“Zen is boring.” Those are the words of Korean Zen master Seung Sahn. The quote appears in the book The Intimate Way of Zen: Effort, Surrender, and Awakening on the Spiritual Journey by James Ishmael Ford.
Seung Sahn meant that the practice of Zen meditation could get monotonous. Ford picks up on this to make a larger point about how boredom and the fullness that goes with it can lead us down a path that results in spiritual insight and creative inspiration.
America used to be a Zen nation. A gigantic country, it offered people space in which to lose themselves—and find themselves. Henry David Thoreau. Jack Kerouac. Timothy Leary. Essential was an expansive boredom that could put one in a fugue state, receptive to the spiritual flow of the universe. On long summer days in the 1970s I’d sit on the front stoop for hours, eating a piece of watermelon, absorbing the heat and just watching the world exist. Was there skateboarding, concerts, long bike rides, baseball games, the beach, skateboarding and puppy-love make-out sessions? Yes. Yet there was also endless, cosmic boredom.
That boredom came with silence, which offered a path. In The Intimate Way of Zen Ford sees the silence as the doorway to something. Here he describes his first attempts at a spiritual practice:
What I got was silence. It took me a long time to notice that silence was one of my opportunities, perhaps the greatest of them. Part of the problem for me at the beginning was that I had no idea what I was actually seeking. It was some sort of inchoate longing, and the best I could articulate it was, Is God real? For me it proved just a slice this side of impossible to notice there were questions within that question. It would have been very easy for me to take that silence as there is no response and nothing to respond. In one sense, after all, that is what happened. I looked and found nothing. And, as they say, not the good nothing.
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