September 15, 2021, Clement without became Zen monk. Ordered under the name of Tozan (“Fisheries Mountain”), the young Frenchman now lives in a temple in Japan. Every month, it sends us a letter that makes us share his singular daily and almost time, rhythmous by the long hours of meditation and the work of the fields.
Letter of February 2022. The cold has settled in the gray mountains of the prefecture of Hyogo, in the heart of Japan. Like a heavy boat blocked in the ice of the North, our little temple sinks into meters of snow, starting a wintering that will last several months.
The small forest trail that leads to the temple is now invisible, and every external breakfast can no longer be done without the traditional Kanjiki of wood, the Japanese snowshoes that we manufacture and nouons ourselves. Rice crops and winter vegetables are complete, pine and cedar logs used to heat bath water or cook have been stored in time.
In the Hiroma, the main room of the temple, now has a small cast iron stove that we feed regularly, unique heating point in this big building with paper windows. It’s been several days since deer, bears and wild boars are no longer. The wind scattered the last maple leaves on a large white coat of ineffable beauty.
Fifteen hours of meditation a day
In winter, however, in no way is the pretext to relax the pace of ascetic practice. The Zen temple where I find myself proposes the largest annual volume of meditation in the world, one thousand eight hundred hours. So and as every beginning of the month, we meditate for five consecutive days, fifteen hours a day.
As Jikido, responsible for bells and schedules that punctuate religious life, I get up every morning at 3 o’clock. I prepare the meditation room, I make the prostrations required facing the central altar on which a heavy statue of the Buddha presides.
The meaning of these ritual acts that open the day, like that of changing the water contained in small offering bowls, is not so much to “purify” than to symbolically cancel our past mistakes, every day being the occasion of a spiritual renewal. In Japanese, the ideogram “lead one’s life” is composed of graphic elements meaning “sketch” and “the day”. At each moment a new sketch, every day the opportunity for us to better drive our life.
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