"Lake. Still"
Picture a mirror surface, a body of water poured like glass, unmoved and unmoving. Become that lake.
Other times, when you're piqued by anxiety or undisciplined drive, try this:
"Mountain. Solid"
Feel the mountain. Its weight, its composure, its permanence. Sit like that mountain.
I've used both to great effect. In fact, they recently became a mainstay of my practice in a particularly challenging time. So I'm sharing them forward.
In respectful sanghaship I'd also like to contribute a third and similar focusing technique from my own practice. It's a little less placid, a bit harder to assimilate, but in my experience, just as valuable when called for:
"Wind. Wander."
I picture nothing when using this mantra; I just feel the wind inside me. But if a visual is helpful, you might try a leaf or dandelion fluff or even dust.
This came to me while reciting a favourite chant:
In cola ego sum apud te in terra, et peregrinus, sicut omnes patres mei.
("I am a sojourner before You on this Earth, and I will wander, like all my fathers before me.")
Unlike the TNH images, mine doesn't bring an immediate sense of calm abiding. But it does contribute crucial perspective, positioning me more accurately in the universe. And in some moments, it's just what I require.
Call it active abiding.
In brotherhood with the nation of seekers.
(Sailplane photo courtesy of Mike Peel and Wikimedia Commons.)
"At a peace rally in Philadelphia in 1966, a reporter asked me, 'Are you from North or South Vietnam?'
"If I had said I was from the north, he would have thought I was pro-communist, and if I had said I was from the south, he would have thought I was pro-American.
"So I told him, 'I am from the Center.'"
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching.
(Photo courtesy of Luke van Zyl and Unsplash.com.)
Non-Buddhists may be astonished to learn we lack one of those. Instead, we maintain a libraryful of sutras – pamphlet-sized documents that more or less quote the Buddha – along with three or four additional libraries of epistolary commentary. And we Zenners tend to bust even that down to the Heart Sutra (a short summary of the Buddha's insights), four koan anthologies, and, in Soto, Dogen's Shobogenzo. (Other schools swap that last out for their own founders' teachings.)
But for my money, Heart satisfies the hunger for a source of record, something to tell us in no uncertain terms what we're supposed to be doing here. Heart was the book that made me a monk, and the one I return to in moments of despair and confusion. And it never lets me down, though each time I find I've never read it before.
Among insights gained this time is TNH's reference to "Source Buddhism", one of three streams he sorts modern Buddhism into, by way of understanding the differing perspectives. The other two are Many-Schools Buddhism, notable for its didactic nature, and the Mahayana, which emphasises the responsibility of practitioners to their species and world (the famous "bodhisattva principle").
And though my own tradition – Zen – sits squarely in that last camp, I find I'm a bit of a Sourcer.
Quite a Sourcer, really.
Source Buddhists insist on the primacy of the Buddha's teaching over all other authorities. What he said, is Buddhism. Anything else… might not be.
I think this is an important fixation, because humans compulsively pile everything they like under the rubrics they've already adopted. If they're pacifists, they define even their most bellicose conduct as perfect pacifism. If they're conservatives, each innovation they make becomes the soul of conservatism. If they're feminists, their every impulse reflects pure disgust for sexism – highest of all, their purely sexist ones.
Nowhere is this fatal flaw more evident than in religion.
And in no religion is it more evident than in Zen.
So it's comforting to know that in my instinctive sourcery, I'm paddling an Original Stream – perhaps the original stream – of Buddhism.
Because the path of the Buddha isn't always the smoothest, but I do believe it's the most effectual.
And in case you're wondering: yes. My own meandering improvisations thereupon do constitute "original Buddhic teaching".
Seriously; have you ever met a human?
(Photo of the 6th century Teaching Buddha in Ajanta Cave 16 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
"One of the most powerful teachings that [Thich Nhat Hanh] shared with us before he got sick was about not building a stupa for him and putting his ashes in an urn for us to pray to.
"He strongly commanded us not to do this.
"I will paraphrase his message:
"'Please do not build a stupa for me. Please do not put my ashes in a vase, lock me inside, and limit who I am. I know this will be difficult for some of you.
"'If you must build a stupa though, please make sure that you put a sign on it that says, "I am not in here."
"'In addition, you can also put another sign that says, "I am not out there either," and a third sign that says, "If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps."'"
Senior student Phap Dung, on his teacher.
(Photo of a second century BCE frieze of Buddhists worshiping at a Shunga dynasty stupa courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Wikimedia Commons, and a generous photographer.)
But that's not the only Zen the article contains; another favourite moment relates to the 8 Worldly Dharmas, on which I posted this past August.
In Jason's words, human behaviour is ultimately directed by two desires:
1) The person you desperately want to be.
2) The person you desperately want to avoid becoming.
So that's 8WD all over again. It's also conventional Buddhism à la Thich Nhat Hanh, who emphasises the notion of mental "seeds", or impulses that arise in the mind and either get "watered" (i.e., indulged or praised) or "not watered" (left to languish).
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests we be mindful of these seeds – which exist unremarked in our minds till they sprout as actions, or even habits – and make conscious decisions to water or not water them.
And that's highly effective practice. However, I think Jason's insight – that those seeds come from somewhere too, and knowing where is important – is a necessary second level.
That thing you want – what do you think you'll accomplish with it?
That button that gets pushed – what is that wired to?
That insult that enrages you – why do you care?
That compliment you received – why does that please you? (And how about that other compliment, that leaves you unmoved – or even discomfits you. What's up with that?)
Those positive feelings that arise in a given event – what do you imagine you've accomplished?
That thing you do in a given situation - what are you trying to become, or not become, when you do that?
In Jason's terms, when you feel seeds begin to swell, you should ask yourself, "What do I want to be that's manipulating me to do/say/be this thing?", or "What do I not want to be that's manipulating me to do/say/be this thing?"
I like Jason's perspective, because it goes to the bedrock of delusion. Creating ourselves in this ephemeral world is a lot of what we do here.
If we can give that up – or at least leash it – we stand a chance of getting off this carousel.
(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)
Events this week have me thinking about my favourite Zen teaching story. (I say that about all of them, though my very favourites are the ones I take the piss out of in this journal.)
The gist goes like this:
A bandit army descended on a town, causing all the monks in the local monastery to abandon it, except the master.
Bursting into the zendo, the pirate general was enraged to find the old monk calmly dusting the altar, not even deigning to bow.
“Do you not realise,” he shouted, “that I would run you through without a second thought?”
“And do you not realise,” said the master, “that I would be run through without a second thought?”
At this the general bowed and left.
This is one of those tales we Zenners like to exchange with pious smiles, certain of its allegory, and that we'll never be held to the conviction it implies.
And now here we are.
The plague our species is currently facing puts me in a surrealistic place. Whenever I've imagined myself in an apocalyptic scenario – which is frequently, given my culture's obsession with it – I've seen myself meeting the aftermath of war, natural disaster, or economic crisis beside my neighbours, pooling our skills, standing firm against the selfish and the predatory, guiding our community to peace, promise, and security.
But in an epidemic, you have to board yourself up in your house, see to your own needs, and avoid catching or communicating the sickness to others.
And so stillness and acceptance must be the discipline, in full knowledge that very bad things might happen. And you must not go out and do combat with them, or call for help from others, or even, God forbid, open the door to curse at them.
Instead you must remain heroically immobile. To borrow an image from Thich Nhat Hanh, you must be "lake-still, mountain-solid".
In other words, I am now living the worst nightmare of all religiosos: actually having to practice what I preach.
The death and mortal-threat fables that abound in our religion distinguish it from other faiths. (Some may quibble that traditional Christianity, with its endless recitations of gruesome martyrdom, takes this laurel, but I would counter that those are journalism, placing the listener outside of events. Our tales make him or her inhabit the dying character.)
Such stories as The Tiger and the Strawberry, or The Mother and the Mustard Seed, exist for a pedagogical purpose. They remind us of the knife-edge we walk, that we must walk, and the impermanence of all things, including ourselves. The intent is to jangle us out of the chains of our dread, and into the freedom that acknowledgement confers.
We are not the universe. We are not the most important thing in the universe. It was just fine before we got here, and it will be just fine after we leave.
And so will we.
Because this life is not the goal of this life.
Understanding that, and practicing it, is the origin of strength.
There is no "state of emergency" in Buddhism, aside from the one we were born into and can't resolve without practice. There's no Buddhist constitution that can be suspended when it becomes inconvenient. The law is immutable.
And that's a gift.
So now is the time to do all that stuff we've been saying we do.
Now is the time to practice Zen.
In taking the cushion, let us cleave to our humanity, care for our fellow Earthlings, and maintain our grasp of reality.
Because we have no alternative.
(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)
"People who don’t have a sense of shame have no future."
Thích Nhất Hạnh
(The Cloak of Conscience courtesy of Anna Chromy and Wikimedia Commons.)
I'm not much of a rock.
As a Zenner I aspire to be unmovable. Fudo Myō-ō, the patron of my practice, has made a career of it. And I often exhort others – principally here – to remain calm, to look deeply before acting, to avoid multiplying suffering by making a bad situation worse.
In the blogosphere, no-one can see your hypocrisy.
The fact is, I have a warrior spirit. I want to horse up and ram a swift lance through as many jerks as I can jab before one of them takes me out. Call it an ethnic weakness, but I am by nature a doer, a get'er'doner, and especially a defender. When arrogant pricks start kicking folk around, my first impulse is to cut them off at the knees.
Literally, if possible.
Which means that recent events have handed the monk I decided to be fourteen years ago a steep challenge. By way of meeting it, I've largely withdrawn into meditation and monastic discipline these last weeks, to sit with my conflicting values. If you were to ask me what honour demands in these times, depending on time of day you'd either hear, "Look deeply, understand, and proceed like a grown-up," or "Behead the mofos."
I'm working on that second thought.
And in that task I've greatly been helped by this Vox interview with Pháp Dung. As a senior student of Thich Nhat Hanh, he's received a great deal of training in mindful activism (a concept that conventional Zen considers oxymoronic, but one that Thich Nhat Hanh founded a lineage upon), as well as holding his ground under fire.
As I've found the student as lucid as the teacher, I pass his teaching on here to brothers and sisters who find themselves in the same dilemma.
I guess anybody can be a Buddhist when it's easy, eh?
(Photo courtesy of Moyan Brenn and Wikimedia Commons.)
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.
But given the way he went, and the fact that August has somehow become Suicide Month here at Rusty Ring, I've got stuff to say.
First off, Robin Williams was a crucial figure to my generation. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere – not surprising, given that those of us who followed the Baby Boomers have always been studiously ignored. But Robin Williams was, to some extent, our John Lennon. The fact that he was apolitical suited us perfectly; so were we. His lightning genius was dazzling, his sword scalpel-sharp, though he never seemed to over-use it. He took down the officious and precious, but never harped or dwelled. In nearly every photograph a childlike gentleness glows in his eyes. He wasn't angry; he was self-mocking. In him we saw perhaps not ourselves, but what we wished we could be. And on a personal note, as a kid of Scottish descent growing up in the States, I'll be eternally grateful to him for finally convincing the Yanks that Robin IS TOO a boys' name. (Haven't been hassled about that since Mork.)
None of which I realised until he was gone. Sic transit gloria mindfulness practice.
With his passing, my man Robin also brought depression to international attention, resulting in myriad thoughtful, helpful articles about the relationship between creativity, damage, and loneliness. Last week my 2011 review of The Zen Path Through Depression trended worldwide, attracting hundreds of hits. So people are interested in the topic, and with luck some who need counsel are seeking it.
But one thing I haven't seen is any discussion of the collective responsibility for the condition and its consequences. Some time ago I read a study in which researchers assembled a group of depression patients and another of random others. Researchers gave each individual a series of open-ended true stories and asked them to predict the outcome. The depressed subjects consistently augured more accurately than those in the control group.
Get it? Another word for depression is insight. Often, depressed people suffer in part from the misfortune of not being as mentally incapacitated by denial as their cohorts. The implication is clear: at least some of depression isn't sickness at all; it's a tragic lack of sickness, in a world gone barking mad.
Last year I uploaded a piece partly addressing the issue of how to deal with such unfashionable insight, should you be so afflicted; suffice it to say that killing yourself because everyone else is crazy is unskilful, both for yourself and the world. But like Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Those who think they are not responsible are the most responsible." Therefore, today I'm talking especially to the non-depressed majority.
What can you do to reduce the suicide rate?
The standard Zen response is to be mindful of the seeds of violence in yourself and deny them water. Some of the best instruction in this highly effective practice is found in Claude Anshin Thomas's autobiography At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace. In the meantime, here's a short list of possible first steps:
- If you belong to a church or other religious organisation that identifies any group of fellow mortals ("Satanists"; atheists; gays; intellectuals; competing religions) as individuals who must be "stopped"; converted by physical or social violence; or liquidated; leave it.
- If you belong to a political party or movement that ascribes the problems we face to some superficially-defined group of people (immigrants; gays; rich or poor people; criminals; another race; proponents of a political or economic theory; another nation); leave it.
- Boycott anger-tainment – shock jocks, call-in shows, intentionally biased networks, sensationalistic books and movies. Anything that's heavy on analysis and light on facts. Don't forget the red tops, too. The constant public shaming of Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse (who apparently still isn't dead enough), or whatever other none-of-your-business train-wreck is selling at the moment, dehumanises us more than you think.
- Too ambitious? Ok, just declare peace on somebody. Your choice. Choose one group that annoys the crap out of you and say, "From now on, you have my permission to be or do that." Slow drivers? Fast drivers? Loud children? People who use bad grammar? Obscenities? Residents of big garish houses? Those who dump their shopping trolleys in the car park for someone else to round up? (Ooo, that's mine!)
Note that none of these are solutions to any problem, suicide least of all; rather they're a way to begin clearing the ground so solutions can develop. Maybe now that those self-centred bastards who strew their carts all over the place are no longer prompting a battle response, I will see the cause and effect behind their actions and perceive an end to it. Worst case scenario: I'll stop squandering my finite human energies on unproductive suffering. (Starting with my own.)
Once you start, it becomes addictive, this business of reason, acceptance, and forgiveness.
So go ahead, brothers and sisters: take that first step. See how it goes.
Until next time, honoured reader: Nanu-nanu.
(Still of Robin being human from the Bill Forsythe film of that title.)
We need hermits. OK, it's a self-serving point. But trust me: leave it to the priests and temples alone, and they'll botch this thing.
Corporate religion always warps the founder's teachings, which invariably urge individual atonement and transcendence, into a trophy-collecting expedition. Hence the uniform, the command structure, and the litmus.
That last conjures enemies. Collective religion needs these, and it needs them everywhere.
That's why we always live on the brink of Revolution, the great cosmic victory, prophesied of old, that will literally change the universe. (And will somehow be brought about by us microbes, through our thunderous obedience.) Every generation, in all ages, lives in the End Times.
At least our Zen jihad is usually a personal one. We've resisted second-comings and arhats, and at least in the West, our politics are generally not diametrically opposed to the Buddha's. But dungeons and dragons lurk even here. In Zen centres I've heard praise of "relics" (including "relics of the Buddha", a phrase my hermit tongue cannot pronounce), and breathless accounts of what must honestly be called sainthood, attributed to Thich Nhat Hanh, Seung Sahn, Suzuki-roshi, and any number of local gurus. These teachers would, I am heartened to think, quash such talk, yet the craving for deities remains. Can charisma be far behind?
The danger is real. One has only to consider Christianity, now so buried in augury, Bible-babble, and gothic conspiracy that Christ himself has lost all credibility in the larger culture. In such times a Christian hermit, churched by the Spirit alone, might preach at risk of his life.
Fortunately, we Zenners do little scripturalising. We seldom declaim verses on one another, even when we work violence on one another, and since World War II have not lawyered obscure sutras into cynical stratagems.
But we do live constantly on the verge of "enlightenment", which state we could immediately reach if only we would submit more completely to another person's will. We kick others for eating meat, for having sex, for breaching the latest liberal shibboleth. We kick ourselves, too: for not sitting enough, or right; for losing our temper, or our faith; for giving – or bearing – too little. And most wretched of all: for honouring our own nature over ordained authority. And in that we are precisely identical to every other church on this blue planet: turning away from our liberating practice, and embracing comfortable conventions.
And so we need hermits – a sunburned dervish, a naked fakir, a hemp-haired Hebrew prophet – to remind us what practice really is, and the true nature of enlightenment. Therefore (one sec while I pull on some sackcloth…) say I unto ye:
Hear me, O Zion! It happens when it happens. You can't make it happen, you can't predict when it happens, and you probably won't even know when it happens. But happen it will. On its own and by its own, with you or without you, because of you and in spite of you, whether it vindicates you or shows you for a fool.
And let's cut the crap: it's gonna show you for a fool.
All peace and success to the Nation of Seekers.
(Photo of Katskhi Pillar courtesy of ლევან ნიორაძე and Wikimedia Commons.)
I'm not a big incense guy. Some Buddhists are. They like to set up an exotic Asian vibe, and incense is one of the foreign accoutrements they amass on their borders to accomplish that. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, these practitioners "make a lot of smoke".
Meanwhile, I'm a hermit, and rama-lama-ding-dong irks me. But I have to admit, in many ways it can support valid practice.
At the start of my vocation I lived upstairs from two incessant smokers. Their ceiling/my floor proved dismayingly porous, and I couldn't escape the stench even in my own home. Since I had recently embarked on a Zen path, my counter-schemes naturally turned to fine Japanese temple incense. It's expensive, but it doesn't stink up the place like the cheap stuff, and, as I happily learned, its pleasant unobtrusiveness doesn't stop it getting all bushido on smokers' arses.
As a side benefit, the fact that I was saturating my living quarters with temple incense during the founding months of my practice imprinted it, Pavlov-style, on my neural net. So now the smell of good incense calms me and puts me in practice mind. Which is exactly how cœnobites justify their incense fetish.
Goddam cœnobites.
Anyway, I needed an incense burner. Did I mention I don't like the thing Chögyam Trungpa called "spiritual materialism"? And on a Scottish note, commercial burners tend to be wasteful, because the end of the stick that's stuck in their hole or sand doesn't burn. Hey, if I'm gonna blow seventy dollars on smell, I'm wringing every last penny back out of it.
And so I invented this. It works. It burns the stick down to one or two millimetres. And it's bindle technology, which is the electrical opposite of pretence.
You will need:
1. Two clothespins, the kind whose wooden legs are held together by a steel spring.
2. Glue.
3. An empty sardine tin. (I like the long skinny tins that kippers come in, because they catch all the ash when burning a full stick.)
4. A fine-toothed saw, such as a coping saw or hacksaw
Optional: paint or stain; sandpaper; a small triangular file.
1. Saw the "lips" off one of the clothespins, angling the cuts about 45 degrees toward the tail, making a pointed business end. (See illustrations; you can also accomplish this by rubbing the clothespin on coarse sandpaper or holding it against a disc sander.) Without this, the incense stick will snuff out prematurely.
2. Next, take the second clothespin and saw about half an inch from the end of one of its legs. Then turn that bit narrow end forward, and glue it to the inside of the end of one leg on the clip. (See illustrations.) This forms a cleat that will hook over the rim of the tin and hold the clip in place. Clamp the glued bit down with the donor clothespin until it dries.
3. Inscribe a shallow groove in the middle of the biting surface of the jaws, to keep the round incense sticks straight in the jaws and prevent them from rolling out. A small triangular file is handy for this. In any case don't cut the notch too deep or the clip won't hold the stick. A good scratch is all that's needed.
Optional: clean up the sawn surfaces with fine sandpaper, and paint or stain the clip so it doesn't look so much like a clothespin. If that's a problem. (The clip in the photos was stained with outdoor trinity tar.)
To use, clamp an incense stick between the clip's jaws. Fix the clip to the tin by hooking its cleated leg over the rim of the tin and stepping the uncleated leg in the angle formed where the tin's side meets the bottom. (Photos again.) Ideally the installed stick should lean about 45 degrees over the tin. If the fit is good and secure, you may have to flex the clip's spring a bit to get it mounted. If it's too loose, consider modifying the cleat, or try a different size clothespin.
This incense burner is easily made, lightweight, and cheap. You could conceivably parlay your artistic skills into a pretty fancy model, if you painted up the tin. But it would be hard to make it very expensive, even at that. Either way, I'll confess to becoming very attached to mine. When somebody tossed out the first one I made back in the day, I was truly raked off.
So now I hide this one.
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