Street Level Zen: Captivity

"Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing... how the world still dearly loves a cage."

   Maude.


– From lifelong favourite Harold and Maude, which entire movie has an atmosphere I would later recognise as the precise texture of Zen koans and stories.

    "Why not kill yourself?" asked the monk

    "No place to start," said Caoshan.




(Photo courtesy of Chris Fuller and Unsplash.com.)

Responsiblity Kyôsaku

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
Exodus 23:2


(Photo of Fudo Myō-ō statue courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

Emptiness

"It's the hole that makes the doughnut."

The I Ching. (Probably.)


(Pre-certified doughnut courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Zenola

I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.

(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)

But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.

Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.

The recipe is as follows:

30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
  cranberry raisins
  dried apples
  dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger

(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)

At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)

I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.

Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.

In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.

Sobriety Kyôsaku

An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.

Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.

– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.


(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)

Passing Through

incola ego sum
apud te
in terra
et peregrinus
sicut omnes patres mei.

Psalterium Sancti Hieronymi, 38:13

(English translation here.)


(Photo courtesy of Atlas Green and Unsplash.com.)

A Prayer for the New Year

I first encountered the oft-cited invocation below in a newspaper column by United Congregational minister Dale Turner. At the time I assumed he was the author, but when the Internet happened years later, I found that its provenance is indeterminate. (No shade on the Rev. Turner, who frequently shared gems from his own tireless study, and undoubtedly flagged this as another in the column I read.)

In fact, no-one seems to know where these memorable lines come from. One source claims it's a traditional Kenyan prayer, but I was unable to verify that, either.

As for me, its very anonymity is value-added. Those many pithy, compelling observations that knock around the world, repeated for generations, unattributed or misattributed, are often the most profound; the mere fact they've travelled so far demonstrates how powerful they are.

Any road, this one became a form in my Christian practice. Now twenty years further, having taken the Zen path, I see no reason to change that.

So may this teaching from the great Zen master Anon be a guide and a buttress to fellow seekers in the coming year.

The Truth Testimony

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth
From the laziness that is content with half truths
O God of Truth
Deliver us.


(Photo courtesy of Seiya Maeda and Unsplash.com.)

Merry Christmas 2025

My very best wishes to all Rusty Ring readers, regular and irregular, on this Christmas Day.

May it be filled with warmth and light.

Both that you find, and that you make.

The first is luck.

The second, skill.


(Photo of Kinkaku at Kinkaku-ji [Rokuon-ji] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

How To Be Sad At Christmas

Like a lot of old people, I've come to find myself adrift at Christmas.

Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own.

I never found a home in humanity. So here I sit.

There's a certain irony. I was always the Yuletide warrior: the guy who spent the year sourcing gifts, and immediately on first December, sent cards, decked halls, logged kitchen hours, all while listening to holiday music, alternating between seasonal radio and my ever-expanding battery of Christmas albums.

Who knew the holidays were yet another thing you eventually don't qualify for if you're not married?

I'm told there's an entire nation of us, we solitaries. Though we mostly don't know each other. Isolation is best performed alone.

But fear not. This isn't another treatise on the maudlin holiday of the outlier.

Because I've come to spread the good news of Zen.

I've said it before: Zen practice doesn't end suffering. It just helps you suffer better.

A fact of which I'm well-reminded in December.

Sure, I'd love to have a warm home full of love and children. Somebody to give to. Somebody to share with.

But I can always cherish the desire itself. In spite of our Western thoughtways – our conviction that life has a scoreboard, marking each passing second "earned" or "unearned" – just the belief in Christmas is joy enough.

There's also something to be said for standing outside of a thing to fully see into it. Clear-seeing is harder to pull off from too close.

As my world has shrunk to a room, I've gained a great deal of pleasure in this season. All that's going on around me. The responses that weather and light and sights and smells elicit. The memories, and yes, even the unrealised dreams.

They were good dreams. And I'm grateful that my society maintains this calendar month of sesshin to remind us of such things.

It's important to affirm that our insistence on separating people into winners and losers is delusion.

So this Christmas, as in the past, I'm once again listening to my Christmas radio playlist – over thirty holiday stations worldwide. And if it's hard to get too excited about baking for just myself, I've still got chai and sourdough coffee cake, and pumpkin soup for Christmas Eve, and hoppin' john on New Year's.

And I'll get to have Christmas dinner with my sister and her family. If my circle has dwindled to little more at this stage, it's also true that I look forward to that all year.

And the knowledge that even that isn't guaranteed, in this world of dew, keeps me treasuring it.

So once again I'll sit through midnight on New Year's Eve, holding mudra, minding my posture, and smiling inwardly as the fireworks drive this year out, never to be seen again.

And into that vacuum will immediately tumble… something else.

Creation is infinite. And I am small.

A heartfelt Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters. And if that's foreign to your practice, then at minimum, a deep December full of cheer and contemplation.


PS: If you've yet to discover Internet radio, and would like a taste, Christmas Radio Malta is one of my favourites. Their website player is dead, but you can click here on their stream URL to open it in your browser, or paste it into your media player.

I'm listening to it now.


(Photo of the Jellyfish Galaxy [ESO 137-001] and surrounding space courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia Commons.)

Rain

"I am a continuation, like the rain is a continuation of the cloud."

Thich Nhat Hanh


(Photo courtesy of Anderson Mancini and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good "Song": Alice's Restaurant Massacree

This unlikely 1967 Arlo Guthrie classic has become a Thanksgiving ritual for American radio stations, many of which spin it on that day. Some play it over and over for several hours, if not all day – though seldom or never on any other.

Yet everything about this track is anomalous. For starters, in a market that then insisted that all songs come in under three minutes – and remains uncomfortable with four to this day – this one tops 18. The whole A-side of its album!

It's also harshly critical of a particular American war, and conservatism in general, and despite what some would have you believe, that sort of thing has always been embargoed by American media. (Yes, even in the 60s.)

And finally, of course, it's not a song at all; more like a long monologue with a chorus at both ends. (This art form is called "talking blues": a sort of redneck rap that gained mainstream appreciation in the 30s when Arlo's dad, of whom some have heard, scored a hit of his own with one.)

In sum, it's a bit of a mystery how the Massacree met such wide success, or came to be so deeply associated with a quasi-religious holiday. Or that such a scathing assault on Cold War conventions still calls so many of the nation's angrily divided citizens to enjoy a good-natured laugh.

(And it's had that magic from the beginning. I played this recording in my high school history classes, to Reagan-era students who seized it with delight. There's just something about it. Discuss.)

One thing is clear: this gem of American pop culture is a true Thanksgiving blessing, given the genius of the writing and performance and the welcome relief of whimsy on such a solemn day. Guthrie's text and tone evoke the spirit of the era – and the rollicking ideals of its young. Realism and optimism; hope and resolve; humour and candour, all in equal measure.

I miss that. And them.

For the rest, this story Arlo tells in first person is fundamentally true, with allowance made for good storytelling. Alice really existed, she really had a restaurant, and it really wasn't called Alice's Restaurant. Arlo and a friend really were arrested for an environmental offence on Thanksgiving Day. They really did go to court. He really was later called up for the draught.

As for me, I don't know when I first heard it – early 70's, I'd guess; radio, no doubt – but it's been a favourite ever since. I loved Arlo's rural delivery, his youthful smartassery, his opposition to militarism and the Vietnam War, and his parody of military posturing. Above all I loved his trenchant wit.

All of which reinforced my own burgeoning career as a wiseacre. Now friends, there's only one or two things that the adults in my life might've done in response to this and the first was that they could have risen to their feet cheering, which wasn't very likely and I didn't expect it.

Anyway, here a half-century on, we're suddenly back in a place where singing a couple bars of Alice's Restaurant and walking out may be a duty we must all again perform. And two decades of Zen practice, with its tales of eccentric japes before the coercive glare of authority, have done little to spoil my taste for it.

So Happy Thanksgiving to my American brothers and sisters; peace and insight to all.

All Religious Morality

One lonely commandment:

If you don't like it, don't be it.


(Photo courtesy of Danh Đãnh and Unsplash.com.)

Brief Visual Meditation

Courtesy of a Zen droogie on social media.

Bashō's Frog

Matsuo Bashō (芭蕉) was a wandering Zen hermit of the Edo period, as well as an accomplished poet. Popularly considered the father of modern haiku, many of his verses are accepted as teaching in Zen circles today. The readily-memorised haiku format may drive some of this posterity, but there's no denying that Bashō's work often encodes palpable koanic insight.

Interestingly, his status as a self-trained free-range monk is rarely mentioned in our discussions of him, though we're happy to claim Bashō as the "Zen one" of Japan's Four Great Haikunists.

Thus do conservatives lay claim to the dissenters of yore.

Yet the eremitical nature of Bashō's practice is clearly evident in much of his work. Particularly his most famous poem, which is not merely lauded as Bashō's best, but in fact as the most awesomest haiku ever written, by anyone.

Feel up to it?

OK, clear your mind.

Ready?

the old pond
a frog jumps in
plop

That's it.

That's the poem.


Stuff to Notice

To begin with, this translation (Alan Watts, this time) is only one of dozens if not hundreds available; about which, more later. But I especially value Alan's take, emphasising as it does the humour that's central to Bashō's perspective.

Note also that while haiku – at least the classic kind – is supposed to contain references to nature, this one has nature coming out of its ears. I mean, there's no moonlight or cherry blossoms or summer rain or drifting snow. Nothing pretty, you dig. But nature? Yeah. It's got that in spades.

In his sardonic hermit way, Bashō seems to be saying, "I got yer nature, RIGHT HEAH!"

And then there's the Zen.

You may be thinking, "Big deal. Frog jumps in water. There's a noise. Nothing to see here."

And you may be right. I mean, you can get that kind of stuff anywhere, for cheap or free. Nothing unique is going on here. Nothing special.

Scared frog jumps in water, goes splash; not a headline you're likely to see in the Times.

Meanwhile, concentric circles are expanding in the water, lapping at the edges, returning through other circles approaching from behind. Frog resurfaces, climbs out. More circles. Wet frog drips, log gets wet, water runs off into pond.

The concentric circles expand and retract forever. The whole pond is implicated. And also its environs. And their environs. And all the environs beyond that.

And that's just one possible response. Maybe there's some suchness in there. Maybe some satori. Some admirers see all seven Zen principles of composition in these three banal lines.

Which is why they're sometimes called the most perfect haiku ever penned.

But not by its author, of course. We should also bear that in mind.


Language Matters

While we also remember language.

To start with, Bashō never wrote the poem reproduced above. And if by chance he had happened on it, none of that chicken scratch would have meant a thing to him. Because his text (per this source) was actually this:

古池や
蛙飛こむ
水の音

Which works out to:

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

You don't need any Japanese to feel the visceral difference between this and literally anything it might have inspired in English. In fact, if you want to see just how thoroughly we anglophones can mess something up, check out the 32 translations catalogued here.

Robert Aitken's commentary on that page is also well worth the read, as is his stab at the source material:

The old pond has no walls;
a frog just jumps in;
do you say there is an echo?

And if you really want a plunge into the abyss, try Geoffrey Wilkinson, who starts with an acerbic comment on this whole frog thing, and then… well…

Go see for yourself. By the time Wilkinson's done he's taken you on a fascinating street tour of the haiku form and this one in particular, including several parodies by Japanese monks and poets over the past 500 years.

For example:

Old pond—
Bashō jumps in
the sound of water

– Zen master Sengai Gibon, 1750–1837.


Master Bashō,
at every plop
stops walking

– Anon, 18th century.


...while fellow hermit Ryōkan (1758–1831) had this to add:

The new pond—
not so much as the sound of
a frog jumping in


To say nothing of the fellow who wrote a limerick. (Yes, really.)

So if you're a fan of haiku, or hermits, or haiku-writing hermits, take a good surf into the lore of Bashō's frog. By the end of the evening you will have visited many corners of Zen, Japan, poetry, and history, and learned a great deal about the practice value of small bodies of water.


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

WW: Autumn bullfrog

(Here's another bullfrog [Rana (Lithobates) catesbeiana], rather better lit and differentiated from her background. She's a whole handful, likely weighing about a pound; I found her sitting zazen in the middle of a local bike path on a cool autumn day.

Literally just sitting, untroubled by bikes, dogs, or walkers, as one seldom finds her kind.

Frogs play an outsized role in Zen, but I'll temper my monastic impulses and guess that my sister's equanimous demeanour was down more likely to being zombied out on incipient hibernation, and heading to a winter bed in the muddy lake some yards away.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Timely Reminder

"Strictly speaking, every unenlightened practitioner is mixing their own convictions and belief systems with Buddhism. There is no way around it.

"We need to acknowledge that in ourselves and understand that our perception of reality is clouded by many things, some of which are ideologies and beliefs."

—This salient practice point courtesy of an astute sanghamate in Reddit group r/Buddhism/.

(Photo of torii gate [a Shinto symbol that's been widely embraced by Japanese Zen] at Mosteiro Zem Budista, Ibiraçu, Brazil, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Tandem

Let us walk alone together, comrade sojourner.
We will be like pebbles in a bag, polishing each other bright.


(Ship's dogs, ca. 1920, courtesy of the US Navy and Rawpixel.com.)

Vaudeville Dharma

"Dying is easy. Practice is hard."

(My monastic riff on a hallowed show biz pun.)


(Photo of Chàn ancestor Hanshan Deqing's mummy courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Theory Kyôsaku

The theory is really simple.

The only problem is that theory alone will not help us to be content with our practice.

Although practice of the buddha way is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world, I think it is a fact that we are never quite content with our practice.

Why?


– Though unattributed in the source, this very Soto teaching apparently comes from Muhō Nölke, former abbot of Antaiji.


(Photo courtesy of Antoine Taveneaux and Wikimedia Commons.)