No Zen in the West

Are psychotics just contemplatives with more rigid personalities? Are contemplatives just psychotics who have integrated their experiences into a healthier personality structure?

These lines from a fascinating recent academic paper (“Lo, I Will Be With You”: Conceptual Problems in Distinguishing Psychotic and Spiritual Experience) by my Dharma-and-blood brother Hondo David Rutschman express the core of my thinking around a topic that has come up in several conversations I’ve had since Two Shores came out.  In the paper, Dave asks how Martin Luther King’s hearing the voice of God relates to the voice-hearing of a homeless and “crazy” acquaintance of Dave’s.  A main study he cites from 1993 found that when measured by the standard “Mysticism Scale” measure of mystical experience, hospitalized psychotics were indistinguishable from long-time, established religious contemplatives.  So are they misunderstood mystics, or are we psychotics “passing” as religious?  Or is there a more grey and more rich way of understanding the two?

In Two Shores, I get into a description of a meditation-induced state that, while having some elements of Dharma energy and insight, could just as easily be labeled psychotic.  I was a little bit torn about including the account in the book – it’s no fun to tell the world you’re crazy, on the one hand, and on the other it’s a monastic offense akin to patricide to claim supernatural powers (in this case a highly self-centered form of “mind-reading”).  But it was an important part of my story, as was the more severe break of a friend of mine and the still more severe break of a former monk who would sometimes visit, both of which I also recount.  All of these experiences at the time helped to shatter some of the cult-like inability I found in the Japanese monastery to honestly assess whether the practice was bearing wholesome fruits or not, so I didn’t feel I could gloss over them in the book.  As a result, I’ve found that for at least a few people that is the section they can most relate to.  Certain people, at least, seem all-too-familiar with the grey and shaky line between meditative opening and psychotic break.

So does intensive meditation lead to insanity?  And if it does, is that insanity just the deluded world’s name for the taboo of liberation, or is it a dangerous side-road that misses the vital connected and grounded compassion of authentic awakening?  How should we understand Kennet Roshi’s visions, not to mention Keizan’s?  The Avatamsaka Sutra?  Crazy, or more true than anything else?  What do you think?

For me, I have always felt called by the grounded-ness of Buddhist practice.  Before getting into Dharma, I had related to spirituality as taking place on the “astral plane,” and imagined that spiritual energy came from “above” – the opposite of the ground.  While that way of practice (I was dabbling in magic and my own distorted version of neo-paganism) offered me some important openings and really established for me that my life needed to be dedicated to spirituality, the cosmic highs had inevitable cosmic crashes.  It was at the bottom of just such a cosmic crash that I was “born again” (hallelujah!) as a Buddhist, having seen clearly that I couldn’t keep looking up to find the way.  That the Dharma offered genuine and even wildly cosmic spirituality that was at the same time always grounded in the earth beneath our feet and the physical body we inhabit, was a revelation.

So, while the “astral” experiences can continue to come or not, when they do I can glean what there is to glean from them and then simply go forward in the “real,” muddy work of the five senses, the mind, my relationships, the deep fact of my breath.  In that sense, it doesn’t matter so much whether it is “ultimately” psychosis or liberation – either way, the response is the same.  Appreciate, learn, move on.

Whether we suspect that they are psychotic or are certain that they’re enlightened, I think it’s important that we talk about our meditation practice and our experiences in meditation.  It’s not something to gossip about or to discuss lightly, and certainly not something to hold onto or reify, and for all of these reasons and more it’s sometimes discouraged.  But I think it’s going too far to wait until just the right time with just the right teacher to bring up our “dark nights” of meditation, or our powerful insight experiences.  We all have Dharma friends, and we should use them to shine careful light on what’s actually happening in our meditation.

Newer to the online Dharma realm than many of you, I wasn’t quite prepared to hear the news of Treeleaf Sangha’s online Soto Zen priest ordination that happened last week.

Wanting to be hip and forward-looking and open-minded and not stodgy and conservative and stuck, I would like to have nothing but warm and enthusiastic regard for this historic event. I am genuinely happy for the new ordinees and wish them the very best on their path. It was hard to not be moved by the part of the video ordination I saw – very precise, orthodox, heartfelt.

But the truth is I’m not ready to embrace this level of on-line practice as the future of the lineage, and I do take issue with some of what Jundo wrote in defense of the non-traditional ordination.

Some of the more conservative folks in the Buddhist world may have trouble with that fact, and we have heard some critical voices raised about the nature and effect of the ceremony. It is surprising to me that so many Buddhist folks, though all about dropping artificial categories like “distance and space,” and who regularly invite all the ancient Buddhas and long dead Ancestors into their ceremonies, seem to reject that a ceremony of ordination can be done “long distance via the internet.”

I too hold that the Great Way has no distance and no space, but it has no birth and no death either, and certainly no priests or non-priests or anything remotely like “training” or “practice.” It has no good and evil, no killing or not killing, no skilfullness or unskillfulness. The Way itself does not have these distinction, but any kind of “path” by definition does. There is no such thing as “absolute practice.” Practice does not take place in the realm of no time and “no space” - practice and training can only be spoken of when we are speaking of time and place. Everything we “do” involves interacting with artificial categories, and there is no life apart from or beyond that. Being a priest is completely an artificial category, that is, is takes place in the realm of here and there, me and you, birth and death. It is not an ultimate condition, just as sitting zazen is not “closer” to the ultimate than anything else. We sit zazen and ordain priests because of the conventions of relative reality. “No distance and no space” doesn’t justify anything – sure it can justify a distance ordination, but it can also justify a war, a drink, a kind word, anything you want.

As for inviting the Buddhas and ancestors (or the medieval Japanese ordinations of ghosts), inviting and honoring them is one thing, but saying that they are “training” me is quite another. If someone came here claiming to have been ordained by Keizan in a dream, I would ask them how they trained when they woke up. It’s interesting, but it isn’t enough. I honor the invisible world, and have been deeply informed by it in my life and practice, but it doesn’t hit me how the visible one hits me, and the grounded ground of Zen practice is that visible, tactile contact.

I really do appreciate the effort to create paths of wholehearted practice for people without access to the warmth of a living, breathing Sangha. But being a priest is not the only way to do wholehearted practice – it is a particular condition. It seems to me that the conditions that create a priest include having a living, breathing Sangha with which you relate eye-to-eye and elbow-to-elbow. Certainly there is Zen practice without those conditions, but I question whether there can meaningfully be “priests” without them.

Wanting to extend ordination to everyone everywhere I think confuses the question of priesthood and practice. Let’s help anyone who would like to practice to find space for practice, but if someone doesn’t have access to a Sangha they can see and smell and hit against, I would not say that they have the conditions present to be a priest. That doesn’t mean that they can’t practice, and it doesn’t mean that have lower-grade practice. But it does mean that they simply lack the conditions to be priest. It’s important to me that we stay very clear that being a priest isn’t an indicator or fulfillment of the sincerity of practice, it is just a kind of practice that takes place in the presence of certain conditions. It is vital in honoring lay practice and everywhere practice, that we appreciate that. If we think that everyone needs to be able to be a priest because being a priest is the only real practice, then we’ve really gotten off track.

In truth I could equally see myself arguing the other side of this issue, because I do think opening and including is generally the way to go. And it is clear that the Treeleaf Sangha is going forward in this with the upmost integrity and carefulness. But just as the many “Zen and”s, like the National Peanut Board iPhone meditation app (thank you Austin Zen Center for bringing it my attention!), for all of their worthiness still make me want to move even closer to the heart of the tradition, so to this on-line ordination brings out my most conservative sentiments.

I think we need each other – some holding the core to enable others to branch out. Without either side, the Dharma wilts.

So I offer a deep gassho to the three new ordinees – congratulations and welcome - and a redoubled appreciation, too, for the messy and vital physicality of temple life, without which my priest training would just be an idea.

No Zen in the West is back online! I was advised that if I waited any longer folks would get to thinking that there was indeed Zen in the West. I hope it hasn’t come to that.

Note the new layout, and especially the “Forum: Young People in Dharma” tab. Comments are amazingly still coming in from the April post on the topic, and I’ve moved the conversation to it’s own page in order to hopefully keep it going strong. Please read or skim it and contribute your thoughts if you haven’t already. This may end up being the most lively and useful thing happening on this site!

Many of you know that the last four months or so of not blogging have mysteriously coincided with my first four months or so of fatherhood.  Thank you for welcoming little Frank to the wide Sangha. He’s been here the whole time, of course, but now he has arms and whatnot to make him easier to see. You will be happy to know that whatever American-Zen confusion I may have had about the single awakened teacher to whom I should report is now settled.

Given this current transformation I’m undergoing, it seems right to hold off on some backlogged posts I have in mind – like, what about when Zen practice makes you psychotic, a story of some convoluted nineteenth century East-West Buddhist history, and whatever happened to hara, to name a few. Instead, it is only proper that I reflect a little bit on the No Zen of fatherhood as I see it now.

Having a baby is of course about the least monastic thing a person can do. It undermines the monastic path even more than marriage. My recollection (someone correct me if I’m wrong) is that in the late Daido Loori Roshi’s Mountains and Rivers Order, monastics can marry but not have kids. That is, even for a Sangha that is flexible enough to include marriage, child-rearing is just too big a lifestyle leap to be tenable. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t happened or even been commonplace historically in monasteries and temples East and West. Richard Jaffe’s Neither Monk nor Layman cites research showing hereditary temple succession in Japan as early as the 1600s, long before the Meiji decriminalization of clerical marriage, and Stephen Covell’s Japanese Temple Buddhism is pretty clear about the state of things there nowadays, wherein though virtually all the monks have families, the party line is still simply that monks don’t have families. (Covell’s subtitle says it all: “Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation.”) More on both of those excellent books before long, I hope – they get right at the No Zen in Japan that is amplified all the more as it becomes the No Zen in the West. (A tangential but relevant book from a Catholic perspective, Celibacy in Crisis, has been really valuable for me in considering these questions.)

What both authors point to is the hypocrisy (or, if you prefer, the high tolerance for paradox) in a Japanese Buddhism that identifies strongly with a monastic ideal that is completely contrary to family life, while engaging in family life. (Jodo Shinshu is an important and wonderful exception, having long ago renounced monastic pretensions.) As I think I mention in Two Shores, to this day Soto Zen hasn’t said anything really positive about the role of family life for clergy. They finally permitted it in the by-laws (long after the fact), but they have yet to really name it as an authentic expression of priest/monk practice. And how could they? How could they celebrate themselves as the unbroken successors to Dogen and say at the same time that family life is their unsurpassed Dharma gate?

That is where little Frank, American Zen, and I come in – and where I am grateful to be in a Sangha that, in our best moments at least, doesn’t mind being the “broken” successors to Dogen. We dare to turn the wheel again – we maybe are already – to go from barely “permitting” what’s happening into full-on celebrating it. Not from a rigid ideology of family life as the best life, but more from a profound pragmatism: the understanding that what’s actually happening is actually the real practice.

In that spirit, I say: what better way than child-rearing for a priest of the Great Vehicle to learn the warm heart of practice? How could a cold, sharp temple invite that heart more than a warm, soft baby body? What about that unconditional, boundless Bodhisattva love? What about training in dropping, meeting, responding, dropping, meeting, responding? How could that be more authentic in the layered artifice of monastic life than in the a screaming, shitting, laughing, wonder-filled baby? How better than parenthood for a priest to hone that one project of flowing responsiveness, the single practice that is the mono of monastic?

One priest friend told me that he understood unconditional love only after having a child. It might not take that for everyone, but it wouldn’t it be the height of arrogance to call it a hindrance? Another told me it is like having a han in the living room that is poised to call zazen at any moment, echoing a mother friend of mine who offers that Zen training is nothing more than a male attempt to approximate the experience of motherhood.

In these clear and confident expressions I hear the rumblings of a vital Dharma turning, one that I must say American Zen is taking up far more strongly than our Dharma parents and siblings in Japan. In embracing the life we have inherited as Japanese-lineage priests (or “lay-priests” if you don’t mind the oxymoron), we can hold up our children and say, “look here – this is practice!” It seems that on this point the Japanese clergy are still insisting, “don’t look here! – there is practice!” and carrying on about Dogen-zenji-sama. They are saying, “do as I say, not as I do.”  Or, perhaps more precisely, “do as I do, but say as I say.”

Of course and unfortunately it’s never so simple. Last week I tried to sit a sesshin, but because of my responsibilities for Frankie, I hardly gave 100%. Is it possible to “show up” (SF Zen Center’s unofficial slogan) for sesshin and to “show up” for the responsibilities of family life at the same time? How can we deepen and fulfill our formal practice while the accretions of the “mundane whirl” hang on us like barnacles? What about the time, the energy that formal practice takes? How can we genuinely fulfill the deep Dharma potential of parenthood,  this unattached, selfless love, without the support of the attachment-cutting zendo schedule? But how can we follow the schedule that promises to teach us that if we’re weighed down with family duties?

(Incidentally, it’s just this tension that led Confucianists in China to denounce Buddhism as un-filial – the worst insult imaginable. For them the solution wasn’t to ditch the family, but to ditch the monastery or whatever other excuse anyone had to not fulfill familial duties.)

It’s clear that if I weren’t being trained by Frankie, I would have been more available to be trained by this last sesshin. And maybe the ancient training of sesshin is really better than the more ancient training of parenthood. It may be that the two can’t ever peacefully coexist, and maybe here the Japanese clerical hypocrisy/openness to paradox can serve us well, even energize our engagements. It offers a way, however clumsy, to do both.

Whatever the case, I sincerely confess that never in my life, even in the deepest heart of the deepest sesshin, have I sensed the kind of monstrous and tremendous love that is suddenly gradually overtaking me as a father. Far from a hindrance to my priest path, it whispers a promise that – if only I don’t turn away – it will push open still wider the gate onto the great matter of birth and death

May all of our training, wherever and whatever it is, invite warm, connected, and gone-beyond-conditions love. And may we not be fooled by other ways.

My last post about young people in the Dharma struck a nerve, and I’m reluctant to move on from the theme.  I think there is a lot to learn and open to in the many comments to the last post, although it also seems apparent that “young people” are no more a unified bloc than any other kind of people, and that opinions are passionate and various about how the American Sangha might be more engaged with younger practitioners.  I want to continue to consider how my own practice and presentation of the Dharma could meet some of the many needs and wishes expressed, and I invite anyone else to look over those last post comments and see if they move you.

For me the question of young people in the Dharma is closely related to how we “train” people in Zen.  I am not sure that young people today in the U.S. want to “be trained” or have a cultural context for it.  Part of what keeps Zen in the U.S. seeming foreign and marginal is our attempt to transport an Asian model of training into a culture with a very different sense of it.  Along with “masters” and “disciples” come “juniors” and “seniors,” and the elaborate monastic hierarchy of Japanese Zen is overlayed on a postmodern and internet-wired American culture in a head-on collision that I feel sometimes like I’m witnessing over and over each day.  There is a lot that has been and could be said about hierarchy in general (“No Hierarchy in the West,” anyone?) but I’m specifically interested today in how the Asian tradition of “training” or “apprenticeship” clashes with postmodern America in a way that especially puts off younger people.

“Non-action” in Taoist thought is about not interfering with the arising energy flow.  When applied to beneficial action or governance, it means to support the natural energy of another person.  As Suzuki Roshi put it, “to help things to become their best.”  Their “best” or their “natural energy” needs space, needs to be nourished.  I feel that the energy of youth especially needs this kind of care, this kind of respect.  Teachers should help their students to find their own way, to support them to follow their own wholesome energy.  Young people want this:  they want to be heard, acknowledged, and supported on their own paths.  As the young people of my parents’ generation sang, “Get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand” – just as then, young people want help and support, not “direction.”

When I was younger and more passionately one-sided in my view of the practice, I rarely felt encouraged to follow my own energy.  I thought I was up for “being trained,” and other people felt like it was their responsibility to “train” me, but I often felt undermined or squashed or squelched.  I felt that my enthusiasm was tolerated, but not supported or encouraged.  I felt that many seniors and teachers were trying to “smooth me out” like the rocks in the river, or to “scrub me clean” like potatoes in the tumbler.  And that is truly the function of Sangha, and is truly the experience of working with a teacher, but it wasn’t what I wanted and it didn’t leave me feeling valued or supported.

When I expressed my intention to go to Japan, a lot of what I got was:  “Do you want to be better than us?”  Or, “That’s a gaining idea!”  Or, quoting Dogen, “Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own home?”

A few people, my ordaining teacher Lee among them, were able to affirm and support my energy in the way that it was naturally flowing, to support my path the way that it was unfolding.  They didn’t try to train me to be like them, or train these edges out of me.  Instead, they trusted the practice and trusted my sincerity, and understood that what I had to work out had to be worked out through not around my unskillfulness or partial views.

It is hard to meet people and to let them really be who and where they are.  Especially if they express a desire to understand Zen, my impulse and habit is to replace their version of it with my version of it.  But my intention, redoubled as I consider these issues with all of you, is to help people to see the truth of their own lives and their own paths, rather than to train their path into harmony with or affirmation of my own.

But does this disempower our teaching?  Can this style preserve a lineage?  Manjushri’s sword needs to be able to take life as well as giving life.  Right?  It may be that in according with our American resistance to training (which is intertwined with our individualism and arrogance) we lose the vital function of cutting through.

My wife thinks so of me, anyway – though she is never present in my one-on-one meetings, she intuits (not incorrectly) that when I meet with people to discuss the practice all I do is affirm and support them.  Similarly, a friend of mine said that even when he managed the kitchen he would never correct anyone unless he was certain that they would take it as a kindness.  Support first, train second.  My friend and I both feel most comfortable there, but can that keep Zen alive?  What are we losing if that is the training?  On the other hand, what else can we do – how can we avoid manipulating, squashing, and imposing our own conditioned views on others?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I think they are important to ask as we consider what the teacher-student relationship means in American Zen, and how we might “train” or “support” one another.

I do feel clearly and strongly, though, that to be more welcoming as a Sangha, especially to young people, we might be a little slower to harness or prune or scrub them into compliance, and a little more open the wild, passionate, critical, inspiring energy that they bring.

Ok.  I am over it, right?

I know that we’re not in Japan, and I’m glad not to be in Japan.  I understand and appreciate that we have our own ways of practice, and that it is beautiful and essential that we do.  I know that a lot of the pomp of Japanese high ceremony just isn’t appropriate here:  we don’t need all the swoops and swooshes, and we can do fine with about half of the folds and creases.

Beyond that, I know that the forms are fundamentally just something to do.  They are just some place to put a body that needs to be somewhere; they are something to do with a body that needs to do something.  I know that the true form of Zen is just this present activity:  washing or typing or touching.  Like Toni Packer I’ve seen through the veil of religious forms.  They too often intoxicate us with false spirituality, rob us from the actual life that’s always right before us.

So why does it make me so crazy?  Why can’t I just get over it and join wholeheartedly in the newly mandated shashu bow?

Please indulge some slightly technical backstory (ok, back-rant), and then I will get to my point.  As of today (and who knows how long this will last) the form at Green Gulch for entering the zendo – for service, not zazen – is to come to your place, turn to face the altar, bow with the hands in gasshō, face center, and bow in shashu.  I can accept that – it is the “real” form.  My body knows it from Japan, my robes know it.  The fabric, muscle, and bone delight in the deep bow and the graceful quarter pivot, the slight bow – even slightlier answered by the monk standing across.

Furthermore, however, as of today, when we enter the zendo to perform this service-time form, we are no longer to offer a gasshō bow, but instead a shashu bow.  This, to my regret and consternation, causes me great regret and consternation.  I “so willingly reimmersed in American Zen”;  I so “over” the formal bickering of narrow-minded trainees.

Why this one point?  Why would this particular minor detail send me spinning off into “No Zen in the West”?

One story is that to sometimes enter the zendo in gasshō and to other times enter the same zendo in shashu creates a feeling of arbitrariness.  But, you say, the whole damn thing is arbitrary!  Yes.  And no.  The more we import Japanese Zen forms out of their contexts, the more we create a feeling that the Zen forms are arbitrary, when in fact they are efficiencies and elegances and coherencies of worship and respect and practicality.  That you enter the sōdō (for zazen) one way and the hondō (for service) another way is not made up, is not a fabrication but a response to the space and a dance with the environment.  The sōdō is a room set apart, and the hōndō is better described as a temporary widening of a hallway.  In Zen temple layout, the spaces imply a different treatment – not arbitrary but studied, even intuitive.  Architecturally determined. 

(And I understand again the vigor with which some Japanese insist that a temple needs to be built in America.  No matter that there are many Zen temples in the U.S., each replete with dedicated practitioners – what they mean is the roof, the layout.  They mean a physical temple.  If Idaten in the kitchen isn’t geometrically across from Manjushri in the distant sōdō, how could you call it a temple?)

Deeper than my theory about the logic of this particular form, though, is a deep and fragile nostalgia, a feeling about the futility of all of our best quasi-monastic efforts.  All of our sincere attempts to coordinate and perfect our ceremonial forms seem suddenly doomed to be flimsy and out of context. 

For example, to begin our shuso intiation ceremony we follow the ceremonial instruction to strike the wooden han three times.  But what does that mean to us?  It has no context; it’s basically just to make a sound before the ceremony.  But monastic life is all context:  the sequence signifies an arrival, the three hits that announce a new guest, a returning monk.

In a life of monastic observance, each piece fits seamlessly into a whole, a mandala suffused with reference and meaning.  To snip here and there and pull out a piece here and there, as we inevitably do in our semi-formal, part-time Zen, the integrity and the rich texture of each act is broken.  Rather than unify and create layers of meaning, as it would in a monastic context, it implies this arbitrariness, or worse, a mysticism where disembodied bell sequences somehow hold special spiritual power.  The forms are not arbitrary, nor are they supernaturally potent – they are rather the alphabet and language of a whole way of life.

It’s not that I am giving up on the struggle to maintain the life of these ancient Zen forms.  However clumsy and out of context, they do make up the shape and the sound of our American temple life, and they do find their way into our bodies and hearts.  I’m glad that we keep striving to shed some and maintain some of our monastic ceremonial heritage.

But I’m struck tonight with a sadness, a nostalgia, that the three han hits before the shuso enters go from here forward into history as “just how it’s done,” isolated from its matrix of meaning.  Like a dying language, so much is lost.  What will we find to replace it?

Really – what will we find to replace these forms whose syllables are no longer coherent?

In the meantime, shasshu bow it is, as per the latest mandate, and forward to the next complaint…

First, from a Dharma web newbie, a couple of online things that just came to my attention:

–Dosho Port of Wild Fox Zen is doing a very interesting thing in actualizing online Dharma by leading what promises to be a fairly rigorous but completely online 90-day Ango/Practice Period.  It seems worth checking out if your life doesn’t allow for a 90-day retreat of the walking around, bowing kind.  It goes from 2/20-5/22 – follow these links for information or a video invitation.

–Open Buddha has a Dharma blog aggregator that I hadn’t known about, a noble attempt to contain the Buddhist blog sprawl into one site.  It’s at http://community.zen-sangha.org.

Last Sunday in my talk at Green Gulch (“Practice with the Life You Have” – an exceedingly “opiate of the masses” talk, however true it may have also happened to be) I scratched the surface of a theme that I want to pursue here and consider with you:  the relationship between “dissatisfaction” and “disillusion.”

The story in Two Shores of Zen is that I am dissatisfied with American Zen life and head to the Mystic East to find Real Zen.  Most of you know how that goes:  I cry, I laugh, I see Buddha, and ultimately I join the ranks of the many “Zen failures.”  That is, I end up just as dissatisfied with my austere Japanese Zen temple as I was with my decadent American Zen temple.  With dissatisfaction everywhere I turn, there’s really nowhere left to turn but my own heart, this present moment of my own mind producing my own dissatisfaction with whatever form my life takes.

In other words, my relentless, unproductive dissatisfaction led me to a gentler, more wholesome disillusion.  Not a disillusion with external conditions – with which we are all doomed to be forever dissatisfied – but disillusion with this dissatisfaction itself.

It isn’t then about being satisfied or dissatisfied with Western or Eastern Buddhism, but it’s about getting sick of, getting thoroughly disillusioned with, this all-pervading suffering itself.  Disillusion with this all-pervading suffering doesn’t mean that I should seek refuge some place it isn’t, but that I really have no recourse but to turn and face this suffering itself.

Dissatisfaction, or dukkha, is a turning and running away from what is.  It is looking or longing for some other option, some other more complete or more perfect life.  Disillusion on the other hand is a turning in, a turning towards the mechanism that creates suffering.  When dissatisfaction drives me, I dig deeper into samsara, endlessly cycling by trying to get out; when disillusion drives me, it’s more like stopping, more like seeing, more like surrendering to the life that I have and putting my energy into the deep work of letting go.

The Buddha invites and encourages us to grow disillusioned with samsara, with suffering.  We are to grow disillusioned equally with the agreeable and disagreeable.  To be disillusioned is not to simply be dissatisfied, but in a sense to give up on the whole realm of conditioned existence with it’s pervading dissatisfaction and its glimmers of transient satisfaction.  For me, that means to let my life be my life, let my circumstances be my circumstances, and shift my gaze to a subtler process by which I’m making the whole thing into a problem.

There may be a student of the Pali Canon out there who can help me with the words I am looking for, or who can clarify what the Buddha “really meant” when he taught “disillusion.”  In the meantime, I’ve found something in this framework that speaks to me at least.  It helps me to work with my dissatisfaction in a way that turns me towards my life.  Recalling that dissatisfaction won’t help but disillusion will, I can relax a little bit about getting that elusive satisfactory life circumstance, and just do the work of letting go completely of everything.

This is, of course, just a belated echo of what many of the first comments on “No Zen in the West” insisted – forget about East, forget about West, forget about monk, forget about layperson, and get to the real issue of settling your heart.

A couple of weeks ago I gave the weekly talk, as I occasionally do, at the San Quentin State Prison Buddhist group, the Buddhadharma Sangha.  My ordination teacher and the founding teacher of the Sangha, Seido Lee deBarros, asked me talk about Two Shores of Zen there, and I was a little hesitant.  What do those guys care about “Eastern versus Western Zen”?  My project seemed suddenly academic.  And as book tours go, state prisons are a little far afield.  But I’m used to saying yes, especially to Lee, and I did so even though I didn’t feel 100% behind it.

Maybe not until the moment that we volunteers and inmates sat down together in zazen did I notice the depth of the opportunity behind my resistance – the opportunity that our prison Sangha always offers me.  The opportunity to ask, not as luxury but with real suffering and real liberation at stake:  why does this matter?  Who cares?  And I remembered that I quite honestly don’t give a damn about Japanese Zen or American Zen as such.  I am of course happy to dissect them, read about them, think about them, and talk about them, but at the end of the day it’s maybe more a hobby than anything.  What’s beyond that?  What’s important about it?  Why would this matter to anyone at San Quentin?

Part of what is consistently inspiring about going to San Quentin is that it strips away, or at least undermines, my idea that practice is all about the conditions of practice.  The simple fact of our being there attests to a faith that “real Zen” is available even in the most unsupportive environment.  By being there we are pointing to a practice that is beyond having the “right conditions” in place or holding the “wrong conditions” at bay.  It’s hard to spend the week thinking “I can’t practice at this lazy, unsupportive Zen temple, where people chat during meals” and then to go Sunday evening through the sallyport at San Quentin to tell a group of sincere men in blue that if they just apply their minds the Way is perfectly within reach exactly where they are.

The question for me then, amidst all of this nonsense about where or whether Zen is, is fundamentally about what kind of effort is needed for spiritual practice.  That is the underlying question of Two Shores of Zen, and of my whole life and study, and I’m grateful to the Buddhadharma Sangha for helping me to remember that.

How much do we need to work on our circumstances, and how much is practice-enlightenment just a matter of how we relate to our mind and our awareness?  To say it’s completely unconditioned miss something critical about cause-and-effect, and to say it needs special conditions cuts off the men of the Buddhadharma Sangha, and is in any case refuted by their genuine practice.  This question is present in the broad brush strokes of our life – how many retreats do we do, how often do we sit on the zafu and face the wall – and in the minute details of meditative effort.  How much control, how much intention, and how much surrender?

“Japanese Zen” then is maybe just a way for me to talk about discipline, those moments when we cut through extraneous thought and come back to our breathing, being body.  And “American Zen” likewise is simply shorthand for the wide-open, all-inclusive, all-accepting Buddha-mind that effortlessly surrenders and goes with the flow.  Understanding how the two work together, how the two shores need each other, is not a cross-cultural exercise but is precisely learning the art of zazen and the art of human life.

Thanks as always for joining this conversation.  I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness and depth of your comments (no pressure!), and I renew my intention to put more regular effort into maintaining this page in the midst of my other responsibilities.

Zen teacher Dosho Port raised some interesting questions about Sangha while reflecting on ”Two Shores of Zen” on his Wild Fox Zen blog.  Dosho wonders whether Zen Centers even warrant the designation “Sangha,” and explores refuge in the middle of unreliable everything.  It’s an interesting post with interesting comments, worth checking out.  I responded with some general comments on the Wild Fox blog – not the least of which was to clarify again and still that “No Zen in the West” (like “Yes Zen in the West”) is a position to take and get over, to take to encourage people, not to take and to make a nest in.

But here I want to focus on another point that Dosho makes.  Taking up an exchange in the book wherein the American Zen teacher scolds the young, idealistic American monk for “disparaging the Sangha” by calling the practice at his temple “bullshit,” Dosho writes:

“…to suggest that Jiryu’s earnest-sounding doubts about San Francisco Zen Center (and American Zen generally) – maybe like the kid who saw that the emperor had no clothes and was willing to call out – should not be raised because he’s breaking the precepts seems like both a way of repressing investigation in order to maintain the organizational status-quo and a missed opportunity for a full-out meeting.”

Or, as my friend Eleanor puts it:  “What an odd conundrum to be told you that if you criticize/form a critique you are breaking a precept. Red flag! Danger! Warning Will Robinson!!!!”

I muster to Eleanor some defense of the point of view that just nagging and cynically undermining is actually breaking a precept, not forming a compassionate critique, and that it’s counter-productive to just tear down without trying out/swallowing whole.  Eleanor’s agreement is devastating:  “Well yes, no one should talk before they’ve lived at SFZC for some amount of years. 2? 30?”

I can’t mean that!  Because just like Dosho notes that in American Zen 60 years old seems to be the new 40, for me at thirteen years of practice, ten years of practice is the new one year of practice.  There must be some notion of “membership” that admits a person into the conversation, but as soon as there is a cut off, as soon as “he’s been here long enough that he can speak” and “she just got here, so ignore what she has to say”, we’re on the slippery slope.  (Hierarchy is very much on my mind lately – a No Hierarchy in the West post will come soon.)

This feels very important.  As we shape and imagine and perfect this Western or American or Californian experiment – this experiment of a Sangha of us, not of better people – how do we “call out,” how do we say what we see and share what we think?  If we don’t have modes and mechanisms to do this, how will we grow better?  A person who isn’t open to feedback isn’t so likely to grow, and an institution is obviously the same.  It’s maybe easier to participate in this conversation and development of Zen in the ”provinces” than in the San Francisco Zen Center “Vatican” where by default things progress slowly (like an ocean-faring barge, as Norman Fischer says).  But maybe not.  Maybe wherever we are it is hard to give useful feedback.  Maybe wherever we are we have the opportunity to share what we think constructively, as part of the thing, or destructively as separate from the thing.

“Obama is a war-mongering murderer and the so-called practice at this American resort/temple is a sham.”

R.H. Blyth sweetly and memorably says that people use Zen as an excuse to be rude.  I know I have!  I’d add:  peace as an excuse to be violent.  (Check.)  But I don’t want to let the masters of war off the hook and I don’t want to let my beloved temple and teachers off the hook and I don’t want to let myself off the hook.  But what then?  How do I relate my feedback to any of them/us?

The young idealist of “Two Shores” didn’t have other words, didn’t have another way to express his Way-seeking mind and to offer feedback to others than “bullshit.”  And that “bullshit” often made people defensive.  And Zen people – especially Zen teachers - when they are defensive often resort to “turning around the light” to shine in the student’s eyes.  Variations on the theme of “that’s your problem,”  “everything you see is yourself,”  etc.  People, especially young people who need to be heard but don’t necessarily have more subtle words, often pack their bags at that moment.  It isn’t genuine, and they feel that, whether or not they have the clarity to defy authority in the moment of meeting.

It is true that the student’s complaint is the student’s problem, but when the teacher leaps to the student side of the problem without first completely hearing, completely meeting, and completely “playing out” (in Dosho’s words) the attack, something really terrible happens.  The easy truth of the student’s suffering is used to obscure the hard truth of the disharmony, hypocrisy, or inefficiency that the student is trying to share.  This happens again and again and again.  I’ve seen it for years, and now – and this is the real horror – I see myself do it to others, even if subtly.

We can encourage each other not to separate from our own lives.  And we can point out to each other that complaining and cynically criticizing is fundamentally just cutting ourselves off and setting ourselves apart from our own lives.  But fear of separation, of losing our way, shouldn’t silence us, and speaking out against doesn’t mean we need to slip even a hairsbreadth from complete, wholehearted particpation in the community and one life that we’re speaking out against. 

I want to say: “We need to speak.  We need to listen.”  But that sounds like a cliche.  And it doesn’t sound very Zen.  Definitely not Japanese Zen.

But cliche or not, Zen or not, it seems right now like the most important thing.  We need to speak.  We need to listen.

Thank you for the comments posted in response to my last entry.  I’m touched by their depth and thoughtfulness.  Tempted as I am to try to get in some clumsy last word on each point, it feels best to resist that and keep the conversation open. 

I do want to take up a fundamental issue that has been raised in these first comments, though.  I appreciate in many of them being pointed back to the Zen that is actualized in this very moment, this very breath.  Not the Zen of East or West, not the Zen of Buddhism or the Zen of anything at all – but just this presence here now.  How wonderful to be reminded, and to remind each other of this single moment of life!  Nowhere to go, nothing to do, everything released into just as it is. 

This immediacy seems like a Zen that is beyond conditions – right here now there is no East, no West, no Zen, no breath, no sitter.  This presence is vital.  It is our awakening, our inspiration, and the bedrock of our vows.  But what then?

My moments of presence certainly trump my ideas of Zen.  It’s good to be reminded of that, and all of Zen discourse does – the old teachers redirect each exchange back to a presence that can’t get crammed into language and theories and views.  But we shouldn’t forget that Zen discourse also always does the opposite – it demands a return into language, into theories and views, into the mud of ideas and the mud of action.

So I know that I can drop all of my ideas, and that is my basic practice, but what happens when I pick them back up?  Should I just never pick them back up?  Maybe a good idea – but it turns out in my experience that “never pick back up” is also a pretty violent idea, and amounts to holding fast to a fixed view.  So I have been working a lot lately with the dimension of letting go that is a letting go into whatever is flowing from the moment, rather than a letting go away from the natural flow of things.  That is, letting go as letting go in the midst of participation in what is happening, as opposed to a letting go that blocks what might happen next.  Stillness as readiness, not stillness as stuckness.  Purity not as crystal clear water, but as the freedom to get muddy.  This seems like the real skill of Zen. 

When our experience goes beyond culture – unconditioned experience if such a thing could be spoken of – how quickly and under what motivation do we make it conditioned, cultured experience again?  The next morning, or the next breath (or at the very same moment, if we’re skilful enough) we put it into the language of Zen or some other language.  We identify with it and we look for ways to communicate and transmit it.  That effort has its problems (totally untenable, for one, and the cause of all suffering), but is basically wholesome and natural and necessary.  It is an expression of our vow, that comes from our appreciating that the spiritual depth we’ve found in our own lives we owe at least in part to the generosity of others who have descended into the mud to cram what’s beyond words into words.  To squeeze what can’t be practiced into a practice we can try to do.

It may well be (logically and doctrinally) that there is no such thing as an unconditioned experience, that it is a mistake to think that we are ever outside of conditions, ever outside of culture or language.  If so, to speak of departing from and returning to the conditioned world is just a conditioned fantasy.  Painted rice cakes everywhere we turn. 

Whether we ultimately decide that our “spiritual moments” are truly unconditioned or just really really nicely conditioned, the question for me now is how they meet conditions.  Can this experience be carried into conditions, or is it obliterated immediately by them?

We grasp hold of this presence that we feel and touch through our meditation practice and we claim that it is beyond Zen or beyond culture, but is it really?  And even if we say it is, what do we want to transmit?  What will help others to touch it too?  What will help us to remember, again and again, to return?  Throw away all tools, or pick them carefully up?

So I’m inspired by direct pointing back to my present momentary experience, as the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega of the spiritual path.  I trust that deeply, and my faith in that continues to grow.  But how does it take shape, and how do I honor what has shaped it?

Returning to this conventional world to play and to help, what do we pick up and what do we put down?  Here the whole field is open to our full creativity.  But pure creativity can’t essentially teach, anymore than pure tradition can.  So how do we want to step forward?  What is real letting go, and what culture remains when we do?