The Jutting Jaw

Some years ago I heard a story from the Bhagavad-Gita, in which a great warrior is called to battle, only to find himself facing his mother, his father, his best friend, his kindergarten teacher… in fact, everyone he ever knew.

It's one of the most fundamental koans in scripture, drilling into the heart of striving, dependent co-arising, enlightenment practice, and just plain existence.

But today I'm not contemplating the teaching itself. What's rendered me thoughtful for the moment is the reaction I often get when I share it with others:

"So what do you suggest we do, Mr. Sensitive Zen Hippie Guy?"

Such interlocutors are offended I've brought up the fact that everything we have was taken from someone else, and therefore living itself entails constant karmic consequences. Their reflexive response is to shut down discussion of this troubling, muddling scientific principle, before it jeopardises comfortable assumptions.

I often want to respond, "Well, Mr. Jutting Jaw, I've already got my hands full just dealing with my own karma. Suppose you get off your lazy arse and find your own answers."

And I sometimes do.

Because truth be told, jaws jut everywhere. In fact, the entire conservative impulse is nothing but jut. (I'm not just talking about political conservatism, although that is nothing but hammer-headed denial repackaged as ideology. But Conservatives aren't the only conservatives. We all angrily protect our sloth and cowardice.)

The Jutting Jaw has no truck with challenges. It has no time for uncontrolled variables or human complexity, which is why it hasn't either any relationship with logic, justice, or ethics.

The Jutting Jaw doesn't wait for facts or elaboration. Its motto is, "Bitch first, and if anybody asks questions, bitch louder."

It is a convicted advocate of Lynch's Law.

The Jutting Jaw is in you, and it's in me. It flounces out whenever I hear something I don't like, stomps in every time I'm accused of insufficiency or insensitivity or an ulterior motive I don't actually have. (And sometimes one I do.)

The Jutting Jaw generally signals itself with a distinct nervous tic: it begins most sentences with "Well" or "So". "Well, if that's the way you feel about it...", "Well, then, why don't you just...", "So, I guess you'd rather...". When you hear that, lay a quick wager. 'Cos jaws gonna jut.

It's the sarcasm that tells you your opponent isn't actually talking to you, or that you're not talking to her, or both. Because the argument – such as it is – addresses a point that hasn't been made.

So you're arguing with someone who's not there.

Which'll get you arrested on any street corner.

Insofar as this chip-on-the-shoulder brittleness opposes clear-seeing – and for that matter reason, morality, and sanity – I move we each weave dejutification into our practice. Let's engage to make reasoned, nonreactionary arguments, when we make any at all. Further, let us take a precept not to put words in others' mouths.

It's unsanitary.


(Photo of Gustav Vigeland's Sinnataggen courtesy of Lisabeth Wasp and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Kitty fudo

(This is a funerary fudo I made for a cat friend of mine. [The cord is white, red, and black, the three bardos of death.] She was buried here in the woods a few months ago.)

Extraterrestrial Snail

The large round shells of moon snails (Polinices lewisii) are one of the more memorable features of a walk on North Coast tidelands. Their sheer size – some reach softball proportions – is remarkable, in a region otherwise bereft of large gastropods. But the casual tourist may miss the fact that the animal itself was even two or three times larger than that.

In echo of their spacey name, moon snails are great sci-fi doomsday machines, implacably bulldozing the mud in quest of anything that can't run. Just under the surface, the animal expands to dinner plate size, squishing and undulating through the substrate, leaving just a quarter-sized bit of shell visible from above.

All shellfish it encounters are engulfed in that big gluey mantle, after which the snail's abrasive tongue rasps… rasps… rasps… until it's drilled a neat hole in the victim's shell. The attacker then pumps it full of digestive juices, which dissolve the flesh. Finally, it sucks the slurry back out and moves on, leaving behind a half-digested husk.

Thus, the presence of Polinices can be readily divined, not just by the vacated shells of past generations, but also the many clam and cockle shells littering the beach, each with a distinctive round hole near the hinge, as if pierced by a Native pump drill. Rubbery grey sand collars – its equally extraterrestrial egg cases – are another clue.

When I was a kid, oystermen and clam diggers threw moon snails up the bank to stop them damaging their beds. The law is not so dumb as to allow that now, but I used to eat this mega-escargot regularly before a decade or so, when that too became illegal. I'm not sure why; they're certainly not endangered, and the only people I ever knew who gathered them as food were me and a handful of elderly tribal members.

Any road, the only creatures that benefit materially from these Dr. Who villains today are the similarly B-movie giant black-eyed hermit crabs (Pagurus armata) that inhabit their empty shells.

Those guys are, if anything, even more memorable.

WW: European chestnuts

(Castanea sativa)

The Ride

Down the banister
The wild schoolboy I was slides
To enlightenment


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

WW: Policeman's helmet

(Impatiens glandulifera. A shade-loving shoreline invasive from the Himalayas, imported to the North Coast as a garden flower, it remains nevertheless undeniably beautiful.)

Into the Abyss

"Lion’s Roar Has Killed Buddhism", screams a recent headline on Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen blog.

Um… そうですね。

Don't get me wrong; I've called down the Western Buddhist press many times here on my own public confessional. Most of what passes for our media is pat, predictable, and embarrassingly bourgeois. Still, such a declaration, as sensational and click-baity as it sounds, must be at least a little over the top, eh?

As it happens, not so much.

My brother was reacting to The New Wave of Buddhist Psychedelics, a feature article on the Lion's Roar website that celebrates mind-disabling chemicals as enlightenment practice aids. Its very title asserts the existence of something called "Buddhist psychedelics", magical substances evidently developed by arhat pharmacologists to "get you over".

This is only the latest manifestation of a disturbing foible of Western Buddhism. Back in the 1960s, the hippies, justifiably disenchanted with their childhood religions, went trolling for alternatives. As they imported barely-understood Eastern philosophies from overseas, they were careful to "upgrade" them with their own values, incongruity be damned. Among these were environmental awareness, pacifism, New Age nutrition, gender equality, and sensuality, to name just five.

None of that is strictly-speaking Buddhic, though a strong sutric case could be made for the first two. The next two have to be lawyered up before they slide in, but perhaps the Buddha was suggesting them obliquely, while openly advocating the opposite.

Sly old Gautama. (Ahem.)

But that last one is out. Full stop.

The Baby Boomers were and are famously devoted to chasing sensations. "This I have seen; this I have felt." They wished themselves explorers, pioneers, eagerly barging in where angels fear to tread. (Ed. note: angels actually tread everywhere. They just don't loiter in pointless places.)

Their initial attraction to Zen was the far-out trips they hoped to experience while meditating. Those monks sitting all weird, not moving; they must see stuff, man. Go somewhere, baby.

The fact that zazen is emphatically the opposite of that is one of those contradictions many chose not to acknowledge.

But their favourite terra incognita – famously, infamously – was drugs. Thus the hippies augmented our culture's twin holocausts of tobacco and alcohol with a whole freezerful of new philtres, guaranteed to make you stupid or give us the rest of your money.

When I became a monk, pot was still viewed as a sacramental herb by a significant minority of the western sangha. If anything it's grown in esteem since, though without a crumb of justification; the Buddha was categorical, and common sense concurs, that anything that interferes with the free and natural function of a healthy mind obstructs enlightenment. (Not to be confused with substances taken to bring a malfunctioning brain back to parameter, otherwise known as medication.)

Anyone who's ever known a drug user knows they never make anyone a better person. We don't need to run this experiment an umpteenth time. We can simply validate the Buddha's foundational teaching on the matter, cross it off the list, and continue our authentic practice.

So that was annoying. But what's happening now – retro-chic promotion of acid trip as kensho – threatens to set the cause of ending suffering back fifty years.

Make that another fifty years.

Because it's not just self-imagined "psychonauts" at risk here; if it were, a hermit could just shrug and repeat what he always says to guru-worshipers, religious tourists, nihonophiles, and other posers he meets on the Buddha Way: "It's your karma, dude."

But Zen is important. Critical, in fact. It literally saved my life, and there are many, many others out there who are still desperately seeking it. To plough up their path, to mislead and reroute them into dead-end practices (or worse) is unconditionally the deadliest sin in Buddhism.

Tellingly, there is no precept against obscurantism. (Religion, yo.) But if you want another ten-thousand rides on this merry-go-round, just you keep it up, dharma pusher.

The only skilful response to "Buddhist psychedelics" is the same one we must give anyone suppressing the liberating truth that the Path is in-born, a universal birthright bundled free in every sentient mind, each of which comes into this life pre-programmed and fine-tuned for its single purpose: awakening.

Walking the Path requires no approval or assistance from anyone or anything. The power is inside, and nothing that isn't, is it.

Any other message – any other message – is delusory.

So on the off chance I've been vague about my thoughts on this issue, I'm going to plant my flag squarely and firmly in the open, where even stoned brothers and sisters can't fail to see it:

–––> The teaching that drugs are useful in Buddhist practice is evil.

It isn't a divergent model, a denominational difference, an alternate reading of the sutras, a newly-revealed insight, a simple disagreement among sangha of good faith, a questionable form grandfathered in by centuries of practice, or an inconsistency due to our human nature.

It's the deliberate generation of makyō, with attendant multiplication of suffering and delusion.

It makes the world a colder, more cynical, less compassionate place.

To put it succinctly: these people have joined the other side.


So there ya go, Lion. Looks like you have in fact found one thing psychedelics can accomplish. They can move a freakin' hermit to excommunicate you.

Have you any idea how far from reason you have to fall to achieve that?

Farther, I suspect, than an undrugged mind can take you.


See you on the road, brothers and sisters.

And don't eat the brown acid.


(Graphic courtesy of Hamed Khamees and Wikimedia Commons.)