Category Archives: readings

spirituality, ritual, and being a selectionist-buddhist

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Dad&Mum We had our first formal zazenkai today after a few years of hunkering down in formless practice. As formal as it gets, I suppose, given my tendency to laziness when it comes to form and ritual. Yet those moments of chanting and prostrations are a lovely dance we should all take part in if we are to learn to embody practice, to live vow.  And I felt it was important to honour the 7th day after my mother’s death.

Oh.  That’s my father and mother to the left.  They cut quite a dashing couple in the old days – which were actually the new days for them.  New days of hope that the British Occupation would bring them comfort and opportunity – which it did.  I think the picture is taken after WW II and around the time of Great Optimism.  They were both rising stars in the newly formed government, sometime after Aung San’s assassination and the military take over by Ne Win in 1963.  By then, they had learned to weave through the many political ups and downs including losing much of their acquired wealth when Ne Win demonetarized the Burmese kyat.  In fact, they had both retired and built their dream home only to have my father return to work when asked because, drawing from the rhythms of his poverty-ridden childhood,  he couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t need him or a family that ever had enough money to survive.

This was their legacy: work hard, do what’s necessary, never wonder if things could be better, make them better by waking up each morning and doing what is necessary.

Monk: What is the essence of your practice?
Basho: Whatever is needed

So today, we chanted the Honoring of the Bodhisattvas, lowered our bodies to the ground in gratitude for all the Bodhisattvas and Mahasattvas, the Stream of All Our Ancestors which now includes my parents and the parents of some of my friends whose mothers and fathers made their transition this week.

There’s a reluctance about the form of practice.  I feel it in myself even now after these years of lighting incense, bowing, prostrating, and stepping back before turning away from the altar.  As if somehow I would like this Buddhism to be something pure and separate from the religiosity of my childhood, the cathedrals and the black-frocked Christian European priests speaking to us poor Asians as if we were just south of a Neanderthal lineage.  And yet I resist the neo-spirituality I find that sucks in Buddhism as the panacea for and talisman against all sins past and future.

So yes, I’ve shopped my way around but in my defense it was only because of my ignorance of the many factions (I use that deliberately).  I grew up in a cultural Buddhism which had little to do with meditation and a lot to do with chanting at the pagodas, prostrating and feeding male monastics.  That said, a bit of buffet-surfing was to be expected and having (quickly) settled in Zen, I am quite content and even allow my Latin-Mass Catholic heritage to relish in the rise and fall of Namo Shakyamunaye Buddhaya.

Still, I have to say that meeting so many on this path who are caught in the confounding of being spiritual and being non-religious frustrates me.  Even more do claims to a Selectionist-Buddhism, as if that makes it more spiritual, annoy the heck out of me.    If there was one thing I learned standing my parents’ deathbed – even a decade apart – was that rituals don’t help ease the pain.  That’s not why we step into that space.  Rituals offer an opportunity to see how our mind grabs the nearest thing and makes it fuel.  That’s all.

And that’s likely the most important teaching we will ever receive whether it’s lifting a cup of coffee to our lips, checking the rear view mirror before backing out the driveway, packing our life’s belongings to cross an ocean, or bowing to the stream that awaits us as future ancestors.

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Note bene: Interestingly, I am reading Dispirited: How contemporary spirituality makes us stupid, selfish and unhappy by David Webster.  He has a fascinating thesis on spirituality having been hijacked by the New Age and the buffet mentality of seekers.  The book is good if somewhat problematic in being poorly edited, the occasional philosophical rant and difficulty with having to infer whether he’s talking about “authentic” or “let-me-look-spiritual”  spirituality.  But I’m liking it and, for the more philosophical among you, it may be worth the read.  (He actually does a great job of it on his blog post, Spiritual But Not Religious.)

when the body does what the body does

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unicorn-lights

“In this fathom-long body with its perceptions and thoughts there is the world, the origin of the world, the ending of the world and the path leading to the ending of the world.”  -AN 4.45

It always amazes me when I catch myself trying to run before I can walk.  It shouldn’t surprise me but it does.  With all this cushion time, retreats, sesshins, workshops, and gosh-knows-what that I take on in the pursuit of that one ineffable experience of BAM! YOU’RE ENLIGHTENED! one would think that I could jog a few steps on this path of purification.  Apparently not and the road rash on my mentally constructed nose is strong evidence of this.

In sangha, we are exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  Yet again!  I can’t get enough of it so each year I subject my sangha mates to another round of the body-et al.-in-the-body-et al.  This Sunday, I pointed out that this fathom-long body is all we need to know in order to lift each foot out of the mud.  ”Don’t leave home without it!” I warned.  Yet, each day, we do.  In the hub-bub and brou-hah-ha of the drama of our moments, it fades into the background and is barely perceptible.  Safe to say, even my preaching the Good Word about being in the body as the body had little impact on my monkey mind as I was setting up chairs on yoga mats and placed my little finger between the chair leg and mat.

This time the body is quite forgiving, leaving me with a little blood blister. Other times it hasn’t been though I hesitate to place malicious or punitive intent in its lap. The body does just what the body does. It’s only when that monkey mind grabs the sensations that arise from contact – in this case between form and touch organ – that the show begins.

Well, it won’t hurt any of us to relearn the fundamentals of this walking practice again and again.  Even if it isn’t Zen-sounding.  This, I think is where the running before walking happens too.  In all the glam of Zen practice, we forget to master the basic stuff, the Suttas that came before the Sutras.  After all, how else to understand the Prajnaparamita without understanding the skandhas and the container in which they manifest.  But I’ll be the first to say how I love a good treatise on the interconnection of quantum physics and the Prajnaparamita.  For that, by the way, dig into Mu Soeng’s The Heart of the Universe which has one of the most articulate interweavings of the two threads of unknowing.

Still and all, for all that unknowing is the fruit of our practice, it doesn’t hurt to return over and over to the framework of knowing.  Body, feelings, mind, and objects of mind.  Even so, we have a tendency to rush into the conceptual tangles, the objects of mind, by wanting to know how, why this mind responds to the body the way it does.

The body does just what the body does.

So hard to accept.

This is a lovely presentation on the body/mind connection and the base of practice as mindfulness of the body as the body, in the body:  Mindfulness, visualized.

Also check out Bhante Gunaratana’s new book, The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Plain English.

entering zen: the wabi-sabi of practice

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GRATITUDE

Whatever it is,
I cannot understand it,
although gratitude
stubbornly overcomes me
until I’m reduced to tears.

Saigyo

Entering Zen by Ben Howard is one of those stealthy books that can overcome you page by quiet page.  And at times, as I read it in a cabin tucked into the misty Catskills, it did reduce me to tears.  There is a simplicity in Howard’s words, something that makes this book and his blog posts (One Time, One Meeting ) a place of exploration that is simultaneously safe and challenging to enter.

These 75 essays offer teachings on Zen that show the practice as basic yet intricate, ordinary yet elegant.  To shine these jewels of practice, Howard draws from his immense knowledge and wisdom of literature, poetry, Buddhist practice, and an intimacy with his own life.  The tone of each chapter is by turn filled with delight at a child’s creativity, nostalgic for ways of living long gone, and delicate in unfolding a complex concept like sabi or wabi sabi.

Weathered Wood, the chapter which does the latter, is likely my favourite because Howard draws us in with a lovely poignant explanation of sabi and extends it to an appreciation of how our lives progress as a “bloom of time.”  He teaches from the wisdom of Tadao Ando, an architect:

Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time.”  It connotes natural progression – tarnish, hoariness, rust – the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled.  It’s the understanding that beauty is fleeting…Sabi things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the yielding gray of weathered wood, the elegant withering of a bereft autumn bough.

Howard goes on to point out that sabi carries a suggestion of imperfection.  This is not the imperfection of wrongness or improper creation;  it is the imperfection that confirms the authenticity of a life being lived.  And this is the heart of Zen practice: the confirmation that an authentic life is one lived intimately with the truth of imperfection.

Throughout the book, Howard writes with an ease that comes from his skill as a teacher of English Literature, a musician, and his long-standing practice with different teachers.  He brings out the wisdom and compassion of Dogen, Jack Kornfield, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Toni Packer with the same precise skill as what he extracts from poets Seamus Heany, Mary Oliver, and Gary Snyder.  It can be intimidating and somehow Howard manages to make the accessibility of the complexities of the dharma seem to be our own wisdom.  And, his consternation at vanity plates that say “ME” notwithstanding, I do feel the urge to whisper at the end of each chapter, “I did it!”

As the current trend in Buddhist writings leans towards snappy phrases and promises of liberation by the last chapter, Howard’s writings are refreshingly honest.  Practice takes effort.  It is worthy of our attention.  It grants us “refuge… more dependable than any bank and more durable than any mountain.”  It is no more or less than this, just this.

angulimala and the price of belonging

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Every so often, I come back to the story of Angulimala.  There’s a well-written version here and it is one of the most beloved Buddhist stories of salvation.  Angulimala was a brilliant student of a well-known teacher who turned against him when other students became jealous.  The teacher set a task to test Angulimala’s dedication to his teachings: he was to collect a thousand human little fingers.  In some versions, Angulimala was set the task to prove his unquestioning loyalty to the teacher.  In others, the teacher believed Angulimala had slept with his wife and set him up to commit these crimes so that he would be punished by the law, a rather passive-aggressive move on the teacher’s part.

There’s the obvious cautionary message about what teachers can do when caught in their own tangles of desire.  I would say it’s regardless of enlightenment because I don’t believe true enlightenment is a permanent condition anyway.  There’s also the obvious moral call to be one’s own lamp in matters of principled action.   But that’s not really where the power of the story lies.

At its heart, this is a story about the restrictions we place on our vision of others.  We need them be a certain way, to act a certain way, to meet our needs a certain way.  We believe certainty is a scripted safety net which makes life safe within margins.  When that script is challenged it doesn’t matter if the challenge is real or not; the ripples of fear are immediate and cannot be calmed easily.  

It’s also a story about our need to belong and what we are willing to forfeit to have that place where we are accepted as trusted and valued members of a community.  It’s easy to fall into the mind-trap that gives precedence to a felt sense of belonging over principled action because the former “feels” more real, has more “real” correlates with safety than the latter.  We all need something we can hold onto; a dharma name, a robe, a shawl, a jacket.  Nothing wrong with that unless we look away from the coin we’ve used to purchase it.

I don’t claim to know what the teacher and his student should have done or might have done.  I need to spend a bit of time counting the little fingers I’ve collected while thinking I was truly practicing.

the art critic and the enso: book review of kay larson’s biography of john cage

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Avant-garde artist-composer-Zen student of D.T. Suzuki, John Cage would have been 100 years old on September 5, 2012.  For almost 8 decades Cage has been the source of much deliberation, consternation, and experiential angst for visual and sound artists.  There are a number of books, some being published almost simultaneously with Kay Larson’s rather ambitious attempt to place John Cage the man in a social matrix that explains Cage the artist.

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists is staged in three parts, the section titles quoting D.T. Suzuki and riffing on Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra.  Larson’s intention is to show us the flow of Cage’s life as a process of seeing him as mountain, deconstructing that self as he expresses the wisdom of the sages, and finally – though not permanently – takes his place in the history of modern art.  It’s ambitious and far-reaching, pulling together a sociological examination of the culture in which Cage’s talents cooked and the influential role he played in the lives of all who gathered around him.  In doing so, Larson’s own history unavoidably interpenetrates the story she tries to weave.

Larson is an art critic and contributor to the New York Times.  She brings to the shelf a vast knowledge, not only of the matrix in which Cage was embedded but also of the larger cultural shifts that carried art from form to formlessness.  And it is the essence of formlessness, of shunyata, that has her in its thrall.  Larson has also been a Zen practitioner since 1994, a fact that may or may not have been an advantage to her voice in the book.  However, she did begin her practice at Zen Mountain Monastery and that exposure to the art and teachings of the late John Daido Loori Roshi could have polished the lens to see the form/emptiness flow in Cage’s work.  Larson therefore has the difficult task of dancing between observer and participant in the narrative.  Late in the book, Larson quotes art critic Harold Rosenberg’s article “The American Action Painters.”  It stands as the finger pointing to the challenge of her task and a moral tale that in our efforts we are aware that “art (is) not an object… it (is) a process.”

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.  The painting itself is a “moment” in the unadulterated mixture of his life…  The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.  The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life…

[The artist] must exercise in himself a constant No…

As we explored last week, No is Mu in action, that pesky first koan we confront only to have it confront us.  Larson does a valiant job for trying to hold to that essence of “No” as she works through the first section, Mountains are Mountains.  Staying out of the way of the flow, her writing is rich and the relationships dance on the pages.  The characters are seductive in their passion for their work and for each other; thankfully Larson stays away from portraying the sexual liaisons as over-wrought drama.  They are no more or less the dust that gathers on the cultural consciousness that shapes Cage’s early life as an artist.  In fact, she does a tantalizing magic with the interconnections of Cage to the growing avant-garde movement that I felt rather at home with the Dada-ists and the Surrealists, something I never managed in my Art Conservation years.  When Joseph Campbell, the Allans – Watts & Ginsberg – and a variety of myth, mythology, and buddhistic beings showed up, it did begin to feel surreal.  By the end of the section, there were not only mountains being mountains but entire mountain ranges interconnected in the landscape of art in the first half of the 20th century.

Cage opened a book y D.T. Suzuki on Zen around 1950.  Feeling alienated and likely unappreciated in most aspects of his life, Larson sees him as suffering and that suffering being ripe to receive the first words he reads in Suzuki’s book First Series:

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.

Later Cage attends a lecture given by Suzuki and the book could probably have ended there with the aphorism: And the rest was history.  But it wasn’t, really.  Cage took the teachings of Zen deep into his work and whether or not we can appreciate his “readymade” performance art (see YouTube for many) or comprehend his intentions in deconstructing music into sound sensation, we come to appreciate his message that there is everything going on in the nothing we think is happening.

John Cage, the artist, is a tough subject to write of, let alone review, because his work cannot be apprehended through rational argument.  And as an guard to being seduced into liking a book just because the author has significant street creds, I spent two months listening to Cage’s compositions and researching some secondary sources of his work.  His book on the Ox Herding pictures has always been a favourite but there is much that is beyond my hearing-consciousness in his sound compositions (I hesitate to call it music because Cage himself seems to be reaching beyond the name-form).  Except one.  The composition 4’33″ is perhaps the most challenging practice I’ve encountered; it is a challenge to expectations and a command to be in full contact with the world as it is, inside and out.

This deconstructive process of awareness is where Larson’s second section, Mountains are No Longer Mountains, takes us.  But here there be dragons.  It may seem a bit harsh of me to criticize Larson here, having sinned in exactly the same way above, however her voice in this section is louder and somewhat intrusive.  And it is ironically so because Larson tries to show how Cage’s work begins to manifest out of the Zen practice of shunyata, emptiness, or interconnectedness.  The complete incompleteness of the Zen circle or enso becomes the leitmotif of Cage’s pursuit for enlightenment; there are riches to be mined here.  Yet Larson’s forays into Zen teachings dangerously tread the edges of cliché, saved only by the quotes of Cage’s reflections of the influence of Zen on his work.  It would be graciousness to say that this is what happens when art and life are deconstructed into the essence of sensations.  However, one would anticipate that the practices of art criticism (the deep seeing it commands) and Zen would provide a steadiness in the face of the dissolution of convention and form.

Cage, as the Zen student that Larson constructs him to be, seems to have connected with the enso of practice:

[E]veryday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it.  That when is when our intentions go down to zero.  Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.

This openness to experience infiltrates all of Cage’s work as he carries forward the spirit of his vision in 4’33″.  It is the work of being simply itself, having its own authority to contain whatever arises.  It moves beyond the need to prove a point, make a mark, or  leave a trace.  As a compositional piece, 4’33″ cannot exist without the entire world bearing witness and participating.  Larson does a good job here in bringing out the essence of Zen teachings and their emergence in the mind of John Cage.

The third section, Mountains are Again Mountains, attempts to provide an historical provenance of John Cage.  Larson attempts to place Cage back into a sociological matrix and roll gently into the denoument of his life.  Sadly, it is choppy and filled with more characters than we can handle this late in the book; it simply doesn’t work.  Here too, her voice becomes too present; she shifts from dispassionate observer to a full participant, taking our focus away from Cage’s “post-satori” life.  When he comes down from the mountain, who is he?  And now… and now…  We learn that, in the later decades of the 20th century, Cage loses the reins on the beast he released on the art world.  Yet Cage’s way-seeking mind appears to let go of the need to control where and how this bête noire shows up in the post-Cold War world of experiential expression.  Cage dies from a stroke in 1992 and the circle of his influence continues to expand.

Where the Heart Beats is a fascinating book and not one to be taken on as a quick read.  It is perfect in parts and imperfect in others.  But it pays back with a luscious taste of a time that was creatively wild and which graced us with wise sages who came down from the mountains.  As Zen scholar and artist Kazuaki Tanahashi often says, “The enso contains the perfect and imperfect; that is why it is always complete.”  For that, Larson’s own enso is to be commended for her diligent effort and aspiration to completeness.