Zen and the Art of Meat-Cutting
I do not believe in a God or gods. I’m not sure if I’m still an atheist or if I’m agnostic. These categories and distinctions meant something to me once, a long time ago, but now I really couldn’t give a shit. I mostly just explain to people that I’m not a Christian. But sometimes life gets rough. Where do you turn when you don’t want to burden your friends and can’t seek a higher power for comfort? Therapy? That’s a fucking joke. I went to therapy once. Ok, twice. I flunked out of therapy the first time.
“These exercises are for ADULTS and proven to work! What do you want!?”
I stopped talking to her.
The next one was better, but about the same. “You never gave yourself time to grieve. You just distracted yourself until all of this came to a head because you never addressed it.” I was like ok, that makes sense. But she never told me how to fix it, other than “just let yourself feel your feelings and embrace them.” Yeah, whatever. That sounds dumb. I wish I could get paid $150 for a half hour to give vague advice like my life motto after reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus “embrace the absurd and take the plunge.” You can read whatever fortune you wish from something like that. I might play a fool every day, but I’m intelligent enough to where my professors referred to me as “gifted, but lazy.” And dumb enough to seek help from another person trained to spin bullshit. “Embrace the SHIT!” No, get me out of “THE SHIT!”
I don’t like depending on other people. For anything. Whether they are friends or family. When shit hits the fan, the only one you have is yourself. That’s where I found Buddhism—a philosophy of the mind. I was 29, the lowest low I have ever hit, working a job that I absolutely hated. I bought a Buddhist self-help book I had heard an acquaintance of Asian origins mention his mother had purchased for him when he was going through a tough time. I didn’t understand it at first. What was all this nonsense about breathing?
Buddhism? What business does a redneck from the hollers have with a 2,000 year, long since dead, Indian philosopher? I didn’t know, or understand what had led me there. But I kept reading. I learned that life is suffering, that suffering is caused by craving, that there is a cure for suffering, and there is a treatment. The “Four Noble Truths.” That’s more than what I got from therapy: an actual treatment besides medication. I had studied this in Philosophy class years before, but I never paid it much attention. I didn’t feel like I was suffering. I was pumped full of amphetamines, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, opiates, and THC. I couldn’t feel anything except Nirvana. But apparently that was just the gateway to more suffering, not true Nirvana. I also read about “emptiness” and concepts like impermanence, mindfulness, and that there is no true, fixed self.
Pretty soon I meditated every night. And I felt really good at the end, if only briefly. I had quit drinking, quit smoking. I contemplated each part of my breakfast; how something created by a bee came to rest on a grain formed into a slice of bread and toasted. Salt from the sea met an egg laid by a chicken. I started examining things from their parts and how they formed the whole. Emptiness. Everything was empty. We are just an acclimation of parts that create something that is perceived as a whole. When you break each part down, everything begins to unravel. Emptiness was the true nature of the universe. What began as a tree, then became a leg and a seat and a back, an accumulation of parts that created a whole: a chair—and could be separated to each part which became nothing when not juxtaposed with another object. The philosophy reminded me of Sartre and phenomenology.
I though about myself and how I was just an accumulation of parts—a part of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina. Half my mother’s genes, half my father’s. An accumulation of experiences and genetics. And each moment I was changing, growing, or waining. Looking at pictures from a decade prior, I couldn’t recognize myself in the present. There was NO true fixed self. I was not the party guy of my early 20’s, now I was the melancholy man of my almost 30’s…but even that was undergoing constant change. I was skinny, now fat. I was a druggie and drunk, now sober. I was not the same man from the minute prior. Impermanence.
Moreover I found the philosophy rang true through my work. Buddhism teaches you that there are no menial tasks. You cannot assign judgements like “good” or “bad” to an object or task. Those things exist outside of the realm of truth and are solely a matter of perception; everything is inherently empty until you assign meaning. Again, this was a lot like Sartre. Whether you are cooking a dish you enjoy or cleaning a burned pot, reading your favorite book or weeding the garden, you must apply the entirety of your mind and body to your task and assign no judgement. It’s all about perception. When you perceive everything as empty, there is no fixed sense of self performing that task, delighting from it, or despising it. Life is how you look at it. So I started looking at my work in that mindset, a job I hated, and focused on my breathing and lost myself to my work. The passing of time was forgotten, the mindlessness of my task was unimportant. I placed no judgement on act or object of my attention. They just were. And I just was. Performing this task in the here and now and not contemplating who I was a year prior or where I would be a year from now. Mindfulness. Focus. Putting your all into what is in front of you.
I lived in the moment. Past was irrelevant and future was not promised. All I had was that moment, to live and breathe, to enjoy and savor. My job I hated I now enjoyed. Just moments passing by myself, a walking meditation where I let thoughts pass and focused on my work, on the here and now. I read about a Zen Master who stated “there is nothing I dislike.” With the proper focus, one can appreciate anything. Whether it was cleaning a market, which I didn’t enjoy. Or cutting into a Choice ribeye, which I loved. Everything suddenly felt one in the same. I didn’t enjoy cleaning a market because I was stuck in the past and focused on the times where I never had to clean. I looked to a future where I didn’t have to clean a market. But when I became mindful of the present moment and accepted that it was my job to clean the market, I accepted it and my suffering was suddenly gone. I came to enjoy my labor.
I meditated every day, read a plethora of books. I have an entire bookshelf of Buddhism and Taoism. A backwards hillbilly from West Virginia had to reach out to the far East to get to feeling better. To the point I got almost religious about it. I decided on a particular meditation style: zazen—an opened-eyes Zen practice with gaze focused on the floor in front, particularly placed in front of a wall. Back straight. I didn’t listen to guided meditations or some calming sound. I didn’t count breaths or envision my dreams coming true in my mind. I sat at a wall and stared for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Focused on my breathing. And I just was, existing no more or less important than the other billions of sentient beings in the universe. Just being alive and part of the whole.
I joined a Zen sangha online. I wrote to the Zen Master and told him that I understood emptiness and meditation as it related to cutting meat, the total sense of losing ones fixed-self and being part of a larger whole. I felt it every day on the butcher block: mindfulness, impermanence; cutting meat was my acceptance of the four noble truths and my steps towards Nirvana. I could lose myself to my work and feel connected to the universe in its small parts and as a whole. On the block, I was in the present moment, focused on what was right in front of me. My monkey mind was fixated on the task at hand and it was akin to meditation and everything I had learned from zazen. I focused on my breathing and watched thoughts pass, never fixating on any given daydream or wish to be somewhere else. I felt like a Tibetan monk creating a mandala out of sand, but only with a knife and a saw—something beautiful and profound only to meet heat and flame and be consumed; a sordid truth that nothing lasts forever. I had overcome craving, forlorn thoughts of failure for never finishing college and becoming what everyone expected of me, lusting after lost loves and what could have been. I was a meat-cutter and happy to be one.
He told me essentially that I was a reprobate for being a butcher, a violation of the buddhist precept of not causing harm to other sentient beings. I stopped reading the forums. I stopped reading the books and contemplating Koans. And gradually, I stopped sitting zazen. Meat cutting was good for me, but preachy Buddhism was not. I would find my meaning through my own understanding of the world and not be boxed in by rigid ideologies or dogma. It reminded me of Christianity. And I didn’t want to be part of it. I would use Zen to my own end. I didn’t see a difference between cutting meat and the peaceful state of zazen, unlike my Zen Master. Zen IS the art of butchery, a physical philosophy of action and reaction, a state of mind and a belief structure. It is emptiness and meditation, mindfulness and contentedness with no thought of the past or future. Meat cutting is Zen, in its most pure and unadulterated form.
To this day, when I go through a bad time, I sit zazen. I cut meat. They do for me what therapists and medication, alcohol and drugs, could never do. I don’t sit zazen regularly anymore. And I’m probably worse off for that. Who’da thunk a 2,000 year old philosophy could ring so true after all this time? Christ’s philosophy was always to look forward to the coming kingdom; this stuff is all about the here and now. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. I doubt it. Maybe all we have is the present moment? Best make the most of it. You can’t change the past and you’re not promised tomorrow. Chew on that when you’re flustered cutting a piss-ant customer’s annoyingly specific order. “There’s nothing I dislike.” All we have is this moment to live and feel alive.
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