I felt as though Don Juan were talking to me personally. For what was my life up till then if not taking myself too seriously and then running away when things didn’t go my way, thinking that it showed character? And dropping self-importance? How do you do that and still stay on the spiritual path? How do you hunger and thirst for real peace if you don’t take seriously the self that wants this peace? Always these exasperating enigmas at the heart of the spiritual life. I tucked them away into a deeper part of my consciousness where they couldn’t disturb me, at least not yet.
To do zazen is to study the self. To study the self is to know the self. To know the self is to be enlightened by the myriad things. To be enlightened by the myriad things is to free one’s body and mind and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment is continued forever.
—Dogen Zenji (1200–53), founder of the Soto School of Zen, in The Way of Everyday Life by Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi
Another of the books in the Koko An library would influence my life more than any other up until that time. This was The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, a perennially popular work still in print that I would finish and then immediately start over again from page one, feverishly inspired by its rhapsodizing accounts of contemporary kensho (enlightenment) experiences—“the Big K,” as some of us in the Diamond Sangha called it. As a function of the counterculture’s fascination with the “wisdom of the East,” a raftload of books on Zen, many of them of dubious credibility in their discussion of enlightenment, were coming out at the time, but few did more to blow the kensho experience out of all proportion than did The Three Pillars of Zen. Although kensho is merely the first real step of Zen practice (something I and many others didn’t realize then), in Kapleau’s book it is mythologized into a wholesale spiritual and psychological rebirth, and the unwitting reader comes away with the impression, or at least this unwitting reader did, that one’s life is forever suffused with peace and bliss once kensho is attained. The book lit a roaring bonfire under my zafu, and I resolved to attain enlightenment with the same do-or-die ardor exhibited by those individuals featured in its kensho accounts.
One of the accounts that I found particularly enthralling came from a newly enlightened individual, a middle-aged Japanese businessman identified in the book only as “Mr. K.Y.,” who has as profound a Big K experience as seems possible, one that even has its own name in Japanese—daigo-tettei, or “Great Enlightenment”:
[Mr. K.Y. writes] At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. . . .” [A]ll at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! There’s no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha, ha, ha!” The empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: “Ha, ha, ha!!!”
This is for me! I thought. I was drawn like a moth to a flame by the heady drama of it all. But in diametric contrast to the fevered Rinzai theme and tone of The Three Pillars of Zen, another of the books in the zendo library, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by the Soto Zen master Suzuki Shunryu Roshi, took a cooler approach to Zen practice: rather than striving tooth and nail for enlightenment, one instead just sits as serenely as possible in zazen, taking each breath as it comes. If kensho happens, it happens. If not—no big deal. Just continue to sit serenely and let go of expectations. I was especially drawn to this book’s tone of gentleness, a welcome bit of yin to all the blood-and-guts yang of The Three Pillars of Zen, which often left me with a headache after practicing in the full-throttle way its author seemed to advocate. One of my later teachers would lay into Soto Zen for its lack of emphasis on kensho, likening it to the dried up exoskeleton of a dead cicada. But it seems to me now that a convincing Soto riposte to that criticism would be that trying too hard to attain enlightenment is just the ego desiring another credential. Absorption trumps striving in this Soto approach. I had been beating my head against a wall, striving for enlightenment with the Three Pillars of Zen approach and getting only headaches to show for it. Now I was ready to try something else, and through the gentle Soto approach I found my samadhi deepening.
I especially took to heart the section of Suzuki’s book titled “Nothing Special,” which echoed the teachings of the karma yoga I had practiced back on my high school track team:
As long as we are alive, we are always doing something. But as long as you think, “I am doing this,” or “I have to do this,” or “I must attain something special,” you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something.
•••
The sutras (Buddhist chants) that we recited at key junctures during a typical day at Koko An had an instant appeal to my ears: they were both inherently musical and completely devoid of the guilt-based supplication to a capricious Odin-like God that I had associated from my early youth with Catholic prayers. The exclusionary dictum “Outside the Church there is no salvation” and the emphasis on sin I had grown up hearing about incessantly at school stood in dark contrast to our daily affirmation-filled chant at Koko An: “This very place is the Lotus-Land, this very body is the Buddha.”
In a similar vein, the Purification Sutra that we chanted before evening zazen periods made the process of seeking absolution from one’s misdeeds much less involved than seeking it in Confession:
All the evil karma ever created by me since of old,
on account of my beginningless greed, anger, and
confusion,
born of my body, mouth and thought—
I now confess and purify it all.
—The Diamond Sangha Sutra Book
That was all it took to make things right again on the balance sheet of one’s deeds and misdeeds. No talk of “mortal sin,” no “four Our Fathers and three Hail Marys,” and certainly no tail-between-the-legs entreaties of “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” to the priest on the opposite side of a confessional grille.
Before breakfast every morning we recited a sutra that concluded with “Now as we spread the bowls of the Buddha, we make our vows together with all beings. We and this food and our eating are empty [emphasis added].” The Heart Sutra, so named for encapsulating the core tenets of Zen, explored this theme of emptiness at an elemental level and summed up the Zen view of existence itself, in this translation by Red Pine:
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness.
The paradoxical nature of this portion of the sutra perplexed me to no end each time we chanted it, especially after having read words vaguely similar in “Mr. K.Y.’s” Great Enlightenment account in The Three Pillars of Zen: “The empty [emphasis added] sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: ‘Ha, ha, ha!!!’” Did this passage, I wondered in increasing puzzlement, mean that Mr. K.Y. and the sky were one and the same, and that both were empty, as in this business of “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”? And if so, what exactly did that mean? And how on earth could that be a good thing? Existence is completely empty: Oh, I feel better already.
Seeking answers to these mind-bending questions, I pored over the entire lengthy Diamond Sutra, another primary Zen text, in one reading, but instead of coming to any clarity, I was befuddled even further. In the sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha challenges one of his disciples with the question “May an arhat [enlightened person who lives apart from the world] meditate within himself, ‘I have