A tradition that has been thoroughly borrowed from, usually badly, and usually mixed up with the tea ceremony and the archery hall along the way. Twelve observations about attention, drawn from Zen and neighboring Japanese arts, considered alongside modern psychology — with the seams showing, and without pretending this is what Zen is.
Zen has been borrowed from more thoroughly than almost any other tradition, and most of the borrowing has been poor — a vocabulary of stillness applied to interior decoration and productivity systems. I have no interest in adding to that, and I am aware that writing twelve essays about it is not obviously a way of avoiding it.
So let me be exact about what is in here, because the exactness is the first honest thing I can offer. These essays draw on several things that are related but not identical: Zen practice proper; the Japanese tea ceremony; kyūdō, the art of the bow; and an aesthetic vocabulary — wabi-sabi, ma — that developed alongside all of them without belonging to any one of them. The Western habit of calling the whole cluster “Zen” is largely a twentieth-century invention, and a contested one. Where I cross between them, I say so in the essay rather than leaving it to a footnote.
And what sits at the center of Zen as a practice is not in here at all. That is zazen — seated meditation, done daily, for years, usually with a teacher and usually in a community — together with the precepts, the ethical commitments a practitioner formally takes on. Zen communities do not treat those as background conditions for the interesting ideas. They treat them as the practice, of which everything I discuss here is a byproduct at best. A reader who took this series as an introduction to Zen would have the byproducts and none of the thing.
What these are, then: twelve observations about attention that I find useful and that come from this cluster of traditions. Each one takes an idea, asks whether it holds up, reads it alongside the psychology where the two overlap, and says plainly where I am drawing a connection rather than reporting a result. Each one also has a section on where the idea gets misused, because most of them get misused in a specific and predictable way.
One source note. Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery is the book that made “Zen archery” familiar in English, and the scholarship on it — Yamada Shōji’s in particular — argues that it substantially misrepresents what Herrigel was taught. I do not use it as evidence for what Zen says. It still appears in four of the source lists, labeled there as what it is here — the object of the critique rather than a support for it — because the Western idea of “Zen archery” is part of what these essays are examining, and pretending the book does not exist would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Read them in order if you want the shape — it is a circle, which the last one explains. Or take whichever title describes your week.