Zen Bones and Tokyo Mad Kick

Hey guys hope your all recovering from Christmas New Years etc.

Yeah its new years here in Japan and I had a real strange goof that I’d like to write about. If you don’t want to read about it that’s cool too, nothing of consequence happens, just a bunch of stupid bullshit actually. But I’ll try to make it readable. I apologize in advance for the length (and over reliance on parenthesis).

First stage: Zen Bones

For whatever reason I’ve found myself in the Zen gobbly-gook brain bender for a couple of years now, and finally I had a chance to go to a real zendo http://tekishin.org/ and practice sitting and breathing. When I entered the temple (through the side door to show humility), I met a bald gaijin (foreigner) dressed in modest indigo robes. He introduced himself in English as Gentoku, the head Zen foreign student of the temple. His last name was Zurbriggen and he was Swiss-German. As I’d soon find out a Swiss German Zen Master is a very precise person indeed.
Soon after I arrived it was time for sutra reading. Sutras are sort of like Christian prayers except they are in Pali, the ancient language that the Buddha spoke-and are read at mach II. I was given a 25 page-deteriorating booklet with random syllables on it. Next thing I know everyone is standing yelling, “zabutsugonijishabutsuofzenji” (not kidding) and shit and I’ve already lost my place and just start mumbling. I am not alone; some of the people know pages and pages of his incomprehensible blabber by heart and recite it with great gusto while the rest of us just sound like self-conscious bees. Each sutra goes on for about 4 pages. One guy is banging on a drum and ringing a bell to keep time. When he rings it twice it means the sutra is almost over. Everyone slows down to a comprehensible speed for the last couple lines and I join in like I’d been following the whole time feeling clever and a little guilty. Suddenly everyone hits the deck forehead to the ground hands up. Then stands up again and again. Thankfully a young Japanese girl named Hamada san (indeterminable age, overbite) is sitting next to me (bless her heart) shows me three fingers, I realize that we will do this three times. I was right. Then we sat.
Sitting and breathing. So I sat in the half lotus position (Indian sty…errrr cross-legged with left foot on right thigh) and breathed (breathed?) for a couple hours at 30 min intervals everyday starring blurrily—no glasses-- at a raked sand and stone garden in front of me. Unlike other forms of meditation, including my favored Vappassanna style, Zen mediation (zazen) has no focus. Just sit and breathe. This seems to be very easy. It is not. The sitting position is very uncomfortable. Buddha’s seated position is like Jesus’ Cross, it represents peaceful living in the midst of immeasurable suffering. Anyways. We sit and suffer trying not to think. Just breath. All the sudden an old Japanese guy breaks out of his seated position and the (Swiss) Zen dude goes completely ape shit (without moving) and starts yelling at him in impolite Japanese something to the tune of “Don’t fucking move”. Whatever he said, it scared the hell out of me enough to not move during zazen regardless of the intense pain. Most of the time I hung in there, but when it gets bad I feel like I’m in the pit of hell screaming for that son of bitch to ring the damn bell and end it all.
This sort of stuff goes on for days. Eventually I start to get the hang of it and it’s not so bad mentally. Physically is another story. My right hip hurts like crazy, but my mind is becoming more like Mt Fuji, who doesn’t give a crap about anything and never scratches his nose or move his legs or leaks snot cause he doesn’t have that stuff. Just loads of dirt. Fuji-san is a very respectable Buddha.
Zen meals are pretty mental. The vegetarian food is grown on the temple grounds and is really tasty though sparse, mostly daikon (radish) carrots, and sweet potatoes. There is no talking. Movements are to be exact and silent. To get a sense of it here are some things the master said: “don’t use your hands”, “pick up the bowl”,” don’t pick up the bowl”, “use your right hand”,” use your left hand” etc. At each second of the meal there is a precise action to be done. Buddhist monks in many countries have done each precise action identically for the last 2500 years and it’s comforting to remember that they all fucked up in the beginning. What else…. Oh yeah the guesthouse.
The guesthouse is where the male students stay. It’s about 15 minutes away from the temple in a quiet area of respectable families and snow covered rice fields. The building is a 400-year-old maze of a building with UNESCO class woodwork carefully cleaned by the newest monks everyday (me and a talkative Swede who pronounces “th” as an “f’). It was as cold as it was beautiful. The outer wall is paned glass then there is a wooden walkway with rice paper walls that separate each room. Semi-transparent rice and glass are shitty insulators, but my Marmot-synthetic-down-John-Muir-and-Jeremy’s –living-room-floor-tested sleeping bag and a mound of thick futons did the trick. I slept like a baby and snored like a Romanian dragon as did my other three Japanese, Swedish, and English roommates. Meditation gives you fantastic vivid dreams. One morning I woke up thinking-talking “Stupid Flanders and his chocolate boats---- HOLY SHIT NUCLEAR ATTACK!!” (At 4:50am lights go on). Strange. But I guess anything is strange when you’re awoken by a high-pitched bell and blinding light at that hour.
Christmas was pretty uneventful. We ate a Christmas cake that one of the new guys brought with him and had some green tea. The two Siberian Russian guys who were like brothers (one quiet, one loud), the Swede, the Germans and I sang a few Christmas songs, but that was about it. Christmas dinner was a far cry from my mom and dad’s delicious cooking. We had left over rice soup with no vegetables. It was ok though


After going to the zendo (zen temple) outside Kyoto to some pretty extreme pain in my right hip) I caught the night bus to Tokyo to visit Devin. Little did I know how integrated into his host family he is. His host sister Kiwako is almost his sister. It’s funny to watch them together. Anyways, I was worried about not being able to sleep on the night bus so before it left I drank two bottles of gut rot chardonnay in the bus station and slept like a tranquilized bear. Unfortunately I’m fairly sure i snored like one too because when I woke up the Japanese guy next to me gave me a dirty look. Anyways when I got to Tokyo, Devin was there to meet me at the station, which was really cool. He has very good karma and has helped me out more often than I care to say. We ended up walking around some of the hip areas of Tokyo alternating between coffee and beer. It was pretty sweet. Then we met up with my jet buddy Jake and hung out a bit. In Shabuya we went to a cool Punk bar and Devin met a cute and very interesting girl named Mariko that seemed pretty into him. I think she’s already emailed him so that’s good too. Later Devin`s friend Yuuka (two Us I think) drove her 740i BMW to an exclusive club in God knows where Tokyo. It was a pretty posh place and we had a good time dancing. Unfortunately we forgot to take off our layers of keepwarm clothes and overheated quckly. Lots of very cute rich Japanese girls with swimming pools, rich looking Japanese guys with haircuts and even a few Sumo wrestlers who, I might add, are surprisingly agile on the dance floor. We stayed out late and came home drunk and thirsty having accidentally given our US$3 bottle of Pocari Sweat to a gay dude (who wasn’t really gay I guess) who kept putting his hands down Devin and my back pockets. I fell asleep in the car home and started snoring. Again.

New Years morning I woke up very late (1:00) at the host family’s large house. I wasn’t hungry but it was time to eat. I wasn't interesting in being awake or appearing to be awake. I sorta stumbled downstairs into the dining room and to my surprise a very long table is FILLED with food. The centerpiece being a spider crab at least a foot in diameter. It was like going into a Japanese restaurant and ordering one of everything. Around the table are Devin’s host mother, father, sister and woman of indeterminable age possibly aunt. Yeah aunt I think. Thankfully everyone else was up late drinking Korean wine and didn’t feel the need to dress up. Also I guess New Years is a big holiday to be spent with family, kinda like Thanksgiving. There is a lot of etiquette involved in eating in Japan, especially so if one is a guest in someone’s house. So I did my best not to screw up and I think I did fairly well. Althewhile everyone was asking me lots of questions and I was trying MOST unsuccessfully to answer in Japanese. Thankfully Devin and his host sister Kiwako were able to help me out a lot. After lunch/dinner we watched a hilarious Japanese TV show called "paper driver" in which Japanese people who have drivers licenses and never used them are given their boss’s cars and forced to perform difficult driving tasks around Japan. Then they are told to drive assorted equipment at high speed around a course. It`s amazingly funny.