Steve Antinoff, who wrote about the human tendency to search for salvation and enlightenment in Spiritual Atheism (Counterpoint, 2010), spent 15 years studying Zen at Japanese monasteries and elsewhere in a quest for enlightenment. He hasn’t found it yet. In Reports from the Zen Wars: The Impossible Rigor of a Questioning Life (Counterpoint, June), he chronicles the agonies, ecstasies, and occasional disillusionment in his ongoing quest.
You spent many years searching for enlightenment, but your book isn’t about that. It’s about the people you met along the way. Why?
I soon discovered that the quest for enlightenment was extremely difficult, and while I could not abandon it, I don’t think that I achieved very much. I never stopped trying; I still have not stopped trying. In the meantime I started to meet all these people who just were so fascinating. Some of them seemed to have some sort of achievement, and some, after many years of struggle, didn’t. All of those people I found very inspirational from different angles. They’re not so different from me; you’re striving for enlightenment and at the same time you’re running away from yourself by backing off of that quest. Several of the people that I wrote about at some point in their lives underwent a similar thing.
Who is an example of someone that deeply affected you during your studies?
I met a lay Zen master named Shin’ichi Hisamatsu who said that all koan can be reduced to one koan: “Whatever you do will not do. Right now what do you do?” I think that that really is the essence of koan, there’s this contradiction between the necessity of solving the problem and the impossibility of solving the problem, and that contradiction is driving the force of the Zen quest.
The book details the physical trials you endured in a Zen monastery; how did you persevere?
I was only in the monastery for just a few months. Two or three times a week in these meditation weeks they would have greasy tempura which I really can’t eat, and the head monk said if you don’t eat that then you can’t eat any of the side dishes for the entire week. So while he was in charge I would just eat basically rice and soup. So I moved into a small temple in the same compound as the monastery and commuted each night. Then I would move in to the monastery for those intensive meditation weeks and lose about eight or nine pounds, and then I would have three weeks to try to recover until the next one. I couldn’t have survived life in a monastery; I had to move toward it from a peripheral position where I made kind of incursions and then escaped. That worked out I think pretty well for me.
What do you want readers to learn from Zen Wars?
I just want them to encounter some of the people I met. I also wanted to give a sense of the difficulty of any religious quest, not just the Zen quest. I think there’s a tendency among practitioners to just say, well, I’ll do a little meditation and life will get better. Although people talk about enlightenment, which is a kind of overcoming of the ego, I think many practices are really about enriching the ego existence. So I guess I wanted to emphasize indirectly without being preachy just the enormous difficulty of the Zen quest and the way in which these various people that I wrote about tried to contend with it.
