Yes, I can’t tell you how tired I am of “Zen”. 

It’s not meant as a criticism of Zen, but rather as an honest statement of my personal feeling about something I have been involved in for the last 45 years. As a young man in 1970’s Japan, I joined enthusiastically in all the rituals with which Zen Buddhism in Japan surrounds itself. Although my teacher, Nishijima, was not by any means a traditionalist, spending weekend retreats with him in a beautiful temple deep in the countryside was so peaceful compared to my busy and crowded life in Tokyo. Being involved with translating and publishing the works of Dogen Zenji gave my life a purpose and direction for the following several decades. 

Let me try to set down what these teachings mean to me now, as I approach my 76th year. It feels now as if I have emerged into a much simpler understanding, which for me retains little connection to this world of Japanese “Zen”. Although I retain an interest, I no longer have much enthusiasm for studying the mountains of scriptures and books recording and discussing the sayings of the ancient masters. It’s not that I don’t think they have value. Indeed, all that I learned about the ancient teachings has come in one way or another from Dogen’s writings, and I spent more than 20 years helping to produce the first English version of his writings. 

For me, those teachings are all about balance. What Buddhist teachers have called “the middle way” is to me a teaching about finding the balance between extremes in my life. Between the extremes of thought and feeling, between feeling excited and feeling depressed, between having too much confidence and not enough confidence, between being too passionate and being unfeeling, between overeating and not eating enough, between having nothing to say and being too chatty, between being too busy and not having enough to do, between being too agressive and too passive, between being selfish and being altruistic, between helping myself and helping others. When I find a balance between the opposites in my life, I feel contentment. Always, whenever it happens. 

I discovered that I was not able to find a balance between opposites in my real life just by deciding what I wanted to do and doing it. I realised a long time ago that I am not strong enough to lead a life that follows what I think would be best for me. Although I can understand intellectually what I should do to lead a balanced life, in fact I cannot do it. I have needed a practice, something that I can do regularly to train myself to be balanced. When I was young, I found that rock climbing was an activity that gave me a feeling of balance and contentment. So for more than two decades I climbed rocks and mountains to bring balance to my life. I climbed whenever and wherever I could, eventually conquering unclimbed peaks in the Himalayas. 

Climbing always brought me balance, but I wanted to keep doing it at the expense of other aspects of my life so that the feeling of contentment it brought me would continue. But of course, the contentment only came when the balance came. I realised that balance is a dynamic thing. You can’t become balanced and then stay balanced ever after. You need to practice it. Then, when I arrived in Tokyo in 1977 and stumbled on the practice of zazen by chance, I found a simple practice that did exactly the same for me as my climbing had done – it allowed me to find balance. 

So to me, zazen became a practice of dynamic balance that I could do every day, finding a balance for my life every day. And I have practiced dynamic balance every day since then. Has my life become more balanced? Today I found balance. Will I find it tomorrow?

In these posts, I want to explore week by week my idea that balance lies at the heart of living for everyone and to explore how this simple practice can bring stability to our lives.