Rusty Ring: book

Showing posts with label book. Show all posts

Thursday, 13 February 2025

St. Valentine's Day Meditation

Love is an act of courage, a losing bet that makes all who place it holy. Absurdity, sacrifice, and heartbreak are integral to it; marks of valour, not folly.

Those who refuse to honour it are first damned and last saved.

– From the journal of my 100 days of solo meditation in the forest, the story of which – 100 Days on the Mountain – I'm currently shopping to publishers.

(Photo of traffic signal trafficked for St. Valentine's Day – a lighthouse in the trackless night – courtesy of François Detemmerman and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 2 May 2024

Good Book: Inside The Grass Hut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 21 March 2024

Hermit Habit

The wildlife of the North Pacific rainforest is famously reserved; where the East has its flashy cardinals, red efts, and indigo buntings, our own rubber boas, rough-skinned newts, and varied thrushes are modestly beautiful. The odd Steller's jay or goldfinch may be a pleasant change of pace, but we're satisfied to return to the brown and russet uniform of our understated nation when they've passed.

While sitting my 100 Days on the Mountain, I sometimes daydreamed about founding a North Coast-native order of forest monks. And should that fancy ever gel, we will sit in the forest of my forebears, wearing the habit of our Douglas squirrel hosts: a hooded robe of honest Cascade umber, over an ochre jersey.

(Text edited from the notes for my book, 100 Days on the Mountain. Photo of Tamiasciurus douglasii courtesy of Ivie Metzen, the US National Park Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 25 August 2022

Zen Judaism

In my university years I lived in a comfortably adequate basement apartment, where I developed a friendly rapport with my landlords – an elderly Jewish couple who lived upstairs. It was my first close relationship with a member of that community, and given our relative ages, over the next three years our interactions slipped into a familiar pattern.

Thus I am one of few goyim to have experienced the blessing of Jewish grandparents.

During that time I came to relish the Hebrew world view – so similar to my own Scottish and Old Settler heritage, yet so... not.

Upgraded, as it were. Different data, same conclusion. And with a wicked snap no Scot could despise.

So twenty years later, when, having become a Zen monk, I encountered the following online, I was primed to appreciate it.

The following is one of many well-shared excerpts from Zen Judaism: For You a Little Enlightenment, a short 2002 book by David M. Bader that took the early Net by storm. The site I saved my own text from has long since gone to the 404 meadows, but Heller Web Space preserves a close facsimile, with appropriately Web 2.0 æsthetics.

So enjoy this spin on the wisdom of the Ancestors, with refreshingly Nasrudinic clarity.

Zen Judaism
by David M. Bader

1. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

2. Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

3. Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip... joy. With the second... satisfaction. With the third, peace. With the fourth, a danish.

4. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

5. Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

6. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy".

7. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.And whose fault was that?

8. Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes.

9. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.

10. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this, and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

11. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

12. Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

13. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

14. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: Get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

15. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

16. The Torah says, "Love thy neighbour as thyself." The Buddha says there is no "self." So, maybe you are off the hook.

17. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

18. Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain, though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away, yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full Enlightenment. But first, a little nosh.

(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)

Thursday, 27 May 2021

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.)

Thursday, 29 April 2021

Chance Encounter

The late hour kept me running a brisk 50 mph (the maximum controllable speed on gravel), so that an apparent chunk of slate in the road nearly slipped beneath my radiator before it caught my attention. Grinding to a halt, I stared at the plate-sized rock in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, it sprouted two yellow-striped forearms and a matching head, with acid eyes that glared at me through the pall of dust I'd raised. I snatched my camera and jumped out, thinking to bag a quick photo, then chase my chelonian friend off the road before a less attentive traveller squashed him flat.

But on my advance he sprinted into the undergrowth, with scornful disregard for my species' reluctance to apply that verb to his. I was left to herd him with stomping boots, back into the fading sunlight, to get my portrait. He appreciated none of this - not the running over, not the dirt bath, not the brisk jog, and most particularly not the herding. When the slides came back from the lab, I found a study of one seriously bent Western painted turtle.

Still, I had to admire the guy's pluck. We were a hundred yards from water. Wherever he'd come from, wherever he was going, he'd earned his rest in that place.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Chrysemys picta bellii courtesy of Gary M. Stolz, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 18 March 2021

Zen At War... With Itself

'Way back in March of 2012 CE (how strange to have such a deep vault) I reviewed Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria's exposé of Japanese Buddhism during the Second World War.

And now, these many years gone, while looking up the book's Amazon link for a friend, I happen to glance at the reader reviews.

Some of them are disheartening.

While most commenters shared thoughtful, supportive responses, I rate it worthwhile to meet two others, not by way of defending Daizen's work – it's self-defending – but to survey some dangerous internal trends in our incipient Western religion. Especially here, where our grasp of Buddhist history (and our own) is tenuous.

First to catch my eye was a one-star rating entitled "Very disappointing":

This guy [Daizen] must have a terrible background, probably tried to escape all that trauma by moving to far east and becoming Buddhist etc., the classic story. It's ok as long as one does not try and contaminate beautiful Zen with a messed up mind. Avoid this book especially if you're a new Zen learner as it will ruin the whole experience for you.

There's something simultaneously amusing and infuriating about a self-professed Zenner who has no idea what a human being is. While I assume First Honoured Sangha is a sojourner, I've also met so-called "masters" who lack any greater insight.

So to protect any fragile new Zen learners who may stumble upon such spluttering, Ima lay down some tough-dharma. (Ten thousand apologies, pro forma trigger warning, how's your father.)

1. First Honoured Sangha has no calling to judge others or analyse their lives, or to declare their fate foregone. (Gotama; Dogen; Jesus.)

2. First Honoured Sangha knows nothing about Daizen's "classic story". We all have classic stories. Even First Honoured Sangha. (Gotama; Claude Anshin Thomas.)

3. First Honoured Sangha has no authority to give permission, or withhold it. (Gotama; Jesus.)

4. First Honoured Sangha has not been asked to guard the supposed "honour" of Zen. Zen is clean by its nature. Others soil it. (Bodhidharma.)

5. If First Honoured Sangha can't put down the burden of piety, then First Honoured Sangha can haul his or her prodigal backside back to the Church. If we must speak of contaminating Zen, piety is certainly the ultimate pollution. Mindless fear and shame are what authentic Zenners strive to overcome.

In an oddly similar vein, consider this (ostensibly favourable, five-star) review:

The shock value is not so great, as I've been aware of the basic contents for sometime. Japan is an island and the Japanese are an insular people. The emphasis in their culture is group conformity. Zen is not the transformer of personality as it was once marketed, and it should not surprise us to learn that Zen leaders in Japan followed the lead of the Japanese government and Army into widespread war.

The endemic racism and ethnocentrism of Western Zenners never ceases to dumbfound me. It's not just that we dissuade those of African or Hispanic or Arabic origin from joining us; we even freeze out Asians! With the exception of a dwindling handful of deified Asia-born teachers, you see damn few Asian faces in Western Zen centres.

Seriously, brothers and sisters. We have a problem.

One that won't go away until we drive it bodily from the zendo and kill it with ferocious blows from our monk sticks.

Apart from the sort of blanket condemnation First Honoured Sangha called down on another entire vaguely-defined demographic, Second Honoured Sangha neatly excuses Westerners from suffering any angst over Daizen's thesis. The demon, we're assured, isn't the Sangha; it's the Japanese.

With respect, Second Honoured Sangha is mistaken.

The demon is the Sangha. All of us. Then and now. There and here. Present and future.

You and me.

Nor am I alone in my discomfort with the unBuddhic habit of associating practice with submission to dictatorial authority – and then absolving ourselves of the evil we do under it. Thus, Third Honoured Sangha:

What I don't like, is the way it is almost impossible to discuss [enthusiastic Buddhist participation in Japanese fascism] in the Zendo, and I've tried.

Word.

And a final Fourth:

As a Buddhist, it was a reminder that we must be ever looking at our own practice. Do read this book.

Zen is important. We must resist the urge to turn it into a church.

(Photo courtesy of Serg Childed and Wikimedia Commons)

Thursday, 28 January 2021

El remedio

I just read Isabel Allende's Largo pétalo de mar, a novel of the epic genre, in which a Catalonian family is cast adrift in the wake of their Republican stand against Franco, to wind eventually up in post-Pinochet Chile. In between is a lot of striving, living, and suffering.

Allende has a Hemingwayesque gift for trapping powerful unspoken emotion between terse, concrete lines. I'm not a big Hemingway guy myself, but Allende's command of the technique is effective here.

Case in point: at one juncture, one character tells another, "El mundo no tiene remedio." ("There is no cure for the world.") Being a more incisive take on that dilemma we anglophones dismiss as the "way of the world".

It's particularly à propos in this context, but as a Zenner, I feel the need to add, "Yes, but you can cure yourself."

The Spanish aphorism is exact: it's best to give up the "one candle in the dark" model, by which, given enough candles, you hope eventually to light the world. There lies madness.

But washing your hands of the cruelty here isn't skilful, either.

Instead, concentrate on fixing yourself; it's a prerequisite to changing the world, anyway. Worst case scenario: at least you'll have fixed something.

And that's what fixes the world.

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

Thursday, 13 February 2020

Walden Kyôsaku

"The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour."

Henry David Thoreau

(Early 1900s postcard of the cairn marking the site of Thoreau's cabin on the shores of Walden Pond courtesy of the Newberry Library and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 16 January 2020

The Winston Churchill Effect

In Auntie's War: The BBC during the Second World War, Edward Stourton drops a bombshell.

He's talking about how radio – the original electronic medium – transformed Prime Minister Winston Churchill from a simple politician to a national fetish by bringing him into the sitting room of every British family. Hence all who are old enough can tell you exactly where they were when they heard him transmit these timeless words:

…we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

So indelible was this rallying cry that in Way Back Home – his 2015 anthem to his wartime childhood – Rod Stewart included a clip of this gravelly, defiant BBC broadcast.

That never happened.

It's not unusual for people to remember things wrong. "Play it again, Sam", "I am your father, Luke", "Elementary, my dear Watson!" "Beam me up, Scotty," and enough ersatz Mark Twain quotations to double his shelf, have all entered our collective knowledge. Or properly spoke, belief.

But this case isn't just a few transposed words. An entire nation has literally hallucinated a seminal event, complete with deep affective context and a whole range of sensory cues.

I'm not old enough to remember (or misremember) this broadcast, but reading Stourton's documentation of its nonexistence, I was absolutely floored. I grew up hearing that speech! Old people wouldn't shut up about it! I've entertained/annoyed others with my impression of that Churchill broadcast since high school!

But as it happens, Churchill only ever read out this text in Commons. It was reprinted in the papers next day, and doubtless some BBC presenters quoted it in their segments. But the PM, yea though he frequently addressed his people over the national service, only spoke these particular words into a microphone in 1949, when he was asked to cut the recording we incessantly hear in historical documentaries.

This is just the latest – if most dramatic – instance of the Winston Churchill Effect that I've encountered. Another is the pretty hippy girls who spat on returning Vietnam vets in the 60s and 70s. Many of us remember reading about this in the papers, or seeing it on TV. And in his excellent, highly-recommended autobiography, hermit monk Claude AnShin Thomas relates in some detail the time it happened to him personally.

Except it didn't.

This urban legend is a little easier to bust, given the logistics such an assault would demand. The attacker would have to gain access to a military airbase; loiter around the terminal unnoticed for hours; divine who in the crowd was a returning combat veteran; then approach very near said young man without attracting any attention, even from the target.

All while harbouring jarringly unhippy convictions.

These inconsistencies have bothered me since I was a kid, but I was still dumbfounded to learn no such event has ever been confirmed. Ever. Anywhere.

To be clear, I don't believe AnShin is lying. Rather, he's as certain of this memory as I am that at age 11 I read a front-page story in the local newspaper about a kid – named Richard, wearing a striped collared shirt in the photo – dying from heroin-injected Hallowe'en candy. He gobbed a treat upon returning home, then fell sick. His parents sent him to bed, but when he got worse they rushed him to the hospital, where doctors, little suspecting the cause of his condition, were unable to save him. Later, the candy wrapper was found to be pierced by a hypodermic needle.

You're probably already there. No such crime has ever been reported.

Ever.

Anywhere.

This disturbing bug in our OS has serious implications for our survival. It also vindicates the fundamental tenet of Zen: "don't-know mind". This is the state Zenners cultivate, to the best of our ability, because those opinions we call "facts" are very contingent, and much – perhaps most – of what we remember is inconsistent and imprecise.

And every so often, complete rubbish.

In the state of don't-know mind, we remain open to further data. In this position we stop sorting input into yes, no, and maybe, and just catalogue it. Because the need to respond ethically to external stimuli arises far less often than we think. And "making up your mind" about the rest amounts to shutting off your intelligence.

By not becoming attached to discrete data, we avoid the hysterical blindness it engenders. And, with a little luck and continuing sincere practice, the insanity that leads to.

As for Churchill, he'd get another shot at posterity, as the peroration of his famous Battle of Britain speech would soon be cast in bronze:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

And this time he really did broadcast it, having first received tremendous acclaim in Parliament. Prevailed upon that evening, he re-read his masterful "finest hour" speech, against his will, pouting and mumbling, from the BBC desk.

At 10PM.

To very few listeners.

And critics who universally panned the whole transmission as lacklustre and forgettable in the next day's papers.

Nevertheless, a great majority of British subjects would forever recall how their hearts quickened and their spines stiffened to Churchill's electric performance, as they listened to him that afternoon.

Or after dinner.

There's some disagreement on that point.

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 12 September 2019

Makers Make Makers

So I'm reading Adam Savage's Every Tool's a Hammer, an elaborated meditation on "making", that thing that makers do. (I only recently found out I'm one of these. Before that I was just, you know, making things.)

It's an engaging read; Adam's a philosopher of creativity, and his thoughts on the process of bringing inspiration from concept to object are sangha at its best. Scattered amongst the useful bits of shop protocol, such as the necessity of clamping your work securely so it doesn't kill you, are mindful contemplations on more fundamental topics. Of these, the one that struck deepest is his misdoubt of the "scarcity model".

I've touched on this subject before, but Adam's understanding of it is more concrete. Essentially, he says, some makers work in the assumption that resources are inherently scarce. Therefore, a prudent person hoards them, restricts their distribution, declines to admit surplus or divulge where it is. Adam suggests such people do this from fear that they will run out of whatever they need unless they stop others from getting some.

Nor does he limit his definition to the material. In fact, he scarcely – see what I did there? – mentions physical wealth at all. What mostly aggravates him is spiritual avarice: refusing to help, teach, respect, credit.

I too have often smacked up against this. A classic example is the person who won't share a recipe, on the belief that equipping others to prepare the same dish will steal his thunder. (Note that this excuse rests on two fallacies: that such people won't change the recipe, thereby protecting the author's "patent", and that a cook incapable of outdoing himself is master of anything.) You run into these blocked heads rather often in the work world, were they refuse to teach you their profession, or share trade secrets, or defend your beginnerhood from critics, on the alibi that they're nipping competition that would complicate their lives.

Not that competition doesn't result from a more generous view. But I've yet to see a situation where you can really quash it by cynical means. Childishness on that level, though our culture implicitly endorses it, fences you off from the very resources you yourself must have to compete successfully.

At base, this scarcity model is the origin of the transmission hang-up in institutional Zen. That's the policy whereby only certified "dharma transmitted" gurus are allowed to teach Zen. By extension, all talking about Zen then becomes "teaching", so the rest of us just have to shut up.

To be honest, if it weren't for that second assertion, I'd have no problem with it. "Teaching Zen" puts others at risk, while endangering the teacher's own karma, which is why I'd advise anyone considering it to stop considering it. (And while we're up, if anybody out there takes this blog for "teaching", knock it the hell off before we both get hurt. )

Basically, the fear is that free agents would muddy the water, obscuring access to enlightenment. Trouble is, this scarcity dogma bulldozes 99% of our wealth into a big pile and sets it on fire. So Adam's right: such "scarcity" is manufactured.

It also undervalues sangha, as it posits that without certified instruction, students will fall willy-nilly for false and/or abusive authority. I'll see that and raise you this: when the Sangha replaces blind faith with caveat emptor, fools and scoundrels will find us barren ground indeed. Because dharma-transmitted fools and scoundrels abound, shielded by the Confucianism that's crept into our religion over the centuries.

Adam further suggests that far from establishing security, such attitudes actually impoverish. He's right. There is no scarcity of wisdom, insight, or compassion in Zen. We enjoy boundless wealth, in the millions who have trod and are treading the Path in earnest determination. What mind could reject such a windfall?

The essential quandary is not simply that no-one has a patent on the Dharma; it's that all of us are still not enough. We must have what everybody brings to the zendo. Bare minimum.

In biographical passages, Adam recounts many mentors, of various walks and origins, who put up with his beginner pestering, or calmly watched him make mistakes and then told him why his stuff didn't work, and one senior technician whose elliptical teaching method, by Adam's telling, was as koanic as any Ancestor's. All of which has inspired him to give in kind, now that he's a lion of the maker world.

The fact is, the most important thing makers make is makers.

(Photo courtesy of Richard Greenhill, Hugo Eliasand, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 25 April 2019

Outbacking

Travelling so far so long in isolated country produces a kind of elation. The muttering millions bugger off, leaving you in boundless creation, under a sympathetic God.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Anthony Burden and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 10 January 2019

Compassion Kyôsaku

"[Kitano] was thin and not in good health, but Shunryu was mesmerised by the way he would lay out his bowing cloth and lower himself to place his forehead on it, and above all by the way he would rise up again. He was so frail that every time he bowed Shunryu thought he wouldn't be able to get up, but he did, time after time.

"Eventually Shunryu realised that it was harder for him to watch Kitano bow than it was for Kitano to do so."

David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber

(Photo of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva statue in Bodhisattva garden of Truc Lam Tri Duc Zen Monastery courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Thursday, 8 November 2018

America Needs a Buddhist President

Back in the Duhbya years, a little book called America Needs a Buddhist President appeared on bookstore shelves. It consisted of a poem by Brett Bevell, illustrated with whimsical drawings. (The author's spoken word performance of the poem can be found here, though some of the humour is lost without the cartoons.)

It's light entertainment, but I thought about the premise a lot when it came out. The text plays on Buddhist stereotypes (that we're martial artists, that we're vegetarians, that we eschew contention), often for laughs. But not always; some assertions ("America needs a Buddhist president whose mind is free from desire") are downright revolutionary. And correct.

But the self-congratulatory aspects of some lines brought to mind the claims of Christians in this society where they dominate. That they worship the Prince of Peace. That they're forgiving. That they protect children.

Anyone not completely craven instantly sees through these lies.

And that's why I don't think a census-form Buddhist would make America a better place, either. A real Buddhist, now… But let's face it, a real Buddhist wouldn't even enjoy the support of fellow Buddhists, let alone voters of other confessions. Because a real Buddhist would fail to endorse cynical alibis for unBuddhist ambitions. And that would make us hate her.

But the greatest opening I had, meditating on Bevell's thesis all those years ago, is that I don't even want a Buddhist president. I'd be ecstatic – in tears, even – if America had a Christian president.

I mean an actual Christian. Not a marketplace Christian, or a dog-whistle Christian, or a church-going Christian, but a genuine contrite, practicing Christian.

If such a Christian presented himself for office, I would drop everything and volunteer for his campaign full-time. I'd doorbell tirelessly. I'd hand out leaflets 16 hours a day. I'd say to everybody I met: "Look at me! I'm a Buddhist monk, and I'm volunteering for this guy full-time! You need this guy! We need this guy! VOTE FOR THIS GUY!"

'Course, if a Christian ran for President of the United States, he'd almost certainly be assassinated before he even got out of the primaries.

Because that's what happens to real Christians.

(Graphic of undetermined provenance.)

Thursday, 2 August 2018

Postcards

The instant I start an outbacking trek, I'm looking for postcards.

I define as backward those towns that sell corny postcards, spineless those whose cards depict other places. But the cards I buy fly everywhere, under governance of an elaborate formula.

Lovers get the best ones, followed by Europeans, who suffer a debilitating lack of outback. From there, priority hinges on the closeness of the relationship.

The mailing list is as long as the journey, and I agonize, sometimes for days, over which to send whom. But in the end, I'm mostly just talking to myself.

Slipping cards through slots in post office doors and general store counters soothes the rower, the part of me that always faces aft, and reminds others that I exist, a fact I fear they are likely to forget.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. 1922 postcard of the Osoyoos custom house courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous collector.)

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Addiction

If you'd told me when I was 22 that the day would come when I would cherish my ex-girlfriends, I would have called you mad.

As a young man, I did relationships like a drug. Heroin, to be specific. I loved hard, like diamonds, and lost harder. I wore rejection like a crown of thorns, bled from it like stigmata, dragged it across the earth like the Holy Cross. Cowardice, caprice, indifference, were feminine vagaries I could not forgive.

I was the ex-boyfriend from hell.

I don't know what changed. I didn't hear from my ex-girlfriends for years, and then I did. And I was ecstatic, like a pilgrim who falls to his knees on the far edge of the desert, weeping for the pain, and laughing for the weeping.

No-one was more surprised than I.

So perhaps, sometimes, even I grow up.

Perhaps even heal.

My ex-girlfriends are interesting, caring, engaging women, and a gift to my life. They have great husbands, brilliant children, and there is nothing I wouldn't do for any of them.

There's no word for this unexpected love. It's not possessive, like a lover's, or exclusive, like a brother's, or conditional, like a friend's.

It just is.

And whatever it is, it brings me endless joy.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Peter Dowley and Wikimedia Commons.)

Thursday, 1 March 2018

Good Book: Cat Attacks

I didn't want to read this book. And I really didn't want to keep reading after I started. But as I've often said, denial is an unskilful response to danger.

Most of my life has happened in cougar country, much of it in the woods, where I prefer to practice Zen when possible. A few years back I sat 100 Days on the Mountain, an ancient Buddhist ritual, in Washington's coastal jungle.

The cat threat there, of which I was generally aware, comes up several times in my book. (Which is now finished and seeking a publisher.) But if I'd read Cat Attacks: True Stories and Hard Lessons from Cougar Country, I wouldn't have slept once during those more than three months.

Authors Dean Miller and Jo Deurbrouck are careful to point out that human-cougar encounters are extremely rare, and physical contact a tiny blip in that statistic. But they are also conscientious – downright didactic, in fact – in recounting, second by horrific second, exactly what happens in a mountain lion attack.

And though it's apparently impossible to escape a gruesome death if you're alone when the stats turn against you, your chances of avoiding that actuarial convergence drop to zero if you've no hard data on your predator's habits and methods.

Some of which, thanks to Miller and Deurbrouck, I now know:

• Cougars prefer silent, lightning ambush from behind and above, after extensive, close stalking. When in the woods, turn and look behind you, thoroughly and often.

• Your predator's single-minded intent is to kill and eat you. This makes your bear-mollifying skills guaranteed death. Instead, if one atypically shows itself before lunging, go big, mean, and criminally insane. This may convince the cougar to go back to just stalking you for now. If on the other hand you make yourself quiet and small and avoid eye contact, you've green-lit a kill.

• The charge, when it comes, is supernaturally fast; witnesses uniformly report a "brown blur". And its dump-truck impact is instantaneous. So even if you see a lion crouching to strike (which they take great pains to conceal) you have no time to raise or aim, much less draw, a firearm.

• Though they'll attack groups, particularly children in the midst of one, as readily as they'll strike a loner, cougars rarely turn on rescuers. (It's bizarre, un-prey behaviour that evolution has not prepared them to answer.) So if a companion is hit, come in hot and hostile and fight hard at close quarters, with feet and fists if necessary. Once engaged, a lion may cling stubbornly to its quarry, but they seldom or never accept third-party combat. So keep on hammering until you completely weird it out and it withdraws.

• Solitary humans have no chance of survival.

This is just a smattering of the practical, unromantic intelligence Cat Attacks contains. The authors' steely pragmatism, while traumatic, gives the work great strength. Particularly valuable is their bullheaded refusal to get sucked into either of the silly postures – "kill 'em all" or "poor persecuted kitties" – one usually encounters when the topic is raised.

To counteract the first, they illuminate in equal detail the harsh reality of a cougar's life, which is astonishingly brutal and getting crueller by the day, thanks to overweaning human arrogance.

As for the second, well… in the same instant a cougar touches you it rips your face off. This allows it to begin eating you without waiting for you to die.

That image brings me keenly in mind of Meditation in the Wild, wherein Charles S. Fisher points out that early Buddhist monks – originally all, and then most, of whom were hermits – had a tendency to enter Asia's primordial jungles and never be seen again. Tigers are even bigger than cougars, and not one whit more sentimental.

These are the conditions that forged our nihilistic Zen world view.

So if you live or travel in the northern and/or western half of North America, read Cat Attacks. Get schooled. Be prudently terrified.

Because when I think of all the times I've been afoot in the rough at dusk – including every day of ango – I break into a cold sweat. One unmoderated by the knowledge that cats also attack people in broad daylight. (Even housecats creep me out now.)

So be safe out there, brothers and sisters.

As safe as this existence allows.

(Note: a slightly updated release of this book came out in 2007 under the title Stalked by a Mountain Lion: Fear, Fact, And The Uncertain Future Of Cougars In America.)

UPDATE, 31 MAY 2018. Coverage of a local fatal attack, with further information on staying safe in the forest, is available here.

Thursday, 21 September 2017

Good Book: Two Shores of Zen - An American Monk's Japan

I hold the word on my tongue, bullshit, so he'll know that I'm serious about this. I'm not just complaining. He needs to meet me, to understand that I'm tired of this American Buddhist 'Upper Middle Way'. I'm tired of the sexual dramas, the talk of 'income streams' and 'personnel costs'. […] It is not that I'm averse to problems; I understand that they are the stones that lay the path. I am tired, though, of these corporate problems, 'Are we making enough?' and these hippie commune problems, 'Who's fucking who?'

Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler is nose to nose with his teacher. He's done with the nonsense. He's determined to pursue the Way. The true Way. The authentic Way, goddamit!

The fact that he stalks off in precisely the opposite direction from mine only intensifies my sense of kinship with him.

Two Shores of Zen: An American Monk's Japan chronicles one seeker's attempt to resolve the central contradiction of our religion: a philosophy of transcendence, patrolled in two disparate cultures by a careerist administration.

In young Jiryu's case, he's fed up with the mealy-mouthed doubletalk of Western Zen. His California sangha is flabby, bohemian, materialistic. "When are we going to get around to seeking enlightenment?" he wonders. "Are we going to get around to seeking enlightenment?"

The twentysomething monastic longs to live those legends, breathlessly recounted in the West, of merciless sitting schedules, brain-bending mental training, and utter obedience to a deific master. In his view the Ancestors' instructions have been inverted in transmission, to the point that following them is heresy. "How," he protests, "did we make the original Middle Way into an extreme to be avoided?"

Certain the hallowed Japanese couldn't be so glib, he jumps on a plane and jets off to get him some of that pure Asian practice.

We know what has to happen next. But Jiryu's account of it is fresh and honest, and his courage in telling a tale that doesn't always show his younger self to be the Stone Buddha he takes himself for inspires trust.

Certainly, the antics of a living oxymoron – a rebel cœnobite – make engaging reading. At one point the eager young pilgrim even considers cutting off a finger as a gesture of gratitude to his teacher; fortunately, common sense reins in this particular manifestation of his crush on Japan. (For their part, the Japanese would recoil in horror from such an act; most today regard monasticism itself as abusive and atavistic.)

Jiryu gamely owns a few other delusions as well – including, o shame of counter-California revolution, sexual ones – and documents the uncorrected worldliness of his peers as all swim in the obsessive patriarchy of Japanese practice. (Eremitical Perspective Break: from where I'm sitting – so to speak – both the Eastern and Western schools are culture-over-dharma models.) But the writer's Augustinian confessions are compelling and endearing, precisely because he's so gung-ho. Absent that, his openings couldn't be as revelatory, his witness as eloquent, or his trajectory as utterly human.

In short, Two Shores is the Empty Mirror of our time, enhanced and upgraded by a later generation's relative suspicion of exoticism. Which makes the fact that it was rejected by traditional publishing all the more frustrating. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Buddhist press has largely become irrelevant. Yes, its stable of conservative celebrity teacher-authors reaches a well-monied market. But we practicing Buddhists outside that market are quickly becoming the demographic majority. Jiryu himself calls out the self-help and "lifestyle" mill that passes for our media. The fact that he was ultimately obliged to self-publish Two Shores – a foundational text Zenners should read – is a bitter irony.

Not that the book doesn't suffer a few foibles of its own. A sea of typos – typical failing of self-published titles – distracts the reader and weakens the prestige of the work. Also, were I the editor Jiryu tried so hard to secure, I'd've ordered a short epilogue, closing storylines left open, catching us up on his life and practice (he's on the pastoral staff at Green Gulch, a fact that brings his lessons full-circle) and offering considered insight into his Asian interlude, now that several years have passed. (It's worth mentioning that publisher-released books often share this deficiency, professional oversight be damned.)

But these are minor details. I'm heartily grateful that Jiryu has made his work available at personal expense, as few POD authors recoup costs, let alone profit.

I recommend that anyone who's troubled by our all-too-mortal Zen establishment; suffers from Real Zen Disorder; is interested in Japanese practice models; or just likes a good Zen yarn, do all sentient beings a favour and buy Two Shores of Zen.

Then maybe convince someone else to do as well.

Thursday, 13 April 2017

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.)

Thursday, 2 March 2017

Good Book: I See By My Outfit

By dint of random good fortune I just read I See By My Outfit: Cross-Country by Scooter—an Adventure, by Peter S. Beagle. This inexplicably obscure American masterpiece is basically Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets On the Road by way of Three Men in a Boat, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who appreciated those classics. (I commend it even harder to those who couldn't get through the first two. Beagle utterly lacks the pretence of Kerouac or Pirsig.)

In 1963, Peter and his childhood best friend, artist Phil Sigunick, set out from New York City for the Bay Area on motor scooters. Yeah, that's not a typo: scooters. Weird-looking Heinkel Tourists, from the days when former Nazi aircraft manufacturers were still doghoused by punitive restrictions.

If a cute little city-boy scooter doesn't strike you as the tool for the task, welcome to the adventure. (Past tense form; in the present we call it "catastrophe".)

But Phil and Pete are 24 and invincible, and the tale that ensues is simultaneously hilarious, insightful, and nostalgic. Beagle's tart, economical prose foreshadows the power that will soon make him a cultural icon. A few years later he will write The Last Unicorn (an event subtly hindsighted by his obsession with Tolkien, whose work he has to define for 1964 readers) and become a lion of literary fantasy. But that's even farther ahead than California at this point.

In fact, lots of things are ahead of him, but he's trying not to think about that. For the moment his life is a sequence of picnic grounds and diners; fleabag hotels, pawnshops, and borrowed guitars; breakdowns and rainstorms; eerily prescient cow town parochials; and more than one Cold War cop with little clue where his authority ends – or interest.

Along the way we get pithy, almost poetic descriptions of little towns along old Route 40, some of which have hardly changed in half a century. (I checked on Google Street View.) Pop-culture call-outs recreate the ecosystem of the period. Together with bookish literary references they feed the capital Internet scavenger hunt that signals a great book.

And through it all, the simple joy of being a brash young twentysomething, smart-mouthed and game, and somehow, in Beagle's case, aware of it. His breezy, funny patter is the sort of thing you can only produce – or get away with – at that age. The fact that he and Sigunick constantly remind each other to act like smart-mouthed twentysomethings – because that's their calculated schtick – is at once endearing, and a little surrealistic.

Outfit does suffer from an excess of voice in places, particularly in the repartee between the boys, which can become tedious when it pokes too long in the inside-jokey territory of childhood friends. Fortunately, Beagle's tight pacing limits these interludes to a fleeting irritation.

Some readers have also fingered the riders' casual misogyny, amounting mostly to failure to take women seriously. Beagle himself reportedly winces at those moments now, which as a fellow old man I can well imagine. But their tone is par for young stallions in 1963, and so they are a lesson in their own right. (Full disclosure: my friends and I talked similarly – out of female earshot – twenty years later.)

For the rest, my main complaint is incompleteness. The book badly needs an epilogue, maybe two – one in-period, the other retrospective. And for a book about an artist, it's frustratingly unillustrated. Why don't we have those gouaches Phil's always executing, in parking lots and beside bridges? (Both oversights may have been corrected in subsequent editions; I read the original, with the cover above.)

One thing is certain: I See By My Outfit deserves to be much more widely read. It's a beloved classic waiting fifty years and counting to happen. If you like road stories, or Americana, or social history, or just effervescent, youthful prose, this one's for you.

I nearly cried when it was over, just because there was no more to read.

Update, 7 March 2017: I've just stumbled over this 2012 Chronogram profile of Phil and his wife Judy, in which occurs the following line: "He is also a primary character in Peter S. Beagle’s classic cross-country travelogue, I See By My Outfit, for which he is creating a soon-to-be-published series of illustrations." I hope this means that my above speculation is correct, and that a recent re-issue of Outfit now includes adequate, dare we hope generous, graphic contributions by the book's co-protoganist. I mean, c'mon. Dude shares top billing in this trip, and he's a recognised artist. Isn't this the definition of a "no-brainer"?.