Having grown up in America, where individual choices and freedom are valued above all, it’s difficult to imagine giving one’s freedom of choice up for anything. But when I spent three days of monastic life at Hokyoji, a Soto Zen temple in Japan, that was exactly what I had to do.

Meditation for a Zen monastic is not just the hour of formal zazen (meditating facing the wall in a meditation hall) each morning before dawn and each evening at dusk; meditation is meant to encompass all aspects of one’s life. Eating is zazen. Pulling weeds in the garden is zazen. Walking is zazen. And there are prescriptions by one’s superiors on how to do each act: eat from your bowls in this manner, after these prayers; walk quietly on the pads of your feet, with your hands clasped in front of you; brush your teeth with this much water, chant each morning under a certain decibel.

I constantly violated these carefully prescribed forms. Bleary-eyed at four a.m., I would spill the small bucket of water for tooth brushing; late to the chanting service, my footsteps were loud and hands unclasped; my voice was always an octave too high in the mornings. There was a wrong way to do everything, and I seemed to find every one.

One day, as I was pulling weeds alongside a monk who my friends and I secretly called Oregon because of his home state, I broke form once again to ask him about temples where I might live as a lay monastic, or someone who lives in a temple for a short period of time without taking the monastic vows. Before Oregon could respond, we were hushed by a young Japanese monk named Shugyo, who was raking leaves nearby. Gardening was a time to meditate, not talk.

But a few minutes later, when Shugyo was raking further away from our weeding, Oregon walked over and crouched beside me to talk again in whispers, telling me not to worry about Shugyo, who he called a “Hokyoji robot.” Oregon told me that the structure of our lives here was unnecessarily rigid, and that he had come from a progressive American temple that believed in more individual freedoms and less ritual. At the time, I couldn’t agree with him more. Yet, as I grew accustomed to the forms, was late less often and was finally able to keep up with the rapid eating and cleaning rituals that accompanied every meal, I began to see the merit in following a rigid form.

Zazen is about giving up volitional action; one places one hands in a certain way, and sits a certain way, and faces the wall, so that one doesn’t need to make all of the trivial choices involved in positioning one’s body, even down to the point on which one’s eyes rest. The same goes for eating, and walking, and gardening. There are a million trivial decisions filling our minds each day. When one has form, one is freed from these decisions, and gains a surprising freedom of mind. Paradoxically, giving up one’s freedom of choice frees one’s mind from the myriad decisions that clutter it in each moment.

As a novice to zazen, I found that I needed this form to free my mind and be at peace. Shugyo, too, needed the form. During our first meeting, which had been at a temple hostel in Kyoto, Shugyo had seemed profoundly uncomfortable. After his first, ceremoniously low bow to us, he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He wrung his hands, he sat unnaturally stiffly in a Western-style chair, and didn’t seem to know where to look. He was entirely different when I saw him again in the temple: composed, calm, and self-assured in his perfected, structured life. I felt this too when, after a few days in the temple, the monks took my friends and I to the nearby town of Ono to meet the mayor. As we were waiting for our appointed time, we sat around in a tea shop, wringing our hands, not knowing what to do with ourselves. I felt anxious, even in the quiet, small town of Ono, because it lacked the structure of the temple. Despite Oregon’s exhortations that we would all be better off freed from Hokyoji’s countless rules and rituals, I began to understand Shugyo and his rigid adherence to Hokyoji’s prescriptions. As novices, we needed structure to find freedom of mind.

There is the fear that monastic life is an escape: that one finds freedom and calm there, and loses it as soon as one tries to enter the real world. But Hokyoji is not meant to be a permanent refuge, as the roshi (zen master) told us. It is a place to train and learn how to turn one’s entire life into the practice of zazen. And the roshi was for us, a living example of how zazen can extend beyond the temple walls. He sat beside Shugyo in our audience with the mayor, and the two stood in stark contrast to each other. Shugyo’s face was anxious and drawn, his hands again wringing under the table at which they sat. The roshi’s face held the same absolutely peaceful and self-assured half-smile that he greeted us with each day at morning services, his hands lying flat in his lap, and his voice calm and unshaken.

Through order, he found that peace, and over time, he was able to live with that peace of mind even without the temple’s restrictions. He had truly found a freedom that we could only aspire to, and it was because of his example that I could bumble through the rituals of the temple with a smile, knowing that absolute freedom is attainable even beyond the forms that I used to find it.