My Zen practice is another thing that has suffered from my transition from student to ordinary office worker. I try to hang on to my morning meditation, rising half an hour early for it, but I more or less never go to my meditation group anymore. I've never really got along with the teacher, but I used to be able not to care. It's about personal chemistry; we're not on the same wavelength, communication is kind of halting and he's not a person I feel like opening up to (which doesn't say anything about him, actually. There are very, very few people I do feel like opening up to).
At retreats, there are mandatory face-to-face talks with the teacher about how things are going, and I actually gave up going to retreats because those talks were so uncomfortable. Still, being enormously stressed out and overworked last winter, I started to think about my relationship to my father (a classic, reruns about once a year) and decided to try talking to my Zen teacher about it. The conversation was, as per usual, uncomfortable and afterwards I haven't been feeling in the mood for going back to the group at all. It's like any other ill-advised show of privacy, the reluctance to look somebody in the eyes on Monday morning after drunken revelations on Saturday night.
There are other things about my Zen group that have started to irk me too. A community depends entirely on its members, and small changes can alter the whole feel of it considerably. There's a slow but constant flow of people in and out, and I really don't know if the fact that I feel alien in the group now is because of it or me. I'm also not sure whether the teacher has become less accepting, or if it's me who have become less patient with his factoids and assumptions, and opinions voiced as fact.
One thing I do know is this: when I first ventured to go to an introduction to Zen held by this teacher, one of the things that definitely won me over was the story of his own primary teacher, Ming Qi. The fact that the Chinese monastery where he was presented to Ming Qi apparently didn't think that her being American, female and gay made her a worse monk, and the note of pride in my teacher's voice as he told us aspiring practitioners about her made me feel that I'd found a place where sex genuinelly was not an issue. I've heard from other sources that Zen monasteries generally don't take nuns, but they don't care about the gender of the monks, and I love that.
The more disturbing it was when the discussion over tea after a meditation session about a year ago turned to gender differences and the teacher agreed with the other men present in that women were like this and that and so very nurturing and compassionate, etc. The women present made objections, but were completely run over by well-intended sexism and fell silent. Awfully enough, it didn't stop there: after a journey to China last summer, where the only female group member present was treated like a badly behaved child by one head monk in one monastery, the teacher keeps including women's mysterious superiority in his talks after meditation. And, you know, I can't get behind that.
(NB: Shatner Reference: http://www.uulyrics.com/music/william-shatner/song-i-cant-get-behind-that-featuring-henry-rollins/)
There's also the question of science vs. beliefs. I've never felt that Zen practice and science tread on each other's toes, but people in the meditation group tend to come from the humanities/arts direction and have less clear-cut notions about the the physical world. I feel that my occasional corrections to false assumptions might come across as unimaginative and pig-headed, my scepticism as petulance. Let me add that I've never made any objections based in science to any statements that were part of a teaching about Zen, or something that the Buddha allegedly said; I do realize that would be disrespectful. What I might do is comment on blatantly false statements like "you know, the lungs are the biggest organs in the body, they fill your whole ribcage"or "light is the purest form of energy". I also consider myself non-Aspergers enough to realize when something is meant symbolically or as a parable (the "purest form of energy" comment was not, in that particular case; the teacher actually turned to me, as a phycisist, for support of this statement). I'm probably seen as having trouble reconciling a Zen outlook with a scientific one, but what I'm annoyed about is the tendency to jump to conclusions about science and technology based on own expectations and opinions rather than fact. It used to be fine, but lately the teacher has seemed more disturbed by my pointing things out, simply turning on his heel before I get past the "No, there's...".
Wanting a different Zen teacher because the one I have doesn't agree with me doesn't come across as productive. Still, holding on to the fiction of belonging to a meditation group that I never actually go to because I dislike it so much won't get me anywhere, either.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar