National Hermit Day

This Sunday, 29 October, is National Hermit Day. (I have no idea which nation declared this. The day commemorates an Irish saint, so I'd guess Ireland must at least be in. And since most of the websites about it are American, I'd guess they're in, too. Really, it seems more like International Hermit Day, unless, like Labour Day, various countries are feuding over what date it's observed.)

Anyway.

Judging by Internet sources, lots of people are writing about this, but not many are researching it.

This page, for example, manages to get just about everything wrong.

• The 29th is not St. Colman's Feast. (That would be the 27th.)

• A group of hermits is not called an "observance"; it's a skete. But at least the person who made that up knew what we are; he or she might have gone with a "grumpy" or a "Kaczynski" or some other synonym for antisocial.

• No mention of spiritual practice – the fundamental definition of a hermit.

This one does a better job, at least mentioning the religious nature of non-metaphorical hermits, but only after it says:

Hermits, by definition, are people who prefer seclusion to socialization.

Uh, no. Our actual motivation can be contemplated here.

Honourable mention to this site, which not only gets St. Colman's feast day right, but leans heavily on the religious origins of the word, going so far as to list two actual hermits (50% of the total) on their list of famous hermits.

Anyway.

I'm not sure what we should do on (Inter)National Hermit Day. A hermit parade on the high road would be pretty paltry, unless you happen to live near the Zhongnan Mountains. Pinching people not wearing sandals would involve a lot of people, and spread the most irritating of all the asinine North American St. Patrick's Day customs.

So bump that.

We might take a page from Bodhisattva Day and don some meaningful garment… if the whole thing about hermits weren't that we serve in civilian clothes, without exclusive robes or regalia.

So how about this: prepare a nice sesshin meal. While enjoying it, contemplate the worthiness of devoting your life to pursuing fundamental, extra-human truth. Recall that it's your right, neither alienable nor certifiable.

Rice and beans or a hearty ramen soup, maybe. A good cup of tea and a nice flavour plate on the side.

Eat in gratitude and appreciation for how delicious and filling it is, whether the dish earns others' praise or not.

It feeds and rehinges.

And that's a blessing worth celebrating.


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

Good Video: The Way I Tend To Be

I've loved this song for years but only recently searched out the video, which adds incisive context to the lyrics.

It's a detailed elaboration on the Irish saying, "The first thing to do when you're in a hole is stop digging."

The scenario of this short film is exactly how I used to feel after a break-up, like something of Great Import had happened and I had to lug this massive torch around against everybody's advice, while the world placed bets to see how long I could keep this shit up.

(Fifty-two years, as it happened. That's how long. So maybe there's a winner out there.)

Therefore, for the benefit of others like me – not such slow learners, I hope – here's a brief meditation on the smallness of your suffering and the worth of your life and time.

Don't wait for CNN to show up before you figure that out.

The lyrics themselves bring some Zen of their own to the party. I especially like, "‘Cause it turns out hell will not be found \ Within the fires below \ But in making do and muddling through \ When you've nowhere else to go.

Finally, listen for the drums; they're especially well done.

The Way I Tend To Be
by Frank Turner

Some mornings I pray for evening
For the day to be done
And some summer days I hide away
And wait for rain to come
‘Cause it turns out hell will not be found
Within the fires below
But in making do and muddling through
When you've nowhere else to go

But then I remember you
And the way you shine like truth in all you do
And if you remembered me
You could save me from the way I tend to be
The way I tend to be

Some days I wake up dazed, my dear
And don't know where I am
I've been running now so long I'm scared
I've forgotten how to stand
And I stand alone in airport bars
And gather thoughts to think
That if all I had was one long road
It could drive a man to drink

But then I remember you
And the way you shine like truth in all you do
And if you remembered me
You could save me from the way I tend to be
The way I tend to be

‘Cause I've said, "I love you," so many times
That the words kind of died in my mouth
And I meant it each time with each beautiful woman
But somehow it never works out
But you stood apart in my calloused heart
And you taught me and here's what I learned
That love is about all the changes you make
And not just three small words

And then I catch myself
Catching your scent on someone else
In a crowded space
And it takes me somewhere I cannot quite place

But then I remember you
And the way you shine like truth in all you do
And if you remembered me
You could save me from the way I tend to be
The way I tend to be

Good Comic Strip: Garfield Minus Garfield

This is pure genius, but bear with me, because it won't seem like it just from the description.

In Garfield Minus Garfield, Irish tech professional Dan Walsh experiments with the Garfield comic strip by deleting every character from it except Jon, Garfield's long-suffering, socially-awkward caretaker. In so doing, Walsh ends up elucidating a life that's played out in front of us for nearly fifty years, but remained almost invisible.

The results are uncanny. And a little heartrending.

From a Zen standpoint, the project is also a graphic demonstration of delusion. In Walsh's strip, Jon's largely hallucinating his reality; he himself is literally the only thing in-frame.

The point may be a little facile and solipsistic, but it's fascinating to see his Everyman grapple with suffering, in a world he's created between his ears.

Plus it's hilarious.

So if you like dark koanic humour, give it a click.

(Lead graphic courtesy of Garfield Without Garfield; explicated strip courtesy of Whatculture.com via Pinterest.)

Forth Bridge Koan

An English, Irish, and Scottish steelworker are sitting on the Forth Bridge, lunchboxes in their laps.

"Stike 'n' kidney pie, stike 'n' kidney pie," grumbles the Geordie. "If there's anoatha stike 'n' kidney pie in this lunchbox, I'll jump!"

He opens the box. "STIKE AND KIDNEY PIE!" he screams, and throws himself off the bridge.

The Irishman doesn't notice; he's too fixated on his own misery. "Bacon 'n' cabbage fer breakfast," he growls. "Bacon 'n' cabbage fer supper! Sure, if dere be bacon 'n' cabbage in dis lunchbox, Oi jump!"

He opens the box. "BACON AND CABBAGE!" he screams, and throws himself off the bridge.

The Scot, none the worse for finding himself alone, mutters, "Haggis 'n' neeps, och how Ah hate haggis 'n' neeps! If Ah see haggis 'n' neeps in this lunchbox, right then: Ah jump!"

He opens the box. "HAGGIS AND NEEPS!" he screams, and throws himself off the bridge.


Two days later the widows meet at the funeral.


"If only," sobs the Geordess, "if only I'd packed soomthin oatha than stike 'n' kidney pie, me Nigel'ud still be alive!"

"Sure!" agrees her Irish sister. "N'if only Oi'd not made bacon 'n' cabbage, just fer the day, me Seán'd still be with us!"

They turn to the Scotswoman, expectant.

"Well dinna luik at me!" she snaps. "Ma husband packed his ane lunch!"


(True story.)


Wu Ya's commentary: "A good tenzo is worth his weight in gold."


(Photo of the Forth Rail Bridge courtesy of Chris Combe and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good Podcast: San Francisco Zen Centre Dharma Talks

San Francisco is the capital of Western Zen. The sangha there – the Western one; Asian residents were already practicing for over a century – is one of the oldest in the world, founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1961. Today, most Zen teachers in this hemisphere have some connection with it, whether formal or incidental. (That's Soto teachers; Western Rinzai is less centralised, Korean Zen is bipolar – it has two power centres – and Thich Nhat Hanh's Vietnamese lineage is anchored in France.)

Today's SFZC is a freakin' 900-pound gorilla among spider monkeys, with three houses, an expansive endowment, and a giant sangha consisting largely of priests and priests-in-training. We hermits like to sneer about "enlightenment factories", but this-here really is.

On the other hand, it's nice to have a secure, established hub you know will be there tomorrow: reassuringly conservative, largely unchanging, eschewing relevance and doctrinal debate, and grinding out priests like a latter-day Ireland, who in turn produce reams of teachings for world consumption. In sum, SFZC – its history, its current role, the nature and limits of its authority – is a big topic among Zenners. Few of us exercise don't-know-mind in its regard.

But I'm not going to weigh in. Instead I'm going to direct you to their Dharma Talks podcast; for my money, one of Rome on the Bay's most valuable products. (To begin with, I don't have any money, and all of the teishos in SZFC's bottomless digital databank are free.)

The talks cover every Zen topic under the sun, in every style, as SFZC's diverse clerical corps take turns at the mic. A few of these lectures have about saved my life, when it needed saving. Others leave me more or less unchanged, but they're all useful and productive.

Anyway, dig it, brothers and sisters: there are a lot of them.

SFZC's podcast homepage includes links to such automatic delivery options as iTunes and RSS, as well an archive of the podcasts themselves – one per week right back to 2007 – for individual download.

So if you're up for 300-odd ordained-types throwing down some serious Zen, swing on by San Francisco's perpetual Teisho Slam. Whatever you need, you'll find it there.

There's a River Crossed

Well, it's happened.

The outcome was exactly as I guessed, though it doesn't bring me any satisfaction. As a Canadian, I'm too familiar with separation referenda. It's difficult to get folk to secede from what they've known, unless they're being rousted out of bed by soldiers, imprisoned, and tortured. (Hello, Ireland!) But it's like the Scots to be game for a go on pure conviction; the fact that the nation was up to it speaks volumes. Too bad I couldn't be there; as I understand it, Canadian residents were invited to vote.

I'm impressed by the lack of newsreader second-guessing, constant updates on "who's winning", exit interviews, and the whole democracy-negating circus we North Americans put up with. Scottish voters were left in peace to make their choice. "Envy" doesn't begin to cover it.

Nor has the Scottish initiative been as cruel and hateful as Québec's was in 1995, an experience that left both sides so traumatised, still twenty years later, that the PQ have never been able to muster the political will to try it again. The SNP have promised they won't hold the nation and Union hostage to endless rematches in the coming years, and I heartily recommend that Yes cleave to this pledge. Trust me, it's brought nothing but damage and stagnation to Québec. (And I say this as a Québec nationalist.)

I was particularly struck, while avidly following the news from home via livestreamed radio, by the Yes movement's welter of voices: Irish; Australian; Canadian; English of many stripes; and a Babel of accents from non-English-speaking countries. One Yes organiser I heard on Radio Scotland was a Pakistani Muslim; another on the Scottish Independence Podcast was American. So proud am I of my father's people, that I've been irritating my Facebook friends with it even more than usual. (By the way, the most in-depth coverage I found consistently came from BBC 4; better than any Scottish station, in fact. Somewhere in there is reason to be thankful this happened in the UK, and not somewhere else.)

Any road. As we launch into the next phase of our history, let's get something straight: the Yes loss is a giant win for the Union, which stood to lose not merely a large part of its people, but the best one. The Scots are a people of the future, who can't be trammelled by broken-down notions of nationhood and justice. This train is steaming forward. It's get on or get left.

Indeed, any who may gloat at the SNP defeat may have cause to wish we'd gone after all by the time we're done. As my father said forty years ago: "The world isn't ready for an independent Scotland." Nor, I suspect, are many within the Union ready for the renewed, activist nation that Scotland has become. Show me another nationalist movement, anywhere, that speaks in so many accents, and I'll recant.

Aye, UKIP. I'm talking to you.

So, best to Scotland for the future, near and far. And all those promises we heard before the referendum, all the things Westminster was going to do, if only Scots voted No? Well, it's happened now, hasn't it?

So it's time for a reckoning. Or raise hell if they don't.


(Photo of Ness Footbridge, in my old hometown of Inverness, courtesy of Hartmut Josi Bennöhr and Wikimedia Commons.)

Buddha is the Reason for the Season

Know any Scrooge-sans? You know, Zenners who pout all December because it's Christmas and they're not Christian. If so, you might point out that Christmas is a secular holiday thousands of years old, bent to religious ends by the Druids and their contemporaries, long before Christians got their prideful hands on it.

But some sangha just have a giant chip on their shoulder about the Church, and so become the jutting jaw we hear about every year in the carol. You know: "Four colleybirds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a big honkin' juttin' Zen jaw." In so doing, they surrender all Yule to a fanatical fringe that speciously demands ownership of it, and their own religious convictions to crass competition.

We Boreals have a deep physiological need to confront the terrifying cold and black of Dark Solstice, and so the symbols of light and fire, of evergreen, ever-living, winter-fruiting vegetation, and general contempt of death and fear, crop up repeatedly throughout our hemisphere. It's perfectly logical to find religious significance in natural phenomena, the only indisputable scripture there is. That's why Rohatsu – marking the time the Buddha sat under a symbol of the cosmos for eight days straight and was reborn in the laser light of the morning star – is in December. The Jews commemorate a lamp that burned for eight days without oil; Greeks and Romans sacrificed to the Harvest God, who dies every year and is reborn the next. And Christians celebrate the birth of their Saviour – bringer of light, defeater of death – though he was actually born in March.

In other words, they celebrate the effect of Christ's coming, not its fact, but sadly that's more insight than many contemporary Christians can muster. And so they've made the Season of Peace a battleground. "Jesus is the reason for the season!" is not a cry of gratitude; it's a rebuke to people who take their kids to see Santa Claus.

So it's game, point, and match to sanctimony. But wait, here's Team Zen, taking the ice! Will they make this a game?

No.

Some Zenners campaign to remove Christmas trees from airports; razor Christ-themed carols from school "Winter" concerts; even ban Santa from the mall. (I don't even know where to start with those.) Others just wall themselves up in their little cells and chant loudly in fake Chinese to fend off any errant strains of Bing Crosby that might filtre through their double-glazing.

This in spite of the fact that Christmas is the most Buddhist of holidays; arguably more, actually, than it ever was Christian. It's Sekitō Kisen all over again:

Darkness is a word for merging upper and lower,
light is an expression for distinguishing pure and defiled.
The four gross elements return to their own natures like a baby taking to its mother:
fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid;
eye and form, ear and sound, nose and smell, tongue and taste—
thus in all things the leaves spread from the root.
The whole process must return to the source.
Noble and base are only manners of speaking;
right in light there is darkness but don’t confront it as darkness,
right in darkness there is light but don’t see it as light.
Light and dark are relative to one another like forward and backward steps.

Read this chant – possibly for a first honest time – and tell me it ain't a fair-dinkum Zen Christmas carol.

The only reasonable Zen response to the ancient rite of Jul is acceptance. Acceptance of its universal origin; of its truth; and crucially, of the Dharma, which clearly passes right down the middle of it.

We are in the delusion-slashing business. I respectfully suggest we apply those skills, now they are more vital than usual, to restoring the true meaning of – and demilitarising – Christmas.

May we look deeply, every one.


(Photo of Irish Christmas card courtesy of Shirley Wynne and Wikimedia Commons, from an album of Christmas cards collected by Georgina Pim of Crosthwaite Park, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, between 1881 and 1893.)

Good Book: Walden (2004 Yale Edition)

I tried to read this book when I was in high school, at the instigation of teachers who swore I was the living tulku of Henry David Thoreau. The brilliant American Transcendalist kicked my butt; his peripatetic sentences, cluttered with puns on European history, Greek and Latin classics, and Hindu scripture, run for days. Just the 26,000-word introductory digression is an admission ordeal worthy of Zen monasteries. It's also the reason that for years I only read excerpts.

Nor was I alone; even in Thoreau's (better educated, less fatuous) day, modest sales forced him to live off prosaic jobs and the support of wealthy friends. But when I came off the mountain, I was finally motivated to read this seminal work of hermit literature. Turns out it's a work of genius. Who knew?

Walden; or, Life in the Woods is the record of one man's classic eremitical experiment: from 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a primitive hut on eleven acres beside the pond of that name, situated outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he applied the timeless formula, living as close to the ground as possible, in order to minimise distractions from the Truth. (The book, which appeared in 1854, distils his experiences to a single year.)

Ango and advanced age haven't thinned Thoreau's dense paragraphs, but this time the rewards kept me hacking. Thoreau is the Elijah of our time, calling down the profligacy of commercial morality. His meditations on the hypocrisy of industrial culture, its lazy ethics and poverty-mill economics, are either exhilarating or depressing, depending on your perspective: a century and a half have made no dent in their relevance. Take his debunking of the myth that the rich repay in "job creation" what they cost society:

"Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it."

More masterful is a dissection of capitalist theoretics, in which Thoreau calculates the true cost of train fare to nearby Fitchburg. With accountant-like precision he audits the passenger's entire expenditure, and demonstrates at last that it's not only cheaper, but actually faster, to walk. "We do not ride the railroad," he concludes. "It rides upon us."

Walden positively hums with such wry reflections. Some have become famous:

"If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life."

"In the long run, men hit only what they aim at."

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation [and go to the grave with the song still in them]."

It also carries a surprising tonnage of jokes:

"Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual."

"…called a 'man of colour', as if he were discoloured…"

"Is [Sir John] Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so eager to find him?" (A bit of CanCon there.)

We don't normally think of Thoreau as a stand-up comic (Walden also contains one of the few toilet jokes in 19th-century literature), but it would not be farfetched to call him the George Carlin of antebellum America.

And that's just one facet of an enormously rich vein of insight. You also get Thoreau's detailed observation of flora, wildlife, and natural phenomena; his expertise on simple, joyful cuisine; his research in local history; his (occasionally racist; sorry, Ireland) encounters with other cultures; and his engaging reports on the daily-daily of livin' low.

I strongly advise, nay implore, readers to get the 2004 Yale edition of Walden, annotated study-Bible fashion by Jeffrey Cramer. (See photos.) His comprehensive notes, amounting to a second, parallel book, elucidate Thoreau's antiquated terminology, regionalisms, and scholarly allusions that were already obscure the day he wrote them. With Cramer's help, these lines not only cease to be stumbling blocks, they become some of the most enjoyable passages in the work.

Thoreau was neither the first hermit nor the last, but he remains one of the best. His literary power and sheer American modern-ness are gifts for our time. His masterpiece can be hard going for the first few pages, but once you pick up its rhythm, it's hard to put down. Don't forget to use a full sheet of paper for a bookmark, and have a pen handy to write down your favourite quotations.