When I first started my monastic training at Mt. Baldy, I absolutely hated the chanting. Hated it.
Mt. Baldy has a 25-page Sutra Booklet. We had to chant the entire booklet from beginning to
end, three times a day. One of those chants was 3 or 4 pages long and we had to chant it three
times. Back then, the sutra hall had a cement slab as a floor covered by a thin carpet. When we
marched down to the sutra hall, we carried our zafus, but not the zabutons. The chanting takes
close to an hour; sitting in formal posture for an hour on a concrete floor was torture. Chanting
in Japanese made it even worse for this young student.
I tried really hard to learn the chants. But this was a monastery, with monks and nuns who had
been training there for a while and who knew these chants by heart. They chanted so fast
through some of these chants that it was impossible to discern one syllable from another. Kan ji
zai bo sa became kanjizaibosa going 100mph! I started making up my own syllables by reciting
the names of all my favorite jazz musicians: Mc Coy Ty Ner The lo ni us monk John Col trane Dex
ter Gor don Rah Saan Ro land Kirk… but when I realized I was messing up the chanting of the
people next to me I stopped. I was young, and arrogant, but I wasn’t oblivious to my own
stupidity.
In addition, I hated having to chant in a language that I did not speak or understand. I was an
English major, a writer, a voracious reader of everything – fiction, poetry, history, philosophy,
psychology – I thought it was stupid to learn just syllables instead of learning the chants in
English. Naturally, I complained about it to the Shoji. The monastery has several different
“positions” or jobs that monks do in rotation. The shoji is the one you go to when you have
personal problems or issues. When I spoke with him, he said, “I know, many people have said
the same thing now for years. Roshi says he wants us all to read the translations of the chants
in English so we know what we’re saying, but to continue to chant in Japanese.” End of story.
I already had read the translations of most of the chants so at least I had done that much. So, I
decided to give it another shot. It really took enormous concentration to chant these syllables
so fast. I was silent a lot until I could find my place again. It was hard. But one afternoon, after I
had been there for a few months, I realized that I was doing most of the chanting by heart.
Suddenly, these syllables were pouring out of my mouth and I did not know how, or who was
chanting them!
It’s easy to dismiss this experience by breaking it down psychologically, scientifically,
philosophically, etc. and analyzing it, dissecting it like a corpse. That’s worthless and misses the
point entirely. That’s most people’s first reaction to everything in life. What you say about
reality becomes more important than reality itself. That’s the work of the ego.
My teacher got right to the point by having us chant in Japanese. He didn’t want us to get stuck
in words and attached to their meanings and remain trapped in the thinking realm. He wanted
us to go beyond that. Kan! Ji! Zai! Bo! Sa! Knock-knock-knock-knock – no thinking.
When you hear me say, repeatedly, Look out! – with all your senses wide open, I’m asking you
to see the world as is, free from your interpretation of it. I’m not just talking about that in
pastoral terms like, “How do you realize your True Nature when seeing pine tree?” I’m asking
this: How do you realize your True Nature when someone in the supermarket slips and falls and
without thinking, without hesitation, you help that person? Where did that chattering mind of
yours, that likes to explain everything, and analyze everything, and comment on everything go?
And then, where did you come back from? It’s another way of asking: How are you born?
And once again, the philosophers, psychologists, scientists and so on, will have volumes of
explanations. Libraries are full of them. That misses the point. It’s the experience, not the
explanation.
The other day, a woman said to me, in reference to meditation, “I don’t like being alone with
my thoughts.” I wanted to say, “That’s because they’re not your thoughts, they’re just
thoughts. It’s because you make them your own and think only your thoughts are you, that you
don’t like being alone with them. You are much more than what you think.”
This is why for the first ten years of my training I never used words to answer my koans. Roshi
was always asking me to manifest no self, not talk about it. I spent a lot of time looking at pine
trees.
Chanting in Japanese breaks the spell of the ego’s grip on us. Looking out breaks the spell.
Putting it all down breaks the spell. Not getting stuck breaks the spell. The world as is, and the
world you make: you live in both, but when you only recognize one of them, you’re not seeing
the big picture – your True Nature is the activity of expanding and contracting, from moment to
moment between the world as is and the world you’ve made. Your True Nature is before
thinking.
Where is your home?
Don’t analyze it. These are things to awaken to and to recognize when they come to you in
everyday life and the moment is right. You have nothing to do with it. Dogen said, There is no
realization without practice. That’s why we sit and why we practice sitting and chanting. And
believe me, it takes a lot of sitting and a lot of practice, and there’s no end to it. That’s the
beauty of it. Still, from moment to moment, awakening is happening. Look out!
I hope this is helpful,
Seido
