Let's hear it for lay practice!
This post might come across as a bit defensive. I don’t mind; some things need defending.
I’d like to cut through the idealized delusion that if you’re really serious about deeply integrating the spiritual path, you have to become a professional. This assumption was far more prevalent historically than it is today, but it still persists.
The idea is that the more time spent in meditation and prayer, solitude, ritual, retreat or sesshin, the better. Ordination and monasticism are for the hardcore, committed spiritual seeker. The lay person is, well, playing part-time at being spiritual, like a weekend exerciser compared to a real athlete. As one well-known Zen teacher put it in a recent interview online, if sanghas only offer teachings by and for lay people, they are engaging in “Wonder Bread Zen.”
I don’t buy it. I have known enough monks and clergy and dharma-transmitted Zen teachers to see that their years of meditation, study, and practice are no guarantee that they will become the kind of compassionate, open, humble, self-aware, awakened being that their tradition aspires to. And I have also known parents, laborers, teachers, and committed meditators who work full time and manage a household who are that kind of being.
Yes, a bunch of week-long sesshins or months-long residencies at a Zen monastery can be very deepening for some. And so can practicing Zen every day with screaming toddlers, a demanding job, going through a divorce, or caring for a partner with a serious chronic illness.
Most of my readers are not clergy or monks, so I know I’m preaching to the choir here. But let’s take a moment to celebrate the different and equal calling of lay practice. It can be a full-time vocation, no matter what one is doing during the day. Meeting deadlines? Errands? Physical labor? Childcare? Financial worries? Family problems? All dharma gates, through which the bodhisattva can choose to enter, into further awakening.
Integrating the ancient teachings and practices into daily life is the most demanding spiritual challenge there is. But the fruits, the rewards, are enormous, because in meeting this ongoing challenge, normal life itself - not a special, set-apart version of life - becomes redeemed, sanctified, awakened.
Attitudes are changing. The hierarchical attitudes of former years are crumbling and the lay vocation is frequently considered equal to others, just different. I’ve even heard teachers speak of monks as those who need that lifestyle in order to follow the Way; they couldn’t manage it as a lay person.
I am grateful that this more equitable view is becoming prevalent in contemporary Buddhist communities. Their members are holding down jobs, raising children and paying the rent, and also meditating most every day, studying the dharma and participating actively in their sangha.
The wondrous thing is in the friction between the demands and joys of everyday life and spiritual study and practice; it is where the electricity occurs.