REAL BUDO AND REAL ZEN SUCK!

 

Embracing the Pain and Hard Work of Budo Zen

     Real Zen training sucks.  Real budo training sucks.  And that’s okay.  In fact, that may be the point.

     Another fact: If your training, in budo or in Zen or in the combination of the two, doesn’t suck—at least some of the time—then you might not be training correctly.

     First, both disciplines suck because they require hard work, and this is especially so if you’re combining the two.  Lots of hard work!  And this isn’t something that should just be “passed over.”  You need to embrace the pain, and embrace the hard work if you want to succeed, which is exactly, by the way, how it should be.  If you’re going to succeed at budo, at Zen, or—even better—at both, then you need to understand this early on in your training, and you need to embrace it early.  If you do, then something will happen that doesn’t suck: you will, in the end, succeed at your endeavors.

     There are a lot of zennists, and a lot of budoka, who don’t take this path, who don’t embrace the hard work and the pain that it entails, and they end up paying for it in the long haul because their practice—if you can even call it that—suffers, and they never, truly, make the kind of progress that they could make.  This is because “practice” is taken up as mere hobby, or something to make the practitioner “feel better.”  But if you’re training hard, or at least you take your training somewhat serious—maybe it is a hobby to you, but it’s still something that you want to succeed at, for instance—there will come a time, sooner or later, when you are faced with this utter truth: if you want to really succeed, you’re going to have to face the parts of the path that suck.

     It is this “facing up to it” that is the hardest part of the path for many people, even those who might, otherwise, thrive on hard work, possibly even extremely hard work.  I may not mind at all, for example, sitting in zazen for an hour straight.  It’s hard, there is no doubt about it, but it’s doable if I just embrace the hard work.  But it’s another thing to face the thoughts that come to me in zazen—thoughts of my inadequateness, thoughts of my brokenness, thoughts of all the myriad of mistakes that I have made in my life—and just sit and be with these thoughts, come what may, hell or high water, no matter how painful they are; to sit with them and not try to change them, but rather to let them come up, and look at them unflinchingly and honestly.  That sort of zazen sucks.  Conversely, I may not really mind an extremely hard budo session—I might even be able to embrace such craziness as sitting in a seiunchin (horse) stance for ten or, possibly, difficult as it might be, twenty minutes straight.  I may embrace this kind of crazy-ass horse stance training, but what about facing my fears of fighting against someone twice my size, or half my age, or even the fear that I may not be able to train into the twilight of my life as I had always dreamt of doing?  Well, that sort of budo sucks too.  But, really, if we’re honest, it’s not the budo or the Zen that really sucks.  Rather, it’s our fears that allow the practice to feel as if it sucks.

     “As our practice proceeds the delusion comes under attack; and slowly we begin to see (horror of horrors!) that WE must pay the price of freedom.  No one but ourselves can ever pay it for us.  When I realized that truth, it was one of the strong shocks of my lifetime.  I finally understood one day that only I can pay the price of realization: no one, no one at all, can do this for me.  Until we understand that hard truth, we will continue to resist practice; and even after we see it our resistance will continue, though not as much.  It is hard to maintain the knowledge in its full power… In fact, nobody—but nobody—can experience our life for us; nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings.  The price we must pay to grow is always under our noses; and we never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all.” ~Charlotte Joko Beck

     When I first read the book by Joko Beck, Everyday Zen, in which that quote appears, I was struck by that last sentence above.  “We never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all.”  Before I read that quote, and before I realized just how true that quote was (and still is), I would have said something such as the following—and it doesn’t matter if it was in the context of budo or that of Zen: “We never have a real practice until we are willing to pay any price at all.”  That seemed the truth of things.  How can I really consider myself a true budoka unless I’m willing to pay whatever price greatness entails?  Or, at least, that seemed the truth of things at the time.  But the more that I practiced, the more I realized the truth that I wasn’t willing to pay anything.  I wasn’t willing to face my fears, my neuroses, my thoughts that held me back from achieving the goals that I really did want. Sure, I was willing to train hard—damn hard, in fact—but I was blind to my various “weak spots.”  From that perspective, we may not even realize our unwillingness.  We may—quite honestly, in fact—believe wholeheartedly, and without reserve, that we are doing everything in our power to achieve our goals.  We are working as hard as we can.  We are consistent in our practice, budo, Zen or both.  We notice what we believe are our weak points, but they’re really only the weak points that we can see.  Our true weak points—what makes up, as I call it, our “weak spot”—are those things that we just don’t want to face, or simply can’t face, because we can’t see them.  We are, in fact, incapable of seeing them.

     To see something you have to look at it, and you have to pay attention to what is there when you do look.  If you take up zazen, for instance, and focus on your breath, or just to “think not thinking,” as Dogen would tell us, you may not actually “achieve” much at all from your practice.  Why?  Because you can follow your breath, or “rest in awareness” all you want, but it won’t help unless you look and see your inadequacies, your failings, your emotions, and all the other things that “come up” in your sitting practice.  In fact, if you don’t use your meditation practice to look at the things you really don’t want to look at, you may use it as more of a “drug” than anything else.  You may use it to avoid the reality of your life, not as a method to look at the reality of your life—truly look at it—and, thus, improve it.  If you use your meditation practice just to “bliss out” and not face your emotional problems, you will end up with a “practice” that will make your life worse, not better.

     Budo can be seen in much the same light.  You will not truly improve unless you look at the things that you avoid in your training, and do your best to encounter those very things, however hard it might be to do so.  A lot of this in budo comes down to why you took up training in the first place.  Did you take it up because of your fear of confrontation?  Because you were tired of being picked on?  Did you take it up because you wanted to perfect body, mind, and spirit?  Whatever the reason for taking up budo practice, you must make sure that you are doing everything in your power to conquer that reason.  If you don’t keep it front and center, you may get lost in various side tracks that lead you away from budo’s transformative power.  These side tracks could include such stuff as studying the history, the various practitioners, and the techniques of the art without actually practicing—or, at the very least, not practicing hard.  Another one is focusing on just one element of your particular art—kumite, for instance—at the expense of others—such as kata.  Often practitioners do this because they find themselves to be very skilled at one aspect of the art, but not so much with other aspects.  So they only focus on that aspect in which they are skilled.  But this creates an unbalanced art, and an unbalanced practitioner.  This would be akin to practicing zazen in order to only improve your budo, but neglecting other aspects of Zen such as morality or metaphysics.

     So, yeah, real Zen sucks.  And, yep, real budo sucks.  But if you embrace those aspects, it’s then that you discover the transformative power of these practices.