The Meditation Dojo

This post is part of an ongoing series highlighting stories and objects within the Merwins’ home and garden. Read more here.

William described his Zen room—or dojo—as “in a sense, the private center of the house.” It is nestled between the bedroom and the study—while remaining open to the surrounding trees through its glass wall. William’s study of Zen Buddhism brought him to Maui, and this daily practice of mediation was core to his daily routine. William later reflected: “I used both my study and the dojo as soon as the walls were framed up…and I had nailed the roof sheeting in place.” He continues:

I would come down here at first light and work (I was writing Unframed Originals) until the carpenters turned up and I joined them. When they had left in the evening I would go into the dojo, with no walls except the frames, and sit zazen until I left for the evening.

In his accounts about the house, he pays this room special attention, describing it as “a place of private importance.” Despite the simplicity of the space—housing a shrine with a Buddha set at its center, and four meditation cushions—its significance is deeply felt, both through its design and through William’s words:

Its furnishings are very simple. In front of its glassed west wall, from which the view opens into the trees, is the shrine: a broad plank of Eucalyptus robusta that was part of my writing table (held up on sawhorses) while the house was still being built. 

At the middle of it there is a figure of the Buddha. I was told by the knowledgeable owner of the antique store in Soho, is New York, in which I found it, in the mid-seventies, that it was from Thailand, 17th or even 16th century. I had been drawn to it at once but had no hope of being able to afford it. Then he told me that he was offering it at a price much lower than I had expected. I realized later that the reduced price must have been because the figure seems to be missing something that belonged there. It seems to be holding a scroll—but there is no scroll. I was happy to have it after all, and it occurred to me later that it was the very image that seemed destined for me. Quite a few years earlier, when I read The Diamond Sutra, back in the sixties, I had been struck by one passage in particular. The sutra consists of series of questions and answers between the Buddha, known throughout as the Tathagata, meaning “Thus come,” and his disciple, Subhuti. At one point he asks Subhuti whether the Tathagatha has a teaching to teach. Subhuti says no, the Tathagata has no teaching to teach. The Buddha says it is just so: because there is no teaching to teach, it is the teaching. It was that answer that first drew me in earnest to Buddhism. 

The flat stone disk behind the Buddha comes from the top of the dovecote roof of the old farmhouse in France that has been one pole of my life since I found it, half ruined, in 1954. It was replaced by different rooftop stone, found for me by the roofer himself, in 1958. The other large, round flat stone in front of the Buddha that serves as the incense bowl, is an ancient kitchen mortar from a village on the north coast of Spain near Altamira. And facing the Buddha, across the bare floor of the small room, is another massive round stone object. It is the stone mill that figures in the first poem of my book The Vixen. Around the top of it, in bas relief, is the carved figure of a sleeping—or apparently sleeping—fox. For reasons touched on in that poem, the fox belongs there, facing the Buddha.