Eat Sleep Sit
Kaoru Nonomura's Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple (trans by Juliet Winters Carpenter) is, as far as I know, the most detailed look inside the practices of the Eiheiji temple, founded in the mid-13th century with the great Dōgen as abbot. Certainly, it is the most detailed description in English of daily life within Eiheiji.
I will read almost anything about monks and hermits, regardless of religion or inclination, if the focus is on the practicalities more than the dogmas. (An obsession with Henry David Thoreau when I was in high school was probably the first sign of this inclination.) My ideal life would certainly be that of a monk; alas, I have no ability to believe in any particular religion, never mind devote my life to faith. Is there a cloister for cheerful nihilists, a quiet scholastic place where I might sit and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence?
Many years ago, I met a former Trappist monk in Nicaragua, a man inspired, like many, by the writings of Thomas Merton. I talked with him at length, fascinated not by Christianity (which I find less than fascinating) but by imagining a rigorous life of contemplation and silence. He had given it up after five or so years, and I remember feeling both awe at his ability to have maintained silence for such a time and disappointment that he had returned to the world of noise and living. I knew I could never commit to such a life — not only because of the Christianity but because unending ritual isn't anything I can imagine sticking with — but I thought: If I were such a person, and had gotten that far, what a shame to give it up! This is silly, of course, and unfair, because the former monk was living a good life and doing great work among people of desperate need. But still...
That feeling returned as I finished reading Eat Sleep Sit. Buddhism (and Zen in particular) is far more congruent with my own view of the world than Christianity, but even the basic rituals and practices of everyday Zen are not anything I have wanted to commit to. (As I said in my interview with Daniel Braum recently, literature is my religious practice.)
Nonetheless, I greatly admire people who can commit themselves, and so, at the end of the book, when Nonomura chooses to leave Eiheiji after his initial training finishes and he is free to go, I felt a terrible loss. Nonomura gives us such a detailed, careful, thoughtful view of life inside this special (terrifying; wondrous) place that to leave it after we have journeyed alongside him is wrenching for anyone who wishes they were less bound to the material realities and selfish attachments of common life.
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...the greatest, most important and most significant appearance that the world can show us is not someone who conquers the world, but rather someone who overcomes it; and this is, in fact, nothing other than the quiet, unnoticed life of someone who has achieved the cognition that leads him to renounce and negate the will to life that fills all things and drives and strives in all things.
—Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, § 68
(trans. Norman, Welchman, & Janaway)
I got interested in Eiheiji particularly after reading Peter Matthiessen's Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969–1982, which includes an account of his brief visit to Eiheiji. (I went to Matthiessen's book looking for more information about the years covered in The Snow Leopard, but it only includes material already available in that book, although some of the information about the earlier years is interesting. As is the way of things, what I most appreciated in Nine-headed Dragon River had little to do with why I picked up the book in the first place.) As Eiheiji, Matthiessen is told that Americans are rarely successful when training as monks there, since even the most devout American Zen practitioner is not up to the rigor of everyday life as a trainee monk at Eiheiji. I found this intriguing. Just what happens at Eiheiji to make it impossible for even devoutly Buddhist Americans to last there?
Eat Sleep Sit answers that question clearly. Regular life at Eiheiji is austere and severe, but the first few weeks and months of training are flat-out brutal. The new monks are shouted at, slapped, kicked, and punched for the tiniest mistakes (sometimes without even having been told beforehand how to do some complicated ritual correctly). Sleep deprivation is constant, since the trainees must get up sometimes hours before everyone else and do chores or study. Meals are so small and infrequent that new monks are always hungry, and illness and hospitalization are not uncommon — indeed, it seems that beriberi (thiamine deficiency) is used as a way to discipline new trainees: a diet primarily of carbohydrates will lead to it, and one of the only things new monks can get extra helpings of is rice. (The chapter titled "Hunger" in Eat Sleep Sit is truly harrowing.) Go ahead, take that extra helping ... but know that it will, sooner or later, make you very sick. Thus you learn self-control.
The ultimate purpose of such harsh training is not merely self-control, however — it is self-annihilation. It is impossible to dispense with the self intellectually. The self is an intellectual construct, and in many ways it is the intellect, at least for those of us who have lived our whole lives in societies devoted to individualism. We might read or listen to, say, Jay Garfield on the Buddhist idea of no-self, and we might try to wrap our heads around the concept, and we might ultimately agree with the basic principal, but this is just the self negotiating with itself. Without rigorous training, we're still trapped in self. Western cultures excel in mapping all roads out of the self right back to the self. Thich Nhat Hanh may have originally intended The Miracle of Mindfulness as a balm for Vietnamese monks facing terrible oppression (I've written about this previously), but once the book found its way to the west it spawned ten thousand self-help groups. But the self does not need help! The self needs obliteration!
Untutored meditation is able sometimes to produce a fleeting sense of non-self, particularly if it is not meditation with a goal of eliciting a feeling of calm of comfort (which requires focus on the self). But Eat Sleep Sit shows that for people committed to actual annihilation of self, rigorous meditation (often physically painful) is but one tool, and the total work is astonishingly tough, like major surgery without anesthesia. By Nonomura's account, it works, but it's also clear why even devout American Buddhists are unlikely to follow such a rigorous path. Marines trained at Parris Island would be unlikely to put up with some of what Eiheiji's trainees go through.
Nonomura shows that most of the trainees at Eiheiji did not arrive there out of a deep commitment to Zen. Instead, they needed the training so that they could meet family expectations. Many of his peers come from families that own a small temple, and if they are the eldest son then they will be expected to follow their father and become the next priest at that temple. Some have married into (or expect to marry into) families that do not have a son to take over the temple, and they become the next in line. (Japanese Sōto Zen is patriarchal. American Sōto Zen has tried to improve in recent years.) They could study at other training temples that are not as rigorous as Eiheiji, but it would take longer. Surviving the brutalities of Eiheiji means a faster track to priesthood and greater prestige, because while there may be various paths, everyone knows Eiheiji's is the most difficult and demanding.
There is a misapprehension that everyone who comes to Eiheiji has had a religious awakening and is embarking on the path of Buddhism in willing search of enlightenment, but this is emphatically not the case. Many are full of resentment at the burden laid on them. Hearts torn to pieces, they are forced to swallow their tears and scotch long-cherished dreams in order to come. Weighted down by the eager expectations of family and parishioners, seen off with flowery speeches of congratulation, they bid farewell to the freedom of their past lives and make their lonely way to the mountains of Fukui Prefecture. However much they might wish to run away, they have no other refuge. (32)
Before reading the early chapters of Eat Sleep Sit, I had assumed anyone who went to Eiheiji did so out of a deep personal commitment to Zen. Reading that this is not necessarily so increased the pathos of the many chapters describing the training practices — it's difficult enough to imagine subjecting yourself to the rigors of Eiheiji training from a sense of philosophical or religious calling, but to go through it because you don't know what else to do and feel you have no other option in life is heartbreaking. (Which is, of course, me projecting my American individualism onto it all. But still...)
In an interesting review of Eat Sleep Sit, Christina Moon, a Zen priest living at Daihonzan Chozen-ji in Hawaiʻi, shares a conversation she had about the book with a Japanese student:
"It's called Eat Sleep Sit," I said.
"Ha ha!" Her eruption of laughter took me wholly by surprise. "So," she quipped, "it's basically the Japanese version of Eat Pray Love!"
I was stunned and could not, for the life of me, understand what she was thinking.
"Umm, well, six of the guys have already been hospitalized, basically for starvation at this point," I countered.
"So it really IS the Japanese version of Eat, Pray, Love!" She laughed again, even harder.
It took me a while to get the joke. But, eventually, I understood that she was poking fun at the Japanese tendency to be somewhat cold and direct, as well as at Western attachments to self gratification and emotions. Indeed, both books are based on the premises of common, shared cultural understandings about what it means to find oneself. It's just that the Japanese or East Asian versions and the Western version differ starkly. Nonomura's maturation and self development emerges from his complete commitment to life at Eihei-ji, no matter its austerities or severity. Eat Pray Love is about a privileged white woman who jets around the developing world to find meaning (and, lest we forget, love!) while still awash in material wealth, indulgence, and privilege.
It's a useful way to think about the difference between cultures, or at least between the ideal culture embodied by Eiheiji and the ideal culture embodied by stuff and self (and the stuff of self).
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Many people are misled by books, by names, by powers. After they've practiced for a while, they think they've realized the Tao. But they haven't. The Tao has no name. To follow the Tao is to return to nothingness.
—Ch'en Shih-chieh, abbot of Laomutien temple, in Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter
There is a tendency in many religious practices, including some versions of Buddhism, to proclaim that life is miraculous. This is one of the things I find annoying in religions, since if we define the miraculous as something beyond the ordinary, then life, at least on this planet, is the opposite of miraculous, and human life especially so. (Most people who are able to procreate do so. If the ability to reproduce is miraculous, then cancer is a miracle.) This recognition does not need to lead to a philosophy of misery and wanton cruelty. Rather, I see the whole idea of the miraculousness of life, and particularly of human life, as leading to terrible cruelties and inequities — our conviction that we are special (however we define "we") leads quite easily to inquisitions, reigns of terror, witch hunts, and genocides. (My god is an awesome god! Your god sucks!) Our conviction that human life is superior to other forms of life is one of the prime engines of the anthropocene.
I found it heartening, then, to read Nonomura's conclusion after his year at Eiheiji:
The business of living is not in the least special. In a sense it all comes down to two things: eating and excreting. These activities are common to all life forms. Every creature on earth is born, through eating and excreting helps maintain the balance of the great chain of being, and dies. In the realm of nature, these activities are essential to the continuity of life, and they give value to each being’s life. People are no different. If human life has meaning, it lies above all in the essential fact of our physical existence in this world. This is what I strongly believe.
By contemplating life as it is, stripped of all extraneous added value, I found I could let go of a myriad of things that had been gnawing at my mind. Through the prosaic repetition of Eiheiji’s exacting daily routines for washing the face, eating, defecating, and sleeping, this is the answer that I felt in my bones: accept unconditionally the fact of your life and treasure each moment of each day.
I would not be surprised if translator Juliet Winters Carpenter recognized that it only takes one letter to change the English title of this book to Eat Sleep Shit, and liked that possibility. Such vulgarity would be indecorous and undignified, but not inaccurate. Dōgen wrote at great length about how monks should attend to both urination and defecation, and Eat Sleep Sit includes a detailed chapter titled "Lavatory".
If we overcome the socially imposed politeness that casts discussion of bodily functions out of all conversation, we ought to be able to see that these bodily functions, common to all animals in one way or another, also replicate the basic functions of the closed system of the biosphere itself. If miraculous refers not to what is uncommon but rather to what is awe-inspiring and remarkable, then certainly the fact of our systems — from single cells to entire atmospheres — ingesting, converting, and expelling energy is miraculous.
It is important to note that though hunger is used as a pedagogical tool at Eiheiji, the Zen attitude toward food is not like that of, say, an ascetic Christian seeking to deny all pleasure. What may be Dōgen's single most famous text "Instructions for the Tenzo" (aka "Instructions for the Cook") makes it very clear that food is absolutely central both to monastic life — where the tenzo (head cook) is a revered and authoritative member of the temple — and to Zen practice generally. Indeed, cooking (done right) is Zen practice to such an extent that at Eiheiji, cooks are exempted from other types of practice required of everyone else.
The danger of food, for Zen monks at least, is the temptation to cling to preference:
If you only have wild grasses with which to make a broth, do not disdain them. If you have ingredients for a creamy soup do not be delighted. Where there is no attachment, there can be no aversion. [Alternately, Kotler & Tanahashi trans: "Where there is no discrimination, how can there be distaste?"] Do not be careless with poor ingredients and do not depend on fine ingredients to do your work for you but work with everything with the same sincerity. If you do not do so then it is like changing your behaviour according to the status of the person you meet; this is not how a student of the Way is.
A White Wind Zen Community footnote for "Instructions for the Tenzo" offers an amusing quotation: "In the Soei-shu Katyayana says, 'The mouth of a monk is like a furnace. Just as a furnace burns both sandalwood and cow shit without distinction, our mouths should be the same, eating rich and plain food as food. We should use whatever we receive.'"
While I am drawn to the humility in this, I also wonder if we ought not pause over the powerful lesson in impermanence that eating offers us, and perhaps celebrate the lessons of pleasurable food. Once we have received the joy of a particularly nice bite, the taste fades and the food is destined for the toilet. This does not mean that the bite was bad or unimportant — but it also does not mean that we should forget where it all ends up.
(Speaking of food, I should note here that Bernie Glassman, a founder of Zen Peacemakers, published a book (co-written with Rick Fields) titled Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters. Glassman used food for extraordinary purpose — he founded the Greyston Bakery, which provides cakes to high-end restaurants and brownies for Ben & Jerry's ice cream — and brings in millions of dollars a year to support social projects. Greyston's open hiring practices are a real inspiration.)
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...possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship ... as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners ... decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
The English translation of Eat Sleep Sit includes two afterwords from the Japanese editions, one written five years after Nonomura left Eiheiji, one written five years after the book's publication (10 years after Eiheiji). The perspective Nonomora offers in those afterwords is fascinating.
In the first afterword, Nonomura lists the ways he was aware he had been changed by his year at Eiheiji:
Now when a mosquito lands on me, I hesitate for a second before killing it.
I no longer eat more than necessary.
I no longer think about things more deeply than necessary.
I have become capable of tears. Once I told someone, “A man who can cry is a lucky man.” I never could, before. I used to think what a relief it must be to let yourself go and cry, but I just couldn’t. Now I can cry in great gulping sobs.
That’s about it, I think. Then again, I could be completely wrong.
It's a quietly profound list. We might expect or even hope that it would be a list of bigger things: I still sit zazen for hours a day, I donate all my spare income to charity, I work to end hunger and to promote world peace. (And who knows, maybe he does all those things.) When I first read the list, I thought, "After all the pain you went through at Eiheiji ... this is what you got from it?!" But that was shortsighted of me. The first three items are examples of a significant thoughtfulness — thoughtfulness in the full sense of the word. Or perhaps, since (over)thinking is one of the things Zen practice works hard to rid you of, instead of thoughtfulness we might say reflectiveness. A word like that. (Language is always wrong.)
The fourth item is revealing and beautiful. The capacity for tears suggests so much. I don't even want to explicate it here, because its meaning ought to be held in each reader's mind like a koan, not a riddle to solve but an offering to contemplate.
And then: I could be completely wrong. This, of course, is the key to everything. That, too, I expect, is a legacy from Eiheiji.
What might we, who presumably are not aspiring Zen monks or even Zen practitioners, take — receive — from this book?
I expect I will return to Eat Sleep Sit many times, but in this reading of it, I first found the simple pleasure of delving deeply into a way of living that I was unfamiliar with. I love a good, detailed story of a way of work or (and) a way of life. Nonomura's book has it, probably to a greater degree of detail than many readers have patience for. But the writing is so clear that I expect readers find more in it to be interesting than they would if they were told the particular topics of individual chapters.
More than that, though, Eat Sleep Sit offers opportunities to ask ourselves, "What might I do in that situation and that place?" The stories Nonomura tells provoke the imagination. They bring us into a mode of philosophizing and self-knowledge that feels gentle even as it describes brutal or difficult moments.
Such reading, though beginning from a speculation about the self, does not need to reinforce the self. Instead, by imagining our way into unfamiliar, even alienating, experiences, we can speculate about the boundaries of our own yearnings and desires. I know I would not last a day of training at Eiheiji, but it was nonetheless illuminating to wonder what it would take for me to be the kind of person who could survive it — how much would I need to stretch beyond my current personality and physicality and knowledge to do that? Who might that person even be? And what does that say about my own sense of my possibility? Have I constructed an idea of my self that is constricting me (in fact, constricting me to me — binding me to the illusion of self).
Of course, now I am guilty of overthinking what should not be overthought.
I no longer think about things more deeply than necessary, Nonomura said five years after leaving Eiheiji. A valuable lesson, indeed.
"Venerable sir, why put yourself to the difficulty of working as a cook in your old age? Why not just do zazen and study the koan of the ancient masters?"
The tenzo laughed for a long time and then he said, "My foreign friend, it seems you don't really understand practice or the words of the ancients."
Hearing this elder monk's words I felt ashamed and surprised. I asked, "What is practice? What are words?"
The tenzo said, "Keep asking and penetrate this question and then you will be someone who understands."
But I didn't know what he was talking about and so the tenzo said, "If you don't understand then come and see me at Ayuwang shan some time. We'll talk about the meaning of words." Having said this, he stood up and said, "It'll be getting dark soon. I'd best hurry." And he left.
—Dōgen, "Instructions for the Tenzo"
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All images via Wikipedia except the last, which is a screen capture from a now-unavailable video via Red Samurai on Tumblr.
