This blog hosts articles contributed by members of the Chicago Zen Center. For news about events at the Center and in Chicago, please visit our The Theory, Practice, and Experimentation of Zen
Imagine this scenario. A student enters the dokusan room, bows, and sits. The teacher challenges him to explain mu. The student knows intellectually that the teacher is just trying to point him in the right direction, but he can't hear the instruction. It's as if the teacher has something to say but the student can't hear it because he's not even in the room to receive the message. He's in another room, someplace that won't really help...the correct room has a door with a lock only the student can open, but the one thing the teacher can't do is give him the key to open the door. The student has the key already -- he's figured that much out -- and he knows where the door is, and even where the lock is, but he just can't get the key turning in the lock. He's done some experimentation, he understands the theory, but he's having trouble putting it into practice.
These three concepts, experimentation, theory, and practice, form one of the "triangle relationships" that software engineers love to play with. The most famous triangle relationship is between budget, quality, and time, and implies that you can have any two of these at the expense of the third (...you can have your project built on time and within budget but it's not going to be built very well...or, you can have a high quality product but it's either going to be expensive or time-consuming to build). Another famous triangle is between speed, size, and complexity. The experiment/theory/practice triangle is all about problem-solving. It implies that for any sufficiently complicated problem, you can skimp on one of these but you'll end up having to spend more time and energy doing the other two in order to become proficient at solving the problem at hand. For example, you can skip learning the methods and techniques for a particular domain (its "practice") but you're going to end up spending a lot of time experimenting and researching its theory - in effect, inventing the practice as you go along. This effect plagues the software world, partly because it is such a new field that its practices are still being invented, but mainly because developers never get enough time to learn and internalize new practices before they have to use them to build something. This also happens sometimes in upper-level college courses, where time for practicing methods is sacrificed in order to crunch more theory into less class time...the result is that students end up doing copious amounts of self-directed experimentation just to get the homework done.
At one point I was pretty certain that the "practice" of Zen is...well, what we do in the zendo: sitting and meditating. Theory, of course, comes from the sutras and the teishos we attend, as well as discussions in the dokusan room. But what about experimentation? It comes from what we do in the outside world, right? We experiment when we observe the paramitas in the wild or try to follow them ourselves, when we strive to notice important connections in daily life, when we try meditating on the train or while we do daily tasks... right?
Well...no, not quite....
Vimalakirti, in the wonderful sutra that bears his name, demonstrates to us that the model I outlined a paragraph ago is upside down: practice -- real, true, honest practice -- is done in the real world, not in the zendo. Our practice is our implementation of the paramitas in day to day life, out in the wider world. It's our engagement with that world that leads us to important realizations...if we don't engage with the world, we can't have meaningful connections in the first place, so our insights won't turn into realizations. And yes, our practice is also "our practice": the act of managing our mind through meditative techniques. But it's only when it's done "in the wild" that these actions become practice -- when we do them in the Zen Center, we're really just experimenting with the practices. Yes: the work we do in the zendo is experimentation.
The Zen Center is our laboratory. It is a safe place to put theory into practice and test the results. Our robes have more in common with lab coats than they do with the fine raiment that a priest would traditionally wear. We study theory and we practice in the Zen Center too, but experiment is (or should be) our primary focus at the Zen Center. Without it we are dooming ourselves to hours upon hours of studying sutras and practicing without the benefit of safety nets -- like a sailor who decides to become a trapeze artist by reading a bunch of books and taking directly to the high wire. Sure, both professions use ropes, but our sailor is foolish if he thinks he can draw solely on past experience to tell him how to use the trapeze ropes properly. And also, by confusing the role of the zendo and the role of worldly experience, we end up deferring real practice, waiting for what our minds are doing in the zendo to "stabilize" or "mature" (hint: it never will -- experimentation is like that...it's ever-changing, always shifting, never finished). The zendo isn't where we "practice" our practice, its where we experiment with how practice works...the real world is the proper place to put those lessons to work.
The ramification of this viewpoint is that it encourages us to try new things when we're sitting. If you find yourself "stuck" on a koan, or unable to follow your typical pattern for calming the mind, or you can't seem to find the energy to keep going, remind yourself that this brown robe you're wearing is a lab coat and this mat you're sitting on is a lab bench, and thus it's just fine to branch out and try something new. Remind yourself that trying new things is why you're there in the first place.
By the same token, this viewpoint also encourages us to not forget the theory. Teisho really isn't optional, nor are the sutras: we need to digest the theoretical information surrounding Zen, too. Just like the imbalances that occur in software engineering when one of the three sides of a triangle is ignored, our practice can suffer if we don't pay enough attention to the theory of Zen. It should be obvious by now that solely concentrating on the theory is just as imbalanced as ignoring it altogether: we need all three (experimentation in the zendo, practice in real life, and theory from the teachings) in order to have a solid Zen practice.
Gregg Cooke
These three concepts, experimentation, theory, and practice, form one of the "triangle relationships" that software engineers love to play with. The most famous triangle relationship is between budget, quality, and time, and implies that you can have any two of these at the expense of the third (...you can have your project built on time and within budget but it's not going to be built very well...or, you can have a high quality product but it's either going to be expensive or time-consuming to build). Another famous triangle is between speed, size, and complexity. The experiment/theory/practice triangle is all about problem-solving. It implies that for any sufficiently complicated problem, you can skimp on one of these but you'll end up having to spend more time and energy doing the other two in order to become proficient at solving the problem at hand. For example, you can skip learning the methods and techniques for a particular domain (its "practice") but you're going to end up spending a lot of time experimenting and researching its theory - in effect, inventing the practice as you go along. This effect plagues the software world, partly because it is such a new field that its practices are still being invented, but mainly because developers never get enough time to learn and internalize new practices before they have to use them to build something. This also happens sometimes in upper-level college courses, where time for practicing methods is sacrificed in order to crunch more theory into less class time...the result is that students end up doing copious amounts of self-directed experimentation just to get the homework done.
At one point I was pretty certain that the "practice" of Zen is...well, what we do in the zendo: sitting and meditating. Theory, of course, comes from the sutras and the teishos we attend, as well as discussions in the dokusan room. But what about experimentation? It comes from what we do in the outside world, right? We experiment when we observe the paramitas in the wild or try to follow them ourselves, when we strive to notice important connections in daily life, when we try meditating on the train or while we do daily tasks... right?
Well...no, not quite....
Vimalakirti, in the wonderful sutra that bears his name, demonstrates to us that the model I outlined a paragraph ago is upside down: practice -- real, true, honest practice -- is done in the real world, not in the zendo. Our practice is our implementation of the paramitas in day to day life, out in the wider world. It's our engagement with that world that leads us to important realizations...if we don't engage with the world, we can't have meaningful connections in the first place, so our insights won't turn into realizations. And yes, our practice is also "our practice": the act of managing our mind through meditative techniques. But it's only when it's done "in the wild" that these actions become practice -- when we do them in the Zen Center, we're really just experimenting with the practices. Yes: the work we do in the zendo is experimentation.
The Zen Center is our laboratory. It is a safe place to put theory into practice and test the results. Our robes have more in common with lab coats than they do with the fine raiment that a priest would traditionally wear. We study theory and we practice in the Zen Center too, but experiment is (or should be) our primary focus at the Zen Center. Without it we are dooming ourselves to hours upon hours of studying sutras and practicing without the benefit of safety nets -- like a sailor who decides to become a trapeze artist by reading a bunch of books and taking directly to the high wire. Sure, both professions use ropes, but our sailor is foolish if he thinks he can draw solely on past experience to tell him how to use the trapeze ropes properly. And also, by confusing the role of the zendo and the role of worldly experience, we end up deferring real practice, waiting for what our minds are doing in the zendo to "stabilize" or "mature" (hint: it never will -- experimentation is like that...it's ever-changing, always shifting, never finished). The zendo isn't where we "practice" our practice, its where we experiment with how practice works...the real world is the proper place to put those lessons to work.
The ramification of this viewpoint is that it encourages us to try new things when we're sitting. If you find yourself "stuck" on a koan, or unable to follow your typical pattern for calming the mind, or you can't seem to find the energy to keep going, remind yourself that this brown robe you're wearing is a lab coat and this mat you're sitting on is a lab bench, and thus it's just fine to branch out and try something new. Remind yourself that trying new things is why you're there in the first place.
By the same token, this viewpoint also encourages us to not forget the theory. Teisho really isn't optional, nor are the sutras: we need to digest the theoretical information surrounding Zen, too. Just like the imbalances that occur in software engineering when one of the three sides of a triangle is ignored, our practice can suffer if we don't pay enough attention to the theory of Zen. It should be obvious by now that solely concentrating on the theory is just as imbalanced as ignoring it altogether: we need all three (experimentation in the zendo, practice in real life, and theory from the teachings) in order to have a solid Zen practice.
Gregg Cooke
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