Zazen, and the Path to Happiness

By Muhō Nölke and Iwona Luszowicz

Zazen, and the Path to Happiness invites us to wise up and challenge our preconceptions about Zen, happiness and how to live. Part autobiography, part philosophical exploration, the book charts the life and learning of Muho Nölke, former abbot of Antaiji monastery. 

Growing up in 1980s Berlin, Nölke discovered Buddhism in his teens and soon realised he'd found his calling. With wry humour and an eye for the absurd, he describes his journey from teenage misfit to abbot of one of Japan's most renowned Zen monasteries, exploring how we can apply a Zen mindset to our work, our relationships, and the pursuit of happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Vendetta
• Release date: Oct 20, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232345310

Book preview

Introduction

The question of how to find happiness is as old as humankind. Great thinkers have spent much time and energy searching for the answer, but none has ever been found. More precisely: while thousands of answers have been put forward, they contradict each other and are impossible to put into practice. None of them will fully hit the mark when it comes to your life as you’re living it here and now. In the 21st century, we are still asking ourselves how to find happiness. For the Western world, where economic wealth goes hand-in-hand with a pessimistic worldview and spiritual poverty, the question is more urgent than ever.

This book is not intended to provide the definitive answer on how to find happiness. Instead, I’d like you to join me in asking the question one more time before discovering your own answer – because nobody else can give it to you. My aim is simply to point out a path that might lead to where your happiness lies hidden. Chapters describing my journey, from young happiness-seeker to Zen master, alternate with more general explorations of the search for happiness and what it means for our lives. Ultimately, I will try to show that your happiness is not lying hidden at all: you’ve had it in the palm of your hand all along without realising it.

I was seven years old when my mum died, and from a very early age I spent a lot of time alone with my own thoughts. Soon I was asking myself: ‘What’s the point of being alive at all? If we’re going to die anyway, why bother putting in all that effort at school, rushing around at work, raising a family – surely none of it matters when we’re dead?’ Neither my dad nor my school teachers could give me an answer. They’d just shrug their shoulders and say: ‘You’ll understand when you grow up, you little philosopher.’

Even at that age, I had a sneaking suspicion the ‘grown-ups’ themselves were totally in the dark. I decided that if there was any point whatsoever in being alive, it could only be to have as much fun as possible. At the same time, it felt like every moment of pleasure was followed by a wave of fatigue and boredom that washed away the short instances of happiness. Each new day seemed a depressing eternity. During puberty there was always one alternative open to me: suicide. But I lacked the courage for that. Even if life seemed meaningless and death was tempting, it wasn’t tempting enough.

When I was 16 I went to boarding school. One of the teachers there ran a Zen meditation group and invited me to come along. This was around the time when a Bhagwan in India revealed his ambition to drive a different Rolls-Royce every day of the year. Far Eastern meditation wasn’t enjoying the best of reputations, and I turned down the invitation without hesitation. Two weeks later, the teacher approached me again and asked: ‘Are you sure you don’t want to give it a go?’ ‘No thanks, not interested,’ I replied. He kept probing: ‘How do you know you’re not interested if you’ve never tried it?’ I couldn’t come up with an answer, and was persuaded into joining for one session. I ended up attending every day for the next three years – eventually as the group’s leader – and soon came to realise that if there was any path I would follow for the rest of my life, it was the path of Zen.

What had taken away my doubts? First, it was making the simple discovery that I had a body. Until that point, I’d lived entirely in my head. If someone had asked me who I was, I would have replied: ‘My brain. What else could I be?’ Sitting in meditation, I was for the first time consciously aware of my breathing, the beating of my heart and position of my spine. I’d often been told at home and at school that I had bad posture. Through meditation, I learnt that my posture influences both me and the world around me. It’s impossible to separate what goes on in my head from the way I engage with my body. After attending the group for a little while, I started to read books about Zen and found myself re-encountering the questions nobody had been able to give me answers to: What is the meaning of life? Who am I?

Later on, I decided to study Japanese along with physics and philosophy at the University of Berlin. During a year’s stay in Kyoto I discovered Antai­ji, a Zen monastery in the Japanese mountains. I thought I had finally found the place for me, and when I finished my degree I asked the abbot to accept me as his pupil and ordain me as a Buddhist monk. As it turned out, life as a monk was not as easy as I’d imagined. Prior to that, I’d never done any real physical labour or carried anything heavier than a thick philosophy book. Living at a self-sufficient monastery was not something I was prepared for. I had to help in the fields and carry out construction work, cut down trees and chop firewood. On top of all that, there was kitchen duty. My cooking repertoire consisted of fried and scrambled egg, and suddenly there I was, alone in the kitchen with the whole monastery to feed. More than once I packed my bags to leave, and only ended up staying because it was late and I’d long missed the last bus from the bottom of the mountain. The next morning I would tell myself: ‘I’ll keep going till lunchtime.’ And then after lunch: ‘I’ll stay for the rest of the afternoon.’ When evening came, I’d missed the bus again and made it through one more day at a Zen monastery.

The first years were anything but happy. It wasn’t just the physical labour I found difficult. I also struggled to conform to the strict hierarchy of daily monastery life. Yet somewhere along the way my perspective shifted. Gradually, I began to understand that the answers to my questions weren’t waiting somewhere in the future. The questions were directed at me. So it was up to me to come up with the answers. If not me, then who else? If not now, then when? If not here in this place, then where? After this realisation, many things became easier. I’d learnt that my path began right beneath my feet and that every single day, every heartbeat and every breath were another step along the way. At the same time, following this path meant I had to learn to let go of myself completely.

Ten years after I first came to Antai­ji, my teacher formally gave me transmission. That meant he authorised me to take on students as a Zen master in my own right. These were the last words he said to me: ‘From now on you’ll go your own way. Don’t worry about the monastery. But if I die, then come back.’ I believe he said this to all his students when they left. He hadn’t yet decided who his successor would be, but he wanted us to keep Antai­ji going if he died. Nobody – apart from maybe my teacher himself – suspected how soon that would be…

I could have returned to Germany, but I decided to stay a while longer in Japan and turn one of my dreams into reality. I wanted to set up a Zen group in the city and give ordinary Japanese people the chance to encounter the spiritual tradition of their own country. Japan is a highly Westernised society, and most Japanese wouldn’t recognise the written characters for zazen (Zen sitting meditation). People can only take part in the practices of Zen monks at a few remote seminaries.

For me, this project was about repaying a debt. I wanted to pass on everything I’d learnt to at least one Japanese person. And so I pitched tent – literally – in the centre of Osaka, living in two tents in the castle park. Every morning I would spend two hours meditating with whoever wanted to join me, then during the day I would go begging, or translate books about Zen into German. The park had already become a home to me when I got a call on my mobile: my teacher had been killed while clearing snow and I had to return to Antai­ji. Today I’m responsible for the monastery and its 50 hectares of land, holding the door open to anyone who wishes to join us in following the path of Zen. I won’t claim that it’s the only path to happiness. Whether it’s a path to happiness at all, or rather a letting go, an opening up, an acceptance of responsibility for life as it is – that’s what this book is about.

1. My Path to Antai­ji

To follow the path of happiness is to follow the self.

To follow the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to find happiness in every single thing.

based on the words of Dōgen Zenji, founder of Japanese Zen, 1200–1253

Zen was the one thing I knew I wanted to do for the rest of my life. After all, my other interests – maths, physics and computers – were hardly going to answer my life’s biggest question. So why waste my time at university? Why not head to a Japanese monastery and become a Zen monk right away?

Everyone tried to talk me out of it, but their arguments bounced off me until Hubert, the teacher who’d introduced me to Zen, warned me not to rush things: ‘Get some qualifications first. That way, if it doesn’t work out with Zen, you’ll always have something else to fall back on. Too many people end up in a Zen monastery because they’ve got no other options.’ These words took me by surprise. I’d always thought of Zen monks as some kind of supermen. The idea of someone running away to a Zen monastery because they couldn’t find the right job or cope in society was beyond me. As a friend of mine once neatly put it, I wanted to go straight from puberty to enlightenment. In the end, I was persuaded it would be better to learn some Japanese and get a degree first.

At university in Berlin, I studied Japanese and philosophy before doing a second degree in physics. Fritjof Capra’s ‘The Tao of Physics’ was one of the books in fashion at the time, and I went along with the naive belief that the spinning of elementary particles in their orbits follows rules described millennia ago in the teachings of Buddha and Laotse. I wasn’t going to be satisfied with Zen enlightenment alone: I also had my sights set on a Nobel Prize for a ground-breaking theory on quarks and galaxies. As things turned out, I gave up physics after finishing my degree. It would have been the easiest route into work, but it was the subject least relevant to my life.

My dream of becoming a ‘proper’ Zen monk kept its hold on me while I was in Berlin, and I went regularly to a Zen meditation group. But I had to get to Japan! Finally, when I was 22, I had the chance to spend a year studying at the University of Kyoto. Kyoto is viewed as the centre of Zen Buddhism in Japan and I set out with high hopes, expecting to find a spiritual paradise on earth. It was all the more disappointing to discover there wasn’t much happening in Kyoto, either at the university or with Zen. While Kyoto boasts some of the most important Zen temples, outsiders aren’t welcome there – unless they come as tourists. Zen has been reduced to a commodity in Japan, with Zen monks often little more than businessmen using Buddhism to make money. There are only a small number of public Zen groups, and they meet less regularly than the ones in Germany. Several weeks passed before I discovered, completely by chance, that the professor supervising me at university was a Zen priest. I would never have suspected it: he always wore a suit and tie and taught the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Only at a small temple named Shorin­ji, an hour away from Kyoto, did I manage to participate once a month in a five-day sesshin. Sesshins are days of intensive zazen practice from 4am until 9pm. The only breaks are for eating and going to the toilet. Even though I’d been doing zazen for six years and didn’t class myself as a beginner, these sesshins were hell. The pain in my legs seemed to go beyond the limits of my endurance, and when there’s nothing to do all day but stare at the wall in front of you, it can sometimes start to feel like you’re going to lose your mind. Still, this was exactly the test I’d been waiting for. If a path to a meaningful life existed, surely it had to pass through hell.

I decided to spend two months at Shorin­ji during the summer holidays. Life at an ‘authentic’ Japanese Zen temple would be something new for me, so I assumed the other residents would show me everything I needed to know. The temple was run by Zen master Okumura Shohaku Roshi, who now heads a major Zen centre in the US. He would give me a full explanation of how to meditate, what jobs needed to be done in the temple, how to prepare Buddhist cuisine, maybe even how to gain enlightenment – or so I thought…

Search for happiness and you’ll walk in the opposite direction. Only when you recognise this present moment as your happiness will you be at one with yourself.

Dōgen Zenji

It all got off to a promising start. On my first day I was assigned as kitchen assistant to Hans, a guy from Sweden. Since I barely knew how to cook, I was glad of the chance to learn something new. But Hans had only arrived at Shorin­ji a week earlier and the sticky July heat was getting to him. He kept going on and on about how much he missed air conditioning, about the girl from Tokyo who’d given him her phone number…

Three days later he was gone. You can imagine the look on my face when Okumura Roshi turned to me and said: ‘You’ve had a few days in the kitchen now. You can manage the next ten days by yourself, right?’ ‘But how’s that going to work? Someone needs to teach me how to cook before I’m left to make the meals!’ It went without saying that I didn’t trust myself with this responsibility. The role of cook is one of the most important roles in a Zen temple, calling for both technical skill and maturity. I possessed as little of one as the other. Okumura simply replied: ‘Did you never hear that Zen means trying to understand your own self? You won’t learn a thing from the Buddha unless you can learn from yourself first. You are the centre of everything. And I’ve got nothing to teach you anyway.’

What a load of rubbish! What did cooking have to do with the self? I had no choice, though, but to do my best and try not to overly upset the other residents with my bad cooking. Even so, they must have suffered more than I did from Okumura’s decision to put me in charge of the kitchen for ten days. The experience would become my first great lesson in Zen: you are the centre of everything.

Stop staring into the distance – this is about you.

Sawaki Kōdō

In August I had the chance to deepen my learning. This is the month when Japanese families invite Buddhist priests to their homes to hold ceremonies for their dead ancestors. Okumura Roshi was incredibly busy helping out at other temples, returning late at night and leaving before dawn the next day. The remaining temple residents, most of them short-term visitors from abroad, also set off for other destinations. Suddenly I was the only person left apart from Okumura’s wife and daughter, who didn’t take part in temple life. At 5am each morning, I ran up and down the deserted hallways ringing the wake-up bell even though there was nobody to wake. Then I banged the gong for zazen, and afterwards I prepared breakfast for one. Cleaning, working in the fields, heating the bathwater: all the daily tasks usually shared between several people were now my responsibility.

Looking back, I have to admire Okumura’s courage in leaving a newbie like me alone in charge of the temple. I might have accidentally torched the place. At the time, I asked myself: ‘How come this Zen master’s too busy to teach me the secrets of Zen? I wanted to use my two months of summer holiday to learn more about life, and now I’m sitting in this little temple all by myself!’

At the end of the holidays I had a choice to make: I could spend my final six months in Japan back at the University of Kyoto or continue my search for Zen – a search which had become, without me realising it, a search for myself. I chose the second option. George from Alabama, a guy I’d met at Shorin­ji, had told me about his time at Antai­ji. Everything was totally different there, he said. The monastery lay deep in the mountains, five kilometres from the small village of Kutoyama, and the four Japanese monks who lived there with their teacher