To work the land or to gain one's living from the land is 99% hard work and, in the history of Man, the shift from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture was perhaps the most important change in our whole structure and way of thinking.
Without agriculture where would the monasteries be? To sustain such a complex there must be a stable local economy or at least a trade route nearby. The very foundations of Chan or Tibetan monasteries are in the soil in both senses of the word. Even the slightly decadent atmosphere of Oxbridge owes far more to agriculture than the dons are likely to admit; they tend to keep the extent of their estates a secret. Bookwork then rests on sweat; and so in a sense does the whole body of monks, some working the soil, some not.
But here I am not concerned with the sociological or economic links between Buddhism and the soil, but rather to look at it on the plane of emptiness for here the peasant and the monk are on equal terms, the peasant, indeed, even having a slight advantage. Was not Hui Neng a woodcutter? Is there not a marvellous picture of him tearing up a scroll in total disregard of the written word? As a woodcutter had he not a major experience of "cutting through"? Marpa was ploughing his fields when Milarepa came looking for him and mistook him for a peasant - which I suppose he was. Then there is archery and the whole range of Japanese skills with weaponry and flowers which put hunting under a different perspective. In the stories of enlightenment is it not true that insight often happens during the simplest of tasks, like carrying water or dropping a cup of tea? Here we have the province of Zen, or rather the provenance.
What is it about these so called simple tasks that can help the mind? How is it they can shape not just the mind but a whole style of living? What really matters is personal experience, and here I can offer a few illustrations of events that have changed my own life and how a lay Zen lifestyle can emerge and perhaps evolve in the modern world.
Take something as simple as sheep. Herein lies a whole bundle of truths that affect the mind in various ways. Take lambing for instance; here you have a great responsibility maybe for as many as 1500 sheep on a 12 hour night shift seven days a week. This may go on for two months if you do two lambing farms one after another. At night you are on your own and have to be highly alert. You must be capable of noticing the slightest oddity of shift in temperament not just in yourself but in the sheep. You often pick up things without thinking. You are in that state by yourself for twelve hours a night. It is the nearest thing to a Zen sesshin. You are being paid to meditate and there are gaps sometimes of several hours, walking meditation, sitting meditation. The sheep themselves are in that cud-chewing frame of mind anyway - let alone the whole 'birth' thing.
What about shearing? That's a mighty fine skill to have acquired for it can only be done with a free and open mind. The rhythm of shearing good sheep is wonderful and your mind is someplace else. The sheep respond to you and even smell fear or hassle in your sweat. Half the secret of shearing lies in having a good open, mind and then the sheep wont play up. One friend, a Dorset farmer cum scrap dealer, once said to me out of the blue, "You really know when you are shearing when you forget you are shearing!" Pure Zen. Many of the people I have worked with, like woodmen and hurdle-makers who lead raw independent lives, have a great understanding of lay Zen without necessarily the words to express it - but they hand it on in the same way. Rustic wisdom.
Take using a chain saw; a highly dangerous weapon but in the right hands it has a rhythm and a deftness of using a sword in combat. There is a point at which IT takes over and you can fell a tree and cut it up without thinking. One woodman with whom I worked remarked in a moment of reflection just after sharpening his saw "This sound we make with our chain-saws- where does it go to?" Where indeed?
Then there is cider making, building up a "cheese", getting it square, straight and vertical, sometimes the boards go on just like that... and even when you distil the spirit there comes a point when the still is set up right and it comes out perfectly.
With almost every natural physical task there is a right way of doing things in that particular environment and this is what peasant societies have been perfecting over the last 6000 years. It is only those that try to manipulate the social system that fail to understand it. Of course in agriculture there has been the question of over-work, degrading conditions and impoverishment that goes with an exploited peasant class. But this is the fault of the social system, not of the work itself. Farming is indeed hard work and there is a theory in anthropology that some of the worlds hunter-gathers were not necessarily forerunners of settled or even shifting agriculture, but people who chose to return to a nomadic way of life as a preference or necessity after crop failure or soil impoverishment.
These ways of being lead to different states of mind. The farmer is tight, always guarding his land and his surpluses, static and vulnerable whereas the nomad is fluid with the problem of keeping his mobile flocks together. So it is with manual work. There are those that stay put and those that move around. I think the ideal is a middle path of having about four or five key skills, some static and some that move you around. The times of the year determine when is which. Often in the gaps that occur between jobs there is time to reflect and do other things such as gardening or writing. I often have to wait for a rainy day to set pen to paper. But this is perfectly natural and the more I am in touch with the environment the more natural my life becomes.
Manual and physical labour is such an important part of monastic Zen life precisely because being a monk in a monastery is a highly unnatural way of living. Many monks started out as children growing up in peasant families. In the Christian tradition you only have to look at the role of sheep in the Cistercian monasteries to see this. But they became rich and wealth is always the enemy. When this happens there comes a time when the role of the spiritual mind gets out of balance with the day to day activity of the general population
This leads on to the question of emptiness. What is there to say? Nothing much... except perhaps that out of emptiness in manual labour come your most interesting thoughts and emotional realisations, often in the gaps between jobs or bouts of work when you are most at home with yourself. What better after a hard day's work than riding back up the hill through the woods on top of a trailer of wood, just sitting, just watching, just being? That feeling lasts for quite a while, until of course you enter the pub or wolf down your supper. The skill is in keeping that empty feeling.
I have talked enough. Time to go back to the woods.
Hard graft this living by one's hands
The spinning blade, the invisible teeth
Only inches away, the haze blurred and humming
The singing bird, forever pushing into the sawbench
Log after log, ton after ton, week after week,
Endless cordwood, neatly stacked.
Hard graft this living by one's hands
The handle of the axe descending
Time after time, the sudden crack
As the grain splits and yields its inner fragrance
Naked and sappy, a mountain of sawdust
And not a jot does the eye's grasp wander.
Only at dusk does the silence return to the forest
Quivering and vital as men go home
Returning to the firelight, a sense of knowing
Of having been there before......
Here is where we come to
when we stop.
Searching and striving
These are foreigners then.
The password is no word at all.
