Gone, Gone

This morning a brother in my Twitter sangha posted the following five paragraphs from the Pali canon (Dutiyaassutavāsutta, SN 12.62).

OK, four, plus intro. That, with allowance made for the verbose, refrain-heavy nature of Buddhist scripture, really comes to about half as much.

Nevertheless, I've dropped a TLDR at the end for the hard-of-waiting.

(Note: "disillusioned" is a positive thing in Buddhist texts. It means "freed from delusion". When you think about it, it's weird that we use that word as a complaint in English.)

So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. …

“Mendicants, when it comes to this body made up of the four primary elements, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to accumulate and disperse, to be taken up and laid to rest. That’s why, when it comes to this body, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But when it comes to that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, or freed. Why is that? Because for a long time they’ve been attached to it, thought of it as their own, and mistaken it: ‘This is mine, I am this, this is my self.’ That’s why, when it comes to this mind, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But an unlearned ordinary person would be better off taking this body made up of the four primary elements to be their self, rather than the mind. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to last for a year, or for two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or a hundred years, or even longer.

But that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night. It’s like a monkey moving through the forest. It grabs hold of one branch, lets it go, and grabs another; then it lets that go and grabs yet another. In the same way, that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night.

TLDR: It's not hard to accept that our bodies are temporary. What we really don't like is that our personhood is just as biodegradable. It changes constantly – we cease to exist and then reappear in different form from moment to moment – until one day no trace, physical or metaphysical, remains of us.

Reading this, I became disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

Deep bow to my brother.


(Photo of a fragment from an 18th century Thai anthology of Pali canon teachings courtesy of the Chester Beatty Library [Dublin] and Wikimedia Commons.)

Trash Talk

In killing my Self
The monster is defeated
Eat my Zen, dickweed


("Enrag'd Monster" courtesy of John Hamilton Mortimer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Recast In My Own Movie

Back in the 50s, writer and comedian Carl Reiner pitched a sitcom based on his own life, starring himself, to the new CBS Television network. When the pilot failed, Reiner sadly told producer Sheldon Leonard they'd have to drop the project.

"Nonsense!" replied Leonard. "We'll just get a better man to play you!"

Once that better man – Dick Van Dyke – was secured, the show went on to become one of the foundational classics of American television.

This anecdote has so many Zen ramifications it counts as a contemporary koan. How many times have I felt that my life would have played out better if somebody else had lived it – if karma had simply recast the role of me.

Such speculation isn't solely the product of our own delusional minds. We also get told this by those around us – that the problem is we're us, and that's what needs to change. Generally by people looking to profit in some way. It's rather a perfect storm of co-arising – our delusion playing off their delusion playing off ours.

The essential fallacy of this proposition is that if someone else had starred in my life, it wouldn't have happened. Nor would I. Nor in fact would they; a person living another person's life is… that other person. (And now we're back to Jason Pargin.)

Anyway, this notion that the only thing wrong with my life is that I'm in it, is the sort of image the Ancestors used to pitch to smash our brains out of their worn grooves. Is the suggestion a paradox, or is it me? Is there some deeper intent, or am I supposed to use a different part of my mind to understand?

Is it so obvious I can't see it? Or is it such nonsense that it appears plausible?

Or is this where I kick over the bucket? Because that part's fun.

By the way, Reiner had no hard feelings about the recasting. He completely agreed with Leonard's analysis, and was happily demoted from leading man in his own life to the role of Dick's boss.

In which character, being entirely unlike him, he excelled.


(Photo of the better Carl Reiner courtesy of CBS Television and Wikimedia Commons.)

Grow Up

The more practice I get under my hara, the more I notice that most Zen really isn't very revolutionary, or even revelatory. It's just common sense.

Anatta – no-self – is just what happens to successful adults. We get less selfish, less self-centred, less self-interested, less self-satisfied, less self-righteous. Just… less "self".

If you don't do this, you're not a grown-up. And as I've come to understand, lots of otherwise tall people never attain that.

So Zen is nothing more or less than maturity. Alright, it's a bit accelerated, and especially, deeper.

But that's what we're doing on the cushion.

We're growing old.

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

Autumn Anatta

Leaves fall gently down
Like rain into autumn pools
Who writes this bullshit?



(Photo courtesy of Robert Wnuk and Unsplash.com.)

Ego Kyôsaku

"The biggest ego-trip going is getting rid of your ego."

Alan Watts




(Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

I Want, I Fear, I Surrender

I learned this meditation from AJ Smith of Restoration Church, an urban Evangelical congregation in Philadelphia featured on Gimlet's Startup podcast. In a moment of self-doubt and uncertainty, AJ engages this mantra, which I gather is fairly common to seekers on his path.

"I want, I fear, I surrender" has a definite Insight ring, don't you think?

If "surrender" seems a little New Age-y, we can always substitute "accept". That formula you could easily sell as straight from the Ancestors, and none would be the wiser. (Hey, wouldn't be the first time.)

Anyway, I think this is a powerful meditation for those moments when you're paralysed by anxiety. Or just as a technique for confronting the koan of anatta.


(Photo courtesy of Nagesh Jayaraman and Wikimedia Commons.)

Ownership

"This is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.”

the Buddha

(Photo courtesy of Max Pixel and a generous photographer.)

Pale Green Pants With Anatta Inside

When my brother and I were four and five, we were obsessed with the Dr. Suess poem What Was I Scared Of?, better known to adherents as "Pale Green Pants With Nobody Inside".

This gothic thriller, in which a disembodied pair of cabbage-coloured dungarees relentlessly creeps out Our Protagonist, is ripped from the pages of The Sneetches and Other Stories. (Not literally, unless you want serious grup trouble.) These days you can also read it online, though the text is accompanied by only two of the original Lovecraftian illustrations. Suffice it to say the experience pal… I mean, underwhelms, by comparison.

For reasons I can no longer fathom, over a period of months this story completely possessed our young imaginations. At one point we actually stuffed a pair of green denim jeans with wadded newspaper and stood it in the corner of our shared bedroom, to serve as icon to our prostrations. Then we would cower on the far side of the bed, peek out at it, and scream "Pale green pants!" before diving to the floor.

Needless to say, the book itself became liturgy, to be read aloud (yet again) by any adult we could talk into it. The most memorable kokyo was my grandmother, who, having intoned the poem's macabre refrain ("Pale green pants…. WITH NOBODY INSIDE!"), remarked, "I think the pale green pants are scary enough." Commentary worthy of Mumon.

These days I judiciously abstain from looking deeply into this whole adventure, for fear of stumbling on uncomfortable truths about religion in general. But having recently recovered these memories – or recovered from them – I plunged down the Internet rabbit hole to find out if others were similarly enthralled to this scrap of Seussgeist.

tldr: Yes. Yes they were.

Far from falling into obscurity, it appears PGP is so popular today you can buy just that, stripped of epistolary padding. What's more, its illustrations – o feat of nefarious genius – now glow in the dark. Which has led one believing dad to read it to his kids under a black light. Or he did, until he was picked up by Child Welfare.

Nor are my brother and I alone in making idols unto the Chartreuse One. Another fellow stuffed a pair of pale green pants (!) and stood it in the corner of his preschooler's bedroom (!!) because the kid was afraid of the dark (!!!). OK, that guy may really be evil, but another – professional artist, this one – taxidermed some chromatically-correct britches in a relaxed yet empty posture and gave them to his (25-year-old) sister for Christmas.

Upshot: ours is not the only family to find Deep If Somewhat Disturbing Significance in this tale of tailored terror.

Surprisingly, I've yet to encounter a single Net-cruising helicopter pilot wailing, "Never let your tender darlings read this horrifying book!!!!!", or claiming that it's a thinly-veiled Wiccan conspiracy to make our children worship Satan and wear ugly pants. Closest was one mom who recommended only middle school kids be permitted to read it. Right, lady. Best get a few years under your belt before you meet The Doctor.

Or maybe that's insensitive. Perhaps the spectre of unfashionable clothing run amok has special resonance for women. I'll withdraw the statement.

In the end, it may be that the scariest thing about Pale Green Pants is its power to inspire such vague obedience in all of us who, once as children, fell under its mildly-alarming spell. It's the single thread running through every account I've collected, starting with my own: we all fear the Pants, we all cheer the Pants, we all stand ready, like an army of cereal-munching Renfields, to serve the Lime-Hued Lord. How much more exciting all of this might be if He actually wanted anything.

But now I'm back on religion. And in all candour, there may be a touch of Zen in there somewhere; a creak of the Gateless Gate in those selfless slacks. Witness this flash of Suessian insight:

I said, "I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them."
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.

Been there, lied that.

(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Holy Hogwash

I have Christian friends who revel in the notion that God attends to them personally, that they are important. But true peace lies in the opposite. For then your sadness is nothing. Your hopes, fears, disappointments, and ambitions, all made of the same hogwash. Creation stretches on and on, tangible and timeless, and you...

Well, there is no you, is there?

Perhaps you died laughing.


(Adapted from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Troy and Rusty Lilly.)

Analysis Kyôsaku

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself

And there isn't one.

Wei Wu Wei






(Photo of redundant analyst's couch courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Anatta

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away

When I came home last night at 3

The man was waiting there for me

But when I looked around the hall

I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away
Don’t you come back any more!

Go away, go away
And please don’t slam the door

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away

Hughes Mearns

Antigonish (1899)

The Middle Way

I recently encountered this graphic on Facebook. Sums up the situation nicely, though I might have called the right wing of Integrity "puritanism", or maybe just "being that guy". Note that the Buddha made this principle central (no pun intended) to his teaching 2500 years ago.

These days I seem to encounter the moral right more often than the moral left. (I'm not talking about the political right and left; the moral right includes organic-insisters, McDonald's-shunners, business sceptics, and Christmas re-labellers, as much as is does Red baiters, Second Amendment Witnesses, and guru-worshipers. Interestingly, sexual conduct fetishists are equally represented on both sides, though their preferred targets differ.)

It's hard for some to grasp that decency means living with complexity. The ethically lazy skirt such heavy lifting by sidling down one of two side aisles: refusing to recognise the need for regulation -- the hippy-dippy, whatever-dude leftist response -- or shooting down challengers to one's glorious Easy Answer with a silver bullet -- the dogfaced, procrustean prejudice of the right.

Both represent ego run amok. The Buddha's programme to bring it back under control boils down to "doing my best". Doing nothing is doing nothing, and therefore not doing your best. And doing just one thing over and over is not doing most of the full spectrum of things you're capable of. And therefore not doing your best.

Moral extremists tend to reproach centrists (which includes all authentic Buddhists) as shiftless and weak-willed, but in fact, that's them. They adopt one simplistic principle and refuse to do any dead reckoning thereafter. As the Buddha pointed out, they veer immediately off-course, and will never sail straight again until they abandon the delusion of self and get back to the relentless, inescapable work of triangulation.

'Cause there ain't no here nor there in the real world. You calibrate your moral sextant every minute of every day, or you run onto the rocks. (Then there's the karma you incur convincing others to follow you onto the rocks, but that's another post.)

Anyway, the person who created the graphic gets it. If you don't cleave to the channel, you founder.

Good Book: Eat Sleep Sit

Most books available in the West on life in Japanese monasteries are written by Westerners. Perhaps that's why they tend to take a star-struck, romantically uncritical view of the exotic practices they encounter. Eat Sleep Sit: My Year At Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple doesn't suffer from this quirk. Its author is Japanese, and that makes all the difference.

In the mid-Nineties, thirty-year-old Nonomura Kaoru entered Eihei-ji, the Vatican of Soto Zen. His motives were credibly vague; discussing them with his girlfriend, he gets out little more than "I'm uneasy". (Which is what drives most of us to monasticism – the Buddha called it "world-weariness".)

His friends react with anything but joy. In Japan, taking orders is considered rash and self-destructive, as radical and potentially suicidal as any forest ango. (Surprise!) One of them points out that cœnobites have a lower life expectancy than those outside the walls. But Nonomura persists, and his record of what ensues is both a powerful account of monastic awakening and an important corrective to misconceptions about Asian practice models.

The only honest term for the training Nonomura endures at Eihei-ji is "military":

Then the door […] abruptly opened. Before our eyes there appeared a monk, on his face a scowl so bitter that he might have been shouldering all the discontent in the world. Following the orders he barked at us, we each shouted out our name in turn, summoning all our strength to yell as loud as possible.

"Can't hear you!" he'd snap in reply. "If that's the best you can do, you'll never make it here! Turn around and go home!" [...] Again and again we raised our voices, yelling with such might that it seemed blood would spurt from our throats. [...] Finally I was left standing alone. With every shout my voice grew hoarser, making it harder and harder to yell. How much longer could this go on, I wondered.

It's all here: the hammer-headed machismo, the abuse masquerading as instruction, the barking-mad superiors. For months on end recruits are humiliated and beaten, forbidden to defend themselves or even cringe, and denied sleep, food, leisure, and hygiene.

Some have to be hospitalised; some never return.

But Eat Sleep isn't just, or even primarily, an indictment. Nonomura – an excellent writer, speaking through a talented translator – also relates the moving beauty, the timeless wisdom (especially of Dogen), and the penetration of his own nature and that of the world, that he finds "inside". It's another gift of Nonomura's nationality, inured to gratuitous authoritarianism, and so able to see past it to great treasures. Even the abuse has a certain purifying effect:

Every time I was pummelled, kicked, or otherwise done over, I felt a sense of relief, like an artificial pearl whose false exterior was being scraped away… Now that it was gone […] I knew that whatever remained, exposed for all to see, was nothing less than my true self. The discovery of my own insignificance brought instant, indescribable relief.

Perhaps Nonomura's greatest strength as a writer is his unflagging respect for his readers, eschewing condescending exposition, certain we'll get it on our own. Unlike Western observers, he never endorses or justifies the terrorism. Nor does he credit it with the insights he eventually gains. He simply relates events and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. I found this especially useful, as the contrast between ends and means in this system is dramatic. Eihei-ji is ambiguous and contradictory moral ground, and Nonomura is content (and Zen enough) to leave it so.

I have a fantasy that some day, somewhere, a Zen monastery will be founded on the interlocking principles of anatta and humility. Aspirants in this renewed lineage will be required to study with equal zeal ancestral wisdom and the errors that have been committed in its name. Because if you don't have both, you don't have Zen.

As regular readers will have guessed, I'd like the books I review here to be included on that shelf. And teachers in that future Zen Centre could do worse than assign Eat Sleep Sit to each novice on entry, right alongside mu.

Kyôsaku Kyôsaku

Two days ago I found this teaching in my Twitter feed:

"Treat non-useful thoughts like undesirable smells: don't dwell on them, don't identify with them, don't get attached to them, don't get lost in them - simply let them float away."

It's Zen at its trenchant best: laconic, practical, self-evident. A classic and useful taste of humanity's most down-to-earth religion. I immediately stored the passage for a later Kyôsaku and went about determining credit. (It was attributed only to "tad".)

After some digging, I discovered that "tad" is not a guy, it's a business. Specifically, it's something called The T.A.D. Principle, which is apparently a book, though the advert is coy on this point. It's even coyer about a later product, the 21-day meditationSHIFT Programme, which costs $29 and promises to revolutionise your life, though it too is evidently 15th century technology. (I could be wrong; neither of these "works" is described as a book. They aren't described as anything.)

About here you'd expect me to go off on a rant about New Age self-help hucksters. And I'd like to. But the thing is, I've spent some time perusing T.A.D.'s promotional copy, and found not a word I could dispute. It's all straight-up conventional Zen. Great stuff, in fact. No doubt the testimonials ("Thank you for teaching me how to meditate, and how to get control of my runaway mind! [emphasis original]") are sincere and authentic.

And while that $29 price tag (fair price for a book of this kind, if it is a book) is technically selling Zen – and that's immoral – your local Zen master might put the bite on you for much more. Folks have paid thousands; even tens of thousands. And frankly, if you've reached the place where you can't breathe – from grief, depression, or other forms of world-weariness – a handful of coppers spent on the right book could save your life.

So I guess my only serious objection is the implied claim that the unnamed author or authors invented this stuff. Which he, she, or they did not. If the marketing snippets are representative, this is plain old brilliantly effective Zen. To be sure, the word "Zen" appears nowhere on the site, but so long as the author or authors don't assert some bogus patent, the karmic implications seem moderate.

On the other hand, my patented Crusty Old Hermit Programme is cheaper and quicker than other leading brands. If you click before midnight tonight, you can take advantage of our Special Introductory Offer: to wit, nothing less than the FULL TEXT of our Dynamic Life-Coachment S.E.L.F.-Training Modality:

"Get over yourself."

Free to you, because you look like a nice person. But I wouldn't say no to a cup of tea.

(Portrait of original crusty old hermit Bodhidharma courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Dharma Toilet

This haiku is my solution to the koan, "Why do I write this blog?"

Zen emphasises no-self, that is, that the sense we have of existing apart from everything else, with distinct interests, is false. There is no you. There is no me. And our refusal to admit that is the source of all evil.

One of the pitfalls of recognising this truth is the tendency of institutional Zen to reject the validity of experience, in the name of subduing the delusion of ego. Since you have no self, you're not allowed to say, "I've done" or "I've seen." Unfortunately this is a misreading of the Buddhic concept of anatta. The only ambiguity in those declarations is the "I"; the experience is real.

Still, like most sangha rats, I feel uneasy raising my voice. First off, if there ain't no me, I feel silly blogging about it. And after that, there's the uncomfortable suspicion that somebody out there is saying, "What business has this guy talking about Zen? He's nobody."

You and me both, crow-meat.

So that's why I write this blog. Because it's what I do.

I reverently request all sentient beings reject it, pending corroboration.

Deep bow.

(PS: Aren't you glad I didn't think of "Dharma Toilet" when I was naming this blog?)