WW: Summer evening

Hermitcraft: Hermit Zabuton

Red-letter day here at Rusty Ring: a new zabuton has been sworn in.

The old one, which has appeared on these pages numberless times (here, for example, with my zafu, or here, if you look closely at the upper righthand corner of the second photo), had been in service since I became a hermit monk 24 years ago, and I'm a bit heartbroken to set it aside. But the cover had become dirty and threadbare, and finally a dog tore a hole in it.

That last may sound a bit alarming if you've never seen the object in question, but I assure you: pets never missed the joke.

I got that zabuton for free from a person who no longer had a dog. And it worked great – ideal size and weight, highly durable, insulating in the winter and airy in summer. Together we travelled the continent, sitting indoors and out, keeping my physical plant in monastic trim without the least trouble or worry.

(My zafu, less than a year younger, also soldiers on, having as sole intervention been fortified about midway through by a tough, weatherproof cover. True to form, I usually protect that with a cloth shoulder bag, so that the whole looks like a bagful of laundry. Note to self: we need another bag to protect that bag with.)

Any road, just as my winter robe began life as an old fleece bathrobe, I sit zazen on a dog bed. The scepticism this raises in certain quarters is worth the paltry money such kit costs. Welcome to eremitical monasticism, bitches.

But it was time for a new meditation mat, and two decades of experience has taught me that the dogs are right: this-here is what you want. Still, you'd be amazed how broad is the canine mattress market, in every sense: colour, design, shape, expense, comfort… even dimensions vary remarkably.

You gotta know a lot about pet supplies to nail this one. Especially these days, when it often must be purchased sight-unseen.

In the end, after a mere six months' research, I got what I needed. The new pad is a little loftier and has a textured checkerboard cover (see photo) – ironic echo of certain so-designated zabutons meeting fewer criteria and costing four to twelve times more. (Set me back twenty-five dollars Yank, for those playing at home.)

One thing I do miss is the extra 4 inches; where my old zabuton is 28 inches by 35, this one is only 24. However, there are some good reasons for a shallower mat, chiefly that they're less obstructive in a multiuse room; fit more readily into many outdoor sites; and are easier to transport by car.

As for wear or ergonomic issues, only time will tell. But for the moment, it's holding lotus admirably.

So if you need a zabuton but can't afford spiritual materialism, come join me out here with the dogs.

Company's better, anyway.

WW: Alien technology

(So the other day I look out my back window and see what appears to be a cloud of stars on the ground beside the highway. A field glass survey establishes it as alien technology, apparently blown down the road for a considerable distance before getting wrapped around a power pole near my house.

Cognisant of my civic duty, if somewhat nervous about radiation, I climbed the bank for a closer look. And that's how I came into possession of a perfectly intact 4X8 sheet of mylar.

I immediately brought this home and smoothed it out on the floor, during which time it sparkled ardently each time it came into contact with starlight. The substance is also ethereally light, sailing around the room on no more than the draught from a partially open window – fully consistent with its interplanetary itinerary. Finally, note that the entire film was once folded to geometrically exact measure, likely to save space in the flying saucer.

I have no idea what its creators use this stuff for, though intuition suggests a possible connection with small princesses. However, in the absence of frosting or other as-yet undetected residue, we must content ourselves with storing this curious if somewhat alarming find in a sterile environment until a use for it can be determined.)

WW: Stabilising Digitalis

(Foxglove [Digitalis purpurea] is a common weed of the North Pacific slope. While non-native, and virulently poisonous if eaten, it's generally escaped the "invasive" label. I'm not entirely sure why, but it probably has much to do with the fact that it has a pronounced tendency to colonise poor, erosion-prone soil snubbed by other plants. This landslide site in the bluffs above the beach is a good example.

That, and its singular beauty, may have earned Digitalis a measure of tacit support here.)

Good Song: Wide Awake

Despite its author's apparent lack of Buddhist background, this breezy tune from Julian Taylor, under a title seemingly made to trap Zenners like flypaper, has done exactly that to me.

You got the refrain,

I’m wide awake
I chalk it up to all of my mistakes
And all the heartache that I’ve had to face
And all the choices that I’ve had to make in my life

...a succinct summary of the Buddha's teaching on the origins of enlightenment practice.

Then there's that embedded haiku, twice recited:

There is an abundance of hope that lies between the oceans of time
There’s nothing singular about it
Yet it can be clearly defined

If someone told me these lines were extracted from one of the exhortations we chant in our zendos, he or she would probably escape with the lie.

Throw in that infectious country-western bounce, soaked in gentle pedal steel and Julian's own finger-picking, and you got a track that would hit on mainstream country radio if that genre (in which I write as well) were less narrowly and politically defined.

Spin it. Be prepared to spin it again.


Wide Awake
Julian Taylor

It’s a crazy world that we live in
The tide comes and goes so fast
Right now
While I’m trying to be present
I’m still chasing shadows of my past

My father was born in the islands
My mom was born on the great turtle’s back
They prayed for me when I’d go out in the evening
At least that’s one of the rumours I’d hear
‘Round Christmas time spent with our family
Over hot totty sorrel and ginger beer

They did their best and they did it for freedom
They did everything they ever could for mе
We went to church every single Sunday
We’d get dressed up and then go to Granny’s place
I’d run around that house with my cousins
We loved to race

There is an abundance of hope that lies between the oceans of time
There’s nothing singular about it
Yet it can be clearly defined
Yet, it can be clearly defined

And I’m wide awake
I chalk it up to all of my mistakes
And all the heartache that I’ve had to face
And all the choices that I’ve had to make in my life

The greatest pictures are never taken
They’re all stored in your memory
Me and my mom
We use to go to Good Bites and talk philosophy
We’d sit there just talking for hours
I once asked her
Why are good memories so heavy
She simply said
Aren’t we lucky

And I’m wide awake
I chalk it up to all of my mistakes
And all the heartache that I’ve had to face
And all the choices that I had to make in my life

Aren’t we lucky
Aren’t we lucky

There is an abundance of hope that lies between the oceans of time
There’s nothing singular about it
Yet it can be clearly defined
Yet it can be clearly defined

And I’m wide awake
I chalk it up to all of my mistakes
And all the choices that I’ve had to make
And all the heartache that I’ve had to face in this life

WW: Falling apart

(Nice minus tide today, so I decided to have a good wade. I grabbed my sandals – the ones I took to the mountain, where I wore them all day, every day, under very demanding conditions. They never flinched.

Since then these Tevas have remained my mainstay… until I went to put them on this afternoon and found a sole about to fall off. Eager to catch the tide, I slapped on some duck tape and made off down the steep access to the beach.

Duck tape is a rescue product, enabling temporary fixes but not much more. Among other things, it's not impervious to water. So I didn't push it any further than my first intentions. As you can see, both tape and sandals delivered.

But I'll have to glue that sole back on. Which means it'll eventually come off again, and some time later, my prized sandals will have to be discarded. Sad it's come to this, but I can't complain about the performance. They've given undaunted service for 15 years.

Still poignant. Like the man said, all things made of parts.)

WW: Herald of summer

(Nootka rose [Rosa nutkana] heralds impending summer on the North Pacific Coast.)

Practice Kyôsaku

"You cannot eat a recipe."

Shunryu Suzuki, on the relative value of religious teaching.


(Photo of the epilogue to an 18th century Guru Granth Sahib manuscript, wherein the scribe shares his ink recipe, courtesy of Sikhmuseum.com and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Aquarium Buddha

(You find the Buddha in the strangest places here in the West. Exhibit A – this disembodied head. If that's not weird enough, figure this: it's intended to be placed at the bottom of an aquarium.

Indeed. You read that right.

I looked around the pet shop a bit more, but found no heads of Christ or Ganesh or Heile Selassie. In fact, no other religious imagery at all.

Just ours.

I'm not in the least offended; it's a chunk of concrete. But mystified? Yeah. Yet again.)

Easy As Pie

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

This is one of Carl Sagan's most repeated quotations, and it has all the genius his fans came to prize in him: brief, direct, plain-spoken, trenchant. Less noted is the pure Zen that Carl – a convinced, though deeply respectful, atheist – also encoded here. It's a complete and concise summary of dependent co-arising. Easily recalled and memorised. The only part I might gently dispute is "from scratch".

Making a pie – any pie – requires all of Creation.

Carl was referring to the fact that every atom in the ingredients, and all the physics required to produce, process, and bake them, and all the energy all that takes, from generating the materials to heating the oven to your own mental and physical effort, has to proceed from somewhere. As do we, down the eons-deep path back to the Big Bang. Every day and each step of which has engineered, in excruciating detail, not just your dessert recipe, but indeed, the mind that ponders it.

Skip one spec? No pie for you.

Kind of makes you want to tip your baker, eh?

Contemplating this truth helps me to think like a grown-up. To understand that circumstances have a long tail of origination – and that's after you've determined what those circumstances really are – a step people tend to drop. And that until you've delved as profoundly and as honestly as possible into both questions, you've no right to an opinion.

And that's just for scientific matters. (AKA the kindergarten of the intellect.) Make it a human issue, and it's back to GO.

Zen has that peculiarity of all religions, that it hawks an esoteric, unknowable Dharma, then metes out a drumline of simplistic rituals that followers are told is "Zen". Despite the obvious irony, there's a certain logic to this, but the problem is, that as in all binary systems, we tend to judge the superficial wing "fundamental" and dismiss the other as pretty but impractical.

Because given the choice, humans will cleave to observable, assessable behaviours while suppressing the justification for them.

Which is why our rules never work.

So today I'm sitting with Carl Sagan-roshi's teaching:

If you wish to avoid half-baked practice, you must first create the universe.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Catnip

(If you've been there, you know.)

Hermit Rules 6 & 7

6. Be quiet in body, mind and spirit. Don't hurry either in speaking or responding, distrustful of your own urgency.

7. Be firm in your convictions, but be always willing to embrace the truth.

– A Franciscan hermit in my Bluesky sangha.

(Statue of St. Francis meditating courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Thrift store moktak

(Another Buddhist thrift store find. This time it's a Thai frog rattle – essentially, a moktak-style percussion instrument with added sawtooth ridge. This last produces the familiar creak of a frog's call when the chukpi [the striking stick, meant to be clenched in the subject's jaws, but absent here] is run along it. Frogs are a common theme in Asia, where they're a talisman of good luck.

Though not a uniquely devotional object – despite clear parentage with doan paraphernalia, children often play with these, too – I'm always bemused to find this sort of thing amongst the rummage in such places.)

Walking Between Water

Survival = Anger x Imagination.

[…]

Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness.

Sherman Alexie.

(Drawn from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I elided two lines referring to life and struggle on the reservation, in order to demonstrate the universal reach of Alexie's work. This passage is typical of the koanic images he often uses to convey concepts the discursive mind might be unwilling or unable to grasp.)


(Photo courtesy of József Szabó and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Dogwood signs on

(Here's another icon of North Pacific Coast spring: Cornus nuttallii, or Pacific dogwood. Along with trillium, which blows before the dogwoods do, and native rhododendron, which blooms later, it forms a triumvirate of forest blossoms widely adopted as totems in this region. [In fact, all three of these were until recently protected by law in British Columbia.])

Diaper Practice

"No man is too big to change a diaper, but some are too small."

– An Evangelical radio preacher whose name I didn't catch, encapsulating the true man of no rank principle of Zen.


(Photo courtesy of Tembinkosi Sikupela and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Neat sailing pram

(Encountered this remarkably serviceable dinghy moored to the seawall back under the trees. Sort of boat I grew up in, before about the age of 10. The design is classic: pram-faced, with simple, clean lines, daggerboard trunk, hole-in-the-wall mast step. All in good shape.

I don't know if this boat floated in on a storm and was tied up here so the owners might see it, or belongs to whoever lives on the bluff above, but as you can see it's been pretty neglected for some time. Shame, really; she's a fine little build, with topflight materials. You don't see many hulls equipped for serious rowing these days.)

Paul's Epistle to the Buddhists

This week I happened on Andrew Springer's Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up), an essay on the vital question of what the hell St. Paul is doing in the Bible. This has bothered me since childhood: the promotion of a random convert, not even a disciple, to Christ's equal. Christ's superior, really, given that the Church typically defaults to Paul over Jesus.

I heartily recommend Springer's article to anyone who has been or is now a Christian; it's lively and well-argued, and no doubt good companionship for Christians who find themselves blessed with a surabundance of hell-raisin', God praisin' fellows, but little in the way of actual fellowship. (Ah, memories…)

As for me, I'm grateful for my deep and broad Christian journey, which taught me a great deal about spiritual discipline and ethics, and comes in handy every day of my Buddhist life.

It also taught me to appreciate the paucity of Bible-babble in Zen. In my 24 years on the path, I don't think I've once seen a Zenner smack another about the head with a sutra, trying to win a point of practice. In this we beat the Christians cold, but all coins have two sides; our lack of scriptural literacy leaves the door wide open to innovation, with the usual questionable results. I grazed this issue some years ago in Are Teachers Necessary?, wherein I explored an abuse of the Buddha's teaching that's entirely as egregious as the cult of St. Paul.

What really brought this to mind for me in the Springer piece was his citing of a contention, roundly accepted by competent Bible scholars, that six of the 13 documents attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Bible aren't even his. In other words, almost half of St. Paul's contribution to Christian teaching is in fact fraudulent.

And guess which of those two lists is most problematic, from a Christic perspective?

Because where Paul appears to contradict himself, rescinding acceptance he'd extended before, the reversal occurs most often in the apocryphal material.

Hence the training I received on my Christian path: that written wisdom is frequently wangled to please worldly authorities. And that since we're called by and to the Holy Spirit, we must be careful not to replace it in our religious practice with idols of paper and ink.

So when pursuing the Zen matter in my own piece, I was neither surprised, nor particularly dismayed, to find that one of the most poignant moments in Buddhist scripture has been trafficked to political ends. Specifically, that whereas the Buddha preached and demonstrated throughout his life that no human outranks another, the cited sutra makes him "repent" of this on his deathbed, commanding Buddhist monks to accept social hierarchies.

Yeah, that's not blasphemous or anything.

As a Christian, I learned that angels neither wrote nor protect the Bible, so we must study our scripture minutely, always aware of where it comes from, where it's been, and who would stand to lose under its authentic counsel. Where that counsel appears to waver, you seek a higher power.

My comments on that bit of sutric softness met with some scorn at the time. I think I've quoted my favourite example before: "Sounds like Mara." (In case anyone thought devil-baiting wasn't a Buddhist thing.) Which is ironic for a religion – and here I refer specifically to Western Buddhism – chiefly founded by more or less indignant refugees from the Church.

So let the record show that the courage to exercise clear-seeing in scriptural study, and to signal potential tampering when suspected, came straight out of my Christian schooling, and I recommend it to anyone who's determined to get off this merry-go-round.

Because the counterfeit passages are fully as valuable as the authentic ones.


(Photo of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra courtesy of The Metropolitan Museam of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Explosive find

(This is a concretion I found on the beach after a storm. It's a sort of sedimentary rock that solidifies around a piece of metal on the ocean floor; I mostly find them encasing old hardware, tin cans, fishing equipment, and other refuse.

But here the core is a 3 to 4 inch military cartridge, evidently surplused into the sea by the local US Navy base.

Concretions are fairly soft stones, easily broken by roasting in the woodstove or rapping with a hammer.

Which is why I left this one in place.)

Poem: Spring of Life

the snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children

Issa


(Photo courtesy of Ben Wicks and Unsplash.com.)