Finding My Own Way Into Tradition

Years ago, I was introduced to zukoh in a traditional Buddhist context.

Zukoh is a powdered incense placed into the hands and gently rubbed into the skin. Traditionally, it is used for purification before entering practice, ceremony, or sacred space.

I understood the explanation.

But, as is often the case with me, understanding something and finding my own way into it were not the same thing.

I have rarely arrived anywhere by the most direct route.

I seem to need to walk around the block before crossing the street. I approach things from the side. I live with them for a while. I question them. Sometimes I forget about them and return years later. Eventually, if something remains with me long enough, I begin to understand why I was drawn to it in the first place.

This has been true of nearly every practice that has become meaningful to me.

I did not enter yoga through a clear devotion to yoga. I did not enter sound through an established spiritual framework. I did not begin meditating because I had found a tradition I wanted to follow.

I found fragments.

A sensation. A question. A way of paying attention.

Then I followed them.

Zukoh was similar.

I first used it privately. I would place a small amount in my hands before meditation or during a transition in my day. I was not trying to reproduce the ceremony in which it had first been shown to me. I was not attempting to become more traditionally Buddhist.

I simply noticed that the act changed something.

Not because the powder itself was magically removing impurity from me.

It changed something because I stopped.

I opened my hands.

I received something.

I rubbed it slowly into my skin.

For a brief moment, I was no longer rushing from one experience into another.

There was a threshold.

That threshold became the practice.

Years ago, I went to a friend’s house while he was making a stew from his grandmother’s recipe.

The kitchen smelled warm and familiar, the kind of smell that seems to belong to a family before it belongs to a particular meal. He was standing over the stove, stirring carefully, while the stew bubbled right up to the edge of the pot.

Every few seconds, a little more spilled over the side.

It ran down onto the burner. He wiped it away, stirred again, and kept going.

I looked around the kitchen and noticed that he had several larger pots. So I asked, gently, why he did not move the stew into one of them.

He looked at me as though the answer were obvious.

“This is the pot my grandmother used.”

There was so much tenderness in the way he said it.

The recipe was hers. The pot was hers. And somehow, without ever deciding it, he had come to believe that the two belonged together.

Then he glanced at the stove, at the stew spilling over again, and seemed to realize for the first time that he could have used another pot.

He looked a little embarrassed.

I told him not to be.

“Your grandmother would be proud.”

And I meant it.

There was something deeply loving about the fact that he had remembered not only what she made, but what she made it in. He had carried the whole scene forward.

Still, I have thought about that moment many times since.

At what point does honoring a tradition become repeating its container?

And when is choosing a larger pot not a rejection of what was handed down, but a way of helping it continue?

I think about this whenever I encounter a practice with a history much older than my own.

There is a traditional meaning. There is a form. There is a lineage that deserves respect.

But there is also the question of what happens when that practice enters another life.

Do we preserve every part exactly as it was given to us?

Do we repeat the gesture because it is familiar, even if we no longer understand what it is doing?

Or do we remain close enough to the tradition to discover what is still alive inside it?

The traditional language surrounding zukoh is purification.

That word can carry a great deal of weight. It can suggest that we are unclean, impure, or somehow unworthy of entering a sacred space until something has been removed from us.

That is not how I experience it.

I do not believe we need to become pure before we can practice.

I do not believe we need to get rid of our thoughts, our emotions, our exhaustion, or the day we have just lived.

I am not interested in using ritual to divide experience into what belongs and what does not.

But I do understand the need to prepare.

We move through our lives without clear boundaries between one thing and the next. We finish work while answering a message. We enter our homes while still carrying the conversations of the day. We lie down to rest while our attention remains scattered across everything left unfinished.

Our bodies arrive before the rest of us does.

A ritual can help us catch up.

Perhaps purification does not have to mean removing something bad.

Perhaps it can mean clearing a small space around the transition.

We pause.

We notice what we are carrying.

We make a gesture that says: I am entering something now.

The gesture does not make us cleaner, calmer, deeper, or more spiritual.

It gives the movement from one state into another a shape.

Without some kind of threshold, experience can begin to feel like one continuous blur. Work enters rest. Anxiety enters sleep. The outside world follows us into the next moment before we have noticed that we brought it with us.

Ritual interrupts that momentum.

It does not guarantee a particular experience.

It does not transform us into someone different.

It simply creates a moment in which we can recognize that something is changing.

This is how traditions often come alive for me.

I encounter something with a history much older than my own. I try to understand where it came from. I respect the context in which it was given to me. Then I live with it long enough to discover the part that continues to speak.

I do not always take the straight path.

I take a step toward something, circle it, walk away, and return from another direction.

Perhaps this is not a failure to follow the path.

Perhaps it is the path.

We are shaped by what is handed down to us, but tradition cannot remain alive through repetition alone. At some point, it must become intimate. It must move from something we have been told into something we have experienced.

The stew can remain his grandmother’s stew, even in a larger pot.

A practice can remain connected to the tradition that carried it, even as it finds a new shape in another life.

For me, zukoh has become a small ritual of arrival.

A scent.

A pause.

A recognition that I have crossed a threshold.

Not purified into someone different.

Simply more available to the experience I am about to enter.