UnMind 17. Zen Practice Quartet 1: Samu — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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Samu means working,
mainly on the practice place —
which is everywhere

Beyond practicing zazen there are ancillary practices that members are encouraged to join in maintenance and upkeep of the Zen center. This is in keeping with the notion of maintaining the Dharma itself, as pointed to in the Dharma Opening Verse:

The unsurpassed profound and wond’rous Dharma
Is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas
Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it
May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth

At the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, in the mid-1960s, Matsuoka Roshi decided the old sign needed to be replaced. I somehow volunteered to help, as I know something about graphic design, so I ended up painting the English, while he did the calligraphy. The building was a three-story brownstone walkup on Halsted Street a block or so south of Fullerton on the near north side.

We went into the basement, where Sensei had the sign board he wanted to use, which turned out to be the porcelain top of an old-fashioned cook table, nearly identical to one which my mother had at the farm where I had lived as a child. The white plane of the top was bounded by a black edge, with rounded corners. While I was working on the sign, painstakingly masking off the top and bottom edges of the letters, a woman came into the basement, whom I learned later was a tenant of one of the upper-floor apartments. Sensei greeted her, but moved quickly to block what we were doing from her vision. He later explained that the table actually belonged to her. Apparently, he felt she would not miss it and had taken it from her storage area in the basement. I don’t remember how we got it hung on the building, or who helped with that, but I do have a photo of the front of the building after it was installed.

We would often spend several hours engaged in such activities, mostly cleaning the interior of the temple, or in Japanese, soji.

Some years later, at the Zen Center of San Francisco, in the year 2000, I was in residence for a week or so while attending a conference on Master Dogen in Palo Alto. When it came time for work period, I was assigned the task of sweeping the sidewalk in front of the building at Paige Street, one of the chores typically assigned to a rank newcomer, probably because it is difficult to screw up. When I looked at the sidewalk from the corner where the stairs led to the entrance, it went on forever in both directions. But I began sweeping where I was anyway. What seemed like no time at all later, the attendant clacked the sticks, ending the work period. I had barely gotten started on what looked like a Forrest Gump adventure, endlessly sweeping the endless sidewalk around the block. It was actually a bit frustrating — not that the task was daunting, but that I had to quit so soon. The next day, I was allowed to sweep the inner courtyard instead. A promotion.

From this I learned the simple truth that the work is never really done. My grandma on my father’s side once said, “Don’t worry about that work; it will still be there when you come back.” Truer words, et cetera. It is important to learn to be willing to take up whatever task befalls you, but also to give it up when it is time to turn to something else. Wisdom is to know when, and what the next priority really is. We are not so important that we are the only ones who can do a given job, no matter the claims of politicians. We are also not likely to finish anything, in the complete sense of the term, in this lifetime.

When I was in college working on my Master’s degree, we lived in a railroad apartment on the north side, much the same layout as the Zen temple on Halsted. The middle room, which usually is the dining room, I used as my painting studio. I imagine this called upon my wife at the time to practice a lot of patience, but we were pretty oblivious to social norms in those days, so I wouldn’t have noticed, in my zeal to realize my art.

I had two easels set up with canvasses on each, diligently applying oil paint in an expressionistic, abstract, open-ended meditation on what I was trying to achieve as an image. I had no idea, really. At the end of about a year, I still had the two canvases. When I declared victory and set them aside to dry, there were probably fifty or more paintings on each canvas, but the only one you could see was what was left on top. I may be exaggerating a bit, but you get my point.

“Painting,” in this mode, is a process, not an object. But, like slicing a loaf of bread, you have to learn to set aside one canvas and start again on another blank one, if you are to produce a body of work. It is all one painting, in a sense, but it cannot all go on one canvas. The salient question then becomes, How do you know when this particular slice is finished? I have heard of at least one artist who took his kit into the museum where his long-ago finished and sold painting was hanging, and did some further touchup on it, right then and there on the wall.

Something similar happened in the history of Zen painting. A story I came across related that a Zen master was viewing an ancient painting hanging in the monastery, one that included comments in calligraphy from past masters. One day he pulled out his brushes and added his two cents worth to what must have been a priceless masterpiece. This is a startling example of the kind of confidence that is developed in Zen — confidence in what you have to say, as well as your ability to do so — on an antique work of art — without ruining the original, or destroying its value.

This also brings up a well-worn debate in art circles: what exactly is the value of a work of art? The conventional view that art is valuable as an object is challenged by modern conceptual artists, in which the work is not really an object as such, but may be a room-sized installation, a dissected shark, or an event of temporary duration such as a piece that destroys itself. The boundary between art and not-art begins to fray.

The practice place of Zen likewise has a similar lack of definition. At first, it is confined by one’s imagination to the sitting cushion, or the physical plant of the Zen center — from the smallest gathering in the basement of a home or church, to the largest monastic campus. But over time the place of our practice expands to include our home and work environments, and eventually all other such surrounds in space, including those neglected sites that are not specifically designed for and dedicated to the pursuit of Zen.

In Japan, the monasteries and Zen centers include considerable grounds, including parts of forests in some cases, which are often immaculately groomed and composed, most famously the fabulously simple stone gardens. This dedication to “taking good care of the practice place” finds no natural barrier or boundary, much like my perception of the endless sidewalk in San Francisco.

Just as the image of the community in Zen, the Sangha, expands to include all sentient beings in its embrace, likewise the place of practice does so also. Master Dogen reminds us of this in his long poem, Genjokoan, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point”:

If you find your place where you are, practice occurs
Actualizing the fundamental point
If you find your way at this moment, practice occurs
Actualizing the fundamental point
For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’
The place, the way, has not carried over from the past
And is not merely arising now…
Here is the place, here the way unfolds.

Much as the past, future and present merge into one eternal moment, all of space centers around this present place, and your place in it. Please take good care of it, and please take good care of yourself. Like donning the oxygen mask on an airplane in an emergency, before turning to help others, we cannot take care of anyone, if we do not take care of ourselves first. Same for zazen. Zazen is samu, the basic work of Zen.