Awake in This Life

If humor is totally absent from this practice, then what’s any of this worth?

—Question from a renegade Zen student

Okay… who took my robe?

—Question from the same Zen student some days later

After engaging in a spiritual practice with some degree of diligence, it is easy to lose sight of the humor that permeates the entire divine mess. Instead of recognizing the blessings of this life and the lightness that can come from seeing it as an endless gift, we can ossify and harden to the offerings of life. Finding the fluidity, or humor, of it all helps us meet the passage of life with an ever-deepening grace, and while this isn’t always easy, it is a sacred potential for all of us once we start on this Path.

I remember how uneasy I felt the first few times I sat formally with a meditation community. I was so confused and uncomfortable. First of all, the building itself was so simple and so beautiful that I could feel a surge of inspiration within my chest. This was new since most of my time was spent in my head analyzing, qualifying, quantifying, and compartmentalizing. I was untested in the arena of opening to what was beyond my thoughts. Secondly, the idea of getting beyond my identification with my thinking seemed impossible. Of course none of the straight-faced senior practitioners, dressed in brown and black patchwork robes told me that I was supposed to do anything other than simply “sit up straight and follow the breath.” In my spiritual enthusiasm I’d added some mischief to their simple notion of getting past the thoughts in my mind and even the feelings in my body. Of course this wasn’t necessarily wrong of me to do, but for a beginning, self-absorbed sitter, making the practice harder than it needed to be gave my ego a role to grab onto in my newfound practice.

In the years that followed, I was taken by how few giggles I heard around the temple. A few people seemed to have decent senses of humor. Most, however, both the priests on the inside and the lay people who came to sit with us on Sundays seemed sad and often angry.

“They’re suffering,” my teacher would tell me. “They’re facing their lives with courage and this kind of work is very, very hard.”

This made sense to me. It reminded me again and again that I could be most helpful to the other practitioners by being sensitive to where they were coming from, rather than where I wanted to see them end up. Of course, I wanted to have everyone end up laughing. That was where my ego felt most comfortable. But just because I was craving more smiles and more laughter didn’t mean that I needed to push for it. It was my craving after all. My attachment. I could readily see that I needed to let go of my desire to tease and quip so that others could have a better chance at studying their experience. But this was so hard.

It was all I could do to keep from purposefully distorting the liturgy that we recited each morning after our second period of early morning zazen. Those next to me would often look at me askance when they heard the nonsensical words and phrases that I’d substitute for the real stuff. So I lowered my voice. Chanting the names of the Buddhist ancestors, for example, became a time for me to chant the names of anyone that popped into my head. One time, for instance, instead of “Sekito Kisen Daiosho,” I said “Clowns really scare me, die Bozo.” I have no idea where this came from, but the guy next to me started to crack up. This of course distracted and annoyed many of the pious. The not-so-pious started to laugh, mostly because this guy, who shortly began giggling through tears, collapsed to the floor grabbing his sides. It was beautiful. So pure. So genuine. Chanting the way I wanted to chant allowed me, at this early stage of my climb, to stay in charge of my experience by playing for personal gain. If we don’t know what we’re saying in many of the chants anyway, who should care? What were they going to do? Kick me out of monk school?

But something else seemed to be going on at the same time. Laughter, in this case, was the result of nonattachment. Annoyance, on the other hand, was the result of attachment, and not one of the priests was laughing. This isn’t to negate their experience. The priests were “working very, very hard.” But it was still an eye opener for me, and it made me question where their attachments released.

I wasn’t surprised when I learned that one of the senior teachers wanted to meet with me the next day. I was a little nervous but I also felt a certain rebellious defiance, similar to the kind I felt in third grade when I threw the cottage cheese in my lunch at a guy who was bullying my friend. I got a black eye out of that valiant food toss, so maybe I feared the same metaphorical fate from this meeting. Regardless, I approached the door of the teacher, knocked, went in and sat down, cross-legged on a cushion placed directly in front of him. He was a fairly small man, but his robes made him look bigger. I remember being taken by all the cloth management endured by the senior priests—robes on top of robes on top of robes. Layers of Dharma adorning the bodies of modern day Buddhas. Maybe they were just wannabe Buddhas—I couldn’t yet say.

Anyway, sitting in front of this heap of robes with a head took me by surprise. Whatever righteousness I had walking in to meet with this guy diminished as soon as my butt touched the cushion. It wasn’t that I felt scared, it was that I felt seen; all that was secreted away within was now totally exposed. I came to learn that this kind of meeting helped right my steps along the Path in ways that I wouldn’t fully understand until months after our encounters. Just sitting in this man’s presence over the years seemed to ignite a fire in me that began to burn away all the unnecessary stuff I carried with me in my spiritual journey.

“Tell me about what happened yesterday,” he said calmly. “I hear there was a bit of a stir in the zendo during the service.”

“I was screwing around,” I said. I was amazed at how I felt like a little boy, ashamed at having let my father down. He just sat there smiling while I kept talking.

“It’s just that all the ritual seems so superfluous and in every practice center I’ve ever been to, everyone seems so stiff,” I said. “Where are the smiles? Where is the laughter? If humor is totally absent from this practice, then what’s any of it worth?”

“Indeed,” he smiled. “What is this worth?”

Then he just stared through me for what seemed like a few minutes. I did everything I could just to hold his gaze, but for some unknown reason, tears came and began to blur everything. Literally everything. It was like I became blind to this teacher, blind to myself, blind to my thoughts, and blind to all I’d ever known to be true. In those moments, with those tears, all the stuff that truly did not matter just fell out of me, washed away by those precious tears, and all that was left was a beautiful silence and a smile that I still share with my teacher.

My compulsion to judge the humorless diminished substantially that day. So, too, did my need to goof around with the morning service, even though the impulse still lingers a little. Recently, a youthful and devilish student of mine asked me what would happen if he started singing the Eagles’ “Hotel California” at the top of his lungs during our meditation period. I laughed at how much this young man reminded me of someone I keep trying to forget about, and laughed even harder when I imagined how something like this might cause yet another “stir in the zendo.” Still I suggested that he study the impulse that was driving this urge in him in order to see if there was any clinging.

“Yeah, I guess I’m pretty uncomfortable with all of the silence,” he said. “So I guess I’m avoiding what’s uncomfortable. Or I’m clinging to what’s comfortable for me. Funny stuff is pretty comfortable.”

“And why is that?” I asked, trying to hide my near total agreement.

He got very quiet. I just smiled, feeling increasingly like I was talking to a more youthful version of me. Only the slightest of boundaries between us.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel so afraid so much of the time. The joking keeps me safe.”

“Safe from what?” I asked.

“I guess from where this whole Path that you’re always talking about leads, ” he said. “But I know that’s the whole point. The silence, the structure, and your talks force us to look at our attachments so we can let go of them. And then… BOOM… we’re Awake. Right?”

I didn’t say a word, I just kept smiling, holding his stare.

“Isn’t that the whole deal?” he asked, looking down at his awkwardly crossed legs.

“That’s about half the deal,” I said.

His brow then wrinkled and he seemed visibly confused.

“After the whole ‘boom’ thing,” I continued, “you must come back down the mountain, integrating everything the summit showed you into the cells of your body. Then you can truly participate in this life as an Awakened being.”

“Then you’re done?” he asked.

“Then you’ve started,” I said. “It sounds insurmountable to the small self, but if you begin to live a life where Awakening becomes your deepest concern, then Awakening expresses itself through you, for the benefit of everyone.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Thanks,” he said as he bowed and left the room.

I returned his bow, feeling so hopeful and so lucky to have been able to share that moment and the potential that it offered. May all of this continue, may all beings uncover peace and joy, and may all of us find ourselves Awake in this life.