Doraku-An Zen-Dojo

Ever wondered why Japanese gardens look so beautiful and spotlessly clean? It is not a specific Japanese self-cleaning kind of moss, it is lots of work, day by day …

During today’s Samu, the daily working period after breakfast, we had to pick the fallen leaves and pine-tree needles from the moss and carefully pull the omnipresent weeds out. About two square meters took two of us about one hour. 

Right after rain in the evening it looked as messy as before, and we had to start all over again the next day. A good lesson about impermanence, and my aching knees let me feel once more that in Zen doing something is considered more important than any enduring outcome of our activities.  

I am sure, next time I visit Ryoanji in Kyoto I will see the vast extend of spotlessly clean beautiful moss with different eyes.

After the Roshi’s demonstration how to operate the gongs during Sutra chanting, he asked us to follow him to his Zendo one more time. We did one short round of Zazen, then he wanted to explain us more about his understanding of Zen. During his lecture, the Roshi was not just sitting on his pillow talking, he accompanied his words with lots of gestures and action while walking around in his Dojo.

In the middle of his talk he suddenly opened a door under the Altar and put three footballs out. Happily he started playing around with these balls for some time until we all had to laugh, then he told us from whom he got them and so on. 

Eventually he came to the point: that emptiness in Zen, or the KU (空) in the Heart Sutra, is not “nihilism“, but more like a kind of “energy” or Ki, the basis of life. The football can jump back, although there is “nothing” inside but air, but without that “nothing” (throwing a deflated ball towards the floor), there is no energy which lets the ball jump back. The funniest and most clear hands-on explanation about the concept of “emptyness” in Zen, and the related misconception concerning nihilism, I ever witnessed …

Later K-san remarked that the Roshi is always so funny and tries to make one laugh, but sad enough we are not allowed to laugh during his talk. Well, isn’t Zen also about breaking rules? I can’t help laughing even now, when I call back to memory the image of the Roshi playing soccer in his Zendo …

During sutra chanting there is a lot of ringing and gonging and clapping going on. It seemed almost impossible for me to learn how to do this correctly by just watching and memorising, while being busy with chanting and following countless lines of unknown syllables in the Sutra book.

Today the Roshi came to our temple while I was doing Zazen on the veranda outside the Zendo during „free practise time”. I could hear him explaining to K-san some details of how to chant and how to use the gongs properly, and he corrected and humorously imitated his way of performing today’s morning ceremony.

I politely asked K-san later, if he maybe could show me what he just learned, and he replied that it was a very unusual event, the Roshi never instructed him this way before. He let me try a bit with the big Mokugyo and the gongs, and corrected my handling and timing. “Maybe Roshi will show you later!” he concluded his lesson … a privilege I silently doubted the short-time guest to his Dojo will be granted. 

To my big surprise, in the afternoon we were sitting next to the Roshi in his temple, and he demonstrated for us in all detail how to use the gongs of different size while chanting. Several times he jokingly mentioned that foreigners cannot do this correctly. In the end he gave me a Japanese book with all relevant Sutra and explanations in, “日本語がわかる …” he said, overestimating my still far from fluent language skills. 

I am very happy about this unique chance to improve the Sutra chanting at my Dojo from the Roshi’s first hand explanation. Though I will stick to a much reduced schedule concerning the number of Sutras and length of the ceremony. Not just because I am “foreigner” … I guess it is important, next to a good performance, to also have the chance to really understand the meaning of what you are chanting. How much of your life-time you really can spend to memorise, copy, translate and deeply reflect ancient Indian texts you learned in a Japanised version of ancient Chinese pronunciation …?

Ikkyu-san helping us

After cleaning and raking the rock garden outside his temple for about one hour, the Roshi explained to us that this kind of working together and helping each other makes us strong. In modern times, he said, everyone follows his own ideas, setting priority to the own benefit. But together we are much stronger and can live, this is the meaning of Sangha.

I must confess that my ideal image of a Zen-life often has been much closer to a hermit’s dwelling high up in the mountains, and joining other people to help or teach, or for having some fun together, was more or less an exceptional time off, if not some duty. So I always feared Sangha as a too tight community of people following some potentially repressive rules and censored ways of thinking, in cases even blindly following an abusive leader, all of this contradicting the development of a free and healthy Zen spirit and life.

I was wrong. After eating and cooking day by day, all of us together, the food donated by the local farmers, the Roshi’s simple explanation after cleaning and raking his garden made me understand … nobody can live alone.

I feel that the three of us sharing this short time at the International Zen-Dojo, together with the Roshi down at his temple, are a pretty good mini-Sangha. And gratefully I admit that we really do enjoy our days here!

Today the Roshi asked us to come to his temple once more. When we arrived, he was just about cleaning the rock garden (karesansui) in front of the main entrance. We helped to pick up the fallen leafs for half an hour, then he started raking a wave-pattern into the gravel.

Afterwards it was K-san’s turn with the rake, and the Roshi corrected his action with much enthusiasm and accompanying sounds. From watching K-san, I figured that raking a proper pattern into the gravel is much more difficult and physically demanding than I ever thought. Then the Roshi called me to give it a try, and I had to produce a curved line around some rocks, carefully, not to damage any of the moss.

I really liked it! Raking a Zen garden is much like Hitsuzendo, drawing a line with all your energy, concentration and breath.

Today is April 8th, Buddha’s birthday, according to the Japanese Buddhist calendar, and co-incidentally Easter Sunday. We will have a little ceremony at my Dojo, and enjoy eating chocolate eggs.

While I am still editing the notes I took at Tekishinjuku, I feel a bit sad that I was not able to stay in Japan until today. Not just I will miss the ceremonies at the temple; today also K-san will formally become a Monk and change his name.  The Roshi asked me to help K-san shave his head, but he decided to keep his hair as long time as possible … I wonder how he looks now?

What I took from Japan this time is the inspiration how to run a good Zen-Dojo, with hard practising but happy people. Maybe today is a good day to reconfirm my ideas and wishes to set up such a place, instead of longing to be in Japan?

In May 2011, when I first wanted to visit the International Zen-Dojo, no one answered my mails. I concluded they possibly must all be too busy helping after the earthquake and tsunami, maybe all monks and residents gone to the north-east to provide their support. I even felt a bit guilty and selfish to plan a week or two doing Zazen, while in the Tohoku-region the dead are not yet buried. And in the end it was o.k., I went to Tokyo and Sendai, passing by Fukushima with it’s at this time still very unstable reactors, and visited friends and colleagues, instead of sitting on a pillow in the lovely safe countryside outside Kyoto.

Today the Roshi told me that everyone at Tekishinjuku quickly left Japan just days after the disaster happened, and the Dojo was deserted almost until last November, when K-san moved in to spend there the winter all alone. My apology that „we are always afraid“ seemed to have amused the Roshi a lot. I was not ironic when I said that, though I heard the Roshi still laughing when we left through the temple gate.

Probably I was the first person since March 2011 living in the Dojo’s guesthouse, and my task was also cleaning the room I staid, and the whole house and garden. So eventually I found one way, to hands-on help recovering from the after-effects of the disaster: preparing the Zendo for new international visitors to come.

The afternoon of the second day we went down from our temple, the Jotokuji (常徳寺), to the Roshi’s Zendo at Tokoji Temple (東光寺) for doing Zazen. It felt kind of normal and kind of strange to walk through the village like in a formal monk’s procession, the three of us one after the other, our hands folded as during kinhin. But K-san joyfully greeted all people we met on our way, and their friendly reply gave me much comfort not performing too much as a „henna gaijin“ (weird foreigner).

The Zendo of Tokoji is very nice, you can see it in a recently issued Japanese Zazen tutorial-DVD called “自宅で坐る”, made by the Roshi (one can buy at any Rinzai-Zen temple in Japan).

The three of us did a round of Zazen together with the Roshi, and then he gave us some explanation why in Zen it is so important to practise and not just to do theory: body and heart must act together, unified, and not be separated. For us, often the head and thinking is the most important thing, he said. But only when body and heart act together in the same direction, we are free. This “free” he illustrated with very vivid actions imitating a sword fighter defending against attackers from all sides …

Then we briefly talked about my former teacher, that he and the Roshi were both studying under Omori Sogen. The Roshi remembered meeting my former teacher in a bookshop in Kyoto, when we both visited the city in May 2009.

I can see lots of similarities between the Roshi and my former teacher, almost to the extend that I got the feeling to know the Roshi much longer than just a few days. Is it maybe Omori Sogen’s spirit, which I met through both of them?

All food we eat, three meals a day, we cook ourselves. I love cooking, but it is also a challenge to cook Japanese food for Japanese … and how many people are joining our meals is not always clear (I maybe will write later about Roshi’s “special guests”). All things have to be ready in time, more or less, rice, vegetables and soup. And the pickled radish (takuan) to wipe the bowl.

Most of the food are donations from the local farmers, and every other day the Roshi comes with one or two bags full of fresh vegetables or other things to eat, sometimes even sweets.

What we cook we must all eat up. If we cooked too much, the leftover breakfast is used for lunch, and the leftover lunch for dinner. No food is thrown away.

When I hear and see the farmers working on the fields around the temple, I really feel grateful and motivated to practice hard, because here I live on the outcome of their work.

The Roshi phoned the evening before, he will come for the morning ceremony (choka). We sat Zazen in the dark cold Dojo at 5 am, when I heard footsteps outside, and then a voice, a groaning, moaning, many kinds of deep and scary sounds. I imagined a dragon or some big ancient animal slowly coming into the Temple. And then, reflecting in the glass of the window, I saw Roshi slowly passing behind us. A really impressive figure, not just because of his monk’s robes and shaved head.

The morning service took almost one hour, chanting many Sutras, followed by a very powerful breathing exercise the Roshi created, which clearly reflects his background in martial arts, Kinhin and Zazen.

Somehow, we thought later, the way Roshi entered the Dojo evokes a bit the image of a big old turtle coming from the ocean onto she shore. Well, he loves and collects turtles made from stone, as I could find out later when we visited his other temple.