One of our tenants hasn’t paid his rent for more than six months. There has been violence and property damage to his unit. The police have been called. The other tenants have told us they don’t feel safe around him.
He’s one of the residents at The Grove, the transitional supported housing program run by the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community in Vermont, where I’m guiding teacher. We want to support him, but we know we need to draw the line.
This is the kind of situation I think of as a “social koan,” a modern version of the difficult, revealing questions traditionally posed in Zen. The longer our experiment in community Zen practice involves direct service to people in need, the more we find ourselves in situations like this one.
We open our temple to people who need a meal, laundry, a shower, or conversation. We own an apartment complex where we run transitional housing. We sit with neighbors suffering socioeconomic difficulty, mental health challenges, and active addiction. Our Zen meditation practice and our service practice are one. They draw on the same mind: a mind willing and trying to be receptive, to let go of fixed ideas, to open to what’s actually here. And what’s here, increasingly, are tangled and complicated situations that aren’t resolved through more leniency or more firmness. They ask something else of us.
The Form of the Koan
It’s worth saying something about the form of koans, because the form itself is teaching us something.
A koan usually has two elements. First, there’s a relationship. It could be between a teacher and a student, two monks on the road, or some other encounter between people, or between people and things. (Zen tends to downplay the difference between “sentient” and “insentient” beings.)
Then there’s a question. The question is about conduct, about what happens next between people, or between people and things, in the specific circumstance as it’s happening now. What do you do? Why do you do what you do? How do you do it? How we act exposes the mind that meets the moment, but the moment is always larger and more intricate than anything we can fully decipher. The koan takes us into the web of existence and demands that we seek the wisdom inside of it and act.
The shape of a koan—relationship plus a question about conduct—is a teaching about how reality works. Life is relational. Our sense of self, our identity, our flesh and blood—all are known through the web of relationships. The self is constantly being formed and reformed by that web.
So, practice—the actual practice—ultimately has to do with how we conduct ourselves inside the web of our relationships. In that sense, perhaps all koans are social koans. How we conduct ourselves shapes our ideas, and our ideas shape our conduct. If our ideas are locked in place, we won’t see much, so the navigation system for our conduct will be limited. Our relationships shape the depth of our care, and the depth of our care shapes our conduct. Each move we make becomes part of the conditions for the next move. Then it all loops back and we are, as T. S. Eliot wrote, always back at the beginning but with new eyes:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
At our Zen center, the path of direct service drops us into thicker, denser webs of relationship than most of us encounter in any other part of our lives. The troublesome tenant in the building, tenants on the other side of the wall, the police officers who come when called, the neighbors up and down the block, the systems that brought the tenant to us in the first place, and so on—we’re inside all of that. So is our difficult tenant.
Holding Both
Two impulses are alive in us at the same time. The first is to support him. We know something about how he came to be where he is and about the long series of hardships and heartbreaks behind him. We know that asking him to leave will add to them and will most likely make his situation worse.
The second impulse is to draw a line. The other tenants are afraid, which adds to their own hardship and compromises their path toward stability. The financial loss is real and puts the program at risk. The pattern of damage and conflict is escalating despite many efforts to address it.
Both impulses—to support him and to terminate his lease—are accurate readings of the situation and accurate responses to it. But neither is the whole reading. We ask ourselves whether tolerating the months of unpaid rent are a kindness or a form of avoidance. We ask whether we’re holding on to a story about ourselves as the place that doesn’t give up on people and letting that story keep us from seeing what’s in front of us. We ask whether the move to draw a line is partly to make our own discomfort go away. Both impulses are alive.
At some point in working within webbed relationships like this, the categories we bring to the situation stop fitting. He’s more than a tenant in arrears because we’re more than a landlord. He’s more than a person in crisis, because we’re more than a service provider. We’re a Zen community that has decided, on purpose, to live face-to-face with the suffering in our town. We invited this into our lives. The question that opens up is whether our practice is big enough for it.
Some days it is. Some days it isn’t. Some days we manage to hold both impulses without collapsing into either, and some days we lurch toward hardness, or toward softness, or toward the wish that the situation would resolve itself and stop asking us anything. The practice is noticing the lurch and the return and knowing the place for the first time.
Is This Practice Enough?
Eve Marko, a teacher in the Zen Peacemaker Order, wrote a blog recently in which she quoted something I’d said about how the cure for what ails us is getting out more—hanging out with people unlike or unfamiliar to us, feeling drawn enough into each other’s lives to care whether our neighbors are hungry or hopeful. Then she put a question to it: Is this practice enough? Does meeting one another face-to-face actually change the systems that produce so much of the suffering we’re meeting? Or does it make those harmful systems only more tolerable, offering charity in place of equality, handouts in place of fair-sized slices of the pie?
The question is the right one to ask, and I don’t think it has a clean answer. Personal encounters, on their own, won’t change the structures that make so many of our neighbors’ lives hard and precarious. At the same time, personal, intimate encounters are the place where most of the structural changes we admire have started. Social change is often initiated by a singular experience of caring for somebody in a specific circumstance. The koan does its work right there, in that gap, in the “never ceasing” to explore.
The practice is the willingness to keep showing up inside the gap, inside the webbed relationships, rather than to step out of it by picking a side.
One Mind
We may have to ask our tenant to leave. If we do, it won’t register to him, or to anyone watching, as an act of care. From inside our practice, though, it has to be one. Caring about him, caring about the other tenants, and caring about the integrity of the place we’re trying to build—all these live in the same body, and the body has limits. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
The practice doesn’t exempt us from limits. It allows us to meet them without lying about them, and without claiming to be more boundless than we are, and without claiming to be tougher or clearer than we are.
The koan isn’t asking what the right answer is. It’s asking how we’ll conduct ourselves with this person, inside this web, right now. That conduct will shape what we understand and how what we understand will shape the next moment of conduct.
The web won’t let us out. The practice is the willingness to keep moving inside it, receptive, unfixed, awake to the relationships we’re already in. That includes the relationship with the man whose rent has not been paid and whom we may have to ask to leave, and for whom our care is real and will continue, even in a form he doesn’t want and we don’t want either.
It’s one mind across all of it—on the meditation cushion, in the apartments, in our drop-in center, in the community, and in the world. All of it is one continuous practice.
