Work practice. A key aspect to Zen training. But outside of a Zen context, what could it mean? Do young people need practice working? Well, sure. Especially with unemployment being so high among the young, figuring out the way in which strong effort relates to both one's own and others' well being and must be a good thing. There is some evidence that young people who work while in school, at the high school and undergraduate level, are at something of a disadvantage grade wise, but perhaps something equally valuable is gained.

  I am continually surprised at how little so many of our students have done over the course of their lives... no chores, no jobs... this can really create a strange mix of entitlement and disenfranchisement. Now that, friends, is a disadvantage.

  So when a TAS student learns how to clean a bathroom, a whole lot more than a fundamental part of a sanitary lifestyle is gained. One has to figure out why it is important, why we put such emphasis on it, why other students seem to enjoy working, and sometimes, one gets a sharply formed sense of conflict, between the complacent self and the self that wants to be part of things.

  "No work, no food". A fifteen hundred years ago, a cot and a couple of meals were ample compensation for a young man who merely had to fake meditating innumerable hours a day. The central government was collapsing and warlordism was rising. There was famine, bandits, and firm grip of poverty. How could a weary abbot ensure that his or her monks and nuns were on the path? 

  Work. Work shows what a person is made of. True, the Taoist ideal of wandering the world accepting only what comes and reaching for nothing else- very much like St. Francis- is quite different than working the monastic garden and charcoaling in the monastic woods. Yet it is its own sort of intense commitment, and we modern Americans, a little sloppy, confused, and resentful, need a chance to show others what we are made of. Ultimately, the purpose of work practice is just to work. But kids and beginners often need reasons beyond simply getting behind the toilet as clean as a fresh napkin. 

  There is a powerful connection to martial arts here as well: in a period of chaos and worry, a mountain redoubt crammed with easy going, yet deadly monks gives a little band of bandits pause. Zen has within it a powerful theme of self-reliance- so American, so Ralph Waldo Emerson- and an equally compelling theme of grace, in the sense that the world, if you are open to it, will provide all and only what you need. More than this is distraction and delusion.