Coming Back Home

by Sheila Collins

Today I was stepping out of my car in the late September light and the words came to me, “This day is a great golden bell that is ringing.” I savored the sentence and I smiled. What a long long road is practice, how many mountains we have to scale and plateaus (as Sensei would say) traverse!

In my case the trail has been long indeed. I am returning to Zen practice after more than ten years of actively shunning it. I swore I would have nothing to do with Zen anymore—no more reading about Zen, looking up Zen temples, hearing new Zen masters say new and terribly profound (or silly) Zen things, finding Zen in breakfast cereals, bodywork ads, home decorating magazines. There would be no more Zen!

I had a bad experience with Zen. Well, the experience didn’t start out badly. When I was five years old I found a Buddha statue at a friend’s house and held it in my hand staring at it for a long time. I knew I knew it from somewhere! Then when I was sixteen I found a book in the high school library about Shakyamuni’s enlightenment. I was overjoyed and swore right then and there that I would become enlightened too. The next book I read was Philip Kapleau’s “Three Pillars of Zen,” I think I knew the stories of the sesshin participants by heart; I reread them probably thirty times. I made a promise to myself that someday I would travel to Rochester and learn how to “sit right.” So when I was twenty or so I got on an Amtrak train traveling from Milwaukee to Rochester. Once there, I met Philip Kapleau and was immediately impressed by him. He was such a spry figure up there in the front of the room! He made Zen meditation look so easy. I managed to sit properly in half-lotus myself and to count my breath. This was different from the kinds of meditations I had practiced at home on my own previously, which were primarily to encourage so-called “out of the body” experiences or were intense visualization techniques. I was encouraged and felt intuitively that I was on the right track.

The visit to Rochester would change my life. I began a long-distance relationship with another participant in the Rochester workshop, eventually coming to live with him in New York, which started a round of visiting numerous temples and monasteries, meeting masters and teachers of various sects, lineages. I became immersed in Zen and in the healthy-living, spirituality-oriented culture of the 1980s “New Age.”

After a few years, I came to live at a small temple in New York City where I had close contact with a noted Zen master and scholar. I was young and naïve—rather rebellious too. I was quite in awe of the teacher, but was also somewhat confused and disturbed by what I perceived as silly adherence to old rituals, by arrogance and coldness on the part of the male monks and their condescension toward women. When I look back now I think I was trying to make my Christian (Catholic) upbringing, with it’s emphasis on life and love, and my very American ideas about equality and democracy fit the Asian Buddhist pattern. I became frustrated when I felt I couldn’t make that work.

Then I did some stupid things and got myself kicked out. It was a traumatic event for me—even though I had helped to bring it about. I felt that I had been betrayed by someone for whom I had had great respect. Furthermore, I could not see how fine Buddhist words and riddles could have much meaning for ordinary Americans experiencing the “real world” with all it’s challenges, mundane or otherwise. I guess I made a decision then in my heart that I would give up on Zen as an institution—forever.

So for ten years my books gathered dust. I went back to the university to finish a degree, had a family, pursued a career. I bought a sitting cushion and used it occasionally, but with no real ambition. I assiduously avoided listening to anyone calling themselves a Buddhist teacher and was critical of the more famous Buddhist voices, thinking to myself that they could surely know nothing of the things that ordinary people—and in particular ordinary women—face. “Yes,” I thought, “it’s easy for great monks to carry on about a philosophy of happiness or peace or nothingness or whatever, when they are subsidized heavily by their admirers and don’t have to worry about getting a job, supporting and raising their children, keeping their health insurance. And why should people in robes with bald heads get so much respect when there is real wisdom and compassion manifesting in single moms, in artists, in factory workers, in the homeless, in everyday people with everyday problems—but few listen to them?”

I was so traumatized and disgusted that it would take a major personal crisis to bring me back to Buddhism. Last year, after experiencing some health problems, I found out that I might be facing debilitation and possibly even untimely death. It frightened me right down to the core, just blew my complacency to bits. I had often thought about dying, but never like this. Nor had I considered the idea of physical wasting before; I had always been so healthy and strong. It shook me badly. I became very anxious and depressed, spending much of each day in bed. To comfort myself, to try to reach toward some sort of light, I dug out my ragged copy of “Three Pillars of Zen.” There was Philip Kapleau’s autograph on the front page that was falling out. There was the inspiring story of Yaeko Iwasaka who had achieved great enlightenment from a sickbed. I remembered my old vow. I remembered Rochester. I began to search for some way I could get back to my roots. I found the Chicago Zen Center on the internet and called Sevan Ross Sensei. What a revelation! He wasn’t cold, he wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t academic, he wasn’t condescending. He listened to me and offered advice and he welcomed me to the Center. I felt I had connected with a real person. It was just so good. I thought, “Maybe this is Real Zen.”

Sensei invited me to a Tuesday night introductory sitting. I had to drive a couple hours to get to Evanston from Waukesha, WI and I was anxious about it, but I felt that I should go. “Maybe I do need to relearn sitting,” I thought. It went well and I liked everyone that I met. So then I decided to try to come for Sunday sittings and teisho/dokusan. That was even better. I signed up to become a member, then eventually I also signed up for a four-day sesshin. By early summer I was revitalized. I had made new friends and my practice began to bear some fruit.

I was seeing again how important a rock-solid faith in Buddhist practice is, and how important it is to practice regularly. I realized that I had held many prejudices that caused me to perceive some of my old teachers, sangha and Buddhist philosophy in a distorted way. By “coming back” to the Chicago Zen Center and meeting Sensei I felt warmed and welcomed by a spiritual embrace that has caused some of those old conceptions to be turned around. And by focusing on a koan or just sitting with firm resolve, in regular practice, my mind has “lightened up.” Those prejudices and distorted views that I had carried around for so long have been becoming gradually weaker and are interfering less with daily life. The good effects I can test and feel in my many interactions with my family, friends and fellow workers. There is more harmony and less fighting. There is more understanding and less vexation.

So I have come back to truly valuing Buddhist practice, teachers and the sangha. In fact, I feel really grateful, right down to the bottom of my heart. Perhaps it is my being away for so long that makes the return ever more precious.