Zen Buddhist Monk's Perspectives on Biohacking
Yogetsu Akasaka — Zen Monk
Yogetsu Akasaka is a Zen Music Artist who improvised music with beatboxing, overtone vocal sounds, and Buddhist chanting. He became a Zen Buddhist monk after traveling to eight different cities as a beatboxer. During his intense practice as a Zen Buddhist monk, he also had an opportunity to practice in Zen centers in the United States, including San Francisco Zen Center, known for the place where Steve Jobs used to attend. The experience of the mixed culture of Japanese traditional Zen Buddhism and American organic/sustainable community, which is from counterculture in the '60s, inspired him as a Zen Music Artist.
Yogetsu Akasaka, a Zen Buddhist monk and musician, offers
Zen practice is all about staying in the moment in everything we do in our daily life. When you are in the moment, you are free from suffering.
Summary
- Zen practice focuses on "being here now" during daily tasks like cleaning to stay in the moment, which helps reduce suffering and increase serotonin levels for better mental health.
- Shojin cooking is a Zen culinary approach that prioritizes making an effort, seasonal ingredients, and a zero-waste policy by using every part of a vegetable for maximum nutrition.
- Fermented staples like brown rice, miso, and pickles serve as vital biohacking tools, providing essential probiotics and nutrients that support gut health and physical longevity.
- Zen meditation is defined as "sitting for nothing," where the goal is not to gain productivity or stress relief, but to realize one is already a complete spiritual being without attachment.
- Sound and specific frequencies, such as 432 Hz, are used to guide practitioners into a meditative state, encouraging a focus on breath and bodily sensations to appreciate the present moment.
Article
Zen Buddhist Monk’s Perspectives On Biohacking: Shojin Cooking, Meditation And Music
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Yogetsu Akasaka Offered A Counterpoint To The Culture Of Optimization
In Helsinki, at Biohacker Summit 2022, the language of performance met something older, quieter and more difficult to commodify. On Friday, 3 June 2022, Yogetsu Akasaka, the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, beatboxer and Zen music artist, stepped before an audience often accustomed to metrics, supplements and self-experimentation, and proposed a different route to human flourishing.
His presentation, *Zen Buddhist Monk’s Perspectives On Biohacking*, did not reject the biohacker’s ambition to live better. It reframed it. The body, he argued, could not be upgraded in isolation from the mind, nor the mind steadied without attending to the body. Nutrition, meditation and sound were not separate interventions but parts of a single ecology of being.
“Body mind unity is the key of Zen Buddhism,” Akasaka said. “Our body and mind are connected to each other. If your physical body is healthy, your mental condition will be good too.”
A Philosophy That Began Not With Control But With Presence
Akasaka’s central thesis was deceptively simple: Zen practice is the discipline of being fully present. In a summit devoted to enhancement, he spoke instead of release. The problem, in his telling, was not merely stress or poor diet. It was the restless habit of interpretation, the ceaseless layering of judgment upon experience.
“Everything you think is your point of view, which is separate from phenomenon,” he said. “Phenomenon itself is neutral; when you add your point of view to a phenomenon, suffering will occur.”
To illustrate this, he turned to a humble domestic act: cleaning. A cloth sliding across a floor is only that until resentment enters it, until the mind says this should not be my task, this is beneath me, this is unfair. In that moment, a neutral act becomes suffering. Zen, as Akasaka presented it, was not withdrawal from ordinary life but a stricter intimacy with it. Cleaning, cooking, chanting, sitting: each could become practice if one remained inside the moment rather than above it.
Shojin Cooking As Ethical Nutrition And Everyday Biohacking
The summit audience, primed for food as fuel, was introduced to *shojin ryori*, the Japanese Buddhist culinary tradition that Akasaka described as both nourishing and ethical. Vegetarian, seasonal and rigorously low-waste, Shojin cooking treated ingredients not as commodities but as gifts requiring care.
“Shoujin means making an effort,” he said. “Chefs cook meals making an effort as much as they can, hoping that training monks can make an effort in their practice.”
That definition carried unusual moral force. Effort in the kitchen was not vanity or culinary performance. It was an offering. Even the structure of the meal embodied discipline. Simplicity mattered. Beauty mattered. Waste was to be resisted. Stems, seeds and skins, often discarded in modern kitchens, were instead valued for both their nutritional density and their place in a whole system of respect.
In an age of ultra-processed convenience, Akasaka’s account of Zen food sounded almost radical in its modesty. Seasonal vegetables, carefully prepared, became a form of physical maintenance and spiritual attention at once.
Fermentation, Gut Health And The Slow Intelligence Of Traditional Food
If there was a recognisable bridge between Zen and contemporary biohacking, it lay in fermentation. Akasaka presented fermented foods not as fashionable add-ons but as foundational practices embedded in Japanese daily life.
He highlighted fermented brown rice, prepared with brown rice and red beans, soaked long enough to germinate and reduce phytates. The process, he explained, increased nutritional value, improved texture and taste, and supported preservation. It was slower food in every sense, requiring patience before reward.
He then turned to miso soup, which he called the “Japanese soul soup.” Miso, made from fermented soybean paste, stood in his telling as both nourishment and communal ritual. Traditionally, families and communities made it together, sharing what he described as indigenous bacteria from their hands, allowing fermentation to become not only biological but social.
Japanese pickles, especially *nukazuke* made in rice bran, completed the picture. For Akasaka, they were daily tools for cultivating gut health, richer in living bacteria when made at home than when bought from supermarkets laden with preservatives and artificial flavours. Long before the microbiome became a buzzword, these foods had already entered the Japanese table as practical wisdom.
In this respect, his speech quietly punctured the novelty often surrounding wellness culture. Much of what is marketed as innovation, he suggested, had long existed in traditions shaped by scarcity, attentiveness and community memory.
Meditation As The Refusal To Gain
Yet it was on meditation that Akasaka most sharply diverged from the contemporary self-improvement industry. At a time when mindfulness is often packaged as a tool for productivity, focus or stress reduction, he insisted on a more austere proposition.
“Zen meditation shouldn’t be done for gaining something,” he said. “Spiritual awakening is opposite to the idea that you can become happy after gaining something; you realize that you are already a spiritual being with nothing.”
This was perhaps the most subversive moment of the presentation. In a room likely filled with people seeking sharper cognition, longer life, better sleep and enhanced resilience, Akasaka described a practice whose deepest purpose lay beyond acquisition. Zen meditation, he said, was “sitting for nothing”. Not because it lacked value, but because value emerged only when instrumental thinking fell away.
To a culture obsessed with outcomes, the statement landed as both challenge and invitation.
Sound, Breath And The Return To The Present
Akasaka closed with what he called Zen Music Meditation, drawing on handpan, chanting and the sonorous hybrid art that has made him a distinctive figure beyond the monastery. His biography shaped the moment: a former beatboxer who travelled through eight cities before becoming a Zen Buddhist monk, later practising in the United States, including at San Francisco Zen Center, he embodied a crossing of traditions rather than a preservation of purity.
That mixed cultural inheritance could be felt in his use of 432 Hz handpan music and rhythmic vocalisation to guide the audience inward. The point was not spectacle. It was return. Breath, sensation, the contact of skin with clothing, body with chair, life with the present tense.
“Focus on your breath and realize that you are alive,” he told the audience. “Appreciate your breath. Appreciate the moment. Appreciate the opportunity that you are here.”
In another speaker’s mouth, such language might have sounded sentimental. In Akasaka’s, after an hour spent dismantling the ego’s appetite for control, it carried a lucid seriousness.
A Different Vision Of High Performance
What emerged from Yogetsu Akasaka’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki was not a rejection of performance but a correction to its modern mythology. Better living, he suggested, did not begin with domination over the self. It began with alignment. Feed the body well. Waste less. Ferment patiently. Sit without trying to become someone else. Notice the breath before the ambition.
The irony was that, in speaking to a crowd gathered around optimisation, Akasaka may have offered one of the summit’s most rigorous forms of biohacking. Not because it promised more output, but because it asked a deeper question: what if the most advanced human technology was attention itself?
In the end, his message was less about transcendence than integration. Nutrition and spirituality. Discipline and gratitude. Sound and silence. Body and mind. In a culture that so often splits the human being into systems to be managed, Yogetsu Akasaka proposed wholeness, and for a moment in Helsinki, that older wisdom sounded startlingly new.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki