Graduation Meditation

I made this fistful of fudos for a friend's daughter who just graduated from high school. Graduation is an odd rite; we tell young people their lives have changed overnight, utterly and irreversibly, and encourage them, by our silence if nothing else, to party like all their problems are over.

We really don't do this in any other context. We celebrate New Year's, we celebrate weddings, we even celebrate graduation from other institutions, but we never say "all is attained!" This already bothered me when I graduated. I get it that we want to emphasise the accomplishment and celebrate the opportunities. I'm for that. But "free at last!" is simply – maybe even tragically – a lie. (As I put it myself all those years ago, the truth is more like: "Responsible at last". But I guess that doesn't look as festive on a cake.)

And now that I'm old, I've noticed something even more sinister: the near-universal insistence of grups that a person knows nothing at 18. Yet people that age are in fact not children. (Neither are 16-year-olds, or even 14-year-olds for that matter, but that's another rant.) I don't know if we do this because it makes us feel inadequate to see these dynamic young adults gallivanting about, or because we still have a retinal image of them in diapers, or maybe we just like wielding power over others. But 18 is grown-up. Newly grown-up, sure. Still in need of counsel, of course. But grown-up. (And let's be honest, homies: that second one never changes.)

Therefore, by way of conceding to this young lady some of the power that's hers by right, I included the following note:

At your age there are a lot of older people telling you that you haven't had any life experience, and therefore you have no wisdom. Now that I'm old, I can tell you that 18 is in fact not as much as 50. (And I'm beginning to suspect there may be numbers even larger than that.) But 18 is still a lot – much more than old people think. (Or maybe just more than they remember; the years take things away, too.) Fact is, I had wisdom at 18 that I've since lost, somewhere along the way.

So here are 18 fudos, one for each year of wisdom you've accrued. Hang them in places that are special to you, or will become special to you later; mark your own trail, blaze it for others who follow; give some to friends and strangers. They're yours to do what you want with.

Remember that the more abused the ring, the more power it has. Just like people. Some of these have added meaning as well. The diamond one recalls the Diamond Sutra. The square one proclaims the Four Noble Truths. The Chinese coin with cord in the colours of the Three Bardos of Death is a cemetery fudo. And the one with the broken ring and four Franciscan knots is my own proprietary design. All fudos say, "The world is full of bastards, but an army of compassionate seekers has your back." Mine adds: "… and they'll have to get through me first."

All peace and good fortune to you, young sister. No time for small minds; eyes on the prize.

Eighteen is enough.

Robin

PS: And if anybody still tries to tell you it's not, tell them you won't hear until they've made 18 fudos. That crap takes forever.

WW: Hence the name

(My nephew holding a leaf of Acer macrophyllum,
the Pacific bigleaf maple.)

Hermitcraft: Bindle Oryoki Set

Though the word translates as "just enough", oryoki has grown to mind-numbing complexity in Zen monasteries, where every second of every meal is carefully choreographed. Beginners often view this mealtime ritual as an onerous pack of made-up fuss, but in fact it's the most efficient way to get lots of people through a full-course meal and back to work. (Once everyone's mastered it, anyway.)

Centrepiece of the ceremony is the monk's dining set, which consists of three or more graduated bowls (details vary from house to house) nested and knotted in a large napkin, along with a range of utensils. Diners start and end each meal in the same position: seated before a neat, perfectly-packed oryoki set. Watching a well-trained sangha perform this bewildering kata, from opening through serving, eating, cleaning, and closing, is a memorable experience. (Participating in it is even better. As neurotic as it sounds, oryoki is curiously satisfying. I've never met a monk who doesn't consider it one of the most powerful – maybe the most powerful – liturgies in the monastic day.)

Having said that, I didn't intend to observe oryoki when I began my 100 Days on the Mountain; too much falderal for a man alone. But I quickly realised that it's even more necessary in the woods than in the artificial forest of institutional Zen. When you're sitting lotus on the ground, with only your lap for a table, you're forever reversing tea on yourself, scuffing dirt into your rice, knocking over the water bottle… those first meals without oryoki were a chaotic, wasteful fiasco. Fortunately I had the basic elements of a bowl set with me, and after some intensive assembly and invention, managed to reduce accidents to virtually none. (Absolutely none, if you subtract mishaps due to neglect of the forms.)

Out in the Red Dust World, storebought oryoki sets are often lovely works of art… and the money needed to buy some of them could keep their lacquerware Buddha bowls full for many years. By contrast, the kit you see here serves admirably for "bindle oryoki": an eremitical version of "just enough" that's, like, just enough. It includes only two bowls: a Buddha bowl for rice and beans, and a smaller one for tea; only two cloths (wrapper/wiper and lap cloth/spoon case); and – most heretical of all – a single utensil (still folded in the lap cloth in the photo at left). Fact is, forest practice doesn't require anything but a spoon. It'll put rice in your bowl, take rice out of your bowl, and scrape the bowl clean afterward. Mission accomplished.

All of this, properly (make that, obsessively) cleaned, wrapped, and knotted, fits nicely in my little tea kettle, and then both of those in my larger rice kettle.

The elements, with approximate prices new, in US dollars, are:

2 melamine bowls, $7.50
2 bandana handkerchiefs, $5.00
1 wooden mixing spoon, suitably modified and finished in trinity tar, $5.00

Total cost: less than $20.00. If that's still too much, you can buy the bowls at a dollar store or garage sale; make the cloths from old sheets or shirts; and whittle the spoon out of scrap wood. In fact, with due diligence, you could probably reduce the total investment to $0.00.

The spoon is the only component that requires careful consideration. I actually used an old stainless steel spoon on the mountain. Metal is tough and holds an edge, and so it scrapes the bowl well at meal's end. Also, a heat-proof utensil is handy; you never know what you might need to do with it. On the other hand, Japanese tradition favours the natural beauty of wood, and appreciates the fact that a wooden spoon makes less noise in the mouth. (One of the many neuroses of monastery etiquette.) This is germane to the forest as well, where a monk must keep the lowest possible profile for tactical reasons. Wooden implements also are non-reflective, and don't ring or sink if dropped.

The kettles came from an ancient camping cookset my parents bought in the early 60s with S&H Green Stamps. You can't get quality like that today – at least not at the price – but sharp eyes at the Good Value Army, or careful crafting of tin cans (for further consideration see this post), could get you into a serviceable pair for very little.

One way or the other, this set-up fed me with radiant adequacy for 100 days. I'm sure it'll do as much for you.

May each of us carry our bowls through this world with mindful resolve.

WW: Driftwood sundial

Mente de Marinero

"El mundo era una estructura muy compleja que únicamente podía contemplarse desde el mar; y la tierra firme sólo adquiría proporciones tranquilizadoras de noche, durante el cuarto de guardia, cuando el timonel era una sombra muda, y de las entrañas del barco llegaba la suave trepidación de las máquinas. Cuando las ciudades quedaban reducidas a pequeñas líneas de luces en la distancia, y la tierra era el resplandor trémulo de un faro entrevisto en la marejada. Destellos que alertaban, que repetían una y otra vez: cuidado, atención, manténte lejos, peligro. Peligro."

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

English translation here.

(Foto por cortesía de Joaquim Alves Gaspar y Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Walking the walk

Prophesying the Cyber-Sangha

This week I found a stunning quarter-column in an ancient Life magazine, dated 18 July 1962. In it, an uncredited writer summarises a Horizon magazine article (whether the British or American version is unspecified) by Arthur C. Clarke, in which the famous engineer and author meditates on the then-recent launch of Telstar I, Earth's first communications satellite.

The new technology, Clarke said, would continue to develop and spread until at last it had revolutionised virtually every aspect of human life. Among the changes he saw coming (quoted verbatim from Life):

• High-riding (22,000 miles up) nuclear-powered transmitters in synchronized orbit which will make absolute privacy impossible. Completely mobile person-to-person telephone facilities will mean individuals can no longer escape from society, even in mid-ocean or on a mountaintop. This has, Clarke concedes, "its depressing implication."

• An orbital post office handling transocean correspondence by instantaneous facsimile, and orbital newspapers dialled onto a high-definition screen in your home.

• An electronic library – just in time, Clarke thinks, to keep libraries from collapsing under the weight of their own books – which can flash any piece of reading matter in existence from a central "memory bank" onto a home screen.

• A powerful impulse to develop a world language – almost surely, he thinks, English. 

• A complete breakdown of censorship, since communications satellites eventually can reach every living person on earth. Despite the possibilities for scatter-shot sadism and pornography, Clarke is on the whole optimistic since, as he wrote in Horizon, "no dictatorship can build a wall high enough to stop its citizens' listening to the voices from the stars."

Incredible to observe that over half a century ago, Clarke, while slightly off-mic on the precise nature of the coming technology (the Internet being primarily terrestrial), got 4 1/2 out of 5 points dead-on, in both principle and detail. I dispute his prophecy that English would become "Earthese", despite the desperate claims of contemporary speakers. But there's no doubt it has become much more widespread; is in fact the default auxiliary in much of the world; and that it rode the Information Age to that position.

More astounding are his bang-on predictions of the primacy of pornography and sadism in our world; the extinction of privacy; the negative spiritual aspects of perpetual connectivity; and the debilitating effect that connectivity would have on authoritarians and their regimes.

The unnamed Life reporter concludes with this advice:

In ways largely unpredictable now, Telstar and its successor will surely change the life and thinking of all nations. They challenge us to take full advantage of our awesome opportunities.

I wish I could claim we've done that. But at least I'm doing my part; Arthur C. Clarke, at any rate, would have no trouble understanding the concept of a cyber-monk.

(Photo of Thor Delta rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral on 10 July 1962, bearing the Telstar I communications satellite, courtesy of NASA, Wikimedia Commons, and a generous uploader.)