Zen in the Cloud: A Meditation Group for Beginners in Poland

An Old Question, an Old Controversy: How to Teach the Dharma

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 locked us up in our small homes. A large number of people, however, had access to the internet, an infinite digital window to the world. It turned out that it’s possible to practice in giant virtual dharma rooms spreading from one continent to another. In the course of two years the mahasangha developed various ways of spreading the dharma on the internet.

The question of how to transmit the legitimate teaching was an important concern from the very first Buddhist council, after Buddha’s death. There, Ananda recited the 84,000 authentic discourses of what would later become the Pali Canon. Nonetheless, since nobody had asked the Buddha which of the offenses of monastic code were less important, some accused Ananda of distorting the true dharma.

Controversies such as this are not limited to ancient Buddhism. When the Latin version of the Tridentine Mass was translated into national languages, Christian conservatives also worried that this would destroy the sacred essence. How fragile this sacred essence was considered to be! How common that changes such as these cause controversy.

When I went to Korea in 2010, it was the first year when haeng-jas, candidates to monastic life, had to memorize the Korean version of Heart Sutra along with the Sino-Korean one. Since fewer and fewer young Koreans can read and understand Chinese characters, this decision was a matter of making the Buddha’s message more widely accessible. This is how we adapt and survive. During the pandemic, we had to adapt to the internet. This has again raised the question of how best to engage with and instruct new students. It’s also provided an opportunity to inquire into our connection with all students, and with the sangha.

A New Inquiry, a New Approach

This inquiry had several components. It began prior to the pandemic and prior to the European sangha engaging with these questions in an intentional, structured way. In 2016, the North American sangha looked at the needs of millennials and whether the current approach to practice and teaching was meeting these needs. This culminated in a millennial dharma report, published in 2016. Among other things, it noted, “Technology permeates nearly every facet of millennial existence. As a school, we must understand this and meet millennials where they are.” Inspired by this document in 2018, the European sangha organized its first convention, which focused on adapting Zen Master Seung Sahn’s message to the twenty-first century. A survey from over a hundred students delineated four areas to work on:

·       New forms of together action for community building

·       Zen practice for beginners

·       More education

·       Empowerment of students

As we were formulating how to put these recommendations into practice, the pandemic hit. This also forced us to consider how the student–teacher relationship, the sangha, and beginners might be engaged with online, rather than in person. With this in mind, at the Warsaw Zen Center in Falenica we began to consider how we had been engaging beginners, and whether there would be a different way that strengthened the connection.

Revisiting How to Engage Beginners: A Tenfold Increase in Membership

For about ten years at the Warsaw Zen Center in Falenica we had well over a hundred people per year visiting us for the first time, with only three to four new people becoming regular members. This means that only 4 percent of newcomers stayed with us. During the pandemic, we worked with Zen Master Joeng Hye (Andrzej Piotrowski) to develop an approach that we ended up calling Zen in the Cloud. We formed two long-term meditation groups for beginners, one in 2021 and one in 2022. We based the structure on the four priorities listed above. Each group had about fifteen people, and eight participants from each group are still members today. 

This means that what we feared—that online practice would result in a watered-down version of “stay-at-home, pain-free” dharma—led to 50 percent of newcomers practicing with us live, both daily and during retreats. This is more than ten times the participation we had before. What follows is a description of the design we came up with and the rationale for it.

Horizontal Structure and Circle Style

The Zen in the Cloud groups, as mentioned, were formed according to the four criteria outlined by the European convention. We designed these groups for beginners after long discussions with Zen Master Joeng Hye about the most effective methods. The younger generation is used to a certain bottom-up approach to education, in which they personally engage in emotionally stimulating projects. They value peer learning more than lectures, and they value sharing their mistakes and group wisdom among themselves. This is why we decided on a Zen circle format—or rather a Zen square, since it was taking place on Zoom. We opened up a Facebook group as well for daily exchanges, motivating each other and sharing Zen memes. Each group was led by a senior dharma teacher or a monastic. We met with our Zen masters once every month. In 2021 we met for ninety minutes once a week for six months, and in 2022 we did that for three months with similar results.

Each meeting consisted of

·       thirty minutes of practice reports,

·       thirty minutes of meditation,

·       thirty minutes of discussing meditation methods or Zen Master Seung Sahn’s key teaching phrases, and

·       establishing homework, including daily practice and weekly study texts.

Laying the Foundation for a Practice That Can Mature Well

Obviously the nature of the Zen practice is based on the student–teacher relationship, which can foster a true, nondual encounter beyond thinking. Teaching online how to manage the psychophysiological energy of such a meeting didn’t seem possible. However, a beginners’ class is not yet a mature form of training, but rather an introduction to the fundamentals. 

We designed the introduction to keep in mind the barriers that beginners commonly face. It’s simplified in order to help beginners overcome these barriers, many of which are either psychological or practical in nature: shyness, introversion, or lack of motivation, or lack of time or transportation. Three months seemed enough for the small sangha to develop and form a group of peers—the class of 2021 and 2022. Among their written feedback one person said, “Without this group, I wouldn’t have courage to visit the temple.” Another remarked, “Before, I felt alienated, and the sangha of old friends seemed very hermetic and only for the advanced ones.” 

Starting from Correct View and Don’t Know—Teaching the Fundamentals

Most formats of modern skill-learning courses, from stress reduction to skydiving, consist of theory and practice. In our case it meant that we decided to offer more structured and planned education rather than relying on individual, random readings and intuitive experiments with meditation methods.

When I told this to two experienced Zen masters, they said, “We never knew with Zen Master Seung Sahn what the structure of our training would be like. We always just started from don’t know! And you start from thinking!” And indeed, we started from thinking—clear Buddhist thinking, called correct view. Participants learned about the four noble truths, the eightfold path, and the chain of dependent origination. They are then systematically, one by one, introduced to basic phenomena Zen Master Seung Sahn distinguished in practice. He spoke of various kinds of minds operating on different levels of practice:

·      Lost mind

·      Wandering/holding/loose mind

·      Checking mind

·      Thinking mind

·      Try mind

·      One-pointed mind

·      Not moving mind

·      One mind

·      Mind clear like space

·      Mirror mind

·      Before thinking mind

·      Stillness and bliss mind

·      Shining mind

·      No mind

·      Freedom mind

·      Clear mind of truth

·      Clear mind of function

Choosing a Suitable Method for Your Stage of Practice

The practice part of the course was based on the meditation techniques in the Dharma Mirror. We practiced for two to three weeks with each of them. In the end, most practitioners knew which technique suited them best. One person commented, “Counting the breaths is like counting the trees during a forest walk!” Another said, “Why would I think about numbers when my mind is silent?” A third person remarked, “Only counting the breaths to the very, very end of the out-breath helped me to silence my internal noise.”

Following Zen Master Joeng Hye’s teaching direction, we put a lot of emphasis on distinguishing between samadhi and prajna, to build both the calming and clear-seeing aspects of meditation. In this way we could avoid teaching people only to relax and accept the thought-stream while sitting, or to focus in too narrow a manner and suppress thoughts and emotions.

I extracted the meditation instructions from Zen Master Seung Sahn’s books and got about two pages of text all together about the breath, posture, tantien (or center), energy going up to the chest or head, plus the description of three elements of Zen method. Zen Master Seung Sahn stresses all the time that “don’t know” is the heart of the Linji (Rinzai), Caodong (Soto), and Chogye schools. However, after many discussions, we realized that it’s important to divide his techniques into those suited for beginners and those suited for mature practitioners, like our Dharma Mirror does.

Building a More Precise Map of Steps and Right Effort

We resolved that for beginners, the more suitable methods are the ones associated with more effort and one-pointed attention on a concrete meditation object. The Dharma Mirror calls these methods breath meditation (paying attention to the breath) and mantra meditation (inwardly reciting “clear mind—don’t know” or “Kwan Seum Bosal”). The remaining techniques—keeping a great question on the one hand and maintaining a clear and open mind of just seeing and hearing on the other—seemed too advanced for an introductory course like this one, because at the beginning students need guidance on what to do while sitting.

Recently, during our dharma teachers’ training, Zen Master Bon Shim spoke about students misunderstanding the instruction to “put it all down” and “not make anything.” Without right effort, it can change into “doing-nothing” practice, without any direction or growth of wisdom. She said that we tend to forget about the gradual, initial practices of seven factors of awakening: mindfulness, inquiry, effort, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. Everyone can say “the grass is already green” and “samsara is already nirvana.” But in order to experience this not as an intellectual view but as experienced reality, we need an enlightenment map to help students gradually experience these seven factors.

Meditation Training Can Be Precise Like a Needle

Our surveys showed that over 70 percent of participants saw “the possibility to practice online” as one of the three most important features of the course, along with “the possibility to start with people at the same beginning stage of practice” or the “systematic step-by-step introduction to meditation technique and Zen Master Seung Sahn’s teaching.” 

No wonder, then, that 40 percent of participants still asked for more precise instructions or even for guided meditations in the follow-up survey. Only two participants out of twenty-four agreed with the statement “I would rather meditate intuitively instead of applying gradual instructions about the methods and types of mind that appear in meditation.” 

Some Feedback

One student commented: “It would be cool if teachers had a system of checking the student’s mind and guiding them from initial meditation techniques to more advanced ones. Intuitive guidance with too much space for practitioners can lead to a threat of not systematic enough teaching and discourage the students.”

Another remarked: “I’m giving the course an A+ because in the end, despite some breaks, I still practice and hope that it will become my lifestyle. Our classes became my internal foundation on which I can understand the texts better and mobilize myself to practice in the Zen center and on the cushion. Additionally, I am well-equipped with the tools to meditate correctly.”

And Zen Master Joeng Hye said, “Buddhism has survived twenty-five hundred years thanks to wisdom, which has expressed itself as flexibility, the ability to integrate with cultural circumstances and the spirit of the times. Flexibility allows us to seek new forms without ever losing the essence of the teachings. This essence can be properly explored only through clearly and precisely mastered meditation training and understanding of the mind. I believe that the presented approach will help our school continue to flourish and serve people in the best way possible in the spirit of the teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn.”