A Bow to Zen

The first thing you notice is the quiet – a hushed, reverent silence that pervades the conference room. The group is small, six people of varying ages seated on thick, round pillows, each facing a different stretch of plain white wall.

When you say this is your first time, that you’re not sure how Zen meditation works, exactly, a young, bearded man named Eden smiles. “I’ll find one of the monks,” he says, and politely lifts a finger to his lips – signaling shhhh – before opening a thick door and entering. But he doesn’t just walk in. He steps into the room, presses his hands palms together in a sign of prayer, and bows. Then he vanishes into the room.

The monk appears a few moments later. Her name is Ji Sen Coghlan, and her wholesome smile is warming, even on this frigid, snow-speckled morning. She guides you to a separate room – a sort of library, lined with bookshelves – and offers you one of the thick pillows. Her approach is simple and methodical: “You want to sit on the edge of the pillow,” she advises. “Cross your legs like this... it may be kind of hard, but you get more flexible the more you practice... try to have both feet touching the floor...”

The position is more difficult than it looks – you feel pressure where you legs join with your hips – but Ji Sen is encouraging. “Good! Now, posture is very important...”

Given how famous the lotus position is, it’s remarkable how little you know about it: Your hands don’t clasp, but overlap, left over right, with the thumbs pressing against each other. Your eyes don’t close, but your lids drop sleepily, along with your gaze. You concentrate on nothing. “Allow your thoughts to come and go,” Ji Sen says, her voice as smooth as cashmere. You imagine for a moment that this will lead to trance, hypnotized by her haiku-like images: Standing firm like a mountain, thoughts as soft as petals. But for a few minutes – a kind of instructive, pre-gaming meditation – you feel less entranced than transcendent. At Ji Sen’s recommendation, you press the tip of your tongue against the front of your hard-palate (to prevent salivation), and take deep breaths through your nose.

Ji Sen revives you with the question: “Do you have any thoughts about it?”

It’s surprisingly easy to describe – leaving your surroundings behind, not forgetting that you’re sitting on the floor of a spare office in the Mattress Factory at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, but letting these hard facts melt in face of more important matters-- like inhaling. And sitting straight. And exhaling. And continuing to do these most simple of things for 20 more minutes.

It’s also easy to understand how Zen can benefit its practitioners. Meditation has been known to relieve stress and help ease physical pain and lower blood-pressure. Whether or not you believe in Nirvana or the practical accumulation of karma, the practice of Zen is upbeat, open to all, and requires little commitment. And slowly – like the opening of cherry-blossoms – Zen groups are springing up in Pittsburgh.

Wake Up!

It’s hard to roll out of bed at 6 a.m., take a shower, grab a bagel and drive to the North Side – especially in the dark wintertime, when you’re further deterred by cold, damp air and sleeted streets. But the Zen Center of Pittsburgh strives to make it worth the pre-dawn journey: The Wake Up! meditation is free and welcoming, and the proceedings are geared toward first-timers and zazen masters alike. The groups vary in size, but the idea is always the same: To sit in a room and meditate for 45 minutes, until the gentle peel of a gong, when everyone slowly stands, bows, and retires to the nearby kitchenette for toast and tea.

The Mattress Factory has hosted Wake Up! for three years, allowing the Zen Center monks to slip into a second-story room and peacefully await the daybreak. The Zen Center’s official headquarters are located among the hills above Sewickley – a solid 20-minute drive for downtown Pittsburghers – and the North Side location is perfect for inner-city workers seeking some spiritual flowering before they dash to the office. For visitors with less hectic schedules, the monks offer a simple, communal breakfast and some pleasant conversation. Unlike a club or many temples and churches, attendance is never an issue: Visitors may show up one Tuesday, then return a few months later.

“We don’t talk much about the Buddhism aspect,” says one of the monks as she jellies her toast. “We’re more interested in the practice of meditation, getting people involved.”

Zen it Up

But many people do want to learn about Zen Buddhism – the actual philosophy, as practiced and lived by millions of people around the world. For a scaled, $80 donation, students can enroll in an eight-week course, where they can read and discuss Burton Watson’s translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra – a literary pillar in Buddhist studies. As an abbreviated alternative, the Center also offers “An Evening of Zen,” a workshop that introduces novices to basic Zen rituals (there is a lot of sitting, but also chanting, structured bowing, and the mobile “walking meditation”). And each month there is the reflective Ryaku Fusatsu ceremony and a World Peace Ceremony. The Zen Center is based in a cozy wood house, nestled into evergreen woods and overlooking rolling hills and stretches of lawn.

The matriarch of the Zen Center is Rev. Kyoki Roberts, Head Priest and founder of the Center’s umbrella group, the Order of the Prairie Wind (a second branch, the Heartland Temple, is located in Nebraska). Becoming a Head Priest isn’t easy: She has trained in Japan and throughout the United States and is a current board member of two major organizations, the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, and the Program Committee of the American Zen Teachers Association.

Zen and the Art of Spiritual Maintenance

While all of Buddhism descends from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, each branch of Buddhism differs from the others (after all, Jack Kerouac was no Dalai Lama, and not all Buddhists repair motorcycles). What distinguishes Zen from other Buddhist schools is “dharma transmission,” or direct teaching from one knowledgeable practitioner to the next – a student-teacher relationship that fosters a community relationship. Hence Zen gardens, Zen monasteries, and Zen groups in the United States – and especially in Pittsburgh.

The Zen Center isn’t the only collective in town. The Zen Group of Pittsburgh gathers for 30-minute meditation sessions at the Friends House in Shadyside. While the Zen Center practices Soto Zen – the largest of the sects, claiming about seven million followers – the Zen Group follows the Korean Kwan Um School. Kwan Um is a more recent development, founded by Zen Master Seung Sahn, who arrived in the U.S. in 1970. Simply put, Kwan Um is interested in the clear mind, or embracing the “unknowing” mind-set. Like most meditation, Kwan Um can be practiced alone, but for novices, the Zen Group’s guiding teacher, Timothy Lerch, hosts four one-day retreats each year, where guests can practice chanting and meditating and enjoy a vegetarian lunch (included in the $75 registration fee).

Down the hill, in nearby Lawrenceville, Shohaku Okumura leads regular meditations with Stillpoint Zen. Stillpoint is also a Soto branch, but its urban location allows easy access for city dwellers. Begun as an informal, nomadic cluster of friends, Stillpoint moved into a permanent house on 41st Street in 2001. Thanks to recent renovations, the house provides a peaceful setting for Wednesday night koan studies (koans are unanswerable philosophical questions, most famously “the sound of one hand clapping.” The Stillpoint group offers casual discussion of such queries). Stillpoint also offers retreats, such as last year’s gathering at the Franciscan Spirit & Life Center.

If Franciscans seem like peculiar compatriots for Zen Buddhists, the two ideologies aren’t that far apart. The Nebraskan branch of Prairie Wind, for example, holds regular services in a Unitarian Church. Because Buddhism is so famously non-denominational – even non-religious, in the traditional sense – the philosophy mixes easily with other flexible, peace-loving dogmas. And although each group differs from the others, they are non-competitive: Visitors may bounce between the different groups, learning slight differences in meditative customs.

Now that’s good karma.