The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery by Janwillem van de Wetering

Author:Janwillem van de Wetering [van de Wetering, Janwillem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466874664
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

Rohatsu, week of weeks

Sesshins, the meditation weeks of a Zen monastery, fill the first seven days of six months of the year. A week has seven days; I had forgotten that fact. I was still thinking that a week had five days of regularly repeated obligations, followed by two days of another order altogether, two days in which to forget the five days.

But a week in a Zen monastery has seven days and not one minute is given away. Every meditation period lasts exactly twenty-five minutes, and the pause between two periods lasts five minutes. At eleven p.m. the last stroke on the large copper bell ebbs away slowly and only then is there sleep. Some sesshins contain more meditation hours that others: in summer, when there is a lot of work in the ornamental and vegetable gardens, seven to nine hours a day; in winter eleven hours a day.

But it could be much worse, as I heard from the monks, although I didn’t believe them at first. The first week of December is Rohatsu. Rohatsu is the sesshin which rules all sesshins. Fifteen hours of meditation per day: from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m.; from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m.; from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.; from 7 p.m. to midnight. That is seventeen hours altogether, but the visits to the master take time and are deducted from the meditation time.

I couldn’t believe it. It had to be an impossible exercise, even if there were regular beating up and shouting. No human being can sit still for fifteen hours a day, and under stress as well, with an unanswerable question tucked away in his belly. I would faint or go raving mad. Certainly, Buddha had meditated for weeks on end, under a tree, on a rock. But that was 2500 years ago. A holy man, shrouded in the haze of antiquity. Christ had meditated in the desert for forty days on end. That was 2000 years ago. But I was a westerner of today—a restless, nervous, noisy seeker without insight, without power. With some sense of humor and a somewhat indifferent outlook on daily life one cannot sit still for fifteen hours a day. All right, I had managed to sit still for eleven hours a day, but with a lot of wobbling about and secret glances at others and at my watch, and with rest periods of an hour or more so that I could sleep or sit on a gravestone and smoke cigarettes and dream.

I tried not to think about this coming horror, just as in the past I had pushed away the image of an approaching visit to the dentist or an examination, drawing nearer and nearer. But this was something quite different. Dentists and examiners had been pushed on me by strong powers around me, powers outside myself, grim and overbearing powers against which I couldn’t defend myself. But what had forced me to undergo a training which asked me to perform an absolutely impossible

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