Street Level Zen: Family

"Having children takes talent, like any creative thing."

Maurice Sendak


(Photo courtesy of Seth Anderson and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Battered but not beaten

(I made this fudo [look left; hanging from the bell] in 2009, for friends in Spokane County. When I took care of their farm for a few weeks 6 years later, I posted a photo of it here. It was still looking pretty smart then, all things considered.

On a visit last month I noted that 16 years' continuous duty in the desert hadn't done it any favours. But given the conditions, the old warrior still serves our patron well.)

Bodhisattva Day 2025

So here we are on another Bodhisattva Day. The statement has subtly become more emphatic in the current environment; even a touch confrontational, in a world where any call for steady hands is suddenly fighting words.

Perhaps that's why I chose my father's cardigan this year, though the thought only just now occurred to me.

My best to all who agree that discretion and mindfulness are the essence of morality.

Gasshō.

WW: Bodhisattva Day is 20 March!

(That's me in my cardigan on Bodhisattva Day 2014. This year Bodhisattva Day falls on Thursday – i.e., tomorrow. For information on the bodhisattva principle, Bodhisattva Day, and how to participate,
click this link.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good Video: Не могу оторвать глаз от тебя

Though it's generally unknown to Western Buddhists, Russia is one of the formative homelands of our religion. Not only has Buddhism been practiced there for as long as many another Asian nation – for example, the Volga republic of Kalmykia is the only region of Europe to have a historical Buddhist majority – Russia also hosts today what is likely the most fervent and productive conversion movement in the Eurosphere (i.e., nations with white majorities).

I was reminded of this while, for the first time in years, rewatching the above video. I originally encountered this song via primeval Internet radio, and it first appeared on Rusty Ring away back in January 2011, at the bottom of my third-ever post. (Those earliest articles sometimes ended with a premium, called the Cereal Box Prize. When, inevitably, finding and formatting this treat began to eat appalling amounts of blogging time, I abandoned that quirk, though not without regret.)

But having listened to Не могу оторвать глаз от тебя again (and remarveled at that awesome video), I figure it's due for a 14-year bump.

Аквариум (Aquarium) are a seminal Russian pop group, with roots deep in the perilous (for rock musicians) Soviet era. Today they're one of a handful of contemporaries routinely compared to the Beatles. Although founder Boris Grebenshchikov's precise religious convictions remain elusive, he's published multiple translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts and has a long history of including consequent themes in his music.

Just what (or whom) he is singing to here is a bit enigmatic. That chanting refrain suggests your standard love poem; you know, to another human. But the moiling mysticism of those verses opposes that hypothesis.

Still, his repeated second-person appeal at least seems to rule out a Buddhist theme; the author is clearly addressing an interlocutor he can see and calls "you". Our religion generally, though not categorically, refuses to speculate on such things.

The Eastern church, meanwhile – Russia's majority faith – has spoken of and to God in tones very like these for two thousand years.

So there it is: the song is Christian.

But what about that video? Seriously, fellow Buddhists, what about that awesome video? That's not just patently Buddhist, that's outright Zen.

Bodhidharma if ever I saw him.

So maybe "you" is enlightenment. Or the Path. Or the Great Matter. Or Kanzeon. Or some other glib Buddhist euphemism for God.

I don't know.

(See what I did there?)

Anyway, it's in front of you. Watch it. Hear it. See if it doesn't key your bodhisattva nature as hard as it does mine.

The video is of slightly – if very – higher quality than the one shared all those years ago. I was unable to find better, even on our Currently Superior Internet. But no trouble; it still works.

More irksome is the lack of reliable English interpretation. I can grasp the thrust of these lyrics, but my Russian is not up to translating them, at least not accurately. But I can tell that the translation supplied here is a little better than several others I found, by a slim margin.

I'd bet all were generated by artificial ignorance. Buy human, folks.

But for the moment, it seems our only recourse is to accept the best of them, however flawed. Just bridge the gaps with your koanic intelligence.

It's worked for me for 20 years.

Reflections On The 23rd of February

Today is День защитника Отечества (Defender of the Fatherland Day) in Russia. The date always leads me to a bit of a "on the one hand" contemplation, because over time it's gained more significance than simply Veterans' Day. To wit, it's come to honour all men, whether veterans or not. For example, on this day women in the workplace perform small gestures of appreciation for their male colleagues – gifts, compliments, cursory favours – regardless of civil status.

This is a good idea. The denial of universal human value implied by identity warring is, as Dr. King taught, backward and ultimately suicidal, and in my era at least, gender warriors have been most vocal and least corrected in this delusion.

(I should pause to point out that the Russians have observed International Women's Day since the Bolsheviks, which is why at some point they felt compelled to balance the equation in this fashion.)

So fair play to them. But I'm unsatisfied with glossing armed service with manhood. To begin with, Russia has famously employed large numbers of women in military combat roles for at least a hundred years. But the deeper issue is the unchallenged custom of pegging a man's intrinsic human worth to the presumed privilege of killing him at discretion. In wars, certainly, but also on the job, or in emergencies, or when non-men require defending, or to assuage collective rage, or basically any time we need more grist for Hollywood movies. Loudon Wainright III nailed this many years ago, and I haven't seen any progress on that front, to invoke an apt metaphor.

Like most men – virtually all; I've never heard one object – I accept this status implicitly. It doesn't annoy me, really, this notion that I might get a sword run through me at any time, whether protecting others or making a buck for the boss. We're all literally raised to die. And so it's always passed as the Way of All Things with me. It's just the pretexts arrogated by some non-men that make me grumble.

Life is hard all over. That's why everyone requires compassion.

And bodhisattvas are also all over. That's why everyone requires appreciation.

I respect the Russian people for understanding that – a vestige of their Communist past, perhaps. But the conflation of men with soldiers is disturbing. It's not true that soldiers are a gender – and to suggest otherwise devalues both.

It'd be great if we could receive every newborn as endless potential, promising everything and owing nothing.

But while we're waiting: С 23 февраля! to all my brothers and those who love them. The feast may be a little flawed, but it's a start.


(Photo of a US Navy corpsman in 1st Medical Battalion USMC, feeding his daughter at an on-base Father's Day event, courtesy of Lance Corporal Sarah Wolff, the United States Marine Corps, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thanksgiving Recipe

"Gratitude to squelch my anger, and tenacity to overcome the obstacles."

Henry Winkler's recipe for success. Note that the first one is bodhisattva awareness.



(Photo of Yorkshire coble "Gratitude" ["There's Gratitude for you!"] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Smokey Bear Sutra

Recently stumbled over this in the course of a Zen surf:

Smokey Bear Sutra

It's Gary Snyder's 1969 bid to raise Smokey Bear to vajra status. A contemporary of Jack Kerouac, Snyder was an early American adopter of Zen – such as it existed in Western Buddhism's hippy phase.

Buddhism was popular among freethinking Westerners at the time, in part because it was (and is) viewed as territory ripe for conquest. As a religion with little cultural hegemony, local converts could make it advocate any bohemian thing they wanted. (This stands in contrast to Christianity, which has high cultural hegemony, and is therefore press-ganged into conservative crusades.)

Case in point: environmentalism, still a bedrock value of our Zen, though largely absent from the Asian sort. (Zen has well-established cultural hegemony there, and is consequently a conservative sandbox. See how that works?)

As it happens, Snyder wrote his neo-sutra to serve as Buddhism's contribution to the first Earth Day. What's most interesting to me is that he took Acala-vidyārāja – called Fudo Myōō in Japan, and patron of my practice – as his model, apparently because that figure is often depicted engulfed in flames. Snyder even flat-out appropriated Acala's mantra (namaḥ samanta vajrānāṃ caṇḍa-mahāroṣaṇa sphoṭaya hūṃ traṭ hāṃ māṃ), albeit with some creative transliteration.

Not that Fudo, or Smokey for that matter, probably cares.

Anyway, the text, and the comments Snyder made about it almost 50 years later, are worthwhile. They definitely capture that era, with its (sometimes cloying) earnestness, but mostly, the hope and determination that briefly motivated a generation.


(Photo courtesy of [the US] National Agricultural Library and Wikimedia Commons.)

Humility Kyôsaku

"This isn't the final Buddhism; it's just ours."

Seth Zuiho Segal


(Photo courtesy of Carlos ZGZ and Pxhere.com.)

Boiling Water

The didactic, the secular sceptic, and the Buddhist polemicist like to point out that bodhisattva mind is always in us, and it's possible to hear it even in the grief, elation, and tumult of society.

It's also possible to boil water in a paper cup. So what?


(Adapted from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of a busy samovar courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Higher Ground

I'd been a hermit monk for 5 years when I heard on my truck radio that after the news the host would speak with a US Army chaplain just back from Iraq.

I have a tetchy relationship with military chaplaincy. At best it enables sin. At worst it weaponises it. None of the planet's mainstream religions endorse collective destruction, no matter how vociferously their institutions argue otherwise.

On the other hand, the war industry mass-produces humans badly in need of refuge, which makes military chaplains a very good thing. It's just that I doubt that's the reason they were commissioned. But some do it anyway – help the exploited survive hell – even though it contradicts the larger mission, which is to exploit those people

Still, when the radio presenter announced her upcoming guest, I instinctively moved to change stations.

Then I thought, hold on. Don't I sell myself as a Zen monk? Haven't I taken a precept to strive after an ideal that rejects otherness and recognises that we're all the product of forces beyond our control?

Haven't I myself committed acts of great hypocrisy? And aren't I now poised, finger on trigger, to commit another one?

Bodhisattvas test your sincerity before they offer their gifts.

So I stood down. If this guy started selling partisan pap, I could always press the scan button later.

And that's how I received one of the central tenets of my monastic practice.

In the interview, the officer was asked for an example of the sort of ministry he provided. He related the story of a young soldier who came to him after smashing into a private Iraqi home and spraying the entire weeping family with automatic weapons fire

As they huddled on the floor of their own living room.

It's to the young man's enduring credit, and that of those who raised him, that this atrocity took him to the brink of suicide. Decent people aren't able to do this sort of thing. No matter what kind of clothes they're wearing or what they've pledged to whom.

This one couldn't stop putting himself in the place of that Iraqi father. Seeing himself through his target's eyes. The complete absence of justice or justification. Who he was in that scenario

Ha!, thought I. Get yourself out of this one, warrior preacher.

The chaplain's response was notable first for what he didn't say. He didn't talk about orders, patriotism, or service. He didn't present excuses or greater-good defences, or displace blame onto the soldier's government or superiors. There were no references to geopolitics or God's will.

He simply asked the broken man what his victim's duty was.

I can imagine the man was taken aback. I certainly was.

"If matters had been reversed," said the Army chaplain, "and he'd killed your family, what would your duty to him be?"

"I… I guess, to forgive him," the soldier stammered.

"Then that's his duty to you as well."

I've been meditating on this koan ever since.

We're taught early on that forgiveness is next to godliness, that we must do it. And that's certainly correct.

But what we're not told is that we also have a right to demand it. Because it's also everybody else's unshirkable responsibility. This was the Buddha's teaching to Aṅgulimāla: when you're no longer the person who committed the crime, atonement, not condemnation, is your burden.

I'll warrant readers who were offended by my criticisms of military chaplains are little mollified by my chastened gratitude to this one for his insight.

But I suspect the man himself will forgive me.

Deep bow to all who labour honestly for higher ground.


(Photo of US Army Buddhist Chaplain insignia courtesy of Ingrid Barrentine, the Northwest Guardian newspaper, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Source Buddhism

I've been rereading The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, the succinct little Thich Nhat Hanh book that amounts, so far as I'm concerned, to our Bible.

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.)

Street Level Zen: Strength

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway

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

Good Song: Don't Judge a Life

If you don't know John Gorka, you should know John Gorka.

Few artists sing the human heart like John. A number of his songs sum up affecting moments of my life in ways that not only people my isolation, they help me understand what happened.

But in this case he's addressing a wider problem. The immediate topic is fellow poet and good friend Bill Morrissey, who possessed much the same gift as John's, had much the same sort of career – ignored by the machine, adored by initiates – and died in 2011 from complications of a dissolute life.

An Amazon reviewer who knew Bill quoted him from a conversation they'd had:

"Most everybody knows that I've had some rough sledding for the last few years, including my well-known battle with the booze. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as bipolar and I am on medication for depression, but sometimes the depression is stronger than the medication.

"When the depression hits that badly, I can't eat and I can barely get out of bed. Everything is moving in the right direction now, and throughout all of this I have continued to write and write and write."

And then he was gone.

Don't Judge a Life – bookend to Peter Mayer's Japanese Bowl, spinning the issue from first to second person – is a reminder we all need on a daily basis. I particularly like this part:

Reserve your wrath for those who judge
Those quick to point and hold a grudge
Take them to task who only lead
While others pay, while others bleed

Readers with a solid base in Christian ethics will instantly recognise the source of this counsel. The same precept in the Buddhist canon is a little less explicit, but our teachings on bodhisattva nature clearly endorse and require it.

And both faiths stand firmly on the last verse.

DON'T JUDGE A LIFE
by John Gorka

Don't judge a life by the way it ends
Losing the light as night descends
For we are here and then we're gone
Remnants to reel and carry on

Endings are rare when all is well
Yes and the tale easy to tell
Stories of lives drawn simplified
As if the facts were cut and dried

Don't judge a life as if you knew
Like you were there and saw it through
Measure a life by what was best
When they were better than the rest

Reserve your wrath for those who judge
Those quick to point and hold a grudge
Take them to task who only lead
While others pay, while others bleed

Tapping the keys in a life of rhyme
Ending the tune and standard time
Silence fills the afternoon
A long long way to gone too soon

Don't judge a life by the way it ends
Losing the light as night descends
A chance to love is what we've got
For we are here and then
We're not

(Photo courtesy of Jos van Vliet and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Canadian bodhisattva

(Jizo Bodhisattva, patron of children and teachers, is traditionally venerated a variety of ways. Most involve specific gifts left at his statue's feet, or dressing it in certain garments, usually red. Of these, the most common is a knitted tuque.

Thus, when I saw one bareheaded on a friend's deck, I knew what practice demanded.

I classed it up a little while I was up.)

The First Trial

"Yoshimura explained that Louise couldn't [study Zen at a Japanese temple] because she wasn't Japanese and would be a burden on the priest's wife. She should remain in America for a year or two while her husband studied in Japan.

"Louise became angry. 'All of you think it's better to be a man than a woman, you think it's better to be a priest than a layperson, and you think it's better to be Japanese than American. But I will always be a woman, and I will always be a layperson, and I will always be an American, and here I am.'

"Everyone was silent. [Shunryu] Suzuki turned to her and said, 'What you have just expressed is the spirit of the bodhisattva's way.'"

David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber.


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

The Psychopath Koan

We Buddhists like to think nobody wants to be evil. We prefer to imagine that evil is learned, a product of environment, and not in anyone's true nature. It's one of the Buddha's foundational teachings: all sentient being progress through multiple migrations to eventual enlightenment.

Sadly, research has confirmed that it's not always so. Psychopaths – individuals born without bodhisattva nature – are all too real. In fact, we now have the technology to identify precisely which circuits in their brains aren't firing, under what circumstances, and map it reliably.

In other words, these people are born with a physical, irreversible intellectual dysfunction, the medical (but not at all the moral) equivalent of Down's Syndrome or FAS. They lack the fundamental faculty of human decency.

And they're not even rare. Researchers suggest 3% of us suffer from this condition. (Or more accurately, the rest of us suffer from it.) That puts one in every classroom, one on every bus, one or more in most businesses, government offices, political caucuses, and religious communities.

And I suspect that number's low. From my vantage, psychopathy is certainly a spectrum, like autism. If 3% of us are outright monsters – serial killers, torturers, financial predators – many more are apologists and opportunists, profiting from serendipitous weaknesses, getting off on less theatrical violence. But whether in whole or in context, none are biologically capable of conscience.

The Buddha didn't know that. The Ancestors didn't know that. But we know that.

So, what do we do?


(Photo courtesy of John Snape and Wikimedia Commons.)

Jizo Meditation

The discursive mind is like a child.

It will always get up to stuff. That's its nature.

It's the role of the adult – the bodhisattva mind – to baby-sit: keep the discursive mind entertained, feed it, care for its injuries, protect and correct it, love it.

Child mind runs everywhere, touches everything, puts everything in its mouth. Often bodhisattva mind is too busy with lofty important-affairs to give it full attention; sometimes it gets none at all.

Then all sorts of mischief ensues. Like a child, the discursive mind lacks judgement, gets into trouble, goes places it shouldn't, takes things apart it can't put back together.

It's easily impressed, easily amused, and easily led.

And so nefarious impulses, yours and others', trick it into all manner of suffering, because the bodhisattva is elsewhere, or its voice simply gets lost in the cacophony of social living.

When this happens, the skilful response is empathy, humour, and loving correction.

Short of this you will have no family at all.


(Photo of Jizo Bodhisattva, protector of children and possible Canadian, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason

A few weeks ago a friend directed me to Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason, by Tim Lawrence. It's attracted an enthusiastic following online, and since August has become the traditional time for Rusty Ring to address such topics, I figure this is my opening.

Tim's central hypothesis – you gotta love writers who state their thesis right in the title – is also a primary Zen principal, but his objective trends rather more to the negative than affirmative.

Specifically, he's that tired of grieving people being told they're "suffering for a reason", that it's all part of some great compassionate plan, that "God never gives you more than you can handle."

"That's the kind of bullshit that destroys lives," he says. "And it is categorically untrue."

Preach, brother. The problem with the "everything happens for a reason" crowd, aside from their faulty analysis, is that they lay a giant trip on the injured, just when their resistance is low. Now they're dumb, weak – hell, even ungrateful – as well.

Tim goes on to finger the origin of this nonsense:

...our culture has treated grief as a problem to be solved, an illness to be healed, or both. In the process, we've done everything we can to avoid, ignore, or transform grief. As a result, when you're faced with tragedy you usually find that […] you're surrounded by platitudes.

…In so doing, we deny [sufferers] the right to be human. [My emphasis.]

It's a hallmark of some worldviews to meet dukkha with weapons-grade denial. If you insist the Universe is ruled by a benevolent force, or that a given socio-political system is self-correcting, you'll immediately bang your skull on the titanium grille of the ever-oncoming First Noble Truth. Then you'll have to abandon all positive ends and exhaust your remaining intellectual capital on explaining why bad things keep happening in your Dictatorship of Infinite Good.

Therefore, for the benefit of all sentient beings, Ima say it right out loud:

Life is pain.

This is a direct result of the inescapable nature of existence. (Seriously. Don't try to escape it. That's a major source of pain. Second Noble Truth, for those of you playing at home.)

All of that is orthodox Buddhism – though Tim is an Anglican monastic. There is, however, one aspect of his programme that flirts with unskilfulness.

He's big into "letting people go".

Not that this isn't often an excellent idea. Good people tend to allow themselves to be abused, on the belief, inbred or inculcated, that they somehow deserve it, or that they owe it to others. Like other decent folks, I've suffered at the hands of those who took advantage of my patience and good will. I should have let those people go right off. Ideally before I picked them up.

However, like all weapons, this one is apt to wound its wielder, especially if overused. Thus Tim:

If anyone tells you that all is not lost, that it happened for a reason, that you’ll become better as a result of your grief, you can let them go.

Seems a tad trigger-happy to me. I've often said useless things, maybe even hurtful ones, to people I authentically wanted to support. Problem was I didn't know what to say.

(Free tip from our Hard-Earned Insight Department: Sometimes you can't help. Sadly, the world is still awaiting the self-improvement book How to Help When You Can't Help.)

So let's not lose our humanity, here. When I've been in the worst possible shape, my capacity to remain human in the face of inhumanity has been tremendously gratifying.

Tim also loses me when he suggests that grief won't make you a better person. It damn well will, if you're determined that it will. As self-centred as I am now, I'm a buddha compared to what I was before. If recent politics prove anything, it's our moral obligation to suffer intelligently.

But of course it's not skilful to say that to someone in the throes of heartache. Instead, I try to offer tested survival tips from my own laboratory. And, since guilt and regret are key components of grief, I also bear witness to their decency. Psychopaths don't suffer.

Still, advising others is fraught. Often the best tack is just to accompany the sufferer in shared silence, accepting the person and the pain. Especially, to remember him or her actively. Call and text (that strange word again: "and"), visit, invite him or her out, break the isolation that's the warhead of both shame and grief.

Tim makes all these points, and others as well, in his timely essay. There's a reason it's been so well-received. Whether you're in pain yourself, or accompanying someone who is, give it a read.

(Photo of artist drawing Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, courtesy of Republic of Korea Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and Wikimedia Commons.)

How To Be Perfectly Unhappy

This week I'm deferring to Matthew Inman, the Seattle bodhisattva who stands against evil and pointless suffering under the nom de guerre The Oatmeal. You may remember him from our 2014 nod, Happy Las Casas Day!

In How To Be Perfectly Unhappy, Inman takes on the Happiness Mafia, and he does so brilliantly and analytically, as is his MO. No Zen master (that is, no shingle-hanging Zen master) ever laid it out more cogently and succinctly.

At any rate, not more entertainingly.

Therefore, as part of my on-going outreach to fellow depression sufferers – and to our non-depressed brothers and sisters, who are equally responsible for it – this time around I'm directing you off-site to Matthew's nefarious lair.

Nefarious, I say, because once you step inside you'll never get out again. Clear your calendars, Zen droogies. I'm convinced it's called The Oatmeal because it's gluey and inescapable and "Quicksand" or "Spider Web" or "Satan's House of Infernal Temptation" would have been too on-the-nose.

You'll find the current example at How To Be Perfectly Unhappy.

And happy reading. (See what I did there?)

(Cartoon panel from The Oatmeal teaching linked above. Because the first hit's free.)