I’ll tell you this though. At any other time in my life, having read these words I wrote above would have made me feel a bit depressed and even scared. What do you mean we will never reach that shore called ‘happiness’? But funnily enough, as I kept on driving down the dark highway, a warm feeling came over me. A weight was lifted. And it wasn’t just the relief of having passed my exam…
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