By Karen Maezen Miller

Once I wrote a book about motherhood. People sometimes recommend it to others by saying, “Don’t let the fact that it’s written by a Zen Buddhist priest scare you away.” To be honest, I know a fair number of Zen priests who are petrified of parenthood, so the misjudgments are mutual.

Still, it makes me wonder, “What kind of an encounter with a Zen Buddhist priest would scare you?” Then I realize that it is likely to be the kind of encounter my daughter has had with menacing nighttime monsters—the kind under the bed.

That’s the kind of Zen—and, moreover, the kind of Buddhism—that I see proliferating these days: the imaginary kind. When I hear the calls to make buddhadharma more accessible to the Western mind, I wince. When I see the attempts to adapt the teaching to make it relevant to modern life, I wail. Buddhadharma can’t possibly be made more accessible than it already is, because it is what is. How can something so inexpressibly obvious be adapted into something more obvious? The original teaching is so totally immediate that it makes comparisons of relevance, well, irrelevant.

I wonder if by “accessible” we mean “convenient” and if by “relevant” we mean “popular.” Modern life is already so overfed with convenience that it’s killing us; we are so addicted to the poison of popularity that we are spiritually starving. What’s lacking is not a modern method or a fresh spin, but pure and simple practice. Practice!

And to find that, you have to look under the bed. You have to sweep away the dust of conceptual notions and the accumulations of indolence. You have to turn on the overhead light and come face-to-face with your ego fears. Do that within a sangha, or practice community, and you are comforted and emboldened like a child in the night when a mother lifts the bedspread and reassures, “Here, honey, open your eyes and see for yourself.”

Of course, I’m talking about the practice of meditation, which is so terribly inconvenient and unpopular these days, although it’s the only practice Buddha practiced. It’s so very less attractive, for instance, than the practice of reinventing Buddhism, which seems to require just a weekend or two at a hotel seminar, a night in the high desert, or more accessible still, a webcast led by the most popular television star in the world. These activities may have some beneficial outcome, but they are not the benefits of practice that the Buddha so wholly embodied and urged each of us to experience for ourselves.

Excerpted from the Winter 2008 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, available on newsstands now.

KAREN MAEZEN MILLER is a Zen priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles and the author of Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood.