Grad School is Zen

Below is a message I sent to H-Grad in March 1996.  I place it here not so much for the original post as to show you the followup reply I got from Valija Evalds, which is wonderfully incisive and succinct.

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Original posting

Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996
To: h-grad@msu.edu
From: Dave Burrell 
Subject: Grad school is Zen

Like many of you, I suppose, I often find myself trying to justify this graduate school experience to myself.  I'm a first year Ph.D. student but often find myself unsure that continuing makes sense.  But today I received a little bit of enlightenment in an unusual place.

Reading a book review of Lawrence Shainberg's Ambivalent Zen: A Memoir in the Chicago Tribune, I got the distinct impression that what I'm going through isn't grad school at all, but rather Zen.  Just replace the word Zen with grad school or doctoral training; you may see what I mean...

Zen Buddist training is a powerful physical discipline attended by unpredictable mental states: anxiety, self-contempt, exhilaration, the prideful 'stink of enlightenment,' even  the voices, lights, and tricky hallucinations known in Japanese as 'makyo.'  The discipline of Zen meditation requires you to sit still through them all.

Everything but the voices, lights, and tricky hallucinations seems right on. (I haven't gotten those yet.)

Zen hurts.  Zen is boring.  Zen is static. Zen training removes you from ordinary life and routine; it strands you on your meditation cushion for long, repetitive periods whose senselessness eventually gnaws at your resolve no matter how eagerly you were drawn to the exotic or aesthetic qualities that give Zen its gateway appeal. 

Feeling the senselessness of zazen, the "Why am I doing this?" that troubles your mind sooner or later is one of its necessary spiritual stages.

We're all traveling along this path to enlightenment.

I remember what I wanted to speak to him [the master] about - a feeling of disorientation, bewilderment verging on panic, which has lately come upon me whenever I sit in meditation.  Nothing makes sense anymore, I tell him, and Zen makes less sense than anything. 'Yes! Yes!' he cries. 'Very nice.  You making progress, Larry-san!'

Yes! Yes!  I am making very nice progress, then!  I am not in grad school; I am in training for Zen.  It's all starting to make sense...

I must return to my mat and meditate.  Wisdom is coming shortly, I think, and I want to be there when it arrives.

Dave Burrell
University of Chicago

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Valija Evalds' terrific reply
 

Dave,

my friend sam just forwarded me your zen message
and i found it most enlightening
i am also a first year phd student
and i was just saying to another student here
who also meditates:
grad school is just like meditation
(i was thinking particularly of vipassana)
you sit there on your mat
and you start to feel your legs fall asleep
and then they start to hurt
and then you think they're going to fall off
your back goes into spasms
your whole body is in pain
but you just sit there without moving
and sure enough, just like they say
eventually it passes
and you realize the world is bigger than your agony
well graduate school is just like that
only instead of an hour
it lasts five years