Notes from a Studio

Introducing my new bi-monthly online journal, Notes from a Studio, inspired by the monthly Studio Notes published by fellow artist (and cousin) Ann Yakimowicz.

You can visit her website here!

December 2025

The Dharma Gate of Fingering

The year is 1973, and I am at the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Muzyczna (State Higher School of Music) in Warsaw, Poland. I have come to Warsaw on a grant from the Kościuszko Foundation of New York, to study piano as a graduate student, having already begun work on my master’s degree at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana. In Poland, I am in the class of Professor Jan Ekier, considered the country’s best piano teacher. Getting into his class was a very lucky break, and I am happy and excited to be there. Poland in 1973 is still a communist country, although cracks in the regime are starting to appear. It is what could be termed a ‘second world’ country with shortages of consumer goods, long lines in food shops and chronic breakdowns of infrastructure. Daily life is a challenge to meet the simplest needs. Located behind the “Iron Curtain” and badly governed, it paradoxically has a thriving cultural scene. And the music school I am attending has extremely high standards.

I have been assigned a piece by Franz Liszt titled “Il Lamento” and today is the first time I am playing it for Professor Ekier. Some things to keep in mind here:

- all pieces played for Professor Ekier must be ready to play from memory from the first time it is presented at a lesson.

- all lessons happen in ‘Masterclass’ format i.e. all members of Professor Ekier’s class are present for the lessons of everyone else. There are no private lessons i.e. alone with the teacher.

This system is quite different from the format in the States, where all lessons are private, and occasional Masterclasses are arranged by the teacher at her discretion. I listen to the other students playing and I am blown away by the high level of playing. Over time I discover that these students have already attended both a music grade school and music high school, a completely organized system of music education funded and supported by the national government. I feel like a country hick who has been plucked up from the rural Midwest and plopped down onto another planet where every pianist is a virtuoso with years of performing experience. Keeping up feels like an enormous challenge as well as an enormous opportunity. In fact, my subsequent artistic development takes root in and grows from the pedagogical methods of Professor Ekier. If I am a good pianist today it is largely due to the methods of learning, memorizing, practicing and performing that I learned during the three years I spent in his class.

I play “Il Lamento” from memory at this first lesson as required. Ekier asks me for the fingering for a particular passage. My response is that I don’t really know, I just play the fingering that seems to be right. The look he
gives me tells me my answer is insufficient. In an instant I know that if I am to continue in his class, I must pay more exacting attention to the fingering.

At the next lesson, I present him with the score before sitting down to play the piece by memory for the second time. I have carefully marked a fingering number above each and every note of the piece, using a green
thin-point felt marker (I’m not sure why the green marker, possibly because in Poland at that time, the scarcity of consumer goods means that you use whatever writing tools you can get ahold of, and I just happen to have a
green felt marker.) When he looks at the score a slight smile of satisfaction appears briefly across his face. I have just gone through a ‘dharma gate’ although I don’t know it at the time.

Two concepts need to be explained here: fingering and dharma gate. Let’s start with fingering.

Obviously, piano playing uses all ten fingers of the hands in an infinite number of combinations on the keyboard. Deciding what combination of fingers is the best for any given passage of music is one of the skills that a pianist develops over her lifetime. It is equivalent, possibly, to the way a visual artist chooses exactly the right kind of brush to render a desired effect on a canvas, or a woodworker chooses exactly which tool with which to carve out the wood for the intended result. For pianists, the tools are the ten fingers.

In my decades of practicing and performing I have learned many things about fingering. The very first and most important is that all decisions about which finger goes where in a piece of music must be consciously considered, consciously decided and consciously written down. This was something that had never occurred to me until that day when I took up the green felt marker and carefully fingered each and every note of the Liszt
piece.

Since the comprehensibility of a piece of music rests on repetition - patterns of notes, harmonies and melodies reappear in a composition - there may be no reason to finger every note in a piece, as a repeated pattern will use the same fingering. But in 1973 in Warsaw, writing a finger number for all the notes in both right and left hands was a ‘dharma gate’ that I intuitively knew I had to pass through.

More on the concept of dharma gate a little later. Let me dwell for a moment on the particulars of fingering, by discussing my recent experience in preparing for a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D
minor for Keyboard and String Orchestra. Looking at this experience of fingering is particularly useful since the Bach piece is very ‘horizontal’: there are almost no simultaneous/vertical chords or harmonies. Instead, there are strings of single notes spun out in an endless array of patterns in the three-movement work. In contrast to concerti of later eras this piece requires the soloist to play with the orchestra from the very beginning of the piece until the end. There are approximately 1000 notes to be fingered in the first movement alone! That’s 1000 individual decisions to be made about what finger goes where in order to effectively communicate the piece to the listener. What the listener may be unaware of is that the process of preparing a piece such as this concerto for performance usually involves at least two months of preparation. This will be more if it is a new piece - as much as six months to a year of work to perform a new concerto lasting in most cases barely half an hour.

I had already performed the Concerto numerous times previously, althoughit had been some ten years since the last performance. So the piece didn’t have to be relearned from scratch, but it did have to be ‘refitted.’ What do I mean? As a pianist my technique - the how of playing - changes over time. And my body changes over time as well (I have been making music for 70 years now!) A fingering used ten years ago may not feel right as I
prepare for a performance now. Some might feel awkward and uncomfortable and need to be changed. Indeed, there are passages in the concerto (mercifully few) that resembled a puzzle that refused to be easily
solved. I returned to these passages again and again, trying out different combinations of fingers (and writing them down in the music, while erasing previous ones) until I found a fingering that worked in any and all
circumstances: alone in the practice room, with the orchestra in a rehearsal room on a bad piano, at the dress rehearsal in the hall where the performance would take place, and finally at the performance itself.

A fingering must be tested numerous times and be reliable in all circumstances.

In my years of teaching, I have encountered many students who do not understand the importance of fingering, and the concomitant importance of noting the fingerings chosen in the score. While they may say they understand this, when I look at their music, I see no fingerings noted at all. Even worse, they may be looking at music that comes with suggested fingerings added by an editor, yet they are playing a fingering that is entirely different! Instead of crossing out the fingering suggested by the editor and writing in a fingering of their own choosing, they instead just ‘play what feels right’ while looking at something different on the printed page. You can imagine the confusion this creates. And the student wonders why he is not making any progress in learning the piece. His whole neuromuscular system exists in a state of chronic confusion. He thinks he will just remember a comfortable fingering while looking at something entirely different on the page. Who wouldn’t be confused?

There is a phrase that I heard during my music studies many times: God is in the details. Divinity, or in the case of music, Beauty rests on giving minute attention to the details of the piece. Every note, every silence, every dynamic marking, every expressive marking must be examined. A successful performance is the accumulation of thousands of details, brought together under an overarching vision of the piece. This process takes countless hours. What a listener hears in a good performance is akin to seeing the tip of an iceberg - the listener sees the tip of the iceberg, while underneath submerged in the water is a massive, hidden structure. Here the ‘iceberg’ is time: A twenty-minute piece many mean hours of practice for an effective aural communication of the musical score. I often say that if I were actually paid for every hour of practice I put into a successful performance, I would be very, very wealthy.

The life of a developing musician is a pathway of attentiveness to details large and small. The musician learns to hear in ever more nuanced ways. Degrees of ‘color’ or the shading of tones, and loudness and softness of a
passage, the amount of silence between notes, how gradually to get louder or softer, these and other decisions are refined and developed over a lifetime of music making. One becomes aware of how the conscious choice
of fingering influences the musical result.

Now what does all of this have to do with the concept of dharma gate? In its broadest sense, the term refers to experiences in life through which one passes. The trick in Buddhist/Zen practice is to pass through the gate, to

‘experience the experience’ with complete attention, bringing the light of awareness to what is actually happening – not what we would like it to be, or it should be, or it might be but what it really is, right now.

Fingering the Liszt piece in detail, carefully and consciously writing down a fingering number for each note (even the ones repeated from a previous passage) was a way of bringing my full attention (in a way I had never done before) to the details of the piece I was learning and perfecting. It was a dharma gate to further development as a pianist. Becoming conscious of which finger I was using and writing it down deepened my awareness of the of the music at a granular level. Making musical progress was the result of observing the ten fingers of my hands in a way that was more conscious and detailed than I had ever experienced before.

Life creates endless opportunities for passing through dharma gates. I’m driving on the freeway, and someone cuts me off. A momentary wave of anger passes through me. If I am attentive, I can feel the anger like a
heatwave of tension. If I pay attention, I can catch the moment when the anger plugs into all my reactive conditioning - that nanosecond when a flash of anger becomes a burn of resentment possibly leading to an
episode of road rage with dangerous consequences. Notice I did not repress the anger, but with full attention felt it in my body, and allowed the anger to consciously pass and dissipate. It might not happen the first time,
or the second, or the third. But with attentive effort, I can learn to pass through the ‘dharma gate of road rage’ and drive on.

Another example: I am taking care of my three-year-old grandchild, and he wants to watch the same movie again (one that we’ve already seen 100+ times.) I can re-watch the film with impatience and resentment “why am I stuck doing this, I have 1000 other things I’d rather be doing, etc. etc. etc.” Or I can consciously experience my impatience as it manifests in my body (sometimes called the felt sense) let go of my resentment and be present during the precious fleeting moments of a grandchild who will grow and change more rapidly than I can imagine. And just maybe, by paying close attention to the movie, I might begin to observe details in it that I had not noticed before. In so doing, I have passed through a dharma gate.

Examples such as these can be cited endlessly. We enter and exit experiences, unaware of the opportunity to be fully present. We can be in a situation that we find challenging and our response may be not to ‘enter and pass through the dharma gate’ but rather to unconsciously find a way to avoid it. Modern life gives us abundant ways to avoid fully experiencing life as it really is: turn on a screen, plunge into the internet rabbit-hole of endless distractions, buy things, consume more and more. It’s no accident that our contemporary culture comes up with ever multiplying ways to distract our attention. Culture is response to a need - we want to be distracted, and presto, the entrepreneurial wheels of commerce spin out a new distracting toy.

Moving consciously through a dharma gate, as I did decades ago by meticulously writing numerous green numbers above notes in a piano piece written by Franz Liszt, led to artistic growth. It was an entrance into a
world of detail, a minute examination of a musical composition that created further horizons for musical exploration. And yes, more musical dharma gates.

May your dharma gates, musical or otherwise, be boundless and may your awareness be open!

September 2025

Welcome to my new online journal, Notes from a Studio (NFAS). I intend to publish it on a bi-monthly basis, i.e. every other month, sharing insights about the art of music and the piano as they come up in my work in the studio.

In this inaugural edition I want to share an extended essay written this past summer titled Ten Years of Zazen. It documents my decade of practicing Zen meditation. What does Zen meditation have to do with playing the piano? This is an interesting question that can best be answered by clarifying what Zen meditation (known as zazen) is not. Contrary to common belief, Zen is not the art of being calm all the time! Zen practitioners do get mad, get frustrated, fall in love, fall out of love, live the lives of ordinary people. What distinguishes Zen practitioners (or at least this is a goal of Zen practice as I see it) is the fact that they strive not to get stuck in any one state of mind, emotional reaction or place of being. The goal is to always move, never staying glued to any one position.

Making music is essentially creating the organized movement of sound waves travelling through the air. In this way, Zen is Music and Music is Zen. They are both the practice of conscious movement. In future NFAS entries I’ll explain how my practice of Zen has enriched my understanding of music and deepened my artistry at the piano. The essay is below and please contact me at peter@petergach.com if you have any comments or questions. I’d love to hear from you!

Reflections on Ten Years of Zazen

Note: What follows is an account of my personal experience of Zen. It is by no means a guidebook to how you, the reader, should do Zen practice. Rather it is just a finger pointing to the moon.

The wise man points to the moon: The fool looks at the finger.

Beginning

Ten years ago, I began practicing zazen. I had always collected and read books about Zen, as well as other books dealing with Buddhism and Asian philosophy. I frequently noticed that when I read books on Zen, I felt both happy and puzzled. There seemed no logical reason to feel happiness reading descriptions of an approach to life whose origins stretched back to the Buddha in the 6th century. After years of filling bookshelves with the topic, I decided that it was better to “plunge into the water, rather than read books about swimming.” I searched on the internet for the nearest Zen center to my home, and the Hidden Valley Zen Center came up. I made an appointment for an introductory lesson, and at the appointment time went to the center. Sozui Roshi (roshi is an honorific title for a zen teacher) greeted me at the door of the zendo. As we went inside, I noticed the tranquility and simplicity of the space. She explained how to sit, the susok’kan breathing technique and the various protocols of the zendo. She also recommended the two meditation postures of lotus and seiza (knees folded back). I was 64 at the time and found it painful to sit in either position for very long. But I persisted in trying to sit this way for longer and longer periods. After about a year I was able to sit in either seiza or lotus for a full 25-minute meditation period. Ten years ago, I was not flexible and sitting in these positions was a real challenge. But it is not impossible. It only takes patience and determination. I must admit that I sit only in half-lotus, not the full-lotus position. I am happy with that. (And yes, from time to time I do sit upright on a chair or bench.)

I first began attending the scheduled daily sittings. These consisted of two sets of 25-minute sittings. After the first 25 minutes Sozui Roshi would ring a bell, and one could change sitting posture while remaining in the same place in the zendo. After two 25-minute periods, there was a break of about ten minutes for kinhin, walking around the zendo single file with a chance to drink some water or use the restroom. Then the next set of 25-minute periods would begin, for a total of two hours for a meditation session.

Zazen

What exactly happens during zazen? Many people have the mistaken belief that zazen is the process of attempting to stop thinking. Here’s the truth as I see it: it is impossible to force yourself to stop thinking! The skin feels, the nose smells, the eyes see, the ears hear, and the brain thinks. These are the natural functions of a living human being. In zazen we are not anesthetizing ourselves, or attempting to ‘space out’, in order not to think. On the contrary, thoughts occur naturally. They are, to quote Joseph Nguyen “The energetic, mental raw material our minds use to understand and navigate the world.” Thinking can here be understood as the rumination, judgement and opinions that may be generated by and follow upon a simple thought. What might start out as a simple, fleeting thought grows a layer of Velcro, sticking to our consciousness and distracting us from our present experience. However, it is possible to remove the stickiness, neutralize away the Velcro so that a thought simply pops up and disappears, like you were blowing soap bubbles into the air and they just floated up and popped, disappearing into the sky.

How to do this? Simply by feeling the thought completely in our body, allowing our mind and body to join in a total but simple experience of the thought without judgement, resistance or hope that it will go away. Sometimes this is described as becoming aware of the ‘felt sense’ of thought. It is subtle practice, does not happen overnight. But over the years it felt as if a layer of grey thought-clouds slowly lifted, revealing the sky above.

After attending these shorter meditation sessions in the zendo for a few months, I was ready for an all-day sitting. This was followed by a weekend and finally the challenge of a seven-day sitting, known as a sesshin. This consisted of seven days of zazen for approximately 9 hours a day. Of course, the 9 hours were broken up by time for meals, a work period, a rest period after lunch and an exercise period. There were also morning and evening seizan sessions (individual conferences with the Roshi) as well as a teisho (a discourse on Zen thought delivered by the Roshi) in the afternoon. I discovered that the sesshin schedule with its restrictions (no cell phones, no internet, minimal talking, no shaving or makeup) was ideal for setting the stage for self-inquiry, looking deeply within. The sesshin, with its daily schedule, largely removed all distractions that normally pull us away from deep exploration into the nature of our own minds.

Herbert Simon says that “information consumes attention, and a wealth of information means a poverty of attention.” In the 21st century, with all our various devices/screens/opportunities for distraction, our attention is in inverse proportion to the amount of information bombarding us. Sesshin, by removing these distractions, allows us to refocus our attention, creating the conditions for a deeper and more fundamental reality to be discovered.

During the first sesshin, on the third day, I discovered that I had reached a kind of bottom in my meditation, and despite the admonition to ‘go deeper’ I was unable to break through this bottom. When I went into the morning seizan, I shared this with the Roshi. She said, simply, “Show me.” Suddenly I found myself making a gesture of stabbing my stomach with a knife and rolling on the floor sobbing. When I left the conference, I returned to the cushion and continued to cry through the rest of the day. It seemed as if every painful experience I had ever had, every sorrow, every loss, every betrayal had returned and brought with it wave after wave of pain.

I wanted badly to leave the sesshin, but I knew that if I left early - ‘chickened out’ - I would be unable to return. I stuck it out, hoping that things would get better. On the fourth day, I again wept through most of the morning. In the afternoon sitting it was as if the storm clouds raging in me were lifted, and a sense of tranquility emerged, like the appearance of a clear sky after a storm. I heard the sound of a bird flying near an open window of the zendo, and the sound was exquisite. The bark of a tree I walked by during a break was indescribably beautiful. The feel of the breeze touching my cheek was a feather-light caress of warmth. It felt as if I were wiping away years of accumulated grime from the window of my awareness, and was able to see, hear and feel with a new-found clarity.

Since that first sesshin, I have attended many others. Each of them has had a different tone and experiential feel. Each of them has brought new insights into the nature of my own mind, my conditioning and the concepts that I had unconsciously allowed to cloud my vision. Sometimes, the insights were immediate. At other times they came gradually, while engaged in my everyday activities. Sometimes I was only aware of the changes in my consciousness in retrospect.

In those first sesshins I would sometimes go into seizan with a fresh insight, and I would enthusiastically share it with the Roshi. On one occasion, Mitra Roshi said “Don’t make a rule of it.” As I reflected on this, I discovered that one of the tricks of the mind is to seek a solution and say “OK, you’ve found the answer, so now you can stop making all the effort.” Rules are a way of simplifying/streamlining the complexities of human existence. The brain is the laziest organ of the human body. It wants to always find an ‘answer’ so it can go on to the next thing and be distracted by the next problem. Making a rule is an efficient, but artificial way to simplify life’s experiences, allowing us to avoid going deeper into the paradoxes, complexities and ambiguities of real life. True simplicity lies deep under all of this; it is not found by making up rules that limit our curiosity and narrow our experience of life.

Conditioning and Concepts

There are two ideas I discovered in Zen training that became fundamental to my approach to zazen and to life in general. The first was the idea of ‘concepts.’ Webster’s Dictionary calls a concept ‘An abstract idea generalized from a series of particular instances.’ Concepts are like mental containers into which we dump an experience. I began to discover that frequently, I was not actually experiencing something happening to me in the present: I was dumping it into a concept-bucket!

The term conditioning refers to all the many influences that create a lens through which we view the world. Those influences are multiple: the language we learned as a child, our gender, our sexuality, our education, the country we grew up in, our socio-economic background. The list is endless. It’s as if we sit in the center of a transparent globe. The globe is made up of thousands of colored glass windows, each one representing an aspect of our conditioning. At any given moment, based on our situation, we may be looking through a particular window with a particular color. What we see takes on the color of that window. Zazen is a way of ‘shattering the globe’ - beginning to see clearly and directly, bypassing our conditioning. There is less and less preconditioned coloring in how we respond to a situation. There is a greater clarity in responding to a circumstance. This can also be described as not adding but subtracting. Zen practice is not about accumulating new knowledge, reaching an ‘increased awareness goal’, or acquiring a new bag of concepts. It is about taking away, not adding on. In every situation the question is “What am I adding here that could be let go of?” Subtracting in this way leads to simplicity and clarity, bringing a natural sense of freedom and ease to everyday life.

“Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying illustrating that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling create a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality with a steady stream of labels.

-Robert Lanza

Zen study is like washing a dirty garment. The garment is originally there: the dirt comes from outside. - Pai-Chang (720-814)

Radical Acceptance

Key to this growing awareness of our concepts and conditioning is an embrace of ‘Radical Acceptance’ – this is the steady, unflinching look at ourselves, our behavior and our actions without judgement, but with increasing clarity. The ancient Roman playwright Terence, c. 190-158 BC, wrote the following:

Homo sum: Humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.

This is Radical Acceptance – to see ourselves as we are, not as we would want to be, not at we should be, but just as we are. Sometimes this is painful. As Roshi once said “If I had a penny for every regret of a thing I had done, I’d have more than a million dollars.”

As I began to practice Radical Acceptance I noticed that while I was more self-aware, I was also less self-conscious. Self-awareness can be defined as a deepening clarity into the nature of our own being. Self-consciousness is a habitual concern about how I believe others are perceiving me. Self-consciousness is deeply rooted in the belief that I’m not enough, that I need to be someone else, that I need to meet the expectations of others, to look good, to play a role. Zazen can abolish self-consciousness – not necessarily instantaneously, but gradually, allowing me to just be, and to know that I am perfect whole and complete - just as I am.

It is important to note that Radical Acceptance does not mean acquiescence. If I have a thorn in my foot, I pull it out! I don’t say “Oh because I’m practicing Radical Acceptance, I’m going to just let the thorn be.” That would be both unwise and impractical. But in this context Radical Acceptance may be looking carefully at the distracting thoughts that carried me away from attention to where I was walking and allowed me to overlook the cactus in my path. It is this looking at the totality of my experience, accepting all of it – 360-degree awareness – that brings us closer to truly being in the present.

Fear and Anger

Over the years of deepening Zen practice, I noticed that the fraternal twins of fear and anger were gradually relinquishing their presence in my experience. I don’t mean that I was fearful and angry all the time. I mean that I noticed that a substrate of these two was operating in the background of my consciousness. Imagine the effect you feel when the power goes down in your home. Suddenly, you notice a level of quiet you weren’t previously aware of. And when the power goes back on, you notice the very subtle hum that seems to inhabit the walls of your home. It's like that with this awareness of fear and anger. Something I hadn’t perceived before, because it was so subtle, as well as so habitual, stopped – at first intermittently and then more and more. Experiencing this subsiding of the fraternal twins of fear and anger was a new taste of freedom. My body felt more spacious, lighter, more at ease.

The Necessity of Intellect

There is, as I discussed earlier, the mistaken perception that Zen is the practice of stopping thinking, that somehow the goal is to give up thinking. On the contrary, the goal is to enable us to think more clearly, to respond with more clarity, not to react due to prior conditioning. To attempt to stop our thinking entirely would be like trying not to hear, or not to see. Although both seeing and hearing might be human faculties that we may be deprived of and can learn to live without, living without a brain – the most miraculous of the human organs – is impossible. Zazen is a way of clearing away the fog of conditioned thought, of pulling out the mental weeds from the brain-garden, so that the truth can emerge.

Both the Hidden Valley Zen Center and Mountain Gate-Sanmonji contain extensive libraries of books about Zen. Like this essay, all this voluminous writing is an attempt, by means of the intellect, to point toward something that is deeper than intellect. In my own Zen practice, constant reading and studying of Zen texts and commentaries about them has become an essential part of my path. I can go back to a classic Zen text that I had read previously (Dogen’s “Shobogenzo Uji, Being Time” is a good example) and things that seemed to be nonsense then are now clearer. The reading has taken me deeper into my practice.

Life as Zen Practice

Ultimately, the value of zazen lies not in whatever insights might be gained on the cushion. It lies not in the pursuit or attainment of a goal called Awakening or Enlightenment. Either of these attained while sitting in meditation are in the end without meaning unless they are taken out into our everyday lives.

As I moved through these ten years of Zen, I noticed some profound, but subtle changes in the way I related to the world. There was less and less ‘stickiness.’ When encountering a situation, say a driver who cut me off in traffic, I found myself feeling a moment of anger, for sure, and using my horn if I needed to warn the driver. But I also noticed that these sensations and actions passed more quickly, and I was able to return to a ‘steady state’ more and easily. There was less internal monologue about ‘crazy drivers these days’ less rumination. There was less reaction to situations and more responding to them in a way that was appropriate. Here is an example from my own life which happened recently:

Practice is intimately reacting with life. – Shinshu Roberts

Practice is much more than when we do zazen. Practice includes all activities. It begins when we open our eyes in the morning and ends when we close our eyes at night. Everything in between is practice. - Kapleau Roshi

I was visiting my son and his family in their apartment on a Sunday morning. As I approached the passageway leading to their apartment, I received a phone call from my granddaughter. She was in tears, and she said breathlessly “There’s a man knocking on the door, and he wants to get in, and my Daddy keeps shouting at him to go away and he won’t go away, and the dog keeps barking and my Daddy keeps shouting and I’m scared!” As I got nearer, I noticed a man standing in the passageway leading to their apartment with a briefcase and a computer. I went up to him, introduced myself and told him I that I had just received a call from my granddaughter and that she was very upset, saying that someone was trying to get into the apartment, and that her Daddy was shouting and the dog was barking. He said he was working for the Census Bureau, showed me his badge, and said that my son’s address had been randomly chosen by the Bureau to complete a survey, and that my son was obliged to open the door.

I explained to him that he had just returned from a business trip, was probably jet-lagged and that lots of knocking started the dog barking, which could bring complaints from the apartment management if it continued. I asked if he could come back later or possibly mail them the survey. I also noticed that he was an older gentleman, who was most likely doing this work part-time to earn some extra money, and that quite possibly his income depended on how many surveys he successfully completed.

He reluctantly agreed to try again another time. I thanked him for understanding, and just as we were completing our conversation, I noticed that he was standing perilously close to a heavy iron support for the stairway leading to the apartments above. I told him to please be careful, and step away from the staircase as he risked a nasty bump on the head if he turned around to leave from where he was standing. I noticed that his whole attitude toward me physically changed. He seemed softer and more open. He seemed to get that I was looking out for him as well as my family. He pleasantly told me to have a good day and left.

This was being fully present in a situation that began with the possibility of escalating into an angry confrontation to no one’s benefit. Instead, it ended with a calm resolution for all concerned. This is a small example of Zen practice in the world: learning to be present whatever the circumstances and responding appropriately.

Is Zen the Answer?

I came to the practice of Zen with the idea that it might be the answer to many of life’s problems. Instead of getting an answer, I found a question. Who am I? Who is this “I” who is asking the question? Can I go deeper in my zazen? It has taught me to question every aspect of my existence, to question who I am in ever more profound ways. I have learned that it is impossible to ‘finish’ Zen practice. Regardless of the circumstances, Zen brings me to the edge of my experience not with an answer, but with a sense of inquiry.

I want to conclude by expressing my deep gratitude to Sozui Roshi and the sangha of the Hidden Valley Zen Center, and to Mitra Roshi and the sangha of Mountaingate Sanmonji. They have shown me the way, traveled with me on the path and assisted me in a deep and ongoing transformation of my life. My time on the cushion doing zazen is not over. The practice of bringing the awareness of Zen into the world will be part of my life while I am on the planet. One does not ‘finish Zen’ – there is nothing to finish, nothing to gain, and ultimately nothing to learn. It is always already here, waiting for us to wake up.

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margins fade for ever and ever as I move… - Tennyson

The study of Zen has no beginning, middle or end. It is about waking up, seeing for yourself, and standing on your own two feet. Start anywhere: eventually you’ll come full circle. - Thomas Cleary