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A Zen Experience

Conversation With A Buddhist Monk

By Christopher Zehnder

The great gold statue of Buddha gazed serenely above me while I, feeling somewhat ill-at-ease, sat Indian-style on a cushion at its feet. Before me various dishes of Korean food lay spread out on a large mat made of reeds. My fellow diners on my right were visitors from Korea; across the mat sat a local contractor and his Korean wife. Instead of the tea or water that everyone else imbibed, this fellow, an American, drank orange soda and seemed about as out of place as I felt. On my left sat my host, Mu-Ryang Sunim. Clad in a gray robe and gray baggy trousers, he reflected the quiet serenity of the Buddha.

I was in the dharma ("truth") room of a Zen Buddhist temple, eating lunch -- what was I, a Catholic, doing there? I began wondering this myself as I made my first assay of Korean food. One of the dishes was lotus root. I enjoyed the first serving of this strange dish, though the second I found somewhat cloying. To make conversation, I alluded to the Greeks in the Odyssey who by eating lotus forgot their way home. Mu-Ryang gave a comprehending smile.

Silently eating I wondered at everything I saw -- the statue with the sticks of incense burning before it, sending up a sweet, pungent smell; the pictures of pagan gods on the walls; the curiously wrought bell in the corner. What did it all mean?

It was curiosity that brought me to the Mountain Spirit Center in the Sierra Nevada not far from Tehachapi. I was curious as to what Zen Buddhism was all about and, in particular, why it has drawn so many Catholics, from the Benedictine monk Thomas Merton, to the many clerical, monastic, and lay practitioners of our day. To find out, I would not ask the Catholics, I thought, whom I feared were mere syncretist dilettantes, but I would go to the source. I would talk to a Zen monk.

I soon learned the difficulty of the endeavor. Seeing my tape recorder, Mu-Ryang Sunim ("sunim" means "monk") evinced some discomfort. "I'm a little leery of tape recorders," he told me, because with them "you get the words correct, but if you don't understand my mind or what I'm trying to say beyond the words, it's going to be less than...." Here he paused unable, it seemed, to find the right word. "My point is," he continued, "we try to look beyond words. The problem with words and speech is that they are only very relative, they only point at truths; they don't show the truth. There's no way I can distill in words the essence of Zen. Whatever I say is just going to be a kind of indication of our practice."

Still, despite the insufficiency of language, we were able to have a conversation. What is Zen Buddhism? Zen Buddhism, said Mu-Ryang, "means the attaining of my true self and helping other people." I could see that in some way this was like the Faith. Our Lord did speak of finding one's own soul and loving one's neighbor. He also spoke of losing oneself for His sake as the way to find oneself. Buddhists, too, I discovered, speak of losing oneself.

According to Mu-Ryang, this losing of oneself comes through a union with God -- what he called "the essence of any religious life, but certainly of our Zen practice." I thought immediately of the words of St. Athanasios of Alexandria -- God became man so that man might become God. Also of the Roman Mass -- "da nobis... eius divinitatis esse consortes..." ("grant us to be sharers of his divinity...") The words were, indeed, similar, but what of the "truths" they signified? I soon found there was something to the monk's discomfort with words.

For Mu-Ryang, it turned out, union with God means the realization that I am not separate from God. "In real life," he said, "the two are not separate. In Indian mysticism they have this terminology -- 'I am that,' meaning the small 'I' is the same as the big 'I', or God, or Buddha, or the Absolute, or energy, or consciousness." Does this "I", I asked him, refer only to humans, or to all things? "All things," he replied.

"Are the distinctions between things that we see apparent only," I asked, "and is wisdom coming to see the distinctions as apparent? To see myself separate from that tree over there" (here I pointed out the window to a scrub pine) -- that's what's apparent and the reality is that we are really one?"

"Yes," replied Mu-Ryang. "The problem is.... Okay, here's the common Zen question -- the tree and you, are you the same, or different?"

"Different," I replied.

"Okay, if you say different," continued Mu-Ryang, "then we say you are attached to name and form because, obviously, the name and the form are different. If you say same, we say you're attached to emptiness, because emptiness is the substance which pervades all things. So, not being attached to emptiness, not being attached to name and form, how can you answer?"

"Well," said I, "there would be a third thing one can't express."

"And we say in Zen, open your mouth, already mistake. So, a long time ago, many Zen masters taught by shouting, 'huh!' Or hitting the floor, or raising one finger -- just one action to cut off the mind mode, cut off the thinking mode which [is found] in words and speech."

Of course, the Catholic faith teaches that no words or no thoughts can express the ultimate mystery, who is God; still, the Word became flesh; He dwelt among us; He spoke to us, using words to reveal God to us. Not so for Zen. Accordng to Mu-Ryang, one needs to reach a state "before thought, beyond thought." "Zen practice means," he said, "when you are seeing, just see; when you are hearing, just hear. When you are tasting, just taste. When you are touching, just touch. So, just now, the tree and I become one; so, my experience is the tree is green. Sitting here, talking to you, I become one with my situation. So Zen is always returning to just now -- what do you see, what do you hear, what do you smell, what do you taste, what do you touch? We say that that mind is Buddha mind, that mind is God mind. Just now, without past, without future, without present, because present is in relation to past and future."

Zen practice, said Mu-Ryang, entails "finding a question that grabs us completely, like: 'what am I?' 'What is this?' Or 'What is God?' Or anything. 'Am I separate from God?' And just not knowing, running out of ideas to think about on that topic, and just not knowing. We would say wisdom is subject and object becoming one."

"So," I asked Mu-Ryang, "if I asked the Zen master the question, 'What is God?' He would answer, 'I don't know'?"

"I don't know what the Zen master would say," replied the monk. "If you were to ask me, 'what is God?' I would say, 'the sky is blue, the tree is green, the wind chimes go ding, ding, ding.' That is really the same as 'I don't know,' because it's easy to come up with ideas of what God is. Most Christians I run into have a very fixed notion of what they think God is, from like a very basic man with a white beard somewhere out in the heavens, to much more philosophical, amorphous notions. But still they're ideas. But if we let go of our ideas of what is God, then we can experience divinity."

Interested in seeing how these ideas worked themselves out in practice, I asked Mu-Ryang about how a Buddhist monk spends his day. At his monastery, he told me, he and another monk from Poland wake up at 4:30 in the morning to do "spiritual calisthenics" -- that is, 108 prostrations before the statue of Buddha. Mu-Ryang demonstrated a prostration for me: he knelt on both knees, then placed his forehead on the ground while turning his outstretched hands palm upward. After the 108 prostrations, the monks spend an hour to an hour and a half chanting various Buddhist sutras (scriptures) and prayers from the Korean Buddhist tradition. About thirty minutes of "quiet sitting meditation" follows the chanting, after which they eat breakfast and go about their day's work. After dinner in the evening there is more chanting, more sitting meditation, then bed.

Mu-Ryang told me that their bowing was not worship or prayer; "it's just bowing," he said. "A lot of people think we are bowing to Buddha, but actually we are bowing to take away this notion that I am here and Buddha is there; or that I'm here and God is there. Bowing means eliminating the duality of I and thou, or man and Buddha, or man and God. At that time, subject and object become one."

The chanting is similar. The sutras the monks chant are a Korean translation of the Chinese, which is merely a transliteration of the Sanskrit. "Most people have no idea of what it is they are saying," said Mu-Ryang. "We have the English translation with it, but my own experience with morning chant is the more you go into the sound, the meaning actually comes from just doing it. My teacher said, no meaning is great meaning."

I saw from all this that, unlike the Faith, in Buddhism there is no notion that God comes to us, that the Word became flesh. "It's eliminating the idea that God and you are separate in the first place," said Mu-Ryang; "so where would God come from? In Zen we're trying to eliminate this notion that I am a separate individual."

But if I am not a separate individual, then my personality, my ego, is just another deception? "How do you know?" answered the monk. "The best way is to find out. A lot people ask, well, if I practice Zen will my ego dissolve? Will I become nothing without a personality or anything? I've never seen that. My Zen master, whom I consider to be the most enlightened person I've ever met, has a very strong personality; he's not attached to it, he can use it for other people, but I wouldn't say he has given up his personality. 'I am this, I am that' -- those are all ideas, which are like dirt on the window, and if we clean the window, then we can actually see through it. Then what we thought were 'I' aren't me at all. It's just something I'm attached to, some idea I've been holding of myself. So we can see, when I'm hungry I can eat, when I'm tired I can sleep --" and then, because nothing of myself dirties the window, and separates me from another, I can respond to another as I do to myself --"if someone's hungry," said Mu-Ryang, "give them food. Everything is very clear."

But all was not clear to me. How did Mu-Ryang, who is not Korean, but tall, blue-eyed, and very European looking (his Christian name is Eric) -- how did he become a Buddhist? He told me he was raised as a "nominal Episcopalian," but that it all seemed like a social club to him. Because he did well in high school, Eric went to Yale University. "When I got to Yale," he said, "I was disappointed, because it seemed to me to be a continuation of high school, which meant I was putting more of the same information in my head, and I had hoped for something more than that. So I began looking around, and a friend of mine suggested that I try yoga meditation, that maybe I would find the truth inside. So, for a year or two I practiced yoga meditation.

"I wanted to study philosophy in college; so freshman year I just jumped right in; I should have started with Plato or Aristotle, but, instead, I went to Existentialism and was immediately confronted with this notion that human beings have no meaning, no reason, and no choice. This meshed with my experience at the time. So I was very unhappy, and that was one of the motivating forces that brought me to practicing yoga, which I did for a year or two. It was very calming and peaceful, but, still, I didn't understand things, like, what is truth? What is the purpose of my life? What are human beings?

"I was still looking around, and at that time I saw a poster for a Zen master giving a talk at the New Haven Zen center. So I went over there, and what he said really affected me. He said human beings have no meaning, no reason, and no choice. And I said, yeah, that's what I've concluded. But he said if you throw away 'I,' 'my,' 'me,' you get great meaning, great reason and great choice. So, I thought, 'that's what I want.' That day I moved into the New Haven Zen center and, basically, became a Zen student and began practicing Zen meditation." This was in 1979.

Mu-Ryang's search was inspired, at least in part, by suffering -- does Buddhism, I asked him, offer an escape from suffering? "Traditionalist Buddhist teaching," said Mu-Ryang, "is about leaving suffering and attaining Nirvana; Buddha taught that life is suffering. The reason people have suffering is that they have desire, and so the way out of suffering is to stop desire by practicing the Eight-fold Path: right speech, right thought, right meditation, right concentration, right livelihood, right wisdom, right intention, right action. The problem, though, is when you say you want to get out of suffering, you are already in it. We have this interesting conundrum that cannot be answered by the intellect and which will allow you to jump out of the thinking mind. 'The world is on fire, how can you escape being burnt?'"

"You can't," I answered.

"You're already burned. The whole world is on fire with desire. Here's another one: 'How can you not step on your shadow?'"

"You simply don't."

"You've already stepped all over your shadow. So, those two questions are pretty much the same, which means that you and shadow become one, you and fire become one. If you become one with shadow and one with fire, then you are already free -- you won't be burned and you won't step on your shadow. That's a big hint."

I was left wondering, is suffering, then, illusion? And, if suffering were illusion, what of sin, the root of suffering? "In Buddhism we say that good and bad are created by my mind," said Mu-Ryang. "My thinking makes good and bad. Every culture has its own good and bad. So, there's no sense that I sin and fall into hell, like eternally, but if I am only acting out of my selfish desire, and other people get hurt, eventually I'm going to have to pay the consequences for that action. I either am going to get suffering from other people or make suffering for myself. We call that hell. It can be experienced in this lifetime, or when you lose your body, briefly or for some time you may have a lot of suffering before you get to the next body."

Towards the end of our conversation, Mu-Ryang said that he thought Zen meditation could be used in any religious tradition, even the Catholic. I thought about this as I, again, visited the dharma room, and took a walk to the "energy point" from where I could look down the canyon and see the Tehachapi Valley, where my home is. Many Catholics would agree with Mu-Ryang. Indeed, Zen teaches that one needs to, in effect, forget oneself, to leave behind his ego, and so find God and help his neighbor. But the central notion of Zen is so very different, so very contrary, to that of the Catholic faith. For us, God is transcendent, infinite, the "entirely other" with whom, in a mystery, we attain union, and in whom we are united, without confusion, with every other person.

Still, I thought, Zen is attractive, especially to us moderns who mistrust definition and thought. It seemingly fulfills our longing for mysticism. It is the lotus fruit, which, like that eaten by Odysseus' men, renders us unable to remember the way home. Our home, I thought as I climbed into my van, is not in the distant East, but in Jerusalem, in Greece, in Rome. We need seek no further, for all we need is there. Filled with these thoughts, and weary, I turned my van down the winding dirt road that led in the direction of my family and my home.

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