Meditating with Zen Friends (and no ego)

Recently, I was honored by a friend.  He had asked me about some details of Zen practice and the simple questions he asked me brought me to a few realizations.

Skillful Means?

It has been a few months since I have really talked with someone about what I had learned when first starting to learn about Buddhism, Zen in particular.  Now that I am knee-deep in the Genjokoan I feel humbled by the new subject matter, but I also feel miles and miles from my own humble beginnings when I took my first seat on the cushion.  Lately, it seems like everything about my practice, and maybe even my life has changed since those early days.  Even my view on the practice itself has changed; meditation is not an exercise in “not-thinking” anymore.  Actually, it is not an exercise at all.

My new Zen-friend introduces me to my old friends

My new friend-in-Zen made me think back as to what worked for me in my practice.  He made me think of my practice itself and about how it has matured over time.  One particular recent realization is: now I am reading certain texts as if they were written by friends.  Dogen, he was a friend indeed.

It is kind of interesting, a decade or so ago I read the Fukan Zazengi for the first time,  remembering back then when I scratched my head over the text, trying to let it wash over me before each meditation. I then thought I knew what letting it “wash over me” meant, now I guess I might know a little bit more.

How to learn Zen without ego getting in the way

Sooner or later I think we all realize what an obstacle our egos can be.  Our egos are what makes us grasp or push away at things that we really don’t need to.  When I first looked at Zen it was with a healthy dose of skepticism.  Even as I let some of that skepticism go and let more of Zen wash over me, my ego still clutched at the ideas with a kind of “yeah right” attitude.  The intellectual inside me that needed to understand or pick apart things was still there sitting on my shoulder during meditation.  But things have changed a little since then. Now when I read some Zen texts I find that my “little skeptic”, the part that pushes has relaxed some; it has made the texts much easier to read, less bumpy, and the whole experience more relaxed.  I know I won’t “get it all”, and you know what? It’s ok.

Learning to leave my ego on the sidelines more and more has made learning about Zen much much more fun. Keeping a little less ego around has actually made just about everything much much more fun.

So, in my realization, I found a shortcut to getting around my ego when learning about Zen, I think it is just “too bad” that I didn’t realize the shortcut sooner.  In all truth, I probably couldn’t have.

Try this:  Read the text as if your best friend wrote it to you.

Now, I’m not talking about all Zen texts or writers, and I’m also not talking about “facebook” type friends either.

I have personally started this “friend-in-Zen” approach with things like Dogen’s writings and the various sutras.  And please don’t get me wrong, be smart with it.  Most of us will not take our best friend’s word on everything, we won’t even drop all of our healthy skepticism, or even our sarcasm with them, but most of us will view the subject matter delivered from a best friend in a different way than we would from a stranger, possibly even in a more playful way.

Spacious and Fun

What did I tell my friend to do?  What pearls of wisdom did I give him about Zen?  I told him to read the Fukan Zazengi of course!

Do you think it is worth recommending to him to read it as if Dogen was his best friend?

Tell me what you think …