(In honour of Thanksgiving.)
that I was a child before helmets and helicopters
Internet radio
brown rice
pinto beans
cats
dogs
all the music
that this world happened after I had twenty years of enlightenment practice under my belt
this beautiful, teeming, engrossing, unknowable planet
dancing Muppets
(Photo courtesy of Samuel Stone and Pixabay.com.)
Back in 2023 I wrote a post about another post I wrote in 2015 on the topic of forgiveness. As a prime example, I referred to the case of a repentant former Nazi. (Let's be precise: the man had abandoned his dead-end path of his own volition and atoned for his past through public confession and self-condemnation. Such gestures are extremely rare in the judgemental, regardless of their imagined justification for their bigotry, but many in the Internet community chose instead to proceed as if he'd been caught out being an active Nazi by upright citizens who had brought his case to public scrutiny.)
In 2022, person or persons unknown outed my article as "hateful", or at least hate-adjacent, whereupon Google fenced it off from search engine indexing and slapped a locked gate on visitors already possessing the link, requiring a second Google sign-in to read it.
This is effectively a take-down, with the added benefit to the taker-down that the piece wasn't literally taken down, perhaps to puncture potential lawsuits.
The whole experience was Orwell-grade surrealism, but I have more important practice, so I posted my mystifiction over it and moved on.
And now it's happened again.
This situation too involves a Nazi reference, but this time the questionable motivation is Facebook's.
Now in the dock: last week's post, consisting of photographic testimony to Nazi vandalism and a call to arms (or at least a proper Zen hell-no) from Canadian literary lion Félix Leclerc.
Facebook's swift condemnation of my anti-Nazism began the instant I posted the link to its server. Within seconds I was informed that it contained offensive content and so had been removed.
This all happened so fast I suspected malfunction, and reposted.
And seconds later, got zapped again.
Given the speed of the response, it's likely that some artificial stupidity-powered hate detector simply saw the swastika and panicked. The boilerplate notice – identical both times – contained a link to something or someone higher up for reconsideration. I immediately complied, certain this possibly human judge would see without difficulty that:
1. The photo documents a criminal act and couldn't possibly be taken for glorification of Nazis or their ambitions, and:
2. The Leclerc quotation below it reflects both the author's and the poster's combative attitude toward totalitarianism and ideologised narcissism.
The next day I received a response, informing me in the same Hal-esque tones that my monkeyshines would remain barred from the service. It too offered further escalation, though frankly, given that my trust in humanity and its instances was exhausted decades ago, I'm just not that invested in it.
Speculation on the origin of such eerie hostility is pointless; the space in which these ghostly arbitrators spin being so far removed from objective reality as to render any attempt to fathom it a waste of time and effort more productively spent on the cushion.
So at the risk of further discipline, let me make my position on the Nazi issue crystal-clear to anyone who might have been disturbed by last week's meditation:
• Nazis are a thing again, and they can be neither ignored nor placated without sacrificing our integrity.
• The global Zen sangha is therefore called to confront them with greater honesty and courage than we did last time.
Because that brought irredeemable shame upon us.
(Photo of 1878 Japanese painting of Fudo Myō-ō, possibly by Kano, courtesy of the Library of Congress and Rawpixel.com.)
« Un mauvais film, on quitte la salle, mais un mauvais siècle?
On le subit, on lui tourne le dos ou on le corrige. »
Félix Leclerc
(English translation here.)
(Photo courtesy of Kamil Czaiński and Wikimedia Commons.)
(As a warm-up for building myself a new radio, I put this together. It's for securing a printed circuit board while soldering in the components. Dozens of other gadgets accomplish this – I own at least three besides – but this design has the advantage of holding the work so low that the builder can steady his or her wrist on the bench while applying the solder iron. Very useful when populating small, crowded PCBs.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
Long ago, in the first years of my Zen practice, I encountered a teaching that's remained in my mind through the intervening years. Unfortunately, despite my obsession for note-taking and record-keeping, an hour of combing through my files hasn't produced line or author.
So I'll have to report both from memory as best I can.
I recall that the source was a modern Chinese Chàn teacher, born in the 19th century. This makes him almost certainly Xuyun; the more since in the course of my digging I discovered in an early practice folder a text file of his teachings. Sadly, this wasn't one of them.
Whoever it was, the Chàn master in question had this to say:
"You ask why there are so many schools of Chàn. [This was possibly translated as 'Zen'.] It is because people have different natures. They require different practices. That is why there are so many schools of Chàn. It takes that many."
At the time, having just taken the Zen path following a lifetime of convicted Christianity, I was impressed by the wisdom and generosity of this pronouncement.
As my practice grew deeper and broader, I would come to see the very soul of Zen in it.
Such freedom from jealousy and turf-warring is rare; nowhere more so than in religion.
In the course of my subsequent Zen vocation, I've been a bit disappointed, if not surprised, to find that this is not in fact our party line. The truth is, though Zenners score higher on the many-paths test than Christians (low bar that they are), our reflex too is to malign teachers in other schools; even other teachers in our own.
The error in this goes beyond fundamental insecurity and egotism. At the end of the day, like all we purchase with that two-sided coin, it deprives us of wealth.
Because other schools, lineages, denominations, even faiths (that's right, I said it) encode centuries of enlightenment instruction. Buddhism isn't like other religions; our founder said enlightenment comes of action (meditation), not faith. The clear implication is that the world is full of people very unlike us who must nevertheless be enlightened.
And that means an honest seeker won't simply tolerate superficial differences in doctrine and dogma, he or she will welcome them as a blessing, delving into them to profit from the insight they embody.
In the end, I'd suggest we go Xuyun one better:
Given that our species is still stumbling around in the dark, 2500 years beyond the Buddha, screaming war and weeping bitter tears, it's obvious we don't have enough schools yet.
(This guy came by one hot afternoon last July and spent the evening in the backyard.)
Appearing also on My Corner of the World.
