Category Archives: reflections

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variations on a theme

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Has Mu become a cliché?

Or maybe saying “Oh it’s a koan!” has become a cliché.  A spiritual mobius strip in the highway to enlightenment?

I ramble.  Or maybe not.

We’ve been spending our weekends rambling… hiking.  Why?  Well, I woke up one morning and decided that was a nice thing to do – waking up, I mean – and something I’d like to continue to do.  As I often say to my family, it’s not the heart attack that will kill me; it’s that heart attack that doesn’t kill me that will kill me.

How’s that for a koan!

I doubt I’m alone in fearing a life of slow degradation.  Despite watching so many people courageously living their own lives through after heart attacks, cancer, various diseases and injuries, I continue to doubt my capacity to live with grace and ease in such circumstances.

So, I woke up one morning.  And I decided that settling for waking up and waddling to the bathroom then bemoaning the double chin and the plus size PJs (I know, I know… you will now need several doses of gore-filled alien-invasion movies to get that picture out of your head) was not enough waking up.

Mu!

When I worked with that koan, I realized that there is an alternative for “This is it!”

This is not it!

So we began the weekend hikes.

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even if there’s no buddha statue in the room…

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…there’s always a buddha statue in the room.

This I was heard to have said.

In a discussion late one evening about the aversion we have to religion icons and rituals, I made this comment as a parry to the arguments around the ridiculous ends we go to when we feel the need to deny the obvious.  I did however have to agree that Zen is particularly rife with these doubly-negating aphorisms.  In this case, it went something like this: The buddha statue in the room is not really a Buddha statue; it’s simply a mirror of all your assumptions and preconceptions of what it means to have a buddha statue in the room.

Now, I’ve drunk enough of the Kool-Aid that, in my sugar-addled stupor, I often believe this.  And I can, in my more sober moments, feel the embarrassment of the nonsensical statement – not to mention the bad grammar and syntax!  But it’s really not about the statue in the room as much as it is about our relationship to a pattern of thinking and a treasured set of schema.  So, I’ve taken a different tack to the problem of the ever-present buddha statue in the room.

There’s a statue in room.
It’s of the Buddha.

You may not like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another room.

You may like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay in the room.

Either way, there’s something you’re practicing.

You may not like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another practice.

You may like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay with the practice. 

Either way, this is something.

In your room.