Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [37]
As far as I could tell during my first visit the main activities of the monks at the temple seemed to be hanging out in the kitchen watching vapid TV chat shows, drinking beer and brushing up on the chants used in funeral services. Over the next few years I discovered I was pretty off base with that assessment. The guy I’d seen drinking all the beer turned out not to be one of the monks (though he did have a shaved head and lived in a temple—sue me for getting that one wrong) and managed to give up the booze by the following summer—no small feat in Japan where you can get plastered seven nights a week and still not be considered an alcoholic. The monks are in fact all hard-working guys who perform an important service for their community. Still, apart from the head of the temple who usually joins us for at least one sitting, the only other monk there I’ve ever seen doing zazen—which is the central practice of Zen Buddhism, mind you—was a Sri Lankan guy from the Theravada school of Buddhism who was there as part of some Buddhist exchange program. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of Buddhist temples all over Japan.
Nishijima’s retreats are pretty lightweight as Zen retreats go. While many such retreats have their students wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning, Nishijima lets his students get up at a very leisurely 4:30. There are four zazen periods each day, two of which are forty-five minutes while the other two are an hour and a half each (that’s forty-five minutes of zazen, fifteen minutes of walking meditation, and another forty-five minutes of zazen). This is about half, if that, of what the really rigorous temples make their students do. The retreats are just three days long, rather than the week-long or even month-long affairs elsewhere. Still, if you’ve never done that kind of thing before, even this can be a major jolt to the system.
BY THE TIME I went to my first formal retreat, I’d already been doing zazen for eleven years and going to Nishijima’s lectures for two. But my first retreat with Nishijima was my first experience in an actual temple with an actual Japanese Zen priest running the show.
I hated it.
For starters I was completely confused about the arrangements. Bonehead that I am, rather than signing on for the annual English-language retreat for foreigners, I signed on for the one Nishijima holds for new members of the company he works for. The company president is enamored of zazen and requires all new employees to attend one of these. A bunch of spotty-faced new college grads who’ve just entered the fabulously exciting cosmetics industry are herded up to the mountains to sit still for three tedious days. There’s no beer, no dried-fish snacks, no karaoke or party games—just peace and solitude and sitting up straight facing a wall all weekend long. Needless to say these kids are not happy campers.
I ended up being one of three of Nishijima’s special guests that weekend, along with Jeremy Pearson, one of his long-time students, and a strange Korean man who was apparently some kind of philosophy professor somewhere. The four of us shared a room on the temple’s second floor.
I didn’t know Jeremy very well at the time, but he had a shaved head, knew every chant and mealtime ritual, and wore a set of monk’s robes all weekend. Clearly he was a very serious Zen guy. I never could work out exactly why the Korean guy was there. He spoke fluent English and could get by moderately in Japanese, and he had obviously studied a lot of Buddhist literature and considered himself quite the expert in the field. For all I knew he might have been one of Korea’s most renowned Buddhist scholars. He certainly carried himself like Korea’s most renowned something . Maybe he had come to get a bit of hands-on experience with Japanese Zen, no doubt so that he could go back to Korea