One Blade of Grass (and Thoughts on Meditation)
This is a book by Henry Shukman exploring Zen. Specifically, it's a memoir that chronicles his personal journey, starting with a spontaneous experience as a nineteen year old, and leading eventually to his role as a Zen teacher.
I've had a daily meditation practice for 7 years, and while progress in meditation is an odd concept, I nonetheless feel I'm finally starting to understand some things about it. Primarily, that it's not something that can be explained in language, but is something that must be experienced. At first, this can seem mystical, but it's really not. It's simply how all experiences work.
Take lifting as an example. A coach can tell a lifter to brace their trunk, their "core", while lifting. She can give the lifter various cues: "flex like you're going to take a punch", " breath into your belly", etc. She can use whatever tools are at her disposal to get the concept across. Likewise, a meditation teacher can tell a student to "focus on the breath", "look for the one who's looking", and other pointing instructions.
But in neither case is this the action itself. The lifter must physically take the action to contract certain musculature, and the meditator must learn what it is to simply experience awareness, prior to labelling, including the label of a self. There's nothing mystical in either case, simply the difference between the language about an action and the action itself. Though in the case of meditation, it might be more accurate to say it's letting go of an action, rather than taking one.
Brief Summary
Shukman was born in England, and when he was 19, took a gap year and travelled South America. While there, he had an experience that I'll relay in his own third-person description:
As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field of sparks. A fire kindled in his chest, his fingers tingled, in fact everything tingled. The fire was not just in his chest but everywhere. Everything was made of drifting sparks. The whole universe turned to fire. He was made of one and the same fabric as the whole universe. It wasn’t enough to say he belonged in it. It was him. He was it. The beginning and end of time were right here, so close his nose seemed to press against them.
I've never had quite that experience, but I've had close enough to recognize what he's describing. It's sometimes referred to as "the center dropping out of experience", which I find an apt description of the sensation. Having no prior concepts to tie this to, Shukman was enthralled by the experience, but also confused by it. Through the rest of the book, he relates his journey to understand and deepen his insights from this experience, finding first transcendental meditation and later Zen. He eventually found teachers in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage, and after many years of practice became a teacher himself.
Main Lessons
Koans
As I mentioned above, I've been meditating since 2016, and I can't say I've ever understood the purpose of koans. What's the point of a question you're not supposed to answer? This book had excellent timing, along with an experience I had a couple weeks ago, and I now have at least an inkling of what koans are about.
The way I phrased it for myself was that a koan is like a mirror. It's a question to reflect on, not for an answer, but for the quality of those reflections themselves. Shukman put it as "The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language... That’s why the koans, although couched in words, had to be “shown,” without words."
Non-self
From a first-person perspective, there is no such thing as a self. For a third-person perspective, it make perfect linguistic sense to refer to someone as "Sean", but from a first-person perspective, there are just sensations in awareness arising and falling away.
This is easy to figure out intellectually: all you are is what's happening right now, which is the combination of what you were born with and the experiences you've had. There is no extra third part, no essence that makes you who you are. This is deeply connected to the issue of free will, but I'll leave that for a separate post. This is not making a metaphysical claim about the past and the future, but in the present, those do not exist. Only thoughts about them exist, and they arise and fall away like any other thoughts.
But intellectually is not experientially. Shukman describes what some traditions would call awakenings, which rose like waves and then slowly subsided over time. As his practice furthered, they became deeper and more abiding, culminating with one that did not subside like the others, but became a deep part of his experience going forward. I have not had anything like that last experience, but I have had times where it was simply obvious that there was no central "self". I didn't have to go through any reasoning to see it, it was simply my experience. There was no room for a self. What could it even mean for there to be a self? Sadly, I have not suddenly flipped a switch since reading this book and gone back to this state, but it does, somehow, feel as if it's closer. That's not a great explanation, but as I wrote above, all we can do with language is give pointers, and I'm a better coach with barbells than with meditation, so I don't even have particularly good cues here.
Sangha/Community
I like Buddhism. Well, kind of. I like the experiential claims, the first person psychology that tells you to simply observe your own mind and see what you find for yourself. I'm not a fan of the supernatural claims, any more than I am for any other religion, but I'm on board with what I see as the core of Buddhism.
Buddhism has three pillars, or "jewels", as they're traditionally called. They are the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. The Buddha is, obviously, Siddhartha Gautama, who is seen as the exemplar of a fully enlightened being, one who has seen past the illusion of self and into the inherent emptiness of all things. This is, again, not a mystical claim at its core. It's simply the recognition that there is no "treeness" in a tree, anymore than there is "Seanness" in me. Everything is a process, simply parts of the universe interacting with other parts of the universe in a particular way at a particular moment. I'm not the same self as I was when I was 5 years old, nor am I the same self I will be when I'm 50, or even in 5 minutes.
The second jewel is the dharma. There's not a great translation into English, and I, shockingly, am not a scholar of Sanskrit, so I can't weigh in on it. Essentially, though, it is the teachings. These include the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. I do not call myself a Buddhist, and even among Buddhists, these are not seen as the word of God like Christians view the Bible or Muslims view the Koran. Instead, they are useful instructions for cultivating insight and skillful thought through living in a way that leads to understanding and awakening. Very loosely speaking, this is the one pillar I've spent considerable time on.
Finally, there's the Sangha. The word means something like "community", and can refer either to a specific community of monks or to all those who have had a glimpse through the illusion of self. There is no shortage of religious baggage that has been attached to this concept, but taken broadly, it could be as simple as a few people who are on the path of understanding together. It's in this last sense that I have had my view shifted by this book.
To say I'm introverted would be an understatement. While I wish COVID hadn't happened because of all the suffering it caused, the enforced isolation suited me just fine. I do my work from home, and on an average day, I come into contact with exactly one other person. That works fine for me. I am, however, coming to recognize the limitations of such a lifestyle. In this particular context, I'm not getting the support of others who are trying to understand the same things I'm trying to understand.
While I do gain a lot of insight from the Waking Up app, where Sam Harris has gathered teachers from many different traditions to provide lessons and guided meditations, it's not the same thing as having a one on one relationship with a teacher. I'm not going to run out and find a teacher this instant, but reading this book did significantly shift the likelihood that I will at some point.
Conclusion
This book was well timed for me, and is a worthwhile read for anyone curious about meditation, whether you have an active daily practice or are completely clueless about it (though hopefully you're slightly less clueless after reading this).
For other resources, I would primarily recommend the Waking Up app. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've tried several apps, and I find this the most useful. If you simply want to meditate for relaxation, I'd recommend Headspace, but if you want to understand more deeply, Waking Up is the best I've found. It is subscription based, but if you can't afford it, head over to the website and request a discount or even a fully free subscription. I've had a subscription for about 3 years, and I absolutely find it worth it. Shukman has a conversation series and two series of guided meditation on the app, which is how I came across him in the first place.