Getting On With It

"Well, never mind.
We are ugly, but we have the music."

Leonard Cohen

(Tōsendō Rifū's Wakashu and Itinerant Monk Playing the Shakuhachi courtesy of the Honolulu Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

Suchness Haiku

From the nostril
of the Great Buddha comes
a swallow

Issa

…demonstrating again why he's the greatest haikunist ever.


(Photo of giant Buddha statue on the Hill of the Buddha, Sapporo, Japan, courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Kintsugi bowl

(A few years ago my sister gave me a kit for making a kintsugi bowl, probably because she knows how deeply that artform speaks to me. I greatly appreciated the gift, but for one reason and next – mostly that the skills required are fairly wide of my talents – I ended up offering it to an artist friend, in a bid to fulfill the kit's destiny. My friend agreed to assume this responsibility on one condition: that I take ownership of the finished article.

And now it resides with me.)

Good Podcast: Guo Gu

It's always illuminating to hear from Chinese teachers and students.

We tend to forget that Zen is a mispronunciation of Chàn, a practice model that originated in China. Over the centuries, given the vicissitudes of history, Chàn faded mostly away as an active denomination, but a 19th century restoration movement has steadily gained ground.

My own admiration for Chàn – historical and current – is a matter of record. Encounters with our rootstock have informed my practice from the first, providing depth and balance to an otherwise comparatively narrow Japanese schooling. It's worth noting that Dōgen himself was a Chinese-trained bilingual sinophile, and while he dedicated his life to founding a self-sufficient Japanese Chàn lineage, he had no intention of rejecting its Chinese heritage or principles.

So it's heartening to see disciples of modern Chàn show up in Zen circles.

The above teisho, delivered at San Francisco Zen Centre on 16 June 2026 by Chàn teacher Guo Gu, is an excellent example of the sort of guidance we lost when our ancestral tradition went 404, and the wealth we're regaining as it returns. (It may help that Guo Gu's path to enlightenment practice reflects those of many ancient Ancestors.) It's all here: the sardonic humour, the laconic common sense, the notion that we're our own worst obstacle.

All the stuff that makes Zen Zen, what.

Audio of this talk can also be accessed in SFZC's own online teisho archive, or downloaded to your desktop or mobile device wherever you get your podcasts.

Note particularly how Guo Gu clears the decks on the matter of shikantaza. Just that brief teaching advances my practice significantly.

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.)

Merry Christmas 2025

My very best wishes to all Rusty Ring readers, regular and irregular, on this Christmas Day.

May it be filled with warmth and light.

Both that you find, and that you make.

The first is luck.

The second, skill.


(Photo of Kinkaku at Kinkaku-ji [Rokuon-ji] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Bashō's Frog

Matsuo Bashō (芭蕉) was a wandering Zen hermit of the Edo period, as well as an accomplished poet. Popularly considered the father of modern haiku, many of his verses are accepted as teaching in Zen circles today. The readily-memorised haiku format may drive some of this posterity, but there's no denying that Bashō's work often encodes palpable koanic insight.

Interestingly, his status as a self-trained free-range monk is rarely mentioned in our discussions of him, though we're happy to claim Bashō as the "Zen one" of Japan's Four Great Haikunists.

Thus do conservatives lay claim to the dissenters of yore.

Yet the eremitical nature of Bashō's practice is clearly evident in much of his work. Particularly his most famous poem, which is not merely lauded as Bashō's best, but in fact as the most awesomest haiku ever written, by anyone.

Feel up to it?

OK, clear your mind.

Ready?

the old pond
a frog jumps in
plop

That's it.

That's the poem.


Stuff to Notice

To begin with, this translation (Alan Watts, this time) is only one of dozens if not hundreds available; about which, more later. But I especially value Alan's take, emphasising as it does the humour that's central to Bashō's perspective.

Note also that while haiku – at least the classic kind – is supposed to contain references to nature, this one has nature coming out of its ears. I mean, there's no moonlight or cherry blossoms or summer rain or drifting snow. Nothing pretty, you dig. But nature? Yeah. It's got that in spades.

In his sardonic hermit way, Bashō seems to be saying, "I got yer nature, RIGHT HEAH!"

And then there's the Zen.

You may be thinking, "Big deal. Frog jumps in water. There's a noise. Nothing to see here."

And you may be right. I mean, you can get that kind of stuff anywhere, for cheap or free. Nothing unique is going on here. Nothing special.

Scared frog jumps in water, goes splash; not a headline you're likely to see in the Times.

Meanwhile, concentric circles are expanding in the water, lapping at the edges, returning through other circles approaching from behind. Frog resurfaces, climbs out. More circles. Wet frog drips, log gets wet, water runs off into pond.

The concentric circles expand and retract forever. The whole pond is implicated. And also its environs. And their environs. And all the environs beyond that.

And that's just one possible response. Maybe there's some suchness in there. Maybe some satori. Some admirers see all seven Zen principles of composition in these three banal lines.

Which is why they're sometimes called the most perfect haiku ever penned.

But not by its author, of course. We should also bear that in mind.


Language Matters

While we also remember language.

To start with, Bashō never wrote the poem reproduced above. And if by chance he had happened on it, none of that chicken scratch would have meant a thing to him. Because his text (per this source) was actually this:

古池や
蛙飛こむ
水の音

Which works out to:

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

You don't need any Japanese to feel the visceral difference between this and literally anything it might have inspired in English. In fact, if you want to see just how thoroughly we anglophones can mess something up, check out the 32 translations catalogued here.

Robert Aitken's commentary on that page is also well worth the read, as is his stab at the source material:

The old pond has no walls;
a frog just jumps in;
do you say there is an echo?

And if you really want a plunge into the abyss, try Geoffrey Wilkinson, who starts with an acerbic comment on this whole frog thing, and then… well…

Go see for yourself. By the time Wilkinson's done he's taken you on a fascinating street tour of the haiku form and this one in particular, including several parodies by Japanese monks and poets over the past 500 years.

For example:

Old pond—
Bashō jumps in
the sound of water

– Zen master Sengai Gibon, 1750–1837.


Master Bashō,
at every plop
stops walking

– Anon, 18th century.


...while fellow hermit Ryōkan (1758–1831) had this to add:

The new pond—
not so much as the sound of
a frog jumping in


To say nothing of the fellow who wrote a limerick. (Yes, really.)

So if you're a fan of haiku, or hermits, or haiku-writing hermits, take a good surf into the lore of Bashō's frog. By the end of the evening you will have visited many corners of Zen, Japan, poetry, and history, and learned a great deal about the practice value of small bodies of water.


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

Timely Reminder

"Strictly speaking, every unenlightened practitioner is mixing their own convictions and belief systems with Buddhism. There is no way around it.

"We need to acknowledge that in ourselves and understand that our perception of reality is clouded by many things, some of which are ideologies and beliefs."

—This salient practice point courtesy of an astute sanghamate in Reddit group r/Buddhism/.

(Photo of torii gate [a Shinto symbol that's been widely embraced by Japanese Zen] at Mosteiro Zem Budista, Ibiraçu, Brazil, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Theory Kyôsaku

The theory is really simple.

The only problem is that theory alone will not help us to be content with our practice.

Although practice of the buddha way is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world, I think it is a fact that we are never quite content with our practice.

Why?


– Though unattributed in the source, this very Soto teaching apparently comes from Muhō Nölke, former abbot of Antaiji.


(Photo courtesy of Antoine Taveneaux and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Inevitable Spring

The warbler
wipes its muddy feet
on plum blossoms

–Issa


(Plum Garden, Kamata, by Utagawa Hiroshige, courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

The Infinite Monk Theorem

"An infinite number of monks,
with an infinite number of zafus,
and an infinite amount of time,
would eventually get around to meditating."

Wu Ya

(This assertion has never been formally tested, but my suspicions are the results would be similar to those of another famous thought experiment.)




(Nineteenth century Japanese drawing of a monk meditating, or maybe sleeping, courtesy of the US Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.)

Taking Delivery

It's been a long time since I had a dramatic sit – the thing Zenners call kensho. This is mostly down to lifestyle constraints that have made practice scattered in recent years, as well as the fact that I've been doing this for 22 years. After the first few, your brain acclimates to the meditative state, becoming simultaneously more inured to and less precious about it.

Which is why the other night thrilled me as I've seldom been since those early days.

The set-up was predictable: I'd had an opportunity to sit regularly and deeply for several days, and also to sit outdoors, in a quiet, rural setting, which is always productive for me.

If the sea is also involved, so much the better, result no doubt of a lifetime as a bay boy, itself the product of my family's centuries-deep maritime tradition. And as it happens, I was sitting on a bluff over a particularly active passage – a narrow channel where the tide runs like a river, during a week of deep, still summer nights. But on the last one the temperature plummeted, a storm blew up, and I found myself sitting at midnight in a tearing wind, bundled to the chin. Still didn't help my hands, frozen in dhyana mudra.

I did this because I'm a macho Japanese-trained Zen hermit, determined to log half an hour of pointless suffering to prove my monastic manhood.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, my mind spent about twenty minutes (I imagine; could have been ten, might have been 50) confronting the gale, complaining about the cold, starting at alarming sounds soft and loud in the dark around me.

And then I slipped into The Zone.

My mind settled into an equanimous hum. My consciousness assumed high alert, a sort of excitement that's neither fear nor expectation, just… receiver-on. I thought nothing, but noted everything. The gusts iced my face, roared in my ears, yanked my clothes, tore branches off the huge firs around me, and I neither defied nor surrendered to any of it.

The storm, the night, the planet, and I, just, like, were.

It's been a long time since I saw that place.

Why I did that night, in that location, is an open question. Certainly, I was awash in 190-proof oxygen; the stuff was practically forcing itself into my lungs. And the very fact that the storm was an unremitting distraction probably made it a trigger; the symbiotic relationship between concentration and disruption being well-documented in Zen.

(This would be a good time to remind fellow seekers that your meditation practice is your own and so are the results. The cushion stories of others can infamously cue feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction, leading some to conclude they're no good at practice or not doing it right or using the wrong incense or whatever. If my account inspires you to go sit in a windstorm, and the result is nothing more than a head cold, it might simply mean that you have more common sense than I do.)

But one way or the other, I took delivery. Thanks for the encouraging experience. On to the next.


(A Storm Off The Normandy Coast, by Eugène Isabey, courtesy of The Eugene Victor Thaw Art Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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.)

One Religion

I never get used to the fact that there's exactly one religion on this planet. Or humanity's eternal frantic protest that there are in fact many.

Convicted Christian for the first 2/3 of my life, the hypocrisy – worse yet, the casuistry – of that sangha was deeply troubling for me from the beginning. At long length I was convinced to seek better company, for my own welfare.

I was therefore heartened when, early in my subsequent Buddhist training, I encountered Zen priest and historian Brian Daizen Victoria, whose book Zen At War documents the way Japanese Buddhists abandoned their most essential convictions during WWII to embrace the horrors of Imperial Japan – even to the point of declaring Emperor worship, and all the murder and violence his servants demanded, the highest expression of the Buddha Way.

The willingness of a Buddhist cleric and scholar to "go there", as the Americans say, reinforced my faith in my new path.

Wrote Daizen:

My reading of Buddhist political history tells me that every time Buddhist leaders have closely aligned themselves with the political ruler of their day, the Buddha Sangha has become corrupt and degenerate... The Sangha's often slavish subservience to, and actions on behalf of, their rulers have resulted, in my opinion, in its becoming the de facto pimp and prostitute of the State.

Change Buddhist terms for Christian, and you get an exact description of what's happening in Christian-majority nations today, most notably the US and Russia.

I suggest that the opportunity this offers Zenners is to let go of our reflexive tendency to assume we're different from our Christian neighbours, and instead consider how our own institutions subtly or overtly call us to analogous conduct. (Yes-butting and what-abouting Daizen, for starters.)

And how must we act, in light of this insight?


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

Good Book: Inside The Grass Hut

Shítóu Xīqiān (called Sekitō Kisen in Japan) is having a moment. Fixture of contemporary Soto, his Sandōkai, a memorable exposition of the nature of reality, is chanted regularly in our sanghas (and name-checked here). Student of Huineng himself, my brother died in relative obscurity, and remained in it for centuries thereafter before his slim but weighty catalogue was rediscovered and he became a rock star in Japanese Zen. And now he's trending here in the West.

Which is why I recently read Ben Connelly's Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou's Classic Zen Poem. The work it explores – Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage – is a largely overlooked classic of Zenlit, and another title in a peculiar hermit genre: the boy is my house awesome essay.

To structure his examination, Connelly simply lingers on each verse in turn, elaborating on its broader meanings. Soto priest at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, he's a talented teacher working from a Taigen Dan Leighton translation, and his meditations on Shitou's pithy, economical dissertation on hermit practice are worthy companionship for others who aspire to it.

Connelly's own observations are couched in a classic Western Zen voice, upgraded with a deferential tingle of irony that fends off the piety that sometimes weakens similar efforts. His willingness to join the rest of us, and his gentle sense of humour, drive his philosophical points home in such a way that they highlight the inherent truth of the source material and invite the reader to delve along with him.

Witness this reading of a Zen moment from American pop culture:

In the movie I Heart Huckabees, an "existential detective" asks her new client, "Have you ever transcended space and time?" The client, bewildered, answers, "Yes. No. Uh, time, not space. No, I don't know what you're talking about." From a Zen perspective, all his answers are good, none of them are true, and the last one is likely the best."

(In fact, the client's whole response, if delivered while looking his opponent in the eye, would be an awesome dharma combat parry.)

This tone pervades Connelly's thoughts on all 32 lines of the poem; at two to three pages apiece, a rhythm that keeps things flowing and maintains momentum. As such it's a good example of what I call a "bathroom book" – a work you can digest in short, self-contained chunks at a regular pace, unhurriedly building an ecosystem from the images it contains. It's an ideal structure for conceptual musing. The text is light enough to be accessible to those unaccustomed to Zen thought – in fact, a great introduction to our intellectual tradition – yet meaty enough (if I may be forgiven the reference) to illuminate experienced seekers. In short, it has "instant classic" written all over it.

I found Inside the Grass Hut valuable support for hermit practice, and expect to reread, quote, and recommend it in future. If you're looking for an insightful Zen read that meets you where you are and continues giving as your practice matures, this book will set you up.

WW: Spring blessing

(Pieris japonica, known here as popcorn bush, is a popular landscaping shrub on the North Pacific Coast. Native to the same latitudes on the far side of the ocean, where climate and soil types are about identical, I'm told it fills whole ravines in Japanese forests. This must be brilliant to see, given its heady fragrance and dense sprays of sparkler-bright blossoms.

The early-spring show, and the fact that we had one at every house I can remember – always right by the front door – made this a favourite flower from early childhood. It's also a good carving and turning wood, fairly soft and light but fine-grained, taking an oil finish well; properties apparently unknown outside of Asia, given the absence of mention online, at least in any of my languages.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

One-Legged Meditation

Though this seems at first glance avant-garde sculpture, in real life it's the famous one-legged torii of Nagasaki.

You can fill in its backstory yourself.

This Shinto devotional object was just another spirit gate, like thousands of others in Japan, until retrofitted for the Atomic Age by the US Air Force. The survivors took its still standing, despite the instant destruction of their entire city and the amputation of over half the monument, as an icon of hope. While rebuilding their home, they carefully preserved this gate, unmoved and unrestored, in front of the shrine that no longer existed behind it. (Though it soon would again.)

Today both are close-pressed by modern urban development, quite unlike the quiet neighbourhood in which they started, though neither has travelled so much as a yard since the day they were built.

And though all of this is as Shinto as it comes, I can't help but find commanding Zen significance in it, too.

To me, that war-veteran torii's silhouette – gates being a foundational metaphor for us, too – speaks to the nature of enlightenment practice. You practice where you are, how you are. If you lose a leg, you practice on the other.

And if an atomic bomb annihilates everything you know, you practice in the remains.

Nothing to do with machismo; it's just that you have no alternative.

I'm particularly touched by the Little Apocalypse – the tidal wave of concrete that drowned shrine and spirit gate in a matter of decades. Because while I struggle to imagine their Great Apocalypse – it's just more horror than my mind can honestly grasp – I've lived, and continue to live, the little one over and over.

Thus the sight of that silent, single-minded symbol of trust and true nature, standing up to its chin in a mindless race to oblivion, has special relevance for me. In that sense, notwithstanding religious distinctions or the brutality it's survived, we're comrade monks.

It's simply the most succinct expression of Things As They Are that I have found.

Today humanity is flirting with holocaust at least as hot as WWII. Given the geo-engineering challenges we choose to ignore; our growing embrace of political ideologies long proven suicidal; and the diplomatic tools we beta'd at Nagasaki, this could reasonably be the end.

It's difficult for me as a historian, a Zenner, and a decent guy, to remain in harness in the midst of our extinction.

So, what to do?

Well…

Sit down.

I'll also be keeping a photo of the one-legged torii of Nagasaki somewhere in the house, where I can see it.

(All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Contemporary view also courtesy of Frank Gualtieri. View of torii after blast from bottom of stairs also courtesy of U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945; Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing; Nagasaki Foundation for Promotion of Peace; and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Torii's eye view of the devastated city also courtesy of 林重男 [Hayashi Shigeo].)

Merry Christmas 2023

On this Christmas of 2023, all of us here at Rusty Ring wish our readers the best and kindest of seasons.

Right in darkness there is light.



(Painting by Ohara Koson. Image file courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

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.)

WW: Japanese cherries

(This is the fruit of the Japanese cherry tree [Prunus spp.; Cerasus spp.], whose blossoms bring world-famous glowing colour to the north and south Pacific Rim in spring. Its fruit, on the other hand, is viewed as inedible; some authorities even insist it's poisonous.

It isn't. It just tastes bad.

The stiff, bitter flesh of Japanese cherries is indeed uninspired fresh fruit, to put it mildly, but they still have the vibrant colour and heady fragrance of their more palatable cousins. Hence, cooked well and sugared judiciously, they can yield a cranberry-like jelly that's not at all objectionable.

Here I've gleaned about 3 cups of them from a local tree; I plan to simmer them in cider to impart to it their colour and perfume, much as sorbs – a similar fruit – are sometimes used. Afterward, I'll probably make kvass from the cider.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.