The Zen of Leonard Cohen

The following quotes were excerpted from Shambhala Sun in an interview they did with Leonard Cohen (otherwise knows as "Jikan" [i.e., Silent One] - his Dharma name) at Mount Baldy Zen Center, which, if I may say, sounds like the most rigorous Zen training to be had (they're Rinzai-shu) at any monastery in the Western Hemisphere. Leave it to badass Leonard Cohen to go at it hard-core. Gassho to the end of love.

This "connection—the unavoidable presence of the Other—has driven us to religion," he says, explaining why he thinks "the great religion is the great work of art." We "form ourselves around these problems," he goes on. "These problems exist prior to us, and we gather ourselves, almost molecularly, we gather ourselves around these perplexities. And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity."

"In the zendo," he tells me, not unhappily, "all of this disappears." ("This" referring, I think, to his name, his past, the life he carries around within him.) "You don’t notice if this woman’s beautiful or ugly. If that man smells or doesn’t smell. Whoever you’re sitting next to, you just see their pain. And when you’re sitting, you feel nothing but the pain. And sometimes it goes, and then it’s back again. And you can’t think of anything else. Just the pain." He pauses (and the chanteur/enchanteur slips out again). "And, of course, it’s the same with other kinds of pain, like broken hearts."

On Zen students:

"Everyone here is fucked up and desperate," he says brightly. "That’s why they’re here. You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate."

In exultation, one Zen student proclaimed zazen to be "Better than drugs!"

"Secretly," he told me cheerily, "the sin of pride as it’s manifested here is that we feel we’re like the marines of the spiritual world: tougher, more reckless, more daring, more brave."

"There’s a bias against religious virtue here," he assures me, grinning one morning, as bells toll outside and I smell sweet incense in the air and hear clappers knocking in the distance, "and it’s very appealing. So you never have the feeling that it’s Sunday school. And you never have the feeling that you’re abandoning some cavalier life, or getting into some goody-goody enterprise. Not at all. Not at all." When a Buddhist magazine recently asked Cohen to conduct an interview with Sasaki, he gladly agreed, provided they could talk about "wine, women, and money." And to be sure, we’ve hardly been introduced before the disarming sinner-songwriter is using "pussy" and "shunyata" in the same sentence.

"What would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence. "I think that’s the real deep entertainment," he concludes. "Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it." He smiles his godfatherly smile. "Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement."