Life as a Zen Monk in Japan
I have been living as a Zen monk for the past few months at Antaiji, a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. I hope to stay for 3 years.
Life here is hard, simple, full and rich.
The typical day involves a 3:45am wakeup, 4 hours of zazen (sitting meditation), 6 hours of samu (work period), cooking, cleaning, eating, meetings and rest. The day ends at 8pm.
There are Japanese and foreigners here, with Japanese the primary language, and a mix of monks and laypeople. Everyday life is effectively the same for all of us, except that senior members have more responsibilities.
Zazen (meditation)
At the heart of life at a Zen monastery is zazen.
Zazen is best described as “just sitting”.
Sometimes zazen is insightful, sometimes painful, sometimes boring, sometimes blissful.
We sit for two hours at the start and end of most days, as well as for a full day once every 5 days. The most intensive period of practice is the monthly sesshin, during which we sit for 15 hours every day for 5 days.
Zazen is the practice of being with life as it is.
Work
The monastery is self-sufficient. This requires a lot of physical labour, and so work periods are often gruelling.
A typical work period might be trudging around a muddy field, using hand tools to soften and level the earth to make it suitable for planting rice seedlings.
Sometimes this is pleasant: "ah, how nice the sunshine feels, and look at all the frogs!"
Sometimes this is unpleasant: "I'm tired. My body hurts. What am I doing here?"
Either way, you do what needs to be done.
The rhythm of monastic life is so foreign that you are forced to surrender to the flow of life here.
This extends more broadly. You learn to experience what life is like when you are not constantly trying to manipulate each moment to get what you want, and avoid what you don't want.
Good in theory, hard in practice.
So hard, in fact, that for the first 6 weeks I felt certain I would leave. However, as I settle into this way of living, something changes.
Time becomes impossibly strange, beauty is more apparent, and there's a sense of aliveness, ease, and contentment that is difficult to describe.
That said, even the most profound insights from monastic life are immediately available in any moment, wherever you are.
Living as a Zen monk in Japan is nothing special. It's only one of the many paths available for a life deeply lived. I just happen to find this one very interesting.