Category Archives: Western Teachers

Teachers primarily of American and European cultures

breaking bread

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luminous2

There’s a new energy in the house.  Not just the wild exuberance of the pups who have so far managed to survive my every threat of sending them to the Great Beyond.  Not just the brighter light of Spring or the receding snow line on the fields.  Not just the thick glaze of ice crust on the trails from the day melt and night freeze.  Not just anything in particular but all things in their eternal uniqueness that come together effortlessly.  Yet that asks so much of us – to simply wait with deep faith that change requires little of us but presence.

After watching Espe Brown’s movie “How to Cook Your Life,” I had an urge to bake bread.  This was a somewhat safer urge to indulge than the one I tend to have after watching superhero dog survivor movies.  But bread making requires effort akin to the great effort of Zen; and yet Espe Brown made it look and sound like the ultimate in cultivated laziness.  Now I get all the be one with the carrot and the spinach rap of Zen.  I do.  Really.  I even get the drink your tea even if it’s just a riff on the sentiment because I’m doing so while pounding out the next blogpost.  And I know about bread baking too having spent many a year baking two, three, many loaves each weekend.

DSC_0053The dharma of bread making is that there are no guarantees.  It thrives on doubt.  Great Doubt.  It is fickle in its liturgy.  Empty yet demanding of form.  Demanding of protocol yet unyielding in promises of outcome.  It is not for the rigid of mind or acolyte of scrupulosity.  And that makes me the worst person on earth for this practice.

However, great effort is often codependent with great blindness and sometimes the delusion of possibilities pays off.  In one of his teaching moments, Espe Brown said, “Let things come to your heart.”  And when I do, it’s clear that bread making is not about bread or making.  It is about distress tolerance.

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At each stage, from the way in which yeast feasts on the sugars to that tender balance between elasticity and collapse of the dough, creating the loaf-to-be is only about trusting the invisible bodhisattvas of gluten and fermentation more than the demons of fear and desire.  It is about letting things go into the dark and do just what they are meant to do without the interference that arises from our desperation to have it done.  Letting go, yes.  Not clinging, definitely.

And yet.  We are not given to truly know the essence of these transitions.  The first round of bread making resulted in a stunted, thick loaf that only Frank, in his endearing love of all things carbohydrate, would relish.  Heavy chunks of glutinous wheat with a savoury buckwheat bite make his morning (and I don’t doubt he dips it in his high-octane coffee).  It may have been the temperature, the thundering hooves of two playful puppies, the arch of my eyebrow, the waves of panic energy that seeped from my palms into the dough as I kneaded it.  Not knowing is the most intimate, Dizang said.  I wonder if he baked bread too.

DSC_0077The second loaf was more generous in its response.  Then again, I adjusted the parameters.  A different recipe from a different book, a few breaths reminding me of my capabilities, more wood in the wood stove, and taking the pups for a 1 hour walk so I didn’t keep checking the proofing of life in the dough.  We can put all the ingredients together when cooking our life.  We can stir, beat, fold, and knead them into some shape.  We can read each expansion and contraction for portents of praise or blame.  We can entrust the clusters of our life to the dark and the light.  We can hold them in boxed forms or freeform.  We can blast them in furnaces or freeze them for some future date.

But we can never really know until we break them open and let them penetrate deep into our heart.

the vulnerability of sentients

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Two new Zen Masters came to town last Saturday. They are Kazuo and Yuki of Imminent Death School of Canine Zen.

Photo courtesy of Friendly Giants Dog Rescue

Along with their three siblings, Kaz and Yuki (originally named Riggs and Riley) were slated for being gassed to death at a kill shelter north of Montreal.  I can’t quite get my head around the oxymoron of putting the words kill and shelter side by side but there you have it.  With 24 hours to extermination, Friendly Giants Dog Rescue managed to “pull” them from the shelter by convincing the shelter the pups would be picked up 48 hrs past their expiration date.  FGDR is a non-profit community of people who care deeply about the abandonment, neglect and rate of kill in shelters where pets or progeny of unexpected encounters between non-neutered/spayed dogs are frequently abandoned.

I don’t know how they do it.  I can’t even watch Hollywood-whitewashed movies about animals without dissolving into a blubbering mess.  And the Japanese original version of the story of Hachiko?  Let’s just say I refused to re-name Riggs as Hachiko or even Hachiro because I’d end up sobbing if anyone asked me what it meant.  So I designed a psychological hardening program that had me lurking on various dog rescue facebook sites.  For a while it all showed up on my new stream but that was too much like flooding myself into empathy overload.  So I made a vow each morning to check in on each site and just bear witness for a few months.

There is something about the vulnerable sentients that should pierce into each of our hearts.  It should activate and energize stepping into this cycle of life and death.  But there are so many and Frank tries to reassure me that not all can be saved.  To which I counter, why not?  And the deeper question is how?  How can we save all beings without frying our empathy circuits and frazzling our compassion networks?

Bernie Glassman is fond of pointing out that unless we take the time to bear witness and sit with not knowing, compassionate action is not possible.  It will not arise; instead what arises is ego-ladened and more likely to do harm than good.

And so it happened, one day, quietly, without fanfare.  I sent an email asking about Riggs.  The adoption form seemed to fill itself and the background check (yes they are that thorough) didn’t reveal that I once had to have rabies shots.  (Not to worry; no one I’ve ever bitten has hung around to complain.)  We made all the arrangements and the boys arrived last Saturday.

Yes.  The Boys.  Plural.  I have no excuse other than to say the idea of being alone, without companionship, pierces more than the idea of physical death.

Meet Kazuo:                                                                                        And Yuki:

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It’s quite the challenge to take on two 12-week old puppies of uncertain lineage – other than Large or Giant.  And apparently, our home is not quite puppy-proof; at least the boot rack and boots aren’t.  However, we seem to have fallen into a sesshin-like schedule and there is something powerful that arises when our focus is beyond our self-weighted needs.

These little guys have taught me a lot in the last seven days of Puppy Sesshin: Entering the heart of equanimity and harmony.  I’ll do  my best to transcribe their talks (played on souped-up woofers) and pass them along for your enlightenment.

In the meantime, enjoy the fur creatures in your life.  Oh and… get over to the various dog/cat/rat/all beings large and small rescues to help, donate, offer your professional services.  Whatever you have.  It all counts.  And it all matters.

 

good enough for me & abhi d

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I’m off today for the wilds of Barre MA and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  It’s been a lifelong dream to sit and study the dharma/dhamma.  Somehow, life always had other things for me to study and in the last few months I’ve made a commitment to play hard ball with its demands.  So, I’m off!  Headed down the highway to my favourite breakfast stop and then to Burlington VT to lunch with a dear friend.  And then to land in a community of contemplation and study.

This week of learning about and through the Abhidhamma is going to be a challenge.  There are many dreams and delusions that will get in the way of sinking into the teachings.  Being mostly self-taught, I’m hoping it won’t be too much of an ego-thrashing.  But maybe I’ll get lucky and it will be!  Good enough for me.

As I typically do before I go on long trips, I update my will, make sure every knows where it is, and where the password list for all my computer accounts is stored too.  I take a moment to tell everyone I love them and that yes, I expect the dishes to be done before I get back.  This time, I’m also thanking Frank for holding down the fort over the septic tank (yes it has to be replaced and the “designer” is coming on Monday morning).  I also let people know they are in my will.  Really.

I’m telling you that too: you are in my will – the one I carry around in my back pocket and pull out which says: May you receive all you need to be safe and well.  May you receive all the blessings you need and fully deserve – whether you think so or not.  May you receive clear messages that you are precious and loved and valued.

Be nice to each other and I’ll see you on the other side!

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For some reason, I was humming Me & Bobby McGee as I wrote this post so I bequeath it to you.  I’m a Janis fan but this is nice rendition.

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.

handful of leaves

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Last week, I spent 5 days at the Omega Institute learning about mindful self-compassion.  The potential redundancy of the topic title and the nuances of dharma may chafe a bit but it does point to the current trend in turning Buddhist psychological concepts into therapeutic processes.  That’s not a bad thing because given what interventions actually work and the paradigm shift we need so we can improve as therapists, another approach would be a Godsend… or Buddhasend in this case.  In fact, when done right (read: commitment to training on the part of the therapist), there is no greater accountability than that for a professional who has to test the medicine before administering it.  And what medicine it is!

The Buddha said that what he had taught was a handful of leaves in comparison to the numerous leaves in the simsapa forest.  In the Simsapa Sutta, he explained that what he had not taught was irrelevant because 

… they are not connected with the goal, do not relate to the rudiments of the holy life, and do not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to Unbinding. That is why I have not taught them.

The Buddha went on to say that he taught one and only one thing: suffering and the end of suffering.

A few things about this sutra have bothered me for a long time.  First, why the heck would he avoid teaching something because it did not lead to suffering*?  By inference, it means some of the things he taught opened us to suffering – which, of course, is what he said.  Second, in my pea-brained head what he taught has always been two things: (1) suffering and (2) the end of suffering.

Somewhere in the week of the retreat/training, I had a chance to walk with a dear dharma sibling.  As we discussed the intricacies of what the Buddha taught (and didn’t teach), I wondered out loud why suffering never seemed to cease.  Why was it that each time we drilled down into that deep gut somewhere under the hara, we reliably struck the oily, thick, black smoke of ancient twisted karma?  We talked some more about this “walk of disillusion” we often take as practitioners, this path of disenchantment, grief, and sorrow that we mistake for an obstacle to our progress.  Stopping under a towering tree (close as we can get to a simsapa forest), I chuckled with the realization that perhaps we had become experts in drilling for suffering.  Perhaps we only found suffering each time because that precisely was what we drilled for at every sitting.   Perhaps it was time to hang up that dowsing rod and turn to something more balancing.

I can’t think of a better argument for a practice of love; not just compassion but also lovingkindness, equanimity and joy.    The fourfold practice that warms and opens the heart.  And ends suffering.

So the Buddha did teach one and only one thing.  Our practice is not only about the origins of suffering and the defilements that cause them.  It is equally and likely even simultaneously about the cessation of suffering through the practice of warming the heart so it can open and not fear being broken.

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*The Buddha’s teaching are not simply an exercise in intellectual exploration of suffering.  In order to understanding suffering, we first need to open to it in the body, experiencing the very sensations we struggle against and strive to avoid at all costs.  So paradoxically, his teachings lead us directly to suffering because that is the only route out of this tangled mess born of craving, hatred, and ignorance.