Knowing Contentment

A great contentment is to be found walking the Middle Way. With neither lack nor surplus, all things are in balance. Craving is put to rest, and there are sufficient things for life and happiness to thrive. Our insatiable desires have been calmed but not suppressed, and we find peace, no matter what situation we are in. Of the mind-states that flow from zazen practice, contentment is one of the most precious.

I have known many content people in my life. To be clear, they were not people in dire poverty, whose wants of food, housing, security, and other basic needs were not met. My mother used to say, “Poverty is evil.” I think she was right. But these people were not highly successful people either. They were not the people who chased after high achievement and status. They were not usually people in positions of power. They were ordinary people, living ordinary and decent lives. They were people with little ego and few cares in the world. They were free within the boundaries of their own life. Often, they had a quiet faith in things, believing that the flow of life would take care of itself and work out. In that sense, they were in harmony with their surroundings, whatever those surroundings were. They were people who gardened in the neighborhood where I grew up, finding silent pleasure in planting and tending vegetables or flowers. Or they were old fellows sitting quietly in country pubs, unconcerned with the busyness of the world, meditatively sitting near an open fire. What was common among them was their centered presence. Their full being was right there in the situation they were in. They were totally engrossed in the present task and the present moment.

We live in societies geared toward endless economic growth. The whole commercial basis of how we have organized everything is based on the creation of wants through advertising. In this model, everything must be disposable and regularly replaced. Things we once craved quickly become obsolete and must be updated. Everything is assigned a value in a theater of prestige and fashion, rather than having a value in its own right. In this unhappy vision, anything can be turned into a commodity—even the ground we stand on.

To be present here is to be present with the true reality of all things.

I remember in the late 1980s when gold was discovered on Ireland’s holy mountain, Croagh Patrick. The place had been a site of pilgrimage and contemplation for centuries, but now it was to be ripped open and mined for the seam of gold that ran along its western slope. Even one of Ireland’s most sacred sites was under threat by those that wished to extract gold from the mountain’s heart for short-term profit. The ordinary people of County Mayo, who knew something of contentment and the innate value of things, pushed back successfully and stopped the mining. But other battles were lost in the years that followed. Shell ran its infrastructure through scenic Rossport to bring in gas from off the west coast. In this instance, the local community were beaten off the roads by police. But there were other successes, including Carnsore Point in County Wexford, where nuclear power was resisted in the 1970s. Often, it was ordinary people of modest means who fought these battles and understood that things had a value all of their own, far beyond any commodity value. In contrast, the powers of state and commerce were under the delusion that all things could be bought and sold in an insatiable drive for more.

When we meditate, we want for little but to sit still with the inbreath and outbreath. We know satisfaction with the state of things the way they are, and seek out peace and quiet. With effort, we bring our awareness to when and where we are, right now, cultivating wisdom and stillness. In this state we no longer objectify the world as something we can use for our own selfish ends. We intimately realize that we are deeply connected to the world around us. In truth, our body reaches far beyond the boundaries of our skin. It is the air we breathe and the food that sustains us, grown in fields watered by rain that falls, brought here by clouds that have crossed the broad ocean. The ground that supports us as we sit in zazen is not merely an object or commodity; it is our body itself. It is the body of things that stretch out in every direction, filling the entire universe. And in a simple, quiet way, that total reality is just here where we quietly sit. To be present here is to be present with the true reality of all things.

Master Dogen learned this when he returned to Japan from China in 1227. Having taken the dangerous journey there and back again, he knew that he did not need to abandon his own place and seek out “the dusty borders of foreign lands.” He learned that “the truth is originally all around” and that “we do not stray from the right state.” Would he have learned this if he had never made the journey to begin with? Maybe not. But this was a journey he made on behalf of us all. He returned to Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto with the teaching that everything we need is already with us. He taught this in his Fukan zazengi, or “Universal Recommendation for Zazen”; he addressed all people—not just monks and nuns. Zazen was for everyone and everyone everywhere, in all times and places. Wanting little and knowing contentment were to be found right where we are, not out in another faraway and unattainable place. This news of Dogen’s is very good news—and never have we needed this news more than we do now.

The eccentric Japanese poet Ryokan (1758–1831) well understood this teaching of frugally wanting little. But even frugality is the wrong word in a Zen vision where even a particle of dust contains whole universes. For this hermit monk, even a few twigs were a treasure from which he could make a fire. Known as Taigu, the “Great Fool,” he spent his days sitting in zazen, playing with local children, drinking sake with farmers, and wandering around writing poems. He often wrote his poems and then just left them behind. He was offered prestigious positions as poet and priest, but he declined them all. He preferred instead to remain in his simple, isolated hermitage, living surrounded by nature, content with his simple life. Ryokan has much to teach us. For him, even the sound of the rain was a precious gift.

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.  

♦

From Do Not Try to Become a Buddha: Practicing Zen Right Where You Are © 2025 by Myozan Ian Kilroy. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.