The River |Kwai Zen Training Centre

              It's like presbyterian buddhism. They meditate in a sparse room, darkened and drear with one small wooden buddha sitting on a bare altar. You have to conform exactly to what everyone else is doing with lots of bowing at set times and such like. Every now and again there are little tinging noises to make you do something else. If you make any mistakes in the bowing and scraping, you are pulled up for it by the monitors.

              There is a terrific work ethic. I|was in shipping and packing (they sell stuff from a website) for nearly six hours on my last day. |If you are a trainee like I was, and it is the Ango schedule (six months of the year) you get no free time at all really. There is half an hour or so after lunch during which you will sleep since you are on the go from before four in the morning till nine at night. The folk who run the show do not seem to be so exhausted as the rest, but they do not have to do Body Practice or Art Practice as a group, and I expect that the spend this extra hour a day in bed.

               The worse thing about the place is the lack of meditating. They spend about four hours a day in the zendo, but they only meditate for thirty or thirty five minutes before the bells go and they all get up and walk for a bit. This is supposed to be walking meditation, but it isn't. They start slow for a minute or two and then walk at faster than normal pace. This means that they just can't sit. When they do sit, half of them are falling asleep due to being permanently knackered.

               But they do a week every month where there is brilliant intensive meditation, called sesshin. They are in the zendo for about forty hours in five days. By then, my friend had discovered that you didn't need to get up and walk like everyone else. So we were able to sit for two hours at a time. Nobody could meditate like us in the whole place!!! One senior monk greeted me at the end of this (you couldn't speak for these five days) with, "John, you are a monument to sitting still!!"

               So they haven't a clue. You can get everything from meditating. They are masochists as well!! The big stick folk. Whack! Whack! How can anyone get absorbed when that's going on.

               But they are getting Americans to meditate. I'll give them that! But they are into making offerings to spirits. I was asked to take a leaf out to the back of the woodshed and offer it to the spirits. I thought the boy was winding me up!!

                Just a month or so before we got there, the abbot had to stand down because he got into Peruvian hallucinogenics and shamanism, and screwing someone who wasn't his partner (the second in command!). If this is the best they can do ...

                I guess they are doing their best, but .... unless they start meditating they'll get nowhere. Still, they are very nice people and I wish them well. They are trying to adapt Japanese Zen to an American setting and it will change. They've only been there for thirty five years. The abbot they have now is a very good talker and I hope they do well under his leadership. Charismatic leadership is what these communities need. As far as realisations of non-self and emptiness goes ... well, they are doing mahamudra meditations really and they should get them, but I wasn't convinced .... the Venerable Khenpo on the mountain top an hour and a half away did convince me. Go Tibetan, I'd say. Just ignore all the crap they bring with it. Three years in retreat is what you need for a start if you want to talk to me about the juju!!