Some months ago I had a refreshing conversation on Zen ethics with a fellow hermit on Mastodon. We're equally sceptical of quietism – the religious posture by which forms are judged sufficient to practice and action anathema – and our discussion helped me clarify some of my own thoughts on a matter that's critically pressing.
The quietist temptation pervades contemplative religions: this notion that real Zenners sit serenely with a satisfied smirk on their faces while injustice gallops unchallenged and others suffer.
It's easy to mistake that for dharma.
Quietism is the opposite of theological activism: the idea that true practice means doing good outside in the Red Dust World. Western Zenners most commonly encounter its ad absurdum form in those Christians who are called to sing, exhort, and engage in public "praise" (an archaic word for advertising) by way of filibustering hesitant believers and driving converts to the fold, where they too will presumably join in such questionable practice.
We non-Christians and former Christians tend to lean hard on this demographic when the topic of activism comes up, since this sort of exercise is easily criticised. But let us note also the Christians who care for the poor and imprisoned; assist the stranger and the foreigner; educate the illiterate; raise the downtrodden; and actively enhance the levels of hope and opportunity in their community.
A rare few publicly oppose deliberate evil, often at significant personal risk, while others – Quakers, for example – go so far as to confront passive evil. While a minuscule fraction of the whole, these last still trounce the percentage of Buddhists doing it.
Which brings me back to the exchange with my brother. We began on common ground, agreeing that the popular Zen position that practice excuses us from protest is erroneous. That, said I, is an illogical conclusion; ethical people act, and as I've written before, if practice doesn't result in an ethical person, there's no need of it. (I, for example, am already a fully-transmitted Self-Absorbed Jackass. No need for cushions, candles, or things that go ding to attain that.)
In the end, my brother summed up this entire meditation in words he'd come to several years ago:
"If you don't sometimes sit down and shut up, you'll never be enlightened.
"If you don't sometimes stand up and shout, there's no reason to be enlightened."
He also offered an alternative phrasing (another translation, what) that I call "the Rinzai version":
"If you never get your ass on the cushion, you can never become enlightened.
"If you never get your ass off the cushion, there is no point to becoming enlightened."
Regular readers will comprehend which of these I'm most given to.
(Photograph of police arresting a Buddhist sitting lotus during the Clayoquot Sound protests courtesy of Aldo de Moor and Wikimedia Commons.)
This well-worn Chàn koan, attributed to Linji Yixuan, has the sting befitting the ancestor of Rinzai. (Which word is just "Linji" pronounced badly.) Down the generations, this single sentence has attracted a wealth of commentary in the Great Sangha, and has to some extent even become familiar to the world beyond it.
Shunryu Suzuki – Soto priest, founder of San Francisco Zen Centre, prominent ancestor of Western Zen – inflected it in at least two directions: “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else" (an invocation of things as they are), and "Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature,” a timely reminder that you're the only one who can save you.
Others rush to insist that the Buddha in this directive isn't the actual Buddha, i.e., the man Gautama (though I believe he is, but more on that in a second). In this reading, it's really a warning against mistaken Buddhas: inferior teachers, your own delusions, received wisdom.
Perfectly sound, but a bit churchy for my taste.
So I've been turning this commandment in the light for about twenty years now. To me it does in fact refer to the historical Buddha. Because he's much more likely to hurt you than anyone else.
Some huckster in a plaid sport coat could con a minority of seekers with his pious salvation scams, but most of us will walk past that. No, to screw the majority, you need the real thing. That'll get us all worshipping when we should be practicing.
'Fore you know it, robes and gongs and incense will be all that's left of Buddhism. We'll be anointing statues, chanting names, venerating relics. At last some clever-dick will bust out the sutras and start telling us the Buddha said this and the Buddha said that, all in defence of this massive religious folk dance we will all have to complete before we're allowed to seek enlightenment.
Hell, with a little luck, we might even get the Buddha to straight-up end all Buddhism on Earth.
Which is why you want to kill that mofo good.
One good whop with your monk stick.
Because the fact is, Gautama left us 2500 years ago. He spoke his piece, left his treasures, and sensibly died.
Don't let a zombie eat your brain.
(Photo of an arrestingly Buddhic road in Uzbekistan courtesy of Arina Pan and Wikimedia Commons.)
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.)
As non-Vajrayana Western converts to Buddhism will tell you, we have a slightly awkward relationship with Tibet. Not that we have any real bone to pick with our Tantric brothers and sisters. It's mostly just a difference of style. Practice models in the three other common convert denominations – Zen, Vipassana, Theravada – are pretty stripped-down, with Zen probably being the most "gorgeous" of the very Puritan lot. Tibetan forms, meanwhile, are downright High Church.
More prosaic is the simple fact that the Dalai Lama is the only Buddhist most Westerners can name, and since our media regularly imply that he's the "boss of Buddhism", we're all generally believed to owe him fealty. Thus, non-Buddhists are often surprised to learn that I don't really follow the guy's news – he's fine as far as august spiritual figures go, but carries no greater weight with me than the Pope or other sincere religious celebrities.
Similarly, Tibetan Buddhist stereotypes often pass for Buddhist, full stop. Yet I rarely chant "om"; I don't own a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; my Zen teaching embraces transmigration (which I don't necessarily buy, either) rather than reincarnation; and therefore we don't believe past masters can inhabit children.
All of which to say, non-Tantric Neo-Buddhists tend to know fairly little about that tradition or its teachings.
So I was grateful when a fellow Mastodonian shared a particularly provocative passage from Tilopa, an Indian sage whose wisdom looms large in Tibet. Upon further exploration I learned that the posted lines are actually the heart statement of the great Tantra master's programme.
The interpretation presented can be traced to Alan Watts, and reads as follows:
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.
Certainly a Zen-friendly sentiment, in that we-say-these-things-a-lot-but-never-do-them kind of way. And other translations found elsewhere enrich the context:
A bit more Soto in flavour than Watts' Rinzai-esque lines, perhaps, consisting of nuts and bolts exhortations ("act this way") rather than a self-absent explication of phenomena. But taken together – as is usually the case with these two schools of Japanese Zen – they bring greater insight.
And finally, this fraternal take:
Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.
So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old as the religion itself.
This contentious point of Buddhist teaching, whose name draws on the French « subite » – "sudden" – asserts that enlightenment is a discrete event that occurs all at once in a blinding flash that explodes in your brain, changing both it and you forever. (The Christian adjective for this notion is "catastrophic", as in catastrophic conversion, the Evangelical ideal.)
The opposite view is gradualism, in which enlightenment slowly accrues over time through diligent practice, and only in turning back does one realise it has, at some point, been attained. (And Western Buddhism often implies that it may remain occult even to death.)
This is the main doctrinal difference between Rinzai and Soto, the two extant schools of Japanese Zen. (Seon, Korea's Chàn-descended tradition, also embraces sudden insight, but interestingly, has divided into parties over whether further practice afterward is required to "ripen" it, versus insistence that the bang itself is comprehensive; you're done.)
Rinzai students meditate to precipitate the long-awaited thunderbolt that strikes off the shackles of delusion – weakened beforehand by the crowbar of koanic logic – leaving a mind gleaming in perfect clarity.
Soto types sit for insight – a post-cognitive grasp of the koanic nature of existence, which, over a period of years or lives, eventually calibrates our minds to the universal frequency – though we may not apprehend for some time that our minds have inexplicably taken to gleaming in perfect clarity.
I'd always assumed subitism developed within Zen itself, and was surprised to learn that it actually came from the Southern School of Chàn, having been planted there by none other than 8th century founder and Huineng successor, Shenhui. Further study reveals that the two perspectives were already current in Bodhidharma's India, and may have touched off the first great theoretical debate in Buddhism
The topic isn't pedantic; it strikes at the very nature of enlightenment, and therefore Buddhism. Are we a religion, as subitism suggests, leading faithful practitioners to concrete, certifiable metaphysical transformation; or a philosophy, as gradualism would have it, shifting the adherent's perception by subtle and cumulative means?
History tends rather to support the first, though test cases are often ambiguous. Exhibit A would be the Buddha himself, said to attain enlightenment at an exact moment – upon seeing the morning star after eight days of intensive practice. The softness in that argument comes from his description of the phenomenon, devoid of fireworks, euphoria, or choirs of angels. He just… woke up. (The title we know him by translates as "The One Who Awakened".)
The legend of Bodhidharma also implies a sudden change – we're told he sat before a wall for nine years and "became enlightened", though we have even fewer particulars about the mechanism of that. To the best of my knowledge he never described it, or specified a time, date, or even season. Did he "become enlightened" in a flash, or did he just notice that it had happened, and get up?
And somewhat strangely, Dogen – founder of Soto – by his own detailed admission also received catastrophic illumination. According to the man himself, he was meditating up a storm when the jikijitsu suddenly whacked his dozing seatmate with the kyôsaku. At the crack of the cane, Dogen awakened as well.
Yet this is also the guy who told us enlightenment is gradual.
So clearly the distinction isn't simple. There are many Soto stories of enlightenment events like Dogen's – moments where the dam broke to the fall of a final raindrop, and nothing was the same again. What's common to both teachings is that getting to that point, whether it arrives with chirping birds or marching bands, is intricate, esoteric practice, demanding much zazen and maintenance of one's perceptual instrument.
And that makes the query a bit beside the point, though it does remain intellectually stimulating.
Rather a koan in its own right, really.
(Photo courtesy of Felix Mittermeier and Wikimedia Commons.)/span>
After a recent very pleasant afternoon spent in the companionship of a beloved sangha-mate, I've fallen to contemplating the blessings of the Third Treasure.
This is the hardest one for us hermits to acquire. The Buddha is in the can. He's been and done, and left his priceless teaching and even more priceless (less priceable?) example.
The Dharma too is freely available. In fact, good ol' Donum Secundum is the great strength of my path. House-monks must cobble up an artificial, human-dependent Dharma to simulate the flow of the River we wild boys see in the sky each night. If in their rituals our domesticated brothers and sisters sometimes take direction from Les Nessman-roshi, it's that mocking up a universe is not for the faint of heart.
But we hermits, having sniggered at their choreographed pantomimes, must quickly return to the endless task of pulling Sangha out of plants, animals, mountains, tools, stars, meteorological events, water features…
For their part, cœnobites enjoy free and convenient access to, like, companionship. So much so that it becomes burdensome. Leonard Cohen, asked if he missed the days of his own Zen centre residency, diplomatically replied that monastery monks are "like pebbles in a bag, polishing each other smooth". He then pointedly dropped the subject.
But Sangha is critical, if for no other reason than to triangulate one's own attitudes and actions. A human being alone first becomes weird (guilty) and then insane (charges dropped for lack of witnesses), wandering off on ego-deflected tangents until simple reason, to say nothing of enlightenment, becomes impossible. Any sincere solitary will tell you that mindfulness of this dilemma, and self-monitoring of our course over the ground, claim much of our cushion time.
But as vital as all that is, it's not Sangha's greatest gift. There's also endless wisdom and insight; the times a fellow traveller solves a koan you've been working on for years in two or three words, and a tone that implies "…you dumbass". Then you return to your own practice liberated, in the Buddhic sense, and game to seize the next quandary.
But even that is not Sangha's highest power.
That would be simple companionship.
Here in the industrialised world, where humanity itself is roundly considered weakness, if not sin, we generally insist that social interaction is a luxury, and a superficial one at that. We absolutely do not recognise that refusing same is equivalent to denying food and shelter.
If we kept food from prisoners, there would be scandals, hearings, forced resignations, ruined careers; more advanced nations would levy the satisfying irony of prison sentences.
But when we lock people in dungeons, nothing happens. No gavel strikes, no activist shouts "hey-hey ho-ho", no candidate makes promises – even ones she has no intention of honouring – to eliminate this particularly caustic torture.
To cite a single case, a large percentage of incarcerated Americans are daily buried alive in solitary confinement. Not for days (24 hours being the maximum the average person can endure without permanent damage), nor even weeks, but years. Even sentences of ten years without the equivalent of food and shelter are considered trivial in American courts.
All of which is on my mind in the wake of four hours spent catching up with a close friend and comrade in Zen. I cleared the tea things much lightened, instructed, and renewed, and very aware that when the Buddha called Sangha one-third of Enlightenment, he wasn't being twee.
The equivalence is mathematical: in Buddhist practice, Sangha is of equal necessity to the Buddha and the Dharma.
Or to put it another way, you'd be entirely justified in locking your Buddha statue in a closet and replacing it on your altar with photos of your peers.
The Rinzai side of me is already smirking seditiously.
(Photo of "A Few Good Men" courtesy of Vibhav Satam and Unsplash.)
Sometime around the 9th century CE, Ch'an Ancestor Yunmen said the whole of this practice could be resumed in a single sentence:
"Every day is a good day."
It's one of those deceptively simple statements that seem trite and supercilious on first consideration. But try actually meditating on it: analyse each day – each breath – and draw up an airtight case for why it's a good one.
Hell, a good day for what? And are you making good on it... whatever it is? How do you do that? How will you know when you've done it? Can you ever have done it? Or have you already done it?
And what about Naomi?
Not so vapid anymore, eh?
That's what Yunmen (ancestor of the Linji, or Rinzai, school) intended. You're supposed to dismiss his quintessential koan on meeting. That's how you prove you're an idiot.
Then, if you're worth a damn, the second thoughts start dropping.
Which puts a whole 'nother spin on "Bobby Bones and the Raging Idiots", don't it?
Anyway, I stumbled into this song some time ago and thought it provided another excuse to post such reflections. The lyrics may be dippy and hackneyed.
Or not.
Sometimes you just wanna hear something upbeat.
EVERYDAY IS A GOOD DAY
Lyrics by Bobby Bones, Kristian Bush, and Lindsay Ell.
Refrain:
Every day is a good day
It's how you see it, that's what I say
When you wake up in that mind frame
Singing with the Blue Jays, sipping on a latte
Every day is a good day
Forgot to charge my phone before I went to bed
Now I gotta get to work but my iPhone's dead
I just missed my mouth, and now it's on my shirt
Ain't got nowhere to park but it could be worse
I know what to do, drop a little Ice Cube
You need to check yourself before your wreck yourself
Because...
Refrain
Some dudes texting in the movie and he's lighting up the room
There's a line at the stall and I gotta go soon
The car is on 'E' and I'm almost out of gas
Traffic's backing up, I'm going nowhere fast
When it's raining and I'm soaked
Got no money and I'm broke
Has anyone seen my remote?
But...
Refrain
There's a new episode of my favorite show and you ruin it
That one hurt, how 'bout a spoiler alert?
Refrain
It's how you see it, that's what I say
Tell me are you going my way
I'm singing with the Blue Jays
Riding on a Segway
Every day is a good day
"In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand."
Lin-ch'i (Rinzai)
(Photo of a Japanese sculptor's summation of existence courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
San Francisco is the capital of Western Zen. The sangha there – the Western one; Asian residents were already practicing for over a century – is one of the oldest in the world, founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1961. Today, most Zen teachers in this hemisphere have some connection with it, whether formal or incidental. (That's Soto teachers; Western Rinzai is less centralised, Korean Zen is bipolar – it has two power centres – and Thich Nhat Hanh's Vietnamese lineage is anchored in France.)
Today's SFZC is a freakin' 900-pound gorilla among spider monkeys, with three houses, an expansive endowment, and a giant sangha consisting largely of priests and priests-in-training. We hermits like to sneer about "enlightenment factories", but this-here really is.
On the other hand, it's nice to have a secure, established hub you know will be there tomorrow: reassuringly conservative, largely unchanging, eschewing relevance and doctrinal debate, and grinding out priests like a latter-day Ireland, who in turn produce reams of teachings for world consumption. In sum, SFZC – its history, its current role, the nature and limits of its authority – is a big topic among Zenners. Few of us exercise don't-know-mind in its regard.
But I'm not going to weigh in. Instead I'm going to direct you to their Dharma Talks podcast; for my money, one of Rome on the Bay's most valuable products. (To begin with, I don't have any money, and all of the teishos in SZFC's bottomless digital databank are free.)
The talks cover every Zen topic under the sun, in every style, as SFZC's diverse clerical corps take turns at the mic. A few of these lectures have about saved my life, when it needed saving. Others leave me more or less unchanged, but they're all useful and productive.
Anyway, dig it, brothers and sisters: there are a lot of them.
SFZC's podcast homepage includes links to such automatic delivery options as iTunes and RSS, as well an archive of the podcasts themselves – one per week right back to 2007 – for individual download.
So if you're up for 300-odd ordained-types throwing down some serious Zen, swing on by San Francisco's perpetual Teisho Slam. Whatever you need, you'll find it there.
Some months ago I had a refreshing conversation on Zen ethics with a fellow hermit on Mastodon. We're equally sceptical of quietism – the religious posture by which forms are judged sufficient to practice and action anathema – and our discussion helped me clarify some of my own thoughts on a matter that's critically pressing.
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