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Posts Tagged ‘thich nhat hanh’

37. Me and Mu

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 3 July 2009| 2 Comments »

In New York State you can own a Personalized License Plate, better known as a vanity plate, for $ 43.00. To retain your plate you will need to pay an annual fee of $ 25.50. Depending on your viewpoint, that is a lot or not much to pay for the privilege of having your name—or that of your trade, your passion, or your favorite sport—emblazoned on your car.

As I was driving on the New York State Thruway the other day, I came upon the ultimate vanity plate. Pulling into a rest stop, I noticed the out-of-state license plate on a sporty silver car. In bold black letters, it proclaimed its owner’s first concern:

ME

On either side of these letters were several inches of white space, which gave further prominence to this one, all-important word.

It’s common to hear the word “me” in conversation, but it was striking to find that word isolated on a license plate. I was reminded of a poem by my one-time mentor, the Maine poet Philip Booth (1925-2007). Entitled “Marches,” the poem is an exploration of seasonal change and human mortality.

In the first four stanzas the narrator reflects on the advent of spring, imagines the young “wading the surf, getting wasted, pretending / they cannot die,” and envisions “thousands of death-needles” being passed, leaving “hundreds of / children. . . born with systems in no way immune”. In the last two stanzas, he reflects on  the imminence of death in everyday life, especially life on the highway:

And millions of the rest of us, self-righteous

in the perfect democracy of backcountry roads, freeways,

and interstates, pass each other at life-span speeds;

or close, in opposing lanes, at a hundred-and-thirty,


trusting implicitly in simple self-interest, missing

each other, time after time, only by fragments of seconds,

as we move our lives, or dyings, another round toward

what March may be like in maybe the year 2000.*

Yes, the roads are dangerous, these lines acknowledge, but no one wants to die, and we can depend on each other’s self-interest to keep us alive.

This vision of interdependence is common in Western culture. In sociological terms, it is often called Western individualism; in economic terms, the free-market economy. In America this view has prevailed for at least two hundred years, though of late its economic version has not been faring so well. But there is another vision of interdependence, which the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes in this way:

In our ordinary discriminatory world, we see a teapot as a single, independent object. But when we look deeply enough into the teapot, we will see that it contains many phenomena—earth, water, fire, air, space, and time—and we will realize that in fact the entire universe has come together to make this teapot. That is the interdependent nature of the teapot. A flower is made up of many non-flower elements, such as clouds, soil, and sunshine. Without clouds and earth, there could be no flower. This is interbeing. The one is the result of the all. What makes the all possible is the one.**

In this vision of interdependence, everything depends on everything else. All are interconnected parts of the great, indivisible body of reality, in which energies are constantly being exchanged, and what we normally call “things” are being transformed, moment by moment. To describe that reality, Thich Nhat Hanh has coined the word “interbeing.”

In Japanese Zen, the reality of “interbeing” is epitomized by the Japanese word “mu,” which literally means “no” but in Zen usage has no extractable content. Rather, it is a way of pointing toward things as they are at any given moment—impermanent, void of intrinsic selves, and utterly dependent upon each other. In contrast to “me,” “mu” evokes a fundamental mutuality and engenders a spirit of compassion. Were I to see it on a license plate, I would feel safer on the road.

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*Philip Booth, Selves (Viking 1990), 56

**Thich Nhat Hanh, Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness (Parallax Press 2001), 77

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30. The Mother Road

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 1 April 2009| Leave a Comment »

“The present contains the past,” writes the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. “The materials of the past which make up the present become clear when they express themselves in the present.”

A few months ago, I was reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, as I sat in the main room of Flint’s Auto Center in Almond, waiting for a new battery to be installed in my wife’s car.

All around me, the present made its presence felt. As I surveyed the room, I noticed the tall stacks of virgin tires, the bright green batteries on the racks, the factory-fresh fan belts hanging near the ceiling. The phone rang, and someone left a message. Moments later, a hurried young man came in, asking if his car could be inspected that very day. Over the next quarter of an hour, three more customers arrived.

Yet amidst these signs of a thriving business, the past was also expressing itself. High on a shelf lay a vintage copper washboard and a stash of antique toys—a model airplane, a red bus, a metal chicken. On the shelf below stood well-worn cans bearing their famous names: Boraxo, Prince Albert, Gilley’s Beer. Not far away were a Ranger fire extinguisher, a Woodman Bee Smoker, and one of John Flint’s family heirlooms: a manual, cast-iron meat grinder, with which many a sandwich was prepared.

Beyond these evocative relics, what caught and held my attention were the gas-pump signs on the far wall. Esso. White Star. Sky Chief. Fire Chief. Sinclair Dino. Some readers of this column may know that Fire Chief referred to Texaco Fire Chief, a gasoline with an octane high enough to be used in fire engines. A popular radio show of the thirties featured Ed Wynn, the Texaco Fire Chief. “Sinclair Dino” referred to the company’s hugely successful logo, a benign brontosaurus. As part of its imaginative promotion, Sinclair put out, in 1935, a dinosaur stamp album that could be filled only with Dino stamps issued at Sinclair stations. That the gas-guzzling cars of ensuing decades might themselves become dinosaurs was not on anyone’s mind.

“The car used to be greatly admired and desired,” remarks John Casesa, a leading automotive analyst, “but now some people see it as something that is not good for us, like tobacco. . . . The sound of a gas engine, the V8—those are going to be increasingly rare commodities. Maybe we’re going to have to give up that seven-tenths of a second from zero to sixty.”

Maybe so. But as Thich Nhat Hanh often says, the present is made up of the past, and we can learn from contemplating the materials of a bygone era. “If we observe these materials deeply,” he suggests, “we can arrive at a new understanding of them. That is called ‘looking again at something old in order to learn something new’.”*

If you would like to reflect on America’s long romance with the car and the culture of the open road, while also having your car or truck reliably serviced, you need look no further than Flint’s Auto Center in Almond, New York. And while you’re there, don’t overlook the rows of original license plates that line the walls or the roadsign that reads New Mexico, Route 66. Spanning the 2,448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles and celebrated in Bobby Troup’s famous song, Route 66 was the trail of choice for migrants, dreamers, the Dust Bowl poor, and all those headed west. Some called it the Main Street of America. John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road.

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

The full text of John Casesa’s remarks may be found at http://www.onearth.org/article/motown-blues. Flint’s Auto Center is located at 63 Main Street in Almond, New York.


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18. The cypress in the garden

Posted in Previous columns, tagged , , , , , on 20 February 2009| 1 Comment »

A few hours before Sarah Palin was to deliver her speech at the Republican National Convention, BBC correspondent Katty Kay observed that Ms. Palin seemed a little nervous.

“I guess we’d all be a bit nervous, wouldn’t we?” replied anchorman Matt Frei, before moving on to another matter.

As it turned out, Governor Palin did not appear nervous at all. But I took note of the Kay-Frei exchange because it represents a conversational paradigm that has become conspicuous in recent years. It goes something like this:

“Nixon was a crooked politician.”

“All politicians are crooked.”

Or like this:

“I’m feeling sleepy tonight.”

“You’re always sleepy after dinner.”

I could offer more examples, but perhaps the point is clear. In each instance a particular observation prompts a generalized reply. And the general statement trumps the particular. It no longer matters whether Sarah Palin was nervous or Nixon was crooked. It’s as if the first speaker had noted a specific instance of a universal pattern, which the second speaker understands. Innocence meets experience, and the case is closed.

Whatever the origins of this paradigm, and whatever it might reflect about contemporary culture, to the Zen practitioner it represents the essential delusion that Zen warns us against, the dream from which we must awaken if we are to see things as they are.

Perhaps all politicians are crooked, but quite possibly some are not. But in this instance, as in the others, we will never know, because we have stopped inquiring. A general concept has taken the place of direct experience. A verbal absolute has masked the unprecedented, unrepeatable reality before us.

Because Zen practice is chiefly concerned with that reality, Zen is forever calling us back from the sphere of abstract thought to the concrete world in front of our noses. Only in the here and now, the Zen masters exhort us, can we live out the reality of our lives—or, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, “keep our appointment with life.”

The Indian sage Bodhidharma is credited with bringing Zen Buddhism from India to China in the fifth century CE. In a well-known Zen koan, a student asks his teacher, the Chan master Joshu (778-897), why Bodhidharma came to China.

“The cypress in the garden,” Joshu replies.

Like many a Zen koan, this appears to be a non sequitur. But it makes intuitive sense, once we realize that Joshu is hauling his student back from the ether of speculation to the world at hand. “Come home!” he might be saying. “Come home to where you are.”

Joshu lived in a time very different from ours, but the story of his retort is worth remembering, if only because it offers an antidote to the malady I’ve been describing. “Stop and look!” it is telling us. And look into what you see

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11. Mindful Wading

Posted in Previous columns, tagged , , , on 20 February 2009| Leave a Comment »

I have a friend who’s obssessed with fish. Or, more precisely, he’s obsessed with fly fishing. So far as I can tell, when he is not fishing, he is thinking about fish. His license plate reads “Red Trout.” So does his e-mail alias. I suspect that he also dreams about fish, and when he closes his eyes it’s not Renoir’s bathers or Rubens’ nudes but red trout that swim up to greet him.

As some of you may have guessed, I am speaking of Richard Thompson, a painter of national renown, who recently retired from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. Now he devotes his days to painting and fishing in (I think) that order.

Not long ago, Richard painted a series of pictures entitled “Mindful Wading.” These paintings feature a fly fisherman in hat and waders making his way across a stream. The paintings were inspired by a conversation with my wife (who suggested to Richard that he take up yoga and meditation) and informed by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Long Road Turns to Joy, a pocket guide to walking meditation. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains, “Walking meditation is walking just for the sake of walking.” Mindful wading is Richard’s version of the practice.

In one of Richard’s paintings, a circular panel called“Cross Currents,” the fisherman stands in the center with outstretched arms. In one hand he holds his rod, in the other his line. His feet are poised on the bed of the stream, surrounded by rocks, and he appears to be stepping gingerly, lest he stumble and fall. Above his head and to either side, the heads of trout are surfacing, each lunging toward a fly. Superimposed on five contrasting colors—yellow, red, blue, and two shades of green—the image feels both centered and kinetic. Viewed from a distance, the painting itself resembles a pinwheel.

“I fly fish,” Richard has written, “and I wade streams. When I am crossing a stream I can’t see the bottom, and the water is moving. I have to balance myself while testing each rock for stability. I do this navigating under low light and in bad weather and often on unfamiliar streams. I do mindful wading.”

Thich Nhat Hanh might be surprised to learn of Richard’s adaptation of his practice, but I suspect that he would approve. For the practice of walking meditation, as interpreted by Thich Nhat Hanh, is more than a respite from the rigors of zazen. It is a practice in its own right, whose purpose is to cultivate awareness of our bodies, our surroundings, and our changing states of mind. Beyond that, it is also a way of developing inner peace and a non-violent attitude toward our natural environment. Walking mindfully, we notice whether our steps are anxious or peaceful, and we cultivate the latter.

If you would like to practice walking meditation, select a place where you will not be observed or disturbed. Open your senses to your surroundings. Assume an upright but flexible posture, letting your shoulders drop and your belly soften. Relax into your breathing. Then walk naturally and unhurriedly, as though you had no destination, feeling the bottoms of your feet pressing the ground. Continue this practice for fifteen minutes or more, maintaining mindfulness all the while. If your mind wanders, gently bring it back.

As you become more skillful in this practice, you may wish to extend it into the public arena, increasing the tempo so as not to call attention to yourself. Let the practice restore your peace, your grace, and your dignity, as you walk—or wade—through your day.

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