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sawaki kôdô & yokoyama: unexpected mercies of homelessness

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Perhaps one of my most beloved source of teachings comes from the story of Yokoyama Sodô roshi, the grass flute monk. Arthur Braverman wrote of his life here. There is something ephemeral about the life and teachings of Yokoyama, a simplicity and dedication that often escapes us in our plunge forward into making practice something. Following the bloodline back from Yokoyama, we encounter his teacher Sawaki Kôdô roshi known as Homeless Kôdô. This moniker was not just a reference to his tendency to wander Japan teaching but also – if you read The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kôdô by Kosho Uchiyama and Shokaku Okumura (Wisdom Publications) – is reflected in his very perspective of the dharma. Yokoyama evokes a tender compassion for his approach to offering the dharma freely to everyone who walked past his corner of Kaikoen Park in Komoro; we feel ourselves leaning into that bower of leaves to hear his teachings. Sawaki evokes a fierceness born of his own experiences as a soldier fighting for the emperor and that he believed was right to do so as well as his ardent rejection of all things institutional. This determined attitude is in his words (leeway given for translation) on the purpose of the Buddhadharma:

A religion that has nothing to do with our fundamental attitude toward our lives is nonsense. Buddhadharma is a religion that teaches us how to return to a true way of life. “Subduing non-Buddhists,” or converting people, means helping them transform their lives from a half-baked, incomplete way to a genuine way. ~Chapter 2, Having finally returned to a true way of life, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kôdô by Kosho Uchiyama and Shokaku Okumura.

No minced words here. Left to themselves, Sawaki’s teachings can seem harsh, strangely naive, and yet necessary truths about our “stupidity”. The structure of this book however offers different intonations for his words. Each chapter is presented with Sawaki’s teachings in a pithy quotable quote followed by his dharma heir Uchiyama’s commentary and then his heir Shohaku Okumura. Both Uchiyama and Okumura place Sawaki’s teachings in the context of post-war Japan and the culture that arose after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They make no apologies for Sawaki rather pointing out that even in a great master’s teachings there lie the foibles of constructed perceptions. And there is a sweetness in seeing three generations of thought evolve. Should you wish to walk away now thinking this is a book of teachings by an irascible, aged, male, grumpy, old Zen Guy, turn into that particular assumption. Not that we judge but rather that the judgement arises from a reactivity to some very real truths in being told we can be deaf, dumb, and blind about our motivations that transcend gender, culture, and time.

Sawaki: Heaven and earth make offerings. Air, water, plants, animals and human beings make offerings. All things make offerings to each other. It’s only within the circle of offering that we can live. Whether we approach this or not, it’s true.

Uchiyama: Heaven and earth, all the ten thousand things freely give us 99.99 percent of our necessities. Only 0.01 percent of the things we need are subject to our decisions whether to be greedy or not. (And even that) we should make efforts to reduce.

Okumura: However, Buddhism is not merely a teaching of social morality. If our deeper motivation is greed, then no matter how much we give our actions cannot be dana paramita, the perfection of offering… Yet if we take bodhisattva vows, our whole life becomes an offering, even if we have no material possessions to give.  ~Chapter 63, The blessing of the universe, ibid.

Yokoyama and Sawaki Kôdô lived very different lives. Who is to say which is better or which had more impact. What is more relevant is our attraction to one or the other. Or neither. Experiencing that moving towards, pulling away is the essence of Buddhadharma, the kindling point of our transformation. Not because we land on one or the other’s way of life – that way lies guru adoration and the cult of personality. To experience that desire for homelessness, for simplicity, for a life struck through with offering is also to experience our desires, motivations, and intentions in all its fallibility and unexpected mercies.

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invitations from the buddha, rsvp: book review of Gowans’ philosophy of the buddha

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Christopher Gowans’ Philosophy of the Buddha gives me some hope that I might get a handle on the convolutions philosophers tend to put into explaining the fundamentals of Buddhist thought. It’s well over 10 years old in print and I suspect some challenges have arisen around his explanation of non-self though I have yet to find anything via my oracle Google. I did however come across an essay by Gowans on Buddhist Well-Being that outlines his approach to this intersection of Western philosophy and Buddhist ideas.

Gowans’ interest in this meeting place of thoughts and ideas introduces his essay:

First, what is the proper philosophical elucidation of Buddhist ideas? Second, in what ways, if any, do these ideas relate to ideas in Western philosophy (contemporary as well as historical)? Finally, to what extent might these two domains—Buddhist philosophy and Western philosophy—learn from one another and challenge one another? That is, to what extent might they critically interact so as to advance our philosophical understanding?

The first point – the proper elucidation of Buddhist ideas – is the gist of this book where

(the) first goal is an accurate and insightful understanding of the Buddha’s teaching. We should assume neither that a perfectly objective account is possible nor that any interpretation is as good as another.

Gowans is insistent throughout his book that we are held tightly by our own perspective and, while not necessarily a negative thing, it would be naive to believe that objectivity would be possible. That being said, he does an excellent job of guiding us down the intricate path of Buddhist ideas and principles. Where the interpretations are likely to be convoluted or conflated with Western ideas, he sets up the investigation so that ideas are challenged not as a means of showing off but rather to truly tease apart the complex layers of understanding. His strategy is particularly helpful in working through the concepts of impermanence, non-self and suffering where he holds up the objections and the support all the while questioning the answers.

As for that thorny issue of non-self, Gowans does a remarkable job of breaking it down into substance-self and process-self; the former being a belief of the Buddhism-curious (he calls them stream-observers) that various aspects of form and experience confirms the existence of a distinct substance with an identity (think: sun and plant) while the latter proposes a self “consisting of over-lapping and ever-changing aggregates (p78 Kindle edition)” which have “no independent reality but do have a form of dependent reality (p60 Kindle edition).” Even more so is his explanation of dependent origination which includes imagery of aggregates as “neighboring sandbars…each is a unified nexus of processes that is part of the overall network of processes (p81 Kindle edition)” and the challenge of explaining causal conditioning and freedom to choose action “without recourse to distinctness” of the component parts.

After establishing the underlying Buddhist thought, Gowans tackles the Four Noble Truths and Eight-fold Path with the same steady and unrelenting intensity of examination all the while returning to a common sense rendering of the teachings.  These two sections of his book contain some of the best and most clearly written explorations of the core teachings of Buddhism. And they are enhanced by a tone and quality of writing that is absent of the writer’s need to show he is doing what he is doing.

The final chapter is perhaps the sweetest. In it, Gowans proposes the Buddha’s teachings are an invitation to live selflessly (the theme of ethics runs through all the chapters.

“The first invitation asks us to think about the quality of our life as a whole in a fundamental and sustained way.”

“The second invitation asks us to consider why the fragility of our lives is a source of dissatisfaction.” (Go beyond the obvious that we don’t have what we want, don’t want what we have and get confused regularly by all of it.)

“The third invitation brings us to a crucial juncture. What, the Buddha asks us, can be done to overcome this dissatisfaction?” (The answer can be one of despair, frustration or hope.)

“The (fourth) invitation asks us to reflect on why fulfillment of desires is so important to us.”

“The (fifth) invitation (and hardest to accept) is to consider whether piercing through the illusion of selfhood might reveal not nothing, but…everything.”

“The final invitation asks us to discover on our own whether there is any truth in what he says.”

Gowans book makes for a good introduction to Buddhism and a training in critical thinking that many practitioners would find useful, especially in these days of “quotable Buddhism” and a leaning to fundamentalist-type clinging to what we think is what the Buddha taught. This is definitely a keeper on the book shelf.