Opening ceremony of sesshin: With three intonations of the big bell, Sensei Kjolhede and the two monitors enter the zendo, bow as one, and proceed toward the altar. The creaking of oak floor boards and the faint rustle of robes are the only sounds; the other fifty participants sit motionless and silent, all eyes down. Alone, the head monitor approaches the altar holding up the figure of Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, who sits cross-legged brandishing a sword. Placing him high on the stand, he bows and returns to the procession. The two monitors then approach the altar together. With a swift flourish they take up the two flattened sticks on the altar and place them down, their handles now on Manjusri’s right. They bow, and another sesshin is underway.

At the Rochester Zen Center as well as at many Zen temples in Japan and China, few elements of sesshin are more important than the use of the kyosaku, or encouragement stick. Yet it is probably the most misunderstood feature of traditional Zen training. Countless readers of books about Zen have become prejudiced toward the stick by the words of authors who themselves have no experience with it. The stick has suffered perhaps more abuse at the hands of such outsiders than any Zen trainee has had to deal with from the stick itself. The denunciation of it as a “sadistic expression of Japanese culture,” in the words of one author, is as historically misleading as it is unjust. The stick was widely used in China long before Zen was transplanted from there to Japan, and it may go back even further. As mentioned in The Three Pillars of Zen, it is “probably a hardier descendant of a small rod used even in the Buddha’s day to awaken dozing monks, and constructed so as to whistle when shaken beside the ears.”

Some Zen students might object, on principle, to the stick. Why? Isn’t it because the stick involves two people, who then are all too easily seen as adversaries? No doubt the primal human delusion of self-and-other is deeply nurtured in the West by the dualism that has long been one of our basic cultural assumptions. If we see the kyosaku as pain coming from a wholly separate entity, as our senses tell us, then we readily presume some form of malice behind it, which in turn generates fear and other negative reactions. The stick teaches us that we get through pain and fear not by clinging to an “I” that separates us from them but by becoming one with them. What teaching could be of greater value in today’s world of unremitting conflict and misery?

In sesshin no one may ask for the stick; it is used only at the discretion of the monitors, who try to apply it with the force, tempo and frequency best suited to each individual. When this practice was adopted at the Center many years ago, sesshins acquired a whole new level of power. It eliminated the need to ask oneself, every time the monitors came around with the stick, “Should I ask for it or not?” a cogitative exercise that easily draws one into the web of ego’s machinations and other discriminative processes that interfere with concentration. At the same time, sitters who had relied on the sense of control that comes from asking for the stick had to make a crucial psychological adjustment. They had to transcend the dualistic notion of simply “bearing up” under a stick wielded by some separate self, and realize that sitter, monitor, and the stick were working together.

In the formalized setting of sesshin, the stick has the power to help Zen students “let go their hold on the cliff.” The following excerpt from a kensho account that appears in Zen: Merging of East and West reveals how important the sound alone can be in nudging the mind beyond itself:

The kyosaku whacked me whenever it whacked anyone in the Zendo and the bells and wind and cicadas were all in my own mind and Mu and Mu and I would not stop. One final whack in some part of my mind across the room on someone else’s shoulders brought finality and I was wrenched into a black, black ego-shattering paroxysm of Mu, Mu, Mu. And it happened a second time and I did not yield to the temptation to rest in anything called “glorious” or “I am there” (…) I saw that nothing in the universe existed that could separate me from the totality of deathless being with which I now knew mySelf to be one!

To more fully understand the role of the stick in sesshin, one may first look to the sesshin altar. The Buddha figure, which represents our intrinsically enlightened Mind, the nothing-lacking, Essential nature common to all of us, recedes for now into the background, the altar curtains remaining drawn until the closing ceremony. It is Manjusri, a bodhisattva engaged in the ceaseless struggle to vanquish the forces of delusion, who, from his pedestal temporarily installed at the front of the altar, presides over sesshin. His vow is, “All beings, without number, I vow to liberate,” and not until that final battle is won will he rest. If the Buddha represents the Peace of ultimate freedom − freedom from which we are separated only by our wrong thinking − Manjusri, in his sword-wielding pose, may be seen as representative of the courage and exertion required to realize that freedom.

Manjusri’s preeminence during sesshin reminds participants of the numberless dharma gates still standing before them even as it reminds them that they too have the means for passing through those gates. Manjusri warns us not to fall into “buji Zen” − the fatal error of assuring ourselves that since we are all intrinsically Buddhas, there is nothing to strive for. With the Buddha in eclipse, sesshin is no time to sit back and bask in one’s inner light of original buddhahood. True, “from the beginning all beings are Buddha,” but until we experientially realize this truth, it is not real. It is not true.

Sesshin involves far more daily sitting, more teisho, and more dokusan. But a powerful sesshin includes, in addition to this expanded schedule, an extraordinary intensification of effort. To this end, the use of the kyosaku is seen as indispensable. Why? First and most obviously there is the problem of sleepiness.

Although sleep restores the body-mind in one sense, it does not generate joriki, the unique psychic energy that grows out of intense mental absorption. Strenuous sitting builds joriki by focusing and conserving energies that would otherwise be dispersed through sleep, and this is how sesshin participants are able to do with far less sleep than normal. Still, as with any other human effort, sitting cannot be sustained at peak intensity, and periods of drowsiness and torpidity are inevitable. This is where the stick comes in, one of our chief allies in the battle against “the demon of sleep,” as Zen master Hakuin called it. Nor is it just the fact of being struck that wakes one up. The specific points on the shoulders where one is struck are on an acupuncture meridian connected to the lower belly (“hara” or “tanden” in Japanese) which when stimulated liberate psychic energy.

As daunting an obstacle as tiredness may be, the most relentless challenge in zazen is simply thought itself. Besides the run-of-the-mill random, irrelevant thoughts that buzz in the mind so much of the time, there are some common patterns, such as the sense of being caught in a stubborn duality of subject-object, seer-seen − the relentlessly kibitzing mind. One may also reach a state in which it seems impossible to either advance or retreat, the mind as if frozen. A well-aimed blow with the stick can give one the burst of energy needed to break out of such mental impasses. In this sense the stick becomes Manjusri’s own sword, a sword which when wielded no-mindedly can sunder the bonds that obstruct the sitter. The transcendental wisdom with which we are all endowed, represented by Manjusri, may be seen as none other that the absence of delusive thought. Manjusri-as-monitor helps liberate the Manjusri in each sitter, cutting out the thought-sustenance of the ego to reveal True-mind.

Almost any form of makyo will likewise evaporate under the compassionate force of the stick: fantasies, illusory sensations, hallucinations, and obstructive psychological states, including euphoria. The stick can also help one see through fears − even ancient, lifelong fears − and banish them forever. With fear, however, the sitter’s ego will sometimes seize the stick and use it for its own purposes by turning the monitor and his or her stick into the object of fear. If this fear is a mild one, the continued use of the stick can itself help one overcome it; but if it is seriously distracting to the sitter, he or she must be left alone. It is for such cases that sitters are told in sesshin (the only time the stick is used without the sitter asking for it) to write a note to the monitors if any problems develop with the stick. Mutual trust between monitor and sitter is absolutely essential in order for the stick to be truly helpful.

The stick may be applied to rouse a sleepy sitter, enliven a weary one, or spur on one who is striving hard, but under no circumstances is it used for punishment or out of any sense of malice. Never. Every strike of the stick is an affirmation of faith in the sitter. Each “Whack, whack! Whack, whack!” may be heard as, “The energy of the whole universe is yours! You can work harder! You can go deeper! You, too, can realize your innate perfection!”

The stick, then, is a means of focusing the energy and force of the monitors and the sesshin as a whole and transferring it to each sitter. Seen this way, the use of the stick is an act of true compassion. Sesshin participants turn a corner in their practice when they realize that the monitors, with Sensei, become their closest allies, their dearest friends.

It must never be forgotten that the monitors were once on the other end of the stick. Most of them spent years there, learning, through direct experience, that the stick is first and last an instrument of compassion. They know, as well as anyone can, the great value of the stick when it is accepted openly and trustingly, without fear or resentment. And out of this experience arises deep gratitude − gratitude not only to the monitors who actually encouraged them with it, but to one’s teacher and all of the teachers and masters before him who included the stick in their training methods as a means of liberating human beings and preserving the strength and vigor of the Zen sect.

It would be a mistake, however, to see the stick as a panacea, effective for every Zen student without exception. There are men and women of such finely-tuned psyches that to use the stick on them would be more a hindrance than a help. Pregnant women are not hit, as we don’t really know how it would affect the fetus. There are also those for whom the stick elicits deeply painful memories of childhood physical abuse. Although the monitors well understand the need for leaving such people alone, it sometimes turns out that by giving the stick in a more or less token manner − very lightly and infrequently − they can help extinguish the negative associations with the stick and enable the sitter to overcome the fear entirely. In any case, it is not uncommon for a newcomer to take some time to learn to work with the stick.

Then there are those rare individuals who don’t need the stick. The Buddha is reported to have said, “A high-class horse moves at even the shadow of the whip,” and some such horses are still around. But how many? Some people are able to mobilize their inner resources to sit with great energy without the stick, and a few of them are able to use that energy to see “their face before their parents gave birth to them.” But it is all relative: aside from those who have special problems with the stick, who could deny that the stick might give them more energy?

The inscription on the wooden block outside the Zendo urges:

Great is the matter of birth and death;

Life slips quickly by.

Time waits for no one.

Wake up, wake up!

Don’t waste a moment!

At least until their initial breakthrough, average practitioners of Zen, like average horses, need all the help they can get.

Zen speaks of “the hen tapping from the outside while the chick pecks from the inside.” Though this generally refers to teacher and student working together, it may also be seen as the collaboration that occurs between monitor and sitter. Ideally the monitor and sitter are in a kind of communion in which each responds to the other’s exertions. It is a joint effort with the mutual respect and feelings of intimacy that grow out of their shared purpose. The trust and vulnerability implicit in the rows of backs turned to the monitor inspires in the latter a sense of sharing in a sacred trust. Sitters who can respond to the stick with the same trust and openness will find themselves fortified in “penetrating Dharma gates beyond measure.”

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