Brief Visual Meditation

Courtesy of a Zen droogie on social media.

The Grandfather Paradox

This graphic illustrates the grandfather paradox, a secular koan demonstrating the inability of the human mind to grasp reality.

Alright, it's actually La avo-paradokso, which means "the grandfather paradox" in Esperanto, because it's still July and I'm still licensed to go a bit off the rails. And as we'll see, those rails can be hard to discern, anyway.

For starters, let's acknowledge from the outset that the above premise cannot be tested, because we don't have a tempomaŝino (time machine). But that doesn't stop us using it to challenge our mental faculties.

So, starting at 12 o'clock and proceeding horloĝdirekte (clockwise):

I invent a time machine.
I travel into the past.
I kill my grandfather.
My father isn't born.
I'm not born.
I don't invent a time machine.
I don't travel into the past.
My grandfather is born.
My father is born.
I'm born.
I invent a time machine.
I travel into the past...

You can see that though the proposition is (science-)fictional, the conceptual challenge is real. It's an example of a reality that the human mind can't perceive:

– It's impossible to kill your grandfather, because if you did, you wouldn't exist.
– But you do exist, so if you could go back in time you could totally kill your grandfather.
– Except you couldn't, because if you did, you'd never exist in the first place, so you couldn't kill anybody.
– But you do exist, therefore…

The solution? There isn't one.

Not if you're human.

Because your primitive reason runs on logic, which is why all the Vidyārājas are sniggering at you.

(However, consider that we might come to realise even this concept if we could live it. The human brain has the capacity to pencil out and penetrate circumstances that utterly lack logical sense, if it stands in front of them. I only hope our grandfathers arm themselves well if ever that comes to pass.)

Buddhism has long taught that time is neither linear nor universal; timelines are numberless, each running at its own speed and in its own direction. The variance between the classical reincarnation of Hindu and some Buddhist worldviews, and Zen's messy ad hoc concept of transmigration, originates in this contention.

That's why we developed koans, which are meant to jazz that part of the brain that can't grok the great stretch of reality that lies beyond dualistic perception. ("What was your face before your grandmother was born?" seems an appropriate example.) This also goes a long way toward explaining those wild tales of monastery practice: the decades of mu-pondering, the dharma combat, insight expressed by farting and slapping and barking like a dog. Because extracranial notions exceed language.

You can find an in-depth philosophical exploration of the grandfather paradox, as well as similar thought experiments, at BYJU'S page about it. And while you're there, take a moment to marvel that this page was uploaded by a company that educates children. I've got a feeling India's going to be running this popsicle stand in another generation.

In the meantime, why not just be nice to your grandfather? Ok, so maybe you can build your time machine without him, but who decided we needed that more than we need him?

See if you can wrap your choanocytes around that, Spongebob.

Dukkha Koan

"You may not believe in hell, but hell believes in you."

(A message from this station and Fudo Myō-ō.)


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

Street Level Zen: Home

"A man is never lost at sea."

Ernest Hemingway


(Photo courtesy of Paul Harrison and Wikimedia Commons.)

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.

Virtue Koan

The Sword of Righteousness has a D handle.

Wu Ya's commentary: Only true warriors can lift it.


(Photo of a Land Girl at work courtesy of The Imperial War Museum, the UK Ministry of Information, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Killing the Buddha

"If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him."

This well-worn Chàn koan, attributed to Linji Yixuan, has the sting befitting the ancestor of Rinzai. (Which word is just "Linji" pronounced badly.) Down the generations, this single sentence has attracted a wealth of commentary in the Great Sangha, and has to some extent even become familiar to the world beyond it.

Shunryu Suzuki – Soto priest, founder of San Francisco Zen Centre, prominent ancestor of Western Zen – inflected it in at least two directions: “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else" (an invocation of things as they are), and "Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature,” a timely reminder that you're the only one who can save you.

Others rush to insist that the Buddha in this directive isn't the actual Buddha, i.e., the man Gautama (though I believe he is, but more on that in a second). In this reading, it's really a warning against mistaken Buddhas: inferior teachers, your own delusions, received wisdom.

Perfectly sound, but a bit churchy for my taste.

So I've been turning this commandment in the light for about twenty years now. To me it does in fact refer to the historical Buddha. Because he's much more likely to hurt you than anyone else.

Some huckster in a plaid sport coat could con a minority of seekers with his pious salvation scams, but most of us will walk past that. No, to screw the majority, you need the real thing. That'll get us all worshipping when we should be practicing.

'Fore you know it, robes and gongs and incense will be all that's left of Buddhism. We'll be anointing statues, chanting names, venerating relics. At last some clever-dick will bust out the sutras and start telling us the Buddha said this and the Buddha said that, all in defence of this massive religious folk dance we will all have to complete before we're allowed to seek enlightenment.

Hell, with a little luck, we might even get the Buddha to straight-up end all Buddhism on Earth.

Which is why you want to kill that mofo good.

One good whop with your monk stick.

Because the fact is, Gautama left us 2500 years ago. He spoke his piece, left his treasures, and sensibly died.

Don't let a zombie eat your brain.


(Photo of an arrestingly Buddhic road in Uzbekistan courtesy of Arina Pan and Wikimedia Commons.)

Swordsmanship

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

I've recently been pondering this Philip K. Dick line. A lion of literary science fiction, Philip's life was dogged by mental illness complicated by drug use. This led, as such things often do, to a fascination with metaphysics and transcendental philosophies. And an enduring preoccupation with reality, that thing human brains are singularly ill-suited to detect.

Perception challenges notwithstanding, I think the writer wields a sharp Zen katana here. We humans are especially apt to mistake ourselves – our cultural assumptions, our half-experienced experiences, the truisms we were taught as toddlers – for objective truth. "That's the way of the world," we say. Or, "That's just the way the world works."

Problem is, we're not talking about the world, or anything like it, when we say that. Far less any rule the world may impose.

For the benefit of those still struggling with the concept, let me take a page from Philip: the world is that thing that remains, unmoved and unchanged, when the last of us has died.

Which could be rather soon, at the rate we're going.

I find this principle a productive "empty" meditation. You know, those paradoxes we Zenners like to chase on the cushion as calisthenics for our power of perception:

"Picture an empty mirror."

"What was your face before your grandmother was born?"

"Mu."

So I sit and imagine a planet millions of years hence, unmarked by human striving.

Endless global landscapes that bear no trace of our passing.

The utter inexistence of economics or religion, art or technology, love or hate. And the profound absence of any recording witness whatsoever, anywhere on the planet.

An Earth returned to the ground of being, removed that single self-centered force of denial that dominated a second of its lifecycle, its pan plumb flashed out.

As Philip conjectured: a vast and infinite reality, entirely innocent of human delusion.


(Photo courtesy of Vadim Mivedru and Unsplash.com.)

Koan: Floors and Ceilings

'Way back in 1973, Paul Simon released a song called One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor. The lyrics are classic Paul: a Dylanesque flow of images that makes sense on an intuitive level.

But as a many-time flat dweller, it's the title refrain that means most to me. For like the best of Sufic teachings, its significance changes as you turn it in the light.

At base, it seems to mean "walk mindfully, because your tromping will be amplified in other rooms."

Or it could be a social justice message about the people you – wittingly or un- – exploit for your own comfort and well-being.

Conversely, it may be telling us that those limits we allow to confine us, a more visionary person could use to launch him- or herself to the stars.

Or maybe it just refers to the fact that we all live within a vast complex of shared boundaries, where freedom, if it exists, is more a matter of accord than licence.

Whatever the case (bit of a deep-dive Zen pun, there), I like to sit with Paul's one-sentence koan from time to time; see where it lands in that moment.


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

Koan: Pacifying The Mind

Huike said to Bodhidharma, "My mind is anxious. Please pacify it."

Bodhidharma replied, "Bring me your mind, and I will pacify it."

Huike said, "Although I've sought it, I cannot find it."

"There," Bodhidharma replied. "I have pacified your mind."

(Wikipedia)


(Sesshū's 1496 painting of Huike begging teaching from Bodhidarma courtesy of the Kyoto National Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

Effort Kyôsaku

"Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, because you might die tonight."

Ajahn Brahm


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

Why Do You Practice Your Religion?

We choose our religious convictions. This fact may be a bit occult; we tend to imagine we've been convicted or converted to our faith in some way, by some revelation that came from outside of us.

But we weren't. Whether we settled for the path of our forebears, or struck out on a new one in response to lived experience, we elected to follow those teachings.

For reasons.

So the most revealing question you can ask a religious person is, "Why did you choose that religion?" The answer, if you can get a candid one, tells you important things about that person.

And if it's the least bit reflective, it also teaches them important things about themselves.

I find "Why did I decide to practice Zen?" a great housekeeping koan. Regular delving into it is an effective hedge against the egocentrism that eremitical practice engenders.


(Photo courtesy of Sérgio Valle Duarte and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Trilobite Koan

Let's clear up a pernicious gaffe.

The fundamental tenet of Darwinian theory is not that the strongest survive.

That's been arrogant-prick propaganda from day one.

Rather, the fundamental tenet of Darwin's hypothesis is that the fittest survive.

Among humans, fitness boils down to one thing: living in a group that prioritises coöperation. Members of that group not possessing this instinct weaken the unit's ability to meet survival challenges; something our species only does collectively.

If obsolete members gain too much influence, whether through numbers or other means, and so draw below parity the group's ability to overcome environmental obstacles, your band collapses, leaving you to fend for yourself. In our species, that usually means dying without (further) offspring.

If, on the other hand, you're lucky and/or sufficiently evolved, you might earn membership in a new group. Thus the trend among human cultures has been to privilege coöperating individuals over those who compete. (In-house, at any rate.)

Spooling forward, we find humanity overall becoming less churlish by comparison with ancestor species; more drawn to novel others whose very difference suggests obtainable value, and less given to reflexive fear and attack.

(Note that these generalisations, like all evolutionary principles, apply only to the species as a whole. They don't apply to individuals – or, in the case of humans, individual cultures – and take no account of the infinite temporary tidal patterns within the gene pool.)

When the bulk of our community becomes unable to apply the essential human survival tool of sociability in amounts sufficient to clear the next hurdle, our species will lie down with the trilobite and never been seen again.

In view of this scientific fact, I propose a question:

In what ways must our Zen practice – each one – change to meet this existential imperative?



(Photo courtesy of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Wikimedia Commons, and a generous photographer.)

Second Thought

Everything happens for a reason, but the reason doesn't happen until everything happens.

(Earlier meditation here.)


Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.

Obedience Koan

A British, American, and Canadian ship captain are having a drink together on an aircraft carrier.

The British captain says, “Gentlemen, allow me to demonstrate the bravery of the British seaman.”

"You there!" he calls to one of his sailors. “Jump overboard. Swim under the ship and climb back onto the deck.”

The sailor salutes, jumps off the flight deck, falls 60 feet to the water, swims under the keel, climbs back up and salutes his commander again.

“That," says the captain, "is courage."

“Ha! That's nothing,” scoffs the American. "Sailor!" he calls out to a crewman. “Jump off the bow, swim down the keel to the stern and report back."

The American sailor salutes, leaps off the bow, swims the length of the ship underwater, and climbs up the transom. Dripping before his commander, he salutes again.

"And that," his captain says, "is courage."

Without a word, the Canadian captain turns to one of his crew and says, “You saw what the American just did. I order you to do the same."

The sailor salutes and says, “You can fuck right off, sir!”

The captain turns back to his companions.

“That, gentlemen, is courage."


(Photo courtesy of the Leslie-Judge Company and Wikimedia Commons.)

Proportion Koan

"It is better to light one candle than to hit the wax museum with a flamethrower."

- Wisdom I collected from the wall of a university library men's room back in 1974.

(Close-up of flamethrower dahlia courtesy of Andrea Stöckel and PublicDomainPictures.net.)

How Sudden Are You?

So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old as the religion itself.

This contentious point of Buddhist teaching, whose name draws on the French « subite » – "sudden" – asserts that enlightenment is a discrete event that occurs all at once in a blinding flash that explodes in your brain, changing both it and you forever. (The Christian adjective for this notion is "catastrophic", as in catastrophic conversion, the Evangelical ideal.)

The opposite view is gradualism, in which enlightenment slowly accrues over time through diligent practice, and only in turning back does one realise it has, at some point, been attained. (And Western Buddhism often implies that it may remain occult even to death.)

This is the main doctrinal difference between Rinzai and Soto, the two extant schools of Japanese Zen. (Seon, Korea's Chàn-descended tradition, also embraces sudden insight, but interestingly, has divided into parties over whether further practice afterward is required to "ripen" it, versus insistence that the bang itself is comprehensive; you're done.)

Rinzai students meditate to precipitate the long-awaited thunderbolt that strikes off the shackles of delusion – weakened beforehand by the crowbar of koanic logic – leaving a mind gleaming in perfect clarity.

Soto types sit for insight – a post-cognitive grasp of the koanic nature of existence, which, over a period of years or lives, eventually calibrates our minds to the universal frequency – though we may not apprehend for some time that our minds have inexplicably taken to gleaming in perfect clarity.

I'd always assumed subitism developed within Zen itself, and was surprised to learn that it actually came from the Southern School of Chàn, having been planted there by none other than 8th century founder and Huineng successor, Shenhui. Further study reveals that the two perspectives were already current in Bodhidharma's India, and may have touched off the first great theoretical debate in Buddhism

The topic isn't pedantic; it strikes at the very nature of enlightenment, and therefore Buddhism. Are we a religion, as subitism suggests, leading faithful practitioners to concrete, certifiable metaphysical transformation; or a philosophy, as gradualism would have it, shifting the adherent's perception by subtle and cumulative means?

History tends rather to support the first, though test cases are often ambiguous. Exhibit A would be the Buddha himself, said to attain enlightenment at an exact moment – upon seeing the morning star after eight days of intensive practice. The softness in that argument comes from his description of the phenomenon, devoid of fireworks, euphoria, or choirs of angels. He just… woke up. (The title we know him by translates as "The One Who Awakened".)

The legend of Bodhidharma also implies a sudden change – we're told he sat before a wall for nine years and "became enlightened", though we have even fewer particulars about the mechanism of that. To the best of my knowledge he never described it, or specified a time, date, or even season. Did he "become enlightened" in a flash, or did he just notice that it had happened, and get up?

And somewhat strangely, Dogen – founder of Soto – by his own detailed admission also received catastrophic illumination. According to the man himself, he was meditating up a storm when the jikijitsu suddenly whacked his dozing seatmate with the kyôsaku. At the crack of the cane, Dogen awakened as well.

Yet this is also the guy who told us enlightenment is gradual.

So clearly the distinction isn't simple. There are many Soto stories of enlightenment events like Dogen's – moments where the dam broke to the fall of a final raindrop, and nothing was the same again. What's common to both teachings is that getting to that point, whether it arrives with chirping birds or marching bands, is intricate, esoteric practice, demanding much zazen and maintenance of one's perceptual instrument.

And that makes the query a bit beside the point, though it does remain intellectually stimulating.

Rather a koan in its own right, really.


(Photo courtesy of Felix Mittermeier and Wikimedia Commons.)/span>

Suchness

This may be the most Zen thing I've ever seen in a Japanese garden. (And I've seen a lot; been fanboy of that Zen-soaked tradition since I was 9.)

The feature itself, carefully nestled in native and introduced ornamentals, is a fine example of skilfully-used stone. No surprise, given that we're in Seattle's Kubota Garden; founder Fujitaro Kubota was noted for his expertise with stone.

What's less widely known is that he apparently also had a koanic sense of humour. Because the inscription on this stone (記念碑) reads "monument".

The Kubota Garden Facebook page says this is also a kinen-hi – a disaster memorial – but neither it, nor the garden's own website, nor any other I've found, specifies which disaster it memorialises.

But material matters aside, the Kubota Stone remains a ringing, uh… monument… to suchness.

(Photo courtesy of Joe Mabel and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Lincoln Koan

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?

Four.

Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.


Abraham Lincoln


(Detail from the Lincoln Memorial courtesy of Steve Evans and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Jackalope Koan

If you think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For there is no such thing.

And if you don't think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For it clearly does.


(Extrapolated from versions of a teaching found in three sutras [Surangama, Platform, and Lankavatara], in which the Buddha or an Ancestor is said to have referred to a horned rabbit.)

(Graphic courtesy of MaxPixel.com and a generous contributor.)