The Zendo
Mark K January 29th, 2007
Joining a meditation session in the zendo at 5:40 in the morning? Just getting up that early in the morning testifies to the power of meditation.
It all started with my trip to Spain two months before. On the spur of the moment, I had decided to take a detour and devote five days to walking part of the Camino de Santiago – the ancient pilgrim route across the north of Spain. It was such an incredible experience – hours and hours of walking and pondering, fascinating conversations with fellow pilgrims, soaking up the culture and history of the towns and cities we passed. I couldn’t wait to go back and finish the entire route. Since that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, I figured that the next best thing was to create my own pilgrimage closer to home.
Unlike Spain, we don’t have a cathedral containing the bones of one of the apostles as a destination for a pilgrimage, so I had to think outside of the box.
Thirty minutes by car from my home lies the San Francisco Zen Center at Green Gulch. The land for the center used to be a ranch, and when it was donated to the Zen Center twenty-five years ago, the Buddhists agreed that it would remain open to visitors and that it would also be compatible with the public park lands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area that surrounded it.
These two factors made it a perfect destination for two would-be pilgrims – my friend John and myself – who made our way through the dark at 5:40, trying to find the zendo – which had been a barn in a previous life, so to speak.
John and I knew when we made our reservations, that another group was just finishing their silent retreat. What we didn’t realize was that an additional group was finishing a two-month long intensive training program and that we were stumbling (literally) into their final mediation of the session. We had been told to wear dark, loose-fitting clothes, and no shoes, but when we walked into the meditation room, we saw that we were the only ones who weren’t wearing black Buddhist robes and that many of them had shaved heads. The students and residents were completing their walking mediation and were walking single-file, very slowly, in a clockwise direction. I remembered my brief experience with walking meditation and how our teacher had told us that we all looked like extras on a scene from “Night of the Living Dead.” Despite the fact that there was a sign on the door that read “Residents Only”, we reasoned that this is the door that we were told to enter, so we removed our shows and tried to “blend in.”.
Later I was reminded of another movie scene – the one in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and her companions try to infiltrate the castle of the wicked witch. They knock out some guards and steal their clothes, disguise themselves and join the other guards who are marching and chanting something that sounded like “Oh-ee-oh —-oh-EE-oh.” With their long coats and weapons propped on their shoulders, they fit right in. The only thing that might give them away was the Cowardly Lion’s tail, which kept popping out of the back of the coat and swishing side-to-side.
We blended in for approximately 15 seconds until a woman, apparently some kind of a teacher or leader, approached us and asked us if we had ever been to a zendo before. How did she know? She prepared us with some instructions on how to comport ourselves when we entered the actual temple – apparently this an annex to the main room and, amazingly, the others were completing their second of three meditation sessions at this early hour.
Having been raised in a Catholic tradition, I thought that my religion was pretty strict about rituals. To a non-Catholic a Mass probably seemed a bit strange – standing, sitting, kneeling, genuflecting, following a procession to the altar for Communion, readings, hymns, holy water. Fellow Catholics and recovering Catholics sometimes joke about the “lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down fight-fight-fight” rituals of Catholicism. Compared to what I was about to experience, however, I would say that the Catholics were downright laid-back and sloppy.
We were told that we were supposed to hold our hands like this at first – folded together with this one over that one and not the other way around, placed in front of your body right here. Later, you would change the hand position to this one and later still, it would be like this. When you entered, you would follow the person in front of you and when it was time to sit or get up from your pillows, you were to turn in a clock-wise and not a counter-clockwise direction.
I did the best I could to absorb all of this instruction but, honestly, between my sleepiness and my nervousness about being amongst all of these veteran meditators, most of the information escaped me. To make matters worse, I was not able to manipulate my position in such a way that I was at all times following John’s lead, since he seemed to be absorbing his lesson much better than I had.
After sitting and meditating for all of five minutes, I began to get restless. I had done a bit of meditating before and tried to clear my mind and think of nothing. Sadly, I failed miserably in this endeavor. I started to think about how uncomfortable I was, how my light-colored socks were not fitting in with the dress code, how all of the students and residents looked as still as statues, how soaked I was going to get on the hike back home in the rain, and how John didn’t seem to be having any of these problems.
Ten minutes into the 40-minute mediation, I began to have a more serious problem. One of my feet had fallen asleep and I was having trouble maintaining even my sloppy, amateurish lotus position. I tried recrossing my legs with the opposite one in front.
I would find out later that there were all kinds of additional rules about how to behave in the zendo. You were to cross your legs in a precise manner, with the left in front of the right, you were supposed to move your cushions with your hands, never with your feet. The rules were even being so exact as to specify which foot should step first as you crossed the threshold into the zendo.
After an interminable forty minutes, the leader gave the signal to stand and I began hopping on my now totally-deadened foot. I’m not sure if I did so in a clockwise, or a counter-clockwise direction. I am pretty certain, however, that despite meaningful glances and hissed instructions from John and some rather severe looks from the meditation leader, it is was safe to say that I was not “blending in.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were safely outside the zendo, full circulation returned to both of my feet.
What had I learned from my experience? First, that this mediation thing, which I had struggled with in the past, was even harder than I had anticipated. Being present in the here and now for me seemed to mean focusing on anything and everything that could keep me unfocused.
There was a feeling of comfort and freedom, being outside, even though it was gently raining and still just past dawn. With my now fully-functional foot, I looked forward to the comparatively simple task of hiking home. This was something that I could handle.
But should I start with my left foot, or my right?
I was shopping at Costco the other day and was browsing through the book section, looking for a particular book. I noticed that I was humming and stopped myself for a moment to figure out what tune I was humming. What I discovered was that it wasn’t any recognizable song – it seemed to be a random collection of notes put together into an improvised tune of my own creation – no, that would be exaggerating my compositional abilities. It was just random notes like a person might pick out on a piano if they didn’t really know how to play but were trying to make some pleasant sounds.