WW: Summer rest stop

(Stopped for a rest on a long bike ride the other day and noticed the picnic table pretty much told the whole story. Helmet, gloves, granola bar, Alan Watts' autobiography. These are the sweet days of summer.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good Website: Sotozen.com

If you'd like to explore a rich source of provocative, not overly-technical Zen reads, check out Sotozen.com. Among its many offerings is an attractive compendium of Zen stories, presented with penetrating opening commentary. A good start might be this favourite example, starring the decidedly un-Soto Ikkyu.

As you'll see, the infamous Rinzai master strongly recalls Nasrudin – an old friend who figures on this blog – and also Alan Watts.

In any case, the Ikkyu story provides another meditative exposition of conventional authority: sometimes they kick you out and sometimes they lock you in, but in all cases you must be where they tell you to be.

And while you're up, enjoy a good surf around Sotozen.com. It's a valuable resource for our lot.


(Shiba Zojoji, by Kobayashi Mango, courtesy of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

Alan Watts On Hermits

There’s always a very inconsiderable minority of these non-joiners. [...] But you will find that insecure societies are the most intolerant of those who are non-joiners. They are so unsure of the validity of their game rules that they say everyone must play. Now that’s a double-bind. You can’t say to a person you must play because what you’re saying is – you are required to do something which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily.

Alan Watts

Long ago I happened upon this teaching from Alan Watts – an Anglican priest, founding figure of Western Zen, and arguable Zen hermit – for whom I have attested admiration. He was specifically addressing the predicament of Buddhist hermits, but as was his habit, more basically referring to the universal status of free-range monks of all paths. Virtually all religions have them, though some meet us with greater grace than others. (I've been told that Zoroastrians, alone among major religions, have no hermits, but I might not believe it. It's possible they "have no hermits" in the same sense as Western Zen.)

Over the years I've returned to Watts' meditation on hermits and the Institution, and found it validating and insightful. Since fellow hermits and the hermit-curious rest here occasionally, I thought to spread the wealth.


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

The Youthful Imperative

Alan Watts once said, "Now I’m a grandfather, and so I am no longer in awe of grandfathers." If I liked this 20 years ago, when I first heard it, today it teases a secret I feel obligated to share with my young brothers and sisters.

Old people like to say we've gained wisdom. We have better judgment; a longer view. Our superior familiarity has brought us perception and patience. We're slower to inflame, whether with anger or passion.

But the truth is, we're just tired.

Reviewing my twenties, I'm astonished by the heat of my prejudices, my penchant for assigning the role of villain to so many in my environment, my disrespectful impatience.

But I also remember how instinctively willing I was to break eggs, confront hypocrisy, power over and through impediments. Get crap done.

That irritated authority. And that brought pain. And, in surprisingly short order, that produced dread.

Eventually I slipped into idle middle-aged cowardice. AKA that "philosophical perspective" old people are so proud of.

Which is why humanity remains mired to the shoulders in solvable problems. Because our seniority gave us the power to hamstring those younger, and our terror of consequences, the motivation.

So now old people peeve me a lot more than they did before I was one. In my youth I took it for granted that their self-vaunted wisdom must be grounded at a least a little in reality.

And it is, a little.

But mostly it's just self-serving fear and laziness.

Let us meditate upon this uncomfortable truth:

When age brings humility, that's probably wisdom.
When it brings self-satisfaction, that's probably a learning disability.

Old age is an excellent time to practice don't-know-mind. You know, that thing we seldom embrace in our rhetoric and voting record. Because our task is to accept that we had our chance, and that the courage, vision, determination, and primal strength of the young is what we need now. Their willingness to rise to a challenge, even if they get a few things wrong. Even if – nightmare of senescence – they incur some personal damage.

This is their evolutionary role, their responsibility, their crucial contribution. Worry not, unproductive ones: they too will stumble into their day of wan platitudes; their age of weary wisdom.

But for now, they must bring – and we must honour – the dauntless insight of their youth.

Because someone has to actually do something around here.


(Classic meme courtesy of Alex Leo and Wikimedia Commons.)

Don't Do Anything

As non-Vajrayana Western converts to Buddhism will tell you, we have a slightly awkward relationship with Tibet. Not that we have any real bone to pick with our Tantric brothers and sisters. It's mostly just a difference of style. Practice models in the three other common convert denominations – Zen, Vipassana, Theravada – are pretty stripped-down, with Zen probably being the most "gorgeous" of the very Puritan lot. Tibetan forms, meanwhile, are downright High Church.

More prosaic is the simple fact that the Dalai Lama is the only Buddhist most Westerners can name, and since our media regularly imply that he's the "boss of Buddhism", we're all generally believed to owe him fealty. Thus, non-Buddhists are often surprised to learn that I don't really follow the guy's news – he's fine as far as august spiritual figures go, but carries no greater weight with me than the Pope or other sincere religious celebrities.

Similarly, Tibetan Buddhist stereotypes often pass for Buddhist, full stop. Yet I rarely chant "om"; I don't own a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; my Zen teaching embraces transmigration (which I don't necessarily buy, either) rather than reincarnation; and therefore we don't believe past masters can inhabit children.

All of which to say, non-Tantric Neo-Buddhists tend to know fairly little about that tradition or its teachings.

So I was grateful when a fellow Mastodonian shared a particularly provocative passage from Tilopa, an Indian sage whose wisdom looms large in Tibet. Upon further exploration I learned that the posted lines are actually the heart statement of the great Tantra master's programme.

The interpretation presented can be traced to Alan Watts, and reads as follows:

No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.

Certainly a Zen-friendly sentiment, in that we-say-these-things-a-lot-but-never-do-them kind of way. And other translations found elsewhere enrich the context:

Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.

A bit more Soto in flavour than Watts' Rinzai-esque lines, perhaps, consisting of nuts and bolts exhortations ("act this way") rather than a self-absent explication of phenomena. But taken together – as is usually the case with these two schools of Japanese Zen – they bring greater insight.

And finally, this fraternal take:

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.

(Both of the non-Watts translations quoted here are the work of Tibetan Buddhism teacher Ken Mcleod.)

So I'm paying this forward, as a particularly valuable meditation for Zenners, regardless of source.

Because it's not just good stuff, it's Zen stuff. And also good Zen stuff.



(Tableau of Tilopa courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Ego Kyôsaku

"The biggest ego-trip going is getting rid of your ego."

Alan Watts




(Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

You Damn Well Can Do Something About It

This week I encountered a piece of apparent fluff from The Stranger, Seattle's edgier (or maybe just more sophomoric) alternative newspaper. And as often happens in The Stranger, it turned out to be hard-hitting insightful fluff.

A Playlist for the Brokenhearted is a Valentine's Day laundry list of good hurtin' songs for the damaged, courtesy of Sean Nelson. (By the way, Sean, if you see this: pretty much the entire Magnetic Fields catalogue. Not just Smoke and Mirrors. I Don't Want to Get Over You. I Don't Believe You. You Must Be Out Of Your Mind. I Don't Believe in the Sun. Seriously. Throw a dart.)

Seems like a throwaway premise, until you start the half-page preamble, which turns out to be an extended Zen contemplation on a "little morsel of non-insight" that crushed people are often thrown:

"The past is past. Nothing you can do about it now."

Regular readers know that facile responses to suffering are one of my detonators. And the writer goes on to vivisect this one with literary power, even citing at one point an early work by Alan Watts. (Is Nelson a Zenner? He writes like one. Not a Baby Boomer Western Zen "When Things Fall Apart" mandarin, but a gritty younger guru-sceptic "Hardcore Zen" type, from our invisible-but-still-next generation.)

The text amounts to a didactic consideration of the philosophical ramifications of love – something the Buddha suggested we'd be better off just not doing. But we're gonna do it, since it's our nature. It's also about forgiveness – of others, of ourselves, of love itself. To which end he offers his mixtape, as a means to revisit and reanalyse the reader's specific train wreck.

So I'll just let you savour it yourself. There's much to appreciate, even if the playlist itself turns out to be beyond your tastes or knowledge. (Again, you'll find the Stranger article here.)

In the meantime, I'd like to drop a bomb of my own:

You damn well can do something about it.

As William Faulkner famously said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Yeah, the events – and often the people – that hurt you have fled into the past, where you can't reach them.

But the suffering is right here and right now. Where you can totally kick its butt.

The fact that Zen is all about here and now leads some to imagine it means ignoring the wrongs and wounds of the past; to insist they're not alive, not important, not still banging around out there causing suffering in all directions.

If that were so, Zen would be a pointless New Age pipe dream.

So let me be perfectly clear: you damn well can do something about the pain, regardless of what caused it or when. You can make it bearable, which is the same as declawing it. You can even turn it into insight, forgiveness, fulfilment, contentment. And in a very concrete sense, you can go back into the past, to the place where the past lives, and pull it out by the roots.

Many paths will take you there, but I advocate zazen as a good start and the foundation of a lifetime practice.

I also advocate Zen and Buddhist insight into the origin and nature of emotional pain.

Most of all, I advocate awakening to the fundamental nature of reality and our own existence.

It works.

Peace and progress to all brother and sister seekers.


(Art from Sean's article in The Stranger.)

Good Podcast: The Alan Watts Podcast

Update, 2023 16 November: Unfortunately this source has gone pay-to-play, and all shared podcasts I've been able to uncover are of non-Zen origin. Public libraries sometimes have audio collections of Alan teaching; you really do want to hear him, rather than just reading him. So for the time being, YouTube is the best bet. I could even see myself buying an audio repository outright; it's the sort of thing you might listen and re-listen to throughout the years.

Alan Watts was one of the first Zen teachers I encountered, full forty years ago, and today he remains among my favourites. One-time rock star of Western Zen, he's lost a lot of glitter in the intervening decades; from Boomer gadfly to unfashionable hermit. But his lectures are still as magnetic, his wit as wicked. And his insights? Right on, man!

Indeed, rarely has so qualified a scholar stepped into those waraji. Once a Zen student working toward transmission, he chose instead in the last stages to be ordained as an Anglican priest. As a result his references are about equal parts Christian and Buddhist -- ideal for Western audiences.

If it's true that Watts was typical of his generation in some respects (there's a lot of self–obsession and fad-envy in his background, along with the requisite flirtation with drugs), it's also true that he maintained a sardonic distance from both the youth culture of the 60s and the Zen hierarchy in Asia; his blunt Saxon axe cleaves to the heart of what was often a very vapid conversation.

Fortunately for us – his descendants – most of Watts' talks were assiduously recorded. Now some of them are available free of charge online, in fifteen-minute bites, from The Alan Watts Podcast. You can hear them on the website's Flash player, or download them from the iTunes Store directly to your own computer or mp3 player.

Speaking as a guy with a hard-bitten Generation X distaste for all things hippy, I think we Zenners could use a lot more Alan these days. Load up one of these podcasts, and see if you don't agree.


(Alan Watts mural by Levi Ponce, design by Peter Moriarty, conceived by Perry Rod. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Walk-The-Walk Kyôsaku

"One day a myoko-nin [wandering hermit monk] was traveling and he stopped in a Buddhist temple overnight. He went up to the sanctuary where they have big cushions for the priests to sit on, and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the floor and went to sleep on them. In the morning the priest came in and saw the tramp sleeping and said, 'What are you doing here desecrating the sanctuary by sleeping on the cushions and so on, right in front of the altar?' And the myoko-nin looked at him in astonishment and said, 'Why, you must be a stranger here, you can't belong to the family.'"

Alan Watts

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Ken Funakoshi.)