Feeds:
Posts
Comments

67. The sound of tea

16 September 2010 by Ben Howard

Of the sounds of this world, few are more pleasing than that of tea being poured, quietly and gently, into a porcelain cup.

That sound may he heard every Sunday evening, when the Falling Leaf Sangha, our local sitting group, meets to practice seated and walking meditation. With the striking of a gong, one of our members rises from her cushion. One by one, she serves us, pouring hot green tea into each of our cups. Amplified by the spacious, silent room, the trickling sound of tea brings to mind a bubbling stream or a miniature waterfall.

Listening to that sound in that place, I am sometimes reminded of the story of the monk Kyosho, who asked his teacher, Gensha (834-908), how to enter the practice of Zen.

“Do you hear the murmuring of the mountain stream?” asked Gensha.

“Yes,” Kyosho replied.

“Then enter there.”

With that reply, we are told, Kyosho experienced a spontaneous awakening.

To be sure, Gensha could have chosen other means. He could have advised his disciple to study Zen teachings and traditions. He could have prescribed a course of instruction. Instead, he exhorted Kyosho to listen: to put his logical, reasoning faculties in abeyance and to open his body and mind to the sounds of the world. In so doing, Gensha also pointed Kyosho toward an encounter with absolute reality and a deeper understanding of the self.

To listen with full attention to any sound is to awaken from one’s daydreams and speculations and return to the reality of the here and now. In the story of Gensha and Kyosho, the sound could have been almost anything: the sough of wind in the trees, the scrape of sandals on the road, the sound of Kyosho’s own name. By choosing water, however, Gensho called Kyosho’s attention to a phenomenon that was unmistakably concrete, liquid, and transitory. As anyone who has listened to the flow of water knows, the sound induces a sense of calm, a mood of tranquility. But it also places the contemplative in the presence of impermanence, fostering the realization that what appears to be fixed is really fluid and subject to change. In time, the water in the mountain stream may become a lake, or ice, or a cloud, or water vapor. It is anything but solid.

And what is true of the stream is also true of all conditioned things, including the entity we are pleased to call the self. Zen teachings and the larger body of thought from which they derive do not propose that the self does not exist. Rather, they urge the recognition that what we imagine to be a solid self is in fact a fluid collection of experiences, a shifting aggregate of “form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.” And though we imagine that self to have an intrinsic existence, separate from the rest of the world, it is really an integral element in the web of life, susceptible like water to changing causes and conditions. The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck likens it to a whirlpool in a river. Certainly that whirlpool exists, but it has no permanent form. We don’t have to expend our energies pretending that it does, or attempting to hold it in place.

Paradoxically, the way to engender that liberating recognition is not to analyze the concept of emptiness, or struggle to envision the One Body of absolute reality, or engage in abstract thinking generally. Rather, it is to reconnect with what Zen calls our relative existence: our day-to-day, ordinary lives, experienced with openness and full awareness. And one of the best ways we can do this is through the act of listening, both to ourselves and to the world around us.

If you would like to demonstrate this to yourself, please sit still for a few minutes, following your breathing and collecting your scattered energies. Then do nothing but listen to whatever is occurring within and around you. If you are in a public space, listen to the voices in your environment, as they express their anxieties or joys, their elation or their sorrows. Listen, if you can, to what the novelist George Eliot called the “roar” on the “other side of silence”—the roar of human suffering. If you are at home, listen to your breathing, to the processes of your body, and to your ego as it arises, asserts itself in speech, and dissolves into the silence of awareness. Then, when you are ready, pour yourself a cup of tea, and listen to the sound.



Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

66. Back to school

2 September 2010 by Ben Howard

Sheila Pepe at Alfred University

This is the season when students go back to school. Here in Alfred, New York, the college students have already returned, and the yellow buses will soon be rolling again. There is a youthful freshness in the air.

Zen students also go back to school, but that action occurs with each new sitting, each fresh encounter with things as they are. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi describes the process in this way:

Once in a while you should stop all your activities and make your screen white. That is zazen. That is the foundation of our everyday life and our meditation practice. Without this kind of foundation your practice will not work. All the instructions you receive are about how to have a clean white screen, even though it is never pure white because of various attachments and previous stains.*

The clean white screen to which Suzuki Roshi refers is a mind without prejudice or expectations, judgments or rigid notions. In the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting,” the mind of the practitioner becomes the mental counterpart of a clean new notebook—or what, in grade school, we used to call our tablets. Open and unmarked, such a mind is ready to receive whatever comes its way.

Yet, as Suzuki observes, the screen is not pure white. Attachments and stains prevent our minds from being immaculate or entirely open. Prominent among those attachments is our fear of the unknown and our expectation, conscious or otherwise, that whatever we encounter should fit our preconceptions. And prominent among the stains is our previous knowledge, which ought to help us interpret experience but often has the opposite effect.

Commenting on what Zen calls “the barrier built of knowledge,” Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh distinguishes between mere knowledge and true understanding:

Old knowledge is the obstacle to new understanding. . . . Like those who are awakened, great scientists have undergone great internal changes. If they are able to achieve profound realization, it is because their powers of observation, concentration, and awareness are deeply developed.

Understanding is not an accumulation of knowledge. To the contrary, it is the result of the struggle to become free of knowledge. Understanding shatters old knowledge to make room for the new that accords better with reality. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth goes around the sun, most of the astronomical knowledge of the time had to be discarded, including the ideas of above and below. Today, physics is struggling valiantly to free itself from the ideas of identity and cause/effect that underlie classical science. Science, like the Tao (Way), urges us to get rid of all preconceived notions. **

Whether the preconceived notion is that of the pre-Copernican universe or the assumption of cause and effect, conventional wisdom quickly grows obsolete, and it can bar the way to a deeper understanding. Elsewhere, Thich Nhat Hanh defines that understanding as “direct and immediate perception,” “an intuition rather than the culmination of reasoning.”

To cultivate direct, intuitive perception is the real work of the Zen practitioner. That work may be aided by the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, including intimate knowledge of Zen teachings and traditions. But unless that knowledge is integrated with direct experience, it can indeed become a positive hindrance. For the work of the Zen practitioner is to enter this present moment, becoming fully and sometimes fiercely aware of whatever is occurring. And as Roko Shinge Roshi has observed, to enter the present moment we “have to let go of everything extraneous—what we think regarding this moment, what we add to it, or try to take away from it.” Practicing Zen is not a process of acquisition, nor is its aim the mastery of a body of knowledge. On the contrary, it is in large part a process of unlearning, of becoming aware of our layers of conditioning rather than adding another layer.

To those of us who grew up in the competitive world of Western education, such a practice runs against the grain, and it may seem formidably foreign. But insofar as the aim of Zen practice is to help us navigate a complex, rapidly changing world, it shares common cause with our universities, colleges, and schools. And insofar as the practice engenders, as it often does, a passion for inquiry and a heightened sense of discovery, its spirit is congruent with that of Western education. In each new moment, we are going back to school.

_____________

*Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So (HarperCollins, 2002), 51-52.

**Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart (Parallax, 1988), 50-51.

In the photo above, visiting artist Sheila Pepe teaches a class in Foundations at the School of Art and Design in the New York State of College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Photo by Robin Caster Howard.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

65. Pursuing the real

19 August 2010 by Ben Howard

Shadow

When greyhounds race on a track, they chase an artificial rabbit. Mistaking that furry object for the real thing, they pursue it with all their might.

During a recent greyhound race in Australia, however, a living, breathing rabbit wandered onto the track. Spotting that hapless creature, a greyhound named Ginny Lou took off in hot pursuit, leaving the other dogs to their delusion. Apparently, Ginny Lou could distinguish between the illusory and the real, and she chose to pursue the latter.

To make that distinction is also the work of the Zen practitioner. And to reconnect us with our actual lives is a defining aim of Zen meditation. The poet Czeslaw Milosz once described the art of poetry as the “passionate pursuit of the Real,” and much the same might be said of Zen practice. During the course of a day we might expend the bulk of our energy chasing artificial rabbits, but when we are practicing Zen meditation, we are pursuing the real one: the moment-to-moment reality of things as they are.

That pursuit often begins with the body. The Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing, a foundational text for Zen students, directs the practitioner to recite, “Breathing in, I am aware of my body // Breathing out, I calm my body.” In keeping with that prescription, the contemporary Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer advises us to begin a sitting by sweeping our awareness lightly through our bodies. “The point,” he explains, “is to arrive in the body, to be aware of the body as sensation and process, to ground [ourselves] in the body as basis so that thought and emotion don’t fly too far afield.” * In similar fashion, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh directs us to bring compassionate awareness to the various parts of our bodies, including our internal organs: “Aware of my lungs, I breathe in. / Smiling to my lungs, I breathe out. / Aware of my heart, I breathe in. / Bringing kind attention to my heart, I breathe out.” By such means, we return to our bodies, grounding ourselves in our physical lives.

Having established ourselves in that awareness, we can then turn our attention to our states of mind. In Zen teachings, mind and body are often seen as aspects of each other. “What happens to the body,” Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, “happens to the mind.” By being aware of the present state of the body—relaxed or tense, energetic or fatigued, balanced or imbalanced—we may already be aware of our present state of mind. To sharpen that awareness, however, we might ask ourselves, “What is my state of mind just now?” Or, more concretely, “Is my mind/body tight or loose?” Employing that classic analogy (which originally referred to the strings of a lute), we can then investigate the causes of tightness or looseness, identifying such specific states as craving, fear, or anger, on the one hand, or balance, elation, and equanimity, on the other. And as with awareness of the body, we can bring kind attention to whatever state of mind we may be experiencing, noting the effect of our awareness on our fear or anger, our craving or agitation.

Meditation of this kind steadies the body and mind. In Zen practice, however, it also serves a broader aim, which is the recognition and acceptance of our present lives, just as they are, just now.  “Do not get carried away,” Dogen Zenji admonishes us in his Instructions to the Cook, “by the sounds of spring, nor become heavy-hearted upon seeing the colors of fall. View the changes of the seasons as a whole, and weigh the relativeness of light and heavy from a broad perspective.” ** Commenting on this passage, the Soto master Kosho Uchiyama urges us “to be resolved that whatever we meet is our life,” and to “see the four seasons of favorable circumstances, adversity, despair, and exaltation all as the scenery of [our lives].”  Such an attitude, which Dogen identifies as “Magnanimous Mind,” can profoundly alter our experience of the world, engendering a deeper realism as well as a more balanced perspective. Uchiyama Roshi describes its impact in this way:

When we have developed this kind of attitude toward our lives, the meaning of living day by day changes completely, along with our valuation of the events and people and circumstances that arise. Since we no longer try to escape from delusion, misfortune, or adversity, nor chase after enlightenment and peace of mind, things like money and position lose their former value. People’s reputations or their skills at maneuvering in society have no bearing on the way we see them as human beings, nor does a certificate of enlightenment make any impression on anyone. What is primary and essential is that as we develop this vision, the meaning of encountering the things, situations, or people in our lives completely changes.***

Artificial rabbits abound, as do encouragements to chase them. But as Dogen’s observations and Uchiyama’s commentary make clear, we can indeed develop another kind of vision, in which things appear as they actually are, not as our conditioning would have them be. Like Ginny Lou, we too can pursue the real.

___________________________________

*Norman Fischer, Sailing Home (Free Press, 2008), 79.

**Eihei Dogen, Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook), q. in Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment (Shambhala, 2005), 47.

***Uchiyama, 49.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

64. Closing the gap

22 July 2010 by Ben Howard

At one of the climactic moments in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, the aged king experiences a pivotal awakening. Divested of his kingdom and his power, his regal robes and loyal retinue, he finds himself on a barren heath amidst a ferocious storm. Reduced to rags himself, he sees the suffering of the indigent as never before. In a passionate soliloquy he expresses his realization:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From  seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

— III, 4

Forty-five years ago, I memorized those lines, and in four ensuing decades they have often surfaced in my awareness. Their staying power has something to do with their formal beauty, their muscular syntax and resonant pentameters. What makes this soliloquy memorable, however, is not only its forceful rhetoric but also the motive behind it: that of a fallen king, who has realized at long last that he must dissolve the barriers between himself and the suffering of others. He must take “physic” (medicine) to cure the illness of pomposity, the sickness of class prejudice. He must close the gap between himself and others’ suffering.

That is also a motive of Zen practice, whose ultimate aims are the relief of suffering and the cultivation of compassionate wisdom. From the vantage point of Zen teachings, the notion of a separate self is an illusion, whether that self be a king or a homeless serf. And that illusion causes suffering, both to the king and the serf: the subject and object in a mutual relationship. For the reality is that we are all enmeshed in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” To deny that reality is to live in a self-centered dream—and to widen the gap between self and other.

But how, in practice, is one to close that gap? Short of becoming destitute and desperate ourselves, how are we to awaken, fully and compassionately, to others’ suffering?

For the Zen practitioner, the best medicine is meditation, which not only steadies the mind but also affords access to our internal suffering and its causes. To attend to others’ suffering, Zen teachings tell us, we must first attend to our own. This directive is not a prescription for self-pity or an invitation to wallow in our woes. Rather, it is an admonition to become aware of the elements in our psyches and our culture that engender suffering—the craving, fear, and anger; the impulse to violence; the mindless consumption; the habitual patterns of reactivity. Only when we have gained insight into these forces and, if possible, transformed them into something more constructive, will we be in a position to pay full attention to others’ distress, much less help to relieve it. As Thich Nhat Hanh sternly puts it, “we have to dissolve all prejudices, barriers, and walls and empty ourselves in order to listen and look deeply before we utter even one word.”* If we can manage that daunting task, we will be in a far better position to act for the benefit of others.

What we will do will depend on the circumstances. It might be humanitarian action, but it might also be the act of stopping and listening, wholeheartedly and without preconceptions, to those with whom we engage in everyday life. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this practice “deep listening,” by which he means unprejudiced, non-judgmental attention to another person’s suffering. “Deep listening and loving speech,” he writes, “are wonderful instruments to help us arrive at the kind of understanding we all need as a basis for appropriate action. You listen deeply for only one purpose—to allow the other person to empty his or her heart. This is already an act of relieving suffering.”**

By such means, any one of us might close the gap—and show the heavens more just.

____________________________

*Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (Riverhead, 1995), 101

**Thich Nhat Hanh, Creating True Peace (Free Press, 2003), 88.

To view a performance of King Lear, Act III, with J. Stephen Crosby in the leading role, see http://vimeo.com/6011143.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

63. Here and there

8 July 2010 by Ben Howard

Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Bob Dylan once remarked that when Tommy Makem sang, there was an elsewhere in his eyes. From that elsewhere came his singing.

What was true of Tommy Makem (1932-2007), the celebrated singer and songwriter from Co. Armagh, is also true of Irish balladry in general, particularly its immigrant ballads. One of the best-known ballads, Frank Fahy’s version of Galway Bay, recalls the rugged rocks and the sweet green grass of Galway from the vantage point of Illinois. And one of the most poignant, Sliabh Gallion Brae, is a kind of elegy in advance, in which a farmer by the name of Joe McGarvey from Derrygenard, who can no longer pay his rent, bids farewell to the parish of Lissan, the cross of Ballinascreen, and “bonny, bonny Sliabh Gallion Brae”  All are soon to be elsewhere. In the Irish language, sliabh (pronounced shleeve) means mountain, and in Scots Gaelic brae means hillside. As so often in immigrant ballads, an elsewhere fondly remembered is evoked through its place name, which brings its felt presence into the foreground.

To wish to be elsewhere is a universal human desire. And to become aware of that desire, even as it is arising, is one of the aims of Zen practice. Sometimes the “elsewhere” is a geographical place, as in the immigrant ballads, but just as often it is an imagined state of mind, and it lies in the future rather than the past. In her book Nothing Special the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck examines this recurrent human impulse, as embodied in ordinary thought:

In ordinary thinking, the mind always has an objective, something it’s going to get. If we’re caught in that wanting, then our awareness of reality is gone. We’ve substituted a personal dream for awareness. Awareness doesn’t move, doesn’t bury itself in dreams; it just stays as it is.*

Ordinary thinking, as here portrayed, removes us from wherever we are. By contrast, immovable awareness grounds us in the here and now. To bring meditative awareness to our thoughts is to realize how often they serve to transport us elsewhere.

Of course, not ­all thoughts serve that purpose. Happy to be Here, the title of one of Garrison Keillor’s books, expresses a thought that many of us have when conversing with friends at a dinner party, or spending time with a son or daughter, or eating a bowl of ice cream on a summer evening. Yet the fact is that only a few of our thoughts amplify or clarify our present experience, and many have the opposite effect. If you would like to test this claim, may I suggest that you sit still for three minutes and count the number of thoughts you have during that time. Then sit still for another three minutes, labeling your thoughts (“Thinking about tomorrow’s meeting:”; “thinking about last night”). You may well find that the bulk of your thoughts pertain not to the present but to the past or the future: to where you have been or where you might sometime be. Others may pertain to no place at all, being generalized, abstract, and void of concrete particulars.

The point of this exercise is not to extinguish all such thoughts. To think about other times and places is a natural human activity, and it can give rise to artistic works as richly diverse as Billy Collins’s poems on his childhood or Tommy Makem’s Farewell to Carlingford. The point is rather to become aware of conceptual thinking and to see how it comes between our minds and the realities of our lives, bringing anxiety and untold suffering in its wake. “On the whole,” W.C. Fields is thought to have written as his epitaph, “I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” That makes for a good story, but like many a colorful tale, it isn’t true. The real epitaph reads simply, “W.C Fields, 1880-1946.”  So it is with our images and thoughts, which purport to illuminate reality but often take us elsewhere.

_____________________

*Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: Living Zen (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 152.

Gemma Hasson’s rendition of Sliabh Gallion Brae may be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiSd2rUyrQ8. Tommy Makem’s Farewell to Carlingford may be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGn2G-xjM_M.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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.

_____________________________________

(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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

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/.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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.

_______________

*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/

Posted in 1 | 2 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »