Hermitcraft: Hermit Zabuton

Red-letter day here at Rusty Ring: a new zabuton has been sworn in.

The old one, which has appeared on these pages numberless times (here, for example, with my zafu, or here, if you look closely at the upper righthand corner of the second photo), had been in service since I became a hermit monk 24 years ago, and I'm a bit heartbroken to set it aside. But the cover had become dirty and threadbare, and finally a dog tore a hole in it.

That last may sound a bit alarming if you've never seen the object in question, but I assure you: pets never missed the joke.

I got that zabuton for free from a person who no longer had a dog. And it worked great – ideal size and weight, highly durable, insulating in the winter and airy in summer. Together we travelled the continent, sitting indoors and out, keeping my physical plant in monastic trim without the least trouble or worry.

(My zafu, less than a year younger, also soldiers on, having as sole intervention been fortified about midway through by a tough, weatherproof cover. True to form, I usually protect that with a cloth shoulder bag, so that the whole looks like a bagful of laundry. Note to self: we need another bag to protect that bag with.)

Any road, just as my winter robe began life as an old fleece bathrobe, I sit zazen on a dog bed. The scepticism this raises in certain quarters is worth the paltry money such kit costs. Welcome to eremitical monasticism, bitches.

But it was time for a new meditation mat, and two decades of experience has taught me that the dogs are right: this-here is what you want. Still, you'd be amazed how broad is the canine mattress market, in every sense: colour, design, shape, expense, comfort… even dimensions vary remarkably.

You gotta know a lot about pet supplies to nail this one. Especially these days, when it often must be purchased sight-unseen.

In the end, after a mere six months' research, I got what I needed. The new pad is a little loftier and has a textured checkerboard cover (see photo) – ironic echo of certain so-designated zabutons meeting fewer criteria and costing four to twelve times more. (Set me back twenty-five dollars Yank, for those playing at home.)

One thing I do miss is the extra 4 inches; where my old zabuton is 28 inches by 35, this one is only 24. However, there are some good reasons for a shallower mat, chiefly that they're less obstructive in a multiuse room; fit more readily into many outdoor sites; and are easier to transport by car.

As for wear or ergonomic issues, only time will tell. But for the moment, it's holding lotus admirably.

So if you need a zabuton but can't afford spiritual materialism, come join me out here with the dogs.

Company's better, anyway.

Easy As Pie

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

This is one of Carl Sagan's most repeated quotations, and it has all the genius his fans came to prize in him: brief, direct, plain-spoken, trenchant. Less noted is the pure Zen that Carl – a convinced, though deeply respectful, atheist – also encoded here. It's a complete and concise summary of dependent co-arising. Easily recalled and memorised. The only part I might gently dispute is "from scratch".

Making a pie – any pie – requires all of Creation.

Carl was referring to the fact that every atom in the ingredients, and all the physics required to produce, process, and bake them, and all the energy all that takes, from generating the materials to heating the oven to your own mental and physical effort, has to proceed from somewhere. As do we, down the eons-deep path back to the Big Bang. Every day and each step of which has engineered, in excruciating detail, not just your dessert recipe, but indeed, the mind that ponders it.

Skip one spec? No pie for you.

Kind of makes you want to tip your baker, eh?

Contemplating this truth helps me to think like a grown-up. To understand that circumstances have a long tail of origination – and that's after you've determined what those circumstances really are – a step people tend to drop. And that until you've delved as profoundly and as honestly as possible into both questions, you've no right to an opinion.

And that's just for scientific matters. (AKA the kindergarten of the intellect.) Make it a human issue, and it's back to GO.

Zen has that peculiarity of all religions, that it hawks an esoteric, unknowable Dharma, then metes out a drumline of simplistic rituals that followers are told is "Zen". Despite the obvious irony, there's a certain logic to this, but the problem is, that as in all binary systems, we tend to judge the superficial wing "fundamental" and dismiss the other as pretty but impractical.

Because given the choice, humans will cleave to observable, assessable behaviours while suppressing the justification for them.

Which is why our rules never work.

So today I'm sitting with Carl Sagan-roshi's teaching:

If you wish to avoid half-baked practice, you must first create the universe.


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

Diaper Practice

"No man is too big to change a diaper, but some are too small."

– An Evangelical radio preacher whose name I didn't catch, encapsulating the true man of no rank principle of Zen.


(Photo courtesy of Tembinkosi Sikupela and Unsplash.com.)

Paul's Epistle to the Buddhists

This week I happened on Andrew Springer's Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up), an essay on the vital question of what the hell St. Paul is doing in the Bible. This has bothered me since childhood: the promotion of a random convert, not even a disciple, to Christ's equal. Christ's superior, really, given that the Church typically defaults to Paul over Jesus.

I heartily recommend Springer's article to anyone who has been or is now a Christian; it's lively and well-argued, and no doubt good companionship for Christians who find themselves blessed with a surabundance of hell-raisin', God praisin' fellows, but little in the way of actual fellowship. (Ah, memories…)

As for me, I'm grateful for my deep and broad Christian journey, which taught me a great deal about spiritual discipline and ethics, and comes in handy every day of my Buddhist life.

It also taught me to appreciate the paucity of Bible-babble in Zen. In my 24 years on the path, I don't think I've once seen a Zenner smack another about the head with a sutra, trying to win a point of practice. In this we beat the Christians cold, but all coins have two sides; our lack of scriptural literacy leaves the door wide open to innovation, with the usual questionable results. I grazed this issue some years ago in Are Teachers Necessary?, wherein I explored an abuse of the Buddha's teaching that's entirely as egregious as the cult of St. Paul.

What really brought this to mind for me in the Springer piece was his citing of a contention, roundly accepted by competent Bible scholars, that six of the 13 documents attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Bible aren't even his. In other words, almost half of St. Paul's contribution to Christian teaching is in fact fraudulent.

And guess which of those two lists is most problematic, from a Christic perspective?

Because where Paul appears to contradict himself, rescinding acceptance he'd extended before, the reversal occurs most often in the apocryphal material.

Hence the training I received on my Christian path: that written wisdom is frequently wangled to please worldly authorities. And that since we're called by and to the Holy Spirit, we must be careful not to replace it in our religious practice with idols of paper and ink.

So when pursuing the Zen matter in my own piece, I was neither surprised, nor particularly dismayed, to find that one of the most poignant moments in Buddhist scripture has been trafficked to political ends. Specifically, that whereas the Buddha preached and demonstrated throughout his life that no human outranks another, the cited sutra makes him "repent" of this on his deathbed, commanding Buddhist monks to accept social hierarchies.

Yeah, that's not blasphemous or anything.

As a Christian, I learned that angels neither wrote nor protect the Bible, so we must study our scripture minutely, always aware of where it comes from, where it's been, and who would stand to lose under its authentic counsel. Where that counsel appears to waver, you seek a higher power.

My comments on that bit of sutric softness met with some scorn at the time. I think I've quoted my favourite example before: "Sounds like Mara." (In case anyone thought devil-baiting wasn't a Buddhist thing.) Which is ironic for a religion – and here I refer specifically to Western Buddhism – chiefly founded by more or less indignant refugees from the Church.

So let the record show that the courage to exercise clear-seeing in scriptural study, and to signal potential tampering when suspected, came straight out of my Christian schooling, and I recommend it to anyone who's determined to get off this merry-go-round.

Because the counterfeit passages are fully as valuable as the authentic ones.


(Photo of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra courtesy of The Metropolitan Museam of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

Arriving

With a motorboat you get there faster,
but with a sailboat you’re already there.


(Winslow Homer's Breezing Up courtesy of the National Gallery of Art [US] and Wikimedia Commons.)

Squeezing The Legs Out Of The Snake

That's what the Tibetans call it, when you try to force your delusions on objective reality.

You find a snake. It's an animal; it should have legs. But where are they? It has no hair in which to hide them, no feathers, no shell.

Well, they must be inside.

So you squeeze. I picture the unoffending reptile, coiled around my wrist: bug-eyed, silent, indignant.

You want it to have legs. You'd feel better if it had legs. You insist it have legs. In the end, you'd rather it were dead, than to go on existing without legs.

But the thing is, it has no legs.

And that's only a problem for you.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges [manuscript in progress]. Photo of Epicrates cenchria, the rainbow boa, courtesy of Rawpixel.com and a generous photographer.)

Street Level Zen: Captivity

"Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing... how the world still dearly loves a cage."

   Maude.


– From lifelong favourite Harold and Maude, which entire movie has an atmosphere I would later recognise as the precise texture of Zen koans and stories.

    "Why not kill yourself?" asked the monk

    "No place to start," said Caoshan.




(Photo courtesy of Chris Fuller and Unsplash.com.)

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.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

Emptiness

"It's the hole that makes the doughnut."

The I Ching. (Probably.)


(Pre-certified doughnut courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Zenola

I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.

(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)

But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.

Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.

The recipe is as follows:

30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
  cranberry raisins
  dried apples
  dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger

(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)

At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)

I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.

Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.

In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.

Sobriety Kyôsaku

An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.

Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.

– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.


(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)

Passing Through

incola ego sum
apud te
in terra
et peregrinus
sicut omnes patres mei.

Psalterium Sancti Hieronymi, 38:13

(English translation here.)


(Photo courtesy of Atlas Green and Unsplash.com.)

A Prayer for the New Year

I first encountered the oft-cited invocation below in a newspaper column by United Congregational minister Dale Turner. At the time I assumed he was the author, but when the Internet happened years later, I found that its provenance is indeterminate. (No shade on the Rev. Turner, who frequently shared gems from his own tireless study, and undoubtedly flagged this as another in the column I read.)

In fact, no-one seems to know where these memorable lines come from. One source claims it's a traditional Kenyan prayer, but I was unable to verify that, either.

As for me, its very anonymity is value-added. Those many pithy, compelling observations that knock around the world, repeated for generations, unattributed or misattributed, are often the most profound; the mere fact they've travelled so far demonstrates how powerful they are.

Any road, this one became a form in my Christian practice. Now twenty years further, having taken the Zen path, I see no reason to change that.

So may this teaching from the great Zen master Anon be a guide and a buttress to fellow seekers in the coming year.

The Truth Testimony

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth
From the laziness that is content with half truths
O God of Truth
Deliver us.


(Photo courtesy of Seiya Maeda and Unsplash.com.)

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.)

How To Be Sad At Christmas

Like a lot of old people, I've come to find myself adrift at Christmas.

Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own.

I never found a home in humanity. So here I sit.

There's a certain irony. I was always the Yuletide warrior: the guy who spent the year sourcing gifts, and immediately on first December, sent cards, decked halls, logged kitchen hours, all while listening to holiday music, alternating between seasonal radio and my ever-expanding battery of Christmas albums.

Who knew the holidays were yet another thing you eventually don't qualify for if you're not married?

I'm told there's an entire nation of us, we solitaries. Though we mostly don't know each other. Isolation is best performed alone.

But fear not. This isn't another treatise on the maudlin holiday of the outlier.

Because I've come to spread the good news of Zen.

I've said it before: Zen practice doesn't end suffering. It just helps you suffer better.

A fact of which I'm well-reminded in December.

Sure, I'd love to have a warm home full of love and children. Somebody to give to. Somebody to share with.

But I can always cherish the desire itself. In spite of our Western thoughtways – our conviction that life has a scoreboard, marking each passing second "earned" or "unearned" – just the belief in Christmas is joy enough.

There's also something to be said for standing outside of a thing to fully see into it. Clear-seeing is harder to pull off from too close.

As my world has shrunk to a room, I've gained a great deal of pleasure in this season. All that's going on around me. The responses that weather and light and sights and smells elicit. The memories, and yes, even the unrealised dreams.

They were good dreams. And I'm grateful that my society maintains this calendar month of sesshin to remind us of such things.

It's important to affirm that our insistence on separating people into winners and losers is delusion.

So this Christmas, as in the past, I'm once again listening to my Christmas radio playlist – over thirty holiday stations worldwide. And if it's hard to get too excited about baking for just myself, I've still got chai and sourdough coffee cake, and pumpkin soup for Christmas Eve, and hoppin' john on New Year's.

And I'll get to have Christmas dinner with my sister and her family. If my circle has dwindled to little more at this stage, it's also true that I look forward to that all year.

And the knowledge that even that isn't guaranteed, in this world of dew, keeps me treasuring it.

So once again I'll sit through midnight on New Year's Eve, holding mudra, minding my posture, and smiling inwardly as the fireworks drive this year out, never to be seen again.

And into that vacuum will immediately tumble… something else.

Creation is infinite. And I am small.

A heartfelt Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters. And if that's foreign to your practice, then at minimum, a deep December full of cheer and contemplation.


PS: If you've yet to discover Internet radio, and would like a taste, Christmas Radio Malta is one of my favourites. Their website player is dead, but you can click here on their stream URL to open it in your browser, or paste it into your media player.

I'm listening to it now.


(Photo of the Jellyfish Galaxy [ESO 137-001] and surrounding space courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia Commons.)

Rain

"I am a continuation, like the rain is a continuation of the cloud."

Thich Nhat Hanh


(Photo courtesy of Anderson Mancini and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good "Song": Alice's Restaurant Massacree

This unlikely 1967 Arlo Guthrie classic has become a Thanksgiving ritual for American radio stations, many of which spin it on that day. Some play it over and over for several hours, if not all day – though seldom or never on any other.

Yet everything about this track is anomalous. For starters, in a market that then insisted that all songs come in under three minutes – and remains uncomfortable with four to this day – this one tops 18. The whole A-side of its album!

It's also harshly critical of a particular American war, and conservatism in general, and despite what some would have you believe, that sort of thing has always been embargoed by American media. (Yes, even in the 60s.)

And finally, of course, it's not a song at all; more like a long monologue with a chorus at both ends. (This art form is called "talking blues": a sort of redneck rap that gained mainstream appreciation in the 30s when Arlo's dad, of whom some have heard, scored a hit of his own with one.)

In sum, it's a bit of a mystery how the Massacree met such wide success, or came to be so deeply associated with a quasi-religious holiday. Or that such a scathing assault on Cold War conventions still calls so many of the nation's angrily divided citizens to enjoy a good-natured laugh.

(And it's had that magic from the beginning. I played this recording in my high school history classes, to Reagan-era students who seized it with delight. There's just something about it. Discuss.)

One thing is clear: this gem of American pop culture is a true Thanksgiving blessing, given the genius of the writing and performance and the welcome relief of whimsy on such a solemn day. Guthrie's text and tone evoke the spirit of the era – and the rollicking ideals of its young. Realism and optimism; hope and resolve; humour and candour, all in equal measure.

I miss that. And them.

For the rest, this story Arlo tells in first person is fundamentally true, with allowance made for good storytelling. Alice really existed, she really had a restaurant, and it really wasn't called Alice's Restaurant. Arlo and a friend really were arrested for an environmental offence on Thanksgiving Day. They really did go to court. He really was later called up for the draught.

As for me, I don't know when I first heard it – early 70's, I'd guess; radio, no doubt – but it's been a favourite ever since. I loved Arlo's rural delivery, his youthful smartassery, his opposition to militarism and the Vietnam War, and his parody of military posturing. Above all I loved his trenchant wit.

All of which reinforced my own burgeoning career as a wiseacre. Now friends, there's only one or two things that the adults in my life might've done in response to this and the first was that they could have risen to their feet cheering, which wasn't very likely and I didn't expect it.

Anyway, here a half-century on, we're suddenly back in a place where singing a couple bars of Alice's Restaurant and walking out may be a duty we must all again perform. And two decades of Zen practice, with its tales of eccentric japes before the coercive glare of authority, have done little to spoil my taste for it.

So Happy Thanksgiving to my American brothers and sisters; peace and insight to all.

All Religious Morality

One lonely commandment:

If you don't like it, don't be it.


(Photo courtesy of Danh Đãnh and Unsplash.com.)

Brief Visual Meditation

Courtesy of a Zen droogie on social media.