Tag Archives: book review

the endless training of zen: book review of A Guide to Zen

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Zen training is without beginning and without end.  Some days, when the petty ego takes over and the arbitrary lines are drawn between past and future or gain and failure, that’s a bitter pill to swallow.  On those days, it’s helpful to have a guide that takes the sting out of whatever thought may drift by about gaining and failing.

Katsuki Sekida, author of Zen Training and Two Zen Classics, a translation of the Mumokan and Blue Cliff Records, was a teacher of English and trained in monasteries in Japan.  Editor of this condensation of Sekida’s earlier work, Marc Allen was one of his students at the Maui Zendo and has distilled Sekida’s teachings in a compact, helpful book for beginner and more advanced students of Zen.

Sekida starts with practice.  Acknowledging that Zen is “concerned with the problem of the nature of mind,” he makes it clear from the outset that the workings of mind (speculation and reason) are not separate from personal practice which arise from our body and mind.  Unlike most books on Zen practice which give slight service to posture and breathing, Sekida begins with two chapters detailing posture and breath work.  It’s not just about sitting and different poses; he digs deep into the experience of the breath and unravels the questions we have about the relationship between sitting immobile and the nature of mind.  More than any other book I’ve read, he digs deeply into the physiology of breath and there are some useful practices that surface from this part of the book.

I particularly liked the chapter on Samadhi,

the cleansing of consciousness,
and when consciousness is purified,
emancipation is, in fact, already accomplished.

Complicated words.  Sekida slowly and deliciously unpacks them through his definitions of absolute and positive samadhi and the phases of each. Using Linji’s categorization of the conditions of mind, Sekida describes the permutations and combinations of inner and outer focus (concerns) in clear and easily comprehensible terms.  He also makes an important point of self-mastery as the difference between true samadhi and false samadhi.   This, of course, is my hobby-horse – that litmus test between mindfulness based in ethics and mindfulness as a utilitarian strategy for the petty ego.

Sekida also clarifies the experience of kensho in one simple sentence (underlined below):

It may be, therefore, that the sound of a stone striking a bamboo trunk, or the sight of blossoms, makes a vivid impression, and you experience the wonderful moment of realization we call kensho. In this moment, you seem to see and hear beautiful things, but the truth is that you yourself have become beautiful and exalted.  Kensho is the recognition of your own purified mind.

It doesn’t get more transparent than that.

The book ends with a chapter on the Ox Herding Series.  I found it lovely but too much of a shift away from the dropping deep process of practice and realization of mind that marked the previous chapters.  Nevertheless, Sekida does offer some interesting links of his concepts of the physiology of practice and the spiritual metaphor of herding the Ox as steps in cultivating samadhi.  At times it seems prescriptive or predictive of what might happen as practice progresses.  At times it is reassuring that even on the journey of finding and mastering the Ox, there are ebbs and flows of gaining and failing.  I appreciated this the most in Sekida’s teaching: the Ox Herder is not simply a master of the capture and taming but truly the Everyman, vulnerable yet full of potential.

Finally, kudos to Marc Allen for putting together a very portable book packed full of generous teachings.  It’s one I will certainly stick in my pack and pull out often.

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.)

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.

unconditional intimacy is unconditional commitment

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Zazen is intimacy.  This is not an intimacy between you and others, between you and the universe.  Zazen is intimacy; zazen is our life that is the universe.  Not seeing this clearly is a problem that stems from the ordinary understanding of intimacy, whereby intimacy becomes another aspect of dualistic self-centeredness.  We feel intimate with another in a relationship as long as they fit our expectations, as long as the experience is what I want.

Clarifying intimacy is tied to clarifying commitment….  Whether it is commitment to practice or to a relationship, true commitment grows out of who we truly are, and true commitment manifests who we are.

Everything is the Way by Elihu Genmyo Smith