Good Video: Не могу оторвать глаз от тебя

Though it's generally unknown to Western Buddhists, Russia is one of the formative homelands of our religion. Not only has Buddhism been practiced there for as long as many another Asian nation – for example, the Volga republic of Kalmykia is the only region of Europe to have a historical Buddhist majority – Russia also hosts today what is likely the most fervent and productive conversion movement in the Eurosphere (i.e., nations with white majorities).

I was reminded of this while, for the first time in years, rewatching the above video. I originally encountered this song via primeval Internet radio, and it first appeared on Rusty Ring away back in January 2011, at the bottom of my third-ever post. (Those earliest articles sometimes ended with a premium, called the Cereal Box Prize. When, inevitably, finding and formatting this treat began to eat appalling amounts of blogging time, I abandoned that quirk, though not without regret.)

But having listened to Не могу оторвать глаз от тебя again (and remarveled at that awesome video), I figure it's due for a 14-year bump.

Аквариум (Aquarium) are a seminal Russian pop group, with roots deep in the perilous (for rock musicians) Soviet era. Today they're one of a handful of contemporaries routinely compared to the Beatles. Although founder Boris Grebenshchikov's precise religious convictions remain elusive, he's published multiple translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts and has a long history of including consequent themes in his music.

Just what (or whom) he is singing to here is a bit enigmatic. That chanting refrain suggests your standard love poem; you know, to another human. But the moiling mysticism of those verses opposes that hypothesis.

Still, his repeated second-person appeal at least seems to rule out a Buddhist theme; the author is clearly addressing an interlocutor he can see and calls "you". Our religion generally, though not categorically, refuses to speculate on such things.

The Eastern church, meanwhile – Russia's majority faith – has spoken of and to God in tones very like these for two thousand years.

So there it is: the song is Christian.

But what about that video? Seriously, fellow Buddhists, what about that awesome video? That's not just patently Buddhist, that's outright Zen.

Bodhidharma if ever I saw him.

So maybe "you" is enlightenment. Or the Path. Or the Great Matter. Or Kanzeon. Or some other glib Buddhist euphemism for God.

I don't know.

(See what I did there?)

Anyway, it's in front of you. Watch it. Hear it. See if it doesn't key your bodhisattva nature as hard as it does mine.

The video is of slightly – if very – higher quality than the one shared all those years ago. I was unable to find better, even on our Currently Superior Internet. But no trouble; it still works.

More irksome is the lack of reliable English interpretation. I can grasp the thrust of these lyrics, but my Russian is not up to translating them, at least not accurately. But I can tell that the translation supplied here is a little better than several others I found, by a slim margin.

I'd bet all were generated by artificial ignorance. Buy human, folks.

But for the moment, it seems our only recourse is to accept the best of them, however flawed. Just bridge the gaps with your koanic intelligence.

It's worked for me for 20 years.

One-Armed Pathfinder Huike

So I've been at it again – diving into the Ancestors and the movement that produced them. And once again I've come up with a gem: Second Chàn Patriarch Dazu Huike, known in Japan as Taiso Eka.

Huike appears to fit the global definition of hermit, as his Wikipedia article says he was "considered enlightened but criticised for not having a teacher." He eventually filled this gap in his c.v. by convincing none other than Bodhidharma to take him as a student, though folklore says he had to amputate an arm as collateral. (Still cheaper than an American university.)

But if we assume that at least the part about becoming Bodhidharma's student is accurate, that makes Huike typical of the anti-scholasticism of early Chàn. Bodhidharma, Huike, Huineng, Layman Pang – this renewalist rebellion is lousy with hermits. Huike's own teachings, heavy on meditation, light on sutra study, underscore this theme.

Tellingly, upon his assumption of Bodhidharma's teaching duties, our ancestral literature tells us that another Buddhist teacher – i.e., a "certified authority" – sent an assassin to kill him, on suspicion of disciple-poaching. Thus are preserved two useful historical points: that Buddhism has always been a religion like any other – worldly, fallible, hypocritical – and the koanic notion of a Buddhist assassin. (Or near-assassin; in the end, Huike defused this bomb Buddha-fashion: by converting the hit man.)

These and other stories (including "Bodhidharma's Skin and Bones", perhaps the most foundational parable in Chàn/Zen) can be found in the concise and readable Wikipedia entry. If you're interested in Zen's origins, it's worth the visit.

(Huike Thinking, attributed to Shi Ke [石恪], courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

Koan: Pacifying The Mind

Huike said to Bodhidharma, "My mind is anxious. Please pacify it."

Bodhidharma replied, "Bring me your mind, and I will pacify it."

Huike said, "Although I've sought it, I cannot find it."

"There," Bodhidharma replied. "I have pacified your mind."

(Wikipedia)


(Sesshū's 1496 painting of Huike begging teaching from Bodhidarma courtesy of the Kyoto National Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

Hermit Nation

For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with her Zen teacher, she's decided to try the hermit path, and asked me for a little sanghic perspective. Inevitably, the exchange ended up clarifying some things in my own mind as well. (Hence the value of sangha. As any teacher will tell you, helping others helps the helper.) So I thought I'd excerpt a bit of that conversation here, to spread the support around.

The sister in question is feeling the pull of her nature, though uncertain she can sustain a solitary practice, or that it will prove as fulfilling as the organised model. At the same time she feels like the institution doesn't respect her – that it views her as an isolated failure that must be repaired, or in extremis, rejected. That has led her to question her teacher's "never hermit" stance on alternatives.

As always, I didn't advocate any path to her, since I lack comprehensive knowledge of the facts and entities in play, and anyway, it ain't my karma at risk. But on this issue of only-ness, I felt compelled to give witness.

And so I wrote the following, with allowance for judicious editing:

As is frequently the case, I've been struck by the similarity of our life paths. We are, as I often say, a nation. This is very hard for the gregarious to grasp.

Although the neo-traditional Zen institution views people of our nature as unevolved or learning disabled, the fact is we are and always have been a demographic. One unserved by the innovated monastery model.

The same one that gave us the Buddha and Bodhidharma, to name just two.

And we seem to be coming out of the closet in greater numbers since the Boomers – great believers in authority, their market stance notwithstanding – began their slide into irrelevance.

Hermits don't necessarily seek isolation from others – I don't – but most of my adult life I've lived in rural areas; was raised in one, and have chosen to live in others when choice was mine.

But we live in a time when the rural areas that used to be despised by the urban and urbane have become chic, and they're clearing us rednecks away so they can take our land. It's a big topic, and for me, a painful one. Reminds me of the age of enclosure, and the segmenting of the European countryside into landed estates, which was the driving force that colonised the New World. 'Cept there's no place for us peasants to go this time.

From a practice perspective it doesn't matter much; you can be a hermit anywhere. But my preference is to be comfortably buffered from the rest of my species, and to be in daily contact with what remains. And that's harder to achieve in town.

As for your musings on Zen, I quite agree on all of them. Most of us find, when we encounter each other, that we've had similar experiences, received similar openings, and have much to offer each other in the way of teaching and support. We're the Buddha's only given monastic model, but formal Zen teachers (as well as those of other faiths) are great ones for saying that an unsupervised monk will quickly go off the rails and begin spouting bizarre, self-serving nonsense.

Which happens, of course, but not more often than it does in the Institution. And the result isn't crazier or more dangerous. From where I'm standing, it's clear that ordination is a risky state that few survive. Whereas my formal eremitical practice of assuming I understand nothing, mixed with a disciplining lack of social acceptance, has done a pretty good job of keeping me in my lane.

Anyway, when you mention Zen masters who run their monks as servants, that's my immediate thought. As a hermit, I can't imagine anybody cleaning up after me. Aside from the presumption, there's the fact that cleaning up my own messes is central to my practice; confronting chaos, accepting the necessity of soiling and breaking things, understanding how entirely I participate in universal entropy.

I suspect teachers who don't settle their own accounts have forgotten how unimpressive they are; given their working conditions, they can't help it.

As for me, "I'm nobody" has been my breathing mantra for twenty years. And I still think I'm the lead character in a movie from time to time; that tells you how much harder ordained types must have it.

Any road, society creates us, through a sort of petty terrorism, and at some point we just shrug and pull on the robe, to its great indignation. It's one reason I won't accept spiritual authority from other humans. I'm sometimes asked to address groups about Zen, and I always start by pointing out that I've never been ordained by anyone but my mother, that I have no unique understanding of anything, and that the next Zenner they meet will probably tell them I'm wrong about everything.

And I finish by telling them that anyone who says different about themselves is lying.

We hermits are a very diverse crowd – if we can be said to be a crowd – but I suspect all of us would agree with that last statement, at least.


Robin

(Photo courtesy of Matt Sclarandis and Unsplash.com.)

How Sudden Are You?

So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old as the religion itself.

This contentious point of Buddhist teaching, whose name draws on the French « subite » – "sudden" – asserts that enlightenment is a discrete event that occurs all at once in a blinding flash that explodes in your brain, changing both it and you forever. (The Christian adjective for this notion is "catastrophic", as in catastrophic conversion, the Evangelical ideal.)

The opposite view is gradualism, in which enlightenment slowly accrues over time through diligent practice, and only in turning back does one realise it has, at some point, been attained. (And Western Buddhism often implies that it may remain occult even to death.)

This is the main doctrinal difference between Rinzai and Soto, the two extant schools of Japanese Zen. (Seon, Korea's Chàn-descended tradition, also embraces sudden insight, but interestingly, has divided into parties over whether further practice afterward is required to "ripen" it, versus insistence that the bang itself is comprehensive; you're done.)

Rinzai students meditate to precipitate the long-awaited thunderbolt that strikes off the shackles of delusion – weakened beforehand by the crowbar of koanic logic – leaving a mind gleaming in perfect clarity.

Soto types sit for insight – a post-cognitive grasp of the koanic nature of existence, which, over a period of years or lives, eventually calibrates our minds to the universal frequency – though we may not apprehend for some time that our minds have inexplicably taken to gleaming in perfect clarity.

I'd always assumed subitism developed within Zen itself, and was surprised to learn that it actually came from the Southern School of Chàn, having been planted there by none other than 8th century founder and Huineng successor, Shenhui. Further study reveals that the two perspectives were already current in Bodhidharma's India, and may have touched off the first great theoretical debate in Buddhism

The topic isn't pedantic; it strikes at the very nature of enlightenment, and therefore Buddhism. Are we a religion, as subitism suggests, leading faithful practitioners to concrete, certifiable metaphysical transformation; or a philosophy, as gradualism would have it, shifting the adherent's perception by subtle and cumulative means?

History tends rather to support the first, though test cases are often ambiguous. Exhibit A would be the Buddha himself, said to attain enlightenment at an exact moment – upon seeing the morning star after eight days of intensive practice. The softness in that argument comes from his description of the phenomenon, devoid of fireworks, euphoria, or choirs of angels. He just… woke up. (The title we know him by translates as "The One Who Awakened".)

The legend of Bodhidharma also implies a sudden change – we're told he sat before a wall for nine years and "became enlightened", though we have even fewer particulars about the mechanism of that. To the best of my knowledge he never described it, or specified a time, date, or even season. Did he "become enlightened" in a flash, or did he just notice that it had happened, and get up?

And somewhat strangely, Dogen – founder of Soto – by his own detailed admission also received catastrophic illumination. According to the man himself, he was meditating up a storm when the jikijitsu suddenly whacked his dozing seatmate with the kyôsaku. At the crack of the cane, Dogen awakened as well.

Yet this is also the guy who told us enlightenment is gradual.

So clearly the distinction isn't simple. There are many Soto stories of enlightenment events like Dogen's – moments where the dam broke to the fall of a final raindrop, and nothing was the same again. What's common to both teachings is that getting to that point, whether it arrives with chirping birds or marching bands, is intricate, esoteric practice, demanding much zazen and maintenance of one's perceptual instrument.

And that makes the query a bit beside the point, though it does remain intellectually stimulating.

Rather a koan in its own right, really.


(Photo courtesy of Felix Mittermeier and Wikimedia Commons.)/span>

A Bit Too Close To Home

(A meme from Zen Twitter.)

The Devil and Bodhidharma

I ran into a Zen axe-grinder on Twitter a few months ago. The experience continues to turn in my thoughts.

I didn't know this guy (I believe he was a guy; if not, my bad) but several sangha there – most of them fellow hermits – did. They just snorted when he turned up again and had little else to do with him. I initially engaged, in good eremitical faith, until he got personal – which happened quickly – and then I ignored him, too.

My brother's holy crusade had something to do with "one true path", of course, as well as a claimed apostasy of Japanese Zen in general, the crystal purity of early Chàn, and a perpetual tantrum over anyone practicing outside the narrow confines he considered "real". A major focus of his rage – and this will surprise no-one who's met the type – was a purported episode that supposedly derailed authentic Zen a thousand or more years ago, allowing evil conspirators to substitute not-Zen in its place ever since.

Part of that Gothic intrigue includes alleged documentary proof that, far from being the iconoclastic solitary we were sold, Bodhidharma was in fact a domestic church boy who kowtowed to canon authority and insisted everyone else do as well. (This would be the Zen equivalent of claiming that Jesus was a well-to-do rabbinical Pharisee.)

All of which was sardonic entertainment for those who'd heard it before; at this stage in Western Zen, we're in great majority converts recruited via informed choice and lived experience, thus there are few of this ilk among us yet. Converts tend to accept the landscape they find; self-declared revolutionaries who radically reconstruct a tradition's history are a hallmark of socially- and parentally-transmitted religion.

It's just that overthrowing the Establishment is no fun if it doesn't net you substantial power, which the Zen establishment entirely lacks in this place and time.

But if the next generation survives us, they'll see more of these people.

So I rate it prudent to reach out to the Great Sangha while the reaching's good, in the hope that younger Zen in particular may, somewhere down the sunset path, ingest a grain of scepticism in their regard.

As I've pointed out, the world already groans with churches, and if all we are is another one, we'd best disband. My Twitter brother is angry; he wants people brought down, chastised. This is churchifying, not enlightenment practice. (I'm reminded of Zenners who "debunk" my hermit practice because I have no living teacher, and even one who met my suggestion that Zen is about sitting rather than service with "Sounds like Mara." Next up: our very own Satanic Panic!)

So they exist, even in Western Zen. And let's face it: to some extent, we are all them. Everyone has that line that must not be crossed, that "Zen is here, not there" litmus spell. If you don't acknowledge it, and atone for it, you're the death of Zen.

There's a cogent Quaker teaching that addresses this issue: "The only way to defeat the Devil is to stop being him." (I hope the maraphobe above also encounters this instruction at some point.)

I intend to use the example of my angry fellow traveller to locate him in myself, remind him why we've given our life to this Zen thing, and whack myself with the invisible kyôsaku I carry for the purpose. 

Because this shit is a waste of energy, in all religions, at all times.

(Portrait of Bodhidarma courtesy of Rawpixel.com and a generous photographer.)

The Busless Bus

Chàn fascinates me. Founded in China during the 6th century CE, it's the parent tradition to the three current national schools of Buddhist dhyana practice – Seon, Thiền, and Zen – as well as to China's own recently reconstituted Chàn movement. Every time I dip into these waters, I find new challenges to my own assumptions and to those that contemporary gatekeepers insist are fundamental to Zen. It's a deeper and more braided source of these than anything else I've found except the historical Buddha and primordial Buddhist practice models.

Case in point: I lately learned that the early Chinese chronicles sometimes affixed the label "One Vehicle School" to the amorphous movement that would eventually coalesce into Chàn. This in reference to the Buddhist concept of ekayāna, a Sanskrit term that also translates as "one path".

Seems shockingly doctrinaire for a loose affiliation of fellow-travellers, scattered throughout the then-existing Chinese Buddhist denominations, whose defining practice was to sit on their backside and cast off delusion.

Until you realise that their "One Vehicle" has rather a lot of seats.

Specifically, it has all of the seats.

For the essential tenet here springs from the Buddha's own teaching that we all eventually attain enlightenment, whether in this life or another. It therefore follows that all paths lead to the summit.

And therefore all paths are valid.

And therefore condemnation of others' practice is not.

Ekayāna doesn't get much ink in the Buddhist press these days, for reasons any incisive student of religion can grasp. As comforting as it is – we all make it through one day, regardless of the errors that occasionally set us back a thousand years – One Path is a lousy business model.

How can you profit, in gold or glory, if all you're selling is something folks can get for free somewhere else?

But this early doctrine of proto-Chàn does tend to explain all those ancient accounts of illiterate hermits coming down off the mountain and besting the local master – and also the continuing Zen strain of "you're not the boss of me" that current-day teachers' pets so haughtily deride.

As a hermit, I might be expected to cleave to the ekayāna viewpoint myself, and of course it has always been a keystone of my perception and practice, even though I only just learned the word for it. However, like all truth, it becomes false when distilled into dogma.

It isn't true that all paths are valid, even if we do ultimately survive them. You can build a cage of freedom.

But it's a cogent corrective to the invalid paths the Great Sangha, chasing worldly objectives that have little to do with saving all sentient beings, collectively stumble down.

May we each strive to practice more and preach less.


(Photo of ancient sculpture of Bodhidharma – founder of Chàn – courtesy of Buddha Tooth Relic Temple [Singapore] and Wikimedia Commons.)

Zen At War... With Itself

'Way back in March of 2012 CE (how strange to have such a deep vault) I reviewed Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria's exposé of Japanese Buddhism during the Second World War.

And now, these many years gone, while looking up the book's Amazon link for a friend, I happen to glance at the reader reviews.

Some of them are disheartening.

While most commenters shared thoughtful, supportive responses, I rate it worthwhile to meet two others, not by way of defending Daizen's work – it's self-defending – but to survey some dangerous internal trends in our incipient Western religion. Especially here, where our grasp of Buddhist history (and our own) is tenuous.

First to catch my eye was a one-star rating entitled "Very disappointing":

This guy [Daizen] must have a terrible background, probably tried to escape all that trauma by moving to far east and becoming Buddhist etc., the classic story. It's ok as long as one does not try and contaminate beautiful Zen with a messed up mind. Avoid this book especially if you're a new Zen learner as it will ruin the whole experience for you.

There's something simultaneously amusing and infuriating about a self-professed Zenner who has no idea what a human being is. While I assume First Honoured Sangha is a sojourner, I've also met so-called "masters" who lack any greater insight.

So to protect any fragile new Zen learners who may stumble upon such spluttering, Ima lay down some tough-dharma. (Ten thousand apologies, pro forma trigger warning, how's your father.)

1. First Honoured Sangha has no calling to judge others or analyse their lives, or to declare their fate foregone. (Gotama; Dogen; Jesus.)

2. First Honoured Sangha knows nothing about Daizen's "classic story". We all have classic stories. Even First Honoured Sangha. (Gotama; Claude Anshin Thomas.)

3. First Honoured Sangha has no authority to give permission, or withhold it. (Gotama; Jesus.)

4. First Honoured Sangha has not been asked to guard the supposed "honour" of Zen. Zen is clean by its nature. Others soil it. (Bodhidharma.)

5. If First Honoured Sangha can't put down the burden of piety, then First Honoured Sangha can haul his or her prodigal backside back to the Church. If we must speak of contaminating Zen, piety is certainly the ultimate pollution. Mindless fear and shame are what authentic Zenners strive to overcome.

In an oddly similar vein, consider this (ostensibly favourable, five-star) review:

The shock value is not so great, as I've been aware of the basic contents for sometime. Japan is an island and the Japanese are an insular people. The emphasis in their culture is group conformity. Zen is not the transformer of personality as it was once marketed, and it should not surprise us to learn that Zen leaders in Japan followed the lead of the Japanese government and Army into widespread war.

The endemic racism and ethnocentrism of Western Zenners never ceases to dumbfound me. It's not just that we dissuade those of African or Hispanic or Arabic origin from joining us; we even freeze out Asians! With the exception of a dwindling handful of deified Asia-born teachers, you see damn few Asian faces in Western Zen centres.

Seriously, brothers and sisters. We have a problem.

One that won't go away until we drive it bodily from the zendo and kill it with ferocious blows from our monk sticks.

Apart from the sort of blanket condemnation First Honoured Sangha called down on another entire vaguely-defined demographic, Second Honoured Sangha neatly excuses Westerners from suffering any angst over Daizen's thesis. The demon, we're assured, isn't the Sangha; it's the Japanese.

With respect, Second Honoured Sangha is mistaken.

The demon is the Sangha. All of us. Then and now. There and here. Present and future.

You and me.

Nor am I alone in my discomfort with the unBuddhic habit of associating practice with submission to dictatorial authority – and then absolving ourselves of the evil we do under it. Thus, Third Honoured Sangha:

What I don't like, is the way it is almost impossible to discuss [enthusiastic Buddhist participation in Japanese fascism] in the Zendo, and I've tried.

Word.

And a final Fourth:

As a Buddhist, it was a reminder that we must be ever looking at our own practice. Do read this book.

Zen is important. We must resist the urge to turn it into a church.


(Photo courtesy of Serg Childed and Wikimedia Commons)