Fearless Zen

At the age of 25, Cristina Moon sat her first ten-day meditation retreat to prepare for the possibility of arrest and torture inside military-ruled Burma. While Moon acknowledges the naïveté of her initial intent, on the retreat she discovered not only a method to withstand pain but also a new way of seeing the world that set her on a decades-long spiritual path.

Eventually, Moon found her way to Daihonzan Chozen-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Honolulu that emphasizes warrior Zen training. Her new book, Three Years on the Great Mountain: A Memoir of Zen and Fearlessness, follows her first three years at Chozen-ji as she learns ferocity and grace through swordsmanship, ceramics, and the rigors of all-night training.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Moon to talk about the importance of learning to face challenges directly, why the highest directive of a Zen priest is to give courage and take away fear, and how she’s learning to take herself less seriously while remaining entirely sincere.

Chozen-ji incorporates many forms of training, from manual labor and martial arts to ceramics and the Way of Tea. How do these different aspects work together? One of the first things that a Chozen-ji teacher said to me when I arrived was, “It’s easy to stay calm and centered when you’re sitting on a cushion. But how does that hold up when you have a sword at your throat? Or when you have a calligraphy brush in your hand?”

In order to take the skills that you learn in zazen and make them more available in your everyday life, you have to apply them in novel and challenging situations. Moving heavy rocks is great Zen training because you can’t think about moving a rock and have it move—you just have to do it.

The fine arts provide an interesting counterpoint. With martial arts and manual labor, there’s an emphasis on physicality and learning how to take out all of your strength without hesitation. The fine arts have an aspect of that, but they’re also about refinement. In the martial arts, you want to envelop your opponent with your kiai, or your energy. In Chado, or the Way of Tea, you envelop people with your kiai in a totally different way that makes them feel welcome, relaxed, and taken care ofno matter what they were experiencing before they came into the tea room. It uses the same raw materials of breath, posture, concentration, and kiai, but it’s expressed in a more refined way.

You write that while many Western dharma centers emphasize practice, Chozen-ji felt like training. How do you view the distinction between practice and training, and what are you training for? With practice, there can be a dualistic framework of “me” and “my practice”; there is a “me” that owns the practice. This often coincides with a syncretic spiritual approach of cherry-picking aspects of different traditions. When we do that, it can keep us from truly feeling challenged in the ways that are required to uproot the ego. When you subsume yourself to a tradition in its entirety, it’ll get to your attachments really quickly. It’s terrain that needs to be navigated skillfully, but it’s incredibly effective at getting to the root.

“When you subsume yourself to a tradition in its entirety, it’ll get to your attachments really quickly.”

I love the use of the word “training” because it has a sense of urgency. The way I understand it is I am training to realize my true self. I’m doing that knowing that the worst day of my life and the best day of my life may be in front of me or behind me, and when I’m presented with those moments, I want to be the best version of myself that I can be.

The more esoteric way of talking about Zen training is preparing to die the Great Death. We know that we’re all going to die. If that’s the one thing that is certain for all of us, wouldn’t we want to meet that moment with complete resolve? There’s a sense of urgency for me in being prepared for that moment.

You say that over the years you had internalized the message that you were “too big, too loud, too sharp,” and you worked to make yourself smaller, yet at Chozen-ji you encountered a path that celebrated vigor. Can you say more about this? Often, when we’re dealing with internalized anger, mainstream Western society tells us that the antidote is to do the opposite: put yourself in calming situations and try to be more peaceful. Another way to approach our habits is to go straight into them, realize all the attachments that come up, and become more familiar with them.

The value placed on martial arts has been really important to me because I’ve learned how to refine and navigate my own intensity not by shying away from it and trying to be small but by going straight into it. It pushed me to transcend my own boundaries, and I realized that some of my anger was rooted in a false confidence and a deluded way of seeing the world.

Only by challenging those habits and putting myself in aggressive situations that were safe and bounded was I able to see where my perception was falling short and to bring out my real power.

You also talk about the importance of learning to face hits head-on rather than duck or turn away. Can you tell us about your training in kendo, or the Way of the Sword? Coming into my Chozen-ji training, I thought I was a very direct, precise person. Then I started training in kendo, and I quickly realized that in the face of an attack, I tended to freeze, get small, and duck my head.

The problem with getting small in kendo is that even when you’re wearing a men, or a helmet, there’s very little protection on the top of your head. If you face the hit head-on, your opponent’s sword will hit the metal grate that’s protecting your face, so it doesn’t really hurt. But if you duck your head, the sword hits you where there’s only cotton padding. Very quickly, I had a lump on the top of my head, which was a clear reminder of my habit of getting small.

This was an incredible lesson for me, and as I kept training, it started to manifest in other parts of my life. About three months into my time at Chozen-ji, I had one sitting where I was ruminating on a difficult situation. All of a sudden, I had the feeling of leaping forward, yelling at the top of my lungs, and cutting right through the problem. All of my rumination just fell away in that instant. I couldn’t describe it as anything other than the kiai of kendo, or the psychophysical memory of doing kendo.

That was one of the first moments that I could truly see [Chozen-ji founder] Tenshin Tanouye’s intent in incorporating the martial arts into the training as a means to accelerate traditional monastic practices like zazen. Martial arts can enliven zazen so that, hopefully, if you’re doing serious Zen training, you can achieve the same wisdom that comes with age much younger in life. That way, you have many more years to bring that wisdom to bear.

♦

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Visit tricycle.org/podcast for the full episode.