Everything is Complete

“Two weeks into the trek there it was! The small temple I had been looking for! Inside that ancient tile-roofed structure was the all-knowing one who would answer the great questions of life and death for me. At last, I was to meet a real live Tibetan lama. Heart pounding, I knocked at the gate, certain that when the lama saw me, he’d immediately recognize I wasn’t enlightened and shout, “Go away, you parasite!”

A beautiful Tibetan woman answered the door. “Is the lama in?” She smiled a brilliant white, ultrabright smile and said, “Lama? Not here! Lama, New York.” “The lama is in New York?” I asked incredulously. “Yes, yes, New York! You come back again!” I sat down on a big rock and laughed out loud. Always the long way! I could have taken a four-hour train ride to New York, and here I was, unemployed, without a home to return to, on the side of a Himalayan mountain. Looking out over the vast rhododendron forest at the glorious snow-covered peaks in the distance, I realized that everything I was seeking was a lot closer to home than I’d previously imagined. So close in fact, I was staring at it.

Being a great believer in perseverance, I kept knocking on other temple doors until I thankfully found some lamas who were in. Like loving grandfathers, they generously gave their time and helped me get started on the path of practicing meditation.

It ultimately ended up being a good thing that the first lama was in New York. As luck would have it, many spiritual masters from Asia had settled in the United States to teach us Western barbarians. After coming home from Nepal, I discovered a large network of teachers from Asia right here in the States. Taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from them, I attended many Buddhist retreats over the next few years. One year, at the end of a ninety-day meditation retreat in Barre, Massachusetts, two guests were invited to speak to our group of about a hundred students. One was Zen Master Seung Sahn (also called “Dae Soen Sa Nim”), and the other was one of his senior students, Zen Master Su Bong. They were quite a presence, the two of them, with their bright eyes, hearty laughs, and cryptic responses to questions from the audience.

Whenever anyone asked Zen Master Seung Sahn a question, he picked up his Zen stick and said, “I hit you thirty times!” Finally, I raised my hand and asked him, “You keep saying, ‘I hit you thirty times!’ Do you really hit people?” “Come up here!” he commanded, feigning the tough-guy imperial Zen master, though the twinkle in his eye gave him away. He was having fun, and so were we. I approached the front of the meditation hall where he was seated cross-legged on the floor. “Sit here.” He motioned for me to sit down on the floor in front of him. Then, clapping his hands together, he said, “Take this sound, and bring it here!”

Without thinking I gave him a big high-five, slapping his hand in the air. He laughed loudly and said, “Wonderful, wonderful! That’s Zen mind.” It was unlike any conversation I’d ever had. In that moment I recognized this man as my teacher.

Zen Master Seung Sahn is a widely revered Zen patriarch from Korea. He’s got an infectious laugh and a mind that can meet anyone, regardless of the situation. His teaching is streamlined to the point of brilliance. Even after all these years as his student, I haven’t grasped one-tenth of all he has to impart. Of course that makes it all the more interesting to study with him. When he was a young man growing up under the Japanese occupation in Korea, his overwhelming passion had been to liberate his country. He became involved in the underground Korean independence movement and was briefly imprisoned for transmitting information to resistance leaders in Shanghai and Manchuria. He narrowly escaped a death sentence when a high-ranking official pulled the strings for his release.

Still in his early twenties, tired of politics and disillusioned with society, he cut his hair and went into the mountains alone to do an arduous retreat for one hundred days. From that point until the present day he has lived as a Buddhist monk and actively taught people all over the world how to practice Zen. Here was a man whose direction in life was the clearest I’d ever seen. What happened to him on that hundred-day retreat? Why not try it? The whole idea of being alone had always intrigued me, yet at the same time scared me half to death. Being alone would mean no human contact, no talking, no going to work, paying bills, running errands, or doing any of the usual things I spent so much energy on. What would that be like? Who would I find there, underneath all the layers of social conditioning, obligations, rules, and cultural filters? What was the raw material made of? Would I even like this person? Would she be someone wonderful or horrible? Would she be strong or weak? Deep or shallow? Or all of those things combined? It seemed the best way to find out would be to follow the traditional monastic schedule of sitting, walking, chanting, bowing, and cutting wood for one hundred days. During all these activities in every moment I would repeat the Great Dharani mantra, as Dae Soen Sa Nim had done.

In one way, it doesn’t make sense that one could engage in such simple activity all day and find deep wisdom in it, yet this is exactly what the ancients figured out a long time ago and have been trying to tell us about ever since. A wonderful story illustrating this point involves a Sufi master named Mullah Nasrudin. One day, his student went to visit him. He happened to sneak up from behind, intending to surprise Mullah, when he noticed that he was sprinkling bread crumbs around the perimeter of the garden.

“Mullah, what on earth are you doing?” “Oh, this? It’s my technique for keeping the tigers away.” “But Mullah,” the student replied, “there are no tigers for miles around here!” “Effective, isn’t it?” said Mullah. As with Mullah Nasrudin’s bread crumbs, as unusual as they may seem, the techniques of bowing, sitting, chanting, walking, working, and eating meditation used on traditional Zen retreats are indeed effective. As for me, I knew there were still plenty of tigers stalking around in my mind: “What am I?” “What is life?” “What is death?”

It was time to set them free. Since I had already been to the Himalayas and back again, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be in an exotic locale like Tibet or Korea for such an undertaking. I made plans to do a one-hundred-day solo Zen retreat in the woods of New England, with no idea of what would happen or even if I would make it through the first week. At a bare minimum, I would find out the limitations of my mind. If what the Zen books said was true, maybe there are no limitations. An old Zen teaching puts it this way: “If your mind is complete, the sun, the moon, the stars … everything is complete. If your mind is not complete, then the sun, moon, and stars are not enough. You will feel as though there is something missing.”

~ Jane Dobisz, One Hundred Days of Solitude
Bon Yeon (Jane McLaughlin-Dobisz) is a Zen master in the Kwan Um School of Zen, a dharma heir of the late Seung Sahn.