The Single-Minded Way: Zen Wisdom for Christian Contemplatives by Richard Lehan

As I suspect is the case for many Christians, reading Thomas Merton first introduced me to Zen. Merton expressed his enthusiasm for Zen in his introductory letter to the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki in 1959:

Not to be foolish and multiply words, I’ll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.

Merton went on to write a number of essays on Zen collected in his books Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite.

Then there is the cadre of Jesuit priests who traveled to Japan as missionaries in the years before and after Vatican II. After encountering Zen for the first time, they practiced and wrote about it, including its relationship to Christian contemplation. My own interest in Zen deepened when I later came into contact with the books of three of these Jesuits: the German Jesuit Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, the Irish Jesuit William Johnston, and the American Jesuit Robert E. Kennedy.

Enomiya-Lassalle first arrived in Japan in 1929 and was later appointed the vicar of Hiroshima, where he was critically wounded in the atomic bombing of the city in 1945. In the 1950s, he became an apprentice to the Zen master (roshi) Yamada Koun, who was open to teaching Zen to Christians; in fact, Yamada believed that Zen would someday become “an important stream” in the Catholic Church. Enomiya-Lassalle subsequently became a roshi under Yamada, thereafter promoting in books and retreats the spiritual value of Christians practicing Zen.

Johnston spent decades in Japan, with stints teaching at Sofia University in Tokyo, and wrote several books on Zen and Christianity, including The Still Point: Reflections on Zen and Christian Mysticism. He also wrote a helpful introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, drawing comparisons between Zen meditation (zazen) and the method of contemplative prayer recommended by the unknown 14th-century author of these two treatises.

Kennedy, the author of Zen Spirit/Christian Spirit and Zen Gifts to Christians, was another Jesuit who studied under Yamada Roshi and later became a roshi himself. In 2022 I attended a Zen weekend retreat led by Kennedy Roshi, who was a vital 88 years old at the time. Before beginning our first zazen sitting of the retreat, he stood up and declared: “Zen has no story; Zen is just practice. Zen is . . . fresh air!”

In Zen Spirit/Christian Spirit, Kennedy writes that neither Yamada nor any other Zen teacher he worked with ever asked him about his Catholic faith. Instead, Yamada told him, “I am not trying to make you a Buddhist, but to empty you in imitation of your Lord Jesus Christ.” Kennedy adds wryly, “Whenever Yamada Roshi instructed me in this way, I thought that this Buddhist might make a Christian of me yet!” In the same book, Kennedy notes that while there is much in Christianity that does not relate directly to Zen, contemplative prayer is where Zen and Christianity can converge. Johnston makes a similar point, writing in his introduction referenced above that while there are many books on discursive forms of Christian meditation, not many teach a method that goes beyond thought and imagery into “the supraconceptual cloud of unknowing.” For him, The Book of Privy Counseling is as radical in this regard as any Zen Buddhist. “Reject all thoughts, be they good or evil,” the anonymous author advises. “See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God.”

Merton argues in his book Contemplative Prayer that absent the practice of silent contemplation, religion itself tends to lose its truth. The problem, Kennedy explains in Zen Spirit/Christian Spirit, is not that the teaching behind contemplative prayer has been rejected by the church, but that it is rarely practiced by the faithful. And this, he contends, is where Zen can be of great help to those Christians who desire to deepen their contemplative life. Zen is a way of contemplation that psychologically has much in common with true Christian prayer, Kennedy believes, and can be used without reference to its theological background. For him and other Christians, the explicit practice of Zen has served as the foundation of their faith.

I am still a neophyte on the subject of Zen and consider myself a Christian contemplative, not a Zen practitioner. But I greatly value the wisdom found in the Zen, including its attitude toward practice and insights into the nature of ultimate reality. Three Zen attitudes or insights in particular have helped me reimagine or rediscover ways to sustain and enrich my own Christian faith and contemplative practice.

1. Establish a contemplative practice that is single-minded and seamless with a daily sitting as its foundation

Zen emphasizes the primacy of practice. Ellen Birx, a committed Christian and Zen practitioner taught by Kennedy who later became a sensei (teacher) herself, highlights this core attitude of Zen in her book Embracing the Inconceivable: Interspiritual Practice of Zen and Christianity. “Many people say they are interested in Zen and read books about it,” she notes, “but if they don’t regularly sit they are not practicing Zen.” In short, Zen is an experiential spiritual path centered on a daily commitment to zazen.

As context, Birx cites Yamada Roshi’s description of the five phases of religious life: belief, understanding, practice, realization, and actualization. Yamada categorizes the first two—belief and understanding—as a faith-based spirituality. The remaining three phases—practice, realization, and actualization—are features of an experience-based spirituality. Many people, Birx observes, go no further than belief and understanding and are left with a spirituality that is primarily intellectual. “The emphasis in Zen,” she explains, “is on direct experience gained through the regular practice of meditation. Realization and insights gained through meditation are applied to daily life. This is called actualization.” Similarly, Kennedy says in Zen Gifts to Christians, “The goal of Christianity is to move us from a notional understanding of the truth to a vital experience of it in our lives today.”

Robert Jingen Gunn, a Christian pastor, Zen sensei, and Jungian psychotherapist, explores this theme in more depth in Journeys into Emptiness: Dogen, Merton, Jung and the Quest for Transformation. The first of the three exemplars discussed in his book is Dogen, the 13th-century Japanese Zen master who traveled to China to experience authentic Zen and returned to his homeland to found the Soto school of Zen. Dogen was keenly aware of the human tendency to distance oneself from a direct experience of life. Overcoming that tendency through practice, he believed, is necessary for enlightenment because “without your complete effort right now, nothing would be actualized, nothing would flow.” Consequently, Zen calls for the total exertion of the body/mind self into whatever is in front of you, whether it be “the washing of a dish or the pushing of a child out of the path of an oncoming car.” Zazen is the place and activity in which one learns how to do that. That is why, Kennedy says, Zen teachers encourage their students to practice “with all their might” and come to zazen with absolute confidence, “like a champion about to run his course.”

As the single-minded activity of sitting, Gunn continues, zazen becomes over time the “zazen of everyday life.” Shunryu Suzuki, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind explains that when Dogen said, “Ashes do not come back to firewood,” he meant this: When you do something, do it with your whole mind and body so it burns like a good bonfire with nothing remaining but ashes. That’s how Zen is embodied in daily life; not as an abstraction confined to the mind, but through acts of single-minded being.

This Zen principle has, in turn, informed my own contemplative practice in several ways. First, it has taught me the value of a daily contemplative prayer sitting. Not only does the sitting serve as a prayer refuge free from (at least) outside distractions, it functions as the generating heart from which contemplative living arises. The seamless interplay between these two contemplative ways of being (the sitting and the rest-of-day posture) also breaks down the artificial boundaries between prayer and ordinary life. The practice of maintaining a “rooted” posture also fosters the proper disposition for engaging with Christianity’s faith claims and participating in its sacred rituals. As Father Kennedy asks in Zen Gifts for Christians:

Would not the gift of practice, of being totally attentive, help us participate more fully in the liturgy and recall the death and resurrection of Christ more vividly? Why would we, who would not play a game of golf without some apprenticeship, come into the presence of God’s mystery, truth, and revelation with no preparation at all?

2. The concept of “nonduality” best describes God’s relationship to creation

Birx defines nonduality in Embracing the Inconceivable as simply meaning “not two.” This principle of “distinct but not separate” means that “form is finite; formless is infinite. The infinite includes but exceeds the finite.” Ultimate reality is “the One” and the world of individuals and things is “the Many.”

Applying the concept of nonduality to her Christian faith, Birx describes God as “the formless infinite and everything in the universe is a manifestation or expression of the living God . . . We are distinct from God but not separate.” She continues, “The realization of our true identity [is] in oneness with ultimate reality or God.” Turning to Scripture, she notes that Jesus expressed nonduality in his proclamation that “the Father and I are one,” praying for his disciples “that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (John 17:22-23).

The 15th-century German Catholic philosopher Nicholas of Cusa had his own poetic formulation for the Divine’s relationship to creation: “God is the enfolding (complicans) of all things in that all things are in Him; and He is the unfolding (explicans) of all things in that He is in all things.” As Thomas E. Hosinski, CSC, underlines in his book The Image of the Unseen God: Catholicity, Science, and Our Evolving Understanding of God, “Nicholas is quite clear that universe of finite beings is not identical with God and can never exhaust the infinite being of God,” an orthodox Christian view now known as panentheism. Johnston, in turn, cites a longstanding principle of Teilhard de Chardin that further illuminates the paradox that “all is one and not one”: “In the realm of personality, union differentiates,” Teilhard explains, “When I am most united with God, I am most myself.”

Taking seriously the nondualist character of God’s relationship to humans and creation can reorient one’s contemplative prayer experience and ways of relating to others and the world. Prayer is no longer about petitioning a God who resides somewhere “out there”; it’s about opening oneself up to an intimate, ever-present God who is the ground of our being. Since everyone and everything else has the same nondualist relationship with God, this spiritual truth should manifest itself in fellowship and solidarity with others and in stewardship for creation as a whole. Contemplatives across both traditions are called to be models for enacting this underlying oneness and unity in their daily lives.

3. A posture of “not knowing” is the most receptive way to encounter God in contemplative prayer

The emphasis in Zen on “not knowing,” Birx explains in Embracing the Inconceivable, “is not the opposite of knowing. It is not ignorance. It is complete openness to what is right before you, not limited by any concept or thought. Zen urges us to experience that which is beyond knowing and not knowing.” Christianity has its own version of “not knowing.” An epigraph from a sermon of Saint Augustine included in Vincent Pizzuto’s book Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life succinctly captures the humility required for this endeavor:

We are talking about God; so why be surprised if you cannot grasp it? I mean, if you can grasp it, it isn’t God. Let us rather make a devout confession of ignorance, instead of a brash profession of knowledge.

Birx goes on to distill her own synthesis of the Zen and Christian concepts of “not knowing,” beginning with theologian Roger Haight’s description of God as “personal, loving, and present to all, as revealed through Jesus’ life and teachings,” and, at the same time, an “infinite, unimaginable, and incomprehensible reality.” For Birx, “knowing God intimately and not knowing the inconceivable God are both embraced.” The Christian apophatic tradition, Kennedy points out in Zen Spirit/Christian Spirit, teaches us that “all of our words, images, metaphors, and dogmas break down before the mystery [of God] that grasps us.” This realization brings to mind another moment from my Zen retreat with Kennedy Roshi. “God is such an immensity,” he said with real feeling. “How could you not be silent before God? For a person of faith, silence becomes a form of worship.”

The author of The Book of Privy Counseling offers more unadorned advice on the matter: Keep yourself poised in the deep center of your spirit. Resist the temptation to indulge in spiritual thoughts no matter how sublime. Reject “all thoughts about what I am and what God is in order to be conscious only that I am and that God is.” The focus is not on acquiring knowledge about God but on being led to a “bare” state of consciousness that experiences God directly. Thus, the author urges, “Go after the experience rather than the knowledge. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.”

Fittingly, the closing nugget of Zen wisdom is from Dogen. Think of your practice as “one continuous mistake,” he said, a lifelong process of “adding error to error.” Described as a “beautiful expression of the dialectic of Zen,” Dogen considered his dictum to be a form of encouragement. He believed that those who experience the most difficulty in their practice have the greatest potential to flourish in it over time—but only if one is willing to learn from their mistakes and persevere with single-minded effort. Zen insists that practitioners stand firm in their commitment in spite of all the setbacks that litter the way, a bracing reminder to Christian contemplatives as well. ♦

Richard Lehan is an essayist and fiction writer living in Massachusetts.