Zen and the Big Questions
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By Jũken Zach Fehst
As a philosophically inclined Sagittarius, I used to be passionately concerned about the Big Questions: the meaning of life, the existence of a creator, fate and free will, the afterlife. I became interested in religion because I thought it would help me resolve these questions. I figured that once I found the answers, I would be able to simply accept them, and salve my restless spirit. Naive, sure—and yet, in a way, that’s exactly what happened.
Many of the Big Questions have resolved for me. Mostly this is because I’ve accepted that such questions are essentially unanswerable (and I’ve become increasingly okay with that), but it’s also true that studying Buddhism over the last twenty years—and a commitment to Zen practice and daily zazen for the last eleven or so—have helped me to come to something approaching clarity about at least a few Big Questions.
More to the point (and isn’t getting to the point what Zen’s about, after all?), I’ve noticed that as the years pass, my engagement with the Big Questions has largely shifted from the abstract to the personal. Less, How is the world to be understood? More, Given that I currently understand the world in this particular way, how ought I to live? For me, this means that the questions that have come to the fore concern things like my livelihood, my relationships, my responsibilities to communities large and small, priest ordination, vegetarianism, alcohol use, and others.
These are still big questions, but they are big questions for me. You have your own that are unique to you. One of Zen’s great gifts to the world has been this insistence on the importance of the immediate and practical over the grand and abstract. Somewhere along the line I’ve internalized that the Truth is not something that can be known by the intellect, but something that must be experienced through living life—and since the only place where life can be lived is in the present, it’s not a mistake to point one’s energy there. (One might say it’s a mistake not to).
For me, a significant piece of experiencing the Truth through living life involves daily practices and rituals. Sitting zazen, of course. But also lighting candles and incense in offering at my home altar, invoking and honoring ancestors, reciting gathas and sutras, and so on. Time was, I used to the find such behavior superstitious. As I’ve grown spiritually, I find that far from being mind-dulling opiates, these things serve as needed mnemonic devices, like little notes sent from the past to remind the present me of the way I wish to live. I don’t just wake up ready to be a living embodiment of compassion, reverence, humility, awe, kindness, and patience (do you??), so I have to scaffold these reminders into my day to prevent the path-of-least-resistance autopilot from taking control. I need these reminders every day.
Actually, no: not every day. I think it’s important to take a day off from these rituals on the regular (for me this is usually Saturday). A little pause helps prevent them from going stale and losing their power—in which case they really do become superstitious, because the intention goes out of them. When the heart of sincere devotion is lost and religious activity becomes rote, the slide into dogmatism begins. Which is very un-Zen. One of the things I love most about our tradition is that it’s the only religion whose central and uncompromising dogma is to accept nothing as dogma. “In the ultimate freedom,” says the ancient Chinese poem Xin Xin Ming, “there are no doctrines.” So out go the Big Questions, and in come the big questions for you. In Zen, any definition or explanation of the Ultimate Truth is necessarily false. Instead, the real Truth is the way we live our lives.
After first encountering the Dharma and beginning to meditate while living in South Korea in 2006, Jūken Zach Fehst entered the path of formal practice in 2014 as a member of Brooklyn Zen Center, and received jukai at Clouds in Water in 2022. He has worked as an actor and writer, and is now a public high school teacher and musical hobbyist. He has an abiding interest in all forms of spirituality and religion, and holds a Master in Theological Studies from Boston University. He is currently exploring the priest path at Clouds.