Tag Archives: book review

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brewing the dregs – a review of Nothing is Hidden by Barry Magid

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The practice of Zen is a beautiful, transformative, profound, imperfect, corruptible, culturally conditioned tradition and way of life of which I am part and which I am responsible for maintaining and passing on. The medium is the message: there is no Zen apart from Zen teachers and Zen students, doing what they do, devising ever new recipes for brewing the dregs we all need to live and practice.

Nothing is Hidden: The psychology of Zen koans by Barry Magid is a refreshing exploration of koans and the process of how they work on us. Magid, one of the dharma heirs of Joko Beck, describes his own journey with koans as a “complicated relationship.” Trained in both the Rinzai and Soto traditions. Magid also brings his incisive thinking as a psychoanalyst to the practice of seeing what is “cutting us off from life as it is.” Chapter by chapter, Nothing is Hidden takes us through familiar koans (and some new to me) with a steady pace, shining a new light on each and drawing out sweet juice from the dregs Magid brews. More than just teaching, Magid is surprisingly human and vulnerable in his connection; he speaks of his own journey with Joko Beck in loving terms and holds her insights firmly close. He is fearless in pointing out the lack in modern Zen teachers and students to be themselves fearless while never descending into finger-pointing. In fact, in this search of our true nature, he advises like Master Tou-shuai in the chapter Hui-neng and the Original Face:

Pointedly Tou-shuai asks, where will we look for this true nature? This is a case in which, instead of trying to turn our gaze to follow the pointing finger up into the sky, all the way  to the moon, we should stop and look directly at the finger itself and forget all about the moon.

Caught in the intellectual seduction of “solving” koans, we forget that ultimately this is the workings of a koan: to point us back to ourselves, to return us to just who we are in the process of becoming. At every turning away from this, Magid meets us and blocks the automatic sloppiness of our practice. He flips concepts neatly away from the catch phrases we’ve acquired from hanging around Zen types and Zen gatherings. Starting with Mu (but do we ever end?), he flips the koan by pointing out that the gatelessness is not the absence of a gate for us to get through the obstacle of the koan. It is “wide open just as it is”; it gateless because there is no gate, no wall in which to house the gate, no form, no structure to tear down. It’s exactly this illusion of a separation from our inner self and others that keeps us searching for a gate when none is necessary, Magid teaches in page after page. And the practice is in not becoming obsessed about the knots which bind us but in “re-owning both our perfection and our failures.” However, given our innate tendencies to fool ourselves and get stuck in our desiring mind, the desire to transcend can become a trap in itself. On this Magid is forthright:

Rather than conceal our true motivation behind a veil of high-minded aspirations, we should use practice to honestly explore what has brought us to practice in the first place… (w)e inevitably will discover that we all have a “secret practice,” a personal psychological agenda and fantasy about how practice will relieve our suffering by eliminating those parts of ourselves that are the root of our problems or by actualizing some superhuman ideal.

Guilty as charged. As are most of us, including Zen teachers and their students. Magid is unrelenting in pointing out over and over, the frailties and vulnerabilities of teachers. He takes a pragmatic view (quoting Kant) that we can’t make anything that is straight out of “the crooked timber of humanity.” And he remains equanimous without offering license to their transgressions.

With this and all aspects of our practice, Magid offers a practice of “seeing the grasses by moonlight,” seeing the purloined life hidden in plain sight.  He draws generously from his work as a psychoanalyst, explaining our drives, self-states, and giving the koan work a slant towards the psychological. In this arena, Magid bring some important lessons to Zen; that Zen teachers have much to learn about teacher-student relationships from the growth (and growing) pains of psychotherapists, particularly in the areas of preventing harmful re-enactments of old patterns of attachment and rejection. Ironically, riffing on the theme of harm and the only chapter I felt disappointment about was his exploration of Ch’ien and Her Soul (Are Separated) as parental neglect to the point of (metaphoric?) trauma. This particular fable-cum-koan is rich with teachings about not-one-not-two, denying our true nature, narcissistically following our desires, regret, restitution, grace and forgiveness. But that’s just my hobby-horse.

This is a book in which we need to brew the dregs of our mind; sweet tea seeps from almost every page. I’d advise buying the book and embracing the art of writing large in the margins. It will amount to writing your own life, large and unrestrained.

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the sacred and profane of death and dying

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Book review of Katy Butler’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.

Katy Butler is a daughter, a writer, a life partner, a Buddhist. Mostly, Katy Butler is a daughter of whom more was asked by the medical system than should have been and more was expected of than could have been imagined by anyone as her father journeyed into his death.

This is the story of a family caught in the velocity of a medical momentum which erupts when someone enters the chaotic zone between a good life and good death. It is a heart-wrenching telling of what happens when we unwittingly place our trust in systems rather than people, in hope rather than clarity of thought. It is also a revealing, investigative and hard-nosed exposé of the death-preventing devices we hope would be life-sustaining. Butler invites us to journey with her to the realization that “(t)he honest, natural death is no longer the default pathway.” She begins by bringing us into her parents’ kitchen, sharing a cup of tea with her mother. This is a scene that can evoke memories of sweet poignancy of beginnings or endings; but here, here, there is a different evocation, a different prayer for an ending.

In  my role as a therapist, I have had the privilege to sit with spouses and adult children who were in the center of the turmoil of a loved one’s passing. The primary referral for “treatment” was triggered, they tell me, when they blurted out to their physician a wish that their loved one would die rather than continue to suffer. Typically, the physician panics and sees this as a pathological response to caregiving; some may even report this fearing the distraught spouse or child may act on those wishes. Butler explores with tremendous sensitivity this unspeakable longing for suffering to end without ever dropping into unnecessary angst or drama. But that is just the first three pages. The entire journey she takes with her mother and siblings is a wisdom trail from unknowing to being with not knowing, from waiting to bearing witness, from reacting to systemic demands to compassionate action.

The event line of the book is typical: her father has a stroke. In the usual process of rehabilitation treatment, decisions are made. It is not the decisions themselves but the revelation, through Butler’s skillful foreshadowing, that there are always unforeseeable consequences. And for many of those consequences, the mission of the medical industry often runs orthogonal to the values of the family and ethics of a supported death. The medical history of life-sustaining devices and interventions (surgeries, medication) is brilliantly interwoven into the narrative. Without taking us away from the unfolding tension, it makes us want to shout into the book “Oh, don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

But this is more than a story of one family’s tumultuous love for each other and their battle with the medical system. It is a cautionary tale for each of us, even if we think death is occupied with our future and not our present. It revealed for me that it is not about finding that right person to “pull the plug.” In fact, by the time it gets to that significant point, too many decisions have been made without full awareness and “pulling the plug” plays the smallest role in ending suffering. Butler writes tenderly, “Dying is hard on the dying. Death is hard on the living.”

Dying is not an acceptable topic of conversation. Still. Yet. Even. But converse on it we must because by looking away we only create a larger cauldron of suffering for those to whom we have entrusted our final moment – so wrongly believing it will only be that moment in which they will be called to act. Butler’s story carries this urgent message. We can honour the concept of dying as sacred but it can become a tragic process if we do not consider that getting to death itself can be a tainted and misguided journey.

It is worth mentioning that this book stands as an act of profound courage. It is brutally honest about the nature of relationships, searingly insightful in the potential of healing, and shines an intense light on our ignorance of what naively assume is a good death. For that alone, it is an important one to read.

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If you are interested in learning more about how to prepare and be with that honest death, here are some resources:

The Metta Institute offers training and workshops on end-of-life care as well as resources for practice.

The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care offers grief and bereavement counselling, end-of-life programs, and meditations. Contemplative Care: A Film is an excellent resource.

Being With Dying Training at Upaya Institute is a rich program ranging in its training by Frank Ostaseki (Metta Institute), Laurie Leitch & Loree Sutton (Social Resilience Model), and Susan Bauer-Wu (Living with chronic illness).

The Canadian Palliative Hospice Care Association lists resources and programs for several professional groups (interestingly no psychologists), family caregivers, and volunteers.

The Quality End of Life Care Coalition of Canada document is a “Blueprint for Action – 2010-2020” to improve end-of-life care and ensure training and funding for Canadians.