Homo SNAFUensis

According to Wikipedia's Chàn article, Zen's progenitors identified not one but two paths, or "entrances", to enlightenment. The first is via teaching, an intellectual process in which one reasons one's way to freedom. The second is practice, a Zen synonym for meditation and supporting effort.

This œcumenical perspective is undoubtedly Indian in orgin. Contemporary Hinduism, for example, recognises four equally-valid devotional systems, amounting in essence to four discrete religions, but all accepted as legitimate Hindu worship.

But modern Zenners will find that First Entrance challenging, given that intervening generations have rejected all but practice as authentic Zen. We may attend to teachings – particularly those given in-person by ordained masters – but we justify that as fuel for our Second Entrance zazen practice. (Although to be entirely candid, Soto for one has allowed a substantial whack of intellectual pursuit back in through the kitchen. So perhaps we should call the two Chàn approaches the Front Entrance and the Back Entrance.)

As for the Second Entrance, the Wikipedia entry illuminates four levels of primordial Chàn meditation:

• Practice of the retribution of enmity: to accept all suffering as the fruition of past transgressions, without enmity or complaint
• Practice of the acceptance of circumstances: to remain unmoved even by good fortune, recognising it as evanescent
• Practice of the absence of craving: to be without craving, which is the source of all suffering
• Practice of accordance with the Dharma: to eradicate wrong thoughts and practice the six perfections, without having any "practice"

The continuity here is stunning, as all of that's readily recognised in current Zen. If it's true that we've largely abandoned the First Entrance, here we are 1600 years later, still practicing the crap out of the Second.

And it's still working.

Proof that in spite of our comfortable fallacies, the human mind hasn't changed over the past several millennia. That all by itself is sufficient cause to mind the Ancestors.


(Photo courtesy of Kari Shea and Unsplash.com.)

WW: What??

(I'm a monk, it's a sunny day... WHAT??)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Higher Ground

I'd been a hermit monk for 5 years when I heard on my truck radio that after the news the host would speak with a US Army chaplain just back from Iraq.

I have a tetchy relationship with military chaplaincy. At best it enables sin. At worst it weaponises it. None of the planet's mainstream religions endorse collective destruction, no matter how vociferously their institutions argue otherwise.

On the other hand, the war industry mass-produces humans badly in need of refuge, which makes military chaplains a very good thing. It's just that I doubt that's the reason they were commissioned. But some do it anyway – help the exploited survive hell – even though it contradicts the larger mission, which is to exploit those people

Still, when the radio presenter announced her upcoming guest, I instinctively moved to change stations.

Then I thought, hold on. Don't I sell myself as a Zen monk? Haven't I taken a precept to strive after an ideal that rejects otherness and recognises that we're all the product of forces beyond our control?

Haven't I myself committed acts of great hypocrisy? And aren't I now poised, finger on trigger, to commit another one?

Bodhisattvas test your sincerity before they offer their gifts.

So I stood down. If this guy started selling partisan pap, I could always press the scan button later.

And that's how I received one of the central tenets of my monastic practice.

In the interview, the officer was asked for an example of the sort of ministry he provided. He related the story of a young soldier who came to him after smashing into a private Iraqi home and spraying the entire weeping family with automatic weapons fire

As they huddled on the floor of their own living room.

It's to the young man's enduring credit, and that of those who raised him, that this atrocity took him to the brink of suicide. Decent people aren't able to do this sort of thing. No matter what kind of clothes they're wearing or what they've pledged to whom.

This one couldn't stop putting himself in the place of that Iraqi father. Seeing himself through his target's eyes. The complete absence of justice or justification. Who he was in that scenario

Ha!, thought I. Get yourself out of this one, warrior preacher.

The chaplain's response was notable first for what he didn't say. He didn't talk about orders, patriotism, or service. He didn't present excuses or greater-good defences, or displace blame onto the soldier's government or superiors. There were no references to geopolitics or God's will.

He simply asked the broken man what his victim's duty was.

I can imagine the man was taken aback. I certainly was.

"If matters had been reversed," said the Army chaplain, "and he'd killed your family, what would your duty to him be?"

"I… I guess, to forgive him," the soldier stammered.

"Then that's his duty to you as well."

I've been meditating on this koan ever since.

We're taught early on that forgiveness is next to godliness, that we must do it. And that's certainly correct.

But what we're not told is that we also have a right to demand it. Because it's also everybody else's unshirkable responsibility. This was the Buddha's teaching to Aṅgulimāla: when you're no longer the person who committed the crime, atonement, not condemnation, is your burden.

I'll warrant readers who were offended by my criticisms of military chaplains are little mollified by my chastened gratitude to this one for his insight.

But I suspect the man himself will forgive me.

Deep bow to all who labour honestly for higher ground.


(Photo of US Army Buddhist Chaplain insignia courtesy of Ingrid Barrentine, the Northwest Guardian newspaper, and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Nettles 'n' noodles

(I've been trying to interest McDonald's. Further info about nettles here.)

Found Poem: Bigfoot

I think Bigfoot is blurry
That's the problem
It's not the photographer's fault

Mitch Hedberg


(Graphic courtesy of Steve Baxter and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Possum skull

(Found with a complete skeleton, clean and gleaming white in a dark wet North Coast forest. Possums only live one to two years in the wild; even in captivity you're lucky to get 3 to 4 years out of one. Thus they give birth to ichthyoid numbers of young, which results in large populations of adults, which in turn leads to carcasses scattered across the landscape.

What got this one I can't say, but it wasn't a predator, since the skeleton was intact. The skull was a few feet away, however, so a [very restrained] scavenger happened by at some point.)

Street Level Zen: Enlightenment

« Il n'y a rien de plus heureux qu'un être humain qui est devenu ce qu'il était déjà. »

Le si regretté Serge Bouchard.

(English translation here.)

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

WW: Déjà vu all over again

Crashing from a precipice of six inches, this raging cataract of last week's rainstorm runoff has chewed its overhang backward about three feet, leaving a broad, cliff-bound foot kettle that's as deep as eight inches in the middle.

OK, probably not the stuff of tourism, but worth pointing out that the photo above is a precise duplicate of the monstrous Missoula floods that completely reshaped much of the Gold Side over a period of just 24 hours. Viewed from the air, the coulees they left look exactly like this, except measured in miles.

The Busless Bus

Chàn fascinates me. Founded in China during the 6th century CE, it's the parent tradition to the three current national schools of Buddhist dhyana practice – Seon, Thiền, and Zen – as well as to China's own recently reconstituted Chàn movement. Every time I dip into these waters, I find new challenges to my own assumptions and to those that contemporary gatekeepers insist are fundamental to Zen. It's a deeper and more braided source of these than anything else I've found except the historical Buddha and primordial Buddhist practice models.

Case in point: I lately learned that the early Chinese chronicles sometimes affixed the label "One Vehicle School" to the amorphous movement that would eventually coalesce into Chàn. This in reference to the Buddhist concept of ekayāna, a Sanskrit term that also translates as "one path".

Seems shockingly doctrinaire for a loose affiliation of fellow-travellers, scattered throughout the then-existing Chinese Buddhist denominations, whose defining practice was to sit on their backside and cast off delusion.

Until you realise that their "One Vehicle" has rather a lot of seats.

Specifically, it has all of the seats.

For the essential tenet here springs from the Buddha's own teaching that we all eventually attain enlightenment, whether in this life or another. It therefore follows that all paths lead to the summit.

And therefore all paths are valid.

And therefore condemnation of others' practice is not.

Ekayāna doesn't get much ink in the Buddhist press these days, for reasons any incisive student of religion can grasp. As comforting as it is – we all make it through one day, regardless of the errors that occasionally set us back a thousand years – One Path is a lousy business model.

How can you profit, in gold or glory, if all you're selling is something folks can get for free somewhere else?

But this early doctrine of proto-Chàn does tend to explain all those ancient accounts of illiterate hermits coming down off the mountain and besting the local master – and also the continuing Zen strain of "you're not the boss of me" that current-day teachers' pets so haughtily deride.

As a hermit, I might be expected to cleave to the ekayāna viewpoint myself, and of course it has always been a keystone of my perception and practice, even though I only just learned the word for it. However, like all truth, it becomes false when distilled into dogma.

It isn't true that all paths are valid, even if we do ultimately survive them. You can build a cage of freedom.

But it's a cogent corrective to the invalid paths the Great Sangha, chasing worldly objectives that have little to do with saving all sentient beings, collectively stumble down.

May we each strive to practice more and preach less.


(Photo of ancient sculpture of Bodhidharma – founder of Chàn – courtesy of Buddha Tooth Relic Temple [Singapore] and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Bedtime

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.