Tedi Mesick
CSOCS 3452 Yoga: Theory, Culture and Practice
Midterm Paper and Presentation
Focusing on the Breath at Cambridge Zen Center
Cambridge Zen Center was not all what I expected when I first Googled it. I had chosen this particular site for two main reasons; one was that it was close (located at 199 Auburn Street in Cambridge, it’s just a short walk down Magazine Street and then a right turn onto Auburn and you’re there), the other was that it was not a yoga studio. My only experience with yoga has been in the weekly classes, and to be honest I am still not physically comfortable doing even the simplest moves. What I am drawn to in our class, however, are the mantras that we say at the beginning and the end of class, along with the meditative periods we have during certain moves and the practice that we do at the end of our class of laying down on our mats and relaxing our entire bodies and being with our thoughts.
With that in mind, I set out in search of something similar to the mantras and stumbled across the Cambridge Zen Center’s nightly chanting and meditation, not realizing at all that it was a Buddhist devotional practice. The center itself is a non-profit Zen Buddhist organization founded according to the teaching of the late Zen Master Seung Sahn and the tradition of the internation Kwan Um School of Zen. It provides Zen training, education, and support through formal practice and everyday life (though you don’t realize quite how much it influences every day life until you go to the center itself).
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Zen Master Seung Sahn was the first Korean Zen master to teach in the West, and it was some of his earliest students who founded the center in 1973. It was established as a residential Zen practicing community, and has more than 35 residents in training and more than 120 practicing members in the greater Boston area. It has been in Central Square since 1982. It provides public programs to both members and visitors (anyone can drop in at any time for morning or evening devotionals, as well as classes) and houses resident training members and families in the 20,000 square-foot urban location. It is one of the largest Buddhist outreach organizations in Massachusetts and is the second largest residential Zen training location in the country.
It honestly took me a little while to find the center. The center itself on the outside blends in as just a normal house. The moment one walks inside, however, one realizes that it’s far more than that. When you first walk in you enter a hallway where shoes are lined up against either wall of the hallway.
Tom Johnson met me at the door, introducing himself to me as the resident abbot of the Zen center. He told me as we walked through the building, going from the hallway into a room with a large wooden table and benches on either side of it, that chanting had just started, but that I could join in after the first chant was over. The chanting sessions were broken up into a series of four chants, followed by “sitting”, so I had time to sit in on the rest of the chants.
He brought me into a coatroom where I could leave my things and instructed me to take off the hat I was wearing. He then picked up a blue robe and had me try it on. Tom showed me how to tie the robe, walking me through the inner ties and then helping Mesick 2
me to tie this elaborate loop on the outside, joking that he was dressing me in the, “latest
in Buddhist fashion.” He then led me down the hall to a door, opposite of which
hung robes like the one I was wearing, however there was a brown, vest like part that went over it.
When there was a small pause in the chanting I was allowed into the room, in my robe, handed a chanting book turned to the proper page. I was instructed to move as close to the altar as possible and to sit on one of the cushions. I moved passed a couple people already there for chanting who let me pass as though it was natural and ended up standing beside an older gentleman who seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He kept his eyes closed until I stood beside him, fumbling with my chanting book. It was obvious he had all the chants memorized. He quietly pointed to where we were in the chant when I joined him, never once fumbling with what he was saying, and I jumped in about a verse through the chant, attempting the Korean the best I could. The chanting books were spelt out phonetically, with each syllable hyphened out in the book (for instance sa-ri-ja). The beat was kept by tapping a round, hollow instrument with a stick called a moktak. With each tap of the instrument another syllable was said until the chant was finished. Then there would be a moment of silence as we bowed, and the next chant would begin.
Two chants were done standing and two were done sitting down. They were all chants on the heart sutra, and only one was in English. The rest were in Korean. The chant which was in English was about not holding on to any pain or loss, or even any happiness because it all fades to nothingness anyway.
We stood and sat facing the man keeping the beat on his moktak, another man, Mesick 3
Two chants were done standing and two were done sitting down. They were all chants on the heart sutra, and only one was in English. The rest were in Korean. The chant which was in English was about not holding on to any pain or loss, or even any happiness because it all fades to nothingness anyway.
We stood and sat facing the man keeping the beat on his moktak, another man, Mesick 3
and a woman. They sat against the wall facing us, and we sat with our backs against another wall. Later I was told they were Zen Masters Bon Yeon (Jane McLaughlin-Dobisz) and Bon Haeng (Mark Houghton), who are the two guiding teachers at the Zen center. No one sat in front of the altar, and only the man playing the instrument went over to the altar with the Buddha on it to light and put out incense and candles. The altar itself was perpendicular with us as we chanted.
“Chanting meditation means keeping a not-moving mind and perceiving the sound of your own voice. Perceiving your voice means perceiving your true self or true nature. Then you and the sound are never separate, which means that you and the whole universe are never separate. Thus, to perceive our true nature is to perceive universal substance. With regular chanting, our sense of being centered gets stronger and stronger. When we are strongly centered, we can control our feelings, and thus our condition and situation”, states the Cambridge Zen Center’s website.
So, chanting allows one to become centered. The key is to reach the point where all the chants are memorized and there is no effort in saying the words, as there is when I fumble through them. I spoke with Mark, the older gentleman who sat beside me and helped me best he could, after the practice and he told me, “Once the words are memorized, the chant is no longer about the words or the meanings. Suddenly it is about the sound. The words blend together and kind of weave in with the beat of the moktak, becoming one continuous note to help you center.” Essentially, the chanting becomes the equivalent of our “Om” at the beginning and end of class.
“Chanting meditation means keeping a not-moving mind and perceiving the sound of your own voice. Perceiving your voice means perceiving your true self or true nature. Then you and the sound are never separate, which means that you and the whole universe are never separate. Thus, to perceive our true nature is to perceive universal substance. With regular chanting, our sense of being centered gets stronger and stronger. When we are strongly centered, we can control our feelings, and thus our condition and situation”, states the Cambridge Zen Center’s website.
So, chanting allows one to become centered. The key is to reach the point where all the chants are memorized and there is no effort in saying the words, as there is when I fumble through them. I spoke with Mark, the older gentleman who sat beside me and helped me best he could, after the practice and he told me, “Once the words are memorized, the chant is no longer about the words or the meanings. Suddenly it is about the sound. The words blend together and kind of weave in with the beat of the moktak, becoming one continuous note to help you center.” Essentially, the chanting becomes the equivalent of our “Om” at the beginning and end of class.
Immediately following the chanting everyone stood in an almost fluid motion
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turned around, bowed, and sat down on the cushions, facing the wall this time. Mark once
again guided me in a hushes whisper, showing me the different positions to sit (saying that my legs crossed would probably be the more difficult position to keep for thirty five minutes when I automatically sat down in that position). Many of the Zen students sat with their legs under them.
“Just focus on your breathing,” Mark told me as he closed his eyes. “At least that’s what I usually do. It’s the easiest thing I’ve done to get centered in silence.”
The moktak was hit to mark the beginning of meditation. I closed my eyes, focusing on my breathing, and slipped best I could into a meditative state with the Zen students’ breathing being the only audible sound in the room.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika talks about the practice surrounding Swatmarama and sadhana.
“Under normal conditions the mind can never be thoughtless. Swatmaram is actually saying that the mind should be devoid of all thoughts that are irrelevant to spiritual life. Anxieties and worries caused by family and business should be absent during sadhana, as such disturbances affect ones’s ability to concentrate” (Muktibodhananda 1985).
Both the chanting and the “sitting” meditation practices at the Zen center are practiced to help keep one focuses solely on their practice, and to essentially
‘keep one’s mind absent during sadhana’.
“An undisciplined mind is like a boisterous child, telling stories, continually distracting you from your sadhana. If you are working in your study, you do not allow the Mesick 5
children to come in and disturb you; the same applies when you are practicing sadhana. When the mind is assailed by unwanted and irrelevant thoughts, you should cultivate the habit of putting these thoughts aside until later, when you have finished your sadhana” (Muktibodhananda 1985).
When one finally lets their mind go still thirty five minutes can fly by surprisingly quickly in silence. The moktak was hit again at the end of the meditation, forcing everyone to once again open their eyes. One by one, we stood, went to the door, bowed to the altar where the Buddha sat, and then left the room to fold up our robes, hang them on hooks, reclaim our possessions, and exit the center. Those that lived at the center went upstairs to their living quarters and into the kitchen to begin preparing their evening meal. Mark met me at the door before I left. He lived at the center, and was getting ready for dinner.
When one finally lets their mind go still thirty five minutes can fly by surprisingly quickly in silence. The moktak was hit again at the end of the meditation, forcing everyone to once again open their eyes. One by one, we stood, went to the door, bowed to the altar where the Buddha sat, and then left the room to fold up our robes, hang them on hooks, reclaim our possessions, and exit the center. Those that lived at the center went upstairs to their living quarters and into the kitchen to begin preparing their evening meal. Mark met me at the door before I left. He lived at the center, and was getting ready for dinner.
“So, what did you think? Think there will be a next time?”
I smiled and told him probably, that it was different than I expected. It was structured and formal, but not at the same time, and was never uncomfortable as I had feared. After a stanza or two, saying the chants became natural, and at 7:30 at night a half hour to just sit and rest the mind is surprisingly refreshing.
What I was invited to participate in was something I would never have been able to experience in the West. Traditionally, in China and Korea, only monks did Zen practice. The fact that the every day person can practice Zen has changed the character of the practice itself. A monk living a disciplined life in a monastery who has the time to practice hours upon hours is very different from the every day person who is bogged
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down with work worries, family burdens, and the pressures of society on their shoulders. Zen practices had to be changed to suit everyday life and the trials of life. Sitting Zen all the time isn’t possible for the everyday person, and so practices like the nightly sittings have become so important here in the West, because for that brief half hour a person is completely Zen.
“It is a natural tendency of the mind to dwell on past events and to contemplate the future, but this tendency has to be controlled. The mind has to be concentrated on the practice at hand and it must be kept in the present. There is a constant and habitual mental chatter which has to be nullified” (Muktibodhananda 1985).
The chanting and meditations at the center happen twice daily, every day. Those students that live there eat, sleep, and breathe Zen as best they can in this Western world. Those devoted students that don’t live at the center come twice every day, once at 6:30 a.m. and once at 6:30 p.m., to worship and discipline their mind, always on the quest to reach Nirvana. This is true discipline in search of piece, and it is something that both the center and the practice of yoga have to give.
Sources:
Muktibodhananda, S. (1985). Hatha yoga pradipika. (3 ed., pp. 47-49). Ganga Darshan,
Munger, Bihar, India: Yoga Publications Trust.
Cambridge Zen Center Website:
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