The third week of April, I went back to school in New Mexico for a five-day sesshin, which is required each of the two years of the chaplaincy program. I’ve done three one-day sits at the San Francisco Zen Center, which were all horrible, so I was sure a five-day sesshin was going to monumentally suck.
It began on a Tuesday night and ended Sunday morning, so it was really just four full days of sitting in the zendo. Besides sitting, activities included kinhin (walking meditation, mostly super slow but sometimes brisk), service (drumming, bell ringing, incense lighting, bowing and chanting), and highly ritualized oryoki meals.
I was assigned to sleep in a room with three other people in a gorgeous house with four bedrooms of various sizes, three bathrooms, a huge open kitchen, a big living room with a comfortable couch and several capacious chairs, and a good-sized dining room with a massive window looking out onto a grassy field and the piney mountains beyond. All three of my roommates had smartphones in evidence to a greater or lesser degree throughout our time there, and one even brought a laptop. We were in silence, but relations seemed congenial. One of my roommates was someone who is in my chaplaincy cohort. Besides us four, there was a lone person staying on the other side of the house.
The first sitting of the day began at six a.m., with an optional sit at five a.m. On the first full day, I was extremely sleepy and kept finding that, without my having intended it, my eyelids had clamped shut. Over and over, I forced them open and tried to stay awake. My shoulder began to hurt, and I observed my tendency to list complaints, at the very least, and if possible to find someone to blame: an oppressor, with myself the victim.
There were about 40 people at this sesshin, roughly half residents of the Zen center and half visitors like myself. About 35 sat on cushions, and five, including me, on chairs. I was seated next to a woman who was also using a chair. She is in my chaplaincy cohort, and works at the hospital where I did my year of Clinical Pastoral Education. She also turned out to be the person staying at the other end of the house where I was staying. I will call her Rebecca.
After two hours of sitting, walking and service, it was time for oryoki breakfast, our first such meal of 12. Each of us was assigned three nested plastic bowls with a cloth napkin, a wiping cloth, and a little cloth envelope containing chopsticks, a wooden spoon, and a wooden spatula. Those of us sitting on chairs were each brought a small wooden tray table. When the person with my table arrived, we bowed to each other, and then the person set the table down and I put my oryoki set on the table, and we bowed to each other again, and the server withdrew.
I didn’t count, but a day of sesshin must entail bowing a hundred times, including many during each meal. Each aspect of oryoki is done in a precise manner, preferably silently and preferably with everyone doing the same thing at the same time. You must unwrap your bowls and set everything out just so. Each implement, however tiny, must be handled with two hands. There is chanting. Then the servers bring out the first dish and serve the two teachers, and then they go around to two people at a time. This is happening on both sides of the zendo simultaneously.
The server arrives before you and your partner with the first dish. Facing Rebecca and me, the server would bow and we would bow back. Then the server would sink to his or her knees on the wooden floor and Rebecca would lean over with her largest bowl while I kept my hands together in front of my face, in bowing position. There are particular hand gestures to indicate if you want a lot more food, a little more, none at all of a particular thing, or when you’ve received enough. After Rebecca received her first dish, I would bend over and receive mine, and then the server would rise to his or her feet, while holding a heavy pot of food with both hands, and then we would bow to each other again, and the server would move on to the next two people.
All the servers but one were men. I learned at the end of the sesshin that each was wearing thick knee pads, though you could hear the alarming sound of cracking joints now and then as these hard-working people, all residents of the Zen center, sank to their knees and got up again over and over, always holding something in their hands, often something heavy, so that they could not use their hands to help them get up from the floor.
So. At this point there was food in one bowl. The whole procedure was then repeated for the second bowl, and the third, and then the condiment was delivered: gomasio, a mixture of toasted sesame seeds and salt. When the server arrived with a tray containing several little bowls of gomasio, Rebecca and I would bow to him, and then he would kneel down and Rebecca would take one of the little bowls off the tray, the server would rise to his feet, we would bow to him, and then Rebecca would put gomasio on her food while I kept my hands in bowing position. Then she would turn gravely toward me and we would bow to each other—but no eye contact—while she handed me the gomasio, and then she would keep her hands in bowing position while I used the gomasio, and then I would attempt to set the little bowl down on the corner of my tray table without the tiny spoon clinking against the edge of the bowl and without the bowl clattering against the wooden table. Sometimes both noises occurred, sometimes just one, or, with enough careful attention, neither. Then Rebecca and I would bow again toward our meals, everyone else in the zendo ideally doing the same.
Then it was time for chanting and a couple of ritual gestures and, finally, time to eat! This must be done absolutely as fast as possible, so that you don’t end up being the last person to finish. Almost invariably, the thing in the smallest bowl was crunchy and took a long time to eat, so if you were the last person, you had to sit there with your every loud chomp being the only sound in the room,
Obviously, this is undesirable, so I shoveled in every meal as quickly as possible, adding more and more food before swallowing, and never was I the last person eating. A time or two, I feared I might choke, and certainly you don’t have time to appreciate what you are eating, which in the first two bowls is mainly gloppy stuff: oatmeal, rice, quinoa, vegetable soup, boiled or pureed fruit. In the smallest bowl, we usually got salad or other vegetables. The salads were often creative and beautiful, and everything was quite delicious. It was kind of a shame to have to gulp it down, and I also was sure digestion would be impossible with so much unchewed food going down the hatch, but that did not prove to be the case at all, maybe it because it wasn’t very much food. Even the largest bowl is pretty small.
The sound of stomachs growling was not uncommon. Apparently, at the San Francisco Zen Center, snacking food is put away during sesshin, but here everything was generously just as always in the kitchen: mixed nuts, candied ginger, dried prunes, a selection of crackers and breads, fresh fruit, butter, peanut butter, almond butter and sometimes hard-boiled eggs were always available, along with filtered water and a selection of teas. I know people worked really hard to prepare and serve those meals, so it seemed rude to rush to the kitchen right after a meal to eat something else, so I never did that. However, each afternoon we had a nature walk, and beforehand, there was a bit of free time, so every day at that time, I went and had a piece of cinnamon-raisin toast and some nuts.
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