Unknown's avatar

robai-shin: entering the heart of ancestral recipes

by

robai-shin“You understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence. You must have robai-shin, the mind of great compassion. This compassion must help all of humanity. You should not think only of yourself.”

I can’t find the source of the quote attributed to Dogen, who apparently said it to the Third Patriarch of Eihei-ji. Upon the arrival of our Gr’Kid, a dharma sister sent me the quote welcoming me into the the community of Grandmothers. Robai-shin, wrote another. It will bring you deeper into the heart of compassion.

Dogen wrote in Instructions for the Tenzo that “in performing our duties along with other officers and staff, (we) should maintain joyful mind, kind mind, and great mind.” Joyful mind arises from our gratitude for being born into this human form. More so that “we have the good fortune of cooking meals to be offered to the three treasures.” Now that I immediately understand because cooking is the heart of my family, its compassionate ground, and the source of all healing. The curries, dahls, rice. The desserts of glutinous black rice and agar jellies. The pungent fermented tea leaves and pickled ginger digestives. Dogen’s exhortations in the earlier sections of Instructions read like a day in my own grandmother’s hotel on Sule Pagoda Road in Rangoon. Well, maybe it was a bit more frenetic than Eihei-ji because my uncle and aunt who helped there were just as likely to swing cleavers at each other as at the chickens.

dahl

My mother, despite not knowing how to cook (why would you need to when your own mother owned a hotel and simply delivered the food each day!), developed her own skills ultimately crafting a pilau rice that earned the title “Gamma’s Rice.” And, the deterioration in its edibility was what first raised the alarms of her encroaching dementia. I’m not sure what dishes will identify my place on this earth but that is the nature of being parent – and now grandparent. I delight in an eclectic range of textures and flavours, only coming into the ancestral recipes later in life. Interesting how I can now say “later” although it’s never been an avoided or hidden idea that aging grants me many somewhat unearned privileges. My own curries are finally edible and I turn more towards the Indian styles of cooking and taste. And yet, my signature dishes tend to be Burmese, likely more for their rarity than their actual craft.

Robai-shin. Grandmother-mind. Kind mind. The second of Dogen’s doors to community is that quality of kindness. Not just kindness but a stance of protectiveness of the present for the future. Kaz Tanahashi¹ translates it as a parental mind. We develop this kindness for our children to the extent that we “do not care whether (we ourselves) are poor or rich; (our) only concern is that (our) children will grow up.” In principle, it is our only concern: that they survive. Of course, we harbour hopes that they will live carefully, in good health, making wise choices, respecting others as themselves, and knowing that the bloodline extends through them but doesn’t end there. The tricky part is that our kindness is offered against this backdrop of hope but cannot be directed by it. Robai-shin is an offering “without expecting any result or gain.” It simply unfolds as that hand reaching for the pillow in the night, the bow that evidences transmission beyond words, the sound of the single hand at death. It holds, it honours, it transcends form as it is called to do so.

Both my grandmothers were iconoclasts in their own right. My paternal grandmother was a rather severe character but with a sharp sense of humour particularly about her love of oversized cheroots. Devoutly Buddhist, she was the quintessential pragmatist. She never cooked, cleaned, or otherwise engaged in tasks that someone else in her life was already doing. I saw her weekly but never among family. She arrived each Sunday to take me to the Botataung Pagoda (while my parents entertained their friends at poker and various gambling games). I don’t recall any words of wisdom or special gifts. That is, until one day I overheard an intense argument she was having with my father over the damage he was doing karmically by exposing me to his high society lifestyle. She was formidable and, as I understand from the family myths, would not have been above picking up a wooden shoe to whack sense into him at any age – his or hers. I never knew her name until I was an adult but it didn’t dim the connection.

dahl-riceMy maternal grandmother ran the Piccadilly Hotel in Rangoon. Now she, along with her only surviving son, was all about food. I lived in the hotel with my  five male cousins and we all became little cook’s helpers. Unfortunately, only I escaped the epigenetic change that enabled the boys to become great cooks. As “Ma,” she made sure we roamed the hallways as a little gang, thereby protecting us from certain characters who lodged there in transit to Bangkok or Delhi. She set the rules for riding out into the Night Bazaar on my uncle’s scooter, clutched to his flapping, open shirt. Being the only girl (at the time), I was forbidden to go though my uncle found ways around that senseless rule. Apparently robai-shin meant something different to him. As “Belle,” she swept through the evening society parties in shimmering gowns with a hairstyle of braids wound upright over her head like a dark halo and an eternal eye cast on negotiating the family’s best future.

robai-shin2Out of joyful mind and robai-shin arises great mind. “Like a great mountain or a great ocean,” it is the nondiscriminatory mind. It is the vast, boundless space which is also robai-shin and joyful mind because it contains everything. Instructions for the Tenzo is a simile wrapped around a metaphor at whose heart lies a mirror. It’s a discourse on how to wash rice, pointing to principles for living a life of deep practice, penetrating that deep question of who we truly are.  In the teachings of the three minds, Dogen reveals the components of both community and the Great Matter, leaving it up to us to craft a recipe that honours why we have been held in robai-shin and are called to embody robai-shin.

————————

1. Tanahashi, Kazuaki (Ed.), Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. North Point Press, NY.

Unknown's avatar

practice where you are – rohatsu, gr’kid & Rafe Martin’s Endless Path

by

A confluence of events that appear to cancel each other out has left me with a bit of a mash up post. Frank & I are in an Advent pattern awaiting the arrival of our first Grandchild, nominally referred to as The Gr’Kid, Child of The Kid. I suppose that makes us Gr’Pa & Gr’Ma and you psycho-analytic folks can tell me why I refrain from the prefix “Grand.”  Likely “Grand” is quite the misleading handle because my Grandiosity in asking that this child not arrive at a time that disrupted my plans for Summer Practice Ango and Rohatsu were resolutely ignored.

It’s an interesting time, this blossoming of a branch in the ancestral tree. Becoming part of the Elders, adding to the Ancestral Lineage is not quite what I thought I’d be doing at this age and stage. Then again I have no idea what I thought I’d be doing other than continuing to make a delicious mess of my life. And that, my friends, is practice. When it can be done by the book, it’s luxurious. It’s a definite luxury to have a dedicated time to get away and hunker down with like-minded souls for this very special time of the year. I’ve always treasured it. But who knows, given all the special birthdays to come with the Gr-Kid, when I may return to that orbit of sitting with a large sangha, leaning into the rising of the morning star. Time to get creative!

rohatsu1As I write this, I’m sitting cross-legged on a double-bed in a hotel just outside a military base where I will spend this next week working. Across from me, between the TV and the fridge, is a small space in which I’ve placed my zafu on the strip of blanket hotels now use to decorate the beds. There is oatmeal and green tea on the counter. The fridge is filled with food for the week: lunches of couscous and orzo spiced with chorizo-flavoured ground soy. Dinner is set up: veggie biriyani and veggie vindaloo. Keep it simple. No one ever died from eating the same thing everyday for 6 days. (Though my dear friend Barry of Ox Herding had a different story involving lentils on his 100-day solitary retreat!) I’ll be offline from social media and as much as possible off emails. At work, speech and activities will be kept functional (pleasantly so). Meditations are scheduled three times a day or more.

And now, the teachings. The coming of the Gr’Kid opens up a need for stories and my story-telling skills. No, not the story-telling that gets me deluded about my path and practice. The other kind. The kind of story-telling that opens the heart and enlivens the senses. For that we go to Rafe Martin’s Endless Path: Awakening within the Buddhist imagination: Jataka tales, Zen practice, and daily life. How appropriate!

Endless Path is a collection of “original tellings” of the Jataka tales with this compilation reflecting the ten paramitas. This is particularly interesting for me (Gr’Kid notwithstanding) as I was simultaneously slogging through Gombrich’s What the Buddha Thought and his proposal that the Buddha ethicized practice (actually he ethicized karma but practice is karma and vice versa). Rafe Martin is an exquisite story-teller, not only for his transmission of the story itself but for his magical ability to turn us into the storyline. There is no getting away from the ethics that underpin each Jataka tale. And, the amazing artwork by Richard Wehrman is captivating and fires the imagination (also check out Richard’s poetry!).

The first tale is “The Hungry Tigress” and tells of the Buddha’s early incarnation in which he offers himself up to the starving tigress so that her cubs may live. An act of generosity, of selfless giving – dana paramita. Martin’s commentary follows each luscious telling of a Jataka tale. He reaches into a long history of Zen teachings, koans, relationships with his own teachers, and his own practice to draw out the juice of each story. His writing flows like a teisho (some are), it collects in eddies of insights from this experience and then breaks out over that experience. Each chapter, each paramita is a contemplation.

Of course, I have my favourites. The Gentle Heart Jataka taught me aspects of sila (ethics) and informed a talk I gave to our sangha. The Blue Bear Jataka came at just the right time when I needed reminding of forbearance.  Prince Five-Weapons made me laugh out loud (in Starbucks) but I wasn’t too impressed with his stubbornness in defeating the Sticky Hair Monster; maybe I over-identified with him. The Black Hound taught me Upaya or skillful means but I wasn’t too sure how well I’d be greeted threatening to set the pups loose on a village if they didn’t shape up; somehow a bit of street cred would be missing. The Monkey King, Great Joy the Ox, and others gave me cause to re-perceive my practices. Martin’s commentaries offered ways in which that practice could happen anywhere, anytime.

But most of all, what Endless Path teaches is that all the paramitas are but one: dana paramita. We practice to embody dana, to give freely of our time, effort, energy, patience, and love.

So I ask you to take this week, this time that is a time for ripening our practice. Sit where and as you can. Sit even when it seems impossible – because that’s just a story of why we sit. And I’ll see you all on the other side of the rising morning star.