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野々村馨 Nonomura Kaoru (1959-)

「食う寝る座る永平寺修行記」
Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple

Born in 1959, Kaoru Nonomura travelled widely in China and Tibet as a young man. He worked as a designer before his year at Eiheiji. After his year there, he returned to his design job, and it was on the daily crowded train commute to work that he began to scribble his recollections of his Eiheiji experience, and these scribblings eventually became Eat Sleep Sit, the author's only book.

PDF: Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple
By Nonomura Kaoru
Tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter
Kodansha International, 2008. 328 p.

At the age of thirty, Kaoru Nonomura left his family, his girlfriend and his job as a designer to undertake a year of ascetic training at Eiheiji, one of the most rigorous Zen training temples in Japan. This book is Nonomura's account of his experiences. He skilfully describes every aspect of training, including how to meditate, how to eat, how to wash, and even how to use the toilet, in a way that is easy to understand even for readers with no knowledge of Zen Buddhism. This first-person account also describes Nonomura's struggles in the face of beatings, hunger, exhaustion, fear and loneliness, the comfort he draws from his friendships with the other trainees, and his quiet determination to give his life spiritual meaning. After writing "Eat, Sleep, Sit", Kaoru Nonomura returned to his normal life as a designer, but his book has maintained its popularity in Japan. Beautifully written, and a fascinating insight into a lifestyle of hardships that few people could endure, this is a book that will appeal to all those with an interest in Zen Buddhism and to anyone with an interest in the quest for spiritual growth.
This is the true story of an ordinary man's search for meaning to life at Japan's strictest Zen Temple. It presents a detailed portrayal of everyday life at Eiheiji, Japan's main training temple for Soto Zen. It is beautifully written portrayal of every aspect of Buddhist ritual: how to eat, sleep, sit, bathe, dress, pray, making this book appealing to those with an interest in Buddhism. As well as the Buddhist perspective, Nonomura brings his own personal perspective to bear: sometimes sad, sometimes scared, sometimes amused, in the end enlightened, making this a story of redemption that will also appeal to general readers.

Extract :
From - Part One: The End and the Beginning

Evening Meal

After the evening service we returned to the temporary quarters and, carrying our cushion under one arm, picked up our set of bowls and went out again, holding the bowls carefully in both hands. Next we were taken to the Outer Hall, a sort of anteroom to the inner sanctum of the Monks' Hall, which we, with our provisional status, were not yet entitled to enter. Along one wall of the long, narrow Outer Hall are seating platforms fitted with tatami mats for the practice of seated meditation. Each platform is edged with a ten-inch-wide wooden area where bowls are laid out at mealtimes and food is served. This space is held sacred; touching it at any time with the feet, the buttocks, or the defiled fingers of the left hand is taboo.

On the opposite wall, away from the Monks' Hall, are windows cov¬ered with translucent paper to let in the light; beneath them are folding shelves to hold buckets, trays, and the like brought in from the kitchen. The Outer Hall also contains a number of musical instruments: at one end are a large drum and bell; at the other hangs an enormous wooden gong in the shape of a fish, suspended from the high ceiling; and on a pillar by the entrance is a wooden gong like the one at the Main Gate.

When we arrived, we each laid our cushion and bowls at our assigned place on the platform before carefully seating ourselves in the prescribed way. First you drew your cushion up to the edge of the plat¬form and set your buttocks on it; then, supporting your weight on your fingertips (using all but the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand), you hoisted yourself into place and crossed your legs, taking care that your feet and buttocks never touched the wooden edge. Under no cir¬cumstances was stepping up permitted, even if you could do it with¬out coming into contact with the edge. The practice of eating is such an important part of Zen discipline that you assume the same formal cross-legged posture for it as for sitting in meditation.

As we clambered awkwardly up on the platforms and settled into place, a small door opened and, one after another, in came monks bear¬ing buckets and trays. Without a word they went straight to work, draw¬ing out shelves along the far wall, setting down the buckets and trays, and laying out small tables on the floor. I watched them, entranced, until suddenly the sound of the wooden gong at the entrance announced the start of the evening meal.

The Zen term for the evening meal-yakuseki-literally means "medicine stone." Originally Buddhist monks in india ate only once a day, and the meal was required to be finished before noon. This rule was enforced with surprising strictness: past noon, monks were for¬bidden even to swallow bits of food stuck between their teeth or oil left on their tongue or lips. Eventually, in Chinese Chan monasteries the number of meals per day was increased to two, one in the morning and one at noon. In the evening it was the practice to place a heated stone on the belly to soothe pangs of hunger. This stone was called the "medi¬cine stone." Only the name survived to later ages, eventually becoming the accepted term for the evening meal.

In a Zen monastery the evening meal is not a formal meal, and so does not involve the sacred Buddha bowl. The procedures for the
evening meal and the morning meal differ considerably. Back in the temporary quarters we'd been drilled in all the fine points, but it was so complicated that we were thrown into hopeless confusion and no longer had any idea what to do or which rules were for when. Yet here we were, about to be put through our paces.

Five or six instructors stood planted in front of us with arms folded and eyes gleaming, on the lookout for miscues. In this tense, forbidding atmosphere, drawing on indistinct memories, we proceeded cautiously to lay out our things.

"What do you think you're doing?" Somebody was getting yelled at before his bowls were even out of the wrapping cloth. It was Daikan, at the other end of the row. Arms crossed, the monks all went over and glared daggers at him.

I managed somehow to spread out my kit and put the bowls where they were supposed to go. But I was stiff and clumsy with nervous¬ness, and when I took my chopsticks out of their bag, I almost dropped them.

Daikan still hadn't got it right. Now, with all the instructors lined up in front of him observing his every move, he was falling completely apart. "No! You're the only one who can't do it! Pay attention!" Another vicious slap across the face. Helplessly, he pressed his shaking palms together. "What do you think you're doing? Fine, stay like that till you die. If you can't lay out your bowls, you don't eat. Remember that!" As this little drama unfolded, the servers went quietly about their business,, oblivious.

Daikan wasn't the only one to earn the instructors' wrath. "No! No, no, no! Come on!" As the meal progressed, the yells grew steadily louder and more menacing. The sound of slaps rang out ceaselessly

"What's this? You don't want to eat? Fine, then don't!" Tenshin had mistakenly laid his chopsticks across his still-empty bowl. The servers passed him by without stopping.

Enkai had the opposite problem: miso soup being poured into his bowl spilled over the edge and ran down onto the tatami while he watched aghast, not knowing what to do.

Doryu got punched in the stomach and dropped his bowl.

Daikan finally managed to lay out his bowls properly by copying his neighbor, but from then on his every move earned him another slap or punch. In the end, he was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged down off the platform. As he lay on the floor in fright, the instructors kicked him.

Yuho, Kijun, and Choshu somehow managed to keep up with the servers, but their bodies were rigid with effort, their eyes wide open and unblinking as they hurriedly crammed food into their mouths and gulped it down without chewing.

For all of us, the acts of eating and drinking were carried out in a state of abject terror. The least mistake brought an instant cuff from one of the eagle-eyed senior trainees standing watch. The food had no taste; there was no sense of enjoying a meal. The pace was fast and it took intense concentration to keep up. Now the chopsticks. Next the lap cloth. You had to confirm each step mentally before you could act.

If you paused to savor the food, before you knew it, second helpings were being served and you had to rush to get your share. If you took time eating that, next thing you knew the servers were coming around with tea, then hot water. Even after we'd memorized exactly what to do and the routine grew familiar, there was never any time to linger over our food.

Eat carefully and you fell behind. Rush and you ran the risk of drop¬ping your chopsticks or bowl. Washing up was fraught with danger, too. You had to turn each bowl in hot water with one hand while scrub¬bing its sides and bottom with the other, and the slippery bowl was in constant danger of skittering from your grasp. When wiping and stack¬ing the bowls, if you got them out of order they wouldn't nest properly. I have to say that when I finally tied the wrapping cloth I felt intense relief, nothing more.

Our first meal using the bowls, conducted in this highly charged atmo¬sphere amid the unceasing scramble to keep up, was over before we knew what had happened. It left us in the state of mental numbness that follows extreme tension. Amazing feats of physical strength may be possible under duress, but the human mind, by contrast, shuts down to the most primitive, instinctual level. Extreme stress and fear had instantaneously frozen the minds of some of us, leaving us literally at wits' end, unable to do a thing In the end it was not with our minds but with our bodies that we memorized the compact and intricate form and motions, clenching our teeth as we were slapped and knocked about.

Night Sitting

We returned to the temporary quarters and sat in our accustomed places feeling let down and empty as if we'd left behind somewhere the ability to think. Nothing cheerful came to mind, nor could we pos¬sibly have worked up any plan of action. The one thing we were sure of was that this oppressive, stifling gloom would never lift; never in this place would we know the freedom-now a distant memory-of utter physical relaxation untrammeled by doubt, of simply stretching out lazily in the stream of time.

As if to keep us from wallowing in our woe, the order came quickly for us to pick up our mantles, which we had just taken off, and put them back on. Clutching our cushions to our chests, we shuffled out of the room again. The sun had long since set; the temple compound was sunk into deep, ravine-like blackness. Here and there the dim light from a naked bulb formed mysterious shadows in the dark. We threaded our way through the depths of the darkness until we came to the Walking Corridor. Located next to the Monks' Hall, it is a place for walking at a slow pace during the interval between sitting periods. Such walking is not a time of rest, but is itself another important part of meditation.

The corridor was empty except for raised seating platforms that had been set up along one side. Its emptiness made it all the more impressive. Dangling from the high ceiling was a bulb in whose dim glow the solid timbers of the walls and floor took on a beautiful dark brown sheen. There was something warm and human in the color, I thought. We set down our cushions on Ihe platforms and seated ourselves as instructed.

Dogen wrote out the method of practicing sitting, the heart of Zen discipline, in the "Rules for Sitting" essay in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. The rules are still strictly adhered to at Eiheiji, just as he set them out.

The study of Zen means the practice of sitting.

First, to practice sitting, you need a quiet place. Use a thick mat, and do not let in smoke or drafts. Keep out the damp. The place for sitting should be carefully and properly maintained. It should be warm, and not too dark in day or night. In winter it should be heated, and in summer it should be pleasantly cool.

Leave behind all attachments and bonds, and keep yourself entirely at rest. Do not dwell on thoughts of good things or bad. Sitting is neither contemplation nor meditation. Do not think of it as a means for attaining enlightenment. Rid yourself of superficial notions of sitting and lying down.

Eat and drink in moderation. Use your time well, and do not waste it. Like one whose hair is on fire, make use of every moment, sitting down quickly and devoting yourself to the practice.

When you practice sitting, wear a mantle and use a cushion. Don't sit on the entire cushion but only on the front, placing it under your buttocks. This is the way of sitting that has been passed down from buddha to buddha and from ancestor to ancestor.

There are two ways of sitting, the full lotus and the half lotus position. In the full lotus, the right foot is placed on the left thigh
and the left foot on the right thigh. The soles of the feel should be laid horizontally on the thighs, in perfect symmetry. In the half lotus only the left foot is placed on the right thigh.
Wear your robes loosely and sit up straight. Next, put your right hand on your left foot, your left hand in your right palm. The tips of your thumbs should be touching. Hold your hands close to your body.

Hold yourself erect as you sit. Do not lean to the left or right, and do not bend forward or backward. The ears should stay even with the shoulders, and the nose and the navel should be aligned. Hold your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Breathe through the nose and keep your teeth and lips together. The eyes should be open, neither too wide nor too narrow.

When you are ready to begin, take a deep breath.

Sitting this way, you become immovable. Surpassing existence and nonexistence, you free yourself from constrictions of thought. This is the way of Zen sitting.

At Eiheiji, the half lotus position is not allowed, and as the instruc¬tors walked around and observed us, they were on the alert to make sure our legs were folded properly.

Suddenly an accusing cry rang out: "Hey! Why aren't you sitting in the full lotus position?"

Doryu answered in a low, shaky tone: "Um, I broke my leg once, and I can't cross my legs the right way" "You what? Can't cross your legs? Where do you think you are? This is Eiheiji! You've got to be able to sit properly. All right, starting tomorrow, you will tie your legs in place. Is that clear?"

I couldn't believe my ears. The man had broken his leg! Was it necessary to go so far? That was when it finally sank in. This was indeed Eiheij i- the premier Zen training center in Japan, famed down the cen¬turies for the rigor of its discipline. Nothing here, including medita¬tion, bore the least resemblance to the fanciful pictures my mind had painted before coming. I was forcibly reminded that once a man sets foot in this holy place, he must devote himself to the discipline truly as if his life depends on it. At the thought my blood buzzed, and sweat trickled down my back.

In the stillness time passed quietly by, until through the darkness came the deep sound of a bell, echoing through the hail in great waves that seemed to reverberate in the earth beneath us and linger in the silence, deepening the beauty of the pervading tranquility. When the ringing of the bell died away, our first experience of night sitting at Eiheiji was over. We went straight back to our quarters, brought out the heaps of bedding from behind the sliding doors in the rear of the room and spread them out while the instructors yelled. Then it was time to go to bed. All at once the lights went out and the room went black. The far-off sound of a handbell signaling time to sleep gradually faded away.

The first night in Eiheiji. The day had passed with a frenzied momen¬tum. I'd been thrown into a panic, worn to a frazzle in body and mind.

Any resentment I felt, however, was directed purely at the sluggishness of my mind and the clumsiness of my hands and feet. Nothing to do but give a long, deep sigh.

Time and again I sighed and turned over. Once I happened to lock eyes with Doryu, who lay in the bedding next to mine. The oldest son from a temple in northern Japan, he had just graduated from university this past spring. The previous day, when we were scheduled to appear at Eiheiji, he'd flown in and gone not to Eiheiji but to a hotel in town. He'd gotten the days mixed up, thought he was a day early. When his family realized the mistake, they hastily sent word to him at the hotel. Without even unpacking, he tumbled into a taxi and sped over to Jizo Cloister, where he was the last to arrive. Despite this initial blunder, he'd managed to win admittance and take off his sandals before me even though I'd started out third in line, thanks to a booming voice out of keeping with his small stature.

He smiled at me somewhat stiffly and said in a low tone, "Some place, eh?"

Unable to come up with a suitable answer, I gave a slight smile.

"Think it'll be more of the same in the morning?" he asked.

"Yeah, probably," I said. "More of the same from now on." Even as I said the words, I hoped deep down I was wrong.

"Huh. When you think about it, there's no Saturday or Sunday here, so you could be right."

No Saturday or Sunday. The hardships of a life like this would be somehow bearable, I thought, if I could know that in a few days' time
there would be a respite. For the first time I realized that the pattern of life in Eiheiji was not interrupted by weekends. And of the stupen¬dously long time stretching ahead, a single day had gone by. I found it suddenly hard to breathe.

Doryu went on, "You know what a friend of mine said? That tough as it is in the beginning, after that it only gets worse."

"Worse? What happens after this?"

"I don't know. Didn't ask."

It would only get worse. I felt myself suffocating. I no longer wanted to think about anything, but my mind was flooded with worries. "Hey I wanted Doryu to tell me more about what his friend had said, but he was already snoring softly. Well, good for him. How any¬one could fall asleep so easily at such a time was beyond me. My dis¬concertment soon gave way to loneliness as I felt myself left behind, alone in the total darkness.

More of the same from now on.

Was this the life I'd gained in exchange for giving up everything? Was this what I'd been seeking? What would this way of life do for me? I didn't know. All I knew for sure was that thinking about it now would do no good.

Enough. My task now, I told myself, was to go straight to sleep. I closed my eyes.

Solving the mind-body problem?
July 23, 2009
By John L. Murphy "Fionnchú"
This review is from: Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple
http://www.amazon.com/review/RQXS6RTI1N3KJ/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm

"My Year in Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple," the subtitle explains. At 30, weary of the world, Nonomura tells of his year at Eiheiji, founded by Dogen in 1244. It reminded me often of Nancy Klein Maguire's "An Infinity of Little Hours," about five men who entered the Catholic equivalent, perhaps, the Carthusians. Whether Soto Zen or Charterhouse, a monastic life as its most ascetic, like marathon runners or Marines, attracts a few men young enough and driven enough to test their physical and emotional limits under extreme pressure.

Juliet Winters Carpenter translates this handsome 2008 edition of the 1996 bestseller in Japan. Nanomura in an afterword noted how he wrote it, standing or sitting, on the notoriously jammed commuter trains after his year; I admired the discipline he showed and the detail he evoked. Carpenter captures in English the quality I have found frequently pervading Zen practitioners in their prose: the poetic, resonant, evanescent, and tough-minded combinations that enable such as the monks at Eiheiji to endure considerable torment, mentally and spiritually, as they seek to detach themselves from cares by a brutal regimen meant to strip away their egos so as by habit, discipline, and sacrifice to find the purified, beautiful core.

Many natural descriptions capture beauty and harshness there. Snow falls "as if the sky itself had broken into a million pieces and was tumbling down on our heads." (287) "The monastery complex deep in the heart of the mountains was full of beautiful pools and shallows of darkness unknown to a city at night." (241) Zen seeks harmony, not conquest or overcoming nature, Nonomura reminds us; while no doctrinal discussions unfold within these sparely told pages, you do find insight by the setting into the extremes, not only of nature but of human endurance.

In subtlety, essence rests. The means is the end; denial and desire keep pursuing within us when instead, the monks strive to forget about self-satisfaction. They try to stop their longings, to listen to what remains afterwards. Difficult concepts to put into words. The year teaches him to "just sit." The moments follow each other, and it's useless to try to get used to sitting "zazen" or to get over the pain of it. The freedom in Zen, he finds, means "liberation from self-interest, from the insistent voice that says 'I, me, my.'" (292) In this, he learns the Buddha's lesson.

The nature of Eiheiji freedom, he sums up, depends on the beholder of it there. Shelter or holy place, the site sits there, century after century; "There is no compulsion to take up one view or the other." (281) Yet, when he sees himself bowed to in the eyes of first-year arrivals, or the gaze of elderly women whose sons or husbands died in WWII that come there to pray or sew washrags for the monks, who are charged with constantly cleaning their premises, Nonomura finds compassion, and humility.

However, he must sternly inculcate the ancient lessons of how to eat, sleep, pray, work, and defecate to the newest trainees. Those just above the entrants must force newcomers into shape quickly. The instructions for each task are exacting, and the boot-camp drill is told in fearsome and harrowing scenes. Nanomura came to the Zen temple expecting silence and meditation. What he finds during his first months: beatings, shouts, and punishments for the slightest infraction. But this is no masochistic regime, as the violence turns a "means of conveying living truth from body to body and mind to mind, a form of spiritual training and cultivation." (149) Out of such reversals, you as the reader gradually learn to follow Nanomura as he adapts to the long day's routine, and to the necessary willpower, fortitude, and understanding he adopts as he figures out that the hundreds of "hows" perhaps lead to one simple "why": "Ascetic discipline at Eiheiji suppressed our desires to the point that the divide between body and spirit stood out inescapably forcing us to face this dilemma head on." (174) The mind-body problem, at the temple, reduces itself to this rationale for its willing trainees.

A few comments for the version we read; there's comparatively little on the "substance" of Zen-- I get the feeling that for the Japanese audience, Nanomura probably assumed more familiarity with its integration into the lives of some of those with whom he trained, who were preparing (details seemed vague about how long or how exactly) to return to take over their family's temple appointments on the outside. I also could not figure out how many monks lived there permanently as opposed to trainees, and how many, like the author, who came their by choice and not as a career choose to stay at the monastery for life. Finally, a few more endnotes were needed by the translator, who herself may have assumed a greater understanding of Japanese life than many of the English-language readers, like myself, may have. A good companion to this, about running a Zen temple more along the lines of ancestral rituals than prolonged "zazen," is the account of the early career of Shunryu Suzuki in David Chadwick's autobiography, "Crooked Cucumber."