In my immediate post-college days, I discovered there was a Zen meditation hall in a nearby city, JUST a four-hour bus ride away. It was too far to ride on my small motorcycle, and still didn't own a car. I was occasionally able to visit there for meditation sessions and other instruction, but it was a major undertaking.
This zen center followed the Rinzai school of Japanese Buddhism, the "sudden enlightenment" style that uses koans as part of the training. There is another Japanese Zen school called Soto, in which the students "just sit" in meditation and try to empty their minds. That emptiness is what Zen training in both sects is all about. The monks and students learn to clear their minds of mental garbage and focus exclusively on "being here now" as the late Baba Ram Dass said. It is usually a very long process.
The meditation hall was in an old church building. Wooden platforms had been built around the walls, and the students sat upon these platforms using as many cushions as needed to stay upright and comfortable. I was told to pick a spot on the floor and not look at anything else. No eye closing, as that invites sleep. The only sound was the padding of tabi-clad feet as students left from time to time to visit the roshi for sanzen (koan-study interviews). And of course, there was also the equally soft tread of the jiki-jitsu.
During meditation, the hall was patrolled by a monk or an advanced student, the jiki-jitsu. If that sounds like some sort of martial arts master, you are close. He/she carried a cane stick to whack students on the shoulder if they were falling asleep. It is not punishment, but rather an aid to help the snoozer stay awake. In Japan, the jiki-jitsu decides who needs whacking and how hard. Here this would not be tolerated, and a student must first agree to take the blow. Fortunately, nobody ever tried to hit me with the stick.
I have never been able to bend myself into a lotus posture, and instead meditate in a simple cross-legged fashion. Without asking, the jiki-jitsu tried to twist my legs into a lotus. It really hurt, and I hissed through my pain and clenched teeth, "I don't bend that way." He bowed in apology, and helped replace the meditation cushions that I had scattered in my pain. So much for silence during meditation.
After meditation I was usually asked to do a bit of work service. On my first visit, a small courtyard outside the roshi's quarters was littered with seed pods or some other floral debris from a tree. I was issued a broom, dust pan and a bucket, standard equipment for a novice in many Zen stories, and asked to tidy up the area. It was a gusty day, and my debris piles scattered again before I could get most of them into the bucket. Worse, the wind brought down more debris onto areas I had just cleared. The obvious parallel to spiritual practice in a worldly life was not lost on me. Ah, a small Zen lesson, and on my first visit! I suspected that if the roshi was watching from his quarters, he was rolling in fits of laughter. I was later told he was not in residence. All that comedy was wasted for lack of an audience.
On my last two visits I did have sanzen with the roshi . After a half-hour of advancing from station to station sitting on my knees (an agonizing posture for me), I was finally admitted to roshi's room. Here was a tiny Japanese man with just his head and hands poking out from a huge pile of starched silk robes. Ominously, he was holding another stick. His greeting to me in a thick accent was "Vellly hard to study Zen." Rather than giving me a traditional koan, he said "All things are God, yes?" I agreed, with some surprise since the concept of God is usually far from Zen Buddhism. "If I hit my stick on the floor the sound is God, yes?" Again I agreed. "How do we know this?" he continued. When I didn't give an immediate answer, he again said with a big chuckle, "Vellly hard to study Zen", and rang his little bell to signal the end of our interview. Elapsed time, about two minutes.
A few weeks later I returned and again went through the knee-crunching waiting period. This time I was expected to give him back the question he had previously asked, followed by my answer. Whatever I said, it wasn't right. The roshi responded, by hitting his stick on the floor, and perhaps trying to make it easier for me, asked "Who is this sound?" That was followed by another chuckle and "Vellly hard to study Zen." Then the bell tinkled again. This was my last interview with the roshi.
It took me six or so years to solve the question he had given me, "Who is this sound?" The answer came to me during meditation after reading the Buddha's discourse on Dependent Origination from the Dhammapada. In a rather compressed explanation, when the senses encounter a sense object, the sensation is sent to the mind, which is the organizer, judge and storage site for all our experiences. The mind compares the new sensation to past experiences stored there, tags it as favorable or unfavorable, and files it away as the basis for further comparisons with future sensory inputs. These stored experiences are called "aggregates", and are the building blocks for our personality, or "self". Thus what "we" are is a collection of stored experiences, and actually there is no permanent abiding "self", just a function of mind. We are mentally being "reborn" constantly as new sense inputs bombard us. Buddhist practice in all its various sects aims to stop or at least slow this process of constant mental rebirth into pain and suffering through realizing these truths. And that doesn't just mean reading about them in a book. Rather it means internalizing the mental "emptiness" that the Buddha achieved and described so well as a guide to others.
So my answer to the roshi's question would have been, "I am that sound. I am not that sound." I am that sound as a sensory input that becomes a part of "me"; I am not that sound because that "me" is an illusion. Had I been able to tell him this, the roshi would likely have chuckled and given me a harder problem taking another six years to solve.
I also attended one sermon by the roshi. I can't remember a thing he said, but the experience itself was quite memorable. The roshi, in all his silky majesty, was carried into the hall on a palanquin by four monks, with a lot of bowing by the rest of us. When the roshi gave his discourse, he spoke Japanese (he actually could speak excellent English, but his accent was vellly, vellly thick). A translator then rendered the roshi's words into English, sort of. The translator was a Korean fellow, and his accent was every bit as thick as the roshi's. After each brief speech, the roshi erupted with that deep chuckle I had heard before. After the translator repeated the roshi's words in English, the master chuckled again. So who says spiritual practice has to be dour? Not Zen.
There was never a chance to discuss my satori experiences with the roshi or anyone else at the zen center, but maybe that was a good thing. Those experiences were in the past, and I likely would have been told to let go of them and to concentrate on the here-and-now.
I was only able to visit the zen center a few times over five or six months. Shortly after my last visit, I was packed off for basic training in the armed forces, followed by an assignment far away. I never had a chance to go back to the meditation hall.
