UnMind 18. Zen Practice Quartet 2: Soji — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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Soji means cleaning:
“Cleaning the mind” says Sensei —
How dirty is yours?

While cleaning one day at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, way back in the wild and wooly sixties, Matsuoka Roshi dropped a small square of cloth on the kitchen floor, saying out loud, but almost as an impulse, “Very precious!” This stuck with me for some time, and many years later when I visited him and his students at the Zen Center of Long Beach, I mentioned this incident in discussion. He did not remember it.

It also struck me that he kept a carton of squares of cleaning cloths neatly torn or cut from larger rags, each only about six inches square, and I think, all the same size. I have no idea if this was a custom in Japan before and after WWII, when fabric was scarce. In our grandparents’ and parents’ generations, small scraps were saved and made into quilts and comforters, so it would not surprise me that Sensei learned this from his mother. I am accustomed to buying shop rags from the hardware store, which are torn from teeshirts (and thus lint-less), but they are any number of random sizes. And I often end up cutting them down to make them more efficiently usable.

At the Institute of Design, in type shop, where we learned the old-fashioned approach to setting lead type and running offset printing presses by hand, we were painstakingly taught how to use a rag for cleaning up the ink. It might seem strange or even silly that someone would have to teach you how to clean up a mess with a wiping rag, but, much like Zen training, design training overlooks none of the smallest details.

The teacher, Gordon Peterson, I remember to this day, because he was very diligent, displayed a magnificent collection of antique tools in his gracious home on the north side, and once paid me a high compliment. He told my wife of that time that he could not give me an assignment difficult enough; that I always went beyond the parameters of the problem and came up with something that surprised him, in a positive way. One I remember was to design a Christmas card. My solution was a square, telescoping, pyramidal paper box of green card stock with graphic “ornaments” on it, that popped up and stood like a Christmas tree with a ribbon bow on top. I later produced the same basic design as a pop-up toy for children.

Most of us, when wiping up a mess, grab a rag and wad it up, then proceed to sop up the spilt milk or whatever it happens to be. Gordon took one of the shop cloths, a specially absorbent fabric about one foot square, made for the purpose, with hemmed edges and rounded corners, and showed us to first fold it exactly in half, then half again. What this does is transform the rag into eight distinct wiping surfaces six inches square, four per side of the cloth. Then he would carefully wipe the inky faces of the type, still locked in place on the press, adding only as much solvent as necessary. He would turn the rag over, using the opposite side, then flip the rag to expose the next two quarters of this side of the cloth, and then turn it inside out and proceed with the other four squares in the same manner. At the end of the process, all eight surfaces had been used, but the wiping cloth had remained “clean” throughout the process. If you grab and wad, all surfaces of the rag quickly become partially soiled, and simply spread the ink with each wipe. I use this humble method to this day, each time recalling Mr. Peterson, and bowing silently in his direction.

Matsuoka Roshi once said something else when we were cleaning the kitchen, perhaps that same day: “I like to keep things empty around here.” He would also often say, “Cleaning the temple is cleaning the mind.” If you think about it, your environment is a reflection, or projection — or both — of your mind. Einstein’s office, which is kept intact to this day as a kind of museum just as he left it, was filled with “meaningful clutter.” In my case, or yours, our environmental mind may just amount to meaningless clutter. Or the meaning of it may be that we have procrastinated in following up on our noble intention to declutter our environ.

There are now television shows on the worst-case, neurotic hoarders, as well as people gaining fame and fortune by publishing books and appearing on talk shows to teach others how to declutter. It is no accident that one of the best-known is a Japanese woman. One of our long-term residents was a young woman from Japan, whose father is a Rinzai priest. Each time she would return home to visit over the Christmas holidays, upon returning she would report that she spent all her time cleaning the temple. “Clean, clean, clean” is the watchword.

Of course, we recognize, and Matsuoka Roshi would admit, that “the dust itself is immaculate.” Nonetheless, in the world of human beings, if it appears that we did not care enough to clean up the cobwebs, we may not be very serious about the practice, as reflected in taking good care of the practice place. It is said that, even in your home environment, people feel more welcome if it is clean.

But there is the other extreme of exaggerating the issue until it becomes an obsession, like the sterile environment of the young man’s home in the classic French comedy, “Mon Oncle.” Zen follows the middle way, but extremism in public places, in the pursuit of moderation, is no vice.

Speaking of vice, cleaning the mind has nothing to do with dirty thoughts. Purity in Buddhism is not a moral issue, but one of nonduality versus duality. When the eventual successor to Hui-neng, sixth patriarch of Zen in China, had an epiphany after eight years of practicing under him, the story goes, he declared that — in answer to the master’s initial question to him on first meeting, “What is it that thus comes?” — that “To name it would be to miss the mark.” “Is it dependent upon practice and enlightenment?” was the master’s instant retort. “It is not that there is not practice and enlightenment,” the monk responded, “it is just that they cannot be defiled.” Hui-neng affirmed this, saying that he was like this, the monk was like this, and this “non-defilement” is what the Buddhas and all the ancestors have transmitted and protected from day one.

Non-defilement in this context means that, while this insight cannot be connected to practice in any causal sense, both Zen practice and its effects cannot be reduced to common, intellectual understanding. We cannot clean our original mind any more than we can change it. The impulses that are there are born of body, mouth and mind. They come with the territory. What counts is what we do about it.

Even Buddha did not understand this Great Matter. So true morality in Zen is a simple side effect of gaining the kind of insight into our true condition, the condition of all existence, that Buddha gained overnight, but only after many lifetimes. In terms of creation myths or First Causes, Zen simply does not go there. Seeking to identify the first cause of this existence amounts to an endless regress, an exercise in the futility of speculation. In the face of the cloud of not knowing, resorting to “God’s will” turns a “what” question into a “who” answer.

What is important in Zen is not so much where this It came from in the past, but what this It actually is, in the present. The most we can do about It, as Matsuoka Roshi pointed out, is assuming the posture. Zazen is our first and last redoubt, in the war against primordial ignorance. Please keep it free from dust and dirt, like the “precious mirror” of Dong-shan:

Though it is not constructed, it is not beyond words
Like facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other
You are not it, but, in truth, it is you

And later in the same poem:

Now there are sudden and gradual in which teachings and approaches arise
With teachings and approaches distinguished, each has its standards
Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not
reality constantly flows

It is this constantly flowing reality that we are trying to catch up to, and keep up with, in Zen. We cannot think our way there because thinking itself takes time, and is therefore always after the fact, looking back on the past, however immediate. In Zen, we must go beyond thought, all the way to the present, eternal moment.