The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [124]
The jikijitsu is the bad-ass father figure in charge of making sure meditation in the zendo hall is tight, strong, and clear. He shouts corrections—“No moving! Breathe quietly!” and so on. He carries a big stick and hits people with it. He leads all of the sits, as well as walking meditation and formal meals. Don’t F with him. His is the most distilled embodiment of the spirit of Rinzai, or samurai, Zen.
Rinzai Zen practice can be brutal, savage even. It is designed to bring you to a crisis within yourself, to trigger a dark night of the soul. Zen attacks that one last thing you hold dear: your precious self-conception. It unravels any notion of a freestanding, unconditional “I” and shows it to be a lie, a fabrication, a construction. True realization, the old masters tell us, takes bone-crushing effort. We pulverize the very skeleton of ego—upon which the meat and skin and organs of our illusions hang—and we do it through intense, hurtle-yourself-off-the-cliffs-and-into-the-chasm practice.
To prepare for my training as jikijitsu I decided to get tough with myself. I loaded up daily on protein drinks and vitamins, threw away that Anne Lamott book I was reading, quit e-mail cold turkey, and prohibited myself from partaking in all pleasures of the flesh, self-induced or otherwise. I was going to need a backlog of strong, masculine chi energy. I was like a boxer who steers clear of his girlfriend before the big fight.
“You’re a train wreck of overzealousness,” decided my mentor, a sinewy, green-eyed lesbian from Vancouver. “You’ve got a little power now. Don’t abuse it. The primary ass you should be whipping in the zendo is . . . ?”
“That of those noisy, unfocused students?” I tried, smacking my fist into my palm.
“Your own,” she growled. “Don’t bring your personal shit into it.”
The following weekend I was patrolling the zendo when I passed the meditating form of Tico, our most eccentric student, a formerly homeless physicist. That morning he had tried to shave his head, but he’d left patches of soft, curly, gray-black down, which gave him that One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest fresh-from-electroshock-therapy look. He was quivering and shaking, his eyes rolling back into his head, his mouth open and frozen in an Edvard Munch-ian silent scream. Clearly, he was convinced that he was in the throes of spiritual-mojo overload. How much, I wondered, do you let people drift into their own flames, like moths, before you shake them and say, “Enough!”?
In a shamanistic culture Tico might be revered for the trances he slips into. Ours, however, was a shared environment and he was rupturing its equanimity by deviating from the etiquette. It’s not about your own little personal trip. The body of practitioners is your body, and you really don’t want to be that one area of the body that’s an irritation, the inner-ear itch or belly rash. This is the reason for the rules. We move as one, act as one, function as one, and as one we beat our egos down like the redheaded stepchildren they are.
But I began to develop a creeping ambivalence about the inexhaustible ferociousness of this style of Zen. “Eyes down,” I grumbled incessantly. “Don’t sniff. Wake up!” I began to feel like a priest from some Neil Jordan movie about 1950s Ireland. “Keep yer hands in gassho, boyo, or I’ll rap ’em! Erin McMurphy, did I see ya dippin’ yer fingers in yer green tea at breakfast now? I know yer mum. Ya weren’t raised in a barn!”
The truth is, like many underweight, overread sensitivos, I’ve always seen myself as an outsider, a nonconformist. My heroes have always been the rebels, the applecart upsetters—Nietzsche, Ikkyu, Cool Hand Luke. It’s ironic that so many of us who are attracted to a tough, no-nonsense discipline like Zen also happen to be repulsed by the practice’s endless formal punctilios and ornamented, brocaded behavior.
The battle between these two opposing sides of myself—zendo cop and irreligious rebel—began to take its toll. This is the monk-in-training’s challenge. The middle way isn’t all nicely laid out for him, like an insurance plan,