The Zendo
"If you're in a 7 day retreat, you'd get up at 3 am and it's actually someone's job to get up and flip the lights on in all of the rooms and then you have 10 minutes to throw your robes on, wash your face, and brush your teeth and get to the Zendo, the meditation hall. So one of the characteristics of Zen in general—Rinzai zen in particular—is this sense of urgency. In Rinzai Zen, you're supposed to figure out how to be tranquil in any situation and a lot of the situations require that you hurry and run and be quick and not keep the group waiting. The goal is to respond to every situation, not the ones that are designed to be containers for quietness. In our practice, you come to the Zendo, there's a tea to start the day, and you get called down to the chanting hall for the chanting practice...The Zendo is the mediation hall, so after the chanting practice in the morning everyone goes back for meditation practice there. It's very focused just on the practice of mediation. It's very spare—there's just one statue of the Buddha. The environment in there can actually be kind of severe because people can get kind of intense. You know, you're working and making everyone practice hard...Basically, in Zen practice, you're never off the hook for practicing and things are ritualized as a way to keep you engaged. So the meditative awareness that you develop in the meditation hall has to be carried into all the other activities that you do and the meditation hall is sort of the laboratory. It's the most reduced environment and in theory you can have more meditative depth there with fewer distractions, but you have to carry it out. As you start to see the kind of effort you have to make in seated meditation, you have to keep making that effort no matter what activity you're doing and it comes into other activities. So in some sense, in the Zen Center, you're just doing everyday life. You get up, you meditate, you're doing meals outside of the 7 day retreats, you're doing work practice, you have to interact with people, and in some sense it's like an inefficient version of a normal day except for the fact that you have to keep bringing this meditative awareness in absolutely everything you do. This sort of ordinary day that you would have is actually conducted in a way to force you to be doing a sort of pervasive meditative practice" - Shika Dokan Martin