God Is in the Belly

Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Durckheim.  Inner Traditions.  202 pp. $14.95.  ****

Years ago—27 years this fall, it would seem—when I got my first meditation instructions at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, Larry Rosenberg told us we had our choice of where to follow the breathing.  Some people follow it at the nose, he said, perhaps the feeling of the exhalation touching the upper lip.  Others follow it in the chest.  Others in the belly.  The entire body is breathing, he said, and we can follow it anywhere.  We should just follow our instincts.  Mine said to focus on the belly, though at times my breath didn’t seem to descend that far.  But the further down I could go the better it felt.

I did that despite the fact that I’d often had an uneasy relationship with that part of my body.  I’d been overweight as an adolescent, and often envied guys who had lean torsos and chiseled abs.  No matter how much I worked out later, even when I did lots of abdominal exercises, the configuration of my belly never changed much.[1]  One time in my forties I was in bed with a woman who liked to rub my tummy (as if I were a dog), and she once said, “I really like your belly.”  I was stunned.  How, I wondered, could anyone like that?

I had an instinctive feeling that somehow meditation involved bringing the whole self together, the body and the mind.  Just because I hadn’t liked my belly, or my whole torso, when I was younger, I had often suppressed feeling there, and was stunned to feel my torso come alive as I brought my attention to it.  When I learned about the chakras, the deeper ones always seemed the more interesting to me.  I wasn’t interested in flowing out of the crown chakra, as many people were; I wanted to go deep into the body.  I gradually began to access the energy of those deep chakras as I sat, and to feel the energy permeate my body.  That was how I accessed it.  I needed to relax, as I often said to myself, down into my asshole.

I therefore had a strong affinity for Zen practice when I finally discovered it.  Larry had meditated in all the traditions, and was an equal opportunity instructor, though he emphasized the breath.  But my Soto Zen teachers always taught me to bring my attention into the belly, whether they talked about the breathing or not.  The lower belly is the center of gravity, and we make it the center of attention.

I was nevertheless quite startled to discover a book which focused on that part of the body, and explained how Japanese culture itself did that.  Master Okada, for instance, who created his own method of meditation called Seiza[2] (which I think of as the kneeling position that Japanese people often occupy), spoke of three ranks of people.  “ . . . The lowest is he who values his head.  Those who endeavor only to amass as much knowledge as possible grow heads that become bigger and bigger so they topple over easily . . . Next come those of middle rank.  For them the chest is more important. . . . These are the men with outward courage but without real strength.  Many of the so-called great men are in this category.  But those who regard the belly as the most important part and so have built the stronghold where the Divine can grow—these are the people of the highest rank. . . . Those in the first category think that Science can rule Nature.  Those in the second have apparent courage and know how to fight.  Those in the third know what reality is.”

Author Karlfried Graf Durckheim also has any number of inspirational quotations, including this one from early in the book.  “By Hara—and we hold to this name—the Japanese understand an all-inclusive general attitude which enables a man to open himself to the power and wholeness of the original life force.”  It isn’t something you think about.  It’s something you feel.

There were two moments in my life of practice which seem significant as I look back on them.  One was early on, after my first interview with Larry Rosenberg, when he recommended a book by a Theravada teacher but I found it too dry and dull to read.  I returned that book to the Center library and picked up Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which had somehow caught my attention.  I found that book utterly mysterious, but read it avidly.  I felt sure it addressed what I wanted to know.  Years later when I was helping Larry write his own book on Vipassana practice, Breath by Breath, and was staying at the Center for a week to consult with him, I found Hara: The Vital Center of Man in the same library.  And though Larry didn’t think much of it, and has always seen practice as an encounter with Mind, not the body, I felt drawn to it, and read it evening after evening.  I’ve just now read it again.

Durckheim himself (1896-1988) led a fascinating life.  He fought in World War I and faced death, a fact which he thought was important to his development.  After the war he began studying psychology and had a striking introduction to Eastern thought.  “I found myself in the workshop of the painter Willi Geiger in Munich. My future wife, Madame von Hattinberg, was sitting on the table, and next to her was a book…I can still see it now. I opened this book and read out loud the eleventh verse of the Tao-Te-Ching of Lao Tzu. Suddenly it happened! I was listening and lightning went through me. The veil was torn asunder, I was awake! I had just experienced ‘It’. Everything existed and nothing existed. Another Reality had broken through this world. I myself existed and did not exist…I had experienced that which is spoken of in all centuries: individuals, in whatever stage of their lives, have had an experience which struck them with the force of lightning and linked them once and for all to the circuits of True Life.”

He got his doctorate in psychology and began teaching, was actually friends with such notables as Rilke and Paul Klee, but in 1933—this part of his life is troubling—he “signed the commitment of the professors at German universities and colleges to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi state.”  He was an ardent Nazi for a time, but then discovered he had Jewish ancestry, so he became an envoy to a foreign ministry and was sent to Japan.  There he met D.T. Suzuki and studied Zen for years, along with other disciplines like Zen archery.  He continued to support Nazism until almost the end of the war, and though he went into hiding, he was arrested by the Americans and confined to prison for sixteen months.

“In spite of everything it was very fertile period for me,” he said.  “During the first weeks. I had a dream almost every night, some of which anticipated my future work.  In my cell I was surrounded by a profound silence.  I could work on my self and that was when I began to write a novel.  My neighbors simply waited for each day to pass.  That time of captivity was precious to me because I could exercise zazen meditation and remain in immobility for hours.”

He eventually became a psychotherapist in the mold of Jung, whom he knew.  He didn’t believe a therapist was a healer, more like a spiritual friend, and felt that if therapy didn’t include a spiritual dimension it was doomed.

Hara expresses his understanding of Zen and of body practice in general.  It seems padded in places and often awkwardly written; I don’t know if the problem is with his own writing or with the translation.  It is interesting to hear this essentially Western man’s take on an Eastern spiritual tradition.  He often spells things out more than the Eastern teachers do, but thereby says some things I haven’t heard from anyone else, like this quotation from the final chapter.

“What keeps man estranged from Being consists not only in his being fettered by psychological complexes and by the rigidity of his thought-patterns, but also by the fact that they are fixed in his flesh and set fast in wrong bodily habits.  So any renewal can be achieved only through the transformation of the whole man, and implies not only an intellectual and spiritual conversion, but also a transformation of the body and all its postures and movements.  Without this bodily transformation all inner experience of Being comes to a standstill when the experience has passed, and the man inevitably falls victim again to his old, familiar fixing and clarifying consciousness.  Therefore practice must inevitably include practice of the body.”

As I’ve said before, the appendices in this book are worth the price of admission.  The text is an added bonus.

[1] I’ve gone to the Y for thirty years and watched many guys do crunches all that time, but their bellies don’t look any different.  Back when I was doing them, if some guy was standing near me, I would sometimes get up and say, “If you do that exercise every day, some day your belly will be as big as mine.”

[2] Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle.  He created a method of sitting that resembles Soto Zen in every particular, in fact many of his teachings echo Zen, but apparently never studied with a Zen teacher.  I read somewhere or other that one of his inspirations was the way Quakers sit in Friends Meeting.