Oryoki is a formal meal, taken in the zendo, and during sesshin, breakfast and lunch are taken this way. There have been whole books written on oryoki, but to put it very briefly, it’s the act of taking a meal in which every action is deliberate. Each person has a small bundle, consisting of bowls, utensils, and a napkin wrapped in a cloth. At the start of the meal, this bundle is unwrapped and precisely arrayed, and at the end, dishes are done in place and everything carefully put away. The whole process from start to finish takes about 25 minutes.

Like the rest of sesshin, most of the normal set of distractions to awareness are removed. There’s no conversation, no muzak, no waiter interrupting every 3 minutes with a “how is everything?” And after so much zazen, the thoughts associated with food go away, so you’re not thinking about how much better this dish might be if only there were extra tarragon, or how you’d rather be having tomato bisque, and so on. It’s just the food.

Oryoki is a meal and a liturgical service all in one; I’ve heard it referred to as “interactive dinner theater.” At the start of the meal, there’s an offering of food to the Buddha, in which the tenzo (head cook), slowly crosses the zendo to an ever-loudening bass drum rumble. It’s as if the earth itself is anticipating the food, about to be brought to your cushion by the servers.

Before the actual eating begins, there is a meal gatha, which I suppose is like saying grace. At the monastery, it’s recited before breakfast and lunch every day, but it takes on a much greater meaning for me during oryoki. The first line, for example, says “we should know how our food comes to us.” The very act of eating is a very real proof of interdependence. Looking at the rice in my bowl, I can think about how it comes to me. Who and what is responsible for bringing this food to be here? An incredibly short and incomplete list:

1. The server.
2. The person who cooked the rice.
3. The driver who delivered the rice to the kitchen.
4. The person who arranged the sale of the rice.
5. The person who packaged the rice in a warehouse.
6. The driver who carried the rice from the farm to the warehouse.
7. The farmers who grew the rice.
8. The water and soil.
9. The people who made the rice cooker that cooked the rice.
10. The people who built and maintained the delivery trucks and farm equipment.
11. The families of the farmers and other workers, and the communities who support them.
12. The people who ensure that the water and soil are safe and nourishing for growing rice.

The traditional number of tasks involved in preparing food is 72, but you could go on forever, because it does go on forever. The very presence of a bowl of rice, when you consider the vast amount of effort and coincidence and confluence that went in to bringing it to be eaten, is humbling. Next time you eat, think for just a moment about how your food came to you. It will make you much more grateful for it, and it might just taste better.

And that’s just the first line of the meal gatha. There’s a lot more in there, but you get the point that oryoki is thick with meaning. It’s an incredible experience. The final words in oryoki are “may we exist in muddy waters with the purity of the lotus. Thus we vow to Buddha.” The lotus needs muddy waters to thrive, and blossoms to be a radiant flower; no wonder it’s such a central image in Buddhism. We work with what we have, pay attention to it, and the blossoming will come.

I’m listening to a recording of Thomas Larcher playing a Schubert impromptu (D 946, no. 2). It’s a near-perfect match with how I am right now. I could write for a thousand pages, and not get nearly as close to the heart of the matter as Schubert managed to.

Tonight I’m making sushi and udon noodle bowls with veggies for dinner, and I’m going to see a performance of Dido and Aeneas. I haven’t gotten out much recently.

Four years ago was my last day of work at my “real” job, which means that I’m starting up on my fourth year as a freelancer. It doesn’t seem like that long ago.

Working alone has its own set of frustrations, and I’m still not close to making what I was making, but I know for a fact that I’m happier for it.

I slept through much of yesterday, and am feeling quite a bit better. I’m anticipating yet another slide or two into illness before the Winter abates, but I’ll enjoy health while it’s with me.

There’s a feeling that I’m in an interesting place right now; it’s akin to being inside the eye of a storm. Not a particularly fierce storm, but there’s a sense of calm and spaciousness around everything. I’ve got time for things, and I’m not exactly sure why. I’m getting my work done, and enjoying it. Meals are cooked, errands run, the house is clean. I’m reading a lot; my head is full of Whitman, Romantic philosophy, biographies of Cicero and Leibniz, two novels by Haruki Murakami, and quite a few books on Buddhist topics. I’m playing the guitar. There is a lot of activity, it’s just very unhurried and relaxed.

This lull (if that’s the right word) has given me a sense of all the things that are still to do; as the immediate area has cleared up, the disorder in the corners of my life have been illuminated, and the to-do list has grown to titanic proportions. It’s daunting, and a little depressing I’ll admit. There is always so much that is waiting to be done, to be given attention.

This has been a difficult winter health-wise. Every time I get healthy, it’s a matter of weeks before I’m ill again. No flu, nothing terrible, but an endless series of colds. I’ve got a terrible cough right now and am fearful of exercising too much lest I make it worse. I’ll continue to do what I can to get and stay healthy.

Being a borderline invalid has had its advantages though. Curled up on the couch with a fleece blanket and a cup of tea, I’ve done a great deal of reading, and it’s been very good for me, in many ways.

I feel like I made this post already. Wait, I did! So yes, same as it ever was.

I should have the next sesshin post up soon. It talks about the formal meals, called oryoki.

Sesshin is an opportunity to cultivate a profound stillness, an awarenes, that’s much deeper than what we normally have. It’s an intensive, and it’s not intended to be the usual way of being. At the monastery they do it one week a month. To use an exercise analogy, it’s like lifting weights at max effort; it’s important for getting stronger, but it can’t be done all the time. It wouldn’t help and would probably be harmful.

The system of sesshin, the structure by which the intensity is created, is around 500 years old. It’s been modified to suit various situations, but the basic concept of it is to remove, for the period of the sesshin, as much as possible the myriad ways in which we normal get distracted. In other words, to limit the inputs we get. The bird is not going to stay on the wire if people are throwing rocks at it, if other birds are fighting for territory, and if the electrical company comes and starts doing repair work.

So, for a week, there’s a retreat; the curtains come down. No TV. No music. No Internet. No reading. No writing. No talking. No eye contact. Hands in a particular place when walking (no fidgeting). These rules, called precautions, are designed to cut off the various ways we communicate with the world.

This might sound terrifying. It is terrifying. But the more terrifying part, if you think about it, isn’t that we’re not getting any inputs, it’s that we’re left with very few escapes. All our cultural ideas of entertainment are no longer available to us, and the one thing we desperately try to avoid in life is now upon on us – we’re stuck with ourselves. The structure of sesshin continually drives us back to ourselves, and it does it relentlessly.

This is a good thing, because combined with the awareness cultivated by zazen, it gives us an opportunity to observe ourselves as we live. I was surprised at how hard my mind fought to keep my attention off whatever was in front of me. In zazen, it would look forward to the next meal. At the next meal, it would long for the next period of zazen. Anything, it says, is better than what’s going on right now, no matter what is going on. My mind was seeking escape, it didn’t have many options, and sesshin kept bringing me back to myself.

But, eventually, the mind stops struggling so hard. Like a baby who’s cried itself out, the convulsions get weaker, the excuses become more half-hearted. And then, somehow, the mind stops trying to be somewhere else.

The mind, at the very least the part of the mind that I wrestle with here, doesn’t know itself very well. It’s very afraid of the bird staying on the wire. If there are no people throwing rocks at it, no gusts of wind, it will knock it off itself.

On the third day of sesshin, as the resistance wears down, I start to experience things in a way that I have a hard time expressing in words. It feels as if I’m seeing things, really seeing things for the first time. When the mind stops telling you you’ll be happier in a minute – there is a joy in everything. Brushing my teeth becomes an incredibly joyous experience, and I marvel as the brush moves in my mouth. The very act of holding a tea cup is a great moment. And while chanting, the sound of the chant, the feel of the sound as my lips move from one syllable to the next, is so very beautiful.

The bird is you. The wire is you. The vast, boundless sky is you. These are not words; this is reality, stark and wild and gorgeous.

And then my leg twitches, or I wonder if the guy next to you in the robe is thinking bad thoughts about you, or I think about what you’re going to buy at the rest stop when you’re driving back from sesshin and I’m back in it again. And all I can do – all I need to do – is see it, let it go, and return your awareness to the present.

I’m writing up a series of posts discussing various aspects of sesshin. Over the next week or so, I’ll put them up on the site.

A period of zazen, as it happens at the monastery, is a piece of music. Three strikes of a bell, a pause, and
then two more strikes. The pause is a long one – it can take 45 minutes. I could notate it like so:

For the period, I sit quietly, unmoving, on my cushion. Sometimes I have to blink, sometimes swallow, but that’s it. Other than that, there is my ever-present breath. It was there when I was born, and it will be with me until I die. It is on the breath that I set my attention, like a bird on a wire.

If you’ve never done this before, I encourage you to try it. You don’t need bells or cushions, just sit in a chair, get your body into a comfortable position, and follow your breath. When you breathe in, count “one.” When you breathe out, count “two.” When you get to ten, start over with the counting. if your mind wanders – if the bird doesn’t want to stay on the wire – see the thought, let it go, and return to your breath. Start over at “one.”

This isn’t easy, trust me. But it’s not hard either, and more importantly, it is nourishing. Done for a while, the thoughts come with less frequency, less force. The bird lingers longer, and then longer still. And when you are no longer moving, when your mind is no longer churning the waters, there is… I don’t know what to call it. Stillness. Clarity.

This clarity is very deep, and I haven’t even begun to probe the depths. After a period of zazen, I’m still. After two or three periods of zazen, a bit more still. After nine periods in a day, a bit more. And during sesshin, where there are five days, which each day’s schedule including nine or ten periods of zazen, stiller yet.

A sesshin is designed to cultivate that stillness, to provide a way to block out things that can disrupt as you let your mind settle, and at the same time to keep you from getting lulled into a state of dumbness where attention gives way to mindlessness. In its way, sesshin is a very long piece of music, almost entirely full of silence; the fermatas crackle with energy. It is so beautiful.

Another work crush. I haven’t been away from my computer for a while, and will probably be here for a few more days. Now that Valentine’s Day is over from the online chocolate standpoint, I can concentrate on the other, much more important thing I’m working on.

I am very very tired, and could use some rest.

I was saddened to find out that my beloved candy conversation hearts have gelatin in them, making them decidedly:

I’ve had 4, count-em, 4 robocalls from the Clinton campaign today. Who thought this was a good idea?

Unfortunately, my answering machine doesn’t vote.