In “Welcome to Multiplayer Zen,” Vince Horn introduces a relational, out-loud approach to Zen practice—turning solitary meditation into an interactive, peer-to-peer experience—and explores why doing the practice together might serve networked, digital-native practitioners better than white-knuckling it alone.
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💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: So welcome again. It’s great to have you here. Thanks for coming into the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha to check out what we’re doing with Multiplayer Zen. This is the first session of what I guess will end up being around 12 weeks of meeting together weekly to practice and explore some different perspectives.
This is the second time I’ve taught this particular curriculum. The first time it was called Social Zen, so it got a big remake. Now it’s Multiplayer Zen. Why? In part because of the way that I teach relational meditation. I teach under both the moniker of multiplayer meditation and social meditation.
Social meditation’s kinda how my teacher, Kenneth Folk, described these practices, which I started sharing in 2010 after learning them from him. But then after, what is it now, 16 years of sharing them myself and collaborating with friends and students, coming up with new practices and understanding kind of what it is that we’re doing with these relational techniques, I came to, I guess, understand some things that I think Kenneth didn’t describe.
And so I sort of play around with differentiating from my teacher, having my own approach and own language for it. But really it comes from the same root. And his innovation, which is what he called Social Noting, was really a way of doing the Burmese Mahasi Sayadaw mental noting technique, if you’ve heard of that.
It’s a type of vipassana, or mindfulness practice. He took that and did it out loud with other people, with his students, including with me. And that was, in one sense, it’s not really that big of an innovation, right? It’s like, oh, you just did this thing out loud. But in another way, it’s a huge innovation, because in that early Buddhist tradition, meditation is something that’s kind of understood: you do it silently, you do it by yourself. Even if you’re in a group, you’re doing it silently by yourself together. At least that’s how it was in the meditation centers that I practiced in, mostly in America. Not claiming that’s the way it is everywhere. But that’s how I came up: individualism, but together.
We’re a bunch of individualists who fly together to a retreat for nine days, and we practice together for a month or whatever. But what this innovation did as well is it broke the taboo of silence, which is very common in these traditions. What we’re doing is something we do in silence and in our own experience by ourself, introspecting.
I have less experience doing formal training in the Zen tradition, but I did do a couple sesshins with Diane Hamilton, and I trained with Trudy Goodman, who was a Zen teacher before she became an Insight teacher. I did some koan training as well with David Loy when we both lived together in the same neighborhood in Colorado, so my engagement with Zen has been mostly through direct people that I’ve had relationships with, teachers. Not as much spending my retreat time. Most of that happened at the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, doing more Theravada-style long silent insight retreats. But the Zen sesshins I did were not totally dissimilar.
They felt similar in the culture of it at least, where it’s like we’re a bunch of individuals gathering together in community to do our own practice together. And while I do think this is multiplayer for sure, what Kenneth’s innovation did for me was it opened up how I thought about meditation and what it could be.
Like when I think about meditation now, I think meditation is just a series of choices that we make about what to do and what to not do. And when we understand it that way, then we can start to kind of be more curious about what it is we’re told meditation is and what it is we thus practice. We hear from the experts, the people that have done tens of thousands of hours of these things.
What is it that they’re telling us to do? Well, they’re telling us to sit with our eyes closed or open, with our body in a particular posture, and they’re telling us to do certain things with our attention, including pay attention to the breath and count your breaths, or just sit, or think about this story that I’m going to tell you and meditate on it.
Or wish people well over and over again silently while you imagine all these people that you’re wishing well. These are all different techniques, things you do. What Kenneth basically did that I hadn’t considered before is he said, “Well, you could do that internally.” Any of those things — you could count to yourself, or you could wish well to other people inside your own head, or you could do it out loud. You could verbalize the practice, and of course, even this isn’t new. We have chanting in the Buddhist tradition for thousands of years. Oftentimes the chanting I’ve experienced is like synchronized or call-and-response chanting, where everyone’s chanting together.
There’s a chant leader sometimes who’s chanting, and then you follow them. The practices that Kenneth developed are a little bit more like a modern board game or a video game. They’re a little bit more like not just call-and-response or synchronized, but also interactive. You could take turns, or you could do something together spontaneously.
And that makes them relational or multiplayer in a way that doing something together in silence, or even sometimes synchronized, is different. At least, it has a different effect.
So Multiplayer Zen for me is a way of taking these multiplayer meditation techniques and a protocol that I’ve described for myself as like the rules around how we decide what meditation is.
What do you do with your body? What are you doing with your intention? How many words are you using, if there’s words involved in the practice? What are you doing with others? Are you by yourself? Are you with others? Are you inside? Are you outside? Like, all these are questions that we kind of have to ask if we’re doing a practice, or at least we assume we know what we’re doing.
In Multiplayer Zen, I just want to explore some of the different core teachings and practices that have arisen in this tradition, which is a vast tradition. It’s not just one thing. Of course, it starts in India. Indian Buddhism travels into East Asia, to China, Korea, and eventually into Japan and becomes known by the Japanese term Zen.
Of course, Chan in China, Seon in Korea. There are different ways of describing this. I think we call it meditation here. That’s our translation for this, whatever this is. We could say we’re meditating. Yeah, what is Zen? It’s a translation of the word Dhyāna or Jhāna. Literally also translates as meditation.
Of course, the Zen tradition had more than just meditation going on, but it was in a sense a stripped-down reaction to the over-intellectualization of early Buddhism. These super Buddhist nerds for 1,000 years are trying to create models that describe how everything interacts and everything connects, and here’s exactly how you get to enlightenment, and here are the stages, and here’s...
They had everything figured out. They knew everything. And here comes Zen: no, these are all concepts. You’ve built this incredible thousand years of knowledge about enlightenment, and we’re just going to take... We’re going to take the Heart Sutra, and we’re going to pull the rug right from under all of this confidence you have about what it is and why you’re doing it.
This is what I love about the Zen tradition, at least how I’ve experienced it. It’s like, yeah, you can have all kinds of ideas about how things are, but when you’re in the middle of something difficult, then reality’s showing up and you gotta do something with it.
How useful is it to know about the 16 stages of insight or about the 40 meditation objects when your parent’s dying in front of you? It’s like, okay, that’s where it gets real. As a meditator, in my early years of meditation, I thought meditation’s going to protect me from reality somehow.
I’m going to immunize myself by becoming... And this is how early Buddhism sells itself, to be fair to me. I kind of bought the original advertising of, “You can get free from suffering.” And I didn’t realize that, well, the first noble truth is still true.
There’s still suffering, even when you have a different relationship to it. But in the Zen Buddhist tradition, I encountered something much different. It felt like a much more real appraisal of reality: “Oh, no, you can wake up, and then you wake right back down into the life you’re living, because there’s nowhere apart from this.”
There’s no transcendent super-space that you’re going to get to where you can disappear into and never have to worry again. Unfortunately, it would be great if that existed. But in fact, that transcendent moment of freedom, while it can exist for a moment — you can have a moment of disappearing, then in the very next moment, when you reappear, where are you? “Oh, no, I’m here again.”
And how much is meditation useful then? Well, it is still useful. It’s still useful to relax and calm your mind. But what I’ve found is it’s less useful if I do it in a way that’s antisocial. If I do my meditation all by myself, and I’m working out my problems all by myself, and I’m not really connecting with other people, and I’m not being intimate and sharing the kinds of things that are happening...
Meditation done well is really intimate, right? Like, if you’ve really had a good session, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I opened up to and saw some things about myself that I wasn’t even wanting to see.” Right, it’s like you come to terms with how it is. It’s weird to me to do that by yourself and not share that with others now, especially being a parent, and a partner, and a teacher, someone who’s in all these roles that are relational, inherently.
It’s weird. Like, I want to share what’s happening in my meditation practice. So for me, multiplayer meditation just goes straight there. It’s like, why not just meditate with others out loud and share what you’re experiencing while it’s happening? Then I don’t have to share again. We just had the experience together.
We can talk about it. It’s shared. It’s not something that happened to me and that I’m sharing with you. It’s something that we shared together.
So there’s all kinds of practices in Zen that we could take and turn into a more relational, explicitly relational kind of experience. Like, we could do koan practice out loud together. Actually, koan practice is already relational, at least when you’re doing it with a teacher. But we could take it outside of the strict hierarchy of teacher-student, and we could do it in a peer-to-peer fashion.
We could do interactive koans out loud together. I had a friend who I worked with for quite a while named Kelly Bearer, and Kelly was a Zen student of Genpo Roshi, Genpo Merzel Roshi, in the White Plum Sangha. And in that tradition, in that community, they had a practice called Big Mind, this really interesting relational meditation practice that has really informed how I think about multiplayer Zen.
And in Big Mind, the invitation that Genpo often shared was to just become one with whatever it is that you want to awaken as. You want to be Big Mind? Okay, just be Big Mind. Do you want to be big heart, great compassion, great enlightenment? You can actually, in any moment, according to the logic of Big Mind practice, just become that, and then you can talk as that.
You can speak as the voice of Big Mind, for instance. And it’s kind of like an instant enlightenment thing. But in my experience, Big Mind works because everyone in the group does it together, and you end up getting some people who can hold those capacities right there on the spot, and you get a group of them, a group of people who sort of — like we do when we go to the movie theater, right?
We go and we watch this movie. It’s a completely made-up story, and yet we get completely immersed in it together. Likewise, we make up the story that we’re all enlightened, and we’re speaking as enlightenment, and somehow that story has real power, especially with a bunch of people that care about it when they get together and start speaking as, say, enlightened mind.
As enlightened mind, what do you notice? I don’t know. As enlightened mind, I notice that I don’t know. That’s okay.
So with multiplayer Zen, we can do it differently. We can treat the Zen path as an interactive and relational path, as a peer-to-peer journey, as well as one where we can have a sort of hierarchical relationship with a teacher. I’m not saying we should get rid of that.
I’m just saying that’s one mode of doing it. That’s one way we can do it. It’s also great to be able to trust your own sense of things and to allow that trust to emerge in relation to your peers, I think. That’s also a great way. It’s how we become individuated. So I think we can free Zen from itself in that sense.
The failure modes of Zen that I’ve seen happen when we get too rigid about hierarchy. My friend Kelly, who I was mentioning — this is the reason I brought her up. She learned the Big Mind technique. She learned this move of how to put herself in the position of whatever it is she wants to explore, and she got good at it, which is what they were teaching her.
And then she said, “Well, I wonder if I could apply this to the koan training,” because in this tradition they also do several hundred koans, and that’s part of the journey toward becoming a teacher. You have to complete these trainings. So she started to use the Big Mind trick, and she started to become one with each koan.
She just decided, “Well, if I can do it with Big Mind, I should be able to just become one with the koan, too.” And sure enough, she started blazing through koans. She hacked the koan system using the very tools that her teachers gave her. And you know what that did? It pissed her teachers off, actually. That’s what it did.
They told her, “Stop. You can’t move through the koans so quickly. They’re supposed to take longer.” And she’s like, “Well, I’m just doing what you told me to do, which is take this Big Mind technique and apply it to what I’m learning about koans, and it’s helping me.” So I bring this story up because this is what happens when we decide to do things a little differently.
Kenneth did it by taking the noting method and doing it out loud. Kelly took the Big Mind method and applied it to koans. These are not completely new ideas. It’s just taking something old and doing it slightly differently. That’s an innovation. And on what basis do we innovate?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I wrestle with that question. It’s like, have I done enough Zen? Have I known enough Zen teachers? Have I studied enough to be able to do something and say it’s related to...? I don’t— Maybe not. Maybe I’m totally culturally appropriating and being an arrogant asshole.
I could be doing that. I want to acknowledge that. There’s probably some degree of that. At the same time, I’m just inspired by what my friends Kelly and Kenneth did, and other teachers that I’ve seen, and other practitioners, when they find out some new way to do something that seems to work better in certain ways that are important and useful.
For me, doing multiplayer, doing it out loud with other people, it’s so useful because it’s like translating these techniques and these traditions into internet terms, into network terms that networked digital natives can relate to. It’s like, we don’t always— Digital natives don’t want to always be told what to do.
We want to have the instructions explained and be given the opportunity to participate and learn ourselves, and not just learn, but also contribute to the learning of others. That’s when we really feel alive, right? When we’re not just learning, but contributing. We don’t want to live in these rigid roles of teacher and student, where the teacher can never learn and is locked into being the knower, and the student is the only one that cannot know, right?
And how Zen is that, actually? So, Multiplayer Zen. This is a way of approaching the Zen tradition, hopefully with respect and honor that this is a big tradition. There are many different lineages, many different ways of practicing this tradition. I’m only going to be touching on the things that I’ve learned and that I found most helpful, and then bringing that together with multiplayer meditation — doing practice out loud together in an interactive way that can seem a little bit more like playing a video game than kind of white-knuckling it through a solo meditation session.
