Why I Sit

(composed after a Yong Maeng Jong Jin meditation retreat)

I’ve been floating in and out of Chogye since about 1987 and so, when we moved to 14th Street, the first thing I noticed was the beautiful, shiny parquet wood floor. I’m glad that I like it so much since I’ve spent many hours watching it. So - it was very thrilling for me to discover in 1988 what I knew to be the darkest tile on the floor. And I really checked it out. And even after the altar was moved, that tile was still numero uno in the dark department. It felt good to be absolutely certain.

Often we come to practice for strange reasons and stay for even stranger ones. Mine has been the floor. Over the years, I’ve brought various people to Dharma talks. These experiences inevitably have prompted them to ask me why I practice Zen. Since I am still attached to my attachments, savouring them actually, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I hate chanting, hate kong-ans, hate interviews, but that I love to sit especially because I like the floor. In fact, I would add, I even know where the darkest tile is, challenging them to find it. They never could, of course, so I would triumphantly point it out to them after which they would give me polite but skeptical looks. Incidentally, none of these people has, to my knowledge, ever returned. Oh well.

This past retreat, I was sitting on my cushion, eyeing the floor when I suddenly realised after all these years that I had never bothered trying to find the lightest square. This oversight astonished me and so I joyfully set out on my new task when something really strange happened: I couldn't find the darkest square. It had simply disappeared. I tried every rational reason I could think of: the floor had been bleached, the floor had been replaced, our zen master knew with his no doubt immense telepathic powers that I was abnormally attached to this tile and had changed half of the slats of wood that comprise this tile with the slats of another tile. Then of course, the irrational thought came creeping in: could I have been wrong, in error, mistaken? I had to admit, it was a non-zero possibility. After all, the idea of the lightest tile had eluded me. I began to feel slightly sickened by uncertainty.

"Well," I thought to myself finally with enormous disappointment, "so much for progress." And then, just as I was about to start finding the darkest tile all over again, it hit me. Progress? What progress?! And for the rest of the retreat, I had to bite my bottom lip really hard to keep from laughing.