Every time I see a spider now, my first instinct is not to run, or scream, or beg the closest male to get a shoe and squash the living heck out of it. The instinct is to get a cup or piece of paper, scoop it up, and carry it outside to battle for its life on its own terms. Is this Zen?
I look to the leaves tumbling around me each morning and think back to a poem our religion professor shared with us about the way falling leaves show their front and back side as they twirl to the ground. We should all be like leaves, she said, and show all our sides in our lifetime. Is this Zen?
My downstairs neighbors don't know how to maintain a reasonable volume on their obnoxiously bass-heavy rave music, and even though it vibrates through the floor and interrupts my study and sleep, I try to show patience. I try not to stomp on the floor in irritation too often. I try not to climb down the staircase to knock on their door and request a lower decibel unless the alternative is shooting someone. I try, in short, to tolerate the noise and just observe it instead of letting it dominate my day. Is this Zen?
Recently I lost a very good friend, and I forced myself to hold on to that friendship with an "open palm" so that it wouldn't be so hard and I wouldn't be so attached. Is THAT Zen?
I signed up for this Zen course at my school for three reasons: it was a natural continuation from the introduction to Buddhism course I took a year and a half ago, I love the professor, and I frankly thought some "peace and calm" would do me good. To my inexperienced mind "peace" and "calm" were synonymous with the practice of Zen. Boy was I wrong...
Zen is actually not meant to be peaceful. Every piece of literature on the subject is meant to stir up your mind to confusion, to increase anxiety, to further frustration, and in short, to make you think, harder than you've ever thought before. (Just read one passage from Nagarjuna and you'll know what I mean!) The class so far has been about seeing the world and yourself in new ways, with the ultimate goal of shocking you, even for a moment, out of your very attached, very emotional, human state of mind.
I have often thought that it would be very frustrating to be a monk, because almost every question that a Buddhist monk asks of a Master is answered with snark--often, for the purpose of making the monk realize their question was pretty stupid to begin with. For example, one monk famously asked his Monastic Master whether or not dogs have Buddhist nature. The Master replied, simply: "No." The monk was surprised at the direct answer and had to ponder it in a new way, finally coming to the conclusion that his question was flawed. It showed attachment to the dog and the Buddhist nature as two separate things, rather than one, connected entity. He did not understand Emptiness.
Emptiness is pretty key to Zen, and we practice considering it each day in class as we look at our various attachments and break them down into non-dualities. (For example, "hot" and "cold" are actually very relative qualifications for temperature, as they depend entirely on the environment felt beforehand to exist. Someone could walk into a room and consider it warm compared to outside, while someone else considers it cold after getting too used to the air vents--even though the thermometer remains at 60 the whole time.) Emptiness can make you feel pretty... well... empty if you think on it too hard. You lose your identity and sense of fulfillment, of purpose even, and that's hard to take for a young college student eager to make her mark on the world.
I guess the greatest thing I've taken from Zen so far is toleration. I'm a lot more tolerant and self-aware than I used to be. Whenever someone or something is really irritating to me (like the music shaking my desk at this moment or the spider that drops in for a visit) I can keep myself together, remind myself that there is much more to life than insects and neighbors, and get back to living. I'm also slowly learning to appreciate confusion. Not only is it good to be confused, it's essential. This election, for example, has made the whole country confused. And yet allowing that confusion to open me up to research on the candidates has allowed me to choose who I'm voting for with an open mind.
It is good now and then to slow down and see things without the self in the way. I can't really tell you what this class has done to me yet--I guess it's too soon to say. But it has definitely made me a healthier, more conscious person, and for that I am grateful.
*image by me, on campus*
