earth
Here,
I’m here -
the snow falling
Issa
108zenbooks
Category: Eastern Teachers
December 28, 2011
space
The great square has no outside,
the great circle has no inside.
from Enso: Zen circles of enlightenment by Audrey Yoshiko Seo
December 27, 2011
water
Opening their hearts
ice and water become
friends again
Teishitsu
October 3, 2011
zucchini teisho
I’m deeply grateful to have a job. Certainly deeply grateful that it is rewarding on many levels despite the long and frequent commutes, the bureaucratic bs and the oft-times idiotic decisions that lead to wide-eyed surprise at the obvious SNAFU outcomes. All that notwithstanding, I’m truly grateful for time spent at home after grueling days on the road. And this weekend was not different.
Fall has settled comfortably into the valley that contains our house, the forest, and the various fauna. The colours of the maple, birch, and oak are 
vibrant; even the unceasing misty days can’t subdue them. We are inundated with tomatoes and squash. I’ve never been successful with squash but this year there is a bounty of Spaghetti, Buttercup, Acorn, and even a late yet determined Crooked-neck. We’re usually the masked rangers sneaking around the office building leaving zucchini in waiting rooms. But not this year. There were only four; two the size of baseball bats, and two smaller ones. I’ve left one in the garden, squeezing out every microlumen of light I can for it. The other yielded about a cup of shredded delight and wisdom.
Travelling is bad for the eating habit energy. Past stories intrude into the present, derailing intentions to respect my limited lifetime and aging cardiac system. So when I get home, I try to make up for the bad karma. This time with the help of some of my somewhat unruly Facebook friends, I hit on an idea for Nutella zucchini muffins. It called for shredded zucchini. And time.
It’s an interesting concept that we have all the time in the world but never truly experience it that way. In sangha
yesterday, we read from Dogen’s Uji - Time-being. It might have helped the shredding-being to “see each thing in this entire world as a moment of time.” Thankfully, the zucchini saw that as it slid cooperatively up and down the perforations in the steel plate. And then, in a moment of time, it was a small nub, forcing me to slow down. To stop. To feel the watery pulp that was still form, and yet no-form.
Practice is like that. We start full of fire and consuming everything in our path; shredding, pulping, reducing everything to what our little digestive systems can handle. And then, suddenly one day, we know enough to slow down, to stop.
And to see that there is “nothing but just this moment.”
August 30, 2011
flinching from eudaimonism in buddhism
Let me pick up on a hint of a theme from yesterday’s book review of Thich Nhat Hanh’s new novel, The Novice. Towards the end of the post, I commented that Thấy’s teachings offer an easy entry to Buddhism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he, like many teachers who are skillful, offers an apparently simple beginning to practice. There is wisdom in this. The teachings can be encouraging and lay a solid groundwork for deeper understanding as we continue on the path. However, there is also a danger that we can fall into a flowery, vapid, and naive approach that gentle teachings can evoke.
It has always concerned me that “simple” is absorbed as “simplistic” and the evidence is rampant in the millions of catchy sayings that attempt to transport us from the truth of suffering into a facsimile realm of the Pure Land. Tragically, this creates a blindness to the deeper teachings offered by teachers such as Thấy which are – under the child-like renditions – a complex integration of scripture and aids to practice. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that his words, audio and written, are killing-sword koans whose edge we can skip over or on which we can impale our delusions.
I once said to a dharma teacher in Thấy’s tradition that Thấy offers an easy in but it’s a tough stay. Practice, as Thấy teaches, demands an unrelenting devotion to being honest with oneself in every moment. Try it for five if you question how hard this is. And yet, the preponderance of his teachings seem to end up as sound bytes turning the nectar of compassion into a mind-numbing salve against the reality that the practice of Buddhism is not about salvation in this moment or any other. It’s a true koan of our times. How do such accessible teachings result in such a diversion from the intent of practice?
About the time of my struggle with this conundrum an email arrived pointing me to a delicious post by Glenn Wallis on “Flinching.” As frightened as I am by the depth of Wallis’ erudition, I was compelled by his argument that there is a turning away from the truth of suffering, that we have developed a predictive, fallacious equation whose outcome variable is set as “deep joy.” He refers to this perspective as “a eudaimonistic subterfuge” to which Buddhism is becoming heir. If I grasp Wallis’ exegesis and in my simplistic terms, we Buddhists have taken a wrong turn in our understanding of the Dharma by making practice instrumental rather than intentional. Not only have we let our fears about the true nature of reality get the better of us, we have become deeply desirous of a belief that a virtuous practice will reap a future of deep joy. This utilitarian stance to practice is subtly subversive and the ground quickly becomes unstable because it is driven by avoidance of pain. This is further emphasized by a recent retreat on the Tricycle page in which Rita Gross spoke out on “feel-good Buddhism.”
In psychotherapy, we call this a flight into health. The patient, overwhelmed by what is required to make sincere and long-lasting change, suddenly gets better – a one-hit-one-session-wonder. The therapist, anxious about the depth of intervention and the demands of sitting with the pain of the Other, flinches at the prospect and welcomes or even offers this endpoint of deep joy. It is a collusion that creates a dynamic of mutual blindness. Winding this thread back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings, I wish had a peanut for every time I heard someone say, “If you just practice for three days, your depression will go away.” Or, “If I could just sit in the presence of my partner’s anger and understand Interbeing, it will be ok.” Well, if I had a peanut for each of these times, I’d be a happy elephant.
Here’s the unfiltered truth: There are no promises. Hope was a demon in Pandora’s Box. Practice simply because there is no choice. Don’t flinch from this.
