I Can't Go On

    Every once in a while I get asked whether I think Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy. It’s a question a lot of people interested in Zen Buddhism seem to have at some point or other. I don't know if it matters too much whether you consider Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy, if you feel that it helps you in your life in some way. I studied Buddhism with a teacher named Gudo Nishijima, and he often used to describe Buddhism as a practical philosophy. One thing that distinguishes Buddhism from most philosophies or religions is that doing some kind of meditation is an important part of daily life for a lot of Buddhists. 

    In Zen Buddhism, the meditation practice is called zazen. The general idea is that doing zazen regularly helps us experience life in a way that's a bit different from what we're used to, and helps us to live a bit more in harmony with the world around us. It can create a bit of space where we can take a step back from our busy lives and reflect on or notice what’s going on in our life at that particular time. Gudo Nishijima used to encourage his students to do zazen every day, even for 5 or 10 minutes, and ideally to do zazen once in the morning and once in the evening if we can.

    I first met Gudo Nishijima about 30 years ago. I used to go along to his Buddhist classes and retreats, and I also tried to follow his advice about doing some zazen at home. If you start to do zazen regularly, you probably will notice that it makes a difference in your day-to-day life in some way or other. But it also requires a bit of time and effort to keep up the habit of doing it every day. In my own case, once in a while I’d go through a stage where I’d lose my motivation or interest in doing zazen. After I’d been doing zazen like that for a few years, I had a chat with Gudo Nishijima and told him I was finding it a bit hard to keep doing zazen regularly and that I was thinking of giving it up. He said it was no problem and it was up to myself to decide what to do and to stop altogether if I wanted to. But he also said jokingly that if I stopped doing zazen for a while and then decided to start doing it again, then I’d know that I’m a Buddhist.

    So I took a break from zazen for a couple of weeks. My life went on more or less as before. But after I had stopped doing zazen for about two weeks, I felt something was missing in some way even though I couldn't exactly say what it was. Life just seemed a bit more interesting when I'd been doing zazen regularly. So I started to do zazen again, and continued doing it since then. Later on it occurred to me that when I had been doing zazen on a daily basis I didn’t really notice what effect it had, and it was only when I stopped that I could notice that whatever effect there was from doing zazen wasn’t there anymore. That’s the way it seemed to me anyway, but it may be that it was just something I was going through at the time.