Everything Is Time

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

"We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

[…]

"Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. […] The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

[…]

"A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event.' It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

"The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. […] They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

What Dr. Rovelli, internationally noted theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, is saying here, is that a rock isn't an object; it's an event. Which is true of literally every "thing"; they're phenomena, not matter. They only exist for a specific time, their natures changing from moment to moment. So time is the only thing objectively present in that space.

We think objects are solid and exist because we can't grasp the temporary (the word means "subject to time") nature of matter and energy – which are the components of "stuff".

But stuff is an illusion. (More accurately, it's a hasty conclusion, leading to a practical fiction.)

So the good doctor has at long last caught science up with Zen, of which this notion of an "empty" universe, where things don't really exist, but are instead an ever-changing stream of dependent co-arising (scientists call it "attraction") that never attains stasis, is a fundamental teaching.

Which is why every "thing" in the universe – you and me and rocks and trees and amœbas and planets and galaxies and Labrador retrievers – aren't objects or things at all, or even matter, but events.

Literal products of time, having a beginning and end, because the agglomeration of attractions that make us all up never settles on a permanent relationship, and eventually dissipates entirely, its components running off to join other processes, in the manner of a wave or a cloud.

Thanks to Brad Warner, whose latest book, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being, alerted me to Dr. Rovelli's thoughts on this matter.

(Who, by the way, is also a professor emeritus of L'Université Aix-Marseille Luminy, where I spent a year in the late 80s. An observation à propos of nothing but my startled satisfaction.)


(Photo courtesy of Neil Owen and Wikimedia.com.)

Too Important To Sell

A few years ago I read a Brad Warner post about getting others into Zen. Brad was typically circumspect on the notion, but he did admit to having attempted it from time to time. Which rendered me thoughtful.

I've never wanted to do that.

That's partly why my blog is simultaneously so prickly and largely devoid of any basic information about Zen. Aside from the fact that most of the text here is addressed to me, I've always imagined that what supplementary audience remain are fellow seekers, either already practicing Zen, or at least otherwise self-motivated to read it.

Any outreach I picture for Rusty Ring is limited to comforting members of my own sparse and scattered tribe, and giving open-minded others a balancing perspective on Zen convention. Thus my readers are generally friends and companions from the first visit, and nobody in need of or open to conversion.

This turns out a practical editorial as well as spiritual policy, since in the past 12 years exactly one werewolf has honoured my comments section with his or her gory theatrics. I've sometimes been savaged off-site – when I've participated in any Zen discussions there, which is rare – but at risk of a jinx, that one troll, several years back, is the only one I've seen.

It's just that, if you aren't selling anything, you don't attract much attention.

Now, if I hung out a shingle proclaiming COME HERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT, or I CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS, I'd be all up in readership. And, if I monetised, money.

And then my threads would totally be stuffed with people foaming at the mouth, rabid to debunk me. Which would lead to more publicity. Which would bring more readers. Which would score me more money.

What it wouldn't bring any of, is enlightenment. Not for me, not for my followers, not for the world at large.

This suspicion of apologetics is why Zen frowns on evangelism. Because the Christians have it wrong; you can't force salvation on others. You can't talk them into it, trick them into it, shame them into it, or even just sincerely hand it to them.

They won't take it.

The best – and I mean the rare and absolute best – that evangelism can accomplish is to cash in on the weak and desperate, those sentient beings so damaged and disoriented that they can't tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

I took the Zen path because I had to. World weariness had rendered my life unliveable, and it was this or jump off a chair. So I went looking for a practice.

Not a treatment. A task.

Nobody had to doorbell me or buttonhole me or altar-call me. I've endured all of that before. (Fortunately I'm of a nature to appraise rather than believe.)

Unless you come to enlightenment practice on your own road, for your own reasons, under your own steam, you can't pull it off. Instead you'll be recruited, distracted, and used up by unenlightened others.

That's why our monasteries make you kick down the door to get in. And why I write an underground blog that prospective readers must expend effort to find, and why I'm delighted to talk with interested parties about Zen, but usually end up advising them to stay on their existing path, unless getting off this Ferris wheel – which is the point of Zen practice – is all they want to do.

'Cos otherwise you're wasting your time and Zen's.

And both of those things are too important to toy with.


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

Advaya Kyôsaku

"You’re just another version of me. That’s why I can’t take you that seriously."

Brad Warner


(Bairei Kōno's take on 鴉烏 courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

Foreign Invasion

Greetings, honoured sangha. This week I offer Japanese for Zenners, with this basal concept:

マインドフルネス 。

Can't read it? Let me help:

Ma-i-n-do-fu-ru-ne-su.

I think what threw you is that it's written in kana, unlike other elemental Zen concepts, which are usually expressed in kanji.

"But," you say, "that's not hiragana!"

Ah, but I didn't say hiragana, did I?

In a fascinating Tricycle magazine article, writer Karen Jensen reports that Japanese Zen teachers are pinning their hopes on a patently unAsian remedy to their religion's problems.

You see, in contemporary Japan, Zen – like most religions there – has devolved into something more akin to a fraternal lodge than a spiritual practice. Today it's more associated in the public mind with the national obsession with rites of passage, than anything higher. And this shallow, agnostic role naturally obscures the Path in Japan.

Faced with this challenge, some Japanese teachers are resorting to desperate measures. To wit: for the first time since Dogen, they are injecting foreign practice into their teachings.

That's why maindofurunesu (say it aloud with me; feelin' it?) is written in katakana, the syllabary of foreign words.

Because it is a foreign word. For a foreign concept.

To be brutally precise: a Western one.

At this point, some Zenners are probably rushing into the street, looking for a statue of me to push over.

But the joke's on them. Hermits are pre-cancelled.

That's why we're hermits.

Anyway, yeah. "Mindfulness" is not a Zen thing. It's a purely Western one, albeit one that's been kneaded into non-Asian Buddhist practice over the last 50 years.

Which means, among other things, that when you advocate it, you're being Eurocentric.

And thank God for that, because mindfulness is darn good practice.

Not that it's exactly absent from historic Asian models, mind you. At the root of Japanese Zen, for example, is the notion of nen, which refers to spontaneous thought, and by extension, delusion, and by further extension, awareness of same and the necessity of waiting for that second thought, which entire process leads to "clear-seeing". That insight, and its implications, are fundamental to enlightenment practice; some seekers call it the entire path.

But as Brad Warner has pointed out in his excellent essay on the distinction, "mindfulness" is not nen. It's a little less hard-core (no pun intended), a little less "religious", and a lot more accessible. Which, as he says, makes it packageable, and therefore marketable.

Which is why he avoids it.

I'm hip. I too am deeply suspicious of bourgeois Buddhism, with its feel-good bandwagon hustle. But I'm not ready to toss out mindfulness on that basis alone. After all, the local nursery sells concrete garden Buddhas to a decidedly non-monastic clientele, but I still have a Gautama statue on my altar.

But I do insist that mindfulness practice imposes recognition of the fact that Asian Zen is not all Zen. Let's have done with beating others about the head over bowing and chanting, or Dharma transmission, or ascetic practice, or submission to human beings, or other non-Buddhic calculus that accreted over the two millennia we were a uniquely Asian religion.

Because if it's true that Buddhism can't be "just anything" (and it is; this is a defined path, with fundamental teachings), it's also true that the response to those teachings is as varied, and as valid, as anything else in this universe.

And that's a blessing.

(Fortunately. Because ain't crap you can do about it.)


(Photo of a sign on the grounds of the Mid-America Buddhist Association courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Brad Warner on Religion vs. Practice

A few months ago I happened upon this excerpt from Brad Warner's latest book, Letters to a Dead Friend about Zen. I haven't read it, or any of his books save the first. But Brad and I are the same age, from very similar backgrounds, and have come to comparable conclusions on many points. So it's perhaps not surprising that his work often speaks to me.

Nor that he catches a lot of blowback. From people like me, for starters, because he has okesa and makes money off it. (In case it matters, I care frak-all about the first charge. As for the second, yeah, that's dangerous. But as long as he's not claiming a patent on enlightenment, or declaring by word or implication to be the only authorised dealer, I'm listening.)

The linked text starts with a lot of throat-clearing, but beginning with this passage:

It’s like there’s a little Enlightened Beings Club. […] Some guy says he’s got enlightenment. He has a story to back him up about the wonderful day when he finally understood everything about everything. Another guy, his teacher, certified him as a member of the Enlightened Beings Club. And now he’s ready to help you learn to be just like him.

… the pace picks up briskly.

Essentially, Brad uses the book's introduction to address the difference between religion, which serves our craving for temporal power, and practice ("faith", in Christian terms), which rejects human authority and aspiration. The two have always been at each other's throats, as they always must be.

He doesn't delve into the matter in this excerpt; I suspect that's the rest of the book. But in good Zen form, the unanswered questions he poses might serve as a rudder for your own exploration.

Into the Abyss

"Lion’s Roar Has Killed Buddhism", screams a recent headline on Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen blog.

Um… そうですね。

Don't get me wrong; I've called down the Western Buddhist press many times here on my own public confessional. Most of what passes for our media is pat, predictable, and embarrassingly bourgeois. Still, such a declaration, as sensational and click-baity as it sounds, must be at least a little over the top, eh?

As it happens, not so much.

My brother was reacting to The New Wave of Buddhist Psychedelics, a feature article on the Lion's Roar website that celebrates mind-disabling chemicals as enlightenment practice aids. Its very title asserts the existence of something called "Buddhist psychedelics", magical substances evidently developed by arhat pharmacologists to "get you over".

This is only the latest manifestation of a disturbing foible of Western Buddhism. Back in the 1960s, the hippies, justifiably disenchanted with their childhood religions, went trolling for alternatives. As they imported barely-understood Eastern philosophies from overseas, they were careful to "upgrade" them with their own values, incongruity be damned. Among these were environmental awareness, pacifism, New Age nutrition, gender equality, and sensuality, to name just five.

None of that is strictly-speaking Buddhic, though a strong sutric case could be made for the first two. The next two have to be lawyered up before they slide in, but perhaps the Buddha was suggesting them obliquely, while openly advocating the opposite.

Sly old Gautama. (Ahem.)

But that last one is out. Full stop.

The Baby Boomers were and are famously devoted to chasing sensations. "This I have seen; this I have felt." They wished themselves explorers, pioneers, eagerly barging in where angels fear to tread. (Ed. note: angels actually tread everywhere. They just don't loiter in pointless places.)

Their initial attraction to Zen was the far-out trips they hoped to experience while meditating. Those monks sitting all weird, not moving; they must see stuff, man. Go somewhere, baby.

The fact that zazen is emphatically the opposite of that is one of those contradictions many chose not to acknowledge.

But their favourite terra incognita – famously, infamously – was drugs. Thus the hippies augmented our culture's twin holocausts of tobacco and alcohol with a whole freezerful of new philtres, guaranteed to make you stupid or give us the rest of your money.

When I became a monk, pot was still viewed as a sacramental herb by a significant minority of the western sangha. If anything it's grown in esteem since, though without a crumb of justification; the Buddha was categorical, and common sense concurs, that anything that interferes with the free and natural function of a healthy mind obstructs enlightenment. (Not to be confused with substances taken to bring a malfunctioning brain back to parameter, otherwise known as medication.)

Anyone who's ever known a drug user knows they never make anyone a better person. We don't need to run this experiment an umpteenth time. We can simply validate the Buddha's foundational teaching on the matter, cross it off the list, and continue our authentic practice.

So that was annoying. But what's happening now – retro-chic promotion of acid trip as kensho – threatens to set the cause of ending suffering back fifty years.

Make that another fifty years.

Because it's not just self-imagined "psychonauts" at risk here; if it were, a hermit could just shrug and repeat what he always says to guru-worshipers, religious tourists, nihonophiles, and other posers he meets on the Buddha Way: "It's your karma, dude."

But Zen is important. Critical, in fact. It literally saved my life, and there are many, many others out there who are still desperately seeking it. To plough up their path, to mislead and reroute them into dead-end practices (or worse) is unconditionally the deadliest sin in Buddhism.

Tellingly, there is no precept against obscurantism. (Religion, yo.) But if you want another ten-thousand rides on this merry-go-round, just you keep it up, dharma pusher.

The only skilful response to "Buddhist psychedelics" is the same one we must give anyone suppressing the liberating truth that the Path is in-born, a universal birthright bundled free in every sentient mind, each of which comes into this life pre-programmed and fine-tuned for its single purpose: awakening.

Walking the Path requires no approval or assistance from anyone or anything. The power is inside, and nothing that isn't, is it.

Any other message – any other message – is delusory.

So on the off chance I've been vague about my thoughts on this issue, I'm going to plant my flag squarely and firmly in the open, where even stoned brothers and sisters can't fail to see it:

–––> The teaching that drugs are useful in Buddhist practice is evil.

It isn't a divergent model, a denominational difference, an alternate reading of the sutras, a newly-revealed insight, a simple disagreement among sangha of good faith, a questionable form grandfathered in by centuries of practice, or an inconsistency due to our human nature.

It's the deliberate generation of makyō, with attendant multiplication of suffering and delusion.

It makes the world a colder, more cynical, less compassionate place.

To put it succinctly: these people have joined the other side.


So there ya go, Lion. Looks like you have in fact found one thing psychedelics can accomplish. They can move a freakin' hermit to excommunicate you.

Have you any idea how far from reason you have to fall to achieve that?

Farther, I suspect, than an undrugged mind can take you.


See you on the road, brothers and sisters.

And don't eat the brown acid.


(Graphic courtesy of Hamed Khamees and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Tyranny of Positive Thinking

My sister recently sent me a link to Morgan Mitchell's The 'Tyranny' Of Positive Thinking Can Threaten Your Health And Happiness, courtesy of Newsweek.com.

In it, Mitchell abstracts recent research suggesting that human denial has no effect on external phenomena, and that insisting it does might be an ineffective strategy for meeting challenges.

I know. You could have knocked me over with a feather. And it only took 70 years to confirm this basic principle of physics.

In fact, according to Actual Researchers, who were probably wearing lab coats at the time, not only are things that are outside of you, uh… outside of you, but systematic denial of same can harm your mind. And on an authentically positive note, contemplating dependent co-arising can improve outcomes.

Says Mitchell:

"The study [...] concluded that when people acknowledge and address negative emotions [...] it helps them adjust their behaviour and have more appropriate responses."

Gosh. Do you think that would work in offices, too? Or countries?

The scientists in question imply that forcing people to pretend everything is heavenly is an act of violence. Mitchell's article also sidles up to what that means on a societal level, but sadly doesn't mention that power routinely wields Positive Mental Attitude as a straight-up weapon, to beat underlings into silence or even deprive them of their livelihoods.

But its central thesis – that accepting unpleasant mind-states and ferreting out their external stimuli is healthy, and may lead to greater satisfaction for everyone concerned – is, to borrow Brad Warner's catchphrase, hardcore Zen.

Zen also teaches that suffering arises in the mind, but our prescription for it is diametrically opposed to PMA's: we say, "I am miserable." Then we explore every aspect of that misery. In fact, we analyse that mofo – the causes of the effects of the causes of the effects – till our mind is sorry it ever brought it up.

This is called "looking deeply".

Years ago I read another study that further implied individual human beings have personalities. (I know! You could have knocked me over again, with another feather!) It said cheery people tend to be cheery. If something makes them un-cheery, they tend to recover quickly and return to being cheery. By the same token, dour people are dour, and no matter how much good fortune they enjoy, they eventually return to their dour baseline.

As a student of human evolution I'm sensing a survival value in there, but I can't put my finger on it.

No wait; that was negative. Now I really can't put my finger on it, because I said I couldn't put my finger on it! Saying something makes it true!

Oh, no! By saying it to others I've prevented them from putting their fingers on it, too!

Oh, God! Now I've said nobody has their finger on it! I've made it impossible for my entire species to put its finger on it!

I broke the Internet! I'm worthless! WORTHLESS!!!

STOP ME BEFORE I UNFINGER AGAIN!!!

Yeah.

Let's keep our butts on the ground, brothers and sisters. That's the only place problems are solved.


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

Good Book: Zen at War (Second Edition)

Once upon a time a mighty nation considered itself the holiest, most righteous in history. The ruling class especially leaned heavily on religious rhetoric, invoking the name of a great prophet to defend its every worldly whim.

Then the nation began committing colossal atrocities against other peoples, and viciously repressing its own. And how did all of those pious believers react?

(Spoiler alert: not well.)

In Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria scrapes the stickers off many a smug Zen bumper. Taking Japanese Buddhism by the root he shakes it hard, and a lot of bitter fruit falls out. In the political history of our religion, once considered a seditious foreign cult in Japan, he finds pivotal concessions early teachers made to buy safety and comfort. Spooling forward, we watch these dubious innovations draw in all denominations, until the distinction between the Buddha Dharma and Japan's organic (and congenitally nationalistic) Shinto becomes academic at best.

Arriving at the fascist period and world war, we find virtually no Japanese Buddhists, Zen or otherwise, living the Buddha's teaching. Exceptions are either obscure or excommunicated. Meanwhile, Buddhist teachers kink like contortionists to make patriotism, emperor worship, and wholesale killing intrinsic to the Dharma.

Parallels with America scream in the reader's face. Reading Zen at War, I realised that the American mishmash of messianic nationalism and Christianity is nothing less than State Shinto. Where nation and culture are declared 'scripture made flesh', authentic religion is impossible. And just as a society that muddles God and Mammon castrates Christianity, so one that equates selflessness with service mutilates Buddhism.

The first edition of Zen at War concluded with an illuminating review of the ways that Zen is used to gain obedience in postwar corporate Japan, but the most powerful chapter is only available in the second. In "Was It Buddhism?", the author brings Buddhism forward from India, where it had already become a policy tool for the powerful, through China, where it acquired the relativism of Taoism and the paternal piety of Confucianism. (Deviations any honest Zenner must admit are now fundamental to Zen, pagan origin notwithstanding.) These he compares to the Buddha's actual teachings. For example, investigating sangha, a concept much cited in defence of priestly authority, Daizen notes:

The [Buddhic] Sangha was based on noncoercive, nonauthoritarian principles by which leadership was acquired through superior moral character and spiritual insight, and monastic affairs were managed by a general meeting of the monks (or nuns) […] All decisions required the unanimous consent of those assembled. When differences could not be settled, a committee of elders was charged with finding satisfactory solutions.

Daizen is a Sōtō priest trained at Eiheiji. He holds a master's degree in Buddhist Studies from Komazawa (Buddhist) University in Tokyo, and a doctorate in same from Temple. His andragogical résumé is extensive and tedious. In short, this is not the man to mess with.

But the work does suffer from a lack of editing (or maybe intrusive editing), and a tendency to beat certain points to death. Prominent Western Zenners, including Gary Snyder and Brad Warner, have challenged Daizen's indictment of some iconic figures, charging lazy scholarship and wilful misreading. I'm not qualified to have a side, but in the end, the fact remains that no ordained Zen teacher in Japan actively opposed the war until it was lost.

Aside from that, the book's greatest flaw is its title. Zen at War is actually about all Japanese Buddhist denominations; it takes Daizen half the book just to get around to Zen. All of it is relevant and readable, but I found the Zen monk in me saying, "C'mon, Brian, get to the Zen already!"

But such objections pale before the historical significance of this groundbreaking work. The Japanese edition has already inspired unheard-of public acts of contrition in several influential Zen lineages; this, in a culture even less inclined to apology than Western ones. Zen at War has changed the way Japanese Zenners see themselves. Whether it will change their behaviour as well, only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Western Zenners remain arrogant as ever. Perhaps if more of us read Victoria, we too will be inspired to confront some of the dubious assumptions we've imported whole-cloth from Asia, and so attain greater understanding of the Dharma.