Joseph Campbell once said something like, “ritual is the embodiment of myth”. In Zen, the myth is the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha, our practice is the ritual. A Zen student asks, “What is Zen ritual?”. A Zen teacher answers, “Everything”.
In the Buddha’s time the Vedas prescribed ritual as a means of purification and sacrifice, gaining the favor of the Gods. Ritual often involved the slaughter of animals. Buddha eschewed ritual animal sacrifice, advocating instead the sacrifice of the self, using used purification by ritual as a means to that end. In Zen, ritual is shaped more by Confucianism than Vedic Brahmanism. Confucianism, along with Taoism, was an indigenous school of Sinitic thought, prevalent as Buddhism took root in China, both becoming parts of the whole of Zen. Confucius described ‘correct’ ritual as necessary for the cultivation of a ‘nobility’. Correct ritual required study and practice. It could be taught.
Provisionally speaking, Zen ritual can’t be taught. It can only be learned. Learned by doing. And what is really learned is not the ritual itself, but what ritual embodies. Let’s take bowing as one archetype of Zen ritual, and see what it embodies.
Zen ritual is to notice that no matter how carefully and meticulously an activity is performed, it is different each time. When bowing, no matter how hard one tries, each bow is different, unique. Particular. Even if the bow is done precisely the same each time, the context of the bow, the lighting, sound, smell, all different. No bow can be done twice. No matter how many times a bow is done, it is ALWAYS the first time! To practice this is the flesh on the bones of impermanence.
Zen ritual is an actor playing on the stage of things-as-it-is. The ritual actor performs the role without attaching to it as a personal self. There is no “I” performing a ritual. The ritual bow is an imitation of Buddha’s disciples expressing gratitude and humility. Imitation becoming intimation… “not knowing is most intimate”. No gap between actor and action, between disciples, Buddhas, us. Losing the self in the ritual of bowing. To practice this is the blood of no-self.
Zen ritual is demonstrating the unlimited creative potential of immediacy. How things-as-it-is shows up in each moment. The minute change in the direction of the incense smoke as hands move into gassho, the rustling of cloth (and creaking of knees) as bodies lower, knowing gravity as heads touch the ground. The miraculous field of awareness and its contents. All-at-onceness, here-now. Doing a bow for the first time each time, without reifying the self, one doesn’t know where the bow comes from, where it goes. To practice this is the marrow of emptiness.
Impermanence, no-self, and emptiness, pillars of Buddhism embodied as and in ritual. Once embodied, all activity is ritual, the manifestation-expression of things-as-it-is.
A Zen student asks, “What does ritual have to do with IT?” A Zen teacher answers, “IT… is all ritual.”