Coming Together by Being Apart

In Retreat and On Retreat

My Zen teacher Josho Pat Phelan has sat with the group every weekday for years.  In fact, though she does many other things—administrate the whole group, and give talks, and lead sesshins, and do dokusan—I’ve always thought of her her primary job as waking up every morning before the crack of dawn, putting on robes and driving to the zendo to open the place up.  I practiced with her when there was just one day a week we did that, and I was often the only person who came; for years now the morning sitting has happened every weekday, for two periods, and there are often between ten and fifteen people who show up.

My first Buddhist teacher, Larry Rosenberg, never sat the daily sittings.  At the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, senior students led the morning and evening sittings, opened the building and got everything ready and rang the bells.  The teachers led retreats and taught classes in the evening, met with folks for interviews, but there was no tradition that they would sit every day with the students.  Larry’s practice was largely solitary.

I worked with him on a couple of books, and was in his apartment fairly often; one time he showed me his meditation room, a long narrow space that was lined with photographs of different people who had inspired him, Theravada teachers but also some Zen teachers (he had practiced with Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, also with Dainin Katagiri), including his root teacher, J. Krishnamurti.  In those days, back in the nineties when we worked on the books, he told me he sat for ninety minutes in the morning (after doing ninety minutes of yoga), had breakfast and took a long walk, then might sit again in the afternoon for a couple of hours.  The real work of his life took place in his meditation space, but the work he was paid for, his work with the meditation center, took place in the evening, when he taught classes or gave a lecture.

At the end of sesshin Josho traditionally thanks us for being there.  “I couldn’t do this without you,” she says.  Larry, on the other hand, used to take a one-month retreat by himself every year.  He was still doing that when I studied with him, in the nineties.  A friend lent him her vacation home during the winter months, and he would spend a month sitting.

I’ve always been a cross between my two teachers.  I definitely value the Zen Center, and most of the time go there two days a week, Wednesday mornings, when I’m the timekeeper, and Sundays, when a lot of people come.  I cherish that time with the group, love even the feeling of stepping into the zendo, the familiarity of the place.  There’s a subtle difference when you sit in a group; you feel the larger energy.  But every other morning, I sit by myself, at roughly the same time that the Zen Center sits, 6:00 AM, in my study, in a little spot that I reserve for that.  I cherish those mornings too.  It’s great to know the spot in my room is always there, and the posture of zazen itself feels comforting, as if it’s home base.  I can spend the whole night stewing about something (you can guess what I’ve been stewing about lately), but when I sit zazen I encounter it more directly.

These days we’re all sitting alone.

The coronavirus pandemic is a terribly difficult moment, probably the most in my 71 years of life (though there have been other such moments in world history.  I recently read Zen monk Kazumitsu Wako Kato’s memoir, and he spoke of the years in Japan after the Second World War, when his Zen priest father had died and his family had to live in a cave, and had very little to eat, surviving on bamboo shoots).  This moment also presents us with an opportunity, as difficult moments often do.  Especially for a person my age, but also for many others at the moment, it’s a time when we need to self-isolate (a term I’d never heard before).  We have no idea how long this may go on.  We also don’t know what we’re going to wake up and read tomorrow, to say nothing of the wild rumors that abound, and that circulate so easily because of the Internet.  The correct information also circulates; we all know what to do.

We’re in retreat from this pandemic, running for our lives, but the way to run is to stay still, sit in our homes and be by ourselves.  Pascal famously said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”  Never was that statement more correct (and he didn’t mean sitting in the room flipping madly through your cellphone).  I thought of that when I heard about the young people in New York who, despite the perilous moment, were going to bars and sitting side by side drinking themselves into oblivion.  It’s an act of sheer insanity, but you kind of understand it.  At least Pascal would have.

This is a moment when we need to come together, but the way to do that is by staying apart.  To be a good Christian you stay home from church.  To be a good Buddhist you become a hermit.  To be a good child you stay away from your elderly mother.

We’re never really alone when we practice.  As Zen teachers famously say, you sit with the whole universe.   The world doesn’t normally seem this perilous, but it actually is; the peril now is just more in our faces.  My wife’s grandmother told her when she was a little girl to always say goodbye to people as if you may never see them again.  This is an opportunity to see deeply into that truth, sit with no idea if this will be the last time, as if every breath might be our last.

That’s our situation now.  It always has been.