Please Turn Your Cameras On

I have been telling people for years, when I talk about the Three Treasures, that Sangha is not my strong suit. In those moments, I am talking about Sangha as the group of Zen practitioners who sit together on a regular basis, the group of students gathered around an authentic Zen teacher. When I say I’m not a sangha guy, I’m thinking potluck suppers. I didn’t come to Zen for the social life. I didn’t come to Zen to meet girls. As president of the Zen Community of New York, I felt obligated to show up for the monthly potluck suppers, but I hated it.

I was remembering the potluck suppers, but I’d forgotten how important it had been for me to find a group to sit with. I looked for a Zen group for the first time during my senior year in high school, having found Zen the previous spring on the shelf of a suburban bookstore. It was 1959. I didn’t find a sitting group, but I found a chess club – I was playing on our high school chess team – the Manhattan Chess Club and took the Long Island Railroad to the city and got to play Arthur Bisguier, the US Chess Champion. Arthur won easily. The chess club wasn’t the sangha I was looking for.

Thirty years later – the next time I checked the phone book for Zen groups – there were half a dozen. For thirty years, Zen had been calling to me, but I’d rarely answered, sometimes managing to sit for a few days during summer vacations before returning to the world, sometimes buying my annual Zen book which I rarely opened and never finished.

Thirty years later, I found myself in a classic midlife crisis. Career in turmoil, marriage ending, I needed zazen. Struggling to sit alone every morning, finding others to sit with now had an urgency that I didn’t understand. What a turning point it was in my practice when I found my first sitting group at the Soho Zendo. Stepping into spiritual practice in midlife, I was into unknown territory. Zazen was still weird, not only to me but to my friends. I understood why madmen, artists, and saints were lumped together.

The Soho Zendo sangha helped me feel sane if not normal. Here were other people who were also practicing zazen and had been practicing a lot longer than me. Sitting with them each Tuesday evening gave me the courage to sit alone mornings until I got my next sangha “fix.”

As a teacher, I share this experience. I talk about the importance of sitting with others. You have to sit. You have to sit every day. Sitting alone is hard. If you don’t sit every day, you are not doing Zen.

Always a householder, always with family and career and community responsibilities, I have never been a sitting fanatic. A half hour a day is enough. Most days. Some days, the days of particular stress or depression or fear or anger, you may need to sit more. Any less than a half hour and you’re kidding yourself. I know I’m being arbitrary. What’s the difference, 30 minutes or 29? But we all need to stop negotiating and just sit.

This is my experience. This is what worked for me: Sit every day; sit one evening a week with a group, three periods, walking meditation in between; do a zazenkai, an all-day sit, once a month if you can; do one sesshin a year, two if you can manage the time away.

The sitting together was so important. For me, it wasn’t a social. I sat every week at the Soho Zendo, and I did two sesshins a year with Kyudo Roshi. (The Soho Zendo didn’t offer zazenkais). I never saw any of my fellow practitioners outside of the zendo. We never talked in the zendo. I learned only a few of their names. Eventually, I did form some of my closest friendships through my Zen practice, but this occurred later, with Bernie and not in the Zendo. The lasting friendships formed on the Street and in joint study.

It would have been great to sit with the sangha every day. For years, I dreamt of going to the zendo every morning to sit with the sangha, but it was a practice that didn’t fit my householder life. Until Covid. Once we’d begun gathering for our weekly sitting on zoom, it was natural to add a virtual, early morning sit. We have no formal start time and no end time, no chants and no liturgy, no words of encouragement. During the 6 to 7 AM hour (approximately), as our schedules permit, we enter the virtual zendo to sit. Rarely are five or six of us on the screen at the same time. Some days I see everyone. Some days I sit alone, and on those days, I miss the others.

Recently, I was asked to offer words of encouragement to Roshi Bob Kennedy’s virtual Morning Star Zendo. I was impressed by the numbers, over fifty people sitting together. But half of them had their cameras off. Understandable in a way. Early morning. Maybe people weren’t all dressed yet. Maybe they didn’t have their day faces on. Maybe their room was a mess. Maybe a partner was sleeping naked in the bed next to them. There could be all kinds of excuses.

But being on zoom reminds me of the Covid pandemic, and I recalled a slogan from those days. “I wear a mask to protect you; you wear a mask to protect me.” Seeing all those camera-off, black screens, I thought, “Please turn your cameras on. I turn my camera on to support you; you turn your camera on to support me.” I remember my early Zen days in the Soho Zendo. It’s not important for me to know your name. We don’t have to chat, but I need to feel your presence. And when your camera is off, I don’t even know you’re there.

When our charter schools made the Covid pivot to virtual learning, the first challenge was to make sure all our students had computers and internet access. The second challenge was to make sure the students kept their cameras on. How quickly the new technology gave birth to a new way of playing hooky. If you’re camera isn’t on, if we can’t see you, you’re absent.

The same lesson translated to the zendo. If your camera is off, I might as well be sitting alone. I’ve been telling people so long that Sangha is not my strong suit. Maybe I’m just not a potluck guy. We come together to sit for the support. Please turn your camera on. When I see your face, I feel that I am not alone.