Earlier this year, our family doctor departed for pastures new. Like many other members of the Alfred, New York community, I found myself looking for a suitable replacement. Last week, I finally met with my new primary-care physician. Shortly thereafter, I remarked to my wife that this doctor might well become my caregiver “for the duration.” When she glanced at me as if I’d newly arrived from another era, I realized that I was showing my age. On further reflection, however, I also noted that this evocative expression, however dated, sorts well with three of the main tenets of Zen Buddhism.

“For the duration” originated in England during the First World War. Volunteers enlisted in the “New Army” for two years, three years, or “for the duration of the war.” Those who did so were known as “duration men” and were sometimes looked down upon by career soldiers. By 1917, “for the duration,” the abbreviated form of the original phrase, had passed into the common language. By 1920, it had begun to appear in the newspapers, as in the headline “Interned for the Duration” (The Shields Daily News, January, 1920). Almost from the start, the phrase carried negative connotations. Cognate with “endure,” its operative word echoed Samuel Johnson’s characterization of human life as a “state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.” And as the phrase gained ground in peacetime usage, it sometimes took on an ironic tone, as when a married man or woman spoke of being “in it for the duration.”

Zen teachings do not explicitly refer to “the duration,” but the stark realism conjured by the term has much in common with that of the Zen tradition. In his new book Enlightenment is an Accident (Shambhala, 2023), Zen teacher and author Tim Burkett speaks of “surrendering to what is,” reprising a familiar theme in Zen literature. Elsewhere, he defines Zen practice as being “about accepting reality as it is”—a reality that includes not only “birds and the sky and thestars . . . but also the backwaters and the swamps.” With this acceptance of reality comes an acknowledgement of limitations as well as possibilities, as when the Zen priest Zoketsu Norman Fischer, referring to a temporary illness, speaks of “living within [his] condition.”

“Your cup is already broken,” an old Zen saying reminds us, pointing to a second tenet of Zen practice, namely the recognition of the impermanence of all conditioned things. In classical Buddhist teachings, anicca, or the law of impermanence, is one of the three “marks of existence.” To speak of something lasting “for the duration” is implicitly to acknowledge its temporary nature. However painful or felicitous present conditions may be, they will eventually change, to be replaced by other conditions. Implicit in this reminder is the admonition to take the long view and cultivate a patient attitude. Less oracular in tone than such phrases as “This, too, will pass,” “for the duration” quietly asserts that even the most unhappy circumstances are, like the best of times, subject to change.

“All my teaching,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “is about suffering and the end of suffering.” Although that suffering may be mild or extreme, depending on circumstances, it is not solely an individual matter. Suffering is a part of the human condition. In this respect, “for the duration” calls to mind a third tenet of Zen teaching: that of radical interdependence, known in Buddhism as “dependent origination.” Whatever our individual preferences, we are all in the same boat. We are in this together, whether “this” be the now-receding pandemic or the ever-rising incidence of mass shootings in our culture. Though neither as specific nor as fatalistic as the French phrase “C’est la guerre” (“It’s the war”), “for the duration” acknowledges shared external conditions over which most of us have little or no control. Whether we elect to deny, resist, or accept those conditions, “for the duration” bows to their continuing existence, even as it elevates our personal suffering to a collective level.

Zen teachers speak often of the Great Matter, by which they mean the transience of life and the certainty of death. At the end of the day in Zen monasteries around the world, monastics and lay practitioners chant these resonant lines:

Life and death are of supreme importance –
Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.
Let us strive to awaken—awaken.
Take heed. Do not squander your life.

Intoned in a darkened zendo at the close of a long day, this chant may or may not be welcome. “Did you really need to remind us?” we might silently inquire, having spent the previous twelve hours engaged in mindful work and intensive meditation. But, welcome or not, the Night Chant enjoins us once again to honor and appreciate, for the duration, each fleeting moment of our finite existence: what the poet Mary Oliver memorably called our “one wild and precious life.”

Not long after I retired from college teaching, at least a half dozen friends and acquaintances, meeting me on the street or in the supermarket, asked me whether I was keeping busy. My practiced answer: “Busier than ever,” which seemed to settle the matter. Common to both the question and the answer was the unstated assumption that keeping busy is a good thing. Busyness is a virtue.

Which quite often it is. Busy people get things done. Whether those things are worth doing is an open question. But if nothing else, keeping busy structures time and keeps the blues away. And for those who might be tempted to wander off the paths of righteousness, keeping busy can be an effective deterrent. I learned this lesson at the age of ten, when I went around our neighborhood peddling plaster-of-Paris crucifixes I had crafted and painted all by myself. “Good for you, young man” said one elderly lady, as she reached in her purse for her wallet. “Satan finds some evil for idle hands to do.”

Taking issue with this conventional wisdom, one classical Zen teaching offers a contrasting perspective. In Case 21 of The Book of Equanimity, a foundational collection of Zen koans, a monk named Yunyan is earnestly sweeping the ground, giving this mundane task his wholehearted attention. Observing him hard at work, his brother and fellow monk Daowu challenges him by remarking, “Too busy!” To which Yunyan replies, “Brother, you should know there is one who is not busy.”

Like most Zen koans, this riddling anecdote admits of multiple interpretations. One of the most illuminating is that of Sobun Katherine Thanas (1927-2012), a renowned Zen teacher in the Soto lineage. “The one who is not busy,” she explains, refers to a “quality of mind” that may be described in three ways. It is the “awake mind,” the “not-knowing mind,” and “the mind of readiness.” Together these terms define the “one who is not busy.”

Of the three “minds” to which Thanas refers, the “awake mind” is probably the most familiar to meditative practitioners. The awakened mind is present for the present moment. At once alert and relaxed, concentrated and calm, it is neither lost in the past nor preoccupied with the future. It is focused intently on what is at hand. Beyond that, the deeply awakened mind has taken what Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto Zen tradition, called “the backward step.” It has shifted its general orientation from the changing conditions of the present moment to immovable awareness: from the successive acts of attention that create the contents of mind to the broader field of mind itself, which embraces those multiple acts of attention. This broadened perspective is roughly analogous to a shift on a TV screen from the play-by-play action of an NFL game, narrated by an attentive sportscaster, to the view from the Goodyear blimp hovering above the field. In this analogy, the sportscaster is our cognitive consciousness making sense of what it sees. The blimp (or its pilot) is the “one who is not busy.”

“The mind of not-knowing,” Thanas’s second term, refers to another dimension of this all-encompassing view. The mind of not-knowing is open to whatever occurs. Free of cognitive filters and tolerant of uncertainty, it meets the expected and unexpected alike on their own terms. Unburdened by prejudicial attitudes, fixed ideas, and self-fulfilling prophecies, the mind of not-knowing (also known as “beginner’s mind”) respects the unprecedented, unrepeatable nature of each new circumstance. Adapting to changing conditions, physical and emotional, the mind of not-knowing is nimble and courageous enough to engage them at close range. The Zen adage “not-knowing is the most intimate” epitomizes this aspect of “the one who is not busy.”

Last and most important for the conduct of everyday life is the “mind of readiness,” which includes and implements the qualities just discussed. Capable of both the immediate and broader view, continuously aware of both the contents and the field of mind, the mind of readiness is unhindered by ego-centered frameworks and limiting preconceptions. Also known as “the mind that alights nowhere,” it is ready to respond, flexibly and effectively, to whatever may arise. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi likened the mind of readiness to a frog sitting at the edge of a pond, calm and relaxed but poised at any moment to throw out its tongue and catch a fly. For my own part, I would liken the mind of readiness to the red fox who showed up one morning in our backyard. Sitting quietly on his haunches, as if he had nothing else to do or nowhere else to go, he was ready for whatever threat or prey might come his way. Beautiful in his own right, this visitor from the natural world was also a befitting emblem of the “one who is not busy.”

_______

Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life: Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is (Shambhala, 2018), 35.

Photo by Ben Howard

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 10:30 at night, and you are dog-tired after a long and stressful day. Climbing the stairs to your second-story bedroom, bearing your glass of water, you feel the fatigue in your legs, ankles, and feet. Reaching the landing, you are about to enter your bedroom when you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that something is amiss. You have left a living-room light on. The glow is unmistakable. There is only one thing to do: go back downstairs and turn off the light. But something impedes you from taking this immediate, appropriate action.

The Zen teacher Christian Dillo has coined a name for that impediment. He calls it the “friction of self.” Like the friction in an unoiled hinge, a knee joint, or a complex engine, the “friction of self” obstructs, delays, and sometimes precludes our responses to the situations we encounter in everyday life. It generates heat; it causes unnecessary wear. A subtle form of suffering, this obstruction in the flow of life can be minor, as in the present case, but it can also have serious consequences. To understand it, and to meliorate its effects, it can be helpful to examine its multiple layers.

At the most obvious level, the “friction of self” can take the form of a spontaneous, involuntary utterance. Depending on the circumstances, that utterance may be as innocuous as “Oops!” At other times, it may be an unprintable, four-letter expletive. For the most part, such utterances are not in our conscious control, springing as they do from our earliest conditioning. Years ago, my then Zen teacher, who was raised a Roman Catholic and later took up Zen practice, visited a religion class at Alfred University, where he engaged with students in an informal question-and-answer session. No sooner had he sat down at the front desk when an earnest student in the front row eagerly raised her hand. “When,” she pointedly asked, “was your first satori?” “Oh, Jesus!” he replied. Despise decades of training in silence, stillness, and non-reactivity, this honest, unfiltered reaction had arisen from the depths of his early experience.

Such reactions are often colorful, amusing, and revealing, especially when they are hopelessly anachronistic. (“Jeepers Creepers!” my wife is fond of exclaiming). Of more consequence, however, is our emotional resistance to unwelcome situations. Confronted with conditions we wish were otherwise, we resist them with various forms of denial, literal or rhetorical (“I can’t believe I left that light on—again.”). But even when we remain, however tentatively, in touch with unpalatable realities, we may busy our minds with constructing alternative scenarios, in which we made the wiser or more intelligent choice or paid attention to the factors we have unfortunately overlooked. “If only I’d been more mindful,” we might complain, “and noticed that the light was still on.” Or, if our minds are operating more fancifully, we might refuse to take responsibility for what has occurred, as if our latest misfortune had just happened to us, and we were not the immediate cause. As a last redoubt, we might mount our ego-defenses and adamantly refuse to act. “Oh, ____ it,” we might declare, silently or out loud.  “Let the____ light stay on. It will only cost a few pennies, at most. What difference does it make?”

If this last response seems rather on the risible side, it may be because it so clearly illustrates the machinations of the ordinary, egocentric mind—the one that places the fiction as well as the friction of self at the center of every situation, impeding what Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto Zen tradition, calls the “undivided activity” of the universe. Rather than assume our natural, dynamic place in that activity, we elect to set ourselves apart from and against it. We become the stone in the stream. Whether we choose to berate ourselves (“What an idiot I am”) or, in a healthier manner, laugh at our human foibles, we devote our energies to dramatizing our imperfect selves. Rather than attend to the situation at hand, we play out our internal dramas. Meanwhile, we stand on the landing, and the offending light stays on.

An integral aspect of Zen practice is becoming aware, gradually or suddenly, of the “undivided activity” of which Dogen speaks and our human tendency to deny it, resist it, or construct in its place an alternative reality, creating strife for ourselves and everyone around us. With diligent, daily meditative practice, however, we may come to acknowledge and accept the “friction of self” as native to the human condition. Like a faithful but annoying companion, it will ever be with us, reflecting, moment by moment, our intractable human nature. “Hello, Reactivity,” we might say, or “Good evening, Resistance”—and do what needs to be done.

________

Christian Dillo, The Path of Aliveness: A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body and Mind (Shambhala 2022), 207.

Image: Katy Tresedder, Coefficient of Friction (CC)

During her recent visit, our nine-year-old granddaughter learned to send Morse code. Having found the code in her activity book, she printed it out in her own, precise hand on a 4 x 6” notecard. As it happens, I learned Morse code myself when I was not much older than Allegra is now. Tapping a pencil on our dining-room table, I taught her how to translate the printed dots and dashes of the code into rhythmic patterns of sound. By the end of her stay, she was able to send “I love you, Dad” to her father. And to her grandfather (who was still in his pajamas), “Have a nice shower, Grandpa.”

The ability to transmit Morse code was not the only skill Allegra acquired during her visit. With a little guidance on my part, she also learned to play a C-major scale on her child’s-size classical guitar; to write her full name in longhand with a fountain pen; to deploy multiple metaphors in a lyric poem; to earn a little money by sorting, counting, and wrapping Grandpa’s coins; to feed the wild birds; and even to sit, silent and still, for three minutes (maximum). But, in contrast to these potentially useful skills, the sending of Morse code stood apart, in the respect that it has little or no utilitarian value. For all its importance in world history, as a practical matter Morse code is now next to useless. Her newly acquired skill will not help her compete in high-school sports or gain admission to an elite university or bolster a future resumé. Continue Reading »