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Posts Tagged ‘zen’

No gaining idea

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , on 4 November 2026| Leave a Comment »

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), the Austrian-German neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) offers an arresting perspective on the pursuit of success:

Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Man’s Search for Meaning appeared in English translation in 1959. It quickly became a bestseller and in 1991 was listed by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club as one of the ten most influential books published in the United States. Yet as Frankl explains, he never set out to become a successful author. Rather, he wrote his memoir to recount his experience of the concentration camps and to share the central insight gleaned from that experience: that what enabled people to survive unspeakable suffering was their recognition of a meaning to their lives. That insight later gave rise to “logotherapy,” a practice based on the assumption that the search for meaning is the primary motivational force in human lives.

As is the case with most absolutes I encounter, my first response to Frankl’s is, “It all depends.” When someone wins a triathlon or scores a winning touchdown or graduates summa cum laude, it’s fair to assume that their success is the direct result of single-mindedly pursuing that goal. At the same time, to regard one’s present efforts as merely a means to an end, be it a high GPA or athletic glory, can often bear negative consequences. In certain circumstances, it can undermine if not defeat one’s chances of ultimate success.

The practice of zazen (seated meditation) is one such circumstance. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a foundational text for Soto Zen practitioners, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi articulates this paradoxical but cardinal principle of the practice:

When you practice zazen you should not try to attain anything. You should just sit in the complete calmness of your mind . . . [T]o try to do something in zazen is dualistic and not complete calmness.

As Suzuki further explains, zazen is to be practiced “without gaining ideas, without any expectations, even of enlightenment.” Practice “should be directed from achievement to non-achievement.” We should not try “to attain anything. . . . If we think we can get something out of zazen, we are “already involved in impure practice.” By purity Suzuki means being present with things as they are, rather than trying to alter external reality or change one’s state of mind. In Zen parlance this practice is known as shikantaza, which means “just sitting,” giving wholehearted attention to the reality of the present moment and aligning one’s body and mind with that reality.

For many Westerners, the notion of “non-achievement” is difficult to understand, much less accept or put into practice. Why should anyone devote the time and endure the discomforts of sitting upright and still on a chair or cushion unless he or she were trying to achieve something: relief from anxiety, for example, or a state of blissful non-attachment? Two hundred years ago the poet William Wordsworth decried a way of life dedicated to “getting and spending,” and that way is still very much with us. Why spend time and effort in a practice without the expectation of getting something in return?

Suzuki addresses this question. To practice without gaining ideas, he explains, “does not mean . . . just to sit without any purpose.” Zen practice does indeed have long-term aims, most centrally the cultivation of wisdom and compassion and the transformation of delusion into clear seeing. “Delusions are inexhaustible,” reads the second Great Vow, recited daily in Zen monasteries. “I vow to extinguish them all.” But when practicing zazen, the practitioner’s task is simply to give undivided attention to breath and posture and to open one’s mind to whatever may be occurring in that moment.

Other types of meditation involve the recitation of mantras, the use of visualizations, and so on. But those are not the way of Soto Zen. Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center, puts it this way:

Zen is not meditation. It is not a mental exercise, a thing you do with your mind. It is not focused on practices that are antidotes to afflictive states or secondary consciousness. It is not about attaining a special state, being relaxed, or solving your problems. It is not about reducing stress, working with trauma, and being happy . . . . It is about being radically open to things just as they are, not grasping at or rejecting phenomena, but simply being present and at ease with moment-to-moment uncertainty and groundlessness.

At a time when feelings of uncertainty and groundlessness have become pervasive, I know of no better guide to the goalless, stabilizing, and ultimately transformative practice of zazen.

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The moments after

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , on 17 June 2026| Leave a Comment »

One cold afternoon last winter, I made a tasty kale, white bean, and ground turkey soup. It was a new recipe, so I followed it to the letter. First, I washed the kale and tore the leaves off the stems. Next, I sautéed the onions and carrots until the onions turned golden, then added the tomato paste, the cumin, and the red-pepper flakes. After a few minutes, in went the turkey, garlic, ginger, and Kosher salt, followed, seven minutes later, by the chicken stock and beans. After letting this concoction simmer for twenty minutes, I added the kale and let the pot simmer again for a little while. Finally, I added a half cup of fresh parsley and freshly squeezed lemon juice. Having duly completed these steps, I tasted my soup, added some salt and bit more cumin, and pronounced the result delicious. As I removed the pot from the heat, I felt confident that my wife, a noted soup critic, would approve of it too. Job well done.

Except it wasn’t. Ten minutes after leaving the kitchen, as I was settling into a challenging crossword puzzle, I realized with a start that I had left the burner on. Dashing back to the kitchen, I found the blue ring of flame going strong.

Such lapses are not uncommon. As Rub Squeers, a character in Richard Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool, contends, inattention is normal human behavior. To address this natural human tendency, the Japanese Zen tradition offers a practice known as zanshin, which means “remaining mind” or “the mind that remains.” This discipline originated in the martial arts, where remaining continuously aware can determine whether a match ends in victory or defeat. But it is also applicable to everyday Western life.

That is the aim of Takashi Harada’s book, Zanshin: The Art of the After, in which the author applies the practice to such everyday tasks as sending emails, making decisions, and engaging in workplace conversations. “Zanshin is remaining,” he declares. “It keeps you awake to the moment that matters most, the moment after.” Apropos of email, he remarks that “the difference between a careful person and a careless one is often found in the ten seconds after sending. The careful person stays present enough to ask, what did I just do. . . . Zanshin after you hit send means you stay with the action long enough to own it. You do not chase it. You do not pretend it did not happen. You do not add noise. You remain present and you let the communication do its work.”

Zanshin fosters continuous concentration, a requisite for the practice of mindfulness. It extends our conscious attention into those moments when it is most likely to lapse, whether into thoughts of the past, or worries about the future, or, if the completed task was successful, self-congratulation. A potent antidote to forgetfulness, it deepens our capacity to remain present for the present moment, even when full attention no longer seems required. In his book Living the Japanese Arts and Ways, H.E. Davey, an accomplished teacher of calligraphy and the martial arts, notes that “zanshin is not only the sustained concentration following an action but also an unbroken awareness of the moment and an indominable spirit.”

As a practical matter, zanshin ensures that a given action will be fully completed. As Davey observes, “we often fail in an action just at the moment before its completion, when we think we’ve got it, we have made it.” As with the sweep of a golfer’s swing or the arc of a bowler’s arm after the ball is released, the moments following an action are often just as critical as the action itself. And if the action happens to be essential to our welfare, such as locking one’s car before leaving it, paying full attention to “the moments after” can spell the difference between happiness and avoidable hardship.

Skillfully practiced, zanshin can also counter the ego’s tendency to dwell on its perceived successes and failures. Doing a little dance in the end zone after making a touchdown is understandable in its context: it’s part of the show. But in everyday life, basking in our success after completing a task can undermine the next one. It can cause us to lose focus. Conversely, brooding on a minor mistake can precipitate another. If you are a performing musician, for example, dwelling on a few dropped notes can cause you to drop more. Zanshin trains the mind and body to remain ready and move on.

“There is in zanshin,” notes Davey, “a unity of calm and action.” That description largely accords with my own experience of the practice. Returning to the contemplative space of “the moments after,” I have found, is not unlike returning to silence after an intense conversation or to solitude after a difficult social interaction. In a culture where multitudinous distractions have become the norm, it can feel like coming home.

See Melissa Clark’s recipe “Lemony White Bean, Turkey and Greens Soup” at https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021776-lemony-white-bean-soup-with-turkey-and-greens. My most recent book is The Absolute Moment: Essays on Western Zen.

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Perfect the way you are

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , on 20 May 2026| Leave a Comment »

“Each of you is perfect the way you are,” Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, said to his students one morning, “and you could use a little improvement.”

Over the years, in conversations with acquaintances, friends, and family members, I have sometimes repeated Suzuki’s remark, and it has almost always evoked strong responses, ranging from laughter to curiosity to puzzlement. I’m reminded of a self-ironic comment the onetime U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov made, apropos of modernist poetry: “I don’t know what the fellows mean.”

To grasp the meaning of Suzuki’s remark in the context of Zen teachings, it may be helpful, first, to clarify what he doesn’t mean. In common Western parlance, “perfect” is synonymous with “flawless.” If a used book is in perfect condition, its spine is intact, and it is free of dogeared pages, coffee stains, and other visible defects. If a Zen practitioner sits in perfect stillness, he or she doesn’t move, not even a little bit. And if a vacant space is described in a real estate listing as “perfect for a studio,” we may assume that the room could not be better suited to that purpose. Little wonder that perfect is so widely used in advertising, where it is often paired with ideal.

Clearly, that was not what Suzuki had in mind. Most likely, he was employing the word perfect in the special sense in which it is used in Zen teachings. As Tetsugen Bernie Glassman Roshi, an American Zen teacher, explains in his book Infinite Circle, in Zen lingo “perfect means neither good nor bad, just what is as it is,” irrespective of any judgments or other concepts we might add:

Rain is what is. If we are farmers, we tend to say that rain is wonderful; if we were planning a picnic, we think rain is terrible. But rain is rain. People say rain is wet, but a fish wouldn’t. Water is very essence of life to a fish, neither wet nor dry. The fish attaches no notions or dichotomies to it. When we say something is perfect, we’re pointing to this absence of dichotomies or dualism.

Viewing a thing dualistically, whether that thing be rain or a self, we separate subject from object And we view the object through the lens of our “notions,” which in Glassman’s phrase, are the “colors we add to the thing itself.”

In the world according to Buddhism, things do not manifest sui generis. They come into being through “dependent origination,” a twelvefold chain of causes and conditions. Within that worldview, as Glassman notes, any one “thing-event” is “the best that could happen at this very moment—but best in the special sense that it’s happening and there is no choice. It is in this sense that we say everything is perfect just as it is, in the sense of being complete”. Even a broken incense bowl is “perfect as it is—because that’s what it is. We may have the notion that all those pieces should be returned to their original condition as parts of a whole incense bowl so they can be perfect again, but that’s just a notion.”

It’s reasonable to conclude that something akin to Glassman’s definition is what Suzuki meant when he told his students they were perfect as they were. But how does that square with his subsequent assertion: that they “could use a little improvement”?

To address that apparent contradiction, I would note, to begin with, that the first clause of his pronouncement deals with being and the second with doing. We may each be perfect, not only in the sense of being complete as we are but also in having what Zen calls “buddha nature”: an innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. Dormant and unrealized it may be, but it can be awakened and cultivated through committed daily practice. That paradox is at heart of Zen teachings and practice. It is embodied concretely in Hakuin Ekaku Zenji’s “The Song of Zazen,” which speaks of “a man who, in the midst of water, / Cries in thirst so imploringly.”

But beyond this underlying intellectual coherence of Suzuki’s remark, I would also note its deeply compassionate nature. All too often, we may feel more like that broken incense bowl than that object in its original state. But even if our efforts to improve our present condition fall far short of their mark, we will still be “perfect” in the sense of being just as we are in this very moment: whole, complete, and rich in potential. And that way of seeing oneself can go a long way toward overcoming the habit of negative self-judgment, even as it fosters self-acceptance, a condition hard to come by and much to be desired.

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Good neighbors

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , on 19 January 2026| Leave a Comment »

As the world knows, Zen Buddhism is a practice of stillness and silence. Its iconic image is a figure sitting cross-legged in meditation. But Zen is also a practice of active questioning. And no question is more central to the practice than one a child might ask: “What is this?” Zen teachings enjoin practitioners to ask this question over and again, not only in formal meditation but throughout the day. Whether the immediate focus of attention be an orange, an iPhone, a transitory feeling, a state of mind, or what is commonly called the self, to practice Zen is to inquire deeply into whatever we encounter: to penetrate beneath its illusory surface to its “true nature.”

Yet one need not be a Zen practitioner to benefit from asking Zen’s central question. Radical inquiry is basic to pursuits as diverse as science, medicine, law, philosophy, and the visual arts. And it is also fundamental to Western meditative poetry, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude or T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where the aim, as in Zen, is both to understand the essential nature of the object under scrutiny and to reignite an Edenic sense of awe and wonder.

Few Western poems better illustrate this process than Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” (1913), one of the most celebrated, widely anthologized, and enduring poems of the 20th century. At first glance, this readily accessible poem is a folksy, anecdotal account of a conversation between two neighboring farmers in rural New Hampshire. But on closer inspection, it reveals itself to be a profound inquiry into the nature, origins, and purpose of man-made walls. More broadly, it is an examination of the sources of division, enclosure, and territorial conflict in Western culture and the role that fixed, traditional ideas play in such conflicts.

In “Mending Wall,” two owners of adjoining farms are engaging in the annual springtime ritual of repairing a drystone wall that separates their properties. Even as they work together, the narrator (who has initiated this chore by getting in touch with his neighbor) is inwardly questioning its worth and meaning. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he confides to the reader. Whatever that unspecified “something” may be, it has both human and natural agents: the hunters who break through the wall in pursuit of prey and the winter groundswell, which topples the carefully balanced stones. And just as these physical forces undermine the established wall, so the narrator subverts its very existence by questioning its reason for being. As he notes, there is no practical need to separate his apple orchard from his neighbor’s pine forest. Neither is harming the other. Nor are there cows to enclose. Why erect a wall at all?

In response to this mischievous but searching question, the neighbor offers a platitude, most likely derived from a 19th-century Farmer’s Almanac: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Recognizing this argument as proverbial rather than original, expedient rather than persuasive, the narrator characterizes it as his neighbor’s “father’s saying,” which the man has neither the inclination nor the imagination to call into question. And toward the end of the poem, the two neighbors merely restate their opposing positions: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and “Good fences make good neighbors.” Whether the author is siding with one or the other remains unknown. And the question itself remains unresolved.

“Mending Wall” has sometimes been read—or misread—as a didactic poem with a simple message: “Tear down all walls.” But, given the even balance of opposing perspectives, supported by the author’s own impartiality, the poem might better be understood as a concrete demonstration of an ongoing inquiry. That the issue remains far from resolved after more than a hundred years may be seen in an episode of the TV drama Yellowstone (Season 1, Episode 7), where the cattle baron John Dutton (Kevin Costner) directs the Asian tourists who are trespassing on his property (and photographing a nearby grizzly bear) to take note of his fences and get off his land. When one of the tourists objects, asserting that the earth belongs to everyone, Dutton dismisses his argument with a memorable line: “This is America. We don’t share land here!”

In Zen practice, “What is this?” is both a question and a koan, whose purpose is not so much to produce definitive answers as to lift the veils of prejudicial concepts, freshen our perceptions, and reveal the impermanent, selfless, and interdependent nature of things we usually take for granted. Likewise, Robert Frost, at once a social conservative and a radical explorer, offers a koan of his own, inviting us to look more deeply into the nature of walls and boundaries, literal and figurative, and to ask what place and meaning such fabrications have in our daily lives.

Photo: Robert Frost

To read “Mending Wall” go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall

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I should have thought

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , on 3 December 2025| Leave a Comment »

Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from Yorkshire gritstone. Most of my fellow residents were English, but others hailed from such faraway countries as Ghana, South Africa, Iceland, and Rhodesia.

Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend Asmundur (“Asi”) Jonsson, a husky, deep-voiced, older student from Keflavik. Asi smoked an ornate Meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, after I’d offered up a fresh opinion—or, no less likely, a callow misperception—he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response. “I should have thought,” he would finally say, and proceed to address whatever I’d said. More than once, his views differed from mine. I have long since forgotten our opinions, but I recall his opening phrase as vividly as I do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco. I had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since.

“I should have thought” is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense. It places the action, in this case having a thought, in a time prior to the present, before a subsequent event has occurred. In this instance, the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion. For example, were Geoffrey to observe that “I’ve heard that it’s better to brush your teeth first, then floss afterward,” Nigel might reply, “I should have thought it was the other way around.” As this innocuous exchange illustrates, “I should have thought” provides a vehicle for polite disagreement. But even when engaged in more charged conversations, especially those concerning politics and religion, this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space, establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists, and set a distinctive tone.

In contemporary American life, we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces, where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views. If one participant says something the other finds erroneous, ill-informed, or otherwise objectionable, the conversation may soon be abruptly over. Or worse, it might escalate into an angry confrontation.

By contrast, “I should have thought” expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple, differing, and opposing views. And it opens the possibility of a “both/and” rather than a “right/wrong” or “either/or” resolution. Even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may, by its end, prove compatible and even complementary.

By the same token, “I should have thought” widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation. It establishes an appropriate space between them. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has observed, in any relationship between two people, two components are ever present: their connection and their essential solitude. The two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family, friendship, country, or affiliation. At the same time, each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing. In the Japanese martial arts, an appropriate combative distance (known as ma-ai) is strictly maintained. Analogously, an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers’ interconnection and their respective solitudes. And, as Fischer puts it, it also creates “[a] space charged with openness, silence, and mystery.”

And that is not all. In its very formality, “I should have thought” forges a link between contemporary usage, which tends to be casual and all too often careless, and the long history of the English language. Asi’s first language was Icelandic. He learned English in a school, where the old rule regarding “should” rather than “would” was still taught and enforced. According to that rule, “should” must be used when speaking in the first person. However archaic, Asi’s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech. By extension, it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation.

Today, no one I know would say “I should have thought,” except perhaps ironically or in a role-playing context. The phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation. But might there not be other ways by which the space, distance, and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re-imagined, if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals, the in-your-face confrontations, and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary American discourse? I should have thought so.

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Decent ordinary life

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 8 July 2025| Leave a Comment »

If you follow the national and international news, you may be forgiven for concluding that current political, economic, and military developments are the most important things in this turning world. Next to them, the ordinary activities of daily life may seem slight, undramatic, and banal. But two paintings, both of them focused on everyday life, suggest otherwise.

Johannes Vermeer’s A View of Delft (c. 1660-1663) is by common consensus a great work of art. When Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, viewed the painting in a museum in the Hague, he pronounced it “the most beautiful painting in the world.” Over the past two centuries, the collective estimate of art critics and historians has not been far behind.

A View of Delft is a cityscape. The painting portrays the city of Delft, Holland, as seen from a southeastern perspective. From the position of the sun, it is evident that the time is early morning. In the foreground is the harbor, normally a bustling venue, but at this hour it is nearly empty, with only a stationary barge, two herring boats, and a few sailing vessels occupying its waters.  In the middle distance, the walls of the city’s brownstone and brick buildings are darkened by shadows. Its famous gates and fortifications, one of Delft’s distinctive features, are also enshadowed, their rough textures rendered by dots of paint. Higher up, however, the morning sunlight bathes the city’s roofs and steeples. Most striking is the white spire of Nieuwe Kirk, where Vermeer was baptized, a spiritual center of a thriving commercial city. Above the city are scudding clouds.

As the critic Karl Schutz has noted, A View of Delft, for all its masterly illusionism, has the feeling of a snapshot. Unlike a tranquil pastoral landscape, such as John Constable might have painted, Vermeer’s picture conveys a sense of activity frozen in time, an illusion created in part by the momentary ripples in the waters of the harbor. And though the painting possesses a serenity of its own, it is that of normal, everyday life. That effect is further enhanced by the presence of human figures in the immediate foreground, near the water. On the left, two well-dressed burghers, accompanied by two women, are waiting for the barge; not far away, two women in peasant attire are engaged in conversation. I have a reproduction of A View of Delft in my study, and whenever I stop to look at it, I am drawn to the image of those men and women and the activity they represent: casual human interaction, unhindered by the currents of political and social conflict.

James McIntosh Patrick’s The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window (1948) conveys a similar impression. McIntosh Patrick’s paintings are well-known in his native Scotland, and this picture is his most iconic work. Set in the city of Dundee, where McIntosh Patrick lived and worked, it balances a sense of intimacy against a panoramic vista.

It’s late afternoon. Long, parallel shadows thrown by a wrought-iron fence traverse the lawn in the foreground. At the gate of the fence stands the painter’s wife, who is returning from her errands. On the street, a cyclist (identified as the artist’s son) is pedaling past. A greengrocer making deliveries in his horse-drawn cart has momentarily paused. His horse stands still. On the sidewalk on the far side of the street, a man is walking his dogs, and a mother is pushing a stroller. Beyond them lies a wide sward known as Magdalen Green. Above it, the Tay Railway Bridge winds like a serpent above the Tay Estuary, where a cargo ship is making its slow passage across the water. Two locomotives pulling trains send white plumes of smoke into the overcast sky.

As the essayist Chris Arthur has observed, McIntosh Patrick’s painting creates a compelling illusion of arrested activity. In Arthur’s words, the picture leaves “a strong impression of capturing a moment.” The figures and objects in motion in the painting, particularly the cyclist, the dog walker, the cargo ship, and the steaming locomotives, though “captive in paint,” are “replete with a sense of movement.” McIntosh Patrick’s art “emphasizes the interruption of a flow.”

That it does. But like A View of Delft, it also honors the beauty waiting to be discovered in daily activities and common things. It is no accident that I also have a framed reproduction of McIntosh Patrick’s painting on my wall, where it quietly reminds me of the dignity of everyday life. The social, political, and economic ethos within which these paintings were created was no less fraught than our own, if not more so. But just as Zen monastics train themselves daily to remain in the present and to attend respectfully to ordinary things, the creators of these timeless paintings invert the news media’s conventional hierarchies of interest and value, giving precedence not to the mighty, the rich, and the warlike but to decent ordinary life.

Karl Schutz, Vermeer: The Complete Works. 45th ed. (Taschen, 2021).

Chris Arthur, What Is It Like to Be Alive? (Eastover Press, 2024), 237-258.

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Wrens’ nests

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , on 30 April 2025| 1 Comment »

In the opening lines of his poem “Gauze,” Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, asks a provocative question: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” In the remaining lines, he provides a tentative answer:

                        It seems that he can, cutting

            yesterday’s gauze dressing in pieces

–

            to scatter over the grass for the wrens

            who’ve come back again after another

            long winter and are building their nests

–

            in his birdhouses built with old boards

            that he salvaged in happiness, which he

            hammered together in happiness too.

If Kooser’s response to his own question sounds surprising, even startling, it is probably because it runs athwart conventional assumptions. In contemporary Western culture, old age is not commonly regarded as a time of exceptional happiness. On the contrary, it is often characterized as a kind of sunset: a time of loss, regret, physical indignity, and relative incapacity. Likewise, a critical, if not incurable, disease would seem incompatible with a general mood of happiness. Kooser’s pivotal use of the verb seems suggests that even he cannot quite believe what he is experiencing.

            From the vantage point of Zen teachings, however, Kooser’s experience of happiness amidst adverse conditions is not all that unusual. It seems entirely plausible. This is because Zen teachings sharply distinguish between external events and our internal responses. The former are often well out of our control. The latter are often a matter of choice, however conscious or unconscious.

            Usually, this distinction is framed as the difference between pain and conditioned suffering. Pain is what happens to us. Conditioned suffering is what we inflict upon ourselves through our reactions and responses, as when we catastrophize without sufficient evidence or engage in fearful speculation. Classical Buddhism likens the pain attendant to harsh external conditions to an arrow piercing our bodies. Our negative, conditioned responses are like a second arrow shot into the open wound.

            With respect to aging, anyone of a certain age can confirm that the first arrow and its impact are all too real. Beyond the maladies already mentioned, there may be cognitive impairments, the risk of taking a life-altering fall, or the eventual need for joint replacements, to name a few. These and other infirmities can make the lives of elderly people challenging, to say the least.

            At the same time, we have a choice. We can deny, resist, exaggerate, or otherwise worsen our afflictions.  Or we can acknowledge them, seek treatment, and, if possible, accept them for what they are. If the former response is akin to the second arrow, the latter affords at least a possible end to conditioned suffering.

            With respect to illness and disease, true acknowledgment and acceptance may be a far more complex and difficult matter. And it is also an individual one, dependent on temperament, overall health, and many other variables. For those with high pain thresholds and a cultivated tolerance for the uncertain and the unknowable, it is one thing. For those with neither, it is quite another.

            What Ted Kooser’s poem distinctively reflects is an open and curious but realistic sensibility discovering, as if for the first time, that happiness can co-exist with the realities of aging and the presence of a serious illness. It is not as if he is fully accepting either. Rather, he is implying that what Zen teachings would call contentment is ultimately not determined by externally imposed conditions. Its sources are within.

            For Kooser those sources would appear to include the pleasures of making and making do with what is at hand; the sense of being an integral part of nature rather than merely an outside observer; the exercise of imagination in returning a manufactured, disposable fabric to the natural world; and, not least, the neighborly company of wrens, one of the most comely and sonorous of North American birds.

—

Read the full text of “Gauze” in Raft (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Ted Kooser’s most recent book.

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It’s about the music

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 2 April 2025| 2 Comments »

Andres Segovia once called the classical guitar a small orchestra. Traditionally, its back and sides are made of rosewood, its soundboard of spruce or cedar. Together with these resonant woods, its six nylon strings, three or four of them wire-wound, can produce a rich variety of tones, ranging from the velvety to the brilliant, the smoky to the metallic. Depending on where the player’s right hand is positioned, the guitar can imitate instruments as diverse as the clarinet, the cello, the flute, and the snare drum. Notes on the so-called open strings (E, A, D, G, B, E) can be played on multiple places on the fingerboard, each placement creating a distinctive timbre. Notes can also be played as harmonics, natural or artificial. Like stops on a pipe organ, these technical options greatly expand the expressive potential of the classical guitar. At the same time, they make it one of the more difficult instruments to play well. And for some players, that difficulty is only compounded when an audience is listening.

For many years, I taught classical guitar at Alfred University. I also took part in the Performing Arts Division’s annual faculty recitals. Most often I played solo pieces from the Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and modern repertoires. But one year I invited an advanced student to join me in a duet. For our offering I chose “My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home” by John Dowland (1563-1626), a stately, lyrical piece originally composed for Renaissance lute. The arrangement for guitar included an optional second part, which I asked my student to learn. That the second part was optional proved crucial to our public performance. Halfway through, my student lost his way and had to drop out, leaving me to finish the piece alone. As we left the stage, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Ben.”

There was no need to apologize. Stage fright is far more common than one might think. It has afflicted not only inexperienced amateurs but also seasoned professionals of the stature of Frederic Chopin, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Laurence Olivier, and Pablo Casals, to name a few. And it can strike when least expected. Those who suffer from chronic stage fright can either cease to perform publicly, as Gould chose to do, or find reliable ways to settle their nerves. Proven stratagems include controlled breathing, yoga, Tai Chi, and the repetition of a mantra.

For performers who are also Zen practitioners, the daily experience of zazen (seated meditation) can also create a foundation for dealing with stage fright, not so much by enabling a performer to “conquer” it as by learning to integrate anxiety and its physical symptoms into one’s present experience. The deep breathing developed during sitting meditation can of course be beneficial. It stimulates the vagus nerve and helps the body relax. No less important, however, are three practices intrinsic to Zen meditation, namely the cultivation of awareness, the development of presence, and the discipline of selfless contemplation.

Zen practice trains us to bring awareness to every moment of our lives. This begins with mindfulness of breathing, posture, and state of mind, but it also extends to the immediate environment: its temperature, lighting, ambient noises, and so on. For a performing soloist, the experience of stepping on stage and suddenly facing a darkened, hushed auditorium can all too easily precipitate anxiety. Becoming aware of it as soon as it arises can forestall its spiraling into a debilitating attack. Conversely, being caught unawares, as my student evidently was, can subvert and even abort the most well-rehearsed performance.

Zen practice also cultivates presence: the capacity to be continuously present for the present moment. David Russell, a contemporary master of the guitar, once noted that audiences rarely hear every note being played. It is the guitarist’s job to direct attention to the notes that matter most. And to do that, performers must themselves remain present for every note, phrase, and cadence they are playing. Doing so can make the difference between an anxious, lifeless performance and a fresh, expressive one. And because fear is so often future-based, returning to presence can also be a potent antidote to stage fright.

And last, Zen practice teaches us to align the self with things as they are, however pleasant or unpleasant. “When it’s hot, be completely hot,” one Zen master put it. In the case of musical performance, this means aligning ourselves with such intricacies as the crescendos and decrescendos, the legatos and staccatos, and, not least, the points of rest in the music we are playing. Under the pressure of performance, it is easy to forget that the activity in which we are engaged is not ultimately about ourselves. It’s about the music. And to the degree that we can forget ourselves and listen, selflessly and contemplatively, to the music’s pulse and flow, we will not only enhance our performance and garner deserved applause. We will also share with our audience the music’s inherent depth and beauty.

Photo: My 2023 Masaki Sakarai guitar

Listen to my rendition of J.S. Bach’s “Sleepers Awake” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4YbhKkq9Wk

Listen to “My Lord Wlloughby’s Welcome Home” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzYHqiZDUG4.

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An unexpected lightness

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 19 March 2025| 4 Comments »

In the summer of the year 2000, I had the good fortune to be spending the month of June in Ireland, where I was teaching Irish literature to American students at Trinity College, Dublin. One sunny afternoon, as I was walking down Nassau Street in central Dublin, I stopped to browse at a sidewalk bookstall.

Enclosed in wooden trays were dozens of used books, including hefty, well-worn volumes on Irish history, culture, literature, and topography; slim, tattered collections by obscure Irish poets; dated anthologies of Irish drama, short stories, and essays; and biographies of such luminaries as Michael Davitt, Michael Collins, and Éamon de Valera. Finding many books of interest but none I cared to buy, I was about to leave, when another book caught my eye. Lo and behold, it was a book of my own: my verse novella, Midcentury, which my Irish publisher, Salmon Poetry, had released three years earlier.

Midcentury is a book-length, blank-verse meditation, narrated by a middle-aged American lexicographer living alone in Ireland in the nineteen-forties. Down on his luck and overly fond of Irish whiskey, he is seeking solace in the Irish landscape and Ireland’s wartime neutrality. His dominant themes, interwoven through six, interrelated sections in the manner of a string quartet, include impermanence, dispossession, forgiveness, the roots of language, Ireland’s tragic history, and his own spiritual deracination and renewal.

I began the  the first section, “The Word from Dublin, 1944,” while in residence at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. The remaining sections were written in multiple venues over the next three years. I completed the book in 1995 while staying at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Annaghmakerrig), the Irish writers’ retreat in Co. Monaghan. Before I had even begun this project, I might add, months of historical research into mid-twentieth-century Irish history and culture had laid its foundation. And there it was, my magnum opus, for sale on a Dublin sidewalk for less than a pint of Guinness.

“All conditioned things,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “are of the nature of vanishing.” Where books are concerned, those conditions include the vagaries of publishing, marketing, aesthetic fashion, critical opinion, and time itself, which can be cruel to unprotected ink and paper. With obvious exceptions, most authors should not be surprised to see their books vanish or be forgotten in due time—and often sooner rather than later. (With Midcentury I’ve had better luck: according to WorldCat, the worldwide library database, the book is currently in 89 libraries, here and abroad). No matter how many hours went into the making of a book, it can disappear quickly and with scarcely a trace, taking with it whatever ephemeral acclaim it might have accrued. In his poem “Provide, Provide!” Robert Frost puts the matter succinctly: “No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard.”

What I am speaking of, of course, is the reality of impermanence, which the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has called the “cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice.” For Frost, the remedy was to “make the whole stock exchange your own,” which might increase the chances of having interested parties at one’s bedside as the end draws near. “Better to go down dignified,” he advised, “With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all.” From the perspective of Zen teachings, however, the issue is neither so materialistically defined nor so easily resolved. Nor is impermanence something we can deal with later. It is immanent, if not always apparent, in things as they appear to us in the here and now. And, as Fischer puts it, “to understand impermanence at the deepest level, and to merge with it fully, is the whole of the Buddhist path.” Mindfulness, the central practice of Zen meditation, is “not a way to cope with or overcome impermanence. It is the way to fully appreciate and live it.”

That is more easily said than done. A lifetime of Western conditioning militates against it. But having practiced Zen for more than three decades, I can report that eventually one can get the hang of living within, rather than outside, the reality of impermanence. And should that happen, you may find yourself experiencing an unexpected lightness of being. As the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh often noted, we suffer not because things are impermanent but because we expect them to be permanent when they are not. Truly releasing that expectation can lift a self-inflicted burden, offer a fresh way of seeing, and open a gate to the next new experience. And for Zen practitioners who are also creative artists, living in alignment with impermanence rather than habitually resisting it can both facilitate the process of artistic creation and make it far more enjoyable. “Long live impermanence!” Thich Nhat Hanh, a poet and the author of more than a hundred books, delighted in saying, with only the gentlest irony in his tone.

Norman Fischer, When You Greet Me I Bow (Shambhala, 2022), 99, 102.

Photo: “At the Bookstall,” by garryknight (Creative Commons)

 

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Everyday ceremonials

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , on 18 December 2024| 2 Comments »

cleanliness-in-zen-buddhism-1

Around the time I began writing these essays, now more than sixteen years ago, I also wrote a poem by the same title:

ONE TIME, ONE MEETING

Picking up the phone to call my son,
I entertain the thought that every act,
No matter how familiar or banal,
Might be construed as unrepeatable
And all of life as ceremonial.
What could be less formal than the feel
Of yet another handset in the hand
Or, beneath my fingertips, the cool
Resistance to the punching-in of numbers?
And what could be more normal than hello,
Spoken by a voice I couldn’t fail
To recognize, despite the poor connection,
The fading in and out across the miles?
And yet to entertain that counter-thought,
To see each action and its consequence
As marvelous and not to be repeated,
Suffices to enlarge this conversation
Beyond the casual or circumstantial,
The morning’s headlines and the evening’s news,
As though just now the truth of things had spoken.

                        (From Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt, Salmon Poetry, 2009)

As longtime readers of this column may recall, “one time, one meeting” is a translation of the Japanese phrase ichigo ichie. Historically associated with the tea ceremony, the phrase is also a motto for Zen practitioners. It reminds us that in truth, if not always in appearance, every moment of our lives is unprecedented and unrepeatable. As such, it is worthy of our full attention, however habitual or mundane it may seem.

That is the central theme of the poem. But rereading it after many years, the line I find most arresting is “And all of life as ceremonial.” That line envisions a hypothetical (and highly unlikely) state of affairs and should not be read too literally. But the notion of “all of life” being ceremonial invites deeper consideration.

“We don’t stand on ceremony,” I recall a new acquaintance saying, as my first wife and I arrived at her home for a Christmas party. Our hostess’s intention, I assume, was to put us at ease. At the same time, the tone of her greeting was declarative and almost boastful.  It reflected and even championed the casual, informal, and individualistic ethos of American culture. And if that was the character of our society four decades ago, it is even more so now.

Ceremonies have their place and their purpose. Weddings, funerals, graduation exercises, church services, and the like mark certain occasions as special and sometimes historic. Whether religious or secular, they bear an aura of the sacramental. At the same time, those of a skeptical nature sometimes view such ceremonials as hollow, archaic forms and little more. As seen from that perspective, public ceremonies function largely to preserve a tradition, elevate the institutions that sponsor them, and preserve existing hierarchies of status, money, and power. Ceremonies are the province of cultural and economic elites. And though they may console, honor, inspire, and otherwise benefit the ordinary people who attend and value them, they may have little to do with the conduct of their daily lives.

Not so in Zen practice. In Zen monasteries, temples, and practice centers around the world, the most familiar chores and tasks, whether they be washing windows, vacuuming cushions, or sweeping steps, are carried out in silence and in ways both ritualistic and ceremonial. And for committed lay practitioners, the attitude underlying this practice extends well beyond the precincts of the zendo and into the activities of everyday life.

In The Little Book of Zen Healing, Paula Arai, a longtime Zen practitioner, observes that “by consciously approaching an action with presence and purpose, you can ritualize any act to be a healing activity.” That may sound like a daunting challenge, best left to advanced practitioners, but it is quite the opposite. As simple as it is efficacious, anyone can learn to do it.

If you would like to experience the practice for yourself, choose a familiar task, perhaps one you perform every day. Take three deep but natural breaths, following them from start to finish.

Now reflect on the nature of the task at hand. Consider its relationship to present conditions, including the environment, the season, and the time of day. If the task involves a tangible object, such as the cotton T-shirt you are folding or the hand-crafted ornament you are hanging on the tree, take a minute to contemplate its constituent materials and the labor that went into its making. Then give the task your full attention, as though you had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

Undertaken with this attitude, onerous chores can become dignified acts of attention. Personal and household maintenance, which can occupy so large a space in our daily lives, can be transformed into a venue for insight and understanding. And over time, if you persist, this venerable practice can foster greater appreciation of the gifts of nature, closer alignment with things as they are, and a profound and lasting equanimity.

_____

Paula Arai, The Little Book of Zen Healing, (Shambhala 2023), 107

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