Category Archives: Western Teachers

Teachers primarily of American and European cultures

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musical chairs & the subtle nourishment of lack

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Yesterday marked a turning point in my practice.  As most of you know, Frank and I facilitate/manage/runaround a sangha.  Most of the time, it’s a lot of fun.  We have an opportunity to sit, walk, drink tea, and laugh with like-minded folks who share a curiosity about life.  Sometimes, it’s a pain where the zafu meets the body part.  Events are rarely attended and often we’ve been left holding the financial bag for community gatherings.  (Probably the worst was a fund-raising dinner for a local charity to which we had “bought” a table for 10 and no one showed.)  We tend to roll with these things though Frank and I have markedly different approaches to the ups and downs of interest and attendance.

My view is quorum-based.  There’s no point going ahead without the right size of body count.  His view is to go ahead with practice and eventually the bodies count.

I finally acknowledge that Frank is right.

There.  It’s in writing and published across the multi-verse.  And yesterday was that kind of turning point in my practice, a realization finally that practice must be independent of all outward markers of success.  It was our Day of Mindfulness (zazenkai, for those of us who need exotica in our language).  The number of emails expressing regrets suggested there would not be anyone attending but we went ahead anyway.  One person did come – in fact he came twice: the day before, thinking it was Sunday, and again on Sunday.  Now that is dedication! K. walked in and said, “Oh, is no one coming today?”  And for the first time, I truly felt the paradox in our thinking.   I replied,  “There will be three of us today.”

I have wondered where this need for a body count comes from, especially in the sanghas I’ve attended.  One dharma teacher would send out anxious and angry emails railing at the community for not showing up.  Another would become furious when other communities formed because it threatened to take people away from his group.  A third, greatly beloved by all and sundry, took strips off Frank and me because we had only brought 11 people to his retreat (final body count 35) and refused to give talks at our budding sangha until we had over 30 people attending regularly for at least two years.

Looking back, I can see this as a subtle training in sensitivity to lack, to not having enough, to the Other as a threat to acquiring more.  Sadly, it reduces the spiritual path to just another form of desperate consumerism.  Interestingly, the talk I chose for our DoM yesterday was given by Sensei Beate Stolte at Upaya ZC: Exploring the Self.  In it, Sensei Beate goes on a bit of a tangent but an important one.  She describes the subtle ways in which we foster our fear of not getting what we deserve, not having enough.

She used the example of a child’s game, musical chairs. You know the game.  It starts out with much laughter and fun as the music plays, children run around the chairs, and squeal as they try to find a chair when the music stops.  Quickly though, the implications of the music starting and stopping sink in.  Now it’s become a full contact sport.  Has it ever become again just a game for us since those days of birthday parties and summer picnics?  Was this part of the early seeding of our competitive, driven nature? Do we still walk into a room, a situation and scan it for the potential of “one-less-chair-than-bodies?”

I had hoped it would not be that way in communities given to mindful consumption or dedicated to the uprooting of greed.  Apparently it is not and this is distressingly so.  The marker of a community dedicated to practice cannot be the number of bodies sitting in rows.  Admittedly, if we’ve got to support temples and structures which necessitate an accounting at the end of the day, bodies count.  And perhaps, that’s a morality tale in itself about tails wagging dogs.  At the same time, I won’t say I’m not concerned by the low body count in sangha-building but it’s more a concern about people not taking advantage of the dharmic riches available.

But yesterday, it was different for me.  Whatever it was, however many we were, it was enough.  In my striving to be homeless, free of attachments, I noticed that three of us shared a wonderful morning of meditation, followed by a lunch of roasted squash soup, fresh-baked bread, spinach salad, tea, a walk in the woods, and then a gentle sharing about our practice.  There were two chairs and a zafu leftover and no one had to fight for their seat in the circle.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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hakuin exhibit – a study of transitions

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After a disappointing flight delay that resulted in missing the symposium at the Japan Society in NYC, we made it to the Hakuin exhibit, The Sound of One Hand*.  The Japan Society which hosted the showing is a lovely venue and was an easy walk from the hotel.  Seventy-eight scrolls by Hakuin curated by Stephen Addiss & Audrey Seo were displayed in what seemed to be a never-ending series of rooms and set up so that each turn around a corner confronted you with another smack of Hakuin’s koan.

The first scroll is – predictably – The Sound of One Hand; Hotei sitting on his bag with hand raised.  It’s a delicate sound and one is easily distracted from it by the waterfall in the lobby below.  It’s a call to action despite Hotei’s insouciance.  He knows you know.  The problem is you don’t know that.  So the mind ricocheted from one concept to another.  It’s uncomfortable, confronted with the sound of one hand right there at the entrance yet so appropriate because how can you go further until you’ve actually heard it?

But I’m on a mission so the lack of revelation is not going to stop me.  Besides I once worked that koan to its ultimate not-knowing and the answers are lost in mists of my ignorance.  Occasionally, I feel the sound of the slap of one hand but walking through this exhibit I see that single hand sound on every scroll.

Hakuin was relentless in his devotion to spreading the dharma and the paintings chosen by Addiss & Seo demonstrate this.  As Zen Master, he painted words and pictures for everyone: students who achieved satori, wayfarers who needed encouragement, devotees who required something physical to sustain their practice.  His art stands as a paean to equanimity which I found fascinating given his rancorous tirades against the “do-nothing zennists!”  Yet his actions are so very consistent with the Buddha’s advice that we must meet the other where they are.  It didn’t matter to Hakuin if those who came to him were acolytes, guru worshipers, caught in the cult of personality, or simply seeking spiritual comfort; he met them all where they were.

Viewing the works themselves was a joy in terms of getting up close and personal.  Each scroll hung encased in glass so that you could actually press right up to about two inches from the works.  The size of the museum guards made me exercise a little more restraint but I did get as close as four inches to the art works.  And since we had the exhibit all to ourselves, I was able to do that annoying backward walk from the paintings to see that point where I lost detail and got caught in the overall form.  Having only ever seen Hakuin’s works in books, the close-ups gave me a deeper appreciation of the artistry.  I was amazed by the nuanced tones in each brush stroke and the interplay of dark and light.  For the first time, seeing the paintings in life-size, I noticed the interesting use of deep black ink as way of grounding the theme out of which the grey carries the actual story.

Knowing a bit about Hakuin himself helped to put the intensity of his work into perspective.  At the age of 11 years, he heard one of those hell fire and brimstone sermons by a priest and vowed to practice so that he could avoid the terrors of the Buddhist hell realms.  After some incidents showed him that the ritual of practice cannot save us from the pain of being human, he lost faith.  In the throes of his disillusion, he shifted his focus to art and calligraphy.  When he became discouraged with the quality of what he had produced, he shifted his focus yet again to the practice of Zen.  As he moved from what wasn’t working to what did, perhaps he saw that the transitions in themselves are the practice.  Adaptability and the willingness to let go fueled his devotion to cultivating right practice, the activity of living as meditation.  Hakuin’s diligence was both the ink and the canvas of his life.  Even – or maybe especially – after his satori experiences, he continued his art and teachings (sometimes the two are indistinguishable) to foster not only breakthrough via koan work but an integration of meditation into daily activities.  We see this in the Hotei paintings which show the irrepressible monk engaged in everything ordinary from taking a trip to view the moon on the lake to playing kickball.  And of course, that brings us back to the scroll that opens the exhibit: Hotei sitting on his bag with a raised hand.  The koan and the Every Person getting on with life.

For me, this is the ultimate model of practice.  Realization of the true nature of mind is only a moment in the unending bridges between life experiences.  We call it coming back into the marketplace, returning home, coming down from the mountain.  Transitions.  It is moving from one scroll to the next, weaving through each room, knowing that, ultimately, only in living this life just as it is, returning to it time after time, satori after satori, sets us free of our delusions.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

*A heartfelt thank you to Shannon Jowlett, Director of Communications for the Japan Society, who so kindly tolerated my incessant emails as I tried to get to this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit.