Tag Archives: practice

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begin after noon

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The story goes that Dogen saw the elderly tenzo of Mt. Tiantong drying some mushrooms.

He had a bamboo stick in his hand and no hat on his head.  The sun was very hot, scorching the pavement.  it looked very painful; his backbone was bent like a bow and his eyebrows were as white as a crane.

I went up to the tenzo and asked, “How long have you been a monk?”

“Sixty-eight years,” he replied.

“Why don’t you let a helper do it?”

“Others are not myself.”

Who else would do the work of my life?  Who else can see the delusions, graspings, and blindness?  Who else can see the pleasures, contentment, and skilfulness? Are there another set of eyes that can discern better the wisdom in the choices I’ve made or the wild lack of insight in the choices that lead to disaster?

In Instructions to the Cook, Bernie Glassman and Rick Fields use Dogen’s Instructions for the Tenzo as a template for Glassman’s social action work that lead to the creation of the Greyston Mandala, a network of businesses and not-for-profit organizations.  With metaphoric recipes, Glassman addresses the way we can become the tenzo of our lives.  I cringed a lot through the massacre of the central metaphor of menus, courses, and ingredients and thankfully that was only the first few pages.  Once he settled down to the business of creativity, the ideas became useful.

Before diving into sharing Glassman’s occasional gems, I went back to the source, Kaz Tanahashi’s translation of Dogen’s Instructions for the Tenzo (in Moon in a Dewdrop).  This sentence struck me – and perhaps only because I feel I’m at a juncture of my life where a shift is about to happen that couldn’t happen before this moment.

The cycle of the tenzo’s work begins after the noon meal.

This is when the tenzo, with the officers of the kitchen, plans the meals for the next day.  I wonder, is it past noon already in this lifespan?  What is the meal I am to plan?

From Glassman,

Zen masters call a life that is lived fully and completely, with nothing held back, “the supreme meal.”  And a person who lives such a life – a person who knows how to plan cook, appreciate, serve, and offer the supreme meal of life, is called a Zen cook….

Of course, the supreme meal is very different for each of us.  But according to the principles of the Zen cook, it always consists of five main courses or aspects of life.  The first course involves spirituality; the second is composed of study and learning; the third course deals with livelihood; the fourth course is made out of social action or change, and the last course consists of relationship and community.

Intimidating to think of my life as a “supreme meal!”  I’ve never been a good short-order cook and, in a real kitchen, the grilled cheese sandwiches are best left The Kid with the “two eggs side by each” left to Frank.  I’m more of the “supreme spread for 10,000 hungry bodhisattvas” prepared in ten courses with ingredients that require braving the wilds of Chinatown.  In the matters of life, it’s the same.  The rapid-fire decisions and changes in current generate more struggle and doubt than those with longer stale dates.  And with that comes a narrowing of vision and an unwillingness to take a chance – or in Zen koan terms – to leap off that 100-foot pole.

But there’s no one else who can prepare to cook this life of ours and we are always past noon.  The ingredients or the skills may not have been available before this but here they are now.  Time to clean the kitchen, gather ingredients, and fire up the coals!

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

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all in the waiting

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I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith,
but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
— T.S. Eliot

I made the mistake of watching a dog movie.  No, not a “dog movie”  as in a bad one but a movie about a dog.  Everyone in my family knows this one rule: Never show me a movie about dogs.  I cried for days after the one about a Golden Retriever, cat and small dog running across country to find their owners.  Two weeks later, we got Bear, the Unretrievable.  Before that was Gareth the pure-bred mixed Lab-Shepherd and Blue the Coyote-Shepherd and Saura the beagle with recessive wolf genes.  And the most beloved, Grey – the Malamute who escaped the Shelter staff who were walking him down his last mile because he was unmanageable.  He wrapped himself around Frank’s legs and sat quietly in perfect sit position.  Frank was at the shelter looking for Saura who had disappeared.  Guess who came home to dinner.  There was one thing that marked them all – despite some of their wandering ways: they always waited, with infinite patience and complete forgiveness for our frequent tardiness.  After Bear passed on we decided our lifestyle and general uncertainty about life made a dog impractical.

So, back to the movie:  Hachi – A dog’s tale, starring Richard Gere.  In a stupid lapse of awareness I zoned in on the idea of a mindless night with Richard Gere and didn’t do my research on the movie.  Let’s face it, folks, Gere is lovely eye candy of graceful aging but his acting is best summed up as “oatmeal.”  Thankfully, I say, because if all Buddhists came in that form, I’d be looking forward to many more reincarnations to purify my desirous nature.  Perhaps that sentence should not be in the conditional.

Ok.  Back to the movie.  Originally made in 1987 by a Japanese  studio, Hachiko Monogatari is the story of a real dog, Hachiko, and his bond with his owner, Ueno Hidesaburo, a professor at University of Tokyo.  Ueno bought Hachiko in 1924 and, each day, Hachi went with him to and waited for his return at Shibuya train station.  Two years later, Ueno died suddenly of a heart attack at work and Hachiko was given away.  He broke free each time to return to Ueno’s old home and the train station.  He waited at the station for Ueno every day for 9 years before dying there on March 8, 1935.  A statue marks the place Hachiko spent at the station, waiting.  Gere’s remake, Hachi – A Dog’s Tale,  is faithful to the storyline and the movie was effective despite Jason Alexander and fake sets.

I can hardly be critical given I spent the remainder of the night crying.  It perplexes me, this reaction to dog movies.  But I think I got a tiny insight.  All of these movies are about loss and the loyalty it uncovers.  Persistence in the face of insurmountable odds.  Love.  Dedication and diligence.  They represent a commitment that breaks through the insecurity and need for guarantees which typifies human relationships.  In another Gere movie, responding to his fear of commitment because of the potential for loss, one of the characters says, “Every relationship ends with someone leaving someone.”  Someone forgot to tell Hachiko.

In all my relationships, there has been a waiting after letting go.  If I understand Eliot and this process, the heart pain in the waiting is because it was with hope and love for the wrong thing.  I’m expanding past the movie now but it struck me that I wait with a lot of activating fantasy. Once past the ruminative if only’s, I spiral through the anxious what if’s designing scripts and stagings of re-connections. Anticipation of how the reunion will be, what will be said, what will she or he look like.  When the loss cannot be eased, there is a desirous searching of each face that passes by – Is that you?  Is that you?

Ah, I want to wait without hope, wishful, misleading hope.  I want to wait just because it is what I do, simply and completely.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju