How Much Time?

Do I sit enough? How much time do I spend meditating? How much time will I spend on my spiritual practice? I’m thinking “meditation,” but I could as well be thinking about prayer or chanting, any of the many ways of spiritual expression. It’s a complicated question for me with ragged roots stretching back to the Buddha’s day. The early accounts of the Buddha’s sermons always describe the audience, always make explicit presence of monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen. The seed that is planted in the distinction between males and females is one problem, a problem I’ll leave for a later day. Today, I’m worrying about the seed that is planted in that earliest distinction between monastics and laypeople.

Apparently in those days, only monastics could achieve enlightened and be freed from the cycle of birth and death. The rest of us, the laypeople, could do what we could, pray or meditate, lead virtuous lives, and perhaps most importantly provide alms to support the monastics. If we did enough, we could hope for a rebirth as a monk and gain our shot at Nirvana. Some Buddhists later opened an alternative path, “the greater vehicle,” they called it, of which Zen is a part. Here a way was opened to Nirvana for laypeople: we could all achieve enlightenment during this lifetime.

Today, certainly in America, all most all Zen practitioners are laypeople, “householders” we call them. They have families and jobs and fit their Zen practice into busy schedules. Even those of us who have ordained – I’m one of them – are, most of us anyway, really householders: jobs, kids, parents, community obligations. A few of us – not me – may even look like we’ve stepped out of old Japanese prints: shaved heads, flowing robes. But almost all of us are householders. We have a living to make in the world. We don’t make a living out of Zen practice.

But all of us, the ordained and the not-ordained, are haunted by the hallowed images of cross-legged monastics, sitting, sitting, sitting. On mountain tops and caves and cragged coasts, swept by fog, sitting, sitting. In cloistered halls, sitting. From time to time at least, all of us worry, “I don’t sit enough.”

When I first got to Zen practice during my midlife crisis, I managed to attend two, week-long Zen retreats a year. I considered them plunges into the monastic life. We sat thirteen, half-hour periods day, a lot of sitting. By nine o’clock at night when the final period ended, I was ready to fall into bed. We would begin again sitting at 6:30 in the morning. All always there were a few people who’d returned to the zendo to sit some more. Were they the heroes? How macho could you get?

The specter of the monk hangs over us. How much time should we sit? This is not just a Zen thing. Maybe it’s the universal householder’s ghost. Are we all deficient when we compare ourselves to the cloister? We don’t even need a cloister. Maybe it’s the rebbe around the corner who’s praying all the time.

And still, we householders, we need to find a rhythm to our practice, a way to balance all that’s on our plate with our spiritual practice. Still, how much time to I devote to my spiritual practice? How much do I sit? We will have to come back to this question.