The only problem is that theory alone will not help us to be content with our practice.
Although practice of the buddha way is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world, I think it is a fact that we are never quite content with our practice.
Why?
– Though unattributed in the source, this very Soto teaching apparently comes from Muhō Nölke, former abbot of Antaiji.
(Photo courtesy of Antoine Taveneaux and Wikimedia Commons.)
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.
I've been gratified over the years to encounter a small but steady circle of fellow hermits on social media. It's always encouraging to meet others on the path – a particular challenge that distinguishes our practice from that of our cœnobitic (collectively practicing) brothers and sisters.
However, the quality of our experiences, while less frequent, can be notably higher.
Because hermit monks meet on rigidly equal ground. We're ordained by no-one except our similarly equal mothers. Therefore we share, compare, and contrast from a position of parity.
And as none of us can invoke rank to overrule or silence another, we tend to do all of this freely, in sincere respect and gratitude.
Just having someone to talk to. Just that, leads us to cherish each other.
This is radically different from the way companionship works inside, where dominating "lesser" sangha is the defining role of teacher or senior student.
The obedience and hierarchy that are necessary in the monastery or Zen centre are pointless – impossible, actually – on our path; and as a hermit's teachers are often impersonal, we're in little danger of miring up in an obedience fetish.
Obedience to whom?
Throw in our civilian clothes, and layfolk are liable to be a bit mystified about what it is we "do". In such situations, it's natural to cite first what we don't do.
We don't teach.
We don't preach.
We don't accept supervision from those who do.
And we seldom practice in groups.
Most incisively, we cleave to our founder's insistence that enlightenment is not conferred. It's yours for the taking, and can't be refused or rescinded by anyone else.
Thus, the blog and social media component of my practice isn't about claiming authority I don't have. My efforts here aren't meant to teach others or arbitrate their enlightenment.
Rather, they help fulfil my duty of sangha. Supplying, for the most part, but receiving as well, when I'm lucky.
I greatly empathise with and appreciate my brothers and sisters on the path. This is a lonely calling, hard to triangulate, because our mistakes are made in solitude. Which means I'm frequently enlightened within minutes of encounters with other seekers.
A conundrum that's tormented me for 40 years, they resolved long ago.
(My timeline on these platforms is rather more political these days than I'm comfortable with, but don't be intimated; I prioritise good conversations about Zen and practice, and related topics.)
Practice is what happens in your head while you're out living.
This truth may be a little more accessible to hermits, who seldom congregate for zazen, and whose indulgence in other forms is necessarily spare and simplified. But the stuff you do at Zen centre, while valuable and worthwhile, is only a rehearsal for practice.
The actual practice begins when you leave the zendo.
For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with her Zen teacher, she's decided to try the hermit path, and asked me for a little sanghic perspective. Inevitably, the exchange ended up clarifying some things in my own mind as well. (Hence the value of sangha. As any teacher will tell you, helping others helps the helper.) So I thought I'd excerpt a bit of that conversation here, to spread the support around.
The sister in question is feeling the pull of her nature, though uncertain she can sustain a solitary practice, or that it will prove as fulfilling as the organised model. At the same time she feels like the institution doesn't respect her – that it views her as an isolated failure that must be repaired, or in extremis, rejected. That has led her to question her teacher's "never hermit" stance on alternatives.
As always, I didn't advocate any path to her, since I lack comprehensive knowledge of the facts and entities in play, and anyway, it ain't my karma at risk. But on this issue of only-ness, I felt compelled to give witness.
And so I wrote the following, with allowance for judicious editing:
As is frequently the case, I've been struck by the similarity of our life paths. We are, as I often say, a nation. This is very hard for the gregarious to grasp.
Although the neo-traditional Zen institution views people of our nature as unevolved or learning disabled, the fact is we are and always have been a demographic. One unserved by the innovated monastery model.
The same one that gave us the Buddha and Bodhidharma, to name just two.
And we seem to be coming out of the closet in greater numbers since the Boomers – great believers in authority, their market stance notwithstanding – began their slide into irrelevance.
Hermits don't necessarily seek isolation from others – I don't – but most of my adult life I've lived in rural areas; was raised in one, and have chosen to live in others when choice was mine.
But we live in a time when the rural areas that used to be despised by the urban and urbane have become chic, and they're clearing us rednecks away so they can take our land. It's a big topic, and for me, a painful one. Reminds me of the age of enclosure, and the segmenting of the European countryside into landed estates, which was the driving force that colonised the New World. 'Cept there's no place for us peasants to go this time.
From a practice perspective it doesn't matter much; you can be a hermit anywhere. But my preference is to be comfortably buffered from the rest of my species, and to be in daily contact with what remains. And that's harder to achieve in town.
As for your musings on Zen, I quite agree on all of them. Most of us find, when we encounter each other, that we've had similar experiences, received similar openings, and have much to offer each other in the way of teaching and support. We're the Buddha's only given monastic model, but formal Zen teachers (as well as those of other faiths) are great ones for saying that an unsupervised monk will quickly go off the rails and begin spouting bizarre, self-serving nonsense.
Which happens, of course, but not more often than it does in the Institution. And the result isn't crazier or more dangerous. From where I'm standing, it's clear that ordination is a risky state that few survive. Whereas my formal eremitical practice of assuming I understand nothing, mixed with a disciplining lack of social acceptance, has done a pretty good job of keeping me in my lane.
Anyway, when you mention Zen masters who run their monks as servants, that's my immediate thought. As a hermit, I can't imagine anybody cleaning up after me. Aside from the presumption, there's the fact that cleaning up my own messes is central to my practice; confronting chaos, accepting the necessity of soiling and breaking things, understanding how entirely I participate in universal entropy.
I suspect teachers who don't settle their own accounts have forgotten how unimpressive they are; given their working conditions, they can't help it.
As for me, "I'm nobody" has been my breathing mantra for twenty years. And I still think I'm the lead character in a movie from time to time; that tells you how much harder ordained types must have it.
Any road, society creates us, through a sort of petty terrorism, and at some point we just shrug and pull on the robe, to its great indignation. It's one reason I won't accept spiritual authority from other humans. I'm sometimes asked to address groups about Zen, and I always start by pointing out that I've never been ordained by anyone but my mother, that I have no unique understanding of anything, and that the next Zenner they meet will probably tell them I'm wrong about everything.
And I finish by telling them that anyone who says different about themselves is lying.
We hermits are a very diverse crowd – if we can be said to be a crowd – but I suspect all of us would agree with that last statement, at least.
( Update, 13 October 2025: The YouTube file I originally embedded here has gone 404, but I found this one to replace it. Though I haven't watched the new one through, the subtitles seem pretty much the same, and the visual quality is noticeably better.)
This is a fun movie, not least because it annoys the crap out of a lot of over-taught and under-practiced Zenners. Why, I'll get to in a minute.
Legend of Dajian Huineng (embedded in full above) is not so much the legend of Huineng – the hermit monk who's the last common ancestor of all surviving Chàn-descended lineages – as a legend of Huineng. The basics are all here: young peasant yearns to study the Dharma; family obligation keeps him illiterate and labouring; finally gets through monastery gate; clear-seeing impresses abbot; ends up usurping succession from equally legendary Shenxiu; becomes 6th and last patriarch of united Chàn.
Few of us have problems with that. It's the next act that raises Cain.
See, there's a single paragraph in the Platform Sutra – whence cometh Huineng's formal biography – that tells us he lived with a mountain tribe for 15 years after receiving transmission. According to the scribe, Huineng maintained a Buddhist lifestyle among the hunters, though his evangelism was limited to freeing trapped animals when possible and offering his hosts vegetarian alternatives.
Well, not to put too fine a point upon it… director Gui Zhenjie goes to town (or rather, the wilderness) on this footnote. He drops all the pithy poems, robed monks, and ancient temples, and picks up…
well…
• martial arts scenes. (Make that Billy Quan-school flying-fighter scenes.)
• a Captain Kirk-style cliff-top rescue.
• a several-week coma.
• a love triangle.
• not one, but two, pirate attacks.
• an overt feminist subplot.
• a complete Dances With Wolves narrative.
• a gothic torture scene.
• and a partridge in a pear tree.
(That the tribals eat.)
At last, in the final 3 minutes, the plot returns to record, as a stronger, wiser, dustier Huineng shows up at the monastery he'd set out for all those years ago and blows everybody away with his perfect insight. While still in the dooryard.
So the posers aren't wrong to say this is not a "good" film. To begin with, it can't decide whether it's a Zen-style bio-pic or a Saturday matinee. (And contrary to expectation, it does a much better job at the first than the second.) But I was engaged to the end, if only to satisfy my curiosity about what the director would pull out next.
The subtitles are, as is traditional, surreal; indeed, significantly more so than your garden-variety bargain-basement kung fu grinder. Supplied by a suspect intelligence – artificial or human – they render some passages downright impenetrable. Oft-repeated gaffes eventually cede to concentrated analysis, such as the "hunter team" that enforces "team" taboos and "team" honour, which the viewer's mind eventually resolves into "tribe". Or the master's "inner creed", which Huineng brilliantly pierces, to the consternation of the presumed "real" monks at the monastery. That one is, literally and figuratively, a koan.
But perhaps most bizarre (and then entertaining) is the tendency of 7th century Chinese people to call each other "bro".
Less endearing are sutra passages that drone on over the sole translation, "BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE", and esoteric ancestral verses transposed into random gibberish. Competent English translations of both are freely available online, and could simply have been copy-pasted into the .srt file.
Then there are a few clanging visual anachronisms (i.e., the use of chicken wire by Tang Dynasty hunter-gatherers), and a disturbing absence of ethnographic specifics on the exotic hill folk, who seem remarkably assimilated to Han culture (having, for example, zealously embraced the word "bro"), without, however, ever hearing of Buddhism. But humbugs of this sort, in a movie like this, serve in their whimsical way to enhance the experience.
As I've noted before, Zen luminaries are a tough subject for cinema, because the more impressive they get, the less they do. That said, Huineng's a worthy challenge, given the uniqueness of his story and its importance to Buddhist history. Sadly, though this effort has its moments – and would doubtless have more if someone cleaned up the subtitles – it's never going to do the man full justice. One fears others won't even try now, since a film purporting to do so is already in the can. (That's apparently what happened to Radio Caroline, another potentially great film, that unfortunately became a bad one before better scripts could prevail.)
But while we're waiting, we can enjoy Legend of Dajian Huineng on its own merits, both intended and unintended. The upload is a little wonky, dropping the subtitles briefly here and there, as well, in two short periods, as the entire soundtrack. Fortunately, both of them remain subtitled, so viewers can continue following. (As well as ever, any road.)
In the end, Legend has a scene for just about everybody, even if they aren't always people who've heard of Huineng. And that's got to be worth something, right?
Among many incisive observations in Adam Savage's maker manifesto Every Tool is a Hammer, I found this boldest:
"There is no skill in the world at which you get better the less sleep you have."
Reading it, I declared aloud, "AMEN."
The belief that sleep deprivation is useful to enlightenment practice figures highly on the list of counter-productive teachings inflicted on Zen by the organised sangha. Our monasteries – largely indistinguishable from boot camps – glory in it: rousting monks afoot at freezing 0-dark-30, and then chastising those who fall asleep on the cushion. (Dōgen actually attained enlightenment to the sound of his neighour being beaten for this.)
It's worth mentioning that such machismo isn't limited to Buddhist houses, either. Most monastic establishments, of any kind, think stumbling about in a numb stupor is God's plan for humanity.
But it's not.
The fact is, any state that compromises your brain's ability to focus – being drunk or high, cold, hot, hungry, under stress, in pain – reduces the quality of zazen. And sleep is possibly the most important of all. I've found the more seriously I take it – valuing sleep as highly as sitting – the better I practice.
This lesson landed with an audible thud in the early days of my 100 Days on the Mountain. I hadn't planned for an adequate bed, and the lack of rest complicated my practice for every one of those 100 days.
In the end, it's your right and responsibility to decide whether to sleep or sit in any given moment. I eventually learned to do both simultaneously, out there on ango, a technique I still fall back on sometimes here in the Red Dust World.
In any case, it's always well to keep self-hatred – such as "I wouldn't be sleepy if I were a better monk" – in view. It's so easy to confuse that with practice.
(Photo of a sleeping monk ...seal, courtesy of Jared Wong and Wikimedia Commons.)
A few years ago I read a Brad Warner post about getting others into Zen. Brad was typically circumspect on the notion, but he did admit to having attempted it from time to time. Which rendered me thoughtful.
I've never wanted to do that.
That's partly why my blog is simultaneously so prickly and largely devoid of any basic information about Zen. Aside from the fact that most of the text here is addressed to me, I've always imagined that what supplementary audience remain are fellow seekers, either already practicing Zen, or at least otherwise self-motivated to read it.
Any outreach I picture for Rusty Ring is limited to comforting members of my own sparse and scattered tribe, and giving open-minded others a balancing perspective on Zen convention. Thus my readers are generally friends and companions from the first visit, and nobody in need of or open to conversion.
This turns out a practical editorial as well as spiritual policy, since in the past 12 years exactly one werewolf has honoured my comments section with his or her gory theatrics. I've sometimes been savaged off-site – when I've participated in any Zen discussions there, which is rare – but at risk of a jinx, that one troll, several years back, is the only one I've seen.
It's just that, if you aren't selling anything, you don't attract much attention.
Now, if I hung out a shingle proclaiming COME HERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT, or I CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS, I'd be all up in readership. And, if I monetised, money.
And then my threads would totally be stuffed with people foaming at the mouth, rabid to debunk me. Which would lead to more publicity. Which would bring more readers. Which would score me more money.
What it wouldn't bring any of, is enlightenment. Not for me, not for my followers, not for the world at large.
This suspicion of apologetics is why Zen frowns on evangelism. Because the Christians have it wrong; you can't force salvation on others. You can't talk them into it, trick them into it, shame them into it, or even just sincerely hand it to them.
They won't take it.
The best – and I mean the rare and absolute best – that evangelism can accomplish is to cash in on the weak and desperate, those sentient beings so damaged and disoriented that they can't tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.
I took the Zen path because I had to. World weariness had rendered my life unliveable, and it was this or jump off a chair. So I went looking for a practice.
Not a treatment. A task.
Nobody had to doorbell me or buttonhole me or altar-call me. I've endured all of that before. (Fortunately I'm of a nature to appraise rather than believe.)
Unless you come to enlightenment practice on your own road, for your own reasons, under your own steam, you can't pull it off. Instead you'll be recruited, distracted, and used up by unenlightened others.
That's why our monasteries make you kick down the door to get in. And why I write an underground blog that prospective readers must expend effort to find, and why I'm delighted to talk with interested parties about Zen, but usually end up advising them to stay on their existing path, unless getting off this Ferris wheel – which is the point of Zen practice – is all they want to do.
'Cos otherwise you're wasting your time and Zen's.
And both of those things are too important to toy with.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Photo of the Monastery of the Temptation, built on the backcountry site where Christ is said to have been interrogated by Satan, courtesy of Tamar Hayardeni and Wikimedia Commons.)
(Brothers' cemetery in the forest behind the Benedictine monastery in my home town. One of my favourite places since childhood. Plus I saw a mountain beaver here today.)
If you've ever been to a Zen centre or monastery, you will immediately recognise this man's genius. What you're seeing here is a conservative Zen take on a Beatles song. And not even one of the "deep" Beatles songs; rather, one of the fun inane ones. You know, with a Ringo lead.
I don't know what possessed my brother to turn this Western pop hit into a sutra, but I'm glad he did.
The best part is that it seems to be a sincere offering; with allowance made for a subtle playfulness, Kossan's spoofing neither the music nor his religion. Just what you'd expect from a Zen monk and musician. (One with classical bona fides, no less. If you click on his channel, you'll find he's a shamisen devotee.)
In short, he's offering us an opportunity for insight. The meditation at the end drives the point home, and elevates a merely brilliant performance into an awesome one.
Events this week have me thinking about my favourite Zen teaching story. (I say that about all of them, though my very favourites are the ones I take the piss out of in this journal.)
The gist goes like this:
A bandit army descended on a town, causing all the monks in the local monastery to abandon it, except the master.
Bursting into the zendo, the pirate general was enraged to find the old monk calmly dusting the altar, not even deigning to bow.
“Do you not realise,” he shouted, “that I would run you through without a second thought?”
“And do you not realise,” said the master, “that I would be run through without a second thought?”
At this the general bowed and left.
This is one of those tales we Zenners like to exchange with pious smiles, certain of its allegory, and that we'll never be held to the conviction it implies.
And now here we are.
The plague our species is currently facing puts me in a surrealistic place. Whenever I've imagined myself in an apocalyptic scenario – which is frequently, given my culture's obsession with it – I've seen myself meeting the aftermath of war, natural disaster, or economic crisis beside my neighbours, pooling our skills, standing firm against the selfish and the predatory, guiding our community to peace, promise, and security.
But in an epidemic, you have to board yourself up in your house, see to your own needs, and avoid catching or communicating the sickness to others.
And so stillness and acceptance must be the discipline, in full knowledge that very bad things might happen. And you must not go out and do combat with them, or call for help from others, or even, God forbid, open the door to curse at them.
Instead you must remain heroically immobile. To borrow an image from Thich Nhat Hanh, you must be "lake-still, mountain-solid".
In other words, I am now living the worst nightmare of all religiosos: actually having to practice what I preach.
The death and mortal-threat fables that abound in our religion distinguish it from other faiths. (Some may quibble that traditional Christianity, with its endless recitations of gruesome martyrdom, takes this laurel, but I would counter that those are journalism, placing the listener outside of events. Our tales make him or her inhabit the dying character.)
Such stories as The Tiger and the Strawberry, or The Mother and the Mustard Seed, exist for a pedagogical purpose. They remind us of the knife-edge we walk, that we must walk, and the impermanence of all things, including ourselves. The intent is to jangle us out of the chains of our dread, and into the freedom that acknowledgement confers.
We are not the universe. We are not the most important thing in the universe. It was just fine before we got here, and it will be just fine after we leave.
And so will we.
Because this life is not the goal of this life.
Understanding that, and practicing it, is the origin of strength.
There is no "state of emergency" in Buddhism, aside from the one we were born into and can't resolve without practice. There's no Buddhist constitution that can be suspended when it becomes inconvenient. The law is immutable.
And that's a gift.
So now is the time to do all that stuff we've been saying we do.
Now is the time to practice Zen.
In taking the cushion, let us cleave to our humanity, care for our fellow Earthlings, and maintain our grasp of reality.
Because we have no alternative.
(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)
Zen monasteries traditionally close in midsummer, when the zendo gets too hot for comfortable (or safe) sitting and the travelling is good. Then the sangha put the altar Buddha in cryostasis – wrapping him in black cloth till autumn – take stick, and leave, posting a skeleton crew to mind the store.
The Internet does that too. Around July readership drops sharply as more attractive options open up on the northern half of our planet, where most users live. Thus, I learned long ago that I can do pretty much anything I want around now; ain't nobody home no how.
Hence the yearly ritual of the rock groups, with sporadic even weirder vacations from Zen, strictly spoke. So let this post be one of the latter.
Over the past year I've become attached to a Youtube trend so awesome I have to share it. By measured steps, short-subject filmmaking has advanced on that platform, quietly improving and proliferating, in the absence of all profit motive or likelihood of fame. Today, as fans often remark in the comments, these labours of love and passion can rival anything coming out of major studios or corporate television.
Probably the most prominent example is Dust (above). Though devoted to science fiction, in the best tradition of that genre this channel's definition of same is decidedly liberal. So much so that choosing an embed is agonising. The one I finally went with is both typical (quality of concept, writing, performance, production) and unusual (subject). But I'm unable to discern a "normal" Dust subject; any redundancy in their catalogue is well-camouflaged.
Note also that the suggested video is only 12 minutes. That's on the long side. If Dust uploaded a 20-minute film, they'd probably have to put an intermission in it.
The Omeleto vault, for its part, might be summed up as "O. Henry meets Rod Serling". Again, my search for an archetype was fruitless, but the video below is representative of the humour, insight, and fearless young writing.
Some of the actors you'll see are familiar, particularly in the Dust entrées. But if you recognise one, you won't recognise two; the rest will be brilliant aspirants. This means those few name artists are doing it for joy more than career, and I for one tend to love that sort of thing out of all proportion to objective merit.
Which is also awesome here. Just to be clear.
Likewise, some scripts are complete, taking the audience two hours' distance in ten minutes, while others play like opening scenes from non-existent features. But in both cases the raw power of the writers behind them makes me want to get out of the business.
All in, this movement is a perpetual mitzvah: the best movies you'll see all summer, free, bottomless, on demand, fully portable, and each one shorter than a sitcom. (Even without adverts.) "Hang on, I gotta watch this BAFTA-calibre movie. No worries; it's eight minutes long."
And the manna pelts on unabated, for in addition to further Dust and Omeleto suggestions, you'll find other nuggets of comparable genius from still more independent short channels in the margins. If you're not careful, this could become a problem.
But don't come running to me; my own Watch Later list is so long it'll be months before I get back to you.
So much of the hope we had for the Internet never materialised, or rotted into horrors we scarce suspected. In such times, this-here is a fair-dinkum boon; a manifestation of wish fulfillment.
After a recent very pleasant afternoon spent in the companionship of a beloved sangha-mate, I've fallen to contemplating the blessings of the Third Treasure.
This is the hardest one for us hermits to acquire. The Buddha is in the can. He's been and done, and left his priceless teaching and even more priceless (less priceable?) example.
The Dharma too is freely available. In fact, good ol' Donum Secundum is the great strength of my path. House-monks must cobble up an artificial, human-dependent Dharma to simulate the flow of the River we wild boys see in the sky each night. If in their rituals our domesticated brothers and sisters sometimes take direction from Les Nessman-roshi, it's that mocking up a universe is not for the faint of heart.
But we hermits, having sniggered at their choreographed pantomimes, must quickly return to the endless task of pulling Sangha out of plants, animals, mountains, tools, stars, meteorological events, water features…
For their part, cœnobites enjoy free and convenient access to, like, companionship. So much so that it becomes burdensome. Leonard Cohen, asked if he missed the days of his own Zen centre residency, diplomatically replied that monastery monks are "like pebbles in a bag, polishing each other smooth". He then pointedly dropped the subject.
But Sangha is critical, if for no other reason than to triangulate one's own attitudes and actions. A human being alone first becomes weird (guilty) and then insane (charges dropped for lack of witnesses), wandering off on ego-deflected tangents until simple reason, to say nothing of enlightenment, becomes impossible. Any sincere solitary will tell you that mindfulness of this dilemma, and self-monitoring of our course over the ground, claim much of our cushion time.
But as vital as all that is, it's not Sangha's greatest gift. There's also endless wisdom and insight; the times a fellow traveller solves a koan you've been working on for years in two or three words, and a tone that implies "…you dumbass". Then you return to your own practice liberated, in the Buddhic sense, and game to seize the next quandary.
But even that is not Sangha's highest power.
That would be simple companionship.
Here in the industrialised world, where humanity itself is roundly considered weakness, if not sin, we generally insist that social interaction is a luxury, and a superficial one at that. We absolutely do not recognise that refusing same is equivalent to denying food and shelter.
If we kept food from prisoners, there would be scandals, hearings, forced resignations, ruined careers; more advanced nations would levy the satisfying irony of prison sentences.
But when we lock people in dungeons, nothing happens. No gavel strikes, no activist shouts "hey-hey ho-ho", no candidate makes promises – even ones she has no intention of honouring – to eliminate this particularly caustic torture.
To cite a single case, a large percentage of incarcerated Americans are daily buried alive in solitary confinement. Not for days (24 hours being the maximum the average person can endure without permanent damage), nor even weeks, but years. Even sentences of ten years without the equivalent of food and shelter are considered trivial in American courts.
All of which is on my mind in the wake of four hours spent catching up with a close friend and comrade in Zen. I cleared the tea things much lightened, instructed, and renewed, and very aware that when the Buddha called Sangha one-third of Enlightenment, he wasn't being twee.
The equivalence is mathematical: in Buddhist practice, Sangha is of equal necessity to the Buddha and the Dharma.
Or to put it another way, you'd be entirely justified in locking your Buddha statue in a closet and replacing it on your altar with photos of your peers.
The Rinzai side of me is already smirking seditiously.
(Photo of "A Few Good Men" courtesy of Vibhav Satam and Unsplash.)
I normally turn to one of several online public-domain graphics services to illustrate these posts. But figure this: on most or all of them, if you search for "monk", virtually every image will be Buddhist.
Some are Hindu, a decided few are Jain or Taoist, but almost none are Christian.
Take Unsplash. Its very generously free photographs are of such Condé-Nast quality that I rarely use them myself, this being a dirt-floored hermit blog, but click on that hyperlink. See how many of its monks are Christian.
And Unsplash is not an egregious case. Though the most widely-used service – Wikimedia Commons – does somewhat better, if you subtract historical depictions you'll find that its Christian orders still score well behind those of Asian origin.
Which renders me thoughtful. What's at work here? Is it the natural ambivalence of people in Christian-dominated societies to the Church? Or do we view Christian monastics as anachronistic – as indeed many Asians view their Buddhist counterparts? Or is it the common delusion that Asian religions are less hypocritical than Abrahamic ones?
It might simply be that Asian travel is hipper among trendy young Westerners, so the photos they take tend to depict Asian subjects.
Or maybe it's those flaming orange, red, and yellow vestments most Buddhist monks wear. Perhaps they're just more photogenic than the typical earth-toned Christian habit. 'Course that wouldn't explain why snapshots of Zenners, in their black, brown, or grey okesa, outnumber those of Catholics.
One way or the other, I think this is related to the Buddhist statuary often encountered in Western gardens and sitting rooms. But it's not just exoticism; Christian monks have become almost as novel to us in these times, particularly since they rarely go abroad in uniform these days.
Yet somehow they don't command the same mystique. When you consider all the old-school Christian cœnobites still afoot in the Mediterranean countries and Eastern Europe and Latin America, it's astonishing how few make it into our stock photos.
I'm convinced that somewhere in there is a fundamental misconception about the nature and reality of Buddhist monasticism.
Because the fact is, life and practice in Christian and Buddhist monasteries are astonishingly similar.
(Photo of Zen master Seung Sahn uncharacteristically outnumbered by the brothers of Our Lady of Gethsemani courtesy of ZM Dae Gak [Robert Genther] and Wikimedia Commons.)
I've been gratified over the years to encounter a small but steady circle of fellow hermits on social media. It's always encouraging to meet others on the path – a particular challenge that distinguishes our practice from that of our cœnobitic (collectively practicing) brothers and sisters. 
Practice isn't just sitting; nor is it just form.
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I normally turn to one of several online public-domain graphics services to illustrate these posts. But figure this: on most or all of them, if you search for "monk", virtually every image will be Buddhist.
