Kwatz!

My sitting in the morning -- zazen at HSZC -- has been going reasonably well. For several months I sat seiza style with the aid of pillows, but lately I noticed that I wasn't breathing smoothly for some reason. So this week I switched to sitting cross-legged with pillows propping up my knees. My breathing's a little easier but my feet still fall asleep. I guess I'm not supposed to let that bother me, but since there are times I manage to get myself into positions where my feet don't fall asleep, I keep thinking that's ideal.

After meditation and the chanting service -- I've finally managed to memorize the English version of the Heart Sutra enough not to need to consult the printed version -- we do a little work period, cleaning and dusting. While I was dusting the altar, the priest John was dust-mopping and François, a recently arrived resident student, was cleaning the windows. At some point they stopped to talk, and somehow the handle of the dustmop dropped from John's hand and struck the floor with a loud bang. "Ooo, I'm enlightened now," François drawled.

I got the joke. In his book One God Clapping, Alan Lew writes of his experience at the San Francisco Zen Center that roshi Richard Baker used to watch for students who were struggling at the edge of an enlightenment experience, and would sneak up behind them and bang the floor with his stick to send them over the edge. "But I saw him sneaking up on me, so I missed it," Lew confides. (His book is a witty and heartfelt account of a spiritual quest that took the author from non-religious cultural Jewishness to Zen Buddhism and back to a religious, mystical Judaism. I recommend it.)