“All experience is preceded by mind, made by mind, led by mind.” Dhammapada 1:1 (translation by Gil Fronsdal)

When I first encountered living Zen practice, I was surprised to find what at first seemed a cold, rigid formality. I had read enough to expect high-def attention to posture and zazen in general. But the forms around bowing, eating during retreat, kinhin (walking meditation), or how to hold the sutra book during chanting, seemed too much to my post-hippy, post-leisure suit, post-punk, post-Protestant, American to-hell-with-formal-anything attitude. For a practice that is about finding freedom, I wondered why are we asked to do things in such specific manner and that smack of dead ritual or anal-retentive OCD fixation.

And yet my teacher, Josho Phelan, and other Zen teachers I encountered would express the forms without being rigid or uptight. They seemed attentive yet relaxed, precise and yet fluid, reverential and yet responsive, or even playful. The particulars, really, were mundane, ordinary: a simple bow to the cushions (they support our zazen), holding a bowl of food close to the heart (this food sustains our efforts), using two hands to hold a sutra book for service (what else do you need to do while chanting?). Still, I often wondered what this practice had to do with the classical rebel Zen of poet-monks I admired like Han Shan, Ikkyu, or Ryokan, who seemed to spend much of their time wandering about the countryside, observing clouds and crickets, reading classics, and writing poetry.

Over time, I learned that in Zen there are forms, and there are forms, and there are “no forms.” In one sense, forms are any phenomenal object: rocks, trees, clouds, highways, thoughts, etc. In another sense, forms are formal ways we do things in Zen practice: bowing, sitting, eating in the zendo, and so on. Further, the Heart Sutra proclaims, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form,” which is to say forms are ever changing and interdependently dancing with all other forms and if we cling to our fixed idea of a form, we suffer.

In her essay, “The Sound of the Inanimate Expounding the Dharma,” (Seeds of Virtue, Seeds of Change) Josho Phelan, abbess of the Chapel Hill Zen Center, shares how practice with Zen forms can support our effort to awaken and become an expression of Dogen’s “practice-enlightenment.” Regarding the minute particulars of Zen forms, she says:

“When we decide to do something in a particular way, it helps us pay attention; it helps rescue us from our train of thought…”

and awaken us from our unconscious habits and preferences.

“Using the forms: entering and leaving the zendo on the left side, turning clockwise when we sit on our cushion, bowing as the person taking the place next to us bows to his or her cushion, helps us notice our preferences–our prominent or subtle likes or dislikes. The forms give us a background against which to contrast our tendencies and conditioned activity.”

So the forms of practice, what some might derisively call “ritual” or “cultural baggage,” are really an expedient means to wake us up to what we do:

“What all this bowing and stepping forward with a particular foot does is pull us out of the realm of our mental constructs, out of our incessant mental activity, into the realm of what is actually right before us.”

Shunryu Suzuki, who trained Josho’s teacher, Sojun Mel Weitsman, called “what is actually right before us,” “things-as-it-is.” The Buddhist term for this is “tathata,” often translated as “suchness” or “thusness.” Zen practice aims to reveal “things-as-it-is” so we can live in true freedom and no longer live as a mere victim of our conditioned cravings that in today’s world frequently manifest as endless to-do lists and shopping sprees. For me, Zen forms sometimes function as speed-bumps, physical reminders that wake me from a mind velocitized by highway or Internet speeds. The forms give me an opportunity to re-collect body, breath, and mind in the present.

Josho quotes Dogen, 13th-century Japanese Zen master:

“The minds of all beings in the world, the minds of Buddhas and ancestors everywhere…are wood and stone. There is no mind apart from these. These stone and wood, or things in general, are not in themselves bound by the realms of being and nonbeing, and emptiness and form….One arouses the thought of enlightenment, practices, and attains with the mind which is wood and stone because mind is wood and mind is stone.” Dogen Zenji, “Arousing the Supreme Thought” (translation by Francis Cook, How to Raise an Ox).

In our pursuit of enlightenment, Dogen points us toward, not away from, the world, toward stone and wood, the ordinary elements of our life. Josho’s comment on this leads us to a deeper understanding of the Zen approach to everyday activity:

“Undivided mind includes everything it experiences as itself, without dividing or separating into self and other, without engaging the naming, categorizing, judging or limiting aspects of consciousness. The expression doing things single-mindedly is used in Zen to describe how to extend the mind of practice into our ordinary activity.”

This attitude helps me when I face a kitchen sink full of dishes or litter box ready for emptying or my spouse with a different idea about the day ahead. I can huff and puff or try to evade or put off the chore, …or I can refrain from separating and meet the situation as my own mind. Each dirty spoon, each trip to the trash can, each moment of dialog can become a warm, intimate experience if I let go of preconceived notions or the pull of a semi-conscious habit.

For us contemporary Americans, this orientation is radically counter-cultural. It suggests we need to drop our multitasking modality in favor of mono-tasking. The practice is to wholeheartedly do one thing at at time. Josho’s teacher had an exchange with his teacher on this point,

Sojun Mel Weitsman asked Shunryu Suzuki, “What is nirvana?” Shunryu Suzuki replied, “Seeing one thing through to the end.” (–from 49 Fingers: A Collection of Modern American Koans, by Michael Wenger)

We are liberated from endless cycles of craving and stress when we offer our full attention to the task at hand. It is not easy. We have habits of doing things half-heartedly, or of being stingy with our attention. However, modern research supports this ancient yet everyday insight. In his book, The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin cites numerous studies that indicate how multitasking degrades our ability to do something. Yet, researchers find that multitaskers rate the quality of their own work much higher than objective observers evaluating the results of that work. Even as we degrade our attention, we give ourselves high marks for doing so!

Returning to Josho’s essay, she says:

“Soto Zen stresses the non-duality between the everyday world of birth and death, or samsara, and ultimate truth, or nirvana. Because of this, doing very ordinary things single-mindedly, with our whole body and mind–our whole being–can be a direct experience of the ultimate. Zen also emphasizes that Ordinary Mind is the Way, meaning consciousness, wholeheartedly engaged in ordinary activity without grasping or aversion can be an experience of engaging the ultimate.”

Japanese Tea Ceremony, which Josho studied during her time at San Francisco Zen Center in the 1970s and 80s, is an expression of this understanding.

“In Tea Ceremony there is a very precise way of doing everything: of walking, of sitting down, as well as the way you sit, the way you stand up, and the way you place each foot when you walk and turn around in the Tea Room.”

Japanese Tea Ceremony was, of course, influenced by Zen. Both Tea Ceremony and Zen are living arts. The practice of each requires something more than rote memorization of forms, it requests our warm-hearted awareness. At her temple in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Josho teaches this as a concrete practice of using two hands to do one thing.

“Using both hands, in any activity, helps collect and focus the attention; it unifies our body and mind. In this way we can use drinking a cup of tea as a concentration or unification practice.”

I think this could be taken too literal-mindedly or to a rigid extreme. One might then never take up such an art as tea or meditation (or any new skill) out of fear of making mistakes or because it sounds tedious. Or perhaps we don’t trust ourselves enough to engage in such concentrated activity. Josho reminds us of what it’s all about:

“Although we would spend a lot of time and effort learning the forms, the point of Tea Ceremony, the emphasis, is not on recreating the forms perfectly. The emphasis is on taking care of your state of mind in the midst of the forms, with the support of the forms, and whatever happens moment after moment, you stay with your state of mind….In this context when you serve tea to someone, you are not serving tea as much as you are serving your state of mind. Actually, what more do we have to offer?”

Josho’s essay and many other superb offerings can be found in Seeds of Virtue, Seeds of Change. In this rich collection of writings by contemporary women Zen teachers, you can find an exploration of different qualities of attention (Schireson), a healing embrace of being overwhelmed (O’Hara), a study of Dogen’s “Guidelines for Practicing the Way,” (Kinst), and practical advice for meditation posture specific for women’s bodies (Austin), and many other pearls. We are so fortunate to have these sisters in the Dharma shining their keen light on Zen practice.

The art in this post is by Agnes Martin, one of the greats of late twentieth-century painting. In the book, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, she speaks of the influence Zen teachings had on her life and work, as it did for many of the shapers and movers of art and music after World War II.