Wherein I attempt to contemplate Zen
For a couple years, I meditated regularly, at least several hours a week, and on some occasions, as often as three 40-minute sessions a day. This morning I woke up happy, having gone to sleep early—I suspect having eaten well, exercised, and connecting with friends may have helped. Yet during the period when I meditated so often, although I was often happy and calm, there were occasionally months at a time when I was deeply unhappy. Zen was not the cause, per sé, or was it?
For a moment — let me clarify by means of a quote from the “Tao Te Ching”: “The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao.” To be clear, Tao is not not the same tradition as Zen, though they melded in various ways in China; e.g. borrowing, as far as I know, for example, the phrase “the path.” Yet there is a similarity here — what I speak of is not “true” Zen, not the platonic ideal of Zen, so to speak; I believe “true Zen” would not leave someone unhappy; paradoxically, however, it would not leave someone “happy” either.
But what I speak of for the moment is an everyday, conventional sort of happiness or contentedness. I believe it was difficult to achieve or to transcend because of the very instruction to transcend it, or more precisely, the instruction to let it be.
During zen meditation, an orthodox teacher may often suggest that both psychic pain or psychic bliss be let alone; that the ultimate goal might be realizing suchness, i.e. the idea that things are just as they are, and that in such a realization, there is a kind of bliss and openness; but that we ought not even accept that as true reality. That true reality is unnameable and that through our very act of attempting to name ideal realities and reproduce them for ourselves, we are paradoxically ultimately set astray, cast about in waves (of varying turbulence) of samsara.
Yet this orthodox teaching—let it be and observe, say—, for the conventionally unhappy mind is, while deeply profound and beautiful, especially in the context of long periods of zazen, the traditional, silent, group-attended form of Zen meditation, I believe is troubling when not against a backdrop of allowed and even encouraged attempts to find conventional happiness for oneself when off the meditation cushion. It is not so much that everlasting peace is findable, say, through merely eating well, having a stable-feeling living situation, good relationships, or exercise; but that these pursuits, if truly consummated, may certainly help on the path. To use a Freudian idea, which may even challenge the tenets of Zen itself (though I am tentatively more fond of the Zen ideal, to be clear, of accepting ultimate unchanging [empty/apparently formless]/changing [apparently formful] reality)—perhaps we are conditioned throughout our lives to desire one thing or another and that by mere accomplishing of those conditioned goals, we achieve happiness (is this not an incredibly radical idea? perhaps one that is descriptive of all our actions, faiths, mundane or terroristic actions alike?).
What I mean to say more broadly is that, perhaps, against a backdrop of the pursuit of everyday happiness — which I propose ought to be allowed and even encouraged, even from an orthodox Zen perspective—one might more easily be able to attain a deeper sense of ultimate, unconditioned reality; one that is beyond everyday joys and sorrows. But that if it is not… we may samsarically fall prey to exceptional pain on the cushion.
