An Interview with Shinzen Young

REALIZING AWAKENED CONSCIOUSNESS I N T E RV I E W S W I T H B U D D H I S T T E AC H E R S

AND A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIND

R I C H A R D P. B O Y L E

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Interview with Shinzen Young

Shinzen Young is the author of The Science of Enlightenment and Meditation: A Beginner’s Guide. I interviewed him by phone at his home in Burlington, Vermont, on April 18, 2009, although we had met in person previously.

Boyle: What I’d like you to do here is tell about how you got started in Buddhism and where your path led from there.

Shinzen: I will try to restrict my account to what might be called the effects of the practice. Before undertaking the practice, I studied it. I was originally an academician, studying Buddhism at UCLA and acquiring a solid intellectual background. I went to Japan toward the end of 1969, in order to study Shingon Buddhism, which is a Japanese form of Vajrayana, with the intention of writing a Ph.D. dissertation on that school of Buddhism.

When I got there, though, they wouldn’t teach me anything. They said, “Well, you have to become a monk and actually practice these things.” I wanted to study at Mount Koya, which is the headquarters of the Shingon school, but they put me off, saying, “No, you can’t get in here, you have to go elsewhere.” I was just waiting around and studying texts. There are something like a hundred temples on Mount Koya, but I wanted to get into this particular one. I wanted to study Shingon because very few Westerners had studied that school at all deeply. In any event, while I was waiting around I met one of the professors at the local university who had a Zen sitting group. This guy, although he himself was a Shingon monk, had done Zen and had a weekly zazen group. He said, “Well, if you’re going to do Shingon practice you have to learn how to sit.” Although I had a depth of intellectual information about

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Buddhism, I had very little understanding of what it really was. I just had information, a lot of it. So I didn’t understand the connection between learning how to sit and doing the tantric rituals that are, of course, forms of meditation. I didn’t quite realize that. Learning how to sit didn’t compute, but he said I could come to his zazen group every week and he would teach me. So I went to the group, and he gave me breath-counting meditation. That was the beginning of my practice. The first thing I discovered was how untenable my body and mind were. There was a lot of physical discomfort associated with the sitting and a lot of monkey mind. That early experience, especially toward the end of a sit, definitely hurt. My thoughts were really chaotic, and it was extremely difficult to concentrate.

I continued to do breath counting—a pretty standard Zen way to start people. Then at some point I started to notice toward the end of the sit that the voice in my head, although still there, was not as loud, not screaming as loud. My breath was slowing down spontaneously. The discomfort was still there but not as noticeable. So I went to him and said, “My sitting is becoming interesting.” He said, “Interesting in what way?” I described it, and he said, “Oh, you’re starting to go into samadhi,” in the generic sense of samadhi, meaning concentration, a concentrated state. It was a light concentrative state. But he said, “That’s good. Now you have to stay in that state all the time. That’s your job. Try to get into that state all the time.”

Eventually they let me into the temple I wanted to be in, but they wouldn’t teach me anything. I was just waiting around and doing shit work, samu—to me, seemingly meaningless physical tasks. They said, “Those simple tasks are simple in order to make it easy for you to be in a samadhi state while you do them.” I was sort of like, “Duh. I never would have figured that out.” They said, “That’s the idea. While you do the simple tasks, go into samadhi, and then you’ll be able to do it in more complex tasks, all the time.” So I continued sitting. Sometimes it was more focused, sometimes less focused. But being in samadhi, tasting that highly concentrated state, then became a goal. I decided, Okay, that’s good. That’s what I want to do.

It’s a free, legal, and interesting high. I tried to do it during tasks, including more complex tasks, and it became sort of fun. It was like a challenge—how complex a task could I do and still taste a little bit of samadhi as I did it?

So I had discovered an altered state, and now I had something that was like a little secret and I could do it all the time. Then my Zen teacher sent me to my first sesshin. That was horribly painful, excruciating. It was in southern Japan, it was summer, and it was hot. There were mosquitoes.

They were breaking sticks on people. My whole body was shaking. By the

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end of the sesshin I was coming apart at the seams, emotionally. Literally, in the last ten minutes of the last sit of the seven days, I thought I was going to start bawling. I started to scream in my head, You’re not a baby, don’t cry.

You’re not a baby, don’t cry. Then I dropped into a really deep samadhi. The pain drove me, and then the pain broke up into this flowing energy. My mind stopped, pretty much. I could have stayed there forever—it seemed that way, at least. Not that the pain didn’t bother me, but it broke up into a flow of energy that was pleasant. The talking in my head pretty much turned off, and it was like, Whoa, this is a very altered state. That showed me what could happen and involved several high points, or watersheds.

The first watershed was the spontaneous slowing down of the breath, and the fact that although the voice was still there, it was more distant. The next watershed was, “Okay, that’s samadhi. You can get into it counting your breath. Now do it in daily life. Build it through a sequence of more progressive challenges, starting with raking the sand and wiping the floor, etc.” So that was the second watershed: I can do this while I’m moving around. The third watershed was, Oh my god, pain can dissolve into energy. That was a real eye-opener, like, Whoa, who would have ever thought that is possible?

Eventually the monks at the Shingon temple said they would train me, in the Shingon way. That involves a hundred days of isolation, in the winter.

You do tantric rituals three times a day, and, “Oh, by the way, we do it the old-fashioned way here, which means that before each one of those tantric rituals you have to take off all your clothes, fill this bucket from this frozen cistern with ice water, and pour the ice water over your naked body.” It was winter, right? They started me off at the winter solstice. The towel that I would attempt to dry myself with would freeze in my hands. The water became ice as soon as it hit the wooden floor. There I am, barefoot on ice, trying to dry myself with a frozen towel.

I had noticed during this ordeal that if I stayed in samadhi, in a concentrated state, it was not exactly pleasant, but manageable. But if my attention was scattered, if I was in a lot of thought, it was hellacious. On the third day of this hundred-day commitment, looking at ninety-seven more days, I had an epiphany: Okay, there are three forks in this road. I’m either going to spend ninety-seven days in abject misery, or I’m going to give up and go back to the States in black disgrace, or I’m going to stay in some sort of samadhi state for the next ninety-seven days. I didn’t like the first two alternatives, so the third is what I tried to do.

Of course, there’s samadhi and then there’s absolute samadhi. This was nowhere near absolute samadhi. In retrospect it was a light concentration

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state, but it was still tasteable. It’s what Mike Csíkszentmihályi, a major figure in positive psychology, calls a “flow” state. It’s like “in the zone,” all right? It’s conscious awareness. You’re concentrated, and the concentration is intrinsically rewarding. By the time the hundred days were over, the samadhi at some level was permanent. I was always aware of being in that state, all the time, 24/7. That was a watershed. It wasn’t deep, but it was there.

Boyle: You didn’t hear the voice in your mind? It was not there as permanently? How would you describe its presence?

Shinzen: I’d say it was still there. I mean, it’s still there now. But I could taste samadhi. The voice was not screaming in my head in such a way that I identified with it. The samadhi was more like the taste of my body. The breath slows down and there’s a taste that goes with it, in the body. If we take samadhi to be a continuum from light concentration to full-blown physiological trance, then I was somewhere on the light end. But it had become permanently tasteable in my being. That was cool, that was a watershed. Then I just worked to deepen it, deepen it, deepen it.

Eventually I came back to the United States. Because of being in this highly concentrated state, I noticed that things looked very different, coming back to the United States this time. I’d been to Japan once before as an exchange student before I practiced meditation, and when I came back I had this horrible reverse cultural shock. I mean horrible. I didn’t want to be in the United States, I hated it. I wanted only to be in Japan. I was twentyone and really depressed to be back in the States after one year away. This time I spent three years in Japan, in Buddhist temples, and when I came back I had no reverse culture shock. I was completely happy.

I realized that what I learned in three years of being in a monastery in Japan was not just how to be comfortable in a monastery. I learned how to be comfortable anywhere. That was amazing, actually. After returning to the States, my preoccupation for years was to go deeper and deeper into this state of tranquility, which I equated with turning off or getting rid of thought and, broadly, getting rid of self. If I had a thought or a sense of self, then I considered myself a failure. The good news was that I had tasted samadhi and had this thing I could cultivate. The bad news was that, without realizing it, I was suppressing the sense of self. Buddha said that there is no self, and in trying to progress toward that state I had developed an aversion to thought in general, and “I-am-ness” specifically. If being enlightened means that you don’t have an experience of self, then when I had an experience of self I took it to mean that I wasn’t making progress

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in my practice. That caused an attitude of seeing samadhi as a suppression of thought, or an absence of thought, and more broadly, as an absence of a sense of I-am-ness. You know how golfers can be pretty good golfers, but they develop a quirk that messes up their game? I saw it in a movie about golfers. They get one bad habit and it’s really hard to get rid of it. I had developed that same kind of bad habit in my practice.

But my original teacher, the one who got me to sit, the Zen professor, gave me a koan when I left Japan: “Who am I?” He said, “This samadhi stuff is great, but you have to go beyond samadhi. You have to get satori, enlightenment. That’s a whole other thing.” He said, “Work on the koan, ‘Who am I?’” “Well, how do I work on that koan?” “Just turn consciousness back on itself.” That was the instruction. So I was trying to suppress my thoughts and get into samadhi, but I was also trying to work on “Who am I?” and asking, “Where does thought come from, where does consciousness come from?” I did that for a few years, and things were pretty good, because I had this little edge on life.

Then, probably sometime in the mid-’70s, I was reading and getting stoned all day, and I was alone. I had been staying with my parents, but they were away, so I had the place to myself. I had been alone all day, and I realized, Oh, I haven’t done any sitting today. I was actually stoned on marijuana, but I thought, It’s getting late, I should probably do my sitting. So I put down the zafu and sat, and the instant I sat down, the koan was there: “Who am I?” Then suddenly there was no boundary to me at all. I was so shocked I actually got up. And there was still no boundary to me. I was walking around, looking at things, and there was no border between me and anything else. But I still had thoughts. Some sort of negative thought came up, and the walls started to laugh at me for having a negative thought.

Of course that’s a projection, but there was a kind of intimacy between inside and outside. That was just emblematic of what was going on. I thought, Oh my god, this doesn’t have anything to do with whether I’m concentrated or not concentrated. There is just no boundary separating me and what is around me.

I thought, This is too good to be true. This isn’t going to last. Then I turned on the TV and I was watching cartoons or something, but it was still there. It was getting late and I thought, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it’s going to be just a pleasant memory. But when I woke up the next day it was still there! It didn’t go away, and it never went away. It was like the classic sudden kensho experience. I was just walking around in this magic world of oneness.

I walked around the block a whole week, enjoying this experience. I knew

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that the tradition is that when you’ve had an experience like this, you’re supposed to go to see a roshi or someone who knows. The only roshi I knew was Maezumi Roshi, the L.A. Zen Center guy. I didn’t know him well, but I did know him. I called him up and said, “Something has happened with my practice and I’d like to discuss it with someone who is competent.”

I didn’t know him that well, but he was a Zen master. I half expected him to say, “You’re full of shit, kid, get out of here.” I knew I’d had a significant experience, no one was going to convince me otherwise, but I didn’t know how he was going to respond. I just wanted to run it by someone.

And it was total affirmation, like, “Yep, that’s it.” He said, “It’s just the beginning. This is just the first crack, you’re going to have to open it wider, wider, wider. But it’s what we mean by first kensho experience, and you did good.

Don’t stop there. Just keep going and going.”

So I did. I was practicing on my own and exploring what I had learned.

A couple more years went by—I’m not good on the chronology. Then the boyfriend of an ex-semigirlfriend of mine who was living at what was then called Cimarron Zen Center called me. They needed an interpreter for Sasaki Roshi during a teisho, and they didn’t have one. He knew that I spoke Japanese, so he asked me if I would be willing to be the interpreter. I said yes. That was the first time I encountered Sasaki Roshi. I interpreted for him, and even though I’d had these experiences and had done all my Ph.D. work in Buddhist studies except for the dissertation, I couldn’t understand what he was talking about at all. It didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard in any other teaching—father and mother, expansion-contraction, you know, positive and negative and zero. It was like, What is this guy talking about? I mechanically translated what he said from Japanese into English, but I didn’t get it.

I continued to translate for him, but I didn’t do sesshins with him. After a number of years it started to make sense to me. I realized, Oh, he’s just radically innovative. This is standard enlightenment, but from a very subtle and deep and advanced perspective, with a very creative, innovative paradigm. I also realized that I still needed a teacher. I never became his deshi, his student, officially. He dangled the hook. He wanted me to become one of his monks. I wanted to keep my independence, and he was very kind in that regard. He’s let me essentially graze on his Dharma for twenty-five years, without having to commit to being an official student. Which is pretty amazing, actually.

So now I had a roshi, the real thing. That altered my practice in two significant ways. One is that I realized the error in suppressing the sense of

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self. What you have to do is allow the self to arise and pass away. Sasaki talks about that. He talks about no self and self, constantly—they’re both natural—and where the self comes from, etc. He disabused me of that bad habit I had had, of trying to suppress thoughts specifically and self in general. That was a real paradigm shift. I started to love the realizing of the personal self, rather than subtly be averse to it.

Then I started to internalize his paradigm for how consciousness works.

To wit: there is zero, but zero is inherently unstable, therefore it polarizes into expansion and contraction. But expansion only knows how to expand and contraction only knows how to contract. Therefore, in the push and pull between them they vibrate space into existence, which is then further vibrated by expansion and contraction until that space is nurtured into a feeling, thinking self, which either realizes, “Oh, I was born in the cleft in between Father and Mother, and I know exactly what to do, which is to give everything I got from Father back to Father and everything I got from Mother back to Mother. I will disappear. I will become Father and Mother. There will be no separation, therefore, between Father and Mother, and they will come back again to zero.” Or, the self that does not realize that fixates on itself and suffers, and believes, “I am a thing.” That’s his essential paradigm, and I began to actually experience it. That became the way that I formulated the practice for myself.

Meanwhile, I had been living in a place called the International Buddhist Meditation Center. It was [led by] Dr. Thich Thien-An, who was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. It was right down the street from Zen Center of Los Angeles and somewhat north from Cimarron, but still in the Buddhist ghetto in downtown L.A. It was international—they had representatives from all the Buddhist traditions. By this time I was one of the more experienced meditators there, and I was morphing into the role of teacher.

People were coming to me for instruction in meditation. I was starting to run classes and so forth. Initially I did Zen. I had people count their breaths, I whacked them with the keisaku, maybe even gave them koans (I can’t remember). We were chanting the Heart Sutra fast in Japanese, eating with chopsticks, Japanese Zen-style stuff.

There were Vajrayana people there, doing Deity Yoga, with which I was familiar because that was my original ordination, although it wasn’t what I was mostly practicing. But there were also vipassana teachers, people teaching mindfulness practices from Southeast Asia. I noticed that they attracted a lot more people than were coming to my East Asian Zen sittings, and they seemed to be getting quick results with people. I started to

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look into mindfulness, or vipassana practice, and two things struck me.

First, of the three major practice traditions—Zen, Tibetan Vajrayana practice, and vipassana or mindfulness—Zen and Vajrayana are highly modified for a specific cultural niche, East Asia in the former case and IndoTibetan medieval shamanic culture in the latter. They’re culturally specific, whereas vipassana is much less culture-bound. It’s a more primitive form—primitive in the sense of early. It’s an early form of practice, close to what the Buddha taught and less modified for a specific cultural milieu. Of course it’s somewhat modified for South and Southeast Asia, but it’s pretty easy to extract vipassana from its cultural background. You don’t have to eat with chopsticks or chant fast in Japanese to do the vipassana practice.

You can eat with a knife and fork. You don’t even have to chant; the scriptures are in English. It’s easier to adapt to this tradition.

The other thing that struck me is that vipassana is very systematic. Zen is very intuitive. I by that time had a pretty good background in math and science, and I am drawn to things that are systematic and structured and algorithmic. I thought, I should look into this, which led to studying with teachers from various parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia. The upshot is that I took a technique that is called “noting,” which is part of one of the Burmese lineages of vipassana practice, the Mahasi lineage, and figured out a way to use it to bring people to the experience of expansion-contraction and zero, rather than using koans. So I’ve taken Sasaki Roshi’s expansioncontraction paradigm, and I’ve mounted it in the noting technique associated with Theravada Buddhism, and I emphasize a strong ethical paradigm, also based on the Theravada tradition. That’s what I now teach. The other thing I discovered was that if you interactively coach a person in real time, they are much more likely to get the practice and understand it and internalize it than if you do things the more traditional way, which is: “Here’s the cushion, here’s the posture, here’s the technique, now go off and do it and we’ll talk in a few days.” Instead of doing that, I started to sit down with people and micro-interactively guide them and modify the guidance based on what they were experiencing. I’m trying to guide them toward seeing that the nature of consciousness is expanding-contracting space.

In terms of my personal experience there is at least one other watershed. So far I’ve described samadhi, and I described what might be called wisdom. But we haven’t talked about behavior change. Objective changes in observable behavior are a hugely important part of this practice. So in terms of how this has influenced my external behavior, I would say that there are probably three areas, the third of which I’m still working on, still

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struggling with. The first behavior change is that I used to not like to be around people—I would avoid people. As I stated, after having those early experiences of being in samadhi, I found that I could be around people. I didn’t avoid people anymore, I became a more social being. So that was one change of behavior.

A second change in behavior is that I used a lot of drugs, even after my first kensho experience. But then I went to a Goenka retreat, which is in the U Ba Khin lineage of Burmese tradition, where you sweep through the body. As I was sweeping through the body for ten days, I noticed some very slight discomfort in my chest. I didn’t really pay that much attention to it, I just noticed it once or twice. At the retreat, the thought occurred to me that it must be the result of all that marijuana smoke I had put in myself. But it was no big deal, I didn’t say, “Oh my god, that’s awful,” or whatever; it was just a little sensation I was aware of. Oh, there’s a little congestion there, it must be the smoke. On the day I returned from the retreat I didn’t seem to have any inclination to smoke marijuana.

Then another day passed, and I thought, I don’t want to do it. Then about a week passed, and I realized I wasn’t going to use drugs anymore. I just didn’t want to anymore. It wasn’t on again, off again, on the wagon, off the wagon. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. It just happened. And I thought, Holy shit, this stuff really works. Some part of my body, the part that was enjoying getting high, talked to another part of my body, the part that was being traumatized, and they decided on their own, without me knowing, that we weren’t going to do this anymore. It was like plastic surgery had been done on my psyche and my soul, without my even knowing about it.

That was an effortless, permanent behavior change. I’d had a ten-year run with marijuana, which just stopped dead. That was a behavior change.

But the behavior issue I’m still struggling with, the one I actually went to a psychiatrist about, for eighteen months—not that long ago—is that I’d always been a perennial procrastinator. It sounds funny, but actually it has messed up my life. It’s serious. I could go into the gory details. Let’s just put it this way: every one of my peers has written several significant books. But I haven’t, and my perennial procrastination is the reason. It interferes with my ability to help people. It’s getting better, but I needed external support— a combination of the practice plus the psychiatrist—for behavior modification. I came to realize that the procrastination is driven by five sensory phenomena. If I can keep track of them and penetrate them with mindfulness, with concentration, clarity, and equanimity, then I can change the behavior.

But if I lose track of them then I become subject to the avoidance behavior.

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I call them the five Rs—this was an insight that allowed me to begin to change the behavior that had been in my life for so long. They are all words or phrases that end in R. Like the three Rs are reading, writing and ’rithmetic, well, this is the five Rs. It’s not alliterative, it’s rhyme—they all end in R. The first one is “fear,” by which I mean the body sensation of fear. The second is “cheer,” by which I mean the joy/interest flavor in my body. The third is “tear,” a sudden hint of sadness around my eyes and face. Those are the three bodily flavors. Fear and tear are the sensations I avoid if I procrastinate. Cheer, or interest, is the reward that I get if I procrastinate. I can surf the Internet or go to the library and have a great time. So fear, tear, and cheer are emotional flavors in my body that seem to control my behavior, unless I can detect and have equanimity with them, in which case they don’t.

Then there’s a physical sensation, a nonemotional sensation, of poor coordination that arises in my body. If I try to change a behavior, I lose my balance a little bit. I’m wobbly. I’m disoriented (physically, not intellectually or emotionally). I call that “can’t steer.” I’ve talked about this in public, and other people who have tried behavior change have come to me and said, yes, they get the same thing. You don’t know whether to turn right or turn left. Your body is poorly coordinated. My hypothesis is that it’s related to the cerebellum, which not only affects balance but also seems to be where behavior patterns are stored. That’s just a crazy conjecture, but anyway, in the emotional body there’s fear, tear, and cheer, which is an internal rewardand-punishment system that controls the robot. On the physical level in the body there’s this “can’t steer” disorientation—can’t quite control my body kind of thing.

Then in the mind there is the fifth R, which is “blear.” When I resist the procrastination and try to do “the right thing,” I often get confused and stupid, and can’t think straight. So I discovered that there are these five sensory phenomena, three in the emotional body, one in the physical body, and one in the mind: fear, tear, cheer, can’t steer, and blear. They seem to be able to control me, the robot, unless I can keep them distinct in awareness and have equanimity with them—all five simultaneously! If I can simultaneously detect and sensorily accept all five at once, then they no longer control me and I can overcome my tendency to procrastination. But if I lose track of even one or can’t sensorily accept even one, then they control me like a robot and I give in to my lifelong habit of procrastination. So that’s my model for behavior change; it has allowed me to actually get better. But I still need the external support. That’s why I believe, as many modern Western teachers do, that sometimes formal practice alone may not be

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enough. Some people may need a behaviorally oriented accountability and support structure in the form of a counselor, a sponsor, or a therapist. And that brings us to the end of the story. I think that covers all the high points of my last forty-five years—at least with regard to practice breakthroughs.

Boyle: Has your samadhi changed, deepened, over the last twenty years?

Shinzen: Oh yes, the samadhi continues to get deeper and deeper. But now the samadhi is sort of indistinguishable from the wisdom. I use a different model now. If we take samadhi to mean concentration, I now use a model where I look upon the mindfulness as having three dimensions: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. If I have enough concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity, then my experience is the flow of expansion/contraction and zero. When I don’t, then my experience is that of a fixated self encapsulated in rigid time and space. So I would say that there is absolute samadhi—that’s zero. Absolute samadhi, zero,doesn’t last very long, but I’m aware of it hundreds, probably thousands of times during the day.

And each time, I’m aware that myself and the surrounding scene are born from and return to it. In between those moments of absolute samadhi, I’m aware of relative samadhi, which just means enjoying a concentrated state.

Boyle: And the kensho, where you no longer feel the distinction between your self and everything around you, that informs the samadhi?

Shinzen: Yes, they all inform one another.

Boyle: That’s been the way you live, for some while now? It’s not something you work on, like you work on the procrastination. It’s something that is there.

Shinzen: The oneness? The no-boundary thing?

Boyle: The no-boundary and the samadhi thing, that cluster, that way of being.

Shinzen: Yes, that’s there whether I like it or not. I don’t want it at times.

Boyle: That’s what I mean. It has become a permanent state. You don’t get up in the morning and sit and say, “I want to get back into this.”

Shinzen: When I say “no boundaries”—you know, my concentration wavers, like anybody else’s. The difference is that I don’t care how concentrated I am. It makes no difference to me whatsoever. Well, to be honest, I probably have a little preference for the concentrated state, but in the end, that’s just a state of attention. But the “no boundary” thing—that never goes away. It can’t go away—because the boundary was never there to begin with. Something that was never there isn’t going to come back. [Laughs]