Reality can be overwhelming. Increasingly I feel both my own life and society at large is being consumed with 用件; there always seems to be more business to attend to, more things to do. That is why I’m intensely grateful for my experience with Zazen this year. When I’m sitting with my monk, laughing about nothing in particular, my watch and phone sit and buzz in another room, disarmed. When I’m meditating, the real world can try it’s absolute hardest to ruin my peace, but my serenity is a fortress. Zazen has provided me with an escape to the society we are all bound to- and I can even practice my Japanese while I’m at it.

I learned a great many things in my time at Zazen this semester, but one stands out to me as the most salient- contradictions. How can I live a peaceful, unattached life when society rewards only the most extreme attachment? How can I live in this prison of human suffering, longing to escape to detachedness but simultaneously loathe to let go? Contradictions exist in every philosophy, to be sure, but having the chance to actually converse with a member of Rinzai Zen about contradictions within his ideology (and indeed within his own practices) has been a rare opportunity to sail beyond my mental horizons into unchartered waters. The most interesting of these contradictions is my priest’s marriage; the antithesis of Zen is to bind yourself to someone so closely. He still has yet to provide me with an answer, only telling me “it’s difficult” repeatedly and changing the subject as quickly as he can.

I feel like I’ve learned actually a great deal about general Japanese philosophy and identity from my time at Zazen, which has been incredibly interesting to someone like me with clearly a vastly different upbringing. There are so many unspoken rules, so many tiny rivulets of Buddhist influence coalescing to form the rushing stream of Japanese consciousness. Most difficult for me to understand is the emphasis on the group versus the individual- I still struggle to understand it, but my Zazen discussions have given me a special perspective on Japanese ideology and cultural history I would sorely miss had I done a different CIP.

I have learned kanji history, Buddhist history, the Buddhist perspective on the modern world, and far too much about the relative worth of escalators vs. bowls (hint; escalators are not the more useful of the two) in my Zazen CIP. I have been able to practice my Japanese and disconnect from a reality that seems only ever bent on sapping me of whatever happiness I can make for myself. I have found peace. I may not have the answers to any of life’s questions, or ever understand the willing subjugation of the self to the society, but at least I have learned there are ways to find peace still left out there.

This semester I have been conducting research on the Japanese new religious organization called Tenrikyō. In tandem with this research, as my CIP I have been attending services, meals, and monthly festivals hosted at the Heian Nishi Bunkyōkai in my neighborhood. I have been acquainted with the family that runs the church, the Ōshita family, since last year and they have been immensely helpful to me in my study of both their faith and Japanese culture as a whole.

Usually what this entails for me is watching the Ōshita family perform the service, eating a meal with them, and helping with tidying up the church room after the service, putting away chairs and offerings and such. The most helpful part in terms of my Japanese learning is without doubt the conversations shared over meals.

At the monthly festivals, the entire community of this church gathers, and I’ve had the chance to meet and talk with a large number of people, the overwhelming majority of whom are middle aged or elderly. This has provided me with a chance to observe dynamics of an older generation which I have less of a chance to interact with in my schooling. Their tendency towards self-deprecating humor is much stronger than that of the college students I have met, and an even greater tendency to discuss the weather at length at the start of any social interaction. They also speak Kyōto dialect, rarely heard in my generation.

The elderly exclusively use Kyōto dialect. Perhaps in their youth standard Japanese was not as widely taught or enforced. While the middle-aged people seem to be most comfortable speaking Kyōto dialect, they don’t lead with it. When I first came to the church, the middle-aged people would use standard Japanese, but as time went on, either they became more confident in my Japanese ability or I became a more recognized face in the community and they as well started using Kyōto dialect when speaking to me.

Kyōto dialect is somewhat distinct from the more widely known Kansai dialect. When I expressed interest in learning about Kyoto dialect, the brother of the head priest, Norio, was happy to oblige. He taught me the phrases “Samū oman na!” and “Atsū oman na!” used to express that today is particularly cold or hot, respectively.

I tried these phrases out on my college-age friends, and the ones who weren’t Kyōto natives didn’t understand at all. Even the ones who were from Kyōto, while they could understand, said they didn’t know how to speak much Kyōto dialect themselves. But at the next church meeting, I tried out my newfound words on some of the elderly people, and they seemed overjoyed at my efforts.

This story demonstrates a more unfortunate aspect of modern Japanese society: dialect is disappearing. In my Japanese class, we read several articles about the disappearance of dialect as standard Japanese becomes ever more, pun intended, standard.

I’m sure the people of the church were happy to have someone interested in this aspect of their culture, as only interest in the dialect will keep knowledge of it alive. One of the people whose words we read, an entertainer by the name of Ina Kappei, said that people who speak dialect need to be proud of it, and that pride, in the face of whatever derision they may face for speaking it, is the key to keeping it alive. Aside from the occasional joke about how hard it is to understand, the people of Heian Nishi seem to have pride in their unique way of speaking.

My experience with the people of Heian Nishi has been wonderful. I’ve been amazed time and time again by their kindness, and they have taught me so much. The opportunity I had to explore often overlooked aspects of Japanese society, such as dialect and new religions has been welcome, and the crossover with my classwork that dialect has provided has also been fascinating. I’m proud to say that with the support of this community I am “bocchi bocchi ni shiteiru” in my endeavors to understand Japanese culture and language.

For my CIP activity, I decided to take the path less traveled (literally) and hike up a large hill near Kinkakuji each week to partake in traditional zazen in a small Buddhist temple, Fumonken. At these meetings, which were entirely in Japanese and one-on-one, my priest and I would first have a lesson, of sorts. In this brief lesson, my priest would introduce a central zen concept (for example, the first week we discussed muga (無我) and it’s relation to Japanese zen) which featured both philosophy and philology, as he frequently would connect the related kanji to both Buddhist legends and to modern Japanese language and I would desperately try and follow along. These lessons were only about a half-hour long, sadly, but were always riveting; for someone like me who loves both the history of language and philosophy, I never lacked for interesting subject matter in these discussions. We would also always have sweets and tea during our discussions, relaxing on small cushions and both donning Buddhist robes.

The second part of the experience was then proper zazen meditation. I would first remove the paper screens from the meditation room, to clear a view to the rock garden and open the area up to fresh air, and then we would sit and meditate for about a half an hour. At first this was agonizingly painful for my legs, but with repetition the pain has progressed from “bear mauling” levels to more like “light gunshot wound”, which I would call a plus. Certainly the experience of meditating in itself has been beneficial for me, allowing me a quiet place to first worry about things, then worry that I’m ruining my meditation by worrying, and finally overcoming both and finally shutting my inner dialogue up. In the Rinzai school of Buddhist zen that I am practicing (and is, incidentally, the most rigorous type! Joy!) when meditating one must always keep the eyes open; this is 1. So you don’t fall asleep and 2. If your mind is truly in no place, looking ahead should be no different than eyes closed, as you should be unable to “see” anything.

This experience has taught me a lot of humility. It has taught me a lot about leg pain. It has taught me a lot about how complicated kanji history can be. I think most significantly, I have gained some intriguing insights into how Buddhism and the modern mindset cannot coexist. You have to pursue one or the other; both are inherently toxic to the other. Learning how this dichotomy has played out here in Japan, with such a deep tradition of Buddhism and now such a voracious consumer culture has been fascinating, not least because I am learning it from my priest who is an ex-salaryman. I am glad I chose to pursue a more ephemeral CIP, as I think personally this experience has been more helpful to my ongoing construction of my own identity and growth of my spirit than anything else could have been.

In terms of observations, the temple I go to is quite small and cozy. It is located near Kinkakuji, high up on a hill, and seems to receive very little traffic. I have seen several other adherents stop by, but usually they are working for a room for a night or two. The temple is actually my priest’s house, and so I have gotten a little look at the orderly (if cramped) lifestyle of the ordinary Japanese. As for my priest himself, he is a warm, genial ex-salaryman who decided the priestly life was far more interesting for him, and so married a French woman and became a Buddhist priest. I can’t attest to their relationship much since I rarely ever see his wife, but they seem to handle the language barrier and the whole issue of his priesthood quite well.

Finally, in terms of feelings, the greatest feeling I have with zazen is relief. Relief to be away from my phone, job applications, emails, commitments; even time itself seems to bend to the overwhelming silence. Having no prior experience with meditation, that aspect I also find to be refreshing, despite the sometimes difficult leg postures. I am glad to have chosen such a radically project, I think, as it is now coming in handy both in terms of resume-building (because, of course, the hustle never stops) and in finding inner peace.