"A man, he'll walk straight into Hell with both eyes open, but even the Devil can't fool a dog."
Earl Hamner, Jr.
(My favourite line from my favourite episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. This notion of eternal reward is precisely mine as well, dogs intact. You can see the scene here; colourised, sadly, but the shifting tints do enhance the sense of bardo.
Incidentally, Hamner not only wrote all of Serling's "hillbilly" episodes, he was also the creator and narrator of another well-loved series from my youth, The Waltons. His is that voice that supplies the show's abiding soul.)
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)
(Long day in the kitchen.)
I’ve found it's important to call yourself something.
In the first years of my Zen practice I was still a Christian, simultaneously integrated into a Christian and a Zen Buddhist community. Both were visibly annoyed at my insistence that I was both. (There’s no reason you can’t be, and I’m far from the first person to do it; prominent founders of Western Zen were Christian clerics.)
I should add that it wasn’t just immediately-interested parties (i.e., Christians and Buddhists) who took exception to my labels, or lack thereof. Pretty much everyone did. You’d be surprised how fundamentalist the non-religious are about the religions of others.
So at length I chose a side to identify with. It’s interesting to note that in so-doing, I did in fact largely drop the other side. I still get tremendous value from my 40 years of Christian training — I never repudiated anything but the magic stuff, which I’d already deleted from my Christian practice long before — but I now walk a squarely Zen Buddhist path. So that’s a comment on the power of labels.
It’s also noteworthy that as a hermit monk, I still catch the same sort of blowback, but about my practice model this time. Some don’t like it; if you’re a monk, you better have a monastery address and a dictator bossing you around.
So if I’ve learned anything, it’s the importance of inviting others to mind their own karma.
(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)
Zazen is hard because it's simple.
It's the nothing-to-learn that loses beginner and master alike.
We start off being told to clear our minds. Seems straightforward: just don't think.
But you will.
Specifically, you'll think about thinking.
Then you'll become upset with yourself (or if you're a teacher, your student). Which is just thinking harder.
Some folks get stuck there, circling that holding pattern forever. It's one of the Buddhist definitions of hell, but since we're born into that hell on Day 1, I'd call it a lateral move at worst.
At some point I decided to forgive myself for thinking – leering at the priggish monk with a smart-ass teenaged grin on my face – and my sits improved noticeably.
Now when thinking happens, I speak to myself in friendly, collegial tones. Then I return to breathing and sitting.
Sometimes I ease into a deeper state. Sometimes I go back to designing a new workbench. Sometimes I return to fear or pain. Given enough time, I'll eventually do all of these, and a lot more. Maybe enter kensho. Maybe talk out loud with others who aren't there, but still distract me.
Sitting is always worthwhile. Useful. This is hard for some to grasp. You have to see it from the cushion. There is no alternative, and there is no shortcut. No-one can hand it to you, or verify or disqualify it.
It is not transmitted.
But these days, as I enter the last phase of my life, I'm coming to shikantaza. That's the particular notion of zazen that Dōgen handed down to Soto Zen. The word is said to mean "just sitting".
Dōgen's standards are higher than the basic breathing drill. Whereas I've mostly used the breathing method – assume lotus, count one to ten, follow the breath – now fellow Soto-trained monks are recommending shikantaza as sole practice.
Especially those my age.
I haven't done a lot of that. Some, when breathing practice led me there. But shikantaza is devilish difficult.
To do it, you sit.
What? Aren't I speaking English?
You just sit. You don't try. You don't want. You don't aspire. You don't flee. You don't punish. You don't fear, honour, cultivate, or avoid.
Things around you do.
You, not so much.
You don't breathe. Something breathes; you let that breathe. No inventory. No supervision. No observation.
Stuff goes on. You let it go on.
Thoughts think. You let them.
Everything continues. You neither allow nor forbid it.
You have no attitude.
It's exhausting.
Now I see why my brothers and sisters waited till I'd walked this far before they began – gently, confidently – plugging the founder's teaching.
Because you have to gather a lot of nothing before you put it down.
When I get up after these new sits, I have no idea if any of it was worthwhile.
And I'm OK with that.
(Mudra of Great Buddha statue in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
Red-letter day here at Rusty Ring: a new zabuton has been sworn in.
The old one, which has appeared on these pages numberless times (here, for example, with my zafu, or here, if you look closely at the upper righthand corner of the second photo), had been in service since I became a hermit monk 24 years ago, and I'm a bit heartbroken to set it aside. But the cover had become dirty and threadbare, and finally a dog tore a hole in it.
That last may sound a bit alarming if you've never seen the object in question, but I assure you: pets never missed the joke.
I got that zabuton for free from a person who no longer had a dog. And it worked great – ideal size and weight, highly durable, insulating in the winter and airy in summer. Together we travelled the continent, sitting indoors and out, keeping my physical plant in monastic trim without the least trouble or worry.
(My zafu, less than a year younger, also soldiers on, having as sole intervention been fortified about midway through by a tough, weatherproof cover. True to form, I usually protect that with a cloth shoulder bag, so that the whole looks like a bagful of laundry. Note to self: we need another bag to protect that bag with.)
Any road, just as my winter robe began life as an old fleece bathrobe, I sit zazen on a dog bed. The scepticism this raises in certain quarters is worth the paltry money such kit costs. Welcome to eremitical monasticism, bitches.
But it was time for a new meditation mat, and two decades of experience has taught me that the dogs are right: this-here is what you want. Still, you'd be amazed how broad is the canine mattress market, in every sense: colour, design, shape, expense, comfort… even dimensions vary remarkably.
You gotta know a lot about pet supplies to nail this one. Especially these days, when it often must be purchased sight-unseen.
In the end, after a mere six months' research, I got what I needed. The new pad is a little loftier and has a textured checkerboard cover (see photo) – ironic echo of certain so-designated zabutons meeting fewer criteria and costing four to twelve times more. (Set me back twenty-five dollars Yank, for those playing at home.)
One thing I do miss is the extra 4 inches; where my old zabuton is 28 inches by 35, this one is only 24. However, there are some good reasons for a shallower mat, chiefly that they're less obstructive in a multiuse room; fit more readily into many outdoor sites; and are easier to transport by car.
As for wear or ergonomic issues, only time will tell. But for the moment, it's holding lotus admirably.
So if you need a zabuton but can't afford spiritual materialism, come join me out here with the dogs.
Company's better, anyway.
"You cannot eat a recipe."
Shunryu Suzuki, on the relative value of religious teaching.
(Photo of the epilogue to an 18th century Guru Granth Sahib manuscript, wherein the scribe shares his ink recipe, courtesy of Sikhmuseum.com and Wikimedia Commons.)
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
This is one of Carl Sagan's most repeated quotations, and it has all the genius his fans came to prize in him: brief, direct, plain-spoken, trenchant. Less noted is the pure Zen that Carl – a convinced, though deeply respectful, atheist – also encoded here. It's a complete and concise summary of dependent co-arising. Easily recalled and memorised. The only part I might gently dispute is "from scratch".
Making a pie – any pie – requires all of Creation.
Carl was referring to the fact that every atom in the ingredients, and all the physics required to produce, process, and bake them, and all the energy all that takes, from generating the materials to heating the oven to your own mental and physical effort, has to proceed from somewhere. As do we, down the eons-deep path back to the Big Bang. Every day and each step of which has engineered, in excruciating detail, not just your dessert recipe, but indeed, the mind that ponders it.
Skip one spec? No pie for you.
Kind of makes you want to tip your baker, eh?
Contemplating this truth helps me to think like a grown-up. To understand that circumstances have a long tail of origination – and that's after you've determined what those circumstances really are – a step people tend to drop. And that until you've delved as profoundly and as honestly as possible into both questions, you've no right to an opinion.
And that's just for scientific matters. (AKA the kindergarten of the intellect.) Make it a human issue, and it's back to GO.
Zen has that peculiarity of all religions, that it hawks an esoteric, unknowable Dharma, then metes out a drumline of simplistic rituals that followers are told is "Zen". Despite the obvious irony, there's a certain logic to this, but the problem is, that as in all binary systems, we tend to judge the superficial wing "fundamental" and dismiss the other as pretty but impractical.
Because given the choice, humans will cleave to observable, assessable behaviours while suppressing the justification for them.
Which is why our rules never work.
So today I'm sitting with Carl Sagan-roshi's teaching:
If you wish to avoid half-baked practice, you must first create the universe.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
6. Be quiet in body, mind and spirit. Don't hurry either in speaking or responding, distrustful of your own urgency.
7. Be firm in your convictions, but be always willing to embrace the truth.
– A Franciscan hermit in my Bluesky sangha.
(Statue of St. Francis meditating courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
Survival = Anger x Imagination.
[…]
Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness.
Sherman Alexie.
(Drawn from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I elided two lines referring to life and struggle on the reservation, in order to demonstrate the universal reach of Alexie's work. This passage is typical of the koanic images he often uses to convey concepts the discursive mind might be unwilling or unable to grasp.)
(Photo courtesy of József Szabó and Unsplash.com.)
"No man is too big to change a diaper, but some are too small."
– An Evangelical radio preacher whose name I didn't catch, encapsulating the true man of no rank principle of Zen.
(Photo courtesy of Tembinkosi Sikupela and Unsplash.com.)
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This week I happened on Andrew Springer's Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up), an essay on the vital question of what the hell St. Paul is doing in the Bible. This has bothered me since childhood: the promotion of a random convert, not even a disciple, to Christ's equal. Christ's superior, really, given that the Church typically defaults to Paul over Jesus.
I heartily recommend Springer's article to anyone who has been or is now a Christian; it's lively and well-argued, and no doubt good companionship for Christians who find themselves blessed with a surabundance of hell-raisin', God praisin' fellows, but little in the way of actual fellowship. (Ah, memories…)
As for me, I'm grateful for my deep and broad Christian journey, which taught me a great deal about spiritual discipline and ethics, and comes in handy every day of my Buddhist life.
It also taught me to appreciate the paucity of Bible-babble in Zen. In my 24 years on the path, I don't think I've once seen a Zenner smack another about the head with a sutra, trying to win a point of practice. In this we beat the Christians cold, but all coins have two sides; our lack of scriptural literacy leaves the door wide open to innovation, with the usual questionable results. I grazed this issue some years ago in Are Teachers Necessary?, wherein I explored an abuse of the Buddha's teaching that's entirely as egregious as the cult of St. Paul.
What really brought this to mind for me in the Springer piece was his citing of a contention, roundly accepted by competent Bible scholars, that six of the 13 documents attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Bible aren't even his. In other words, almost half of St. Paul's contribution to Christian teaching is in fact fraudulent.
And guess which of those two lists is most problematic, from a Christic perspective?
Because where Paul appears to contradict himself, rescinding acceptance he'd extended before, the reversal occurs most often in the apocryphal material.
Hence the training I received on my Christian path: that written wisdom is frequently wangled to please worldly authorities. And that since we're called by and to the Holy Spirit, we must be careful not to replace it in our religious practice with idols of paper and ink.
So when pursuing the Zen matter in my own piece, I was neither surprised, nor particularly dismayed, to find that one of the most poignant moments in Buddhist scripture has been trafficked to political ends. Specifically, that whereas the Buddha preached and demonstrated throughout his life that no human outranks another, the cited sutra makes him "repent" of this on his deathbed, commanding Buddhist monks to accept social hierarchies.
Yeah, that's not blasphemous or anything.
As a Christian, I learned that angels neither wrote nor protect the Bible, so we must study our scripture minutely, always aware of where it comes from, where it's been, and who would stand to lose under its authentic counsel. Where that counsel appears to waver, you seek a higher power.
My comments on that bit of sutric softness met with some scorn at the time. I think I've quoted my favourite example before: "Sounds like Mara." (In case anyone thought devil-baiting wasn't a Buddhist thing.) Which is ironic for a religion – and here I refer specifically to Western Buddhism – chiefly founded by more or less indignant refugees from the Church.
So let the record show that the courage to exercise clear-seeing in scriptural study, and to signal potential tampering when suspected, came straight out of my Christian schooling, and I recommend it to anyone who's determined to get off this merry-go-round.
Because the counterfeit passages are fully as valuable as the authentic ones.
(Photo of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra courtesy of The Metropolitan Museam of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)
A Substack meditation on the emotional lives of men has been making the rounds. Fruit of Drunk Wisconsin, whose timeline is one of those digital live traps that will keep you scrolling and surfing all day if you're not careful, Men Only Want One Thing (And It's Disgusting) is that rarest of things: a brief, well-written rumination on the never-asked question of what men want.
Given cultural assumptions on this matter, if you're not a man, you likely haven't the slightest accurate idea.
If, on the other hand, you're one of "those" men, you'll probably be disgusted by the whole thing. Look, brother, the writer warned you.
And if you're here among us left–overs, you may feel that welter of repressed, conflicting emotions that signals a direct hit.
For further proof, check out the comments below the Substack post. Important: read the text first, and only afterward the comments. If you reverse that order, you'll lose the ability to read the post at all.
Because bombarding a challenge with self-mocking parody is the jiu jitsu of the reflective male. (If you thought it was middle school insults embedded in dripping sarcasm… see "those" men, above.)
Let the author of this pithy, penetrating, precise manifesto be Exhibit A.
I'd say "I feel seen", but the truth is I feel x-rayed.
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)
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With a motorboat you get there faster,
but with a sailboat you’re already there.
(Winslow Homer's Breezing Up courtesy of the National Gallery of Art [US] and Wikimedia Commons.)
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
Exodus 23:2
(Photo of Fudo Myō-ō statue courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
I practice the religion that suits me.
The one that says I'm right and you're wrong.
That I'm the ideal, and you the mistake.
We all do that.
Except the most lost,
Who commit the sin their sanghas condone
In full knowledge.
(Photo courtesy of MC1 Chad J. McNeeley, the United States Navy, and Wikimedia Commons.)
"It's the hole that makes the doughnut."
The I Ching. (Probably.)
(Pre-certified doughnut courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.
(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)
But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.
Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.
The recipe is as follows:
30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
cranberry raisins
dried apples
dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger
(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)
At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)
I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.
Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.
In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.
An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.
Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.
– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.
(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)
(Boletus edulis. Part of a generous outbreak that burst up not far from my house during the record rains of last month. Some of them were the size of dinner plates. Unfortunately I neglected to get a photo of one of those, but had quite a feast on the lot notwithstanding.)
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