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.)

WW: Trillium challenge

(Trillium ovatum. Jungle flower; iconic herald of North Coast spring.)

What Men Want

A Substack meditation on the emotional lives of men has been making the rounds. Fruit of Drunk Wisconsin, whose timeline is one of those digital live traps that will keep you scrolling and surfing all day if you're not careful, Men Only Want One Thing (And It's Disgusting) is that rarest of things: a brief, well-written rumination on the never-asked question of what men want.

Given cultural assumptions on this matter, if you're not a man, you likely haven't the slightest accurate idea.

If, on the other hand, you're one of "those" men, you'll probably be disgusted by the whole thing. Look, brother, the writer warned you.

And if you're here among us left–overs, you may feel that welter of repressed, conflicting emotions that signals a direct hit.

For further proof, check out the comments below the Substack post. Important: read the text first, and only afterward the comments. If you reverse that order, you'll lose the ability to read the post at all.

Because bombarding a challenge with self-mocking parody is the jiu jitsu of the reflective male. (If you thought it was middle school insults embedded in dripping sarcasm… see "those" men, above.)

Let the author of this pithy, penetrating, precise manifesto be Exhibit A.

I'd say "I feel seen", but the truth is I feel x-rayed.


(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Desert snapshot

(Photo taken during my outbacking trek through the Columbia Basin last summer. Mt. Rainier in the distance.

Open link in a new tab to see it to better effect.)

WW: Classic Puget Sound house

(Another in my unintended series on endangered Old Settler houses in the district where I grew up. I've loved this one since I first rowed the lake at the age of 8. Its classic Puget Sound lines – detached garage, gable roof, dormers, shed-roofed second story, barn paint and gleaming white trim – I associated with grandparents, partly because my own raised their kids and still lived in one like it.

Lacking a boat these days – embarrassing as that is – I took this shot through the back fence; bit of a shame, really, because the view from the water, while less bucolic than it was those many years ago, is much more evocative of the prewar era in this part of the world. [See photo below, taken by a school chum from his front yard in 1965.]

A popular city park was built beside it in the 70s, and I'm told the city bought this property too when the last elderly resident moved out a few years ago. That explains the nominal effort to make the boarding-up less unsightly, but sadly, almost certainly also signals the end of this fine old example of Green Side architecture.)

Arriving

With a motorboat you get there faster,
but with a sailboat you’re already there.


(Winslow Homer's Breezing Up courtesy of the National Gallery of Art [US] and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Sunbeam chair

Squeezing The Legs Out Of The Snake

That's what the Tibetans call it, when you try to force your delusions on objective reality.

You find a snake. It's an animal; it should have legs. But where are they? It has no hair in which to hide them, no feathers, no shell.

Well, they must be inside.

So you squeeze. I picture the unoffending reptile, coiled around my wrist: bug-eyed, silent, indignant.

You want it to have legs. You'd feel better if it had legs. You insist it have legs. In the end, you'd rather it were dead, than to go on existing without legs.

But the thing is, it has no legs.

And that's only a problem for you.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges [manuscript in progress]. Photo of Epicrates cenchria, the rainbow boa, courtesy of Rawpixel.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Late winter check-in

Street Level Zen: Captivity

"Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing... how the world still dearly loves a cage."

   Maude.


– From lifelong favourite Harold and Maude, which entire movie has an atmosphere I would later recognise as the precise texture of Zen koans and stories.

    "Why not kill yourself?" asked the monk

    "No place to start," said Caoshan.




(Photo courtesy of Chris Fuller and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Winter afternoon

Responsiblity Kyôsaku

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
Exodus 23:2


(Photo of Fudo Myō-ō statue courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Evening spectacle

(Garlands of old man's beard [Usnea longissima], catching the winter sun at this specific moment of day.)

The Most Lost

I practice the religion that suits me.

The one that says I'm right and you're wrong.

That I'm the ideal, and you the mistake.

We all do that.

Except the most lost,

Who commit the sin their sanghas condone

In full knowledge.


(Photo courtesy of MC1 Chad J. McNeeley, the United States Navy, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Abandoned barn

(No stronger proof of disuse in an old barn than a rotten hay hoist. Because this tackle can easily kill people if it fails, farmers tend to obsess over its health.

This classic old red barn is part of the miraculously preserved dairy farm in my old neighbourhood. It still housed the herd, hay, milking machines, and cold storage for the milk when I was a kid. Whole district, including the pastures that used to be attached to this operation, has long since gone suburban.)