Leonard Cohen on meditation . . . . .

 Cohen on Buddhist Meditation

Most of the world remembers him as a poet, songwriter, and that unmistakable voice singing about love, longing, desire, loss, God, and the innumerable ways human beings manage to break one another’s hearts.

But for a period of his life, Leonard Cohen was also simply Jikan — his Zen name, commonly translated as The Silent One.

In the 1990s, at the height of a remarkable artistic career, Cohen withdrew for several years to Mount Baldy Zen Center, located at Mount San Antonio—commonly known as Mount Baldy—in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California, roughly 50 miles east of Los Angeles. He sat zazen. He rose before dawn. He cooked, cleaned, shoveled snow, and served his longtime teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Zen monk.

What is especially interesting about Cohen is that he never needed Zen to turn him into someone else.

He remained deeply connected to Judaism and resisted easy religious labels. Speaking about his life at the monastery, Cohen once said, “I never think of myself as a Buddhist, but I like the actual study that people are engaged in here.” He compared that study to learning a musical instrument.

Perhaps that is one reason Zen seemed so naturally at home in his work.

Cohen understood contradiction: the sacred and the profane, beauty and decay, desire and renunciation, suffering and gratitude. He rarely tried to tidy these things up or pretend that one side could permanently defeat the other.

One of his most familiar observations begins, “There is a crack in everything.”

Zen might recognize something there.

Practice does not necessarily repair the world until there are no cracks left. It asks us to see clearly what is here. To stop demanding that life become something other than life before we are willing to inhabit it completely.

And perhaps this is why Cohen remains such an interesting figure for practitioners. He didn’t disappear into the monastery forever. Eventually, he came back down the mountain. He returned to poetry, recording, touring, relationships, aging, and all the complications of ordinary human existence. Two Arrows Zen