Bernd’s account
If I could rescue just one thing from my burning home it might actually be the little pebble on which I wrote the koan (‘Who am I?’) from my first Zenways retreat five years ago, and which has been my companion in daily practice ever since.
In my current life phase (I’m 61) the intensity of work is reduced, and relationships have become stable, so there is more time and space for something else.
At the same time, I’m more aware of how temporary and fragile life is, from the experience of my own ageing, and from friends and family around me, where illness and death appear more frequently.
So the gaze lifts off everyday matters, and tries to see the whole of life, and to look beyond.
Here Zen practice has become central to my life – for insight, grounding, and guidance.
What I find very rewarding is to see connections to other disciplines. I practised Karate for some time, and there the Hara (‘The Vital Centre of Man’, as in the classic book by Graf Dürckheim) is cultivated mainly physically, as the foundation of proper Karate technique.
So it was really exciting for me to encounter the concept of Hara again from a spiritual angle, some years later in Zen.
A journey of discovery… for instance, I could never quite understand how the immediacy and simplicity of Zen could have arisen out of the complexity of Buddhism. Here I found the books of David Hinton (try ‘China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen’) eye-opening, tracing the connection of Zen with the Taoist understanding of the world.
Studying Taoism then gave my Qigong/Internal Martial Arts practice a new momentum, with an understanding of the energetic qualities of body and mind, and their connectedness to the world. Which closes the circle to Zen.
However, despite all the excitement of looking into different disciplines and teachings, and tracing their connections, there’s also the danger of getting into a somewhat shallow enthusiasm, based on reading second-hand accounts. So I think it is important to study at least one subject thoroughly, and with true dedication.
This subject for me is Zen, and I am immensely grateful to Daizan and the Zenways sangha, for the teaching and for all the support.