Far less endangered is the mental activity surmise describes. In ordinary human affairs, the act of surmising is not only habitual but also necessary for survival. Precisely defined, surmise means “to infer or conclude from inconclusive or uncertain evidence.” And if you have been up for several hours, it’s likely that you’ve already surmised a hundred times or more.

Looking out the window, let us imagine, you observed dark clouds in a pewter sky, and you surmised that rain was on the way. Feeling an unwonted ache or pain, you surmised its cause. Driving to work, you checked the messages on your cell phone, having surmised that it was safe to do so. And when you took a mid-morning break to chat with fellow workers, quite possibly you did little else than surmise, as you exchanged political opinions or indulged in local gossip.

All this is ordinary human activity. But as the history of the word surmise reveals, the act of surmising can also have a sinister dimension. As recently as the early twentieth century, surmise could mean to accuse, charge, allege, or impugn. And often the word connoted a false or ill-founded accusation. Those who engaged in such activity, consciously or otherwise, were known as surmisers. They were not to be trusted or believed.

A few weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Boston Marathon bombings, our present-day surmisers, armed with the latest technology, were out in force. CNN led the pack, announcing at 1:15 pm on Wednesday that a “dark-skinned” suspect had been identified and at 1:45 that an arrest had been made. Although neither was the case, Fox News, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe quickly picked up the story, all of them reporting that a suspect was in custody. Soon after, the New York Post, relying on information posted on Reddit, published a front-page photo of two “Bag Men,” who turned out to be an innocent high-school student and his friend. At once foolish and pernicious, ludicrous and libelous, this frenetic activity gave new meaning to “wild surmise,” a phrase coined by the poet John Keats in quite another context.

Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t take anything at face value. Double-check your sources. Revived and remembered, these common-sense imperatives might help to stem the tide of false surmise. But a countervailing force may also be found in an ancient Buddhist practice.

Known as “bare attention,” this practice fosters the skill of being intimately present for our experience. More specifically, it trains the practitioner to dwell in the receptive phase of the cognitive process, prior to conceptual thought. As the Ven. Henepola Gunaratana explains, bare attention “registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. . . . It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. . . . It comes before thought in the perceptual process.” * By closely observing our minds at work, we can become aware, in present-time, of the points where sensory impressions turn into perceptions, perceptions into thoughts, thoughts into conceptions, and conceptions into moral judgments. In short, we can catch our minds in the act of surmising. And with practice, we can also learn to protract the phase of “bare attention,” allowing, in the words of Nyanaponika Thera, “things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily.” **

Those who might wish to explore “bare attention” can find a detailed explanation of the practice in Thera’s The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, a classic Theravadan text. Instruction may also be found online. In contrast to the simplicity of Zen meditation, “bare attention” is a complex mental process, and it is not for everyone. But in my own experience, this practice can complement and augment such Zen-based practices as following the breath and cultivating “objectless” awareness. And in the digital era, where information is both more voluminous and far less filtered than ever before, practicing “bare attention” can provide a potent antidote to instant opinions, mindless speculations, and premature conclusions. Practiced with diligence, it can tame the wild surmiser in oneself.

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* Venerable Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Wisdom 1991), 152

** Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (Weiser 1988), 35.

Manjusri

One afternoon many years ago, when my son and I were playing chess at our dining-room table, our conversation turned to a woman I’d recently met.

“She seems honest,” I cautiously observed.

“I would have said ‘straightforward,’ Dad,” Alexander replied, taking my rook with his knight. Although he was only thirteen at the time, he was even then a stickler for definitions.

As it happened, however, father and son were both close to the mark. The word straightforward is a relative newcomer to the English language. The first usage cited by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1806. Originally, the meaning of straightforward was primarily descriptive. The word meant “directly in front of or onwards; in direct order.” But by the end of the nineteenth century, straightforward had acquired a moral aura, as in the Rev. Griffith John’s characterization of one Mr. Wei as a “plain, honest, straightforward-looking man” (1875). If not quite synonyms, honest and straightforward had come to occupy the same moral universe.

In English translations of Zen texts, the word straightforward also has a positive moral valence. A famous Zen story recounts a chance meeting between a bodhisattva (enlightened monk) and the wise layman Vimalakirti, who is returning to the noisy city of Vaishali after some time away.

“Where are you coming from, Layman?” asks the monk.

“I am coming from the place of practice,” Vimalakirti replies.

“The place of practice—where is that?”

“A straightforward mind is the place of practice,” Vimalakirti declares. Rendered into Japanese as jikishin kore dojo, this remark has since become a proverb, closely associated with Zen, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts.

In Japanese, jiki can mean “direct,” “correct,” “repair,” or “looking straight ahead.” In his commentary on jikishin kore dojo, the scholar and translator William Scott Wilson notes that “one element of the archaic script depicts a decoration, or ornament, or possibly a tattoo above an eyebrow to strengthen a charm or incantation.”* This marking allows the viewer to adjust whatever is not straight or correct. As an analogue, Wilson quotes a line from the Book of the Later Han, wherein the “straightforward mind” is described as being “without hatred.” Such a mind perceives things as they are, uncolored by anger or other strong emotions.

To see things as they are is one of the central aims of Zen practice—and one of the most elusive. “As human beings,” writes Roshi Bernie Glassman, “each one of us is denying something. There are certain aspects of life we do not want to deal with, usually because we are afraid of them. Sometimes it is society itself that is in denial.”** How can we possibly see things as they are if we are sore afraid? If we are denying half of what we see? And by what means can we become aware, both of things as they really are and of our habitual denial?

The Zen tradition embraces a host of “skillful means,” including the chanting of the Second Great Vow, in which we acknowledge that “delusions are inexhaustible” and undertake to “extinguish them all.” But no method is more fundamental than the practice of zazen, or seated meditation, in which we endeavor to remove the “ego filter” erected by our likes and dislikes, our preferences and notions. Not for nothing is the practice symbolized by Manjusri, bodhisattva of wisdom, who wields a flaming sword. By practicing zazen we cut through the veils of dualistic thought, opening our minds and hearts to interdependent, undifferentiated reality.  As Roshi Glassman puts it, we “bear witness to all of life.”

For those who practice in the Soto Zen tradition, the practice of zazen consists primarily of shikantaza, or “just sitting.”  By sitting quietly in full awareness, the practitioner allows the lamp of mindfulness to thaw what the eighteenth-century Soto master Menzan Zuiho Zenji called the “frozen blockage of emotion-thought.” By contrast, the Rinzai school of Zen advocates brisk, energetic practice and fierce concentration, whether its object be the flow of the breath or the living heart of a classic koan. But whether one is inclined, for reasons of temperament or training, toward Soto, Rinzai, or some modern amalgam of the two, the objective is much the same. To perceive the indivisible oneness of all life, clearly and continuously, and to act accordingly for the good of others and oneself, are the guiding purposes of Zen practice. And toward those ends, no faculty is more essential than a truly straightforward mind.

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* William Scott Wilson, The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea (Shambhala, 2013), Kindle edition, 1303. Wilson translates jikishin as the “straightforward mind.” In The Vimalakirti Sutra (Columbia University Press, 1997), Burton Watson translates the Chinese term chih-hsin (jikishin) as “upright mind,” but in a footnote he writes that chih-hsin “may also be translated as  `straightforward mind’ or `direct mind.’”

** Roshi Bernie Glassman, “Bear Witness to All of Life” (Shambhala Sun, May 2013), 57

Photo by Xafran

Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh

If there is one indisputable fact of ordinary experience, it is that all things come and go. The bus arrives, picks up its passengers, and departs. Children grow up and leave home. Friends die. Yet throughout the literature of Zen we find the resonant phrase, “no coming, no going.” And over the centuries Zen teachers have often intoned that phrase, as if its meaning were self-evident.

For most people, I suspect, it is not, but it can sometimes be intuited through direct experience. With that aim in mind, I would like to offer a simple, twenty-minute exercise, drawn from the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

This exercise consists of four gathas, or meditative verses. If you wish to explore the exercise, I would recommend that you record the gathas, leaving silent, four-minute intervals between them. Or, if possible, sit with a group, and appoint one member to recite the gathas. If you have a small bell to ring before each of the gathas, so much the better.

Begin by assuming a stable, upright posture, either on a cushion or in a chair. Take a deep breath and gently release it. Take another and do the same. Then relax, letting your awareness settle into your lower abdomen. Feel your belly rise and fall, as your breath flows into and out of your body. When your mind is calm, and you are fully present, proceed to the exercise.

Aware of my in-breath, I breathe in.

Seeing my in-breath no longer there, I breathe out.

Silently recite this gatha, and all subsequent gathas, at least ten times. You may find it helpful to abbreviate the language: aware of in-breath;  in-breath no longer there.  Maintain full awareness of breathing, noting the points where your in-breath begins and ends.

Aware of the birth of my in-breath, I breathe in.    (Birth of in-breath)

Aware of the death of my in-breath, I breathe out.   (Death of in-breath)

As you practice with this gatha, view the beginning of each inhalation as a birth and its end as a death. Note that your breaths vary in depth, length, and texture. Closely observe these changes, but do not interfere with your breathing.

Seeing my in-breath born from conditions, I breathe in.  (Birth of in-breath conditional).

Seeing my in-breath die from conditions, I breathe out.   (Death of in-breath conditional).

By focusing attention on your ever-changing breath, this gatha heightens your awareness of its conditional nature. Here the primary condition is the state of your respiratory system, specifically your lungs. If they are not yet full and are functioning normally, your in-breath can continue. If not, your in-breath must end. This is, because that is: your in-breath depends upon causes and conditions. It is not a separate entity.

Seeing my in-breath comes from nowhere, I breathe in.  (Breath from nowhere)

Seeing my in-breath goes nowhere, I breathe out.   (Breath going nowhere)

As the previous gatha fostered awareness of your breath’s conditioned nature, this one awakens awareness of its unconditioned nature—what Zen calls its “emptiness.”

To cultivate this recognition, acknowledge that there is no place in space from which your breath comes and to which it returns. When conditions are sufficient, it manifests; when they are not, it remains in hiding. By acknowledging as much, and by exploring that recognition, you can touch the unconditioned realm of your experience.

In classical Mahayana teachings the conditioned and unconditioned aspects of our experience are known, respectively, as the “historical” and “ultimate” dimensions. They are likened to a wave and the water of which it is made. The wave is born, endures, and dies; the water abides. Over time we can come to see every event in our experience—every breath, sensation, thought, and mental formation—as both wave and water, empirically existent but fundamentally empty of a separate self. And we can learn to balance those two views of reality, allowing neither to dominate the other.

That is the work of a lifetime, but it can be enabled by this exercise, which Thich Nhat Hanh regards as “one of the most wonderful practices of meditation in Buddhism.”  What I have presented here is an abbreviated version of a much longer exercise, which you can find in Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Blooming of a Lotus (Parallax, 1991). Over the years I have often returned to this exercise, and I have found its cumulative influence transformative.

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Photo by Dana Gluckstein

Construction was simple. Rummaging in the garage, I found a remnant of 3/4” flat screen molding. From this I cut two six-inch pieces for the top and bottom bars. These I connected with a central, four-inch dowel. Using wire-cloth staples, I fastened two three-inch lengths of cuckoo-clock chain to the ends of the top bar, joining them at the middle with a handsome brass S-hook. My trapeze thus completed, I hung it from a branch of our pin oak tree. Ready for occupancy, it swung invitingly in the wind.

Sadly, the chickadees showed no interest whatsoever. Not on the first day, the second, or the third. I reported their indifference to my wife, who had not yet heard about my project. When she did, a look of bemusement or perhaps incredulity came over her face. She counseled me to be patient.

And patient I was, but to no avail. After another week went by, and not a single chickadee had set foot on my trapeze, Robin gently observed that perhaps the chickadees didn’t need a trapeze. They already had branches to perch on. My memory may be faulty, but I believe the word cuckoo might have escaped her lips. Being constructive, however, she suggested I place a few seeds on the lower bar of the trapeze. If the chickadees weren’t interested in gymnastics, they might be interested in food.

Although I suspected that Robin was projecting her own preferences, I took her suggestion and laid a few safflower seeds on the lower bar. Unfortunately, the seeds repeatedly fell off. And for another week the chickadees continued to ignore my trapeze. I felt discouraged and ready to scuttle the entire enterprise.

About that time, however, Robin came home from the Walmart garden shop with a plastic houseplant saucer. I could fasten it, she proposed, to the lower bar. My trapeze could become a feeder.

Once again I took her suggestion, fastening the saucer facedown and placing some seeds on top. And in no time at all, the chickadees began arriving. No other birds partook of our offering, perhaps because the feeder was too flimsy to support them. The chickadees had their feeder to themselves, and they seemed delighted with their privileged status.

Over the ensuing months our joint creation grew increasingly popular. Through the summer, fall, and winter, we watched a profusion of chickadees come and go. But when Spring came round again, I thought it time to make improvements.

First, I turned the saucer right side up, placing the lower bar beneath it. Second, I drilled four drain holes, so the chickadees’ breakfast would not get soggy when it rained. And third, I sealed the whole contraption with two coats of polyurethane varnish, giving it a pleasing amber glow.

Thus was born the Greene Street Feeder, as we came to call it. Basking in our success, I made a dozen more, selling them at bargain prices or giving them away to friends and family. So far as I know, all are still in use, regaling chickadees as far away as Iowa, Syracuse, and Baltimore.

Whether their owners know it or not, those feeders are also exemplifying the practice of Zen. They represent a principle embodied in the saying, “With people and things, neither grasp nor throw away.”* According to Zen teachings, all conditioned things are impermanent and empty of self. Given that reality, it is unwise to get attached to concepts and objects, grasping at some and discarding others. “If you truly want to encounter the Way,” wrote the sage Bodhidharma, “don’t hold onto anything.”

This principle is well illustrated by the story of the samurai who was carving a stick when attacked by intruders. Not having his sword nearby, he vanquished his enemies with the stick. In the same spirit, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once improvised a Japanese tea ceremony in an airport, using Styrofoam cups,

Those tales may seem remote from Greene Street and its eponymous feeder, but the principle is the same. To bring our feeder into being, I had first to release any attachment to my original idea, whose time, it may safely be said, was never to come. No less important, Robin and I had to make do with what was at hand, be it a scrap of molding or a cheap plastic saucer.

That saucer is cracked now, and the feeder is showing signs of its inevitable disintegration. But as I watch the chickadees dart in and out, I’m reminded less of the impermanence of our creation than of the organic process by which it came into being. By that process, I would submit, most of the things we value enter and leave the world, whatever our notions or expectations.

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* This phrase appears in a well-known poem by Layman Pang, quoted in Case 42 of the Blue Cliff Record. See William Scott Wilson’s The One Taste of Truth (Shambhala, 2013), Kindle edition, 1702f.  I am indebted to Mr. Wilson’s discussion.

Pruitt Taylor Vince

If you have a good memory for movies, you may remember Nobody’s Fool (1994). Set in a declining town in upstate New York and based loosely on Richard Russo’s comedic novel, Nobody’s Fool stars Paul Newman as Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a feckless, sixty-year-old handyman who, in Russo’s words, has “led a life of studied unpreparedness.“ Although he is blessed with humane instincts and a generous heart, Sully’s devil-may-care attitude and his boyish penchant for mischief have too often sabotaged his better nature.

Sully’s sidekick and fellow bungler of odd jobs is a garbage collector named Rub Squeers, who plays a role in Sully’s adventures comparable to that of Sancho Panza in Don Quixote’s. Rub is just over five feet tall. His large head sits “like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders.” For most of his life Rub has seldom paid attention to much of anything. He finds attentiveness “hateful and exhausting,” and he considers inattention “normal human behavior.”

What Rub does do is wish, habitually and frequently. During a lull, when he and Sully are out of work, Rub wishes that “we’d just start up again like before.” Later, when they do find work, Rub wishes “we were all through with this job and sitting in The Horse eating a big ole cheeseburger.”* Wherever Rub might be, he wishes he were elsewhere.

Rub Squeers is a fictional character, but he bears a strong resemblance to an actual person, namely Richard Russo’s troubled mother. In his recent memoir Elsewhere, Russo remembers his mother, Jean, as an intelligent and stylish but profoundly dissatisfied woman, “lost in some labyrinth of her own thoughts and impulses.”** Middle-aged, divorced, and caught in an “economic cage,” Jean eked out a meager living in the upstate town of Gloversville, New York, which she regarded as an “awful, awful place.” When her son was admitted to the University of Arizona, Jean saw an opportunity to escape her bleak environs, and against her aging parents’ wishes she went with him. Relocating in Phoenix, she began to put down roots, but after a few years she came to regard Phoenix, too, as an awful, awful place. And when her brief second marriage ended, she returned to Gloversville—only to return to Arizona a short while later. For the next two decades Jean followed her nomadic son and his family from one teaching job to another, winding up at last in Maine. But no matter where she lived, she remained unsettled, wanting always to be elsewhere.

Jean’s case was no doubt extreme. In Russo’s mature opinion, his mother’s chronic disquiet stemmed from both her straitened economic circumstances and her mental disorder, specifically her debilitating, untreated OCD. But as a recent Harvard study has shown, Jean’s habitual state of mind, however extreme, was not all that unusual. Most of us, it would seem, spend much of our lives dreaming we were elsewhere.

In their 2010 study of more than 2,200 people from ages 18 to 88, Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that about 47 percent of their subjects’ waking hours were spent being somewhere other than in the present moment. And they also found a positive correlation between reported unhappiness and the habit of mental wandering. People are happiest, they concluded, when living in the present and focusing on their present activities.***

Zen meditation can help us do just that. It can return us, time and again, to the present moment, until the habit of being present replaces the habit of being elsewhere. But lest the practice be misunderstood, it should be noted that the immediate aim of Zen is not to eradicate all wishes or abolish all desires. Rather, it is to cultivate a direct, continuous awareness of our present experience, including our wishes, daydreams, and beguiling divagations.

Rub Squeers may well be right: inattention is normal human behavior. And as Russo’s memoir vividly illustrates, by ignoring the present moment and habitually engaging in wishful thinking, we can wreak merciless havoc upon ourselves and others. To become consciously aware of our wandering minds is to allow ourselves, at any given moment, a liberating choice. We can wish for and dream of another life, as it is sometimes fruitful to do. Or, conversely, we can reenter, with curiosity and wholehearted commitment, the imperfect life we are already living.

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* Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool (Vintage, 1993), 81.

** Russo, Elsewhere (Knopf, 2012), 84.

*** Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” Science, vol. 330 (12 November 2010), 932.

Pruitt Taylor Vince, a well-known character actor, plays Rub Squeers in Nobody’s Fool. Community Photo from Rottentomatoes.com.

Let us say that tonight’s menu is Rotini with Lemon-Asparagus Sauce, a side of cooked carrots, and a Martha’s Vineyard salad. After a few bites, Robin may comment on what she has just eaten, or she may not. If she is silent for very long, I begin to get curious. “How do you like it?” I venture to inquire.

“It’s good,” she reassures me. But her real meaning, I’ve come to realize, resides in her inflection. If the sauce is dry or a bit salty, “good” will take on a rising, tentative intonation, as if another verbal shoe were about to drop. If the sauce is indeed good, as opposed to bad, the word will have an affirmative but faintly impatient tone, as if to say, “Why wouldn’t it be?” But if, as occasionally happens, I have outdone myself, “good” will be accompanied or replaced by “delicious,” “scrumptious,” or even “bellisimo!” At that point I will surmise that all is well, though in her own words Robin has “never been partial to cooked carrots,” and at the end of the meal, a discreet pile of those little orange offenders remains on her plate.

For better or worse, I am myself partial to cooked carrots and could eat them every other night. (To which Robin might add, “and we do”). Unlike Robin, who hails from Brooklyn, I grew up in the American heartland—eastern Iowa, to be exact. And a staple of our Sunday dinners was a portion of soft, cooked carrots, bathed in the juices of thoroughly cooked roast beef. As a grade-school child I grew my own carrots in my parents’ backyard garden, and I fondly remember sinking my father’s garden fork into the moist black loam of eastern Iowa. Even now, as I chop carrots into quarter-inch rounds or reduce them to matchsticks for Pasta Primavera, I recall their role in our family dinners and their place in my earliest experience.

Much of that experience is foreign to Robin, as much of hers is to me. And so are the vernaculars in which we, as children and young adults, were deeply immersed. Such delectable words as tschotske (pron. CHOCH-kah, meaning “curio,” decorative object), schmata (rag; inferior piece of clothing), bubala (a term of endearment, sometimes applied to spouses), meshugana (crazy, a crazy person; also applied to spouses), and oy, gevalt! (good grief!), all of which Robin might utter in the course of a day, were never heard in my family home—or for that matter in the entire State of Iowa. Long ago I abandoned any attempt to employ such words in conversation, lest I make myself a laughingstock. To speak Yiddish properly, not to mention expressively, requires a range of inflections and a repertoire of gestures well beyond the range of a plain-spoken, reticent Midwesterner.

Such differences of upbringing, taste, language, and temperament are of course the stuff of marriage, and if conjugal harmony is one’s goal, it is essential to recognize, respect, and if possible understand them. And toward that end, Zen meditation can help.

Zen is often thought of as a solitary endeavor, and in several, obvious ways it is, but Zen meditation can also support harmonious interaction with other people, especially those with whom we live. One of my fellow practitioners, who has been married for thirty years, notes that belonging to a practice group gets him out of the house one night a week, which is probably good for his marriage. More seriously, as the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh has often observed, the practice of mindfulness trains us to be wholly present, not only for ourselves but also for our spouses, children, and other members of our families. At its most effective, meditative practice fosters one-pointed listening and a moment-by-moment awareness of how the other person, be it wife or son or daughter, is responding to what we say or do. And over time, such awareness can transform us into better—or at least less annoying—spouses, partners, and parents, who at long last understand what to say and not to say, and when it is best to say nothing. Perhaps with luck and continuing effort, the practice of Zen may also turn a garden-variety cook into a passable family chef, who knows more often than not what his wife desires.

—–

Photo by Gran

Dennis O’ Driscoll
Photo by Kim Haughton

“He gave the art a good name,” remarked the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney of the Irish poet Dennis O ’Driscoll, who died suddenly on Christmas Eve at the age of fifty-eight. Dennis was the author of nine collections of graceful, civilized verse and one of the most respected voices in contemporary Irish letters. I am saddened by his early death, as are many of his fellow writers, Irish and American, who remember him as a true gentleman and a generous friend.

I first met Dennis at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin in the mid-nineties. We struck up a long conversation, which grew over time into a warm, collegial friendship. Whenever I was in Dublin I would ring him up, and we would meet for lunch at O’Neill’s, a Victorian pub with an excellent carvery. I brought news of American poetry. Dennis brought wit, a playful spirit, and a keen awareness of the Irish literary scene. The Irish novelist Belinda McKeon has described Dennis as a “walking encyclopedia of poetry,” and that he was, but unlike many encyclopedias he was never ponderous or dull. And unlike most modern poets, he had little to do with academia. Trained in the law, he had worked in the Irish civil service since he was sixteen. In our last conversation, in June, 2009, he casually remarked that I had “all the qualities of a good lawyer.” Considering its source, I took that as a compliment.

Dennis was known as a poet of the present tense. Acutely aware of the manners and mores of affluent, 21^st-century Dublin, he portrayed and sometimes pinioned the culture of “fast-moving, computer-clock-watching, speed-dating / Ireland.” But like many Dubliners of his generation, he was not a native of the city. He hailed from the town of Thurles (pop. 8000) in Co. Tipperary. And in his poem “Bread and Butter,” he recalls the fare of a bygone time:

Irish taste buds configured in the bread-and-butter

era, the donkey-cart-to-creamery age that no longer

dares to speak its shabby name, shamefully hunger

sometimes for the old values of the ham sandwich

in a scruffy lunch-hour pub: fat-framed meat in oval

slices, pink folds arrayed on greaseproof paper,

ready, at the half-twelve rush, to be sandwiched with

a wedge of processed cheddar, a slobbery tomato ring

lobbed in for good measure, a tattered lettuce leaf

revived under a cold water tap; white-sliced pan

of pre-focaccia, pre-tortilla days, buttered up incautiously

by the wheezing, plum-faced, sleeve-rolled barman;

cracked plate slapped down—take it or leave it—

on a sudsy Guinness beermat.*

Recalling this humble but savory lunch, the narrator finds himself remembering “a Tipperary meadow, cows / flinching from insects, fly-whisk tails / patrolling dung-encrusted hindquarters.” That image prompts him to recall the “moulded cups / of mushrooms” presenting themselves at his feet.

As the narrator readily admits, he is being nostalgic. He is a long, long way from Tipperary, and his remembered images bear the patina of fond recollection. But unlike the soft nostalgia for which we of a certain age are notorious, the tone of Dennis’s recollections is as objective as his images are precise. Evocative though it is of a vanished era, his poem is set in the present. And though its narrator may go on about ham sandwiches and sudsy beer mats, he never forgets where he is presently living. To be sure, his reference to such fashionable imports as focaccias  may be faintly disapproving, but he does not denigrate  the present or place the “old values of the ham sandwich” above the values represented, elsewhere in his poem, by a healthful regimen of “frosty fruits / smoothie, organic Caesar salad wrap, plastic tub / of watercolour melon chunks, detox glass of wheatgrass.” Rather, he views the two contrasting eras with a balanced eye, as might a seasoned judge or professional historian. Neither era is superior. Neither is to be prized above the other.

To see the past in this balanced way was one of Dennis’s gifts, and it is also one of the aims of Zen meditation. Zen teachings exhort us to live in the present, but that injunction should not be construed narrowly to mean excluding the past. As the essayist Chris Arthur notes, “To conceive of ‘now’ merely as some kind of perpetually isolated instance, shorn of all its interrelationship with other moments, seems more impoverishment than insight—an invitation to superficiality rather than to genuine engagement with the texture of the present.”** And in his commentary on the Bhaddekaratta Sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh admonishes us to admit the past into our awareness of the present moment:

The present contains the past. When we understand how our internal formations cause conflicts in us, we can see how the past is in the present moment, and we will no longer be overwhelmed by the past. When the Buddha said “Do not pursue the past,” he was telling us not to be overwhelmed by the past. He did not mean that we should stop looking at the past in order to observe it deeply. When we review the past and observe it deeply, if we are standing firmly in the present, we are not overwhelmed by it.***

Rereading Thich Nhat Hanh’s admonition in the aftermath of Dennis’s passing, I am aware of the all-too-human urge to “pursue the past.” I have little doubt that the next time I visit Dublin and stop in for lunch at O’Neill’s, I will miss my friend’s hospitable company, his cultivated voice and gentlemanly demeanor. But I am also mindful of the need to stand “firmly in the present,” and I am newly grateful for Dennis’s enduring poems, which so skillfully integrate the present and the past.

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* Dennis O’ Driscoll, Reality Check (Copper Canyon, 2008), 9-10.

** Chris Arthur, On the Shoreline of Knowledge (University of Iowa Press, 2012), 118.

*** Thich Nhat Hanh, Our Appointment with Life (Parallax, 1990), 32-33.

In this it is far from alone. Most of us, I suspect, have our lists of unwelcome sounds, and more often than not, those sounds are beyond our power to abate, much less eliminate. Under such conditions, a scriptural reminder might be helpful: “And we exhort you, brethren . . . be patient with them all” ( 1 Thessalonians 5:14).  But help may also be found in Buddhist teachings, which offer three distinct practices for dealing with unwanted feelings and sensations.

Include everything

To be human is to have preferences. Sweet over sour. Consonant over dissonant. Quiet over loud. And to enforce our preferences, we include certain things in our awareness and exclude others. But as Zen teacher Roshi Pat Enkyo O’ Hara explains, it is possible to do otherwise:

Just imagine what it would be like if you were to include everything that arises. Usually, all of us only include a certain amount: what we like, what we are willing to see about ourselves and others. We don’t include the things we don’t like about ourselves or about conditions and situations. We push them away. Denial.

As a countermeasure, O’Hara exhorts us “to constantly include everything that is arising.” As an example, she recalls her experience in a soup kitchen, where she became consciously aware of her disgust (“Is this man going to throw up on me?”). By so doing, she opened herself to “reality, to the conditions of the world of which we are a part.”

The phrase “include everything” gives O’ Hara’s practice a fresh turn, but the attitude she advocates is rooted in the Faith-Mind Sutra, a classic Zen text. The putative author is Seng-ts’an, the Third Zen Patriarch, who reassures us that “the Great Way is not difficult / for those not attached to preferences.” To “set up what you like against what you dislike / is the disease of the mind.” To heal ourselves, we must put our likes and dislikes in abeyance, allowing things to exist as they are.

Undertaken intelligently, the practice of inclusion can conduce to greater openness, tolerance, and compassion. In my experience, however, the practice requires vigilant self-awareness, lest the effort to be inclusive foster self-deception. Encountering an unpleasant sound, sight, or feeling, I may think that I am including that sensation or feeling in my awareness. But I may also be fooling myself.

Investigate experience

If we can truly accept an unpleasant reality, that practice alone can pacify our minds. But should that effort fall short, we can take the further step of investigating our experience, with a view to gaining insight as well as immediate relief.  This practice may be divided into two stages, the first pertaining to external reality, the second to the practitioner’s internal response.

One summer many years ago, I found myself subjected to disconcerting sound. At the time I was living in a room at Trinity College, Dublin. My window looked out on Pearse Street, a noisy thoroughfare. The din of traffic was constant—or so I thought, until I stopped to listen. Sitting in zazen one evening, I turned my attention from my annoyance to the sound itself, and I was surprised to find that it was neither constant nor in itself unpleasant. Listening closely, I noticed that the sound came in waves, as traffic halted at the stop light, fell silent, and resumed a minute later. Experienced in this way, the once-troubling sound became an object of curiosity rather than consternation, and my tension eased.

In that same sitting, I also examined my emotional response. If the sound itself was not unpleasant, what had caused the inner conflict? What beliefs, assumptions, or unacknowledged expectations had created my internal tension, and with it my negative perceptions? Those questions could scarcely be answered–or laid to rest–in a single sitting. But merely by entertaining them, I released myself from the confines I’d created.

Practice non-duality

In the Faith-Mind Sutra, Seng-Ts’an offers further advice. “In this world ‘as it really is,’” he writes, “there is neither self nor other-than-self. / / To know this Reality directly / is possible only through practicing non-duality. /  When you live this non-separation, / all things manifest the One, and nothing is excluded.”

In our ordinary experience there is indeed a “self” and “other.” And much of the time, that imagined separate self is at odds with a perceived other, whether it be a person of a different class, nation, or persuasion or the world itself, where inclement weather alters our plans and pile drivers intrude upon our peace. But as Seng-Ts’an observes, in undifferentiated reality there is no self or other, no Hearer or Heard. And as the Indian sage Tilopa reminds us, with practice it is possible to “remain in the flow of sheer awareness,” where “the appearance of division and conflict / disappears into original reality.” Dwelling in that awareness, we can experience the world not as concatenation of solid things but as an unending flow, where nothing is excluded, and even the wham-pause-wham of a pile driver is heard as the pulse of life itself.

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Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Include Everything,” Shambhala Sun, November 2012, 61.

Seng-ts’an, “Verses on the Faith-Mind,” tr. Richard B. Clarke.

Tilopa, “Song of the Mahamudra (Tilopa’s song to Naropa),

Photo by Julo

The snow of dharma? In Buddhist teachings the word dharma has three distinct meanings. In its simplest usage, the word refers to phenomena: the things of this world. “Aware of the impermanence of all dharmas,” the practitioner silently recites, “I breathe in. / Contemplating the impermanence of all dharmas, I breathe out.” But the word dharma can also refer to the body of Buddhist teachings, as in the Zen chant “Opening this Dharma,” where those teachings are described as “incomparably profound and minutely subtle.” And last, dharma can refer to the “laws of reality,” most prominently those of impermanence, no-self, “dependent origination,” and the interconnectedness of all conditioned things. As one master put it, if we can sit still and know we are sitting still, the laws of reality will be revealed to us.

Of those many laws, the inescapable law of impermanence is the most easily verified by direct experience.  If you wish to verify it for yourself, may I suggest that you sit still, in a stable, upright posture, and pay attention to what is occurring within and around you. If you wish, you may close your eyes, as Vipassana practitioners do.  Or you may leave them half-open and focused on a point three feet in front of you, as Zen teachings prescribe.

If you choose to close your eyes, you can readily observe that within your body and your inner life, nothing is permanent or solid. A moment ago, your in-breath was present; now it is absent. At the start of your sitting, your breathing was fast and shallow; now it is deep and slow. Before, your lower back felt strained; now, as you bring awareness to your spine and your lumbar region, the sensations of pain begin to subside. When you first sat down, you were feeling tense or sad or elated, but as you train your awareness on your state  of mind, you realize that in the time you’ve been sitting, your mood has changed. Indeed, everything appears to be in flux—everything but your awareness of the changes.

Should you elect to keep your eyes open, you can also verify the law of impermanence, merely by observing your immediate surroundings. On Sunday evenings, especially in the summer, those who attend the sessions of the Falling Leaf Sangha, our local Zen practice group, witness the gradual and sometimes beguiling changes in the light around us. We meet in a spacious, high-ceilinged room, whose tall windows look out on rolling hills. During the course of an hour, the light streaming through the windows brightens, dims, and eventually disappears. Experiencing those changes, moment by moment, from the vantage point of a still and silent awareness, we understand impermanence not as a concept or Zen tenet but as an experiential fact, as palpably real as the darkness gathering around us.

To be sure, it is easier to acknowledge the fact of fading light than to witness, as Dr. Boissevain does in her daily work, the impermanence of a human life ebbing and coming to an end. But by gaining, through meditative practice, what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “the insight of impermanence,” and by deepening that insight through years of diligent practice, we can cultivate the strength and courage to meet even the most troubling forms of impermanence, namely our own and that of our loved ones, with a balanced and compassionate mind.

Models of courageous realism abound in the literature of Zen, and nowhere more than in the writings of the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), a Zen practitioner who transformed the haiku from a pastime into a vehicle for serious poetry. In one of his most celebrated haiku (“Summer grasses: / all that remains of great soldiers’ / imperial dreams”), as in his travels throughout Japan, Basho contemplated the impermanence of life. And in a poetic sequence entitled “While Reading Basho,” the American poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008), writing across four centuries, recognizes his affinity with the earlier poet:

             The snow falls. Basho,

                        we are very far apart,

                                    and snow is falling.

            I’m almost eighty,

                        and as I watch the meadows’             

                                    brown grass vanishing

            beneath this whiteness

                        how can I not share with you

                                    the poignancy of

            passing time?

In this quiet lyric, Carruth pays homage to Basho by adopting his signature form. Each of Carruth’s stanzas is a haiku, with a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5. Beyond this formal connection, however, a deeper solidarity may be discerned in Carruth’s recognition of impermanence, embodied here in vanishing brown grass and falling snow. “Why / is it so hard,” Carruth inquires elsewhere, “to get rid of time?” “Is it because so soon I am going to die?”

Hayden Carruth was not a Zen practitioner, but he was drawn to Asian poetry and culture, and in his lines for Basho he demonstrates an intuitive understanding of the workings of the dharma. To avail ourselves of its support, his lines suggest, we have only to quiet our minds and fully acknowledge the reality of change. We have only to let it snow.

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Friederike Boissevain, “Here With You,” Buddhadharma, Winter 2012, 63

Hayden Carruth, Doctor Jazz (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), 94

The image above is a detail from a drawing by Robin Howard.

William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician

According to a recent report on the NBC Nightly News, American police have been running stop signs and causing serious accidents, so distracted have they become by the computers in their cars. To address the problem, the Fort Wayne, Indiana police department has installed devices that freeze the computer’s keys whenever the patrol car’s speed exceeds fifteen miles per hour.

This situation may be uniquely ironic, but the underlying problem is hardly peculiar to the police. On the contrary, in the age of the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices, distraction has become endemic. With so many objects summoning our attention, where shall we direct it? On what objects should we place our minds?

In many situations, such as when operating a chainsaw, we have little choice but to attend to the task at hand. Our safety depends upon it. But in many others, we do have a choice, and should we elect to engage in meditation, Buddhist teachings offer a variety of objects on which we might place our minds. If you are already practicing meditation, you know that the most basic object is the breath—its comings and goings, its length and texture. But beyond that, the Teachings of the Elders, as they are called, prescribe four general objects (or “foundations”) of mindful awareness.

According to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutra), a fundamental text of the Theravadan school, those objects are the body (its posture, movements, and parts); the feelings (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral); transitory mental states; and “objects of mind.” The last of these foundations includes such objects as the “Five Hindrances” (craving, aversion, sloth, agitation, and doubt), which impede meditation, and the “Seven Factors of Enlightenment,” which are to be cultivated through systematic attention. By contemplating the hindrances, we gradually diminish their power. And by placing our attention on the Factors of Enlightenment, which include concentration, tranquility, and equanimity, we purify our minds, freeing them of “mental afflictions.”

Zen Buddhism is a late flowering of the classical tradition, and though its teachings incorporate elements of Theravadan practice, its prescribed objects of mindfulness are fewer in number and less introspective in character. Broadly speaking, the Zen practitioner is enjoined to focus on the breath, whether by counting out-breaths (susokkan) or “following” the breath (zuisokukan); on koans such as “What is this?” or “What is the sound of one hand?”; and on one’s sitting presence itself (shikantaza). By so doing, the Zen disciple endeavors to cut through conceptual thought with the “sword of attention,” to extinguish the ego’s promiscuous delusions, and to abide continuously in the present moment—the “only moment,” as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh often puts it, “where life is available to us.”

All of Zen’s traditional objects are worthy of attention, but lest the practice become narrow and rigid, it is important to remain open to other possibilities. The Vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield, who speaks of meditation as an art, warns against fixating on any one object or method of paying attention. Instead he advocates a flexible approach, in which the practitioner’s “wise attention” becomes a “zoom lens,” opening from a concentrated close-up to the middle distance to a panoramic view, depending on present conditions. Practicing “close-up” attention, we focus intently on a sensation, feeling, or thought, eventually becoming absorbed in the object of attention. Practicing in the middle distance, we witness whatever is occurring, be it a mental event or an occurrence in our immediate surroundings. And practicing panoramic attention, we open the mind’s lens to its widest angle, allowing our awareness to become “like space or the sky.” In this unconditioned awareness, thoughts, images, feelings, and sounds come and go, as though they were clouds in the sky. And as a final step, we can focus on awareness itself, observing its “clear, transparent, [and] timeless” nature. Like open space itself, unconditioned awareness allows all things, without being limited by any one of them.*

Jack Kornfield also recommends the practice of listening to the “sounds of the universe,” which is to say, the sounds in our immediate environment. This practice, Kornfield notes, “brings the mind to a naturally balanced state of openness and attention.” In similar fashion, the Theravadan teacher Ajahn Amaro encourages us to meditate on the “inner sound,” or the “sound of silence.” In this esoteric practice, known as nada yoga, we listen first to the sounds around us, whatever they may be. Within that body of ambient sound, we may detect a “continuous, high-pitched inner sound.” By concentrating on this “nada” sound, we cultivate stability of mind, even as we heighten our awareness of the insubstantiality of thoughts, feelings, and states of mind. And if we persist in the practice, Amaro observes, we may come to realize the “orderly perfection in which the world is balanced within the heart of vibrant silence.”**

To place the mind on the “nada” sound, or indeed upon any of the traditional objects of Buddhist meditation, is a far cry from placing it on the latest garish pop-up on our computer screens. Yet in this instance the issue of “high” versus “low,” or “wholesome” versus “unwholesome” objects of attention, is somewhat beside the point. For those of us who spend hours online, claims on our attention are countless and more or less continuous. Given such conditions, it behooves us to remember that where the disposition of attention is concerned, we have a choice, and that our power to choose can be strengthened by daily practice. Moment by moment, it might be said, we are creating the reality we inhabit. And to an extent that may surprise us, that reality is determined by where and how we have placed our minds.

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* Jack Kornfield,  “A Mind Like Sky,” The Best Buddhist Writing 2004, ed. Melvin McLeod (Shambhala, 2004), 329-334.

** Ajahn Amaro, “The Sound of Silence,” Buddhadharma, Winter 2012, 27-31.