Zazen: Why?

When I first started sitting nearly nine years ago, we recited the Heart Sutra almost every night I went to the zendo for meditation, and always on Saturdays when we chanted a full service. Some years later, I attended a series of classes Dennis Shofu Keagan taught on the text, falling miserably behind in the reading, but feeling thoroughly engaged in our conversations. It's a text of about 25 lines. Among them are these, sacrosanct to the degree that anything can be sacrosanct in Zen:

no path, no wisdom and no gain.
No gain--thus Bodhisattvahs live this Prajna Paramita
with no hindrance of mind--
no hindrance, therefore no fear.
Far beyond all such delusion, Nirvana is already here.

And among those lines, the one that seems to be the holy of holies is the first one, "no path, no wisdom, and no gain." No gain. There is nothing to be gained from the practice of zazen. It is an end in itself, not a means to something else. It won't get us any of the things, abstract or concrete, we thought we needed to be happy, even as the things we think we need to be happy change.

On the other hand, there are consequences to everything we do. Whether we call it gain or loss, things happen as the direct result of our actions. We just don't have a lot of control over those consequences. A lot of what makes us so maddeningly neurotic are our efforts to control the outcomes of our actions. From the mundane--I'm going to go to Whole Foods first thing tomorrow morning so that they'll still have a loaf of Sullivan Street Bakery's Pugliese loaf; sadly the Sullivan Street driver falls asleep at the wheel and the fresh bread now lies scattered all over 287 East. To the lofty--I will be at my mother's side when she dies and she will not feel alone, except that my mother was unconscious for the hours before her death and I have no idea what she felt. It's all the same: we do what we do and we get what we get, but the complex web of causes and conditions is beyond our capacity to predict, notwithstanding card counters, handicappers, doctors, lawyers, and all the rest of us who are forever calculatinbg the odds.

When I'd been sitting for a few months my teacher Susan asked me why I sat. I answered something that seemed fitting at the time, but really, I had no idea. And every now and then I still find myself asking myself, "Please remind me why I do this." Were I to try to answer that question now, I'd say something tautological: I sit to sit, I wake to wake, I am present to be present.

Back in the 1980s when I was deeply involved in the 12 Steps, I liked something I heard from time to time. Better to pray for God's will than for what you think will bring you peace and happiness; your imagination is too small to do the possibilities justice. My vocabulary has changed since then; I don't talk "prayer" and "God." But the consequences of my life in practice are of greater value--i.e., have greater potential to relieve suffering--than anything I'd have thought to seek. Though it may be that life on the cushion does not get better--although I'm bound to say that I am more tolerant of it as it is, which is, in and of itself, an improvement--life apart from the cushion improves vastly. For a casual inventory of those improvements, please see tomorrow's blog entry.