Zen Buddhism

Zen Buddhism reaches Lionel Essrog through Kimmery, whose account distinguishes it from the version of meditation he expects. She describes a religious discipline rather than a technique for getting centered or reducing stress, and stresses that the practice is not easy. Her explanation gives the concept a practical entry point—sitting, breathing, and staying awake—while leaving its spiritual ideal difficult to grasp. In the novel, Zen is neither an abstract doctrine detached from daily life nor a ready solution to Lionel’s troubles; it is an unfamiliar practice he considers entering through the Yorkville Zendo.

Discipline and Practice

Kimmery introduces Zazen as a form of sitting that makes the body’s demands impossible to ignore: she warns Lionel that his back will hurt. She also describes attention to breathing and a kind of thinking that is not ordinary thought. When Lionel tries to understand this as thinking about not thinking, her correction points away from mental maneuvering and toward the practice itself. The distinction matters: the discipline is not presented as a clever puzzle to solve from outside, but as something undertaken by sitting and attending.

Kimmery names One Mind as an ideal associated with recognizing Buddha nature in everything. Her example—the flag and the wind as the same thing—offers Lionel a compact image of that teaching, though he admits he is not following her fully. He regards the goal as honorable but seemingly unattainable. That gap between the concise image and Lionel’s uncertainty preserves a limit to the explanation: he hears what the ideal might mean without claiming to have experienced or understood it.

Kimmery also describes wakefulness as a reason for the discipline. When Lionel asks whether becoming punchy might help someone see God, she explains that the effort is more about staying awake, and says that Zen Buddhism does not really have God in the way his question assumes. She then allows a qualified connection between staying awake and seeing God. Her answer does not turn wakefulness into a promise of revelation; instead, it keeps the discussion close to the ordinary task of sitting without falling asleep while acknowledging Lionel’s religious framing.

The Zendo and Its Community

The Yorkville Zendo makes the practice available as a shared activity as well as an individual one. Kimmery tells Lionel that sitting can be done alone or with others and that the Zendo holds regular sessions open to anyone. On one visit, she welcomes him as people are already sitting, urges him to take a cushion and sit away from the front, and suggests that he begin by concentrating on his breathing. She postpones working on his posture until another time. The invitation is concrete and modest: he need not understand the teaching before joining the session, but he can take a place and begin with attention to breath.

The visit also carries a sense of occasion. Kimmery tells Lionel that important monks from Japan are in town to see the Zendo and that one will speak after Zazen. At a later session, she says there is excitement about the monks. These details place the local practice within a wider religious community, while keeping Lionel’s access personal: his immediate route into the gathering is Kimmery’s welcome and practical instruction, not expertise or prior achievement.

Teaching, Membership, and Moral Ambiguity

Kimmery’s account of who counts as a teacher or student is notably broad. When Lionel objects that a person he associates with a murder is not a Zen teacher, she rejects the objection as beside the point. In her view, anyone who teaches Zen can be called a Zen teacher, even if that person is a murderer; anyone who sits can be called a student, including Lionel. Her formulation separates participation in the practice from a person’s moral character. It does not establish that the Zendo endorses wrongdoing or that religious practice excuses it; rather, it shows Kimmery applying the labels of teacher and student inclusively, even where Lionel sees a disturbing contradiction.

That exchange also marks a change in Lionel’s relation to the practice. Earlier, he asks whether he might sit with Kimmery, and her answer that people can sit together makes participation imaginable. Later, her welcome and instructions bring him into the session, while her assertion that even he is a student gives his presence a name. His attraction to Zen remains tentative and is entangled with his attachment to Kimmery, but the path she offers is specific: sit, breathe, and stay awake. The concept’s narrative significance lies in that meeting of an exacting discipline with an unsettled novice, and in the questions the Zendo raises about belonging, authority, and the distance between spiritual practice and moral judgment.