Zenosaurus

The Zen of Laryngitis

2011-11-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

In Autumn, there is often a melancholy, not necessarily personal, just a deepening attention as the vine leaves crinkle yellowly and Persephone goes down into the silence of the underworld. Things settle. One of my grandmothers was the wild child of an old family and lived in a cold water shack and traveled about to pick fruit. At the same time she wrote a feature for the Hobart Mercury on the beauty of autumn leaves along the Derwent River. She came to rest in Autumn.

I taught a silent retreat in Seattle last weekend, here: nalandawest.org . The silence of retreat goes towards vastness and self sufficiency—relief from the press of the other's gaze, being up before dawn, the perfection of each thing that rises into the mind—the leaves crimson and gold like antiquated military uniforms, Mt Rainier in the window with its crown of snows and its own vast considered air of being actually a volcano not at all tame thank you, the rain sliding down windows, the faces in the street, the feet of the meditators. We lived down a level, inside the world.

And as I came out of retreat I developed laryngitis. It is a different kind of silence. It’s like being a very innocent child engaging the world in new ways. I call the border collie; no sound comes out and on she hurtles. I am outside the world like Marcel Marceau in the mime school exercise when he is separated from us by a glass box. I start to talk with the guys working on the house and when nothing comes out of my mouth, I point, I knock on things, I draw in the air. At other times I look into people’s eyes and hang my head, I look up to the sky and raise my hands. I draw a tear line from one eye. I shrug and walk away. It’s freeing, there are so many questions on behalf of which I don’t find it necessary to wave my hands. It is a different way of living down a level. I feel well disposed, amiable, absurd, honest, more inclined to make jokes than decisions. It's a helpless feeling but perhaps for that reason, it’s fun. It’s hard to do on the phone though.

Albert Saijo and the long journey

2011-06-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Diminyatz an artist and long time friend of PZI told me today that Albert Saijo just died in Volcano on the Big Island. Kevin is doing his funeral.

Albert was a friend of Jack Kerouac and of Phil Whalen and other beat poets. He was in the internment camp during World War II at Heart Mountain in Wyoming where Nyogen Senzaki had the only zendo in the US at that time. He didn't care much about possessions and claimed to have enjoyed the freedom from adult control that prison camp life conferred. Later like other Nisei, he fought in Italy.

Albert's mother was a haiku poet one of a number west coast poets in the camp though her poems from those hard years were lost. Albert's brother, Gompers, was an artist, some of whose calligraphy paper I still have. Albert wrote in caps but in different colored ink which made his manuscripts intimate, dark, sweet and giddy all at once. It's more or less what you might think if you pay close attention and hang in there happily or otherwise with the sinking ship.

One of Albert's poems:

Zen 2.0. The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 3.1 The great Koan "No"

2011-03-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

This week I'm posting two of my pieces that were included in James Ford & Melissa Blacker’s The Book of Mu, Wisdom Press.

Piece Number 1 on the Koan No

The Great Koan No, Your Dog, and the Meaning of Life

A koan brings about a change of heart—its value is to transform the mind.
The problem we are trying to solve with a koan is this:
The mind we work with every day evolved to flee saber tooth tigers, hunt mammoths, not kill each other too often, share food, gossip, make babies and develop theories of the universe. To manage all this, the mind makes hypotheses, wondering, “Is that a stick on the path or is it a snake?” or “Is that boy or girl hot?” or “Do I have egg on my face?“ or “What will the cancer biopsy numbers be when they come in?”

So we wander along, having thoughts, believing them, acting on them, dealing with the results we get. We scheme and plot, fear and want, trying to wrestle our states of mind into a comfortable shape. People think, “I want not to be crazy when I see my mother,” or “I don’t want to feel jealous, or afraid,” and its hard work and painful to be always two inches to the left of where we want to be. Adjusting our states of mind is a gymnastic work out that never ends. Our minds are still in beta and we live at some distance from our actual lives.

Koans take account of the confusion and cross purposes that are a feature of the mind. They lead us to rest in our uncertainty, including what’s happening now and what we want to flee.

Koans offer the possibility that you could free the mind in one jump, without passing through stages or any pretense at logical steps. In the territory that koans open up, we live down a level, before explanations occur, beneath the ground that fear is based on, before the wanting and the scrambling around for advantage, before there is a handle on the problem, before we were alienated from the world.

A koan doesn’t hide or even manage fear or despair or rage or anything that appears in your mind. Instead, with a koan you might stop finding fault with what your mind presents, stop assuming you already know what your thoughts and feelings are about and how they need to be handled. At some stage my thoughts stopped being compelling and I found a joy in what was advancing towards me. Everyone thinks you need a patch of earth to stand on or you will fall down. Your patch of earth might be someone’s approval or a certain amount of money. When the koan opens, you don’t need somewhere to stand, or a handle on your experience.

The kindness of a koan consists mainly in taking away what you are sure of about yourself. This isn’t a sinister trick, and though I found it disorienting it was more relieving than painful. Taking away is the first gift of a koan.

Among the couple of thousand koans in the curriculum, the koan Mu (as it’s known in Japanese), or Wu (Chinese), or No (English) has been used for about 1200 years. It is popular as a first koan, the koan that stands for all koans, the exemplar and representative, confusing, irritating, mysterious, beautiful, and freeing, a gateway into the isness of life, where things are exactly what they are and have not yet become problems. It begins by looking at the question of whether we are alienated or whether we participate fully in life. It comes from a long dialogue with an ancient, twinkly, Chinese grandmaster called Zhaozhou. Here is the full version of the koan about No and the dog—from The Book of Serenity, as translated by Joan Sutherland and me:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
“Yes,” replied Zhaozhou,
“Then why did it jump into that bag of fur?”
“It knew what it was doing and that’s why it dogged.”
Another time a monk asked Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
“No.”
“All beings have buddha nature. Why doesn’t a dog have it?”
“Because it’s beginning to awaken in the world of ignorance.”

(Note The last line of the koan is literally, “It has activity—or karma—consciousness.” This is an Indian system of describing layers of the mind. “Activity consciousness” has the sense that through the agency of ignorance an unenlightened mind begins to be disturbed or awakened.)

Teachers usually offer the student the one word “No” or “Mu.” There is a long history to this tactic and it was how I first encountered the koan, reading about it in books. It offered a completely different way of approaching the world, something that, given the confused state of my mind at that time, seemed worth trying. I took the koan up by myself without a teacher and made all the beginner’s errors, treating the koan more or less as a gadget. I tried to discover the use of it, the way a hunter-gatherer would deal with a toaster found by the trail—pulling on the cord, banging it on the ground, using it as a mirror. “This gadget doesn’t seem to be working,” I said to myself, scheming and plotting. The other error I made was to treat myself as a gadget that had to be tuned to receive the koan—more scheming and plotting.

I like the koan being about a dog. It addresses the question of whether we can actually change, whether we defeat ourselves, and the way we often rule ourselves out. I live with a border collie puppy and in the morning she is complete in the world, and amazingly kinetic. Her heart beats quickly, and she hurtles toward me on her big paddy paws—she is now grown enough that occasionally when she leaps and I’m sitting on the floor she descends from above, a surprise, flailing and excited. There is no flaw in her universe. The koan is about me, about my buddha nature in any state I happen to be in. If I think life is hard, that thought is the dog with buddha nature, and peace is exactly inside that thought when it jumps on me. Then the apparent difficulty of life suddenly isn’t a difficulty.

The second thing this koan is good for is as a navigation aid in territory without maps. Once the gates in the mind start to open, the koan is pretty much all you have for navigation. The koan helps you to walk through the dim and bright paths that you have never walked before. You don’t have to return to knowing things and assessing your value and skill, and working off the nice map you bought along the way. When you feel as if you are in a dark passage or not getting anywhere, all that is necessary is not to believe those thoughts about being lost in twisty passages. The koan is a nice substitute for wrestling around with your fears.

And if you do resort to your maps, you will find that they are temporary, you don’t quite believe in them, and the world itself is more interesting than your explanations of it.

Everyone is new to this koan since everyone is new to this moment. You can drop everything you think you know about this koan and everything you are eager to tell others that you have already learned. Then the koan can find the space to meet you.
Lots of people from lots of cultures have been changed by this koan and I find that an encouraging thought. While it is exhilarating to step off the cliff of everything that has already convinced you, it can also be frightening. It can be consoling to know that lots of other people, like ourselves having no special aptitudes, have found that this koan saved their lives.

With all the difficulties and absurdities of the koan path my own reaction has been gratitude to the ancient teachers who invented this way of changing my mind. They found a way to talk down through the centuries, a language that helps unshape what I see so that I can see that it is the first day of the world. That is an unforgettable gift.

Koans are a great treasure of civilization and their beauty is just beginning to be understood in the west. After an initial promising start in the West koans came to be considered esoteric and by a couple of decades ago were being neglected as a method. One of the decisions I made at that time was to teach only koans and nothing but koans and to develop new ways of teaching them, ways that might fit Western culture. Along those lines many possibilities are opening for us. The koan No is the quarter horse of Zen practice—resilient, durable and adaptable. It’s been used so often, in so many countries and eras, that there are many different and contradictory ways to encounter it. It is a mysterious guide, a hidden friend, a vial of ancient light, a rodent that undermines the foundations.

When you read about koans, a practice will leap out at you, and an impulse will rise out of your own heart to meet it, and. If you follow that practice with all your heart, or even with sort of most of your heart, and listen to how it’s going and adapt what you do, and follow some more, this koan will change your life. You will come to your own, unique understanding of freedom. You might get enlightened. That’s what all the writing is for—to give you a practice that works.

Piece Number 2 on the Great Koan No

No, nay, never, nyet, iie

Koans are purpose-built to transform consciousness. The usual pitch for using a koan is that it will open a gate into joy and freedom. As far as I know a koan isn’t useful for any other purpose. Koans imply a universe that is in motion; they help us to sympathize and harmonize with the way of things and to find the knack of letting ourselves be carried by it. In other words koans imply that some crucial features of our consciousness can change.

You can think of koans as vials full of the light that the ancestors walked through, and if you can get these vials open you share that light. By getting them open I mean you get at the light any way you can—you find the key and open the vials with a click, break them, drop them from a height, sing to them, step inside them, shake them so that some of the light spills out. Then that light is available to you, which might be handy if you’re ever in a dark and twisty passage. (The material that follows is from a talk at a Pacific Zen Institute Retreat in 2005 in Camp Meeker, Northern California)

The Koan

Student, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?"
Teacher, “No.”

The koan “No” has been used a great deal as a lantern. You sometimes have special discoveries associated with your first koan, so some people find it reassuring that many, many people have used this koan for over a thousand years.

I think that the key point, and the sweetness in the koan, is that we can change. If it really is possible, in this life, to have a shift in the way you come at things, well that’s an amazing idea to consider. If you understand that a shift really is possible, then the rest comes down merely to questions of method. And that’s the kindness of the path: the old master says, “Well sometimes it seems crazy to think it, but transformation really does happen. So try it out. Go at it. And here’s a method for you.”

I did actually work for some years with this koan. Since I began without teachers and just had to grab whatever was handy, it wasn’t the first koan I worked with. And it wasn’t the first koan I understood or with which I had an amusing time with a teacher. Yet when this koan opened up for me it was dazzling.

I tried to carry it with me every second of the day and even while asleep, and to merge with it, and I was slow at that. There wasn’t a lot of becoming-one-with-things floating around in my universe. There was a lot of, “Where’s the koan?” It seemed I had to learn to be patient with everything I didn’t know. But my clumsy meditation turned out to be good enough. So you don’t need a perfect technique, you just need a good enough one, a good enough path. Perfection is the enemy of results.

There is a tradition behind this inquiry into the nature of the dog. The question about whether human consciousness can be reconciled with the natural world is usually urgent, and making peace with the natural world, feeling ourselves to be part of that living matrix is one way to understand the purpose of koan work.

In the first place, what I take from the question about the dog, though, is that sometimes, when you begin a quest, you are just groping in the dark. The questioner, along with you and me, doesn’t even know what to ask, or what to explore, or how to get a grip on what’s primarily important, and that such cluelessness is traditional and even necessary. So there’s no such thing as a bad question. If you don’t have a clue, you might be starting in a good place. Not asking, when you’re puzzled, is probably not smart. And I’ve found that it’s good not to be snobbish about other people’s questions because my questions are just as silly as everyone else’s. Other people’s naivety might seem apparent to me but that’s nothing to do with me. My own innocence and naivety is opaque to me, and my questions move into that unknown territory. So asking a dopey question might be helpful.

And it’s good to know that any question contains the whole of our inquiry into the nature of mind and the universe. Any question you ask will be good enough as a place to begin. You begin where you can. In the Zen tradition you have to inquire for the sake of the exploration itself. A spiritual quest is always an inquiry and there’s a temptation to go into any discovery process with various agendas—alleviating our suffering, impressing others, or improving our opinion of ourselves. But such motives don’t work as a guide. Koan inquiry carries a true risk; you have to just want to find out what’s really happening. You have to really ask your question, to do the exploration into reality for its own sake.

Zhaozhou’s koan takes away what you think. He doesn’t value your opinions and you might find that you don’t either, which is good because they are a weight to carry around. There are two versions of this koan and the question, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?” occurs in both. In one case the response is “Yes” and in the other “No.” “No” is more famous because it goes against what the sutras say, and if you are inclined to believe sutras, that makes it more interesting. But if you were to work with “Yes” it would be just as effective. “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” “Yes!” “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” “No!” You can tell that Zhaozhou doesn’t care about your views because he is not interested in his own.

Michael Katz related to me a conversation with Gregory Bateson, the thinker and anthropologist. Michael was driving him to a conference at Lindisfarne on Long Island and Bateson said he dreaded something about conferences.
“What is that?” asked Michael.
“Well, people don’t have a sense of humor.”
“What do you mean? What does that mean to you?”
Bateson thought about it and said, “A sense of humor depends on knowing that what you think doesn’t really matter, or even that you don’t really matter.”
So life is not about how much you matter, and if you don’t start thinking that you matter, perhaps you matter more.

If you can go into the inquiry without prejudice, without prejudging the outcome, you’ll be likely to find that every difficulty you have is about your prejudices. The fundamental prejudice is some form of, “This shouldn’t be happening.” This rejection of circumstances can be anything from, “He shouldn’t have left me,” to, “Nobody loves me,” to, “I’m doomed. Even meditation doesn’t work for me.” And what rises might be a trivial thought or it might be a tremendous and traumatic thought—”Why did she have to die?”—but the solution is the same. You can bear it. Or rather you don’t need to bear it; that’s the koan’s job. Bearing things is usually to do with finding an explanation or a meaning, and life is truly beyond that. So there’s no need to bear things, and there’s no need to have a handle on them.

Eventually we just start to accept. Not only do we not dislike our circumstances, we do not dislike our own states of mind, which is the key thing. We begin to think, “Fortunately I don’t get it yet.” And if we forgive life for not being what we told it to be, or expected, or wished, or longed for it to be, we forgive ourselves for not being what we might have been also. And then we can be what we are, which is boundless.

We start off into the spiritual work hoping to change, hoping to become different, and we notice that there is a trick of the mind going on, and that actually we don’t want to let go of who we think we are. Buddha found that he was prepared to starve himself and do all sorts of strange, ascetic practices, as long as he didn’t fundamentally change. So there’s an ambivalence in the human quest which means that we have to muster more than reason on our side if it’s all going to work. That is why the koan doesn’t make sense. If it made sense our reasonableness and ambivalence would be able to block it. The koan embraces the whole of your experience, not just the noble bits.

My own experience was that sometimes I worked with this koan very hard, in a way that took me further away from it. The effort assumed, “What I have is not what I want. When I understand, when I awaken, that will be what I want.” And so anything that came into my life was automatically rejected, and any little piece of awakening that came along got rejected too, because it was in my life and therefore couldn’t be what I was seeking.

I knew that some weird game was going on in the mind, a game that seemed close to the core of the problem of the nature of the mind. Then I noticed that the impatience and critique was diminishing and there was a tiny bit of kindness for my own condition, a blessing on the moment. I had a lot of physical pain, so I would get distracted. I would sit up all night and the predominant thought would be, “I hope I can last till the end of this period.” And I had to accept that about myself. It’s unique for everyone—what we have to embrace is the very thing we don’t want to embrace. Our incompetence, our distractibility, our greed, our fear—that makes us fall apart at little things—our detachment that makes us indifferent to big things.

At a certain stage I stopped whipping the dog. Whipping the dog doesn’t make it not a dog. First it’s good to accept that it’s a dog. And in my case I noticed that no matter how perfectly I did everything according to Wumen’s famous recipe about becoming one with the koan “No”, I wasn’t one with the koan. I was hanging onto its tail, or being driven by it, or trying too hard. Sometimes I would fall into a deep meditation state and disappear and then I couldn’t find the koan because there was no one there to find the koan. By that stage it was becoming interesting.

I just started being there, keeping company with the koan in all weathers, and things changed then for me. I stopped trying for those recommended states of being. It became clear that even with the mind I had, I was free. I’d done everything in the prescribed way and still my mind was often chaotic and busy. The freedom was that I found this immensely funny instead of a problem to be solved. The thoughts were things like, “I have the wrong mind for meditation, Australians can not get enlightened.” What was hilarious was watching the way the mind produced nonsense and then believed itself. Then everything started unfolding, awkward and inevitable, like a crane preparing to take off, and my mind did clear. And the koan became clear too, and the laughter became involuntary and lasted silently for months and months, but it wasn’t something I did. I didn’t manipulate reality. I just paid attention to reality instead of trying to change it, or having reservations about it. And I think that’s where the kindness of the koan is.

Zhaozhou’s koan is gesturing toward embracing your current state—that’s why the dog is important because, in many cultures Rover is not greatly appreciated. Rover may even be served for breakfast, and so to be a dog is not a high state of existence. And when we’re unacceptable to ourselves, we regard ourselves as despised creatures. And that’s how it is until we stop building the prison and the inner conflict ends. I think that this No koan, is very deeply about the ways we reject experience as not being correct or appropriate. And if you are making a fundamental judgment that this moment isn’t right, and if you go into the heart of that refusal, it becomes a gate. Go towards the frightening thing, and you find that it holds a blessing. Then, “No” then becomes “No” to your critique, “No” to your “I can’t do this.” It’s a recognition that thoughts are just thoughts and the koan rises to explode them. “I’ll never get there, I’m in the wrong company, I’m unhappy,” all just thoughts. This is a way in which the koan starts to serve the inquiry at a cognitive level. This has a certain deconstructive power.

At the deepest level the koan takes away not only your judgments and your criticisms, but the point of reference that they depend on, the point of reference that makes a problem a problem. And it’s never anybody else who’s causing the problem, and also, not only is it not anybody else, it’s not even you. Even you are not a problem. It becomes clear that the problem of existence is an apparent problem, that existence is existence, full of richness, shimmer and intimacy. Everything is beautiful when seen in that dimension.

I’ll take a question.

Woman in audience: I don’t have a question.

John Tarrant: You have a comment?

Woman in audience: Yes.

John Tarrant: Go ahead.

Woman in audience: Lately I’ve been not quite knowing what to do, so in the morning I just throw myself at my life. I throw myself at these tasks that I think I should do but while I’m doing them I think I should be doing something else. I have a lot of anxiety, and today I walked by a dog. I usually just walk by him because he’s terrifying. He’s lunging against his chain and barking his head off. So today I stopped and I looked at him and I stepped forward and he just went, “Oh, you’re coming over!” so I went over to him to pet him, and he was like so excited, and he’s a big dog and I’d go to pet him and he’d go, “Rhhaaahh!” He wanted me to pet him and I felt so bad that he kept clawing me so that I couldn’t even get to his head, really, to pat him. Then he’d get frustrated and he’d go “Rrrhhhaaahhh!” and he’d bark at me and I’d go, “Well…” and I’d try it again, and he’d bark at me, and I couldn’t do it. And then I realized he was getting really frustrated. I backed off and I looked at him and he looked at me. And I just walked away and I looked back at him and waved, and he was alright and he just turned around. Ya know. Big disappointment. Okay, where was I going with this? It felt—that dog was me. That dog was me throwing myself at my life, wanting to do the right thing, but doing it so hard it was never right. So neither of us had Buddha nature.

John Tarrant: The ending you arrived at is part of it too. The blessing is there, even when it’s not the outcome you intended—you know if you’re sad about something and you just accept it, you don’t have to not be sad, as evidence that you’re accepting it. You can accept that you’re sad and then it can be lovely. If your meditation sucks, you accept that you have miserable meditation. It’s all right, and so the kindness comes in somewhere on the chain of harshness, and everything moves. There’s nothing wrong with being a dog and barking and being frustrated. And what’s wrong with throwing yourself at your life? So it’s like that.

At the same time, the experience we have when all that just stops, is a wonderful thing. When you open up and—how can I say it—things are friendly. Part of freedom is about not thinking, “It’s not here.” When you stop thinking, “It’s not here,” you start noticing all the ways it’s here. And the more you notice how much it’s here, the more what the old teachers speak about as accumulated karma—the stacked up disappointments of your life—starts falling from you. If you only ever do things for strategic reasons, in order to manipulate people, that might fall off you. In this case you might want the dog to change or receive your kindness, yet the dog’s world is already complete. If you’re stingy, that might fall off you. If you try to buy other people’s favors and love, that might fall off you. So in other words, you’re not treating your self like an object, so you will start noticing those times when you’re not creating the walls of a prison. Life is not as hard, and more and more space surrounds that discovery.

Okay thank you very much. And what’s the answer? Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”

Audience: Woof!

John Tarrant: Thank you. How hard was that?

What follows are some thoughts about method. These are suggestions about ways to line up to the koan and to manage your mind once you are on board the koan.

Hacks for consciousness

First a new metaphor: A koan is a kind of technology, a hack for the mind. It strips our opinions and views away. Unlike some other technologies, koans don’t work in a linear fashion. They surprise you by transcending the terms on which you took them up. They draw you into a different way of seeing and experiencing your world.

Teachers
When the fit is good with a teacher it is one of the most intimate relationships possible, and humans like intimacy. But the fit is not always good and people being people, your relationship with your teacher might turn out to be important or trivial. Also, your teacher could be someone you met for one retreat, or the master who initiated the koan a thousand years ago or someone who visits you in a dream. In the end the koan is your absolute, fallback, rock bottom teacher.

Because it is a technology not a set of answers, a koan allows certain insights to be passed on through someone who doesn’t have a deep understanding of them—an obvious advantage if you are interested in handing the light down over thousands of years or ferrying it across cultures.

Choosing a first koan
It can’t possibly matter which koan you use first. I’ve noticed that people succeed with a wide variety of them—for example, “Quickly, without thinking good or evil, before your parents were born, at this exact moment, what is your original face?” Or, “In the sea, 10,000 feet down there’s a single stone. I’ll pick it up without getting my hands wet.” There are probably a thousand of these that work well. Zhaozhou’s dog is famous though no one knows why—perhaps its simplicity and the fact that many of the Japanese schools had a rigid order to their curriculum and this one came first. Hakuin used this as a first koan so it went more or less at the beginning of his curriculum, though as a teacher he was inclined to experiment. In spite of its popularity, it’s a fine koan.

A rigid curriculum has the virtue of introducing a predictability and impartiality to the process. On the other hand, there are advantages for a master who is confident or foolish enough to move around in a curriculum according the needs of the student. So some Japanese schools (as well as Korean and Chinese ones) don’t use a rigid sequence to their curriculum. Pacific Zen School, which includes Open Source and Pacific Zen Institute, feels itself to be in sympathy with those traditions, so we use many different first koans.

If you dream of a koan, if it sticks in your mind like an ear worm, if you find yourself humming it, if it gives you vertigo or nausea, if you feel as if you have come home from a long journey when you hear it—if a koan grabs your attention, if it follows you home, then that’s a good reason to keep it. It chose you. You might as well trust being grabbed, a force bigger than your usual awareness is at work.

The method of working with a koan
The method is simply to keep company with the koan, adhere to it day and night. That’s it, the whole method. And don’t think that it’s not there when you sleep or forget about it for a while.

Strategies for working with the koan—Tips & tricks

1: First find the koan
If your mind is somewhere, find the koan. If your mind isn’t anywhere, there’s not a problem.

2: Any part of the koan is the koan
In this case, No, dog, Buddha nature, does? could stick in your mind—or the koan might consolidate to a sense of being on a quest, of traveling through the mind. Quirks occur; one person had an interesting experience when a cat exchanged itself for the dog in his mind. There is an autonomy to any real process in consciousness and working with a koan is something you do your best to guide without entirely controlling. It’s a creative act and you attend to what appears more than you impose your will on the universe.

3: Accept your mind and its states
If you are being reasonably accepting of your mind states that’s probably a good direction. Mind states are, after all, what we have as humans, they are what we have to embrace and forgive and love, as they are.

4: Relax
Trying to achieve a certain state implies reaching for something not present, living in a projected future world. So, no need to try. I know that some of the old teachers said to try hard, but what did they know? You have to truly appear in your own life. Then there is no question of effort or trying, there is just the koan.

5: Mind your own business
Making a critique of your colleagues and peers and their progress is, well, useless and somehow ungrateful. In fact even an assessment of your own progress is probably useless and somehow ungrateful. Don’t mind even your own business. Just keep company with the koan.

6: Timing
It takes us years to build a prison in the mind. It’s OK if it takes some years to deconstruct that prison. Freedom is worth it. Being on a quest is what life is about.

Membership in a community
One thing we are doing is making a culture for awakening, making awakening a feature of the landscape of modern intellectual life. The meditator isn’t a ronin, a masterless samurai, wandering around alone, looking for personal survival at any cost. Koans make you a participant in the drama of discovery, a member of a community of those who care about consciousness. The deeper the journey goes the more you are likely to notice your love for this community.

The koan and your life
The link between the koan and the transformation of your life is real but since the process isn’t linear you might not notice it at first. The link might seem to be in a black box—invisible. There will be times when the koan shows you your most painful mind states and your most confining thoughts. It doesn’t invite you to identify with them. Nonetheless, you might think that the koan doesn’t seem to be working during your official meditation times, but your life might be opening up greatly. Well, that’s not really a problem.

Gradual and Sudden
The process is always both gradual and sudden because there is some development and then a jump. An example of the gradual side of things is that for some people the koan opens a space in which the mind is not building its prison. In that space, you will notice joy and aliveness and a sense of having a link to eternity. This is in the neighborhood of awakening. Then the space will close up, perhaps leaving a sense of loss. You can just notice these things without grabbing them. Over time you will get more and more space till the spaces start joining up.

Sometimes your longing and impatience and harshness appears in front of you. It doesn’t seem to work to force your way through. You just have to know that the obstacle is somehow you and keep going as best you can and when you acknowledge this and don’t chew your leg off, the trap will disappear.

On the sudden side of things, some people have epiphanies. They plod along for a period and then there is a bang and a large shift happens all at once. This can happen completely outside of a training context also. Whichever way you come to it, freedom is freedom.

The basic nature of consciousness is empathy
If it’s heartless that’s not the koan, either as a method or as a result of the method. When consciousness is stripped down there is a velvety, vibrant quality to it—everything is alive and sparkling and also I am you. It’s unlikely that you can get to this by a harsh method. As far as we can say that a dream has a basic nature, the basic nature of consciousness is something like empathy and a boundary-less love.

Questions just for you:

1. What is Buddha nature? Do you have it?

2. What thoughts and feeling arise for you when you say no in meditation?

3. Say No in all the ways you have ever heard it said. Now say it as though
it’s so large that it fills the universe. What’s that like?

4. When in your life have you said No to something that you had always said

yes to before (even something very small)? How does it feel to say no?

How is it when someone says no to you?

5. Where do you feel No in your body?
6. When you notice your thoughts and say No to them what is that like?
7. Have you had an experience of everything falling away and life seeming to be vast and eternal? What was that like?

Zen 2.0. The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 3.5 Falling Bodies

2011-02-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

Falling Bodies

Falling on the ground seems to be essential—babies trying to walk, dogs chasing tennis balls, hobos who sleep on paper under bushes, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze, people who get caught in scandals, people who get a frightening diagnosis, people having doomed love affairs, people getting divorced, actors who freeze on stage, mothers with post partum depressions, people who one day wake up crazy, people from Sonora sneaking across the night desert into Arizona with plastic water bottles painted black, people in Ethiopia selling fresh baked bread made out of dirt, people who sold everything at the bottom of the stock market crash, people being flamed on the internet, people whose pension funds were stolen, people who give interviews while out of their mind on coke, people who lost their homes to the banks, people who lie on a warm rock in a canyon, people who lose their faith in life, people who pretend that they would never fall, people who get born—falling on the ground happens to all these. Falling is outside of the bounds of acceptable behavior and reality, yet you can’t have a life without it.

The Koan:

Helping Her Dad

Mr. Pang was selling baskets. Coming down off a bridge with his arms full, he stumbled and fell. When his grownup daughter saw this, she ran up and threw herself down on the ground beside him.
“What are you doing?” cried Mr. Pang.
“I saw you fall to the ground, so I’m helping,“ she replied.
“It’s a good thing no one was looking,“ remarked Mr. Pang.

This story shows life as an opportunity for improvisation—a chance to accept all offers. For improv, you need a certain amount of selflessness and a sense of humor, you have to step out of the way things always happen, of who you think you are, of taking yourself seriously, of managing other peoples’ impressions of you and especially of managing your own impression of you. You can’t be clever or playing for a laugh, you just join the situation. You accept the offer right here now. The territory of this koan is what helps others and what doesn’t help, what helps you yourself, and what is possible in relationship.

“It’s a good thing no one was looking,“ remarked Mr. Pang. He is not just teasing and having fun, but playing along, noting how they have moved together from an accident to a theater piece of wonder. He could have said “Thanks for not drawing attention.”

A variant of this discovery is that falling on the ground, while terrible, is also wonderful—the taste of dirt, blood, coffee, oranges, tears, sweat, the taste of life itself.

A friend had a truly frightening diagnosis and in the tsunami of advice and medical possibilities and mind altering medications and surgery and trial drugs, his wife said,
“Things are entirely alive. I have never felt so warm and embraced and so held.”
“The community is helping?” I asked, rather conventionally.
“Well that too, people gather around and bring casseroles, but that’s not what I meant; it’s like being held by enormous arms.”

I have a natural feeling for the Pang girl and her spontaneity, and at the same time, Mr. Pang’s situation is compelling. I imagine falling down and having someone throw themselves down beside me; that is a truly unusual situation, that would be shocking in a fine way. Here are a few stories about people turning into rather than away from a fall.

Smart Nurses and Improv

A woman told me this story in relation to the Pang family chronicles.

I just had a breast exam and there was some sort of question and they took me for more imaging. I’m growing afraid, following the nurse down the corridor in a hospital gown and writing my will in my mind. As we walk the nurse turns back and looks at the gown and laughs and says, “Flashing is optional.” Then I stopped being afraid.

The nurse had an empathy that brought the patient out of a world in which she was saying goodbye to her kids, into the more amusing situation of walking down the hall and being about to fall out of an incredibly poorly designed garment. The distance between heaven and hell is tiny and the nurse joining her makes one into the other.

Doing Not Saying—The Emergency Room Check In

A friend got out of bed, fell over, got up, fell again and called me. That was an offer to me, which I accepted. I drove her to the ER. It lacked the underworld interest of a busy city ER, where if you are not hemorrhaging from the mouth or suffering from a gunshot wound you might wait through the night till the change of shift at dawn—another way of falling. While neither as grey nor as dingy as expected, the waiting area was simultaneously boring and interminable.

I waited while my friend went through her exam. The nurse doing check in and triage made two nice moves—turning towards a situation.

1. A woman flung herself in a waiting room chair. She lay rigid on the chair like a log, touching the edge of the seat and the top of the back. She flopped from side to side. She moaned, she apologized for moaning and moaned louder. She yelled a little. Calmly, impersonally, selflessly, not in the least referring to the pain, the nurse walked up and tied a hospital intake bracelet on the woman’s left wrist. “There you go,” she said, indicating that the woman was now official, having an identity and a place in the lineup of this antechamber of the underworld. This soothed the woman immediately.

2. A woman was in her late thirties—blond, statuesque, agitated; her skin had a kind of glaze and tightness, like an attractive sausage. Her fear expressed itself as anger. Her left leg jiggled and her heel tapped, she looked ready for a fight, looked as if in a fight, she might be happy, relieved of her anxiety. She addressed the check in nurse from some yards away.
“I need a private room.”
“The consulting rooms are private and we’ll take you next. You’ll be the only one there.”
“I’ve got to have a private room now. You don’t understand, I need a private room.”
“That space over there is private,” the nurse pointed to what was indeed an open, dead space a couple of yards behind the woman.
“I didn’t say I needed a private room I need a private space,” said the patient undertaking a small face saving operation, but winding down, moving over into the space, not obviously different from any other square of the floor.

Practical Parenting

I have my own story that makes me wonder about the way koans can get inside you. Without noticing it my body stepped into this koan.

My daughter who was an early teenager at the time was in battle with one of the demons who beset her world. One afternoon she came running into the kitchen and flung herself down at full length upon the lotus flowers painted on the wooden floor. She groaned and sobbed. Before I could think, I threw myself on the floor beside her.
Our eyes met. We began to laugh. We got up and cooked dinner.

The koan wasn’t consciously in my mind and it is almost disappointing that the story is so literally imitated, but perhaps the incident shows how koan moves can become part of a kind of grammar of response to situations. Not setting yourself against a situation can lead to laughter, even where grim sorrow seems likely to win the day.

How to Improve People

I think of another example of this grammar. For some years I hung out with Dick Auerswald, who pursued the transformation of consciousness as a psychiatrist and was one of the founders of family systems thinking. When a family was in trouble Dick liked to do home visits. I remember walking into a house with him, where one of the kids was in what seemed to them to be deep trouble. There were cousins and cousin’s girlfriends, the whole family was gathered. Everybody was sitting on the edge of their chair trying to look like someone who wouldn’t do it again, whatever it was. As we walked in, Dick stumbled and fell. Everybody rushed to help him up and afterwards they weren’t sitting on the edges of their chairs and they began to talk to each other. Perhaps they felt that they had stumbled and that he was saying, “It’s alright I stumble. Then I get up.” Without thinking about it, he acted out the feeling in the room and that opened a door.  

The Koan's Shadow

This koan has a shadow too, which is to bring up the way we can imprison ourselves in a situation, feeling only the pain, embarrassment and effort that unfold with the story. The shadow of this koan might be something like this: “I’m always down on the ground helping people and it never helps them.” Or “When I fall I’m pathetic and it's embarrassing.” The daughter could have spent her time picking up baskets and telling her father not to be such a duffer. It's good to notice what reading your mind goes to, and how much you believe that reading. Perhaps we are most alone when we set ourselves apart from the falling, as though we know a better way it should have happened.

Sometimes you don't need to know why something isn't a problem. Here is a story that goes in that direction.

I was on a very narrow two way street heading home from preschool with my kid and the baby in the car seat when a college kid in a big SUV turned the corner looking over his shoulder talking and coming toward me. I leaned on the horn, he saw me in horror, slammed on the brakes and just missed us. I started laughing and he started laughing too and all was well. Afterwards I had thoughts about why it was funny and about how I had been at that age, but at the time it was just pure laughter.

The thought that something shouldn’t have happened is never true. When we are falling there is no alternative, there is only falling. Falling and laughter.

Questions To Save All Falling Bodies

1. How have you fallen down in your life, physically or otherwise? How was it for you? Did you have opinions about yourself?
2.  Has anyone ever tried to help you? What worked? What didn’t? When you try to help someone else, what seems to work? Not work? Does play have any part in that?
3.  Do you think it’s important to “pick yourself up” when you’re down? Is that hard or easy?
4.  Remember a time when something brought you down, not a physical fall, but something difficult. What movement in your body would describe that time for you? Did your body change when you got over it?
5.  What does the instruction to “accept all offers” mean to you? How would that be? What would it change?
6. Are there mistakes?

Pang Lingzhao was the name of the Pang girl and she is known as a Zen master in her own right.

Keith Johnstone's books on Improvisation in theatre and story telling are examples of books that have a lot to say about Zen without mentioning Zen. The phrase 'accept all offers' comes from him.

Addendum: Case Law on Falling:

Ian Frazier considers Wile E. Coyote’s plight

Coyote V. Acme
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT,
SOUTHWESTERN DISTRICT, TEMPE, ARIZONA
CASE NO. B19294, JUDGE JOAN KUJAVA, PRESIDING
Wile E. Coyote, Plaintiff
-v.-
Acme Company, Defendant

Mr. Coyote states that on eighty-five separate occasions he has purchased of the Acme Company (hereinafter, "Defendant"), through that company's mail-order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling. Sales slips made out to Mr. Coyote as proof of purchase are at present in the possession of the Court, marked Exhibit A. Such injuries sustained by Mr. Coyote have temporarily restricted his ability to make a living in his profession of predator. Mr. Coyote is self-employed and thus not eligible for Workmen's Compensation.

You can read Coyote's full plea here:
http://www.torinfo.com/justforlaughs/coyote_v_acme.html

Zen 2.0. The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 3.4 One Treasure Hidden In the Body

2011-02-09T11:28:00.000-08:00

There is One Treasure Hidden in the Body

The Body's Path to Awakening

This very body is the Buddha 
Hakuin 

We are inside the body and the body is inside us. In Zen we have a tradition of embodying or acting koans out because if the body is not engaged it’s hard to really meet life. Once in China, there were dance forms as dialogues and as responses to koans. Those forms are believed to be lost, but I can imagine that through meditation and attention to movement and the body we might find them again.

The ancient koan masters looked for the gates of wisdom first in poetry because language is a fundamental feature of being human. We are inside language the way we are inside the air and waters of the blue planet, but I’ve been thinking that the body is it too, and wanting to treat awareness of the body as an integrative art.

In the Autumn I had back pain from lifting a wood stove, and some of the body workers at the Autumn retreat changed what I was noticing by moving me around. The pain made it so that I couldn’t extend my right arm. But an interesting moment happened when I found that by closing my eyes I could extend my arm easily. The pain, or its connection to the movement, was somehow a mapping problem. It reminded me of the phantom limb phenomenon in which the brain thinks there is pain in a limb that has been amputated.

The neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran at UC San Diego performed experiments in which he used mirrors so that when the patient looked at her amputated right leg she saw her intact left leg in its place. He then asked the patient to relax the amputated leg that she could now see and the phantom limb pain diminished or disappeared.

So the body has its imagination and its stories and, like other stories, sometimes they seem true but they might not be. The process was an exploration exactly like koan work involving the body. And just as in a koan interview it was as if we were inside the same field, sharing perceptions and movements. The few other people in the room could feel in their own bodies what was happening to me.

I remembered earlier experiences of working with my body in a koan like fashion. I have an odd heart rhythm acquired long ago, probably in the islands east of New Guinea where a fever came on when I was in a canoe. About 12 years ago the non rhythm amplified into a kind of storm. I was falling down on occasion and my cardiac doc, whom I liked partly for his gloomy streak, said,

“Atrial fibrillation. You could end up crawling across the kitchen floor to get your granola.”
“What happens then?”
“Congestive heart failure.” 
“Oh no,” I thought, “what will my kid do when I die?” 

I was suddenly living inside an Edward Gorey rhyme, featuring caskets and orphans and men with long faces in formal Victorian clothes. So I began to explore the scenario and my beliefs about it. First of all I realized that my daughter would be fine if I died. She would live a good life whatever I did, listening to her own inward voice. It was also clear that no date had ever been set for my dying and among important things, unknowns far outnumbered the knowns. And, how to describe this?—I let a koan into the problem and the problem was not directly addressed by the koan but diminished anyway. I noticed that sometimes my heart banged in a way it was hard to enjoy but that if I didn’t worry about it, it settled down and the main effect was that I was tired sometimes in the afternoon.

I feel fine now. But sometimes I don’t and then the treasure has to be there in that pain or disorientation and restlessness in the mind, and if I can’t settle my body, the treasure is there in the not finding and the longing for healing. And that’s enough. My relationship with my body is my relationship with what I am, with how I came to this place. To disapprove of my body seems beside the point.

So there are stories about the body and, like other stories, they seem to generate themselves, like rabbits, or bacteria. I like koans because they refer to a landscape where there are less stories, or where the stories are surprising and unexpected, and we have a better relationship with what we are. Criticizing yourself is one of the great distractions and finding fault with your body is clearly in this class of delusion, expected but untrue. So much for New Year’s resolutions.

The body listens to others and is in an intimate communion with them, regardless of my opinions about them. This intimacy is a way I go beyond myself and is closely connected to the images that arise in my mind. Awareness naturally includes my body unless I make an effort to exclude it. To read my body is to be in a conversation in which I have to listen ever more closely, and not tell myself stories or explain what I’m hearing. When my body can speak for itself then my words become more true, too.

The body’s imagination has its own grammar and its images can lie in ambush for years. A friend told me she heard some 70’s music on the radio “from when I was in high school and suddenly I was in that city, the whole miserable locked in quality of waiting to escape, the dinginess of getting through that time with my angry stepfather and trying to have a normal life and knowing these were bad years, it all descended on me like a grey veil.”

PTSD and pleasant memories both waylay us via the body. Ambush is linked to enlightenment; surprise is the way an epiphany happens, that so intense flavor is the flavor of my life and there is no need to make a choice about it or criticize it, even if it is in the realm we think of as pathology. The pain of memory has some similarity to the sound of the geese clanking overhead, and while it's happening, it is the only sound in the world.

The Koan This Week:

Yunmen said, “In the center of the cosmos, inside heaven and earth, there is one treasure, hidden in the body. It picks up a lantern and goes into the meditation hall. It brings the great three arched entrance gate and puts it on top of the lantern.” 

Putting the great entrance gate on the lantern—the impossible might come to be. Anything you think is built of the stubbornness of matter, of the intractability of what you know, of the bricks of nouns, might also be a verb, might be a koan constantly changing its shape, a person changing into tree, a cold heart melting. My heart problem might be a koan, dying might be a koan, I can’t tell why someone lives or dies and I don’t need to, even if that someone is me.

When I spend time inside it, this koan brings the usual paradoxical effects that lead to a bigger idea of what it is to be alive. We had two warm days, plum blossoms and narcissus leapt out like water from fountains, then the cold west wind returned, loud in the trees, bringing a restlessness and the thought of things changing, seasons, times and nations changing. That one treasure, it might be the sound of that wind, or the sight of a tree branch lying in the field. Then it becomes clear that the wind is in the body and the branch and the field and the lights of the river of cars at night are in the body.  

Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian man

There is a very old idea that the human body is itself a map of the cosmos, the fragment that contains the whole. In the Flower Garland Sutra, the universe is a jeweled net in which each jewel contains the whole, and something like this is implied in Leonardo’s image of Vitruvian man who is literally the measure of all things, the source of proportions for buildings and ultimately the world. Each moment of awareness, each twitch, each ache, each sigh, each tear, each enchantment by perfume or blossom is a world.   

Here are some body questions:

1. How do you use your body? Are you your body? Does it tell you what to do? 

2. When your body is hurting or in trouble, how do you help it heal? Can your body help you to wake up? Are healing and waking up related in any way? 

Charles Atlas bodybuilding ad

3. We have stories about our bodies, that they are not beautiful enough or too old or too sick or too fat or too poorly dressed… What stories rule your body? Do you like it, find fault with it, hope that others admire it, think it needs a coffee or more vitamin B?  

4. Do you approve of some things your body wants and disapprove of others? Be specific. 

5. Do you feel your body? Do you enjoy it? Do you find it exciting or alarming? 

6. Do you remember your body in childhood? Was it different? What body memories do you have from earlier times? Show an activity or a movement that your used to do but don’t anymore. Are you stronger in some ways? Weaker in others? 

7. If you could have a different body for a day, describe what body you would have.

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 3.3

2010-12-09T22:44:00.000-08:00

Scorn and Being Despised

Scorn is a great and inevitable experience. It’s a visa stamp allowing entry to the human realm; if you haven’t suffered from it you have missed something necessary. You see it in dogs who drive a spare dog out of the pack, and chickens who peck at the funny looking chicken, and it touches an atavistic fear that during the long winters of the ice ages we will not have warmth or our share of mammoth meat, and this because, because our hair isn't right, our teeth aren’t straight, we said the wrong thing, we transgressed, or there is something fundamentally wrong with us. Scorn is a strong force in our culture at the moment. It produces fear which in turn produces more scorn, Fox News producing more Fox News. So if we want to find out what Zen is useful for, and what it might free us from, scorn would be a good test case to examine.

The Koan

If you are scorned by others and are about to drop into hell because of evil karma from your previous life, then because you are scorned by others, the evil karma of your previous life will be extinguished.

The koan takes the approach that scorn is a something in the world, like a hailstorm or the sound of a drum. It doesn’t have to be taken personally. And what if it’s OK anyway—if someone thinks I’m terrible, then sure I am, thank you.

The Uses of Being Scorned, Despised, Cast Out and Looked Down upon from a Great Height

Once I taught retreats for men. One of the faculty had been a village boy in a small, poor West African country who had undergone done the traditional shamanic training of his people. He had been educated and, by his account tormented, by Jesuits, and had acquired advanced degrees from great universities. Having achieved escape velocity from the Jesuits, he had undergone the initiation his village gave to young men, rather later in life than was customary. Even though he was already native, he had gone native, and he seemed still to have a lot of the French intellectual about him. Then, rather early in life, he received the initiation given to elders. This advanced initiation was interesting to me and I questioned him about it. It took three days and only men were around. He sat naked and covered with ash in the center of the village, his eyes were closed and sealed with mud. It was as if he were dead. Then people said things to him which stripped him in other ways. Grudges poured out of them, old things they had held against him since childhood, and a terrible bitterness and envy. Under the rules, he could not respond. Their loathing and dislike pierced him and he had no defense. “By the end of that time,” he said, “I felt thinned out and chemical like a piece of fax paper.”

When it was over they cleaned him up, congratulated him and held a celebration. One of the men who had been pointed and harsh came up, to him and asked, “Would you be able to lend me the money to buy a truck?”

“What were you just saying to me?” he thought.

This is in the territory of the koan of scorn, scorn has become an official part of the ordeal that ushers you into leadership.

It starts with a bang but you don’t need to be prepared.

For no obvious reason a woman who sat Zen began to lose her sense of the ground. She lived far away from her group but would come in for most retreats and so was known and liked. She often sent out emails to the list group but gradually the emails became stranger, indicating pain and perhaps disorder of thinking. A man who had worked with her at retreats was concerned about this and tossed out her name at a service at the moment when people who are sick or need something are remembered.

Then she sent an email to the list which was full of odd thoughts and suddenly swerved into an attack on him, a personal and harsh insult for everyone to read: Scorn, being despised.

“First,” he said, “I felt shock, dismay, but surprisingly, not a millisecond of anger or resentment came forth. The colors got bright and the room became full and peaceful. As I sat in front of my computer everything at that moment felt right for me. I remembered a little prayer, ‘When I think of the virtue of abusive words, this is the Buddha appearing before me...’ I thought kindly of her.

The beauty of all of this is that I didn't have to do anything. Everything came to me.”

Really it’s dancing.

You might have had an interaction in the street in which a person who seems crazy comes up and gets in your face. Last night while I was writing this piece on scorn, a friend opened a google chat. Here is a record of it.

10:18 PM Michael: knock, knock

had a very, very weird thing happen while walking home from dinner

me: Hi Michael,

wot happened?

10:19 PM Michael: this crazy black guy, semi toothless, possibly drunk, more likely on something more stimulative, was yelling and slightly lunging at passersby... as I got closer, I heard what he was yelling, and as we met on the sidewalk, he yelled "YOU'RE A NIGGER! YOU'RE A NIGGER!"

10:20 PM and I said "Thank you."

and he smiled and reached out and touched me on the shoulder

10:21 PM me: well you passed that koan

10:22 PM Michael: pretty much

me: Did he give you another one?

Michael: nope

10:23 PM me: You pass one you pass them all.

Sometimes there is no need to resist the scorn.

Yes I am French: Sometimes an Apparatus Will Set You Free

An American friend felt lucky to find a spot as she parked her French rental car in a small hill town in Tuscany but an Italian driver took deep offense. He approached and started yelling at her in broken French. Though her French was fairly good, he didn’t really speak French enough to convey his meaning or to understand her. Her Italian was much better than his French but he couldn’t hear her in Italian because he was convinced that she was French. Eventually he stalked off angry.

As she joined her husband and kids she was arguing with the other driver in her head, asking the right questions, soothing, explaining, defending. She formulated in Italian how to explain to him that she was speaking in Italian. She wanted him to understand that she could speak to him in his language and that he didn’t have to play out the ancient grudges of the Italians and the French. She was having an identity issue, he mistook her for someone she wasn’t and she wanted him to have her understanding of who she was—his story seemed so alien to her view of herself. She realized she had to stop the argument in order to join her day, and it came to her that she had the choice whether to be right or to be happy. And she realized that it had to be okay to be whatever horrible criminal she might be. And suddenly it was, alright, and she was free. She tried on all the horrible things she could possibly be—mother raper, father stabber, murderer, thief. “So what if I’m somebody who has been so incredibly inconsiderate, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know, I parked my car too close to his….” And she thought, “Well what if I am?” And that way it her inner conflict disappeared.

Language and scorn go together; trash talk and insult are venerable arts.

In this case her freedom wasn’t immediate and she had to notice what was going on and try to deal with by using unwieldy tools but they worked anyway.

The Thusness of Scorn.

All these stories are examples of moments in which more awakening comes from being scorned and despised than if scorn and despight had not happened. That which is is always more endearing than that which is not.

Questions since they are sometimes more interesting than answers

1. What's the first time you remember someone making fun of you, scorning you, reviling you? What's the most recent time?
2. What do you do when you think someone disapproves of you? What happens in your mind?
3. Have you ever hurt anyone's feelings on purpose?
4. What does scorn look like in the animal world? among plants? singles celled creatures? atoms?
5. What's the meanest thing anyone's ever said to you? What's the nicest thing?
6. How do you work at a practice level with being despised or scorned?

Zen 2.0. The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.6: Hearing Sounds

2010-03-15T22:44:00.000-07:00

Hearing Sounds

People are always telling us to get a life but don’t tell how. This koan tells how. Any fragment of experience contains a whole life, including the single celled creatures and the galaxies, including every triumph and defeat you might ever have. The moment exists before anyone has succeeded or failed or been virtuous or unhappy.

The koan this week:

Who is hearing this sound?

Anger, sorrow, cherry blossoms, the voice of a crow, a speeding Toyota, these appear in the mind. You can try to hold off what is rising in the mind and get a little space that way, but doing that is really a kind of pain and loss, and living at a distance from your life is hard work.

This koan tries it another way. Instead of turning away from the world, you can let the koan throw you into whatever is appearing. You don’t have to look for a place to stand. If you jump straight into what is arising, the koan starts to shape what is happening. The koan can operate below the level at which you usually manage things. So that is the hearing aspect of this koan. Just let hearing have you. This koan can be carried everywhere with you.

The idea is that it will take apart the building that you constructed to hold unhappiness. You don’t have to think, you just listen; you don’t go out to the sound to make out what it is and explain it, you just let the sound eat, and breathe, and go to sleep at night, you let the sound listen to you.

The next bit is the question—who hears? When the sound takes you over, it shifts what you are. There isn’t much left that is what you think you are. When there is just sound in the universe, what is it like to be me? Is there even a difference between that sound and me? And if this is true for sound, how about for the old wooden fence bright with green winter moss? You don’t either agree with the fence or disagree with it. And what about when I look into the eyes of another person? There is also nothing to have an opinion about there. And then if we come to sorrow or anger it is the same; you are not fighting it or agreeing with it. It is just the brightness of life. Any content arising in the mind is more or less equal in this way.

So this can be a good way to work with koans. You let what is happening appear without fighting it off and you will notice that the koan describes what is happening. There is a feedback back from your life to the koan. Everything that happens then is part of your meditation. Meditation isn’t work; it is tremendously interesting, and fun. If there is no barrier between you and what you feel, see, think, taste, and hear, you are always being carried in the wave of presence.

For example you might want to look at what it is like to want things to be familiar and safe. And then you wonder whether you really do want things to be predictable. I just watched John Cage on an ancient TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” (http://www.wnyc.org/music/articles/84007) in which he performs a musical piece called “Water Walk” using a pressure cooker, a bathtub, a rubber duck, a pitcher, a goose call, some radios not turned on, a seltzer bottle and so on, even a piano. The host warns him that the audience will laugh. "I consider laughter preferable to tears," he replies. There is an immense good humor in the way he lets each sound take over the piece.

There is an Australian bird, a currawong, which is an ally of the jays and crows, intelligent and peculiar. I once lived in a house in the country, where currawongs held parliaments. Every few months, without warning, they would appear in the trees in the garden by the hundreds, calling loudly and swooping from tree to tree. And when they had finished their meeting, which would last the morning, they would vanish and there would be only the usual two or three currawongs visible between the house and the horizon. While they convened, their calls were so loud that conversation would stop. Their voices took us over, they would tip themselves off branches on purpose and catch themselves, executing a fine swoop, and I can still feel that swoop in my shoulders, the wings there, catching me as I fall.

Craig Childs tells a story in his book The Animal Dialogues about hearing ravens and beginning to understand things from their point of view. He followed a raven into an narrow canyon not otherwise visible. It opened out and had high walls filled with perching ravens. The ravens had killed an owl and, deep in the canyon, had placed owl feathers under stones in an array. As he went farther in, the ravens began to call and protest. They screamed at him, they swooped and threw pebbles. He turned back. Another day he came back with a friend and the same thing happened. The men came to see things from the point of view of the ravens—that this was a raven place, and that they had no business being there.
When you really hear, your understanding comes in a way that’s different from the usual.

Questions:

1. What do you hear?
2. What do you try not to hear? How is it for you to make room for that, too?
3. What do you hear with your tongue? your eyes? your fingertips? your nose?
4. When you don't use words, who hears?
5. Close your eyes, put your hands over your ears, who hears?
6. Has there ever been a time when you’ve switched point of view with something or someone else?
7. Are there sounds you remember from childhood?

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.5: Lost & Found

2010-03-09T23:29:00.000-08:00

Lost & Found

Some koans are about having a meditation practice. So this piece is going to be about some of the intricacies and dance moves of that practice.

The Koan This Week:

The Coin Lost In The River Is Found In The River

The sun and moon are travelers in eternity. Even the years are wanderers. For those whose life is on the waters or leading a horse through the years each day is a journey and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Basho

Meditation is something that you do, which is what makes it a practice. It doesn’t need much in the way of theory and it teaches you how to do it as you go. But in order to do it you have to actually do it. In meditation, the world moves toward me and through me and falls away behind. Even if I stay in the same place I am emigrating through time. This koan offers offers the chance of finding that there is a home in traveling, in the smell of toast, the chill of the morning air and even in the feeling of being far from home. The koan reverses the equation that the mind is always trying to solve.

In meditating with a koan you find yourself making moves that would not otherwise occur to you. Basically, you show up in the life you are having at this minute, without judgment or critique. Then you find out what happens.

Meditation goes like this for me:
Let’s start with the part about having lost the coin, let’s say the mind feels off balance in some way. That’s just the first noble truth, that we suffer and most of the things we try to do about the suffering thicken the suffering. The koan is the beginning of a step backwards, of a new direction.

When you are with the koan, you could say that the koan notices your situation for you. Any part of the koan will waken your sense of doubt in the thickness of your unhappiness, so the word coin or river might be what appears in awareness and that will be enough. It is also fun to think of whatever is happening in your life as the form that the koan is taking today. For example, today my body felt out of whack and I noticed my mind offering theories; my thoughts have been a bit sticky and off balance too. The theories are the usual flailing around that the mind does—maybe I need more sleep, maybe I ate the wrong thing, maybe I’m sad, maybe I should get that flu shot….

It doesn’t really matter what theories my mind offers, or even if some of them have a leg to stand on. The mind does lists: the to-do list, the I-can’t-bear-to-or-at-least-prefer-not-to list, or the list-of-dreadful-possibilities. It doesn’t matter whether you are waiting for the results of a cancer test or your lover just ran off, or nothing serious is going on at all. The mind treats treats the thoughts as an instruction to solve a problem but the problem can’t be solved in that way. The thoughts are handles on the situation. The koan takes away the thoughts, then I don’t have a handle on the situation because I’m closer in than that.

At first the mind rushes off after each item that comes up, whether it’s something that happened or a song hook. This doesn’t achieve anything. As the koan continues to operate, the mind settles a bit, it feels the pull of the theories and beliefs but doesn’t follow them so breathlessly. The koan’s job here is to pry you loose, to undermine you, to reverse the direction of the quest. Your awareness notices that it is somewhere and then it’s free for a moment.

Next the mind notices the thoughts but is less identified with them. What is happening when the mind is not chasing its thoughts is starting to seem very appealing. Even the sense that life is unsatisfactory becomes a piece of freedom, something amusing and full of life. Then even the looking is what you are looking for.

Next, not many thoughts or theories seem to be arising but whether they arise is not important. There is no need to move on from this moment, nothing to be anxious about, nothing to do. Then there is not much to say about what is noticed. There is no skin between you and the world. This is the “found” part of the koan. There is not a you and a world in any separated way. The sound of hammering from next door, a truck hauling up the grade, the coyotes doing their midnight cheer, all the sounds happen in stereo and have an aura of eternity about them. The river flows and where you reach is the coin. And the events inside too, the thoughts and feelings are also the coin.

The content of what is happening in my mind doesn’t matter as long as I don’t think it’s me or it’s real. What the koan does is to undermine the thoughts so that what is left is the world. When that happens we have found the coin already and are dancing together—along with the dog who has Buddha nature and the maple tree putting out new buds.

This has all sorts of implications. If I don’t suffer, if I don’t have my known problems, who am I? This is the core of koan work, where it is all headed. Then I step into a darkness or a vastness, and even my thoughts don’t tell me what to do.

The practice part of it is that it doesn’t matter if you think you lost the coin and start to be unhappy about life. That is another theory. And it doesn’t matter how many times that theory rises. Even that theory is the coin. A koan practice means that you go back to the river over and over again and you can trust that process. You can trust the moves your mind makes when you are not ordering it around, telling it to be happy or calm. Then you rest in the source and it it is apparently inexhaustible.

Questions, questions

1. What brought you to meditation? Was there a problem to solve? Does it work? Do you think you're doing it right?
2. Is there a treasure you seek? Can you describe it?
3. What happens for you when you meditate? What happens to the koan?
4. Do you have a favorite explanation for yourself or something in your life? What's it like to imagine being without it?
5. What's the most important thing you've ever lost?
6. What's the best thing you've ever found?

The koan is from the ancient Chinese grand master, Yunmen.
The painting "Incoming Tide" is by Adrian King from Lockhart River.
The map is by pirates.
The toast is by Orowheat.

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.4: Ghost Stories

2010-03-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

Ghost Stories

Why do people sit around the camp fire with flashlights under their chins telling ghost stories? As well as the shudder that takes us to another realm, ghosts bring romance and yearning, they account for incompleteness, the person you loved but who died or changed her mind, the uncontrollable residue of everything we do. In the fishing fleets far out on the Barrier Reef towards the Solomon Islands, people used to hear the ghost of a diesel submarine still trying to get home from the Battle of The Coral Sea decades before. If you steamed off to a new anchorage, the diesel rumble from beneath would follow you.

Some years ago I began assembling an alphabet of metaphors for koans. For example, B is Banana Peel, as in you go head over heels, C is Can Opener. The koan this week fits under G; it is both Game and Ghost story. A ghost story is a world we enter that mirrors a neglected aspect of our own.

The Koan This Week:

Save A Ghost

Let’s start out thinking of it as a game.

Q: Is this a stand alone koan or a sequel?
A: It is basically a stand alone koan, though it comes from a family of koans. Like 'Stop the War', this is a classic miscellaneous koan, given to a student after the light begins to dawn. Apparent simplicity is employed to take you on a plunge into murky territory, dungeons, forest paths, the past, darkness filled with flickering lights, secret teachings and so on. The koan often features escapes and rescues.

Q: Who will I see when I enter this koan?
A: It’s different for everybody because the koan changes its nature just for you. People who have caused you pain, people you have given pain to, incidents of remorse and forgiveness, forgotten people from childhood, people who were never born, the dead, animals, ships adrift in mid ocean, people you do not expect to meet.

Q: How should I use it?
A: Try it on your own ghosts and it will generate questions that are reassuring because they have no modesty or tact.

Q: How would I try it though?
A: Remember that area behind the no trespassing sign—where you haven’t looked since the last time something seriously unhappy happened to you? Use the koan. When we have a problem we think, ‘that’s it then, that’s settled, that area is radioactive and I just won’t go there.’ A ghost constrains our movements; we have to walk a maze—avoid our email or the phone or thinking about particular people or things that might happen. And because we don’t go there we don’t learn about what it is really like there, where the ghosts live. And because we are avoiding a place it’s hard to be in other places too, the avoidance starts to colonize the here. The place you are avoiding might be the place where happiness appears. This is the problem of suffering, the first noble truth.

Q: Is it an action adventure first person shooter koan?
A: Everyone starts where they are. The koan has its own life and changes you.

Q: What else might happen with this koan?
A: The koan contains point of view reversals. For example let's say your ghost refers to a time in your teenage years when your girlfriend took a nap on the couch beside you and in the night she was infected and when you woke up she was a vomiting zombie (it could happen and did in the online game Left 4 Dead and the movie based on it). In that case you too can become a vomiting zombie and see through her eyes, hear through the holes in her head and not be upset about the matter at all. Enlightenment is fundamentally an appreciation of the journey.

Q: Do you have any less Gothic examples?
A: As you lose your expertise, you go farther in (or to higher levels in the koan) The design space of consciousness is filled with characters who die and come back to life at different levels. You become more intimate with your ghosts, they reveal more of their helpfulness. They become nearer than breathing.

Yet More Questions:

1. If you were a ghost what would you do?
2. Someone said when he got enlightened the mountains got enlightened too. Do ghosts get enlightened?
3. Are your ghosts part of your family? Do you have obligations to them?
4. When you save a ghost, what happens to the ghost?
5. What is it like when you approach the no trespassing sign in your consciousness and what is behind the sign?
6. Say something about an old photo that you carry or remember.

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.3: 16 Bodhisattvas in the Bath

2010-02-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

Sixteen Bodhisattvas Take a Bath

The koan for this week:

In the old days there were sixteen bodhisattvas. They all got into the bath together and realized the cause of water.
They called out, “This subtle touch reveals the light that is in everything. We have reached the place where the sons and daughters of the Buddha live.”

The Blue Cliff Record Case 78

Water cleanses us, and is the universal solvent; it is the most part of tears, ocean and of our own cells, and of the idea that all the time, beneath our ideas, we are being carried along by a great current.

Unhappiness is all about being separate. Boredom, refusal, hopelessness—there are things that advertise themselves as problems but which are actually armor. Not just certainty but reaching for certainty is armor, not only impressing others but wanting to impress others is armor. Armor requires busyness and fills space, it keeps the now at a distance. Zen depends on the idea of getting closer to what is going on.

For a long time I had the idea that there was a right thing that should be happening—and perhaps that gave me the feeling that what was actually happening was not worth close examination. I was hurrying past to get to the right thing, there was a gap between my consciousness and the world. In that gap I was working hard, attending to my thoughts and explanations.

Trees didn’t seem to suffer from a gap in their consciousness, so I studied them. They were hard to tell apart, especially the different kinds of eucalyptus which look really alike. I pored over pictures of fruit and leaves and flowers. This was like looking under the lamp for the keys that I lost in the dark field. But it started to work anyway; even searching for the wrong thing helped.

Then I ended up just living with trees, sitting with them, camping out under them. Sometimes I forgot what I was trying to achieve and felt like a tree. Animals began to behave differently around me. Wallabies approached and grazed the extremely green grass under the acacias. An echidna licked the salt off my ankle. I waited by a billabong at dusk till platypuses appeared.

Eventually things were different with people too. Even wanting people to be happy was creating a gap especially if they were sad or irritable. And loving them came to be wanting them to be as they were, the way animals are the way they are.

Welcoming my own life too, meant I did not want myself to be happier or to feel something different from what I was feeling. Then naturally I was participating more.

Listening to the rain today, I was restless and not feeling particularly competent and then the drops started to rain though my body. The popping sound on the roof seemed to indicate that the drops were rising as well as falling. The rain was dissolving the gaps in between the mind and the world. When that happens, I am already in the water with all the other beings, I don’t notice the moment I stepped in.

Sometimes, too, the most interesting things appear that open our connection with each other. In December, I was sailing with a friend just inside the Golden Gate. We were surrounded by harbor porpoises, we could see their black backs and hear their breathing. I was watching a couple swimming close together. Suddenly I saw something I had never seen, they threw their baby in the air. It was so surprising.

Day and night are always waiting for us but it’s easy not to arrive. Suffering seems to occur when we have decided that there is a problem and have stopped noticing the situation. If I have decided that there is something wrong with this moment then there won’t be much joy, there will just be struggling through, watching the clock like a shift worker, wishing I had some other problem or a different job. If I haven't decided something is impossible I could notice that I am walking on the rain drops and the grey sky and all the time surrounded by welcoming eyes.

This koan for me is about turning toward, about immersion, about dissolving ideas about things. It’s nice that we are all stepping into the bath together, with each other and with the trees and animals.

Questions, just in case:

1.    Is there an image, memory, dream that comes to you when you meditate with this koan?
2.    What are some areas of your life or the world that you hold yourself back from? How is it when you step into the bath?
3.    Water can be a powerful image, what is it for you?
4.    How will you know when you have reached the place that the sons and daughters of the Buddhas live?
5.    Extra Credit (10 points): What is the cause of water?

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.2: I Don't Know

2010-02-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

I Don’t Know

This is probably the core of freedom, to rest in the uncertain, before certainty has been constructed. Not knowing is something the mind often dreads. It’s easy to dread not knowing. As a child whenever the teacher asked something I would say “I know, I know” and life seemed to be a test in which if I were clever I could get enough right answers and I could find something to rely on.

The Koan

Bodhidharma’s Vast Emptiness

The Emperor asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the number one principle of the holy teaching?”
Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.”
“Who are you, standing in front of me?” asked the emperor.
“I don’t know,” said Bodhidharma.
The Emperor didn’t get it.

When a baby arrives she doesn’t know things and we don’t know much about what she is going to do. If you take her to see a rose, her eyes get big; for her everything is rose, and alive, like a shout. Later when the child is grown she might think she knows what a rose is and remember her childhood with nostalgia—the time when the universe was alive with no knowing.

Old map makers made things up—‘here be dragons’, they said ‘and here, where the wavy blue lines angle sharply down, you fall off the edge of the world. Don’t go there.’ We make things up to help us to navigate, and it’s a valiant attempt. When I was fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, there were fisherman who believed in a floating reef and gave you warnings about anchoring on it. Even then it was fairly well known that coral is heavier than water and grows up from the ocean bed. But the charts weren’t very good, sea and weather are confusing, and if you run across a reef where you didn’t expect to find it, then perhaps it floats about, like The Flying Dutchman. I believe that medieval philosophers called that ‘saving the appearances.” In medicine, confirmation error means looking for what you expect. It occurs when this morning you have treated five people in the Emergency Room with flu and a sixth person arrives with some of the symptoms of the very beginning of flu and gets treated for flu when she is actually suffering from aspirin overdose.

Instead of making up explanations that the expected thing is the right thing it can be interesting to go into situations without a preset attitude, without knowing what is right and how things should turn out.

Here’s a story about this koan from a friend who teaches art in a primary school.
 

Not knowing what a child needs

For the entire year of kindergarten a child called Marianna did not utter a single word at school, not in the classroom, the playground, or anywhere else on campus. At home, she was gregarious and chattered away like any other five-year-old. If she was shopping at Vons with her mother, she would dance about, laughing, asking if she could please buy this or that. If she happened to run into a classmate in the produce department, silent Marianna would appear.  Bribes, threats, tricks, ignoring the behavior, psychotherapy—nothing worked. The parents seemed unconcerned, a nonchalance that annoyed the classroom teacher, who was certain the strange behavior was a serious and pressing problem. I did not know why Marianna lived in self-imposed silence, but I enjoyed her performance piece. It was quite a feat for a five year-old, utterly in character for an entire year.   In first grade, she joined my world. Before her initial art session I was warned: ‘Marianna does not speak’. She was small, even for a person of six years, slender, with olive skin and long auburn hair. When asked a question directly she could answer it with her eyes. I noticed I wasn't interested in coaxing her to speak. I could see that her silence wasn't sullen, withdrawn, angry, or aggressive. I imagined her as a princess under a spell that required she enter into a world different from the one she inhabited at home.

As Marianna approached the sink at the end of her first class, I said  something friendly. I wasn't expecting a response. Some girls in line said in a loud faux whisper, "She doesn't speak." 
"I know,” I replied. “I wish all of my student's didn't talk. Marianna, maybe you could come and teach my 6th graders how not to talk in art." She looked up at me with her large, luminous eyes and a barely suppressed smile. In this way, I became a character in her fairy story.

In the faculty lunchroom, her classroom teacher could often be heard worrying about her intransigent student. Marianna eventually began seeing a new part-time school counselor, a kind and receptive woman, and she began to talk just to her, in whispers at first. 

Eventually she agreed to talk to me. I approached her carefully, obliquely as if she were a wild bird. I remember the excitement and fear in her eyes. She beckoned to me to bring my head closer. Then she cupped her small hand over my ear and whispered her answer to my question. That was all. She had let me enter her in-between world. We whispered to each other for months, and she slowly expanded the circle to include others.
 
By late spring of that year she was chattering away, indistinguishable from her peers. She retained her ability to communicate whole sentences with her eyes and I sometimes missed the world she drew me into. I also wondered what the silent time was like for her. I now imagined her as Persephone, someone who had set aside that portion of her life to spend in the underworld.

Years passed.   One of the peripheral, and often dreaded, assignments of a teacher at my  school is parking lot duty which entails ferrying children from the sidewalk, before and after school, through the sea of Mercedes, SUV’s, and BMW’s, and into their vehicles. I actually enjoy parking lot duty. On a warm day last fall, only a few students remained and Marianna, now in Grade 6, and I leaned against the chain link fence, talking.

”Do you remember the time when you didn’t talk at school? I just loved that time.”  She glanced rapidly up at me, and recognized that I was speaking truthfully. Waves of light moved across her face.
“Do you remember much about it?” 
“Yes, I remember.”  She pauses.  “My sister has a theory about why I didn’t talk at school. She says I did it because I wanted everyone to pay attention to me, but that doesn’t seem right.”
 “Why do you think you were silent?” 
She turned her attention inward, holding the question. Unhurried and curious, she was searching all the interior spaces, one by one.  Her expression suddenly changed as she gazed up at me, her face wide open, laughing,” I don’t know!”  

Not knowing how to live through a revolution

Here is another story about intimacy and uncertainty.

A friend who is an ObGyn told me “When I entered medical school I truly believed that if I learned everything I was taught and studied hard, I would know how to handle every medical situation.” During the early part of the last decade she visited Haiti. She had been doing poverty medicine and, during one of her visits she decided to adopt a baby whose mother was very young and couldn’t keep him. This was about 6 years ago. Just as she was finalizing the paper work in Port-au-Prince, a revolution broke out. Suddenly there was no functioning government and she had a baby but no exit papers. All the Americans and Canadians were pulled out of the country. There were riots, and helicopters passed overhead at night shooting into the crowds. There was no way to know how to manage. It was an intense, boring, awful, frightening, loving and wonderful time and many people helped.

One of her Haitian friends was stopped in his ancient Toyota pickup, hit over the head with a brick, and left for dead by the roadside. A passerby noticed him and eventually he was taken to hospital. He was to have had a birthday party that night.
“So the party is postponed,” she said.
“No, he woke up, we’ll have it in the ICU.”
And they did and it was joyous. You can’t postpone a party since you don’t know about tomorrow. And you don’t even have to know about today; you don’t know that you can’t have a party and be happy in the ICU. When, after three months, my friend returned to her very interesting job in the States, she said, “I don’t want to forget how we were in Haiti, I don’t want to stop living like that.”

Most problems come from knowing things that might not be true. If we stop insisting on certainty we might feel anxiety at first, but then there an exhilarating freedom might arrive. We often wait to act till we have a handle on things but we can actually move through life without having a handle, without even having the handle that we know who we are and what we should be doing.

The photo of Man on a Wire comes from the innocence of the time when the world trade center was just being completed.

Questionable questions

1. What are the questions in your life for which “I don’t know” is the answer? How does it feel not to know?
2. Have you been in a situation that was marginal, where your usual rules didn’t apply and you had to think on your feet? What is it like to go between knowing and not knowing?
3. Do you like to “get credit” for things you do? How is it when you don’t?
4. Who are you? Does it help you to have an idea of that or not?
5. What makes you happy?
6. What’s your favorite color?

Zen 2.0 The Zenosaurus Course in Koans 2.1: True person of no rank

2010-02-03T17:23:00.000-08:00

This is the beginning of the second cycle of the Zenosaurus course. There will be six koans in this cycle.

The True Person of No Rank

The Koan:

There is a true person of no rank who is constantly coming and going from the portals of your face. Who is that true person of no rank?

This koan is used to awaken the mind, and particularly to show you how you can be at home in universe and share its deep and luminous life. Probably the best way to work with it is to play with it. Don’t rank how you are doing. Just let it keep you company, like an animal would. You forget about it, but every time you look, there it is! And after a while it doesn’t go away.

Linji was a great teacher and the ancestor of most of the koan lines of Zen and this is a koan of his. It has been used since ancient times as a meditation both for beginners and advanced students.

You don’t notice how much the mind makes up stories about people until you catch it in the act. Your mind is walking down the street going, fat guy, old lady, frat boy, cute girl, scary guy doesn’t wash, guy, guy, girl, girl guy, wait is that a guy or a girl? The mind goes label, label, label until it doesn’t and a different possibility appears. If you really show up in your own life, you don’t have rank. No rank is not about humility; it is about noticing who you really are.

Here is an example of how the true person of no rank has been used as a koan.

The Story of the Doughnut Maker

Yu worked in the town as a doughnut maker. She used to visit Zen Master Langya and ask him questions along with everyone else. The Master gave her Linji’s saying, “The true person of no rank.”

One day she heard a street musician singing a pop song about lotus flowers:
“...If you haven’t heard her song, how can you find the lake?”
When she heard those words, she was greatly enlightened. She instantly threw her doughnut pan onto the ground. [Stories about women’s enlightenment often feature damage to domestic equipment.]

Her husband was startled and said, “Are you crazy?”
She said, “This isn’t your department.” Then she went to see her teacher. Even seeing her from a distance, the teacher could tell she had attained awakening.
He asked, “What is the true person of no rank?”
She immediately said, “There’s someone of no rank with six arms and three heads, working furiously, smashing Flower Mountain into two with a single blow. For ten thousand years the flowing water doesn’t know the source.”

After that she became a famous teacher herself.

(The doughnut maker’s story is used in the PZI miscellaneous koan collection. It is based on Thomas Cleary’s translation of the story.)

We chop up our lives is by saying, “I’m wise, I’m happy, I should be wiser, I should be happier.” The true person of no rank steps out of all that.

Here is something a friend wrote me.

I was pondering the phrase ‘Without a trace’ while I was sitting at the Oakland Zendo, and realized it does not mean something like drawing a line in the sand and then erasing it, or stepping in the dust and then the wind blows away your tread. It means the world remakes itself moment by moment, wholly new. Second by second, there is nothing left un-refreshed.

When I’m not ranking people or experiences, I’m free, I’m independent, the world looks after me with what feels like tenderness. The koan follows me around, the koan comes near, the koan becomes me.

Questions are useful sometimes:

1. Name something that’s definitely true about yourself. Now consider, what if you’re wrong? Try out the opposite. What would it be like not to know?

2. What is a high rank for you? What is a low rank? Has that changed for you over the course of your life? Are there or have there been places in your life where you don’t have a role, a place, a position?

3. Is there a time when you have surprised yourself by not comparing yourself with others?

4. Have you ever had the line of a song or words from pop culture speak to you in a deep way? I think of “Do you know the way to San Jose?”

5. And show me someone of no rank with six arms and three heads, working furiously, smashing Flower Mountain into two with a single blow.

Meditation and web surfing

2010-01-28T16:31:00.000-08:00

Steve Silberman who often writes for Wired has an article “Did You Get The Message” in Shambhala Sun March 2010. The theme is mindfulness and the internet.
A section in which he interviewed me is included below.

Another friend who has embraced technology as a way of exploring the nature of mind is John Tarrant, author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros and other Zen books. For years, John has been evaluating various ways of including online life in his students’ field of practice. I recently shared with him a concern that the web could act as a jungle gym for 'monkey mind,' the restless part of our ego that hops from one potential source of gratification to the next, chattering internally all the while. How is it possible to stay grounded in the face of perpetual distraction?

It may just be a matter of acquiring new skills, John observed. People first learn to meditate while sitting, then while walking. Eventually they learn to cultivate the mind of awareness while talking or preparing a meal. Why should websurfing be any different? At the same time, he said, "The Zen take would be that there isn’t a ‘right way’ to be online. There’s a kind of freedom deeper than the right way—an awareness that’s always happening while all this other stuff is going on. I woke up with a splitting headache the other night, but this awareness knows it wasn’t really a problem. It’s calm and having a good time, noticing, ‘He’s got a headache,’ or, ‘He’s online now and he thinks his attention is scattered.’ The relationship between this foreground creature that you think you are and this vast background is the question. When there’s a relationship, most people feel their experience is more nourishing.”  

For the whole article—
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3492&Itemid=0

Zen 2.0: The Zenosaurus Course In Koans: Number 6

2009-11-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

Walls Falling Down at Midnight

Rostov felt both frightened and elated to be riding alone with three hussars into that mysterious and dangerous misty distance, where no one had been before him. Bagration shouted to him from above not to go beyond the brook, but Rostov pretended not hear his words, and, without stopping, rode further and further on, constantly making mistakes, taking bushes for trees and hollows for people, and constantly explaining his mistakes to himself.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky) p.268

When I was in grade school and the teacher asked a question, I would wave my hand and say, “I know! I know!” Later I learned to hide my eagerness, but whenever a guest arrives, whether it’s a beautiful stranger at the door or a phone call late at night, my mind still goes into action without asking for permission. It begins to rank, jostle, acquire, flee, assess, call up memories and form plans. The mind also gives reviews of itself, checking how it is doing with the stranger or the late night phone calls, or swerving away to the argument earlier in the day at the office. We like our minds to give us positive reviews and to feel good about us, to tell us that we are important and right and on top of our game. For this reason, we spend a lot of time justifying our apparent errors and explaining them away.

Meditation goes the other way. It doesn’t necessarily stop the assessments and justifications from arising, it undermines them if they do. They come to seem ghostly and evanescent. At some stage we stop worrying about the our attitude to our experience. The mind offers opinions and reviews about us but we are not compelled to subscribe to them. And if we do subscribe to them, we don’t have to subscribe to that. Eventually the crowding in the mind is reduced too—less jostling and assessing goes on, though the crucial thing is not the crowding in the mind but the identification with the thoughts and feelings.

Some koans show you the way the assessments rise and how the mind makes a world of them and tries to live there, explaining its mistakes to itself, and trying to fit the world to its mistakes.

This week’s koan shows the process of inventing suffering and it gives an image of what it might be like when you don’t live in the world of jostling and painful assessments.

This week’s koan:

The teacher said to the gathering, “If you get it the first time you hear it, you will teach the buddhas and ancestors. If you get it the second time you hear it, you will teach gods and humans. If you don’t get it till the third time you hear it, you won’t even be able to save yourself.”

A student asked, “When did you get it?”

The teacher said, “The moon sets at midnight, I walk alone through the town.”

This koan shows the mind scrambling around to think well of itself. How quickly we learn is something we have little control over but everyone wants to be in the first two categories. We explain ourselves to ourselves, ‘I am doing OK and my world makes sense.’ To this end we might even shift around the data. ‘Surely I got it the second time I heard it?’ is a thought that might appear. Once upon a time, when I was fishing for something middle sized and delicious out on the Barrier Reef, I caught a tiger shark by mistake, and I catch that shark again from time to time in memory and have seen it trying to get bigger in my mind.

I’ve noticed that people’s enlightenment experiences also get bigger with the telling. Editing and adjusting is everywhere.

Some people have an aversion to President Obama. But he is the president and thought to deserve respect. Some of these people address their discomfort by telling a story that he was born in Kenya and that's why he shouldn’t be president.

The first thing this koan does is to show you which prisons your mind habitually walks into. It might do this by evoking them, so that you feel what it’s like to live in them. If that happens, you might think that the koan isn’t working very well because your meditation has become hard to bear, but from another point of view the koan is giving the flavor of your life with all your striving and explaining. And so it's working very well.

It doesn’t matter what thought the mind provides. If I take up residence in any thought world, I have fallen among ghosts, and in the end I will suffer—trying to explain how I really do understand when I don't, trying to explain that the president was born in Africa. When we suffer we are barking up the wrong tree, trying to fix the wrong problem. For us at that moment of course the tree we are barking up is the only tree there is and so we are stuck, and can't stop being unhappy unless there is some change in the way we deal with our minds.

The koan shows an enormous life changing possibility, which is that we might be making fine decisions and the universe might be carrying us along very nicely if we are not jostling and worrying and striving. Enlightenment is here now so it doesn’t matter what size it was, it doesn’t matter when you get it, this guy really is the president and he really is black and so on. The stories fall away, the moon sets at midnight, and I walk alone through the town.

Here are two stories that bear on this possibility.

A woman became godmother to eight kids from her roughish neighborhood. They turned out to have talents, became gymnasts and got scholarships, but despite her heroic efforts they fell into gangs and pregnancies and she wondered if she could have done more. Then she told this story about her own mom who was a toy designer:

One day when I was a kid my mother was stuffing toys on the porch and saw that a bird was starting to use the bits of stuffing in her nest. So my mom started putting all the most beautiful and colorful and sparkly threads she could find outside, on the porch, draped over the fence. And the bird of course used them too, and the nest was amazing.

That’s an answer to the impossible questions about parenting. The way she remembered the thread and the bird all these years later, how she told about it, how she offers things, how we all offer things to our kids. That is walking in the beautiful dark.

Here is another story along the same lines—that a quiet movement in darkness might be effective:

In one of my early experiences at retreat, I had been given an ‘easy’ koan, one in a series of miscellaneous koans given in our school to follow-up and help the student to integrate an opening. But it was not easy for me! Every time I went to the teacher to demonstrate the koan he'd say, "That's not it," or something like that. This went on for a couple of days, and I was quite frustrated. Eventually, I got caught up in a great fantasy story about the koan and a way to demonstrate it that used my whole body and all my belongings. I carried my cushions and shoes and sweater and jacket down to the teacher's interview room and made a big production of throwing them all into the room and making a mountain out of them and then sitting on them. I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that I had demonstrated the koan. My teacher looked at me and shook his head and asked, "What are you doing?" I told him my little story about the koan and he said, "That's not it." I was completely incredulous! "Yes, it is," I said. "No it's not," he said. "Yes, it is," I said. "No, it's not," he said.    Suddenly, all my conviction was gone. I sat there dumbfounded and disoriented, then began to open up to just not knowing what was going on. My teacher then asked me a leading question, and the gesture in response came naturally before thinking. He said softly, "That's it." It was very strange. Both because the question and response were so simple and I had been looking for something ‘profound,’ and because I had no awareness of doing it or no identification with doing it—the doing just happened. So, I continued to sit there for awhile and I can't describe what happened very well. But I suppose it could be described as realizing what the non-thinking mind is, neither thinking nor not-thinking. This wasn't a blow-out kensho experience. Very subtle and quiet.   I hadn't really thought about this much since it happened a few years ago. For me, it illustrates that opening where the teacher appears when conviction falls away. It's like call and response in a song or a chant—there is no separation, just the natural rhythm and flow where one thing follows another, back and forth like that. 

Sometimes when I have a problem with someone and I worry at it, it lightens a bit but it doesn’t really change. Then I forget what I know and it’s not as if I forgave the person, it’s more that the problem doesn’t exist any more and, even more strange, that there never was a problem. There is a velvety richness to walking alone in the warm dark. Sitting down to meditate is like that. I step into a darkness that looks after me.

Questions just in case:

1.What was it like sitting with the koan? Which part of it did you mind rest on or attach to? What feelings did the koan generate in you? 

2. What in your life would you like to get the first time around? Are there things that you despair of ever getting or understanding? Are you quick or slow? What affect does this have on your life? 

3. In what areas do you assess yourself or others? When do you not assess? 

4. What is evoked for you by "I walk alone through the town"? What do you do that has that feeling?

The koan is from The Book of Serenity Case 76 trans. Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant. The teacher is Shoushan.
Screen shot: Mel Brooks from The Producers. Painting: Andrew Wyeth—Master Bedroom

Zen 2.0: The Zenosaurus Course In Koans: Number 5

2009-11-15T22:15:00.001-08:00

Freedom from Suffering: Running Things Backwards

Relativity theory predicts that if a particle could exceed the speed of light, the time warp would become negative, and the particle could then travel backwards in time.

Paul Davies (Physicist) The Guardian 20 July 2000

Most of the time the mind is humming along and registering things without adding much to them—the sound of a diesel truck, the sage branch with electric red flowers bending under the weight of a humming bird, a memory of my father, indigestion, cold toes. It’s a kaleidoscope, and disorderly, but that’s not yet a problem.

Sometimes what’s in the kaleidoscope is plainness—the scarred wooden floor of my kitchen makes me happy in a way that is beyond assessment. At other times there is a sense of walking through vast space with delight—those flowers in the yard are themselves galaxies, and have their song.

At other times nothing much seems to be going on; a friend calls me up and when I say I’m doing nothing, I’m actually doing nothing. So far so good, that’s all in the category of doing nothing.

Then another day I’m wandering along and get an email with bite in it or I notice I'm beginning to dread a certain phone call and my inner attorney has started to maneuver and make cases and convince people of things before I even knew that I had hired him. I not only have thoughts, but I have thoughts about my thoughts. The thoughts give themselves reviews—lovely, boring, that one’s intense, ooh, get that one away from me. I think that is what is meant by suffering.

Each thought brings a world and gives us an invitation to live in that world. We are frightened and even ashamed of the chaotic shapes that form in consciousness but there is nothing truly wrong with them. When we identify with our thoughts we live in their worlds and that might be worth objecting to. Suffering is insoluble then, because no matter how much we adjust a thought world, it’s still an airless cell. The thought we identify with might be a district of the ancient city of should-have, could-have or would-have as in ‘He shouldn't be doing that.’ It might also be an attack on oneself, ‘I always make that mistake!’ Most thoughts are intrinsically unverifiable. One of the product features of a thought is that if you run it backwards it is just as unverifiable as it was when you ran it forwards. 'It was terrible that we argued' or 'it might deepen our connection if we argue'—actually, no one knows. Our thoughts are transparent and if we live in their world, we live as ghosts. When we see through our thoughts, they are dreams, evaporating like morning fog.

The Koan this Week:

If you turn things around you are like the Buddha.

Suffering comes from living in the worlds made by thoughts. 'He shouldn't have left me,' 'It’s terrible that she died.' 'Nobody loves me.' 'I’m doomed. Even meditation doesn’t work for me.' 'I’ll end up pushing a shopping cart.'

Turning things around is demolition. It’s fun. A joke turns things around and dissolves a thought world that we had entered. A koan does the same thing. It’s a kind of banana skin to send you head over heels.

Here is a related koan:

Blossoms on withered tree—a spring outside of time;
riding backwards on a jade elephant, chasing a dragon deer with wings.

It’s an amusement park ride and whatever a dragon deer is, I’ll be happy to chase it. You can play with thought worlds. For example, you might get yourself a shopping cart and push it around in your living room. A mother told me a story about taking her two kids to the Renaissance Fair. After shuffling forward for hours in the sun, she discovered at the gate that she had left her purse in the car two miles away. She began to walk back. The kids started to complain and whine. She threw herself down on the ground and started kicking and complaining too.

Michael Katz related to me a conversation with Gregory Bateson, the thinker and anthropologist. Michael was driving him to a conference at Lindisfarne on Long Island and Bateson said he dreaded something about conferences.
“What is that?” asked Michael.
“Well, people don’t have a sense of humor.”
“What does that mean to you?”
Bateson thought about it and said, “A sense of humor depends on knowing that what you think doesn’t really matter, or even that you don’t really matter.”

Byron Katie’s inquiry system is meant to explode thoughts, and turning thoughts around is one of its key points. Since she didn’t read any Buddhism before she noticed this, it probably goes to show that we invent Zen over and over again.

The non-linear quality of the kaleidoscope of the mind is actually our friend. The mind keeps turning and worlds keep making themselves and I could run them all backwards, I don’t have to believe in the builder. As we learn this we get skeptical about our thoughts. A friend wrote me this in 1998:

"I decided to sign up for the June sesshin. If I tell you I'm backing out, please tell me I told you to tell me I shouldn't."

I’m about to write her and ask if she is coming to our Bare Bones retreat in the New Year, 2010.

What’s it like when we don’t enter the worlds that come with the thoughts? Who owns my thoughts? They don’t have to be mine, they could be anyone’s. Once upon a time I was writing a book on Zen and forgot the kettle and it melted. When I’m not subscribing to the world of thoughts, then there is just the texture of the worn kitchen floor with the scars from the molten kettle near the stove.

The koan, If you turn things around you are like the Buddha appears in Entangling Vines and is originally from The Surangama Sutra. Entangling Vines is a miscellaneous koan collection used for advanced study. It’s the final book of our curriculum. Riding the jade elephant backwards appears in a poem by Dongshan and is a traditional koan.

Questions, just in case:

1. Do you have a painful thought that you strongly believe in? How does it relate to your identity? What kind of thoughts go with it? Is it an important part of your life story? What happens when you turn it around?
2. How does your sense of humor appear? How do humor and play relate to spirituality for you?
3. Have you ever discovered that you were completely wrong about something? What was that experience like? What were the consequences?
4. What feelings, thoughts, images or gestures arise for you when you sit with this koan?

Zen 2.0: The Zenosaurus Course In Koans: Number 4

2009-11-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

Diving In

You can let a koan get you in over your head. For some people the best thing about a koan is entering the moment of mystery and strangeness and disorientation and possibility that shifts your life. Being uncomfortable with a koan can be part of its driving force. So I want to say that these comments on koans are meant to create a culture in which the way of understanding koans is natural. They are not meant as the right way to see the koan or as explanations.

The most fundamental move in meditation is compassion, not being at war inside our minds. In practice this means not judging, criticizing or even assessing what comes up in the mind. Circumstances might not change but we have a chance at freedom inside them anyway.

This Week’s Koan: Stop The War.

That is the whole of the koan: Stop the war. This is an old koan, used early in the traditional Japanese curriculum. In this koan you move into and toward what is happening; stopping means embodying, entering the situation fully and finding freedom that way. War was a fact of life for those who invented the koan system, just as it is for us. The first step in stopping the war is noticing the war. It’s also good to notice what peace might be.

Let me try to find a language to describe peace. Sometimes a silence appears inside. It’s comforting, vividly alive and clear. I think these moments are just how it is when there isn’t a war inside, when the mind isn’t going out questing and reaching for things. I can be alone, or I can be with other people. Sometimes I feel this condition as a darkness because it seems to have a lot of what I don’t know in it. It doesn’t come with a map that can substitute for it. I can move into it without sending my expectations out ahead of me. I can be calm or excited or anything at all. When I’m with another person in this way it feels like love.

Sometimes it seems like a brightness that is always at home. The same brightness that looks out at everything also looks back at me from the things I see.

So one possibility in the mind is that there is a peace that runs underneath the events and conversations. In San Francisco Bay the herring have just come in to spawn. In the twilight the seals are in the Sausalito Yacht Harbor and you can just make out the dark shapes of their backs and tails and occasionally see one leaping. A herring jumps out of the water onto the slip. You can hear the splash and the breathing of the seals as they swirl to and fro. Everything is vivid beyond comparison. Talking with my friend while walking along the dock is another example. It doesn’t enhance or interrupt what is always there.

Everything comes out of the silence and still rests in it. The simplicity and effortlessness of living are part of the silene. This might well be how a seal or a dog experiences the world. Or for that matter a herring being chased. Each moment fills all of space and time. There is no particular content to the mind and heart and any content can appear.

About ten years ago I remember talking with a Thai Abbot, Achaan Jumnien, who said that it had been some years since he had had a disturbing thought. He didn’t mean that he was in a state of deep concentration, he said he thought deep concentration was overvalued. I just took him to mean that he wasn’t disturbed by his thoughts. At the time I assumed that I knew what he meant but later wondered what a disturbing thought would be for him. I took him to mean that it is possible that his mind was identical to someone who was unhappy—in the sense that he wasn’t made miserable by thoughts and feelings that might make someone else unhappy. I imagined also that not being made miserable by any of your thoughts changes the kind of thoughts you have. The point here is that freedom might not be about what appears in the world, or even what appears in your mind.

I also notice there are moments when the transparence disappears. There is worry or fear or anger but that’s not yet a problem, it’s not yet a disturbing thought. When I identify with the worry or fear or anger then it becomes a problem. Then I start to think something in the world is causing me distress. I have a conflict with someone and think that I need to change them or manage them. Or I think I need to change myself or manage myself. Sometimes the identification happens before I even notice what I am thinking and feeling. Nothing has changed in the world, but a thought has entered my mind and brought a world with it. The night harbor is still full of strange beauty but I’ve withdrawn to a small chamber. I’m believing my interior life, starting to live in a movie in which there is a problem. When that happens I have to get out of the movie in order to have peace. I end up doing a lot of deconstruction, inquiry, invoking raw meditation power. Koan work is meant to break the identification with the movie.

War inside and out is part of the human condition. In Zen we begin by stopping it inside.

Paying attention and not interfering with what your mind is thinking is the basic movement toward peace. And paradoxically it changes what the mind is thinking. Then there is just the swish of seals in the night waters, the sound of their breathing, the slap of waves against the hulls, a late off balance moon rising very golden in the cold air.

Questions In Case They Are Handy:

1. What does it feel like to be at war? What are different kinds of wars? What is the war right now? right here?

2. The war often seems to be out there, Iraq or Nazi Germany or Troy, someone else's war. What happens to you when you identify the war as outside yourself? Of the stories of wars that are outside of you, which one takes your imagination the most? Why do you think that is?

3. Are there battles that were once important to you that you realized you didn't have to fight anymore? What happens when you fight? When you stop fighting?

4. Do you remember moments of peace? Do you have ways to be at peace when the world around you is not? What strategies have helped you get free when your mind is at war?

5. What thoughts or images come to you when you sit with this koan? Are any of them unexpected?

Poem

I, May I Rest In Peace

I, may I rest in peace—I, who am still living, say,
may I have peace in the rest of my life.
I want peace right now while I’m still alive.
I don’t want to wait like that pious man who wished for one leg
of the golden chair of Paradise, I want a four-legged chair
right here, a plain wooden chair. I want the rest of my peace now.
I have lived out my life in wars of every kind: battles without
and within, close combat, face-to-face, the faces always
my own, my lover-face, my enemy face.
Wars with the old weapons—sticks and stones, blunt axe, words,
dull ripping knife, love and hate,
and wars with newfangled weapons—machine gun, missile,
words, land mines exploding, love and hate.
I don’t want to fulfill my parents’ prophecy that life is war.
I want peace with all my body and all my soul.
Rest me in peace.

Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kornfield

Fotos: Diane Arbus; Picasso's Guernica

Zen 2.0: The Zenosaurus Course in Koans: Number 3

2009-11-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Bodies are important, our bodies give a shape to the ideas the universe has. In western tradition this thought underlies our long and sometimes disappointed love affair with the mystery of incarnation. Before the universe existed there was nothing; then the universe just appeared—with trees, buildings and people walking their dogs, and people trying to work out what their existence means. When we truly notice what it is to be human it seems vast, beyond scale; galaxies and bacteria are all folded into this one bright perception of life.

The Koan

Question: How is my hand like the Buddha’s hand?
Answer: Playing guitar in the moonlight.

This koan asks us to let the whole of our being fall into it, to love without reservation the experience of being made of flesh.

This koan implies that we have what we need. This is a very radical and satisfying possibility. The human problem is how to move out of suffering and loneliness, and with this koan that is something I can do. I need no one else to be responsible for my experience. It’s not up to someone who can guide me. I can actually do this journey, today everything I have ever wanted is available to me.

At the same time a sense of exile is often present, the sorrow of being in a body that changes and ages, a mind that plunges into turmoil. That sorrow is also what we enter when we are inside our lives. Even what looks like resistance is the operation of the koan—“I don’t like something about the koan, I don’t see that my hand is Buddha’s, what about the mess in the world and the problems in my life?”

All that can be said is that when I have fully entered my circumstances this koan appears. Well yes, no one said your hand was a shape that you had planned it to be. But if you look at the shape it is, rather than what it isn’t, you can see its beauty.

The last koan in our course described what appears when you go into difficulty instead of pulling away from it. This koan is next because it describes what you see when that happens.

Here’s a description of the consequences of having a body, an account by Garrison Keillor of his stroke:

The doctor who saw me in the E.R. wrote in her report: "nice 67 y.o. male, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate." I had appeared with slurred speech and a balloon in my head, had driven myself to United Hospital in St. Paul, parked in No Parking, walked in and was triaged right in to a neurologist who trundled me into the MRI Space-Time Cyclotron for 50 minutes of banging and whanging that produced a picture of the stroke in the front of my brain, so off to the Mayo Clinic I went and the St. Mary's Hospital Neurology ICU and was wired up to monitors. A large day in a nice 67 y.o. man's life.

(chicagotribune.com September 16 2009).

In this case happiness is walking out of the clinic. But is it also to be found in the clinic, in all things human including having a stroke.

Any resistance I have to what my mind is producing or what life is giving me, is in the territory of this koan. If my life is Buddha’s life then the problem is still a problem but it exists in the arc of practice—it’s a piece of landscape that has appeared during the journey. The problem is part of living the right life. And so it becomes possible to see that this uncertain life is beautiful. Any scrap of existence is beautiful.

The response to the question is, “Playing guitar in the moonlight.” Hands do things, they pick up a child, haul in a fish, swing a bucket, write, play guitar. hands have rings on them, hands turn us into artists, people who give shape to matter. And the music is happening in the moonlight, there are memories, and surprises; a dreamlike and eternal quality keeps us company. And isn’t everything a dream?

What I am noticing is my life. Every time I really look at it, the landscape is beautiful and I am part of it. Gerard Manley Hopkins called this quality inscape. Tonight I’m watching the season turn, the wind blow and pile the chestnut leaves large and floppy, yellow and brown, gold, and green. The rain puts sparkling polka dots on the window giving a bright haze to things outside the yellow interior light. This is the Buddha’s hand.

I can’t sleep tonight but that is a happy thing. I sit watching the light, the rain, the night, and being alive is full of a joy that doesn’t end.

Questions

1. Look at your hand for a few minutes. Say something about it. Describe it. What is it like for you to do this?

2. Do you have heroes? Role models? People whose greatness you could never approach? How is this for you?

3. What is a “buddha” to you? How is that different from you? The same?

4. What is “playing guitar in the moonlight” in your life? How does that relate to your work? What is moonlight for you? What is your work in the world?

5. What other images come to you when you sit with this koan?

Zen 2.0: The Zenosaurus Course in Koans: Number 2

2009-10-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

Cold and Heat

We usually understand things by taking them up the top floor of the mind and finding a slot they fit into. Koans are meant to open a different way of being and thinking. Instead of preparing you to understand your life, a koan prepares you to walk through your life.

Koans are often given in one on one situations; I learned them that way. This course is a Zen 2.0 experiment in working with koans using the intrinsic clarity that people touch when they collaborate.

The Koan for Week 2

A monk asked Dongshan, “When the cold visits us, how can we avoid it?”
Dongshan said, “Why not go where there is no cold?”
The monk asked, “Where is the place without cold?”
Dongshan said, “When it is cold, the cold kills you. When it is hot, the heat kills you.”

Blue Cliff Record Case 43: Dongshan’s Cold and Heat

Dongshan’s Cold and Heat is the second koan in our series. It offers one of the classic moves that everyone has to learn. Dongshan points out that you can turn towards things that you might normally avoid. You can curl in toward what you think would be painful or boring or unpleasant.
The motive of finding out what is there will be more helpful than the motive of freeing yourself from unpleasantness. We usually think that the unpleasant is a well known commodity but in almost all cases we haven’t really looked at it. For this reason, if we turn toward it we might find out that it is unknown, mysterious and interesting. The valuable thing about this koan is just to know that you can make that move, unexpected even by you.

When you turn toward cold or heat you are not taking off the shelf solutions to your life anymore. The action might be tiny or it might seem to be the opposite of what common sense, right views, your therapist, good etiquette, correct corporate policy, and consumer research would dictate. This strategy has many applications—it is the foundation of comedy and it is also good if you are an artist, a body worker or a scientist.

I have a small example of the texture of this move. After not smoking for years I was hanging out with a friend whose wife had recently died. He smoked to get through his day and it seemed like courtesy to keep him company. It was fun at first but then I had to find a way to give it up again.

I noticed that the sensation of wanting a cigarette was intense, the way the sensation of smoking was intense. I would want a cigarette and then reach for it even if I had decided not to have one. This was a clue. Reaching for a cigarette was turning away from the craving. So I began to turn toward the craving, to notice it, go into it. I began to look forward to and to enjoy the sensation of craving. After that I smoked only when I wanted to. I found that these occasions were few—a cigar from a friend at New Year’s Eve, for example.

Turning towards cold and heat brings in a sense of play. I was on a summer tour of colleges with my teenage daughter; it was one of those things you do so that you can say you did it and then she can happily go somewhere else that she has never seen. One night I stepped outside the motel and ran across her, lighting a cigarette. It was not clear whether she wanted to be caught. “Oh,” I said and there was a moment of amused uncertainty for both of us. “Can I have one of those?”

You can also touch the freedom inside this koan through small moves. Here is another little example—I had an American friend who was a Tibetan nun and wore the robes, basically swathes of yellow and burgundy cloth. We were talking about how I really didn’t like the idea of being a monastic and she said I ought to borrow her robes and try it out. So I did. I walked around in a country town in California as a Tibetan monk. My assumption was that I would stick out in some inconvenient way and have to deal with odd responses. The opposite was true though, as my friend knew—I became invisible through wearing the robes, and there was something very funny in this.

Questions for working with small groups.

1. Have there been times in your life when you have turned toward a difficulty? Turned away? How was it for you? Are there things in your life right now that you would like to pull away from?

2. What are your associations with hot and cold in your life—passion, hatred, adoration?

3. What would it feel like to kill yourself with heat and what would it feel like to kill yourself with cold?

4. What do you do to avoid intensity or experience?

5. Are there stories about this kind of move from literature or the movies that appeal to you?

6. What else came to you as you were sitting with the koan?

These questions are a suggested guide. It can be good to have more questions than answers.

Zen 2.0 A Short Course in Koans

2009-10-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

Zen 2.0 is a way of speaking about the development of Western Zen. In Japan, Zen was shaped by the students’ relationship through the teacher to the tradition. The social structure was a pyramid, though informally there was often a lot of kindness and warmth within that shape, and the transformation that occurred in the students taught the teachers how to teach.

At Pacific Zen Institute some of us are experimenting with an openly collaborative culture; we develop our understanding of Zen by practicing our spiritual methods and sharing our experience. As a teacher I’ve been very interested in the two way process—how koans open our lives and, in the other direction, what our lives teach us about what is effective about koan work.

This way of doing things has allowed us to take Zen out of the monastery and into Wall Street, the school classroom, the cockpit of a plane, the operating room, the engineer’s office and the children’s soccer practice, and the unemployment line.

When you keep company with a koan, your discoveries give us examples of how the koan can transform us. How the koan appears in your life is the important question. Zen is practical, it changes your life.

Conversation is its own spiritual practice; it help us to appreciate of the way others live and share what we nave discovered. In turn this helps us to be more present with the range of our own lives. Mistakes and epiphanies, losses and triumphs—whatever is really so is the material of the koan work.

This can be tricky because one of the natural things that the mind does with a koan is to take it on an elevator to the top floor and find the shelf such things go on and to compare it with other things on that shelf and then to talk about it. The experiment here is not to do this. Instead the practice is to let the koan into the body and to sink down with it and see what effect it has on you and how it might change your life even if it doesn't at first offer you insight. You let it come to grips with you, you take the ride it offers.

David Parks-Ramage, a UCC minister interested in koans, and I have developed a small group approach to a course for koan study. It’s a six week course. Each week I’ll be suggesting a koan. David will be running a group that will sometimes use Christian koans.

Week One—The Koan:

Sickness and medicine correspond to each other. The whole world is medicine. What am I?

This koan is from Yunmen, one of the great Chinese masters. It’s an interesting koan because you can approach it at any level, whether you have never encountered koans before or have long experience of them. The word medicine can be used alone as an initial koan. The Japanese teachers had a classification for initial koans—calling them Dharmakaya koans—good for meeting reality, before we form views about it. They open insight into the vast background underneath or inside everything we do, and into the transparence of our ideas and actions. This is the experience you have when you look at a tree or another person and it is like looking in a mirror—you see an identity of things and yourself.

This medicine koan also touches on the way that, in our assessments, we can’t be quite sure what is healing and what is painful, since outcomes are uncertain and we have unreliable maps even of the life we have now. The idea that the whole world is placebo is interesting, along the lines of the idea that the world is a dream.

Finally the koan touches the question of who we are, what we are. A very strong idea of who we are tends to hamper our experience of life and the koan is offering an attitude of wonder about being human.

Here’s the format for the groups:
Meditation
Check in: What did you leave to be here?
Questions for discussion:
1. What is sickness for you? What are some of the times when you have been sick? How did it change you?
2. What medicines have worked for you? What are your own personal “cures” ? Have you ever been surprised by something that helped you?
3. Do you feel like you know who you are? When in your life have you struggled with identity? Do you like having a self?
4. What random images or thoughts arose for you when you sat with the koan?

Closing ritual of choice

Dream creatures

2009-05-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

Dreams play an essential part in the current of life—while I’m not paying attention my dreams turn the lumps, details, and meetings of the day into art, giving them depth and a warm amber light.

In January, I visited Joan Sutherland in New Mexico. We went to Bosque del Apache—a wetlands off a lazy arm of the Rio Grande—to see snow geese and sandhill cranes. The birds were wintering down from the Arctic and the Platte River. I wanted to step into the primeval conditions of birds, water and sky.

I heard of the Bosque through Jim Harrison’s poem, “Counting Birds” which mentions the uncountable numbers of geese and cranes there. As twilight came on, it grew cold and the birds arrived—wave after wave out of the endless storehouse of birds—the cranes with their legs sticking out behind them on a flat glide path through columns of snow geese floating down like maple seeds in spirals.

In the morning, before the dawn was in full production, they left in clumps. By sunrise, there were just a few hundred outliers floating and standing in the shallow waters.

We went back to Santa Fe and began translating stories in the Chinese koan collection, The Book of Serenity, a project for Josh Bartok at Wisdom Press. I felt drawn into that ancient world. We worked on the koan of the dog, the first koan I ever threw in my lot with.

Book of Serenity, Case 18: Zhaozhou’s Dog

A monk asked Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
“Yes,” replied Zhaozhou.
“Then why did it jump into that bag of fur?”
“It knew what it was doing and that’s why it became a dog.”
Another time a monk asked Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
“No.”
“All beings have Buddha nature. Why doesn't a dog have it?”
“Because it’s beginning to awaken in the world of ignorance.”

Zhaozhou is weird in a satisfying way, stretching language and the mind. He is watching the world emerge from darkness into form and describing in real time what he sees. The line about the dog having Buddha nature says literally, “It knew and therefore it dogged.” Then I dreamed about that koan and as I was waking, it shaped itself into a poem.

Translating The Book of Serenity in Santa Fe

I dreamed I found a lost poem of Stanley Kunitz
on the cover of an old book
with a lot of white space and black text at angles.
In the dream I was married and I read the poem aloud over the table at the meal.
It was about a person who got an interview with God and spoke their question across
the swirl of hyperspace and night.

The person said, "What does it all mean, all the…and you… grief… and wanting impossible things?"—the question standing for other questions such as:
the snow blossoms on the cotton wood trees
and the thousands of snow geese falling out of the twilight in stages
while the great sandhill cranes glide underneath,
each to a precise place in the water shining
with the last glow of sunset at Bosque del Apache,

but the translator is holding in memory many things such as
the lost papyri of the Phoenicians
and the place where the polar bears are leaving for

so in the language that crosses the turbulent dark,
only two words remain:
the question arrives as, “The dog?”

God is interested and tries, with the means at hand,
to show the whole pattern—
the response travels back through immensity and comes out, “Woof.”
“Woof,” says God, “Woof.”

and that will have to do.

My wife was not convinced by the poem,
but when I woke up it was still here
in my chest,
though most of the words could not cross over into waking.

iPhone foto of snow geese at Bosque del Apache: Joan Sutherland.
Plaster of Paris print of Snarfly the blue heeler: John Tarrant.

Transparent Poems 2

2009-03-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Stanley Kunitz is a poet I don’t know well, but recently I dreamed of finding a lost poem by him. Then I wrote about transparent poetry that allows the world to be visible through it, and a friend sent me this:

I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that
are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that
you can look through and see the world.

Stanley Kunitz
Paris Review Interview The Art of Poetry 29

I like the rhymes in the universe.

Thanks to Allison Atwill

Transparent Poems and Poems that are Journals

2009-03-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

Poems are journals
I’ve always been interested in poems that have some degree of transparence to events and feelings, water over weeds in a stream bed. I noticed this first with the Chinese poets and it led me to an interest in Zen. When I first read Basho, in Brisbane, I think, I remember that my body relaxed, which was something it was in need of. I could see that anything in life could be included and there could be accuracy as well as a feeling for the moments when, no matter how humble our activities, we know that we are moving through vastness. So these are poems that are a certain kind of journal. Here is Basho,
Holding wheat ears
To support myself,
I say goodbye

Wordsworth’s, “Upon Westminster Bridge” is an English example.

This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth is more interested in flash than Basho. He is impressed by how impressed he is by the scene; he wants it to mean something grand. Then he pulls it off, he does convey something grand. The similarities are there too. Both poets are tourists who notice what their minds are doing. For them, what you think and feel is the point of going on a journey.
You know the kind of thoughts you tell a friend? There is a different kind of thought, that is not about making my case or loving someone, or sharing my state of mind. This kind of thought gropes towards what it’s like to be alive. For example, a haiku, Durham, January 09.

It rained in the night,
I was part of that. At dawn
again, winter rain.

Through poems like this I keep an erratic journal of the thoughts that I don’t quite understand—the thoughts outside my usual thoughts. They don’t have a punch line. I like the idea of a spirituality without a moral too. Here’s another way of doing a poem journal, also without a moral, which is just to describe the surfaces.

Sailing

We sailed out of Sausalito.
There was no wind, then a lot.
We sailed to San Francisco.
A queue of freighters came in through the Golden Gate against the ebb.
One of the ships had big cranes on the deck and was obscured by smoke.
It looked like a ship from the London dockyards a century ago.
We came back around Angel Island.
We did more than nine knots.
In Raccoon Straits there was a tribe of seals and hundreds of sea birds.
The seals barked.
The wind died.
We saw a whale. It had barnacles and dark flukes. It was heading for the Golden Gate.
We saw the whale again.
A boat was adrift. We took it in tow.
When we docked the owner found us. He wore shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
His boat pumps out the heads of the boats all over the Bay; the business is called MT Head.
He promised us a free pump out.
We had espresso.
We took out the other, smaller, boat.
The wind came hard in gusts. We lay over and came back up.
I learned how to tighten the back stay to pull the mast back and change the shape of the sail.
Then we sailed fast.
We sailed up Richardson’s Bay.
Divers were working on a sunken boat.
We could see just the mast.
We cleaned our boat and checked the rigging.
I had a flat tire.
A man in a Land Rover had a flat battery but I couldn’t drive to him to help.
I changed my tire.
We ate fish tacos.
We talked.
We didn’t solve anything.
We walked around the night harbor among the boats.
I drove home.

Let me know about poems that you think of as journals.

losing money and koans

2009-03-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

This radio interview is focused on the book Bring Me The Rhinoceros. It was held when Bernard Madoff had just been taken to jail for his Ponzi scheme. The host is Laurie Nadel who works out of Long Island. The theme is essentially that life goes on even when you've lost something. I'm collecting stories about how people are reacting to losing money. If you have any such stories, I'd be glad to hear them

Click here: The Sixth Sense - Bernie Madoff & The Zen Master

2009-02-27T00:49:00.000-08:00

Projects Underway Now—March 2009
Writing
Book on the design features of consciousness: meditation, meta skills, epiphanies, spiritual practices
Book on using koans for exploring consciousness
Poetry—Current thing is a poem that came in a dream while I was translating an ancient Chinese text
Articles — for Shambhala Sun
Translation & Commentary — The classical Chinese koan text The Book of Serenity —with Joan Sutherland. For Josh Bartok at Wisdom Press
Developing & designing koan work for transforming consciousness in modern life. Bring Me The Rhinoceros is the initial run at this project. Retreats and individual koan work are another way this project goes on

Director of Pacific Zen Institute pacificzen.org
Retreats, talks & individual work
Adjunct faculty: Duke Integrative Medicine
Curriculum: Designing an Art of Medicine curriculum based on the idea that the art of medicine is the art of attention. For medical residencies at Duke University Health System