Budo Zen: Living in the Now?

 Living in the Now?

On Zen, Mindfulness, Budo, and the Depths of TRUE Practice

     Zen has become part of our lexicon in the modern English language.  I don’t believe this is a “good” thing.  If you ask the average American about Zen, they’re not going to be knowledgeable on the subject.  They tend to equate Zen with calm or “being peaceful” or something such as that.  Zen is often used the most as an adjective or an adverb.  “Sensei is the most Zen dude,” a young martial practitioner may say of his teacher.  Or a surfer might say that his “ride was very Zen.”

     That is not Zen.

     If someone is a little more knowledgeable on the subject of Zen, they may equate it with mindfulness or “living in the present moment?”  But is that correct?  And for the martial artist, or the Zen practitioner reading this, should that even be the goal?

     What do people mean, anyway, when they talk of “living in the now” or even “being now”?  In many ways, it is the intention that matters.  Do you want to escape your current reality?  Do you really and truly want to actually live in the present?  Because to truly live in the now is NOT using whatever happens in moment-to-moment awareness in order to avoid the realities of your life.  For true mindfulness, true present-ness to occur one must live one’s life with absolute honesty, even ruthless honesty, if you will.  The present moment must not be used to avoid your past or to contemplate the future.  It must be used so that you can take an honest look at yourself and to see yourself as you really are, warts and all.

     Many use Zen as a means to search for, and hopefully find, one’s “True Self.”  This True Self—or so it is claimed by those who supposedly know—is cultivated by living entirely in the now until one finds the “Eternal” within one’s being, a spark of the Divine, or a Part of one’s inner self that has always existed and always will exist; an Eternal Now, a True Self.  But this is not Zen, not truly, and this is not mindfulness as it was originally developed within a Buddhist context.  Because when your mindfulness practice is true—and by that I mean that it is honest—it sees the truth of the moment, and that true self as That Which Has Always Been and Will Always Be is the same true self that is also dishonest, unscrupulous, petty, vain, greedy, gluttonous, and a dozen other (and probably more) attributes.  We are good and we are evil.  We are true and we are false.  That is true Zen.  It is raw, honest, and real—that is what makes it Reality.

     If that does not scare you; if you have lived long enough—and this can come at any age—to see that most, if not all, of your problems come from avoiding reality and the truth of the pain that you, and not others, have caused yourself, well then, you may be ready to walk the path of Zen after all.  In fact, it may end up being the only path for you.  It takes maturity to see that the truth of suffering comes most from avoidance and/or pursuit, usually both.  We avoid the things we believe will cause us pain.  We pursue pleasures that we believe will bring us happiness, however fleeting, and this goes for “spiritual” pursuits, as well.  But once you are mature enough to see that your suffering is caused by the twins of pain avoidance and pleasure seeking, then you must follow a path that forces you to face your demons in the present moment.  This is Zen as preached by the 3rd Patriarch of Zen, Sengcan, in his well-known “Faith-in-Mind” (or Shinjinmei in Japanese):  “Even to be attached to enlightenment is to go astray.  Just let things be in their own way.”  When we are attached, and our attachment can be to our aversion for certain things or even our attachment to “higher” things such as enlightenment, then we will suffer.  But when we see things as they are—however painful our reality might be—we are allowing the variegations of life to be in their own way, which, though it may seem paradoxical at first, is the very thing that frees us.

     Thus freedom can be found—to answer some of our initial questions—through living in the now, through being present to everything that occurs.  Whatever comes up.  However good.  However bad.  Doesn’t matter.  But what does matter is that it must be the truth.  And we must be honest with ourselves.

     The best way to practice this—or perhaps I should say the most skillful way to practice this—is to cultivate this attitude of seeing things as they are, whatever they may be, during zazen.  When you sit, take a few moments to still and center your body and your mind.  But at some point, once you are satisfactorily still and present, just allow whatever is to come into your present-moment awareness.  As with mindfulness in the midst of daily life, it doesn’t matter whether it’s “good” or “bad.”  Whatever your “view” on it may be, simply let that view of good or bad, of this or that, go as well.  You may find that your view on things, both good and bad, was just that: a view from a particular angle.  And when you sit with your view long enough, and allow it to simply be, you realize that there are other views, as well.  Some are lower.  Some are higher.  The important thing is to realize where your vantage point is located, wherever it might be, so that you might see as clearly as possible.  This, of course, doesn’t mean that at some point down the road you will be able to see all the angles, all the views, but even understanding this alone can be liberating.  This allows you to see how limited your view actually is, and probably always has been.  Maybe what you perceived before in your life as “bad” isn’t so, after all.  You can simply let go of many of your fears and prejudices.  At the same time, the flip side of that may also be true.  You may face the stark reality that what you believed to be good isn’t so either.  If you will embrace these truths when they come into your awareness and not reject them—and you will want to reject them, at least at first—then you may eventually find a peace-of-mind that you simply didn’t know was possible.  For it is a peace in the midst of pain, a peace that transcends dualities of good and bad, or pleasant and unpleasant.

     But this is hard work.  Make no bones about it.  And this is why many people reject true spiritual methods, and the reason they end up rejecting Zen, assuming that they actually do take it seriously.

     Here’s an analogy that may help:  A lot of people like to practice martial arts as a hobby.  Then they begin to practice and study MMA.  They like it so much that they decide to pursue MMA more seriously, maybe even make a career out of it.  But then, at some point on their journey, they see what it really takes to be a world-class fighter—the hours of daily training, the long hours in the gym, the nutritional regimen that must be followed without fail, the sheer sacrifice of it all—and so they quit.  They’re not willing to do the truly hard work—they now know what it actually takes to succeed—so they return to martial arts as a hobby.

     Zen can be like that.  True martial arts training can be like that.  When you taste the deep truth of either Zen or the budo—or both—it might scare you, and you may simply want to return to the way things were before this epiphany.  But if you’ve come this far, you might as well see it through.  Once you have tasted what might be, just might be, the eternal, it will be hard to return to Zen as nothing more than simple hobby.

     In our next essay on Budo Zen, I will explore more about how hard this can be—truly, it can be hard—but also how immensely rewarding for the martial practitioner who does apply this Way to not just his training, but to his entire life.  Until then, if you’re a practitioner of the budo—or any martial art—I encourage you to look at the depth that is present in your martial art, and do your best to cultivate it, grow it, and dwell in it.  Don’t settle for only the shallow waters.  Set out for the deep.