Me and Shelby went down the street to get noodles, then grabbed cookies at the convenience store across the street from the temple (they call it a ‘conveenie’).  The lunch and cookies were really delicious.  My latent psychic abilities are beginning to manifest, and they are telling me that before this trip is over, I’m going to get fat.  Yup.

Tomorrow’s our first day of meditation and classes, and I’m pretty excited.  It’s almost 9:00 pm, so I should get to bed soon, but I just wanted to write a little more.  I tried calling Dudley yesterday afternoon.  Didn’t think it was going to get through, so when it did, I was really surprised, and didn’t know what to say.  It was 2:00 am there, and he was at Dragon*Con.  I wish I could be in two places at once.  He’s having lots of fun.  Of course, about thirty seconds into the conversation I started bawling.  Its only been, what, a little less that a week?  We’ve been apart for alot longer than this, but I think the fact that he’s literally all the way on the other side of the earth makes it a little more difficult.  I can’t even do that corny ‘Maybe he’s looking at the same moon!’ thing, cuz of the 13-hour time difference.  Not that I’d do that, or anything.

After I talked with Dudley, I called mom and dad, and told them I was doing well.  I’m going to try and email them tomorrow.  We’ll see how that goes.  I miss them.

September 7th, 2010

Let’s see, where did I leave off…Sunday.  Okay.  Welp, it’s Tuesday now, and, once again, a lot has happened.  Issho-sensei and John-sensei happened, for one.  Meditation began, classes started, and I ate a lot.  The prophecy has already begun to manifest itself…

We sort of had our first morning-meditation yesterday morning.  At 5:15 am, we staggered into the zendo, sleepy and rumpled.  (I’m mostly talking about myself here, I was too dopey to actually notice the state of anyone around me).  When I woke up, I had one of those “WHERE AM I??” moments that lasted about a second too long.  Ugh.  Anywho, we staggered through the futon-folding and teeth brushing before we made it into the zendo.  We all grabbed zafu, round sitting pillows, from a stack in the outer area of the zendo, and filed into the zendo’s inner room.  The sliding paper-screen doors weren’t soundproof, but they kept out the flocks of mosquitos.  Despite them being made of paper, the room was surprisingly cool.  We each got our own tatami mat along the screen walls, while Issho-sensei took front-and-center.  Most of what followed was Issho-sensei introducing himself, and explaining Zazen.  We ended up meditating for about six minutes before doing an introduction to sutra chanting.

Lemme talk about Issho-sensei for a bit.  He went to Tokyo University, and got a degree in Psychology, followed by a PhD in Zen buddhism.  He joined the Soto Zen clergy when he was 29, and, very long story short, went to teach Soto Zen in Massachusetts.  I’m not ashamed to say that when I heard that a priest was going to be teaching us Zazen, I was not expecting anyone like him.  That’s been the story of this trip, really.  Completely unexpected.

I love Issho-sensei.  He makes me want to go to Amherst and take his classes (Harrison goes to Amherst already, lucky guy).  Apparently there’s a huge Buddhist community in Amherst.  There’s a lot of stuff in California too, though…stuff to think about.  In any case, Issho is sweet and smily and does awesome warm-up exercises and has a relaxing voice and speaks awesome English (uses words like ‘paradigm’ and ‘cerebral cortex’ and stuff.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to say those kinds of things in another language too…probably not.)

Anyway, his warm-ups are really awesome.  Unfortunately, my right knee is totally wack, and I can’t sit kekkafuza (full lotus), hanka fuza (half lotus) or just a regular pretzel (pretzel) without my knee screaming “NOOOOO!”  But I talked to Issho-sensei about it after afternoon meditation, and he told me to sit in seiza with a zafu between my legs.  It makes my knee hurt a lot less, which is pretty much awesome.  I love him.

“When we sit zazen, what precepts are not observed? What merits are not actualized?” Dogen Zenji

I like it.  And that fact that Issho-sensei practices it, and the clear and rational way in which he explains it – at least the way he managed to straddle the whole objective/subjective line made it that much more appealing.  But yeah.

The prostrations were also pretty neat.  At first, it felt a little strange.  I almost felt bad for going to such an extreme extent for a religion that I don’t actually practice/legitimately belong to.  The presence of the altar that we were bowing to made the whole process even more intimidating.  Maybe I’ll try and post a picture of the altar here sometime.

We lined ourselves up on the mats in the main area and gassho’d.  From there, we knelt on the floor and bent so that our foreheads were touching the mat.  We then bent our forearms and turned our palms up, lifting them slightly from the mat for a few seconds, then stood up and repeated the process twice more.  We then chanted the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita)  and the closing sutra, before repeating the prostrations.  Then we cleaned the rooms.  All-in-all, it was pretty neat.

After the ceremonies, we had breakfast, then class.  I don’t really feel like talking about class, but all of them were interesting.  I’m auditing Japanese Society – it’s way too interesting not to take.  Also, John-sensei is really cool.

When class was over, we had  orientation (tour of the school, how to use the university computer system, etc) then afternoon meditation (5:00 pm).  The yoga warm-ups were great, and the sitting was okay (only bad cuz my knee, but we talked about that after).

Man, I totally do not have time to do this, but I’m gonna go doodle.