I am travelling on the metro in Madrid as I often do. I’m sitting down and there are several vacant seats in the train around me. A young man comes in at a station, looks around, goes straight to a corner, leavess his rucksack on the floor, sits down on it cross-legged, places his hands on his knees with their palms up and with the index finger touching the thumb in a Buddha-like way, stretches up his spine, closes his eyes, and remains in a perfectly Oriental meditative pose. I watch him from my seat. The train keeps pounding its way from station to station. People get in and out of it without stopping to pay attention to our prayerful young man. ‘Om, mani padme Om’.

It is beautiful to see a young man meditating in the corner of a metro compartment without a shadow of self-consciousness. Quite a new experience. Formerly we could still see from time to time someone fingering their rosary and reciting its Hail Marys between stations while counting them on their beads. Now we see Buddhist meditation in lotus posture. Liturgical changes.

But my thought on seeing that young man today is rather different. It’s all very well finding a corner, adopting the proper posture, resting one’s hands, stretching up one’s spine, closing one’s eyes, but all this is not necessary. True Zen leads up to the point where every moment and every posture is Zen. Feeling what I feel, seeing what I see, hearing what I hear, being aware, living the present, taking life as it comes and every moment as it is. Zen can and should be practiced with open eyes, standing or sitting down, walking or running, talking or keeping quiet, laughing or crying. There is no need to find a corner and a time and a posture. Zen is everything or it is nothing.

A Zen master opened his centre in a busy area in the middle of Tokyo. His disciples objected that they would not be able to meditate with so much noise around. He answered them: ‘If you cannot meditate here, how will you be able to meditate in the street and in your office and when someone is snoring by your side?’

I too am practicing Zen just now in the underground while I’m looking at that young man practicing it, and I allow myself just to think what I am thinking. I see him move his lips gently. ‘Om, mani padme Om’. I too know the prayer and I repeat it to myself. ‘Om, mani padme Om’. Maybe there are even indulgences attached to it. 

I keep on looking at the young man as I ask myself: How will he know when his station comes? He’ll have to come out of his Buddhist trance.

My station arrives and I come out leaving the lad in his Nirvana. Om, mani padme Om.

Disciple: ‘Master, which is the first principle in Zen?
Master: If I would tell you, it would become the second principle.

Zen lives on immediacy. Contact, awareness, reality. No repetition, no preaching, no teaching. We live second-hand lives believing what we are told and doing what we are asked, and we lack vitality, originality, liberty. We are not going to reinvent our life every moment or course, but the fact is we are given readymade directives and we obey instructions. We have to maintain the freshness of the new experience. That is, we have to make every experience into a new experience. We must do everything as though it were the first time we do it. The encounter, the gesture, the surprise. We must let ourselves be surprised by every voice and every face even if we see them every day, we must never take anything for granted, never live by memories, never repeat our day. Every experience becomes new when we know how to live it as new.

With all this, of course, I too am trying to teach what I was taught, isn’t it? At least I’m conscious of it and I enjoy myself doing it. Do not get too much scandalised. Om, mani padme Om.