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.)

WW: Apple blossoms

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Tom Lehrer's Entire Catalogue, Free For The Download!

This is a July post – meaning it has little immediate relevance to Zen or hermit practice – but Tom has made it clear on his website that this incredibly generous gesture is temporary, so I need to get word out to other fans well ahead of then.

Tom Lehrer was the patron saint of my college years, thanks to a chemistry prof who brought The Elements into class on a cassette tape and played it for us as a study aide. (I aced the class. Thanks to Tom? You decide.) I subsequently asked for the album for Christmas, and my sainted mother got it for me.

Infection achieved.

I've since continued to discover and enjoy Tom's work, even though his musical career ended while I was in primary school.

In real life, Thomas Andrew Lehrer was an accomplished academic with an amazingly broad résumé, encompassing teaching positions in mathematics, music, and political science, at a long roster of Ivy League colleges. A secret life of virtue that remained generally occult to the legions who savoured his storied public career as a composer and performer of jangly, razor-sharp music hall satire.

(And if that's not impressive enough, he also claims to be the inventor of the Jello shot, which claim has not yet been debunked. A fact I share in Tom's patented voice, in tribute to his questionable influence on me.)

Anyway, 'way back in 2007, Tom shifted every one of his songs into the public domain, declaring that anyone can perform or record any of them free of any financial obligation to creator or corporate sponsor.

What's more, we are also encouraged to download any of his own recordings, among which there are many enduring classics, also free of charge.

And now he's actually made them available on his website, often in multiple versions, for anyone so disposed.

All 95 of them.

And all of his albums may also be streamed or downloaded there in their entirety.

This amazing act of magnanimity (or insolence, take your pick) is time-sensitive, as the author, who is 96 at this writing, warns that the page may be taken down at any time. So hurry on in.

For those who have lived in tragic ignorance of this seminal œuvre, may I suggest the following appetisers:

The Elements (where my own life took its dire turn)

Oedipus Rex

The Vatican Rag

We Will All Go Together When We Go

And if you don't like those, there are 91 more waiting for you, right here.

Nine bows to a man who has made this existence slightly but significantly more tolerable.


(Photo of Professor Lehrer corrupting Danish youth for once courtesy of Jan Persson and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Farm dogs

(Semper vigilans.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good Website: Sotozen.com

If you'd like to explore a rich source of provocative, not overly-technical Zen reads, check out Sotozen.com. Among its many offerings is an attractive compendium of Zen stories, presented with penetrating opening commentary. A good start might be this favourite example, starring the decidedly un-Soto Ikkyu.

As you'll see, the infamous Rinzai master strongly recalls Nasrudin, an old friend who figures on this blog, and also Alan Watts.

In any case, the Ikkyu story provides another meditative exposition of conventional authority: sometimes they kick you out and sometimes they lock you in, but in all cases you must be where they tell you to be.

And while you're up, enjoy a good surf around Sotozen.com. It's a valuable resource for our lot.


(Shiba Zojoji, by Kobayashi Mango, courtesy of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Dunn's salamander

(Plethodon dunni; a melanistic specimen, lacking the wide, yellow-green back stripe and mottling typical of the breed. Another lungless North Coast salamander with no aquatic stage. Instead it lays its eggs under rotten wood, and they hatch into tiny, fully terrestrial young identical to the adults.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Gone, Gone

This morning a brother in my Twitter sangha posted the following five paragraphs from the Pali canon (Dutiyaassutavāsutta, SN 12.62).

OK, four, plus intro. That, with allowance made for the verbose, refrain-heavy nature of Buddhist scripture, really comes to about half as much.

Nevertheless, I've dropped a TLDR at the end for the hard of waiting.

(Note: "disillusioned" is a positive thing in Buddhist texts. It means "freed from delusion". When you think about it, it's weird that we use that word as a complaint in English.)

So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. …

“Mendicants, when it comes to this body made up of the four primary elements, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to accumulate and disperse, to be taken up and laid to rest. That’s why, when it comes to this body, an unlearned ordinary person might become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But when it comes to that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, or freed. Why is that? Because for a long time they’ve been attached to it, thought of it as their own, and mistaken it: ‘This is mine, I am this, this is my self.’ That’s why, when it comes to this mind, an unlearned ordinary person is unable to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

But an unlearned ordinary person would be better off taking this body made up of the four primary elements to be their self, rather than the mind. Why is that? This body made up of the four primary elements is seen to last for a year, or for two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or a hundred years, or even longer.

But that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night. It’s like a monkey moving through the forest. It grabs hold of one branch, lets it go, and grabs another; then it lets that go and grabs yet another. In the same way, that which is called ‘mind’ and also ‘sentience’ and also ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another all day and all night.

TLDR: It's not hard to accept that our bodies are temporary. What we really don't like is that our personhood is just as biodegradable. It changes constantly – we cease to exist and reappear in different form from moment to moment – until one day no trace, physical or metaphysical, remains of us.

Reading this, I was disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed.

Deep bow to my brother.


(Photo of a fragment from an 18th century Thai anthology of Pali canon teachings courtesy of the Chester Beatty Library [Dublin] and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Rainbow over the farm

(Open in a new window to see full-size.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

WW: Slough mushrooms

(Unidentified; growing on a maple log surrounded by water one to two feet deep.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermit Habit

The wildlife of the North Pacific rainforest is famously reserved; where the East has its flashy cardinals, red efts, and indigo buntings, our own rubber boas, rough-skinned newts, and varied thrushes are modestly beautiful. The odd Steller's jay or goldfinch may be a pleasant change of pace, but we're satisfied to return to the brown and russet uniform of our understated nation when they've passed.

While sitting my 100 Days on the Mountain, I sometimes daydreamed about founding a North Coast-native order of forest monks. And should that fancy ever gel, we will sit in the forest of my forebears, wearing the habit of our Douglas squirrel hosts: a hooded robe of honest Cascade umber, over an ochre jersey.



(Text edited from the notes for my book, 100 Days on the Mountain. Photo of Tamiasciurus douglasii courtesy of Ivie Metzen, the US National Park Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Spring blessing

(Pieris japonica, known here as popcorn bush, is a popular landscaping shrub on the North Pacific Coast. Native to the same latitudes on the far side of the ocean, where climate and soil types are about identical, I'm told it fills whole ravines in Japanese forests. This must be brilliant to see, given its dense sprays of sparkler-bright blossoms and heady fragrance.

The early-spring show, and the fact that we had one at every house I can remember – always right by the front door – made this a favourite flower from early childhood. It's also a good carving and turning wood, fairly soft and light but fine-grained, taking an oil finish well; properties apparently unknown outside of Asia, given the absence of mention online, at least in any of my languages.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Street Level Zen: Diversity

"What makes you different makes you valuable."

Terry O'Reilly







(Painting of Japanese long-tailed rooster courtesy of Shibata Zeshin and Rawpixel.com.)

WW: Big fudo rings

(Here are a few of the largest rings I've collected for making fudos. [Among those not yet deployed, of course.] Most of the malleable washers came off the beach, wrenched from the wreckage of docks and shoreworks cast up by storms over the years. Their condition betrays particular power. Note as well a rare wooden ring.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Chemistry

Here's a brief rumination from an anonymous blogger about a topic I've raised here before:

https://przxqgl.hybridelephant.com/2017/04/21/depression-4/

Reading this, I'm reminded that my own depression never "just happens". It's a response to targeted violence from others around me, and common among those who take refuge in a spiritual path. Because when we pill depression away, we green-light further abuse, typically on grounds that our society profits in some way from the consequences.

I'm on record as endorsing the treatment of depression with meds. I also endorse plaster casts for broken arms, but I don't pretend broken arms are the result of an innate cerebral dysfunction; even less that the occasional need for a cast indicates disability.

Yet the medicalisation of depression implies both. When I question this, I often hear that depression patients are a kind of evolutionary beta release; we're just not bundled with the latest DNA upgrade that allows us to function productively in a society whose survival relies on toughness and insensitivity.

This in spite of the fact that it's the animalistic members of the human family who are by definition the atavists.

Thus my various intellectual reactions to objections that the nation will fall unless citizens are permitted to abuse one another, none of which are, "Oh, I see – carry on, then."

So check out the post linked above. My brother's two paragraphs are short and to the point. At minimum, they prove I'm not the only one who's noted a touch of self-service in our culture's take on this matter.


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

WW: Magic beads

(Last Christmas I got a tiny cellophane envelope containing half a teaspoon of hard, opaque, plastic-looking multicoloured beads, about the size of pinheads. Amidst a certain amount of Chinese text, the only English was two brief directions.

Make that "English", because the best I could decipher was:

1. Pour water on these.
2. Don't eat what happens.

Not a word about what these things were, or what the water was going to make them do.

So I poured water over them, and next morning found this.

Apparently all they do is sit there being miraculous.

Which is sufficient.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good Video: A Disquistion On The Nature Of Idiocy

"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."

This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:

"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."

Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.

Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.

The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.

So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.

No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.

Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.

Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.

I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.

WW: Rose hips

(Even in midwinter on the North Pacific Coast.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermit Sutra

Eschew temples.
Abandon theology.
Ignore priests.
Walk the path.
Don't waste time.


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

WW: T-Bone in the jungle

(My nephew, currently 28, photographed at 16 in the forest where I sat ango.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Sarsarpkin

(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)

The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.

By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.

In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.

Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.

Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.

Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.

But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Sinlahekin Valley courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Bread and kvass

(Both sourdough recipes.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Religion Kyôsaku

"Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are."

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama


(Photo courtesy of Jordan McQueen and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Tundra swans

(Cygnus columbianus.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

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.)

Street Level Zen: Nihilism

"He's a nihilist."

"That must be exhausting."

– The Big Lebowski


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

WW: Bachelor cake

(Last of a traditional Scottish bachelor cake that I baked for Christmas. First time in 30 years. Still just as good.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Secret of My Success

"The secret of writing about Zen practice is sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made."

My riff on a quotation from George Burns. Or Jean Giraudoux, or Groucho Marx, or any of several other posited sources. It's likely an old saw from Yiddish theatre or similar Jewish art form. Not only are many proposed authors [none of whom claimed to invent it] Jewish, but the quip itself has the distinct salt of Hebrew insight.


(Photo of a 'George Burns' variety rose courtesy of Nadia Talent and Wikimedia Commons.)

One-Legged Meditation

Though this seems at first glance avant-garde sculpture, in real life it's the famous one-legged torii of Nagasaki.

You can fill in its backstory yourself.

This Shinto devotional object was just another spirit gate, like thousands of others in Japan, until retrofitted for the Atomic Age by the US Air Force. The survivors took its still standing, despite the instant destruction of their entire city and the amputation of over half the monument, as an icon of hope. While rebuilding their home, they carefully preserved this gate, unmoved and unrestored, in front of the shrine that no longer existed behind it. (Though it soon would again.)

Today both are close-pressed by modern urban development, quite unlike the quiet neighbourhood in which they started, though neither has travelled so much as a yard since the day they were built.

And though all of this is as Shinto as it comes, I can't help but find commanding Zen significance in it, too.

To me, that war-veteran torii's silhouette – gates being a foundational metaphor for us, too – speaks to the nature of enlightenment practice. You practice where you are, how you are. If you lose a leg, you practice on the other.

And if an atomic bomb annihilates everything you know, you practice in the remains.

Nothing to do with machismo; it's just that you have no alternative.

I'm particularly touched by the Little Apocalypse – the tidal wave of concrete that drowned shrine and spirit gate in a matter of decades. Because while I struggle to imagine their Great Apocalypse – it's just more horror than my mind can honestly grasp – I've lived, and continue to live, the little one over and over.

Thus the sight of that silent, single-minded symbol of trust and true nature, standing up to its chin in a mindless race to oblivion, has special relevance for me. In that sense, notwithstanding religious distinctions or the brutality it's survived, we're comrade monks.

It's simply the most succinct expression of Things As They Are that I have found.

Today humanity is flirting with holocaust at least as hot as WWII. Given the geo-engineering challenges we choose to ignore; our growing embrace of political ideologies long proven suicidal; and the diplomatic tools we beta'd at Nagasaki, this could reasonably be the end.

It's difficult for me as a historian, a Zenner, and a decent guy, to remain in harness in the midst of our extinction.

So, what to do?

Well…

Sit down.

I'll also be keeping a photo of the one-legged torii of Nagasaki somewhere in the house, where I can see it.

(All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Contemporary view also courtesy of Frank Gualtieri. View of torii after blast from bottom of stairs also courtesy of U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945; Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing; Nagasaki Foundation for Promotion of Peace; and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Torii's eye view of the devastated city also courtesy of 林重男 [Hayashi Shigeo].)

WW: Radio fixation

(Radio operators are weird about their equipment. We love to look at it. I take photos every time I set up in a new place. This time it's on the second floor of a friend's house, to a longwire antenna running through the sliding door behind it to a tree at the edge of the property. All of which is fascinating, I'm sure.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Fudo City

This is Nicola White, my favourite mudlark. (Yes, I have a favourite mudlark. I also have other mudlarks, who, while not my favourite mudlark, are also brilliant. If you don't have a favourite mudlark, what are you even doing?)

Ordinarily I unspool a mudlark video here and there for a bit of exotic foreign beachcombing. Because the seaweed is always greener on the far side of the planet. And let me tell you, us New Worlders are missing out; what Nicola finds in the Thames – midtown London, mind you – is better than anything I'll find in the North Pacific, ever.

But that's just the inescapable luck of the draw. Consider, for example, that I'd rather not dig clams there. Some things you got, some things you ain't. (Second Noble Truth, with a worldly-dharma chaser.)

But this one drove me mad. I'm talking physical pain. Because this time, my girl Nicola outed me as a bad monk, a self-righteous Buddhist, and a very strange man.

It starts about 1:40 – the video opens at that mark when you click on it – where, if you look carefully at the mud... you'll see a washer.

An old, rusty, well-abused washer.

The sort that makes a first-class fudo.

And boy, does that trigger my greed! You can see it right there. It's within reach. The camera places you right behind the hand. "It's right there! Just right! No, don't pan away!"

But that happens a lot in mudlarking videos. What is less common, happens next.

Another one. Just as good and just as near.

Then another. And another.

I counted at least half a dozen before Nicola wandered on, for a total of about a minute and a half of torment. And God knows how many other rings lie just out of frame.

Needless to say, she walks right past all of them. Because she's after, like, actual stuff. Interesting stuff. Thought-provoking stuff she can use in her artwork. (That's what Nicola is: an artist.)

So she doesn't need a pack of rusty washers.

She's probably got enough of those to hold the duration.

But if you're a fudo maker, that dreggy hardware shines, if only metaphorically, right off the gloomy muck. (Looking remarkably like ours, come to that. Amazing how similar the UK is to the North Coast.)

I'm telling you, that's powerful iron. Those guys contain enough disdain for suffering, each one, to make Mara incontinent for days.*

And I could reach out and take them, if my arms were 5,000 miles longer.

You're killing me here, Nicola.

*MaraisnotrealpleasedonotascribesufferingoreviltoasupernaturalbeingcalledMaraMaraisjustallegoryfordelusionformoreinformationpleasesitzazen.

WW: Sunset over the North Pacific

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.