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ENLIGHTENMENT is probably the single most written-about subject in all of Buddhism. But it’s a damn tricky subject. In Philip Kapleau’s famous book The Three Pillars of Zen there are several descriptions of people’s “enlightenment experiences.” This was a bold move on Kapleau’s part, since such experiences are generally considered “secret” and not appropriate for talking about, and had rarely been published up until then. In that book there were stories of guys watching the sky open up and start laughing with them, and there were tears and shouts and drama all over the damn place. This was one of the first books I read about Zen, so I walked around for the first year or two of practicing zazen waiting for the moment when something like that would happen to me. Once, while strolling around the campus of Kent State University, I thought I’d got it. I just suddenly got all giddy and laughed like an imbecile at everything. Later I talked to Tim, my Zen teacher at the time, saying stuff like, “Y’know, was that, like, um...it?”—again carefully avoiding the e-word. Nope, he’d said, laughing like an idiot was just something that beginners in Zen sometimes did. Beginner?! I’d been practicing for almost two whole years, dammit!

By the time I ended up at Nishijima’s retreat, though, I’d had eight more years of practice. For the year or so prior to that retreat I’d even been pretty good about practicing. I was starting to believe in it again for some reason. But zazen is a pretty hard thing to believe in since the results appear so slowly. In fact, I’d be inclined to tell you these days that the results never appear at all. Well, it isn’t that there aren’t any results. Not exactly. The problem is in the concept of what constitutes a “result.” But let’s not go there just now.

I’ve met people who’ve fallen ass-over-teakettle in love with zazen after only a day or two, maybe even one lecture. Those people always strike me as airheads, the kind of goof-balls who could just as easily go for crystal healing or angels. Enthusiasm is fine but too much is never a good thing. Folks who get too hot on zazen right at the beginning rarely stick with it long. Pretty soon the fervor cools, the crush passes, and they lose interest. Me, I hated zazen from the start and still do sometimes. I did it the way people go on diets or give up smoking. It sucked, but I could tell it was somehow good for me. Hating zazen, on the other hand, is no impediment to coming to real understanding. In fact it’s a time-proven method.

In my years of zazen nothing like what was written in Kapleau’s book had ever happened to me. I kept waiting and waiting, but no dice. There’s an old Zen tale about a monk who got enlightened when he heard the sound of a pebble hitting a tile. So every time I heard a sharp little sound like that I’d think, “Okay! Maybe I’ll get it right now. Wait for it, wait for it—…. Nope. Nuthin’. Crap!”

REALLY THOUGH, I’ve come to see it’s useless to talk about “enlightenment” at all. Our man Dogen said it best by saying that zazen itself is enlightenment. For a long time I hated that statement with a real passion: Yeah, right! Sitting in zazen is pain and boredom, that’s what it is. It’s your head hitting the wall in front of you when you can’t fight off sleep any longer. It’s your brain full of thoughts so asinine you hate to believe they’re really yours. It’s feeling like your knees are going to seize up permanently at any second and thinking you’ll never walk again. It’s looking at your watch when you thought you’d been going for a solid twenty minutes and finding out you’ve only been at it for three. If that’s enlightenment, I thought, then maybe I signed up for the wrong course.

For everyone—everyone—who first takes it up, zazen is tedious and awful. Your brain is in constant motion like there’s a hive of angry wasps in your head. There are moments when you’re certain you’re going to have to leap right off your cushion and run around the room singing the chorus of Hello, Dolly!