By: John Tarrant
There are tools of transformation. The art student draws a hand, a face, the curve of a back, over and over, quickly and slowly. Gradually her consciousness changes and the hand, the act of drawing, and the person drawing become transparent; unity is restored to the world. At the moment this process is complete, the student is no longer an apprentice. Some Tibetan Buddhists undertake a foundation practice in which, among other tasks, they perform one hundred thousand elaborate prostrations, usually over several years. Now, this might seem quite useless and of no benefit to oneself or others, yet it too offers a way to enter life utterly. One lama laughed and said that the first ten thousand or so prostrations he did were not any good, so he threw them away. Then he began to do them more simply, more entirely. The days and months continued and the trees became more vibrant, the eyes of the people he met grew more vivid with their story.
Repetition is narrow and, if undertaken mechanically, stifles us, but it can also allow us to go deep. In meditation we repeat ourselves day after day, coming back to stillness and the breath, and again and again realize that we haven’t yet experienced it completely, that it is ever more subtle. Repetition, when done right, drifts almost imperceptibly into vasts, new realms, but with a slowness that allows for deepening, beauty, the appreciation of the neglected moment. It stabilizes our relation to eternity.
Any good relationship—marriage, a love affair, friendship, teacher and student—depends as well on just this sort of steady, attentive repetition. Common events, like having breakfast together, accumulate significance. Repetition teaches us that the things we do are not confined to their practical value. Bowing, or even lifting a fork from a plate, makes us aware that simple acts share a common timelessness with the sound of the spring wind and of the branches banging on the gutters.
Repetition may seem a succession of small moments, modest and uneventful. Yet repetition has also a certain cunning: it forces us to bide a while. The passage of time so gained alters us—we learn the small arts of attention and how to love the domestic moments between the big moments; we are soothed. But the road of repetition does not just make us calmer, more docile to ourselves. The step-by-step rhythm opens out, in time, to a suprise.
For repetition makes us vulnerable to the apparently random epiphanies that occur even if we have no interest in spirit. The boy immersed in his life stands amazed on the side of the gorge while the hills dance, the woman steps out of doors and dissolves into a field of flowers. Such events appear in our lives as gifts, apparently random. If spiritual openings are accidents, as a number of teachers have pointed out, then the spiritual work of meditation makes us accident-prone, susceptible to the imagination of eternity, the wit of God.
In matters of spirit, no road is ever straight. When first we begin to open, the vastness can be frightening and so we regress, sag back into the familiar darkness, where we can be close to the earth and rest. There we abide, gathering invisible resilience, until once again the involuntary compassion appears in the midst of suffering, and we step back onto the stair of Purgatory and the steady repetitions of spiritual work.
From: The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Sould and the Spiritual Life. John Tarrant Roshi is the founder and director of the Pacific Zen Institute. He was the first dharma heir of Robert Aitken Roshi. Tarrant was a Jungian psychotherapist for twenty years, working on dream analysis while he was developing his teaching of Zen koans.