Tag Archives: koans

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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 dog ate my zabuton: life koans we die by – part 3

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DSC_0010It’s going to be a couple of months of dealing with koans¹. Maybe it’s not a stretch to say it’s going to be a few lifetimes of dealing with koans. Notice I wrote “dealing with” and not “working with.” As someone who not only flunked out of koan studies but also remedial koan practice, I’ll not be your bright North Star – other than to serve by nefarious comparison. I also think we tend to deal with something more than work with it (which implies some level of commitment) because we rarely know it’s a koan until smacked full in the face with one.

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The Dog Ate My Zabuton Koan

I walked in and said, “Teacher, the dog ate my zabuton so I couldn’t practice.”

She tipped her head to the right and smiled. “How did the dog manage to eat your zabuton?”

‘She doesn’t get it,’ I thought. Aloud I replied, “The dog ate it. He just did. Maybe he’s not a good Buddhist.”

“Ah. Or maybe he’s just a dog. Where was your zabuton that your dog could get to it?’

I scuffed my toe.

“Dog is dog,” she said. “And you know better.”

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On the surface, the previous three posts have dealt with issues of the Plum Village Lineage Dharma Teachers and their document intended to resolve conflicts. You can read about it (in order) here, here, and here. Underlying the issues of what one global sangha has done to make it possible for individuals to seek support and recourse in cases of conflict in their sangha are an innumerable number of accretions and assumptions of what it means to be a Buddhist practitioner. Or more accurately, a practitioner of the Buddha’s teachings. These are very different paths and the former may not always end in liberation.

When we are caught in our need to belong, to not be criticized, to be accepted, we are vulnerable – and all the more so when the philosophy of the captor organization is couched in concepts of peace and love and oneness. In our fear of being disconnected from the tribe, we buy into the constructions that seem like Buddhism but are not. If you want to delve into the ways we have bought into a constructed institutional Buddhism, I strongly recommend reading NellaLou’s post Precisely the problem? Typical of her deadly swordship, she points out the ways we risk becoming a mindless cog in the massive machinery that can be Buddhism:

Institutions and systems are made up of processes. These processes get codified—more in theunwritten (sic) rules, rituals, codes of behavior, habits and hidden agendas (include shadows in that) by the laziness of participants than in what is actually written down if anything is written down at all. Laziness in that once comfortably ensconced in an institution, it’s pretty easy to hand off control and thought and critique to that institution and simply become a piece of the machine.

And,

Some of that persuasive environment in a sick institution can include undermining individuals, coercion, guilt, enforcing conformity at all costs, punishing outliers, etc. This leads an individual to self-doubt and unmoors moral anchors making them far more pliable parts of the machine. It’s cult like behavior that leads to insecurity and increases dependence on the institution by the individual. It’s co-dependence all the way down.

This is the point: without transparent and courageous leadership, we – who are hitched to these massive vehicles – are easily dragged away despite our own moral anchors. At the same time, without our own inner leadership that must be unrelenting in its willingness to blast away personal delusions, we are fodder for anyone who talks the ethics talk. And who wouldn’t be? It gets tiring being oh-so-watchful over my anger, greed, and delusions. It wears me down to constantly check in on the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of my thoughts, speech, and actions. It’s hard not to flip the truths of impermanence, nonself, and suffering on their heads and claim anything goes because nothing lasts, there’s no one to hurt, and samsara just is. So much easier to believe that if our leader is ethical, we are in a position to benefit from a received knowledge of their values.

But we know better. Truly. We know better in that moment when we turn away from something that doesn’t feel right. We know better in that moment when we said nothing because belonging was more anxiety-reducing and speaking out. We know better when the sound of our voice denying malfeasance carries into our spirit and rings false.

Yes, we know better than to think someone else can do the thinking for us. And we know that the cost of that unwholesome choice is ultimately having choice taken away. I’m not talking about the choice of staying in a corrupt organization. The choice we lose is the choice to honour the life we have and the death we practice.

NellaLou’s uncompromising conclusion:

If somebody doesn’t even want to confront blatant wrong doing, or question what they are being fed, or even take a look in the mirror (actually and metaphorically), how are they going to confront the great matter of life and death?

Living Truth IS the very matter of life and death.

NellaLou’s second post, Buddhist Exceptionalism, drives the point home. Believing that our path as practitioners of the teachings of the historical Buddha make us Buddhists is the first step in not knowing better. It is the first loosening of the knot that ties us to our “moral anchor.” Our attraction to the putative safety and support it affords us as captialized-B Buddhists is the first magnetic event that destabilizes our moral compass. We can continue down that path, caught by the desires of our teachers and sanghas who are caught themselves in their delusionary states. And pretty soon that capitalized-B is the way in which we keep people quiet or ostracized so that our world is not rocked by facts or reality, ethics or responsibility.

I told a friend last week that I have given up on Buddhism. I have.

But I know better than to give up on buddhist practice.

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¹Mid-October will be a review of Barry Magid’s Nothing is Hidden: The psychology of Zen koans (Wisdom Pubs) and November features Zenshin Florence Caplow & Reigetsu Susan Moons’ The Hidden Lamp: Stories from twenty-five centuries of awakened women (Wisdom Pubs).