When I moved into the Zen Community of New York years ago, I’d often look down the hill at the train tracks that brought Amtrak and Metro North down to the city. AM and PM the trains were full of commuters; I felt happy not to be one of them. To be honest, I also felt superior in some way. My work, my home, my practice—they were all right here. We lived communally on a stipend, I wasn’t chasing money, not buying condos, not worrying about my career. Everything seemed simple.

I think of the old Buddhist nuns of Shakyamuni’s order, who wrote about how happy they were to give up family, home, and domesticity, shave their heads and go out into the world with patched robes and begging bowls. Get rid of society’s expectations and ambitions, reduce life to bare bones, and seek the truth.

Today, battered on all sides by news, entertainment, and endless communications, simplicity is very attractive, especially to us spiritual types. Can’t you feel some nostalgia for the days of one printed newspaper which you read cover to cover once a day, the home phone you shared with the rest of the family, weekends when, heaven forbid, you may not have much to do and there were only three TV networks? Days when you were bored?

Boredom may be going extinct, like the dodo bird.

Buddhists like to go on retreats. We sit, walk, eat, maybe do a little work, rest, follow the schedule. Easy peasy. We feel more grounded and at ease. Wash dishes? Sure. Sweep the floor? No problem. Sit for 8 hours a day? Ok. Take a nap? Great. Who wants to go home?

Our exemplar being the prince who left home and family in order to get enlightened, we, too, feel that a life full of Did you remember to pick up coffee on the way home? or We can’t pay the rent this month or I’m feeling sick today or Want to shoot some hoops? or I got to hang up the laundry or The pipes froze—that life won’t lead to any great truth, it’s too complicated. No wonder Shakyamuni left all that behind, and he even had a wife and servants to do most of it. But he soon enough realized that even with help, he’d still have to organize, manage, and supervise. And what was that going to lead to, other than therapy?

We like simplicity because we think it hones things down to the essence. That’s the famous word: essence. How else am I going to answer the question: Who or what am I? What is this life? “Go deep,” teachers like to say, as if somewhere behind all the details, opinions, stories, and busy-ness, lies the ESSENCE OF LIFE. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Some people also confuse a simple life with purity, as if the narrower your engagement, the fewer the relationships, the humbler the abode, the purer is your life. Lots of spiritual precedents for that, too.

Bernie used to ask whether we really wanted to be enlightened, because enlightenment implies the realization that you are everything and everything is you, so everyone’s suffering is yours, too. Who in her right mind wants that? But the attractions of simplicity and purity continue, and while these have some wonderful aspects, I sometimes suspect that our hunger for them may come out of wanting to take the back door out of life or stop the planets in their tracks.

I recently heard from Sensei Joshin Byrnes, head teacher at Bread Loaf Mountain Zen
Community in Vermont. As I’d written before, this Zen Community opened up Gather, a space for everyone in the community, including street people, who come in for food and drink, showers and laundry facilities, and most important, conversation with caring, involved people. It also turned out that next door was The Grove, a transitional house providing support for people on parole who are reintegrating into community as they come out of hotels and into more stable housing settings. Of course, they, too, were invited to come in and connect.

Joshin told me that recently, a homeless encampment was set up outside the Center by the very people who like to frequent its programs. It made sense for them to want to live close by to such a welcoming place with good food and good coffee. They called themselves The People of the Lawn. Naturally, they also connected with the ex-cons living in the apartments next door, making friends, hanging out, giving shelter in bad weather, storing belongings, finding love—and sharing drugs.

No drugs are allowed on the grounds of Bread Loaf, inside at Gather, and on the grounds of the Grove, the latter being a condition put in place by parole officers and the courts. But what was to prevent the People of the Lawn from dealing to the people in the Grove apartments? As those connections tightened, trouble started, and two ex-cons were evicted from the Grove for violating its rules regarding drug activity and sleep overs.

“The network of connections is wide,” said Joshin. “The town zoning board, our insurance company, the organization managing the folks on parole, the tenants at the Grove who were coming out of homelessness and wanting fewer temptations, our volunteers and residents who felt uncomfortable and at times unsafe, our neighbor who is a dentist and could smell cigarette smoke, another neighbor with dogs that barked all night at the noise in the encampment, another with security cameras that watched every move, the garbage pick-up people who wouldn’t take our cans because people were sleeping outside about 25 feet away, etc.

“The whole thing ‘blew up’ when a young man with serious bipolar disorder became violent, so the police got involved too. He wound up assaulting someone with a screwdriver and got arrested. Of course, the drama all played out at the Center’s Gather. The whole web vibrated. We call ourselves the No Barriers Temple, but we have to work with the koan: No Barriers and Good Boundaries.”

For Bernie, enlightenment meant that you perceive and experience the oneness of life. Do you think that leads to some transcendent, blissful state where all troubles vanish? When I heard Joshin describe all this, I thought that it’s a clear demonstration of the oneness of life. A meditation center offers social services, forming such strong connections with street people that the latter want to live close by, they form connections with a neighboring group of ex-cons, and what happens? A mess.

You might say: No good deed goes unpunished. But punishment or reward is not the point. The wider the door, the more life comes in, with all its blessings and misfortune. We try to do things as intelligently and carefully as possible, with respect and humility as Bread Loaf has done, and things will happen.

Zen is life, and life is messy. Take all the precautions you want, and still, I promise you—the bigger your mandala of practice, of life itself, the bigger the kick you’ll get in the butt (even if you win the Nobel Peace Prize). Do your best, take good care, establish boundaries, open your hearts and hands as widely as possible, but don’t think that you can control anything and that euphoric connection, maybe even enlightenment, are just around the corner.

There is a way to live simply, but is that alone the goal of a bodhisattva? I’d like to write more about this in my next blog.