I made three full bows toward my teacher and the smiling Buddha statue on the altar, my knees and forehead touching the mat, my palms outstretched. When I rose, my face was red, and I was a bit breathless and sweaty. The meditation hall, on an upper floor of an unassuming office building near Union Square, was crowded with meditators dressed in black, some sitting on cushions and some on folding chairs along the walls.

This is where a cheesy movie would have scratched a vinyl record on the turntable, frozen the frame, and played the voice-over narrator in my head: “Yes, that’s me, a middle-aged breaking-news editor at The New York Times who tweets all day and sleeps with his phone. You’re probably wondering how I got here.”

I glanced toward my wife, daughter and other guests. One of my oldest friends, who knew my skeptical views on God and religion, seemed particularly bemused. I had to admit this was a weird pivot for a skeptical journalist. But it was official: I had just taken vows as a Zen Buddhist. This wasn’t a movie. This was my life. And my life had been changing, and it would continue to change in profound ways over the next decade.

Around my neck and across my chest I wore a rakusu, a traditional black garment resembling a small apron, which is worn for important ceremonies and during meditation retreats. After leaving The Times newsroom each night for the previous year, I had pored over the complicated instructions and sewn the strips of cloth together, breathing with each stitch. It had been a slow task, full of needle sticks and do-overs. I could see the trail of my mistakes in the fabric. This was not the seamless Zen perfection I had imagined.

It was said that a rakusu represented the full robes that the Buddha and his itinerant followers had made, using scraps from trash heaps, funeral pyres and burial grounds, thousands of years ago in India. That description gave me some comfort about the sorry state of mine. The reverse side was a white panel, where a calligrapher had inscribed the date of the ceremony, a traditional verse, my teacher’s name and the new dharma name he had chosen for me, using Japanese kanji characters. The English transliteration was Kōryū, translated as “constant stream,” an apt name, according to those who know me.

I was one of three people that night undergoing jukai, which means “receiving the precepts.” We had just vowed to uphold the precepts of a bodhisattva, the term for a being who has committed to the path of awakening. The precepts resemble moral principles in other religions: No killing, no stealing, no lying. Some were more abstract: Do good. Don’t elevate yourself above others. Still others were ideals that remain a struggle: Avoid anger. Don’t talk about others’ faults. Do not intoxicate yourself or others with substances or more subtle intoxicants like knowledge and power.

The jukai recipients had spent months meeting with our teachers to discuss how to put these precepts into action. There was room for interpretation, and no God in heaven keeping score. Unlike other religions and other branches of Buddhism, modern Zen dismisses talk of an afterlife, reincarnation, gods and the supernatural as distractions from the practice of awakening as human beings in the here and now. We were just vowing to do our best.

During the jukai ceremony, our sensei (teacher), Gregory Hosho Abels, read the precepts from the front of the room and asked us, “Will you maintain them?”

“I will,” we replied in unison.

Louder: “Will you maintain them?”

“I will.”

…CONTINUED HERE….

To read more of this essay, which is loosely based on my failed nonfiction book proposal “Deadline Zen,” please see the Summer 2026 issue of Tiferet Journal, Pages 117-126. Thanks to Donna Baier Stein for encouraging me to write this and giving it a home.