Jun Po Roshi (Interview Archive)

Erik asked whether there was any way to speed things up. Did a person really have to sit on the cushion for twenty years, or could results come faster?

Jun Po pushed back right away. No, no. No. Sitting matters first and foremost, because it builds the capacity to stay with whatever is happening, to stay present. Zazen is seated meditation, seated awareness. But awareness also moves. He compared it to his years studying Viniyoga with Patabhi: the question becomes where you move from during the physical act of paying attention. People drive around constantly, he pointed out, so he tells them something simple. You have a car? Shut off the radio. He keeps a Buddha on his dashboard. The car is his zendo. He climbs in and it becomes meditation. The practice can happen anywhere, as long as you carve out time and actually do it. He sits for an hour every morning. Practice itself is the enlightenment. So the objection some people raise, well, I already got the insight, why keep sitting, misses the point.

Then he drifted into talking about someone he called an interesting, amusing character. Erik, a little lost, asked who. Jun Po kept answering in circles until it landed: the character was Jun Po himself.

Seen from the vantage point of simply witnessing, he said, he is an enormously entertaining person. Also wholly conditioned. He has changed enormously over the years and still has plenty of work left. Which is exactly why the practice will never finish for him. There is no final day when he reaches some complete state and never again has to contend with an ego. Old triggers resurface.

He laid out what his body has handed him. Nine years ago he came through stage four throat cancer, and he still lives with the scar tissue, the trouble swallowing. Last year came Parkinson's disease. Hey ho, was roughly his response. The ego spins its routines around all of that, the body slides into the sympathetic nervous system, brain chemistry shifts, the neurotransmitters aren't where they should be. Practice, then, helps him counterbalance the reactivity in his emotional body and in his physical body.

So he keeps at it, and not only sitting: Chi gong, yoga, Tai chi, swimming, tango. A lot of tango lately, actually, because it does his balance a great deal of good against the Parkinson's. Sorry, he added, I got off track there.