Zanmai
Samadhi
Through total immersion in a single act
Zen Master Ken Yokoyama laughed.
He was reading a passage from Miyamoto Musashi’s A Book of Five Rings at the Zen-do Daihonzan Chozen-ji for the training in Budo. In the Book of “No-Thing” Miyamoto Musashi says “In the End, All Ways are One.” As Ken explained, after remaining undefeated in his entire life, Musashi gives us a short opening to how with the right awareness and total concentration, even the path of warrior can be “The Way” to develop oneself.
My first encounter with Zen was very young. I had just read the book Gödel, Escher, Bach given my love for composing music, math and the draw to game-theory and the start of computing. “Hofstadter discusses Zen koans. He attempts to show the reader how to perceive reality outside the normal confines of their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise.” It was much too early, and I had not had enough life experiences to be able to appreciate the sound of one hand clapping was not about the hand or the sound or the clap at all. It was about challenging our thinking about our mind’s way of falling into the trap of thinking about the role “I” play in my own mind. Or in the words of Eckhart Tolle “I could see I was looking at myself, so who was “I”?
For me the experience was in Omori Sogen’s words “Zen without the accompanying physical experience is nothing but empty discussion. Martial ways without truly realizing the “Mind” is nothing but beastly behavior.”
So what was Roshi Ken talking about?
In my own simple way, I learned the following from him: A spiritual path without an everyday practice is simply empty thinking – just like everyday work in business without following a path or principles to develop oneself is beastly behavior.
In either case, the path should lead to the same place.
This is the gateway for us “warriors on the business path” or the Budo of Work. Given we spend most of our lives in some type of professional work or careers – there is a lot we can learn from the Book of Five Rings or the Art of War. Not just the Art of Strategy, which is all about how to win externally and competitively, but the art of the way, or how to develop yourself.
In the beautiful voice of Robert Redford “In the end, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” And on the question on how does one get on this path, that is another post…
It was is the early 1990’s, I was returning to Esalen for a long weekend. The drive as usual was long and winding like a slow unfolding of your life itself. The view spectacular, the sky blue and the ocean reaching and touching the sides of the steep hills.
next to the kitchen, we were thrown into ways to feel the Chi or energy that the form of Tai-Chi aims to help you connect with. Movement after movement, it was not move your hands up, then in a circle and down – breathe in your hara, now pull the energy up, now move it around and now sink it down.Over and over. In all kinds of ways.
