Is Kensho Necessary?

One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart by Henry Shukman.  Counterpoint.  339 pp. $16.95. ****

Henry Shukman had an interesting life as a writer even before he began spiritual practice, but this memoir centers on his practice and wouldn’t exist without it.  He is British and grew up in Oxford, the child of two well-known professors.  The primary problem of his early life was a horrific case of eczema, which plagued him for years.  I myself have suffered from a mild case for much of my life, and understand how mystifying it can be.

But Shukman even as an infant had eczema that covered his entire body and was a constant torment; his parents had to cover him with ointment when he was young, and he was reclusive when he got older because he was embarrassed about his appearance.  He also felt stifled at school; his parents were known as scholars, so he was supposed to be an excellent student, but wasn’t terribly interested and did his work dutifully.  His parents’ divorce was also difficult for him, and seemed to come out of the blue; one day his mother seemed agitated and the next day his father was gone.  The man eventually remarried and tried to bring his sons into his new family, but Henry remained resentful of his parents’ breakup throughout his youth.

He found freedom as he got older and began to realize he wanted a career as a writer.  He hung out with a bohemian crowd and wrote poetry and stories.  After graduating from secondary school he took a gap year and traveled to Argentina, writing and hanging out and working odd jobs.  For the first time in his life, his eczema disappeared.  I wondered if the deciding factor was something about the South American climate, or just being away from home.  He returned to England and the eczema immediately returned.

It was in Argentina that he had his first mystical experience, standing on a hillside and feeling a sudden oneness with everything.  This episode wasn’t much different from what others have reported, but Shukman had no context for it and didn’t know what to make of it.  A few years later he had a girlfriend who was into Transcendental Meditation, and he began doing that, wondering if meditation might clarify what had happened to him.

Shukman was successful in his early writing career, publishing poetry and stories and getting assignments to do travel writing.  At one point he went to New Mexico to do a piece on D.H. Lawrence.  The project didn’t work out, but he met writer Natalie Goldberg, who encouraged his writing and introduced him to Zen.  Goldberg persuaded him to do his first sesshin, and while he worried that he was being unfaithful to TM, he took to Zen immediately.

His travels took him around the country and he kept running into Zen teachers, some who were quite well known, John Daido Loori, Eido Roshi, Josho Kennett.  He was looking for a teacher, but none of those situations seemed quite right.  He eventually found a home in the Sanbo Kyoden lineage—which combines Soto Zen with koans—and found teachers who, though not as well-known as others he’d encountered, worked out perfectly, Joan Rieck Roshi and John Gaynor Roshi.  He had found his spiritual home.

Kensho—a dramatic experience of opening—is extremely important in that lineage; one could almost say it is necessary.  I wonder if people who are prone to such things find their way to that lineage, or if the experience changes those who show up.  Shukman describes an initial opening with the koan Mu, and then—in a chapter entitled “Absolute Zero”—describes  an ultimate experience, what might be described as the Great Death.

I don’t know what to make of that.  Shukman, who had had various enlightenment experiences previous to that, says that his life had nevertheless not been much affected by them; he could easily revert back to depression and self-doubt.  I haven’t had such dramatic experiences, but feel that my life has been utterly changed by my 28 years of practice.  I believe my wife would agree.   Shukman describes the early days of the sesshin in question as rather ordinary, one day when he was trying to settle down, another when it felt as if a battle were going on inside him, two sides wrestling for domination.

But when this final opening came, it was most dramatic.  Shukman—who is a lively, interesting writer throughout most of the book—is rendered almost incoherent by the experience.

“. . . a thunderbolt dropped on the crown of my head.

“Everything gone.  All the hard work of holding together the world as Henry knew it—gone.  No more Henry, no more world.  Nothing.  No more Zen.  Truly, nothing.  True nothing.  Everything annihilated.  Nothing left.  Nothing at all.

“Its hard to know what exactly happened, but when I look back on it, there’s simply nothing.  Not even awareness of nothing.  A gap.  But not even a gap.  Blackness.  But not even that.  It’s hard to know what to call it.  Death, perhaps.  ‘Death’ Seems the aptest term.

“One impossible fact: nothing at all.  Not emptiness, which might still suggest space with nothing in it, but nothing.  Nothing to see, no one to see, no seeing.”

Hmm.

This experience—not surprisingly—changed Shukman’s life altogether.  He only wanted to do altruistic work after that, and began to work with various hospice organizations.  He gave up writing altogether; it no longer seemed to have a point (though he did eventually write this 339-page book).  The Zen Center in New Mexico where he first did zazen was on its last legs, and Shukman took it over; it seems to be thriving today.  A friend of mine who has listened Shukman’s talks says they are a model of clarity.  He seems to have found his calling.

I have read Varieties of Religious Experience and understand that, to some extent, we’re just talking about different psychological makeups; some people are prone to such experiences and others aren’t.  Whenever I read about them—Brad Warner calls such writing enlightenment porn—I find myself wondering why such things haven’t happened to me (though the Great Death doesn’t sound exactly pleasant, and I’ve had my own kinds of excitement).

Yet the teachers I follow, and whom I trust the most, denigrate the importance of kensho.  Kodo Sawaki said somewhere that he’d had many enlightenment experiences, and none of them was worth a damn, and Eihei Dogen—whom the Sanbo Kyoden lineage claims to follow—says in his zazen instructions, “Don’t think good or bad. . . .  Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.”

At some point in the past few months I copied a passage into my notebook that David Chadwick wrote about Shunryu Suzuki, who has always been a model of practice for me, of consistency and steadiness.  It is this passage that I go back to when I feel unmoored.

“He told us that enlightenment was not a state of mind, was not contained in any experience, and he guided us away from trying to recreate past profound experiences and toward accepting ourselves as we are.  He taught a disciplined life of zazen meditation, attention to the details of life, not wanting too much (especially another state of mind) and not getting too worked up.”

I wonder what Sanbo Kyoden teachers would say to that.