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62. Saying nothing

24 June 2010 by Ben Howard

Early one morning, a friend of mine ventured to compliment his wife, who was sitting upright in bed.  “You look lovely today,” he noted.

“Only today?” she replied.

My friend might learn two lessons from this experience. The first is ably expressed by a character in one of the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s stories. “Many’s the man,” he reflects, “lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”*

The second lesson is that the English language is inherently dualistic. “Today” in this instance is an adverb, indicating when an action occurred. Today is not yesterday and not tomorrow. By implication, if not by overt statement, my friend excluded those other possibilities.

Applying this principle to the word “holiness,” Thich Nhat Hanh offers this observation:

Holiness is only the word “holiness.” And when we say the word “holiness,” we eliminate everything that isn’t holy, like the ordinary. If there is no ordinary, how can there be holiness?  Therefore any words, even words like “holiness,” “beautiful,” and “Buddha,” eliminate part of the true nature of the thing in describing it. . . . When we say a name out loud, it is as if we are slashing a knife into reality and cutting it into small pieces. **

In Zen teachings, the act of slashing reality into small pieces is called discrimination, and the mind that performs this act is the discriminating mind, which distinguishes self from other and this from that. Employing dualistic language to that end, the discriminating mind might say that someone is an “acquaintance” rather than a “friend,” implying that the same person cannot be both.  Or, to view it the other way round, by employing language in the first place, the mind is led to discriminate, since language itself discriminates, eliminating part of what it purports to describe. To say that someone is an acquaintance is to think, or to lead oneself to think, that he or she is not a friend.

Dualistic language also generates opinion. The language may be minimal, as when women express their opinion of “men” simply by saying the word. Or it may be elaborate, as when Oscar Wilde observes that “all women become like their mothers. That’s their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” But whether the expression be simple or complex, direct or ironic,  personal opinion and dualistic language are of a piece, each serving to reinforce the other.

The American poet Jane Hirshfield, a longtime Zen practitioner, acknowledges as much in her poem “To Opinion,” in which she addresses Opinion as though it were a sentient being. Positing that a capacity to have opinions is what defines the human, she notes that “a mosquito’s estimation of her meal, however subtle, / is not an opinion.” She also recognizes that to think about Opinion is to have one. It is to “step into” something (“your arms? a thicket? a pitfall?”) Most poignantly, when she senses Opinion “rising strongly” in her, she feels herself “grow separate / and more lonely.” Opinions divide people, not only from others but from the wholeness of their own experience. And language—the poet’s medium—is both the source and the instrument of Opinion.

What, then, is one to do? Hirshfield recalls a line from the Japanese poet Myoe—Bright, bright, bright, bright, the moon—as if to suggest that by simply repeating a word we might honor the presence of an object, rather than slash its reality into pieces. And in her closing lines, she offers an instance of her own, as she recalls a few brief minutes when Opinion “released her,” and “[o]cean ocean ocean was the sound the sand / made of the moonlit waves / breaking on it.” Rather than generate an opinion, or divide self from other, the act of repeating a mimetic name drew her closer to the natural world.***

By such means, the dualistic character of language may sometimes be transcended. The self’s isolation may be overcome. But should those means fail, there is another option, which is to listen rather than speak: to say nothing rather than something. In one of his many reflections on language and silence, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton entertains that possibility:

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say where there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.****

Eloquent though they are, these sentences evoke the wisdom of saying nothing.

________________________

*Claire Keegan, “Foster,” The New Yorker, February 15, 2010.

**Thich Nhat Hanh, Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go ( Parallax, 2007), 122.

***Jane Hirshfield, After (HarperCollins, 2006), 41.

****Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence, ed. Robert Inchausti (New Seeds, 2007), 55.

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61. Batter up

9 June 2010 by Ben Howard

On Saturday, August 4, 2007, Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th home run. When Elvis left the building, as sportscasters sometimes say, the thirty-two-year-old Rodriguez became the youngest player to join the 500 Club. He also became the third player to do so while wearing a Yankees uniform, the previous two being Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth.

However momentous A-Rod’s achievement—the ball he drove into the left-field seats later sold for more than $100,000—it was not brought about by an act of will. On the contrary, his fervent desire to hit one more homer had stood in his way. On July 25 Rodriguez had hit his 499th home run at Kansas City. With expectations rising to a frenzy, he had tried through the next five games to hit his 500th, adapting his swing for that purpose. Only when he returned to his regular swing, trying only to hit hard, was he able to succeed. “I’ve conceded the fact,” he said afterward, “that you can’t will yourself to hit a home run.”(1)

In Zen practice, the counterpart of a home run in baseball is the experience  of kensho, which means “seeing into one’s true nature.”  Kensho arises from two primary conditions, the first being “accumulated samadhi”—rigorous meditative training—and the second a “triggering event,” such as the sight of a falling leaf or the sound of a stone striking bamboo. In kensho, the practitioner experiences a dramatic falling away of the personal ego and a profound sense of unity with all things. Of the many accounts of kensho in Zen literature, one of the most vivid is that of Peter Matthiessen, who experienced it while training at Dai Bosatsu Zendo:

And very suddenly, on an inhaled breath, this earthbound body-mind, in a great hush, began to swell and fragment and dissolve in light, expanding outward into a fresh universe in the very process of creation

At the bell ending the period, I fell back into my body. Yet those clear moments had been an experience that everything was right-here-now, contained in “me.”

With this experience came laughter, then weeping, then “a spontaneous rush of love for friends, family, and children, for all the beings striving in this room, for every one and every thing, without distinction.” (2)

Given its prominence in Zen lore, particularly in the Rinzai school of Zen, the experience of kensho can easily become a goal of the Zen practitioner. If he or she can just attain that experience, the long and often painful hours of sitting will be vindicated. Yet if there is one thing Zen teachings, Soto and Rinzai alike, agree upon, it is that striving to experience kensho only undermines one’s practice and defeats its purpose. In the words of the Soto master Kosho Uchiyama, “to think that people become great by doing zazen, or to think that you are going to gain satori, is to be sadly misled by your own illusion.”(3)  Or, as the Korean master Seung Sahn memorably puts it, “wanting enlightenment is a big mistake.”

What, then, is one to do? In his book Zen Action, Zen Person, T.P. Kasulis likens the longtime Zen practitioner to a seasoned batter at the plate:

Although the novice is always thinking about what he or she is doing while doing it (left shoulder down, eye on the ball, shifting weight to the front leg), the accomplished player, once readied in the batter’s box, ceases such dualistic thoughts and becomes purely reactive. Hinging total awareness on the pivotal moment we call the present, he or she merely waits, poised to respond to the virtually infinite number of paths the ball might travel.(4)

And Tetsugen Bernie Glassman, an American Zen master, has this to say about kensho:

I think kensho is essential—it has to happen. And so long as the practice is constant and steady, so long as the student continues to practice without being intent on achieving some “special” state, something that he or she has heard about, it will. When that idea of gain falls away, people open up. (5)

What these statements together suggest, and what centuries of practitioners have confirmed, is that if we commit ourselves to the daily practice of zazen, without a “gaining idea,” we will not only quiet our minds and ready ourselves for whatever life might throw our way. We might also find, in some future hour, that Elvis has left the building.

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(1) Bryan Hoch, “A-Rod Belts Historic Homer,” yankees.com, August 4, 2007.

(2) Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals (Shambhala, 1998), 129-130.

(3) Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought ( Wisdom, 2004), 18-19.

(4) T.P. Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person (University Press of Hawaii, 1981),58.

(5) Matthiessen, 126.

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60. From rouge to the color of moonlight

27 May 2010 by Ben Howard

On Thursday, May 6, 2010, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly a thousand points in less than an hour. By the end of the day, the Dow had bounced back up to record a net loss of 348 points. On that same day, British voters went to the polls, and the next morning we learned that Britain had created its first “hung parliament” since the 1970s, exposing America’s closest ally to new uncertainties.

Observing these changes and others like them, I’m reminded of the word rely, whose root meaning is “to bind” or “to fasten”—a root it shares with the word religion. Whether the context be financial, religious, or personal, on what if anything should we fasten our trust? On what should we rely?

“Some have relied on what they knew,” writes Robert Frost in “Provide, Provide,” a poem about old age, “Others on simply being true. / What worked for them might work for you.” Perhaps it might, but the realist Frost, who knows that “[t]oo many fall from great and good  / For you to doubt the likelihood,” is not convinced. “Make the whole stock exchange your own!” he urges the chastened reader. And in his closing stanza he offers this advice:

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all.  Provide, provide!

In New England dialect, “boughten” means “purchased.” If you have indeed provided for a wealthy retirement, you can bribe your greedy friends to surround your deathbed. Better them than no one.

At about the same time as Frost was writing “Provide, Provide,” the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji composed these lines:

In the world of these phenomena

where everything is unreliable,

where you cannot count on anything,

the unreliable attributes

help form such a beautiful raindrop

and dye a warped spindle tree

like a gorgeous fabric

from rouge to the color of moonlight.*

Like Frost, Miyazawa recognizes the unreliability of the world. Unlike Frost, however, he views the “unreliable attributes” of the natural world as the basis of natural beauty. Undependable though they are, those shifting conditions create the beauty of the raindrop and the gorgeous, changing colors of the spindle tree.

The Diamond-Cutter Sutra, a core text for Zen practitioners, offers yet another perspective.  In one of the most celebrated passages of that sutra, the listener who would become a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being) is admonished to develop “a pure, lucid mind that doesn’t depend upon sight, sound, touch, flavor, smell, or any thought that arises in it.” He or she should cultivate a “mind that alights nowhere.” According to legend, the peasant boy Hui-Neng, who would later become the Sixth Ancestor of the Zen tradition, experienced awakening upon hearing monks recite that passage in the marketplace.

But what does it mean to develop “a mind that alights nowhere”? The Buddhist scholar Mu Soeng understands the original phrase to mean “a mind that is free from any kind of clinging.”** It binds to nothing. However, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, using a different translation, interprets the passage to mean “that mind that is not caught up in anything.”*** Such a mind does not get caught up in the objects of the five senses because all such objects are “conditioned and constantly changing.” They are unstable and not to be relied upon.

What, then, are we to rely upon? As Thich Nhat Hanh points out, there are many stable things upon which to depend—the earth and the air, for example. But the most stable is “to abide in the non-abiding,” which is to say, to return through the practice of meditation to absolute reality, the ground of being, from which all conditioned phenomena, including the fluctuations of the stock market and the changing colors of the spindle tree, are constantly arising. Like the wave that rises from the water, only to return, the uncertain, fearful mind can return to immovable awareness, finding a place to rest and a source on which to rely.

____________________________

*Miyazawa Kenji, “Past Desire,” Selections, ed. Hiroaki Sato (University of California Press, 2007), 100.

**Mu Soeng, ed., The Diamond Sutra (Wisdom, 2000), 110.

***Thich Nhat Hanh, The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion (Parallax, 1992), 78.

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59. To study the self

13 May 2010 by Ben Howard

Imagine, if you will, that you are walking down the sidewalk on a bright May morning. The air feels fresh and warm. As you walk along, you notice the new leaves on the trees, the yellow dandelions dotting the green lawns. And as you take note of the external world, you also become aware of yourself moving through that world.

It occurs to you that you are a member of a community—a solid citizen, one might say.  But you are also an independent self, separate and apart from your human and natural environment. In your wallet you have an ID, and at home a birth certificate. You may also have degrees or diplomas, a lengthy resume, a record of achievement. Certainly you have your special talents and acquired skills, and you also have your preferences—wine over beer, perhaps, or neither if you are a teetotaler. Where personal finances are concerned, you are better off than many, though far inferior, socially and financially, to the celebrities you see on TV. In any event, you are separate from and superior to the toads, frogs, and other creatures of the natural world, not to mention the plants and minerals. Were you to liken yourself to a non-human object, it might be a late-model car—a Prius, perhaps, or a Ford Focus. Sadly, that vehicle will one day end up in the salvage yard, but for now it’s running fine.

Now consider your self from another angle. Although you might prefer to see yourself as an independent entity, separate from your human and natural surroundings, you are in actuality as porous as a sponge. If the weather were damp and cold, you might not be feeling so cheerful. Were the flowers withered or beaten down, you might feel the same. And not only your mood but the very existence of your “self” depends on “non-self” elements: the sunlight warming your face, the water flowing in the water mains, the breakfast settling in your stomach. Moreover, not even one of your vaunted attainments would have been possible without the support of other people: not your projects and awards, your commendations or your cherished possessions. Were you to examine your place in the cosmos, you might liken yourself to a wave, which other waves have created and sustained.

Such are the contrasting perspectives in which the construct known as a “self” might be perceived and understood. If the first perspective is initially the more comforting, it is perhaps because it reflects a familiar, common-sense view of reality. In Zen teachings, this viewpoint is known as “ordinary mind,” and its frame of reference is the “relative” (or “historical”) dimension of our experience. In the relative dimension, up is up, and down is down. Self is one thing, non-self another.

Yet to those who are living on the other side of our planet, what we call up is down. And from the standpoint of absolute reality, which in Zen is known as the “ultimate dimension,” conceptual dualities such as “up” and “down,” “self” and “non-self,” are viewed as necessary but insubstantial.  To exist at all, “up” needs “down.” Similarly, “self” and “non-self” are interdependent parts of an indivisible whole. As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, a flower is made of “non-flower” elements: light, soil, water, and so forth. Without them, the flower could not be. And what is true of the flower is also true of us. Without sunlight, water, food, and other people, none of us could live, or live in good health, for very long. What appear in the relative dimension to be separate entities—self and other, human and non-human beings—are, in the ultimate dimension, parts of the one, interconnected body of reality, where everything is changing, and everything depends on everything else.

To contrast these two perspectives is not to suggest that the first is false and the second true, the one benighted and the other enlightened. Rather, it is to propose that if we are to stay in touch with reality, and to live in harmony with reality, both perspectives must be kept in mind. “To study the Way” wrote Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen tradition, “is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. And to forget the self is to awaken to the ten thousand things.”

_____________________________

I am grateful to the artist Kaela Speicher for permission to use the image above. Kaela is  a 2010 graduate of the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. The image is taken from a photograph in her senior show. For more information about Kaela’s work, please visit: www.kaelaspeicher.tk and http://kaelarose.wordpress.com/.

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58. The sword of attention

29 April 2010 by Ben Howard

Many years ago, when my son was still in diapers and I was a new and inexperienced father, I spoke with a visiting poet about the challenges of fatherhood. Among them was the challenge of pushing a diaper pin through several layers of cloth without sticking it into my son.

Gray-haired and world-weary, the poet was himself the father of four grown children. “With our firstborn,” he reflected, “I used to worry about that. But by the time the fourth one came along, I just pushed the pin in and hoped for the best.”

I suspect that the poet was exaggerating, or tailoring his reflection for comic effect. But his remark has proved memorable, perhaps because it illustrates the degree to which second, third, and fourth experiences differ from the first. The first time around, we may be fully attentive, whether out of fear or wonder or concern. By the fourth, we may be indifferent or complacent. What once was fresh has become old hat.

To restore our initial wonder is a central aim of Zen practice. What Shunryu Suzuki Roshi famously called beginner’s mind is no other than the capacity to experience the world freely and openly, without prior judgments or self-centered agendas. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, he puts it this way:

Our “original mind” includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.*

Meeting the world with “original mind,” we bring a receptive awareness to whatever we encounter, holding our memories and preconceptions in abeyance. Original mind, Suzuki goes on to say, is the mind of boundless compassion. To return to original mind is to open ourselves not only to our immediate surroundings but also to the interdependent, ever-changing web of life.

But how is one to do that? By what means are we to meet the fourth—or five hundredth—experience of a repeated action with “original mind”?

In her book Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck offers this advice:

A zendo is not a place for bliss and relaxation, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We’ve all heard of it, yet we use it very seldom. It’s called attention.

Attention is the cutting, burning sword, and our practice is to use that sword as much as we can. None of us is very willing to use it; but when we do—even for a few minutes—some cutting and burning takes place. All practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in zazen but in every moment of our life. **

What the burning sword cuts through, Beck subsequently explains, is delusive conceptual thought. By paying close and continuous attention, we come to realize that “the conceptual process is a fantasy; and the more we grasp this the more our ability to pay attention to reality increases.”

Egoistic delusions are many, but few are more pervasive or potentially harmful than the illusion of sufficient expertise: of already knowing it all, or all that is relevant to the occasion. Whether the activity be pinning a diaper or chopping an onion, managing a portfolio or diagnosing an illness, the “expert’s mind” may well be closed to possibilities. It  may also misperceive the facts, jump to conclusions, or ignore conflicting evidence.  Cutting through the self-centered concept of expertise, the sword of attention clears a path to the unknown, unprecedented reality before us. Burning away conceptions and misconceptions, prejudices and expectations, it enables us to encounter the present moment on its own terms rather than impose our own. “Don’t-Know Mind,” the Korean master Seung Sahn liked to call it. “Only don’t know!” Difficult to cultivate and even more difficult to maintain, it is essential to the practice of Zen.

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*Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 1970), 21.

**Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen (HarperCollins, 1989), 32.

In the photo above, the glass artist Randi Solin is adding molten glass to the blow pipe. The glass is heated to a temperature of 2,120 degrees Fahrenheit. This image is being used with the kind permission of Michaela at http://www.thegardenerseden.com/?p=5763. Visit Solinglass at http://www.solinglass.com/

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57. Leaving things alone

15 April 2010 by Ben Howard

“Ah, she was a terror for the flowers,” an Irish widower once remarked of his late wife. “She had no gift for leaving things alone.”

Few of us Westerners do, including those of us who practice Zen meditation. “Zazen,” writes the Soto master Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, “enables life to be life by letting it be” (1). And Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, advises us to “let things go as they go.” But how, exactly, are we to do that when practicing seated meditation? How much, if any, control should we relinquish, and when?

Nearly all the manuals agree that the Zen practitioner should sit in a stable posture, knees down and spine erect, and pay attention to the breath. But should we regulate our breathing? Should we count our breaths or simply observe the flow of air as it comes and goes? Is it really necessary to hold our hands in the “cosmic mudra,” left palm resting in the right? Should we strive to silence our inner chatter—or allow it to continue? Answers to these questions may be found,  but they vary according to the school and the teacher.

Among those who advocate stern control, Japanese Rinzai masters occupy a pre-eminent position. Rinzai Zen has been likened to a “brave general who moves a regiment without delay,” and with few exceptions Rinzai teachers live up to that description. The renowned Rinzai master Omori Sogen Roshi advises the student to push the breath into the lower abdomen and “squeeze it lightly there with a scooping feeling” (2).  Katsuki Sekida, another Rinzai teacher, directs the practitioner to narrow the exhalation by “holding the diaphragm down and steadily checking the upward pushing movement of the abdominal muscles” (3). Similar admonitions regarding breath, posture, and concentration resound throughout the Rinzai literature, lending a tone of rigorous authority.

By contrast, Soto Zen takes a less severe approach, urging continuous awareness more than strict control. Soto teachers do emphasize form in general and correct posture in particular, but the intent is less to marshal the body into submission than to facilitate the open flow of breath and the cultivation of awareness. In his Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama Roshi admonishes us just to “drop everything and entrust everything to the correct zazen posture” (4).  In similar fashion, he instructs us not to suppress discursive thoughts but merely to let go of “all the accidental things that rise in our minds.” Firm but gentle, Uchiyama’s instructions typify Soto teachings, which have been likened to a “farmer taking care of a rice field, one stalk after another, patiently.”

At the least directive end of the spectrum, the non-traditional teacher Toni Packer advocates “fresh seeing” but no particular control of breath or posture. In her essay “A Few Tips for Sitting,” she offers this advice:

No need to be rigid about proper posture. The back lifts itself up spontaneously as the mind inquires, opens up, and empties out. It is intimately related to our varying states of mind. In experiencing pain, sorrow, anger, fear, or greed, the body manifests each mood in its own ways.  In openness and clarity the body feels like no-body (5).

Like those poets who view literary form as an “extension” (or revelation) of content, Packer views proper posture not as a form to be externally imposed but as an expression of an open, inquiring state of mind.

To the newcomer, the rich variety of methods that marks Western Zen can be more bewildering than encouraging. Whom should you trust, and what method should you follow? As a general rule, the unaffiliated novice would do well to choose a method and stay with it long enough to determine whether the prescribed forms of control promote or detract from the development of awareness. For my own part, I often begin a sitting with the Rinzai practice of susokkan, or counting of out-breaths. Later on in the sitting, I practice zuisokukan, or following the breath, focusing on the lower abdomen. Toward the end, I settle into shikantaza, or “just sitting,” which is sometimes called the “method of no method.” Although this sequence will not suit everyone, I have found it a skillful means for gradually relinquishing control. At the outset of the sitting I am, as it were, making something happen. By the end, I am learning, in the manner of the Taoist master Chuang Tzu, to “gaze at the world but leave the world alone.”

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(1) Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought (Wisdom, 2004), 102

(2) Omori Sogen, An Introduction to Zen Training (Tuttle, 2001), 42

(3) Katsuki Sekida, Zen Training (Weatherhill, 1985), 56.

(4) Opening the Hand of Thought, 48.

(5) Toni Packer, The Wonder of Presence (Shambhala, 2002), 17.

“Gaze at the world but leave the world alone” is the Irish poet Derek Mahon’s paraphrase of Chuang  Tzu’s admonition:

We have lost our equilibrium, he said;

gaze at the world but leave the world alone.

Do nothing; do nothing and everything will be done.

–Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book (Wake Forest University Press, 1998), 50

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57. CB’s list

1 April 2010 by Ben Howard

“Death is certain,” Zen teachings remind us, “but the time of death is uncertain.” What truth could be more evident, one might say, what reality more apparent. Yet that truth and that reality are difficult to accept, even under the most auspicious conditions. And should we learn that our own death is imminent, the difficulty increases a hundredfold.

So it was with Carol Ruth Burdick (1928-2008), my friend of forty years, who learned on the evening of Friday, February 29, 2008 that she had advanced pancreatic cancer. Known to her community as “CB,” Carol was seventy-nine years old. Surgery, as she saw it, was out of the question, as was chemotherapy. The plain fact was that she was going to die, and soon. Rather than share that fact with friends or family, she spent the night facing it alone.

Knowing nothing of her diagnosis, I called CB early the next morning to inquire after her health and to suggest that we meet for conversation, as we often did on Saturday mornings. When she told me her bad news, I  expressed my sympathy, but I didn’t know what to say. “What’s the prognosis?” I asked.

“About six weeks,” she replied.

A few hours later, CB and I sat at her dining-room table, looking out of her big picture window at her frozen pond. Her mood seemed preternaturally calm. “How are you feeling?” I asked. In response, she reported that during the night she had made a list of the ten “positive aspects” of her impending death. “You know how I hate positive thinking,” she declared—and then went on to read her list.

First, she would not be a burden to her grown children. Second, she would not suffer the humiliation of senile dementia. Third, she would not become destitute. Fourth, she would not have to endure a second knee replacement. Fifth, she would no longer need to worry about her internal pains, for now she knew their cause. Her list continued, each item detailing another benefit of her death—silver linings, if you like, in the darkest of clouds.

Exactly six weeks later, on another Saturday morning, CB passed away. Since then, I’ve often thought of her list. What prompted her to compose it, I’ve wondered, and what purpose did it serve?

To some, CB’s list might seem an elaborate form of denial, a rationalist’s defense against an implacable force. Perhaps it was, but I would prefer to see it as an expression of her literary sensibility and her practical outlook. CB was a published writer of poems and essays, articles and memoirs. It was natural that she would turn to language and literary form to articulate her situation. And CB was also an unsparing realist, who cast a cold eye on human folly and romantic self-deception. Void of such notions as a happy afterlife or a lasting legacy, her list acknowledged the concrete changes her death would bring, both for herself and her loved ones. It was not a wish list but a sober appraisal, reflective of both her stern Protestant upbringing and her literary education.

Yet CB’s list was more than a realist’s analysis. It was also, in its way, an affirmation of the wholeness of life. Positive/negative; good/bad; fortunate/unfortunate: by their very nature, such dualities divide the stream of being into artificial halves, favoring one over the other and falsifying the whole. Perhaps that’s why CB disliked “positive thinking,” which not only “accentuates the positive,” as the old show tune advises us to do, but also isolates half of our experience at the expense of the other. And perhaps that’s also why CB fashioned her list, which redressed the balance of darkness and light, sadness and happiness in her present experience. For her family and friends as well as herself, her list afforded honest consolation. Beyond that, it affirmed the unity of life and death, creation and destruction, even in the midst of loss. Sober though it was, her list was a hymn to life and death, a lapsed Protestant’s L’Chaim.

______________________

Carol Burdick was Adjunct Professor of English at Alfred University and the author of Haps & Mishaps: Sketches from a Rural Life (Whitlock Publishing, 2008). For more information, see http://www.whitlockpublishing.com/local.htm.

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55. Carols, hymns, and chants

18 March 2010 by Ben Howard

Like forms in the natural world, musical forms have their own, distinct identities. A ballad is one thing, a sonata another. In his review of the Cowley Carol Book (1902), a collection of traditional Christmas carols, the British musicologist Sir William Henry Hadow (1859-1937) explores the differences between two such forms: the carol and the hymn. Although Sir Henry’s discussion has nothing overtly to do with Zen, it brings to mind an important component of Zen practice.

As Sir Henry explains, a carol is the “folk-song of religious music; its essential character is simple, human, direct; it sings its message of joy and welcome, of peace and goodwill, and remembers, while it sings, the sanctity of motherhood and the gentleness of little children.” Carols are by nature democratic. They appeal to emotions that are “the common heritage of mankind,” and they aim at “no display of learning, no pageantry of ceremonial.” They are “the service of poor men in their working garb,” and they bring “tidings which all may hear and understand.” In keeping with their humble origins, the melodies of carols are “simple and flowing” and “easy to remember.” Their native place is the “open air,” where a “few rude voices” are singing “under the frosty stars.”

By contrast, hymns are most at home in churches and cathedrals. They are an instrument of worship, and they have an authorized place in the Sunday service. In their solemnity and grandeur, hymns represent the “majesty and erudition of the Church.” Marked by “intricacy of contrapuntal device,” “ingenuity of modulation,” and “colored or perfumed harmony,” hymns by the likes of William Byrd sort well with the “fretted aisles and blazoned windows” of the great English cathedrals.  Unlike the carol, which evokes a beautiful “beggar-maiden” in peasant rags,  the hymn wears “a sumptuous habit of jewels and brocade.” It is an integral part of Anglican liturgy, and it carries the weight of ecclesiastical authority.*

Zen has no exact equivalent of the hymn or carol. Western “bare-bones” Zen, as practiced by Toni Packer, Joan Tollifson, and others, dispenses with liturgy altogether; and even the liturgy of formal Zen, with its wood-blocks, bows, and bells, is a plain austere affair, at least when contrasted with Sunday morning at York Minster or Evensong at King’s College, Cambridge.

Yet formal Zen does make use of chants, which combine the most prominent features of hymns and carols. Like the hymn, such chants as Atta Dipa (“You are the Light”), the Heart Sutra, and the Four Great Vows embody the authority of a venerable tradition. Chanted in Pali or Sino-Japanese, they evoke a strangeness comparable to that of an Anglican Mass. At the same time, most Zen chants are, in musical terms, rudimentary. The Heart Sutra is chanted in a rhythmic monotone, and Atta Dipa consists of two notes at an interval of a fourth (do-fa). However strange their idiom or formidable their authority, they can be learned and chanted by anyone.

Unlike its counterpart in Christian liturgy, Zen chanting is not a form of worship. Its functions are, first, to loosen the diaphragm in preparation for seated meditation, and second, to unify the body, breath, and mind in the act of chanting. As John Daido Loori Roshi has noted, Zen chanting grounds the practitioner in the here-and-now. No less important, it serves to cultivate wholesome states of mind, particularly those of respect and gratitude. In Daido Roshi’s words, Zen chanting has “little to do with the volume of your voice. It has all to do with the state of your mind.”*

Nowhere are these purposes more evident than in Tei Dai Denpo, or lineage chanting, in which Zen practitioners intone the names of their ancestral teachers. Shido Bunan Zenji. Dokyo Etan Zenji. Hakuin Ekaku Zenji. . .  Echoing in the zendo, this ancient chant evokes a mood of profound communal gratitude. Traversing the centuries, it conjures an unbroken lineage of practice, thought, and feeling, extending from the fifth century B.C. E. to the present day. An amalgam, if you like, of hymn and carol, it also honors the teachers in ourselves.

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*Sir Henry Hadow, “Carol Singing,” Times Literary Supplement, January 2, 1903.

*John Daido Loori Roshi,  Bringing the Sacred to Life : The Daily Practice of Zen Ritual (Shambhala, 2008),  65-66.

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54. Dappled things

4 March 2010 by Ben Howard

“Glory be to God,” wrote the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, “for dappled things. / For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow.”

An archaic form of “brindled,”“brinded” means “streaked” or “having patches of a darker hue.” Couple-colored skies are at once dark and light.  Other dappled things, as seen by Hopkins, include “finches’ wings,” “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,” and “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.” All are parts of the interdependent body of reality, and all are included in Hopkins’s vision of “pied beauty.” (1)

Zen teachings, ancient and modern, accord with Hopkins’s vision. The Heart Sutra declares that in sunyata, the absolute dimension, “nothing is defiled, nothing is pure.” “Defiled” and “pure” are dualistic concepts, projected by the human mind upon undifferentiated reality. Seng-ts’an’s Faith-Mind Sutra elaborates  the point, cautioning the reader against the delusions attendant to dualistic thinking. “It is due to our grasping and rejecting,” writes Seng-ts’an, “that we do not know the true nature of things.” Attached to our preferences, our liking and disliking, we “remain in a dualistic state.” However, if we can free ourselves of our attachment to “refined” and “vulgar” and other comparative concepts, we can see “the ten thousand things” just as they are. We can recognize that they are “of a single essence,” and we can “walk in harmony with the nature of things, [our] own fundamental nature,” freely and undisturbed. (2)

The non-dualistic outlook articulated by Seng-ts’an may also be found in the literature of Zen, particularly its poetry. The wandering poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), best known for his idyllic haiku, “The old pond– / frog jumps in / sound of water,” describes, in a less decorous haiku, “a fishy smell– / perch  guts / in the water weeds.” In yet another, he records the experience of “fleas, lice, / a horse peeing / near [his] pillow.”(3) And Gary Snyder (b.1930), a Zen practitioner and committed environmentalist, describes an “eight-petaled yellow ‘Shell’” sign and a “blue-and-white ‘Mobil’ with a big red ‘O’ // growing in the asphalt riparian zone / by the soft roar of the flow / of Interstate 5.” (4) Whatever his political views, Snyder does not condemn these emblems of corporate America. On the contrary, in Snyder’s vision, as in Hopkins’s and Basho’s, pleasant and unpleasant, refined and ugly phenomena are parts of the great, indivisible body of reality. All are worthy of regard.

So, too, are the brindled skies of our inner lives, where the “ten thousand sorrows”  consort with the “ten thousand joys.” Should we venture to look inward, we might well discover the counterparts of fish guts and horse piss, fleas and lice in our psyches. And if we are meditative practitioners, we might also discover traces of what the Tibetan master Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism,” by which he meant pride in spiritual achievement. Unlike Vipassana (“insight”) meditation, Zen practice does not encourage inspection of the emotional subtexts of our thoughts, such as might occur in psychoanalysis, but it does encourage an open, non-judgmental awareness of the motley images that cross our minds. And ultimately, the aim of the practice is not only awareness of changing thoughts and images but also contact with “original mind,” the timeless ground of being, from which those thoughts and images have sprung.

March, it might be said, is the month of dappled things. Patches of snow coexist with patches of grass, gray slush with crocuses and snowdrops. Looking out on that piebald landscape, we can wish impatiently for April and an end to winter. Or, as Hopkins did, we can appreciate the streaks of darkness and light, while also intuiting the underlying whole. Before our eyes is the changing relative world, where things are, in Hopkins’s phrase, “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” Beyond our eyes is absolute reality, the beginningless ground of being, whose beauty, in Hopkins’s words, is “past change.”

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(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty.” See http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html.

(2) Seng-ts’an, “Verses on the Faith-Mind,” tr. Richard B. Clarke.  See http://www.mendosa.com/way.html.

(3) The Essential Haiku, ed. Robert Hass (Ecco 1994), 35, 39

(4) Gary Snyder, “In the Santa Clarita Valley,” Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker and Hoard 2004), 67.

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53. A fundamental perplexity

18 February 2010 by Ben Howard

Since its arrival in the West, the practice of Zen has taken a rich variety of forms, ranging from the most traditional to the most iconoclastic. At one end of the spectrum there is formal Zen, with its incense, bows, and chants. At the other, there is “bare-bones” Zen, void of liturgy, hierarchy, or lineage.

Yet for all their differences, the varieties of Western Zen share a common practice, namely that of radical questioning. As Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen, once put it, “the ultimate aim of Zen training is full awakening,” and “to awaken, what is most essential is a questioning mind growing out of a fundamental perplexity, or ‘ball of doubt’.”* That view is echoed by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a contemporary Soto Zen priest, who defines the “core” of Zen as the “active, powerful, fundamental, relentless, deep and uniquely human act of questioning.”** Hearing these definitive statements, we might ask what “questioning,” as practiced in Zen, is and is not, and how it might be enlisted in everyday life.

To begin with, Zen inquiry is not the questioning born of fear. Any thoughtful person who has gone through a divorce, the foreclosure of a home, or the loss of a job knows the experience of questioning what to do next, whom to blame, and how to survive a traumatic loss. Such questioning is necessary and sometimes productive, but it is not the questioning of Zen.

Second, Zen questioning is not the same as rigorous philosophical inquiry. To be sure, Zen teachings engage metaphysical issues, most prominently the “Great Matter of life and death.” And insofar as they emphasize personal responsibility and freedom of choice, Zen teachings share common ground with existentialist thought. But unlike professional philosophy, Zen eschews definitions, abstract categories, and other components of systematic inquiry. Its way is more immediate, intuitive, personal, and concrete.

And third, Zen questioning is not psychoanalysis. While doing seated meditation, Zen practitioners keep their eyes open. The aim is awareness—full awareness—of whatever is happening in the present moment. If a memory of a deceased parent or an estranged sibling should manifest itself, it may be noted as something to look into at a later time, perhaps with the aid of a therapist. But the aim of the practice is to be mindful of whatever is happening, not to analyze or pursue the images that arise.

Toward that end, Zen questioning focuses less on specific thoughts or feelings than on the conditions that have caused them to arise. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, urges us to ask the question, “What am I doing?” as a way of awakening awareness of our states of mind. Barry Briggs, a teacher in the Korean Zen tradition, asks himself periodically, “How is it, just now?” By asking such questions, we can become fully aware of the concrete circumstances in which our abstract thoughts are occurring. And we can discern whether the thought we’re having, the remark we’re about to make, or the action we’re about to take is habitual or fresh, reflexive or wisely responsive.

Beyond these practical modes of self-interrogation, Zen questioning is also a process of radical, unmediated inquiry. “Who hears the sound?” asked the fourteenth-century Zen master Bassui Tokusho. It is a question to be asked, over and again, in a spirit of not-knowing, until the truth of the self is revealed with incontrovertible clarity. “What is this?” Bassui also asked, demanding a fearless, unrelenting inquiry into the nature of reality. Norman Fischer has likened such questioning to a torch, which burns away “all the dross and scum of desire and confusion that covers ordinary activities.”

Zen questioning is hard—harder, said Shunryu Suzuki, than giving up smoking. But its aim is a life no longer governed by fear, anger, habit, or forgetfulness, and it is well worth the effort.

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*Roshi Philip Kapleau, Zen: Merging of East and West (Anchor 1979), 132.

**Zoketsu Norman Fischer, “On Questioning,”  Mountains are Mountains and Rivers are Rivers, ed. Ilana Rabinowitz (Hyperion 1999), 17.

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