The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [127]
No. No! It was my turn to carry the keisaku. During sits before koan meetings with the master, a member of the jiki staff patrols the room with the keisaku, a long, thick ruler-like stick tapering from handle to end. When he comes to a student or monk who looks too loose—or too tense—he taps him or her on the shoulder. They bow together, and then the recipient bends to one side and whack! whack! whack! Other side: whack! whack! whack!
A zendo is not a place to space out. To take your seat and catch up on personal fantasies or zone out for a week. Get out of your heads and into your haras! the “encouragement stick” cries with every crack. Activate your viscera with your breath. Gut-sit!
I got up. There was diarrhea running down my leg. It was terrible. I could smell it. I reeked of fresh human shit. I had the dubious good luck to be wearing Hot Chilly thermals and all the excrement running down my legs puddled at the elastic at my ankles.
I stood there at the front of the zendo, holding the stick.
There’s no rule saying the jikijitsu has to venture out to walk amongst the meditators. I could just stand there for the whole twenty-five-minute sit if I chose, but Pema’s words came back to me: “Opting for coziness, having that as your prime reason for existing, becomes a continual obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land.”
Perhaps Suzuki Roshi put it best: “Zen is the path of no turning back.”
When I first started practicing there was one struggling student in particular who remained unconvinced by “boot-camp spirituality.” He carried on every chance he got about how artificial the extreme discipline was, how “not me” the kanji chanting and fierce sitting/koan meetings were. He respected the practice but he couldn’t “get into it.” It wasn’t his thing.
That student was me, a million lifetimes ago, it seems.
What I failed to realize was that my resistance was in itself a pose, a stance—a result of my conditioning as a free-spirited, individualistic American prone to respecting all paths and choosing none. I’d never been stripped of myself, and so I mistook a cleverly embroidered outfit of attitudes for my deepest self, which I had to “be true to.” Through the path of negation of self, I began to get an inkling of just how thoroughly cloaked I was in attitudes and platitudes—in my own bullshit—and I also learned that despite this, I had to keep going.
Way down at the other end of the zendo, shivering, shaking, lost in himself, was Tico, the eccentric student. My sphincter spasmed briefly in rage. He’d been a thorn in my authoritarian side all winter. Now, however, instead of a threat to be quelled, he merely looked like his head was about to spin around in circles. I knew the feeling.
Standing there holding that stick, reeking like my nephew after he’s filled his diaper, I realized that this is when true practice begins: when you are officially in way over your head. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake,” Pema tells us in When Things Fall Apart, “is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”
Zen is the practice of coming up out of yourself and into the situation, any situation, meeting it fully, with a complete heart—no holding back, no half-measures, no room for doubt or selfishness. You run the razor of practice from ear to ear, decapitating the dualistic dictator within so that the blood of ego flows forth as the milk of self-sacrifice, nourishing the world.
OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic. I simply went amongst some Zen students with a load in my pants. This was