Just Sleep

Among many incisive observations in Adam Savage's maker manifesto Every Tool is a Hammer, I found this boldest:

"There is no skill in the world at which you get better the less sleep you have."

Reading it, I declared aloud, "AMEN."

The belief that sleep deprivation is useful to enlightenment practice figures highly on the list of counter-productive teachings inflicted on Zen by the organised sangha. Our monasteries – largely indistinguishable from boot camps – glory in it: rousting monks afoot at freezing 0-dark-30, and then chastising those who fall asleep on the cushion. (Dōgen actually attained enlightenment to the sound of his neighour being beaten for this.)

It's worth mentioning that such machismo isn't limited to Buddhist houses, either. Most monastic establishments, of any kind, think stumbling about in a numb stupor is God's plan for humanity.

But it's not.

The fact is, any state that compromises your brain's ability to focus – being drunk or high, cold, hot, hungry, under stress, in pain – reduces the quality of zazen. And sleep is possibly the most important of all. I've found the more seriously I take it – valuing sleep as highly as sitting – the better I practice.

This lesson landed with an audible thud in the early days of my 100 Days on the Mountain. I hadn't planned for an adequate bed, and the lack of rest complicated my practice for every one of those 100 days.

In the end, it's your right and responsibility to decide whether to sleep or sit in any given moment. I eventually learned to do both simultaneously, out there on ango, a technique I still fall back on sometimes here in the Red Dust World.

In any case, it's always well to keep self-hatred – such as "I wouldn't be sleepy if I were a better monk" – in view. It's so easy to confuse that with practice.

(Photo of a sleeping monk ...seal, courtesy of Jared Wong and Wikimedia Commons.)

Perception

One fish asks another, "How's the water?"

"What's water?" says the other.


(Two veiled goldfish courtesy of Ohara Koson, The Rijksmuseum, and Rawpixel.com.)

WW: Purple nettles

(I found the patch of nettles [Urtica dioica] in the upper photo beside a bike path last week. Notice their purple stems and leaf veins. Usually nettles are entirely green, like the ones in the photo below that one, which was taken about five feet away.

This kind of variation isn't unusual in some plants, such as Digitalis, but I've never seen the like in nettles. Unfortunately they're past eating; I suspect they also taste different.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Rainbow over the lake

Too Important To Sell

A few years ago I read a Brad Warner post about getting others into Zen. Brad was typically circumspect on the notion, but he did admit to having attempted it from time to time. Which rendered me thoughtful.

I've never wanted to do that.

That's partly why my blog is simultaneously so prickly and largely devoid of any basic information about Zen. Aside from the fact that most of the text here is addressed to me, I've always imagined that what supplementary audience remain are fellow seekers, either already practicing Zen, or at least otherwise self-motivated to read it.

Any outreach I picture for Rusty Ring is limited to comforting members of my own sparse and scattered tribe, and giving open-minded others a balancing perspective on Zen convention. Thus my readers are generally friends and companions from the first visit, and nobody in need of or open to conversion.

This turns out a practical editorial as well as spiritual policy, since in the past 12 years exactly one werewolf has honoured my comments section with his or her gory theatrics. I've sometimes been savaged off-site – when I've participated in any Zen discussions there, which is rare – but at risk of a jinx, that one troll, several years back, is the only one I've seen.

It's just that, if you aren't selling anything, you don't attract much attention.

Now, if I hung out a shingle proclaiming COME HERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT, or I CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS, I'd be all up in readership. And, if I monetised, money.

And then my threads would totally be stuffed with people foaming at the mouth, rabid to debunk me. Which would lead to more publicity. Which would bring more readers. Which would score me more money.

What it wouldn't bring any of, is enlightenment. Not for me, not for my followers, not for the world at large.

This suspicion of apologetics is why Zen frowns on evangelism. Because the Christians have it wrong; you can't force salvation on others. You can't talk them into it, trick them into it, shame them into it, or even just sincerely hand it to them.

They won't take it.

The best – and I mean the rare and absolute best – that evangelism can accomplish is to cash in on the weak and desperate, those sentient beings so damaged and disoriented that they can't tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

I took the Zen path because I had to. World weariness had rendered my life unliveable, and it was this or jump off a chair. So I went looking for a practice.

Not a treatment. A task.

Nobody had to doorbell me or buttonhole me or altar-call me. I've endured all of that before. (Fortunately I'm of a nature to appraise rather than believe.)

Unless you come to enlightenment practice on your own road, for your own reasons, under your own steam, you can't pull it off. Instead you'll be recruited, distracted, and used up by unenlightened others.

That's why our monasteries make you kick down the door to get in. And why I write an underground blog that prospective readers must expend effort to find, and why I'm delighted to talk with interested parties about Zen, but usually end up advising them to stay on their existing path, unless getting off this Ferris wheel – which is the point of Zen practice – is all they want to do.

'Cos otherwise you're wasting your time and Zen's.

And both of those things are too important to toy with.


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

Boiling Water

The didactic, the secular sceptic, and the Buddhist polemicist like to point out that bodhisattva mind is always in us, and it's possible to hear it even in the grief, elation, and tumult of society.

It's also possible to boil water in a paper cup. So what?


(Adapted from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of a busy samovar courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Lake on an early spring morning