Avsnitt
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Following on the previous UnMind series of three segments on aging, sickness and death, the Three Marks of Buddhism’s worldview, we will expand our scope to the broader world of international conflict, characteristic of our modern world, where Buddhism’s three conditions of existence are also manifested, if in a more universal form. Traditional definitions of these basic aspects of life are universal in scope: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self (Skt. anicca, dukkha, anatta). We can see clearly that in today’s world, these givens of existence are not warmly embraced on the social level in America, let alone on national or global levels, which surely follows from their avoidance on the personal level.
Beginning with Buddhism’s “compassionate teaching” – the Dharma – we find that along with the three marks of aging, sickness and death, Buddha promulgated the “Three Poisons,” usually rendered as “greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly.” What a witch’s brew is conjured, when we mix the six ingredients together.
In the context of aging, greed becomes the longing for longevity, the overreliance on meds to avoid the ravages of illness, and extravagant, catastrophic efforts at prolonging life at all costs. Anger and hatred arise when we are denied the ability to forestall aging, when we are overcome by a pandemic, and when we blame widespread death and destruction on others. Delusion and folly ensue when we act on our mistaken beliefs, attacking others for the natural consequences of our collective and individual actions. The unexpected consequences threaten us all, whether in our dotage or full-flowering youth, with the Four Horsemen – plagues, famine, and the predations of war, and not necessarily in that order. Just who is to blame for this situation and how can we hold them accountable?
In the worldview of Zen, everything, including charity, begins at home. To quote Master Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The first embrace of reality is to “study the self.” The second is to “forget the self,” as Master Dogen reminds us in his famous teaching, Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point.Actualizing the fundamental point of existence requires that we embrace our own aging, sickness and death – the close-up-and-personal reality of impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality, including our precious self – while recognizing that greed, anger and delusion are fueling the fires of discontent, leading to blaming others for our personal predicament. Sometimes, others are to blame for making things worse, of course, just as we are to blame for making their world more crowded. Stop the world and let me get off. Would it were so simple.
The blame game can range from blaming our parents for our birth, on one extreme, to blaming those others most distantly related to us by blood. I read somewhere that the furthest removed any human being can be from any other human, biologically speaking, is something like 26th cousin, if memory serves. One wonders, with the growth in population, whether that tenuous kinship is getting closer, or further apart, as time goes by, with 8 billion people and counting.
I also read of a laboratory experiment, some years back, where they used the classic maze of rats to find out what happens when you simply keep adding rats to the maze, without letting any escape. At one point of increasing density, the rats begin attacking each other. They “blame” the others for their own discomfort, apparently. The analogy to human population should not be lost on anyone. The anxiety and outright hostility associated with immigration on a global basis is too obvious a parallel to ignore.
Or we can aim all of our blame at the political system, or the candidate du jour. Now that the “debate of the century” has landed with a thud, the rats are having a hard time deciding which of the two leaders of the rat pack is most at fault.
Much of the anger and hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by underlying fears, exacerbated by perceived worsening conditions, including density of population. The identified “foreigners” – bringing unintelligible languages, peculiar cultural customs, and bizarre belief systems – induce anxiety, stereotyping and suspicion amongst native populations, triggering the threat of the privileged being “replaced” by them in the great scheme of things. This probably arises from a tribal, protective social instinct, linked to the survival of “our kind.” Hyped to the max by political opportunists, into the bargain.
But on a more personal level, this anxiety, amplified by mob hysteria, surely finds its origin in the triple threat of aging, sickness and death, that is inborn with each individual. Birth is the leading cause of death, after all, like it or not.
This perceived threat, however irrational, is tied to what biologists call the survival instinct, or imperative. Reality is not a respecter of persons. But biology is designed to privilege survival of the species over all comers, adapting to ever-changing circumstances. Natural and artificial changes in context often outpace and outmaneuver biology, engendering threats to survival, to cycles of “extinction panic,” or to actual extinction of the species, potentially including humanity. Cultural evolution – our ability to pass on technological advances to the next generation, and their ability to further improve on their cultural inheritance – is ensconced in the social sphere. But it likewise runs into trouble when it is not agile enough to keep up with the rate of change of conditions to which it is adapting, in the natural and universal spheres. Such as climate change. Aye, there’s the rub.
“Survival of the fittest” is the shorthand catchphrase for dumbing down Darwin’s elegant and complex theory on the “Origin of Species.” To find a cogent example of society’s collective resistance to this notion that we privilege the fit, we need look no further than the recruiting, drafting and conscription of young men and women – the “fittest” – into the modern military – the main mechanism oriented to societal survival – across the globe. Civilian leaders, and those at higher command levels, manage to keep a safe distance from the front lines, so as to return to fight another day, one assumes. But the survival of the oldest is not Nature’s way. It is not natural to put younger members of the species at risk to protect older members. Witness the wolf pack.
This biological imperative dictates an age-related triage, protecting those most likely to survive, to survive longer, and to reproduce. Yet humans do the opposite in wartime, and did it again in the face of the pandemic, by sending younger first responders into the fray, while protecting elderly and senior leaders through isolation, quarantine and access to medical care. Notwithstanding how miserable a failure that effort turned out to be, the point is still well-taken. Of course, from a practical perspective, the young provide the necessary numbers, and the vitality, needed on the frontlines. Even if senior members of society were willing to take point in crisis conditions, the question would be whether or not they are able to.
Setting aside such considerations of the neurotic societal implications of turning younger generations into cannon and virus fodder, what will it take to finally bring about world peace? Can we beat our swords into plowshares, turn intercontinental ballistic missiles into spaceships, cyberwar into cyberfun?
The current national debate is styled as a contest between democratic governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” striving toward a “more perfect union” of the republic; versus power elites exerting autocratic control over a hopelessly divided populace. The appeal of the latter is understandable for the “haves,” those who already enjoy a relative elite status of economic and social privilege. They stand to come out on top, liberated from the messy business of compromise with those on the bottom end of income equality. Likewise, the uneasiness of the “have-nots” is easy to understand. They see themselves as already victimized by the unlevel playing field, touted as equal opportunity for all.
This, it would seem, is the real wall that is being built, not on the border, but right down the middle of the country. Its building blocks consist of the institutions installed by the founding fathers, rearranged to reassert the original privilege of white, land-owning males. But is all this – the daily fare being served up by the media and opposing forces – really the root of the problem?
Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, or reincarnation, as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus, or resurrection, as do modern Christians, we finally come to face our mortality, in person. In Zen, the only mate who will accompany us to the grave is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, or powers of reasoning we have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of behavior and vicissitudes of fortunes encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death. The same may be said of family, though better to die surrounded by loved ones than alone, or surrounded by hostiles, I suppose.
On the cushion we sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us in his version of “Needle for Zazen (Zazenshin),” including all the tricks, trash and trinkets we have assembled in our toolkit. Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon reliance on reason itself, spawn of philosophy and the other kind of Enlightenment. We find verification of our practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”
Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find ourselves, at a pass that is not really negotiable, in any ordinary sense. All the stages of grief prove futile in the face of the relentless process and progress of biology. We need to confront reality when we are young and vigorous, as in “Stamp life and death on your forehead, and never let it out of your mind,” paraphrasing a truth long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die. Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.
When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her / his relentless, unsympathetic and unforgiving scythe, as being not at all different from the sword of Manjusri, hopefully cutting through our final delusions. Just as hopefully, the passing pageantry of life, particularly the concurrent social-political dimension, will have little or nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding the last breath we take. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Closing out our exploration of the “three marks” of dukkha, in this episode we will take a look, close-up-and-personal, at death. In summary, our confrontation with and embrace of the three marks varies according to their universal natures, as well as to our personal nurturing in their recognition and acceptance.
Aging is predictable, but typically sneaks up on us, moving far too gradually to register in our youth, even nowadays with our ubiquitous mirrors, selfies, and TikTok videos – none of which our ancestors had in abundance. Today’s living generations may be the most self-conscious in the history of humankind. The famous “polishing a tile to make a mirror” koan anecdote reflected the fact that mirrors were originally of polished metal. Narcissus, remember, fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. By contrast, Tung-shan, a 9th century monk, was enlightened upon seeing his face for the first time, reflected in the water. A contemporary stand-up comic, who shall remain nameless, asked, “Did’ja ever look in the mirror in the morning and think, “That can’t be accurate!”?
Sickness, whether life-threatening or not, can land like a ton of bricks, flattening you for the moment – and often for the foreseeable future – with the rate of recovery dependent upon many factors, including aging. Sickness can often be the death-knell, as a diagnosis of cancer once was. As one ages, the body becomes less immune to the predations of bacteria and viruses, it seems. Today the threat of mental illness, leading to suicide, also looms large.
Usually, the threat of death from natural causes may be safely ignored, postponed, or even denied, until it can’t. But sudden death is even more unpredictable than sickness, and can come in such a variety of modes today, including natural and man-made disasters, which are popping up with greater and greater frequency, notably side-effects of climate change, such as the ever-increasing statistical rate of death from extreme heat. America seems to be the poster-boy for death by guns, accidental or intentional, now one of the major causes of death for children in the USA. Death from complications in childbirth is still far too common, particularly for non-white women. And then there is always stress, aggravated by habits such as smoking. If one thing doesn’t get you, something else will, in the end. Death and taxes, as we say.
I must note in passing that much of the hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by an underlying fear, which appears to stem from the triple threat of aging, sickness and death. Witness the “worship of youth” culture, “self-improvement” programs, and anti-aging products aimed at prolonging vim and vigor and extending life itself as long as possible.
This primal, largely subliminal fear is often projected onto the identified “other,” a form of transference that – like the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” trope – deflects self-criticism, in favor of defining each and every conflict in terms of self-preservation, and resorting to blaming others. As the Tao te Ching reminds us, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.” Buddha’s original analysis of the constructed self’s fundamentally dissatisfactory nature of reality, and our place, individually and collectively, writ large. The most dissatisfactory of all affronts and indignities to our ego are the three marks.
If, on the other hand, we could all embrace, in all humility, the realities of aging, sickness and death as being perfectly natural and okay, the resulting equanimity of outlook might go a long way to ameliorating the insane intensity of conflict in the world. Aging gracefully includes embracing illness and death as built-in, intrinsic to the natural order of things. How much of our time, energy, attention and resources are dedicated to resistance to this fact – a fundamental denialism that leads naturally to the abdication of truth – in favor of our favorite fantasies as to the nature and central meaning of life?
A young Rinzai Zen priest named Hasegawa published a book titled “The Cave of Poison Grass.” He mentioned the fact that most people seem to postpone confronting reality until, finally, they are on their death bed. He declared that this is too late – “like eating soup with a fork” – a memorable phrase. He insisted that we have to confront this “Great Matter” of life-and-death while we are young, and have sufficient strength and energy to overcome it.
In the lore of Zen there is a Till-Eulenspiegel-like narrative that captures its sometimes irreverent attitude toward life and death, supposedly a true story. A monk realized that he was to die soon, and began asking other monks what they knew about, or had heard about, others dying. He was curious to know if anyone had ever died standing on their head, but nobody had. So sure enough, when the time came, he stood on his head in the corner and died. His sister happened to be a nun, and when she came to visit for the funeral, the corpse was still standing there in the corner. In disgust, she kicked it over, declaring that he had never had any respect for anything in life, and he still had no respect in death. The story goes that they buried him upside-down.
An old saying in Zen says to “stamp life and death on your forehead and never let it out of your mind.” This is not a mark of morbid obsession with death, but simply recognizes that there is no life without death – birth is the leading cause of death.
Instead of bemoaning the fact that life inevitably passes back into the great remix that is the universe – the wave returning to the ocean – we embrace the inevitability of “shuffling off this mortal coil” as a kind of relief. As Mark Twain was said to have asked, when in his old age reporters inquired as to whether he wasn’t afraid to die, why would he be afraid of returning to where he came from?
It is the stuff of science fiction to imagine a future in which medical science has treated the phenomenon of dying as an unnecessary aberration, a kind of illness, and come up with techniques such as cryogenic freezing of human remains, genetic mutation, and cultivating transplant organs and limbs to achieve what is, for all practical purposes, human immortality. The question becomes, would you really want to live forever?
Life takes a great deal of its meaning from the inevitability of death, which is often considered in opposition to life. But Master Dogen treats both birth death as another nondual, complementary dyad, from Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point:
Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash you do not return to birth after death
This being so it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death
Accordingly birth is understood as non-birth
It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth
Accordingly death is understood as non-death
Birth is an expression complete this moment
Death is an expression complete this moment
They are like winter and spring
You do not call winter the beginning of spring nor summer the end of spring
In this wonderful analogy, Master Dogen places birth and death on a continuum, each as an “expression complete this moment,” and yet undeniably entangled. We might ask: An expression of what? and the answer would seem to be “life itself.” So birth, which we celebrate, and death, which we mourn, are seen to be inflection points, rather equal in import, in the continuum of life.
When my older brother was dying in hospice, I spent about a week attending on him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. I picked up a pamphlet at the clinic where he was cared for, called “The Eleventh Hour.” It was written by a Christian woman, a clergy member or teacher of some sort, but she never once mentioned Jesus or God. One line I recall said something like, “Birth is the death of whatever precedes birth. Death is the birth of whatever follows death.” Very Zen.
I hope this brief foray into the most dispositive and determinative factors defining our life experience helps to allay any unreasoning fear you may have of these time-honored Three Marks. Along with Buddhism’s Three Poisons of greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly, they form the nexus of all that is wrong with the human universe in the personal sphere. When we move into the next outer layer, the social sphere, we confront them on a more global scale as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Today we might be coerced to add even more unintended consequences to the deluge, including increasing population pressure and worldwide immigration, as well as advances in technology that tend to frustrate, rather than facilitate, our presumably inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Speaking of which, in the first UnMind episode of the upcoming month, we will look over our shoulder once again to the dread prospect of Election Year Zen, which is gaining on us, assessing whether or not we can see any light of compassion or wisdom at the end of that maddeningly long tunnel. Please add a seatbelt to your zafu and strap in.
The haiku poem on the “grim reaper” is from a 2020 series called “Dharma Dreams from Great Cloud.” The text, titled “Swords into Plowshares,” will form the basis of July’s UnMind. If you have any remaining questions as to why I feel it important to examine the current political pageantry from the perspective of ancient Buddhist teachings, which may strike you as outdated and irrelevant, please email me about it.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Continuing with a consideration of the realities of day-to-day Zen practice in the context of Buddhism’s central teaching of dukkha – natural suffering writ large – the second of the “three marks,” or characteristics of existence from a human perspective, is usually named as “sickness” or “illness.”
Please note in passing that illness, from the perspective of Chinese medicine – which may be closer to its cultural connotations in ancient India – denotes a lack of centeredness, or balance. Something is out of kilter – the yinyang of it all – when we fall ill. Nowadays, of course, we have much more access to many means of tracing and tracking the origins of our maladies, to environmental and other sources.
Quoting from the Tricycle web site again, we find a less personal, less specific definition of the three:
...all phenomena...are marked by three characteristics...: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana.
Sickness is not called out specifically as one of the many causes of suffering or dissatisfaction, possibly for reasons of cultural context and medical acumen 2500 years ago. We will get around to that throwaway line exempting so-called “nirvana.”
I can personally testify to the dissatisfactory and suffering nature of sickness, from my experience contracting Covid-19 in 2022 and, more recently, a suddenly bloated GI tract blockage that had me hospitalized overnight, and bed-ridden for over a week.
The pandemic occasioned such wide medical suffering and social unrest that Shunei Oniuda, the president of Sotoshu Shumucho, Zen administrative headquarters in Japan, addressed it from the Buddhist perspective in a public message:
I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences for those who have lost their precious lives from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and offer a prayer that they may rest in peace. For those who have been affected by this illness, I pray that they will recover as soon as possible, and I would like to offer my deepest sympathy to their families and relatives who have also been affected by this illness. Also, my thoughts are with all those experiencing tremendous difficulties whose lives have been affected by the spread of this epidemic and the need to stay home.
Then Mr. Oniuda relates some interesting facts providing context for the present:
In the Kamakura Period of Japanese history when Dogen Zenji was teaching, there were times when cool summers caused by climate change often brought poor harvests. There were outbreaks of plague, and, during the Great Kanki Famine (1230-31), it is said that about a third of the population of Japan perished. In times such as these, Dogen Zenji emphasized that these were the very times to not neglect the Buddha Way.
Who is to know it the changes in climate at that time were as precipitous and global as those we are seeing today. As an island nation, Japan is likely more subject to extremes in weather because it is surrounded by ocean waters. A caveat – in our fraught divisive times, it may be necessary to point out that this recollection of similar disasters from the history of Zen – though on a much smaller-scale – is surely not intended to support either side of the ideological argument. Instead, it reinforces the premise that Zen is a practice fully prepared to meet, head-on, the vagaries of life, whether of natural, man-made, or a combination of those causes and conditions.
Note that he offers condolences to those who died first, rather than to the survivors; which is characteristic of Zen funerals. The sermon is actually directed to the deceased.
While emphasizing the need for disseminating accurate information, and recommending that all concerned follow the practical recommendations for exercising due diligence in preventing the spread of infection, President Oniuda refers back to the compassionate teachings of Zen’s founders, as they apply to this current, international crisis:
It is in such a time that the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, Dogen Zenji, and Keizan Zenji are necessary. Shakyamuni Buddha taught right view, right speech, and right practice in the face of the sufferings of sickness and death.
Right view, speech and practice – conduct exhibited in crises – do not follow the mob:
Even if people are agitated or anxious in the confusion caused by others who are fearful and buy up or hoard food and other goods, let us act calmly. Let us act in accordance with the spirit of Dogen Zenji’s teaching of the intention of first saving others before ourselves and in accordance with the Bodhisattva’s Four Embracing Actions. This is to naturally practice the way of benefitting others.
Compare to the panic mode triggered by the pandemic in most circles of the population. Then the President’s message brings it home, uniting both social and personal spheres:
Also, Keizan Zenji taught that we should have compassion and love for all things, that we should sympathize with others’ sufferings as if they are our own, and that with the mind of compassion we should be diligent in the practice of zazen. I encourage you to endeavor to practice zazen during this time that we must spend quietly at home.[1]
So the prescription for practice in Zen remains the same in good times or bad, whether we find ourselves in truly dire straits, or operating under relatively ordinary pressures of meeting the daily needs of ourselves and the community: Hie thee thither – back to the cushion. His message is directed not just to monastics but to householders as well. And by no means is zazen prescribed as an escape from the wolves howling at the gate, but the most direct and efficacious way to meet them where they are coming from.
Matsuoka-roshi would sometimes say, “If you get sick, you just get sick; if you die, you just die. But meanwhile, do what the doctor says.” He frequently made the point that his fellow countrymen and women were usually calm in the face of calamity, whether in the form of personal trauma of getting bad news in a clinical or hospital setting, or even a prognosis of eminent death. This equanimity he attributed to their having been raised in a culture that embraces aging, sickness and death as natural and foreordained, rather than in one that approaches them with fear and loathing. Even young children in Japan are, or used to be, exposed to the teachings of Buddhism, and the practice of zazen, as a regular part of their upbringing.
We like to think that Buddha’s experience under the Bodhi tree that night so long ago represented the absolute apogee of good health and wellness, in all its dimensions – physical, mental, emotional, and even social. Yet it included the robust embrace of the ineradicable marks of biological, sentient existence: impermanence manifested as aging; suffering manifested as illness, both physiological and psychological; and no-self arising as the specter of death, the fear of non-existence on the personal plane.
It seems that our modern obsession with youth and longevity lobbies against any wide acceptance of these natural marks, or transitions, of our existence as human beings. But all sentient beings are subject to their inevitability - no exceptions, theistic beliefs notwithstanding. Perhaps this may be seen as the true source of the neurotic aspects of this age of anxiety. We are confronted with these marks on a progressive basis, as we age and become increasingly infirm, or frail. It is best to engage them on the cushion, when we are young and strong, but better later than never.
In the next segment of UnMind, we will take up the meaning of death, in the context of Dharma as the compassionate teachings. Until then, do not hesitate to allow your view of aging, sickness and death, your personal take on mortality, to enter into your zazen. It cannot hurt, and cannot be avoided in the long run.
[1] Published on Soto Zen Net (www.sotozen-net.or.jp) on April 3rd, 2020
Translated by Soto Zen Buddhism International Center
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Returning from the political fray to the realities of daily life on Earth 2 — as the current popular trope would have it — I would like to delve into one of the teachings of Buddhism and Zen that may contribute to its misperception as being overly pessimistic. The “three marks” of dukkha, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “suffering,” or “unsatisfactoriness.”
Usually, “dukkha” is related to specific aspects of life, specifically “aging, sickness and death,” as the three characteristics of all sentient existence. From the Tricycle web site we find:
The Buddha taught that all phenomena, including thoughts, emotions, and experiences, are marked by three characteristics, or “three marks of existence”: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana. According to the Buddha, fully understanding and appreciating the three marks of existence is essential to realizing enlightenment. (It is a schema that is accepted in both Theravada and Mahayana schools, but more emphasized in the former.)
Here we find a much broader, less personal definition of the three than “aging, sickness and death,” but as human beings, we are naturally more concerned with how they apply to our wellbeing most immediately and intimately, than how they function as universal principles. It seem to me that much of the chaos and uncertainty that we are currently witnessing in the social sphere is animated by the unsuccessful resolution of our personal relationship to these three marks, along with the built-in resistance to embracing them fully, with any measure of equanimity.
As an octogenarian, I can personally testify to the inevitability of the first two, and their power taking precedence over all other dimensions of daily life, in due time. All you have to do is live long enough to find out for yourself. However, the Buddha apparently came to this conclusion, or confrontation, relatively early in life, in his mid-thirties, when we would expect him to be in the prime of life, though 2500 years ago, life expectancy was not what it is today.
Let us consider each of them one at a time, from a problem-definition and problem-solving perspective. In passing, let me recall that the least emotionally-laden definition of dukkha is, simply, “change.” Nothing personal about it.
Buddhists may be said to believe these teachings, rather than “believing in” them, as some of the online commentary would have it. As with all of the “compassionate teachings,” one’s own first-person, experiential evidence will drive home the validity and veracity, as well as the long term priority, of these findings and conclusions of the Buddha. The only question becomes how – how do we comport ourselves in the context of these dominant aspects of our existence?
The existence of suffering itself Buddha said we are to fully understand. And from the above quote, that understanding must of necessity begin with recognizing and appreciating these three most immediate considerations of life, beginning with aging, or impermanence. It does not help much to place our own impermanence in the context of universal impermanence. Misery may love company, but not that much.
It might help to consider the question, When does aging begin? At the moment of birth? At the moment of conception? The current flap over in-vitro fertilization – as part of the larger ethical and ideological debate around all things related to birth control, or the larger category of reproductive health in general – illustrates that aging is actually well under way before conception. The eggs and sperm involved have limited viability, aging out of their own, micro-world shelf lives.
Owing to a welcome assist from modern medicine, many of us can expect to live increasingly long lives, with notable exceptions in the form of further life-threatening causes and conditions attributed to the very success, and lack of due diligence, of the human species.
In Zen, we hear various expressions such as “every moment reincarnation,” from my teacher, for instance. We read Master Dogen’s framing of birth and death as “expression(s) complete this moment.” Buddha himself was said to have mentioned something to the effect that, owing to impermanence, there must be permanence. His monks were said to have been happy to hear this. One of the theories that I have read, attempting to explain the success of Buddhism spreading throughout history in its countries and cultures of origin, is that Buddha’s followers were so relentlessly happy.
So there is a kind of pervasive optimism in Zen and Buddhism, which is hard to explain in the context of impermanence and aging, let alone sickness and death. But just consider, in your own mind for a moment, the possibility that there were no aging. That we would all remain “forever young,” in the memorable phrase from the Bob Dylan tune. What would be the implications, both long- and short-term, of this reversal of biology?
What if we did not age? (We can leave the discussion of illness and dying to upcoming segments.) Buddha rejected such speculation as ultimately futile, if taken seriously, but here, we want to treat it as a mere “thought experiment,” for the sake of shedding light on the actual causes and conditions of our existence, no harm no foul.
In design circles this is a recognized process, called “synectics,” engaging in the seemingly irrelevant on the chance that it might turn out to be relevant. It is related to “Hegel’s Dialectic,” seeing the existing “thesis,” a present manifestation of reality as impermanent, enabling our recognition and even ability to predict the emergence of the “antithesis” on the event horizon. The model goes on to predict the merging of thesis and antithesis into the new thesis, which arises, abides, changes and ultimately decays and disappears with the next cycle. And so on, and on, forever.
Not coincidentally, this terminology of “merging” is used discerningly by Master Dogen in his envisioning the process of Zen realization in Shobogenzo Bendowa, if memory serves (emphasis mine):
In stillness, mind and object merge in realization
and go beyond enlightenment
If we consider aging in this startling, single-point reflection, how does that look? Buddha says, toward the end of his First Sermon:
My heart’s deliverance is unassailable
This is the last birth
Now there is no more becoming
If indeed it is possible to come to the end of “becoming,” is that tantamount to the end of aging? Is the essence of what Buddha and Dogen realized is that everything “else” is obviously aging and becoming something else? And must include the one observing the change. And that it has always been thus, from the very beginning. So what could go wrong?
Just consider: If the very conditions that we all naturally worry about – all too often to an excessive, obsessive degree – have always obtained in the universe, long before our birth in this lifetime, and likely to persist and pertain long after our death; how can there be anything fundamentally amiss? Not that it’s the best of all possible worlds, thank you Pangloss. But really, as a design-build professional, I can fantasize that I was in charge, and made the primordial decisions that determined that, if there is to be sentient existence, what will that look like? How do I make that work?
But most ordinary human beings do not have that kind of hubris. They palm the fundamental questions off to a divine entity, the wizard’s intent hidden behind the curtain of appearances. We simply accept the givens, try to understand and embrace them, and go from there. But there must have been a “before” – before the Big Bang, or the alternative Bounce. There must have been something – the “sound of silence,” and maybe nascent thought — preceding the “Word.” But then, all heaven and hell breaks loose, and here we are. In this moment.
None of this explains anything, of course. Whatever framework we have been given to comprehend the brute fact of existence was totally made up by others. You learned that. And it can be unlearned. Zazen seems mainly a process of unlearning what we think.
The very idea and ideal of longevity has only one value in this context, according to my feeble grasp of Zen’s teachings: A better chance to wake up!
In witnessing – or better, contemplating – aging, I am oft reminded of the unforgettable couplet from musical Zen master Dylan:
Ah but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
My sense of the relevance of aging and impermanence in the context of meditation and Dharma teachings is that, like the questionable linearity of the so-called “arrow of time” in theoretical quantum mechanics, taking the view that time is passing in a direction may be entirely arbitrary. What we may perceive — and more problematically, what we may interpret — as aging, may indeed be true, but only half the reality, as with all dualistic thinking. Perhaps we are growing younger at the same time, disencumbering ourselves with learned inhibitions, rules and regulations that no longer apply, as we mature to embrace emptiness.
My idle conjecture on aging represents yet another variation on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. This bears repetition: Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are nonetheless sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.
In the next UnMind segment, we will take up the more abrupt, if no more tangible than aging, mark of “sickness,” which for some reason is not called out as such in the early translation. Maybe the prevalence of illnesses of all kinds was so much a part of daily life that it did not emerge as a perceivable isolate in the social awareness of the time.
Meanwhile, as Buddha himself suggested, don’t take my word for any of this. Check it out for yourself, on the cushion, and off.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Once again, allow me to address the sentiment prevalent amongst many Zen groups that the political realm is, and should remain, outside the pale - when it comes to topics appropriate to the scope of Buddhism and Zen. The “tongue of the Buddha” represented by the short, curled ceremonial stick carried by Zen priests (J. nyoi or katsu) is said to be “long and wide,” encompassing all four spheres of influence and action in my semantic model of real world Zen practice: the personal; the social; the natural; and the universal. In the social sphere, the political climate surely played a huge role – in Buddha’s life and his decision to form the original order of Buddhist monastics – as well as in China, Japan, and other countries of origin.
In our present situation, the incoming flack from the campaign looks more and more like the damaging hail from the record-setting onslaught of tornadoes and hurricanes being visited upon an ever-wider swath of the United States each year, in an ever-lengthening storm season, leaving major and minor damage in its wake. Unintended karmic consequence on a geologic scale.
Looking into the rear-view mirror of history, we find that this — the issue of political leadership — has been a “known issue” throughout the development of Zen. From Taoism’s roots in China, in “The Way of Life, According to Lao Tzu” (Capricorn Books, 1962), translated by Witter Bynner:
17
A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
‘Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you’;
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’
Compare to protestations of wannabe leaders competing in the current campaign.
Peering even further back into the fog of time, from “The Teaching of Buddha” we find the Buddha challenging philosophical and astrophysical speculation, as well as questioning the design intent of the optimum social order. In a shorter quote within a quote from last segment:
In the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal?... In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society?
He follows with the admonition that:
If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.
In other words, whatever the political situation in which you may find yourself, get your personal priorities in order. Like everything else in life, the present political realm is impermanent, imperfect and insubstantial, the three marks of dukkha, the universal principle of change. Which change we find, more often than not, not to our liking.
Then, after relating the famous metaphor of the man pierced with a poison arrow, he reminds us that:
When a fire of passion is endangering the world, the composition of the universe matters little; what is the ideal form for the human community is not so important to deal with.
Consider the various “fires of passion” now threatening our world on all fronts, and demanding a majority of our available bandwidth.
Later, putting a fine point on it, the sage focuses squarely on personal training, while not ignoring the social, natural, and universal matrix of problems in which a person, then or now, is firmly enmeshed:
The Buddha’s teaching contains what is important to know and what is unimportant.
Therefore, people should first discern what is the most important, what problem should be solved first and what is the most pressing issue for them. To do all this, they must first undertake to train their minds; that is, they must first seek mind-control.
We have received our marching orders. “Mind-control” in this context does not carry the modern connotation of “brain-washing,” but the “discipline” side of the Eightfold Path: right effort, mindfulness, and meditation. In discerning the “problem that should be solved first,” we can not simply ignore causality – including proximate causes of political influence upon our lives. Perhaps the best way to deal with the repugnant pettiness of partisan politics is to continue comparing to the prescripts of Buddhism and Zen.
The Repentance Verse, as translated by Shohaku Okumura-roshi in the Soto Zen Journal in February of 2004, on the Bodhisattva Precepts, is a good place to begin:
All the twisted karma ever created by me, since of old
Through beginningless greed, anger and ignorance
Born of my body, speech and thought
I now make complete repentance of it all
“Twisted” may have overwrought undertones of neurosis, unlike the translation we usually chant. We repent our “past and harmful” karma – the litany of unhelpful, self-centered actions, and unintended consequences thereof – that we now “fully avow.” In other words, we are ‘fessing up, admitting that “mistakes were made.” Note that all this, however, comes with the territory of being a human being subject to the “three poisons,” various forms of greed, hatred and delusion that, though “born of this body, mouth, and mind,” comprise the “three actions” that can get us into trouble.
How genuinely are our favorite candidates for public office manifesting this kind of self-awareness, accepting responsibility? How well are we, ourselves, doing in this regard?
Okumura-roshi highlights the next steps in the traditional Precepts ceremony:
The Three Refuges
We then take refuge in the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha is the one who awakened to reality. The Dharma is reality itself, the way things truly are. The Sangha are the people who aspire to study and living according to the teaching of the reality of all beings.
Taking refuge means, literally, returning to our true origins: our awakened nature; the reality in which we find ourselves; and like-minded folks struggling on the path. In today’s political climate, the very notion of a shared reality seems under assault.
The Threefold Pure [Precepts]
Next, we receive the threefold pure precepts: (1) the precept of embracing moral codes, (2) the precept of embracing good deeds, (3) the precept of embracing all living beings. These three points are the direction we walk on the Bodhisattva path.
Morality, as conventionally understood, also seems to be on the chopping block, or at least up for sale, in this election year cycle. Perhaps it was ever so, with one party’s “good deeds” being another’s social injustice. How do we embrace “all living beings,” when there are so many of them, competing for the same resources? And where, we might ask, have all the bodhisattvas gone?
The Ten Major Precepts
The ten major precepts are: (1) do not kill, (2) do not steal, (3) do not engage in improper sexual conduct, (4) do not lie, (5) do not deal in intoxicants, (6) do not criticize others, (7) do not praise self and slander others, (8) do not be stingy with the dharma or property, (9) do not give way to anger, (10) do not disparage the Three Treasures.
We also express these prohibitory precepts with their positive side – “affirm life,” “be giving,” “honor the body,” “manifest truth,” and “proceed clearly” respectively – for the first five above, given to new initiates, for example. The second five are given to those who enter the formal path, with respect to the social consequences of representing Zen to the public, and so bear more scrutiny in the context of our political social servants. How closely are candidates for office at every level adhering to these admonitions, setting aside the Three Treasures, of which they may have little or no awareness.
We could go on, with endless examples from the written record of Buddhist principles. For example, if we look at the Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva path, we find:
Beings are numberless; I vow to free them
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them
The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realize it
Compare to various positions, platforms and policies proposed by pols and pundits – on immigration; income disparity; education; conventional truth; and the place of religion – in our efforts toward a “more perfect union.” How we doin’ on those fronts?
Jeffrey Lyons, a political science professor at Boise State University, found that “roughly three-quarters of kids who have two parents of the same party will fall on the same end of the political spectrum as their parents. As kids are growing up, their parents have an enormous amount of power in shaping their views.” (From: “Are Politics Hereditary?” – The Atlantic Jun 1, 2018).
If true, this demographic factoid simplifies the picture enormously. We might conclude that the vast majority of voters are going to be biased in favor of their family and social history from childhood – nature and nurture – and not likely to be persuaded by rational or ideological argument, to switch allegiances. So much for independent thinking.
So, once again, we return full-circle to the cushion. Do your own research, draw your own conclusions from your findings, and make your own recommendations to yourself for improving your chances of acting compassionately and wisely in the marketplace of politics, as well as within the community of folks who would rather not have to deal with politics at all. The ability to do so is surely more dependent upon our personal approach to meditation, than upon our social skills. Only if we are independent of the influence of ideology and partisan political pressures can we act interdependently for the good of all.
We will revisit the political scene in July, when we celebrate Jukai, true independence. Until then, “Don’t give up!”
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In looking forward and anticipating the future of Zen in America, once again it may behoove us to take a look in the rearview mirror. According to research reported by one of my future lineage successors – in a years-long series of talks he gave on the history of the transmission of Zen – things did not always go swimmingly when the big cheese finally kicked the proverbial bucket, to mix a metaphor or two. The resultant chaos was not quite as bad as that brought on by the “To the strongest!” gambit attributed to Alexander the Great, settling the question through violence rather than voting, an approach that has gained fresh meaning in recent political campaigns.
In fact, one might reasonably question the validity of any aging, declining leader naming their own successor in the first place, in the face of diminishing mental acuity and physical vigor. What part of “declining” do we not understand? How many political leaders have we witnessed who hang onto power way beyond what the dictates of the natural process of aging-out would suggest?
Matsuoka -roshi was born in November of 1912 and died in November of 1997. He was and is my “root” teacher, in the common parlance of Zen. It is his legacy and lineage that we celebrate during Founder’s Month each November, and which I have done all in my power to preserve, protect, and to propagate. Kongo-roshi, or Richard Langlois as I knew him in the 1960s, was O-Sensei’s immediate successor at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago (ZBTC). He was born in 1935, but died unexpectedly in 1999, only two years after O-Sensei’s parinirvana. This unfortunate turn of events brings to mind the oft-misquoted but always pertinent couplet:
The best-laid schemes ‘of mice and men’ gang aft a-gley,
and lea’e us naught but grief and pain, for promised joy
Thank you, Robert Bobby Burns, from his poem “To a Mouse.” This is not to suggest that planning, as such, is totally useless, or generally ineffective, but any succession planning is clearly a special case. In Zen’s historical record, the cohort left to pick up the pieces and carry on were comprised of more than one individual, in many cases.
It appears there is a common pattern of two or more Zen successors stepping in and divvying up the role previously played by the retiring guiding teacher. They were often of very different personality types, bringing different sets of skills and attitudes to the table, not necessarily the same as their mentor’s. This is also common in the business world, when the CEO is replaced by less-experienced executives.
It took me a few decades to realize that I am not Matsuoka-roshi, and that my students are certainly not me. I could not simply continue doing my best imitation of Sensei, oblivious to the fact that my students were approaching Zen practice very differently from my own early days. I had to have flexibility of mind to innovate, not just to imitate.
Nor can I compare myself to Okumura-roshi – who officiated my formal transmission –with his historical roots in traditional Zen training in Japan. His successor Hoko Karnegis was recently chosen – how and why, I have no idea, and do not need to know. But I do know that she, who generously wrote the foreword to my second book, “The Razorblade of Zen,” is definitely not a Shohaku clone. The character of the community changes with any change in leadership. But its mission and reason for being need not.
I recognize that as founder and guiding teacher of ASZC and STO, I am a “transitional figure.” As are we all – in the ultimate, biological sense – given the inevitability of “aging, sickness and death.” Matsuoka-roshi was certainly a transitional figure, becoming a living example of the “man without a country.” He was no longer fully Japanese, nor was he completely American.
It should be noted that all truly transitional figures necessarily appear as somewhat ridiculous, in the eyes of their contemporaries. It becomes necessary to embrace certain contradictions, many that are counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. If you don’t quite get the point, just picture myself, or yourself, fully enrobed, walking into a Starbuck’s.
These transitional aspects of grafting a living tradition onto a new host culture can be considered a necessary and temporary period of adjustment. It is going to entail, and even require, independent thinking, as well as Interdependent action. Perhaps more than anything, it will require focus and perseverance, keeping the eye on the prize, or at least on the ball, in light of the many diversions and apparent obstructions in the path. The Ch’an poem Sandokai–Harmony of Sameness and Difference puts it succinctly:
Not understanding the Way before your eyes
how do you know the path you walk?
Buddha himself is said to have recognized the many blind alleys and dead ends that can get in the way of the simple pursuit of the only truth that matters. In “The Teaching of Buddha,” chapter two, “The Way of Practical Attainment” we find the following:
1. in the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.
Like his successors in India, as well as those in China, Japan, and the Far East, the clarity of focus comes through loud and clear, in the context of the seductions of the universal, natural and social spheres. The ancestors of Zen are all speaking with one voice, as far as to where we are to direct our personal attention is concerned. Perhaps this singular emphasis – on avoiding the pitfalls and temptations of following cultural memes and tropes as to what is truly important in life – is even more critical in modern times.
When we finally join a fully functioning Zen community, we naturally become possessive and protective of it. We worry about its stability, from both fiscal and psychological perspectives. If its leadership appears unstable, we hesitate to invest too much time and effort into participating in it, both from personal practice and social administrative perspectives. These are natural impulses, and rational as well. We have all witnessed too many betrayals of our trust and confidence by misguided leaders of supposed religious and educational institutions, in America and elsewhere. This is why harmony is the main watchword for the Zen community. And the main reason its members are encouraged to be circumspect in discussing the supposed faults of others.
But I want to impress upon you a deeper confidence in Zen. Not to worry — Zen will survive. It was here before you were, and it will be here after we are all long gone. Zen has survived, and even thrived, for over two and a half millennia, and that is only the recorded history of it. It surely began long before Buddha’s life, and will survive as far into the future as the human species, which, admittedly, is looking a little iffy just now.
Zen will survive because it is not “Zen.” Zen is just a name, a label that we throw at something that has no name. This discovery of Buddha, even in our times, is primordial. It is nothing more than “waking up,” in the most universal, deepest and broadest sense of the word. It is awakening to reality. That simple fact may need our protection, from the vicissitudes of current cultural ignorance. But it comes with the territory of being a fully conscious human being. It will not go away with time, as long as humans survive.
This is why the definitive dimension of sangha is “harmony.” Fostering disharmony in the Zen community is a cardinal sin. As Master Elvis reminds us, “We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.” The sangha itself is like a cloud – after my dharma name, “Great Cloud” – constantly evaporating and recondensing. If you do not think so, stick around for a while. We have had literally thousands of people come and go over the decades, and sometimes return after decades. That they come and go is no fault of our own, or of theirs. It is merely the manifestation of their life stories, the cloud endlessly evaporating and recondensing.
In Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks, “The Kyoksaku” and “Mokurai,” he shares his perspective on the future of Zen, including the meaning of a Zen temple. We are carrying forward his mission of propagating Zen in America, on the premise that he expressed, that Zen is relatively “dead” in Japan; and would find its rebirth in America:
A Zen temple is not a debating place — especially about Zen. Zen was never meant to be debated. It was meant to come into your lives to quiet them and for you to live as a Buddha. If you know Zen, your voice will be quiet and your words will be few. Great wisdom does not need many words to express itself. “Those who speak do not necessarily know.”
Master Dogen also mentioned of the tendency of individuals to want to express their understanding of Zen to all who will listen, including the local guiding teacher. It is a known issue in history, and one of many such attitudes that have persisted down to today. But if we see it for what it is – the natural desire of a person to have their own understanding of Zen recognized, and their efforts in support of the temple appreciated – this, too, can be accommodated in our ongoing program of propagation, as a teaching or learning moment.
Buddha himself was said to have been assailed by an earnest young seeker, who prevailed upon him to answer the “Ten Cosmic Questions” from what passed for the philosophy of the times: how it all began, how it will all end, et cetera. Which Buddha considered hopelessly speculative, somewhat specious, and not at all to the point of addressing the real problem at hand, that of dukkha. The young man insisted that unless Buddha answered, he, the young man, could not accept him as his teacher. Shakyamuni is said to have pointed out to this sincere but presumptive aspirant that he – Buddha, was under no obligation to be his – the young man’s, teacher. And he – the young man, was under no obligation to be his – Buddha’s, student.
We have adopted a similar motto for our practice centers, which was initiated by an early Rinzai pioneer to America, Sokeian-roshi: “Those who come here are welcome; those who leave are not pursued.” We have a similar middle-way approach to donations, first expressed by our initial practice leader of Southwind Sangha, our Wichita affiliate: “No donation required; no donation refused.”
All of the above represent variations on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are still sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.
In the first UnMind segment in June, we will return briefly to our exploration of “election year Zen,” with whatever challenges appear in the campaign in the interim. Until then... just keep sitting.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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We closed the last segment with a quote from Master Dogen from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, regarding monastic practice in 13th century Japan:
How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.
These instructions and admonitions for practicing the Zen Way and maintaining harmony in the Zen monastic community, from over 800 years ago, come across with great currency, as if Dogen may have been attending some of our past board meetings. It just goes to show that people have always been people, and that conflicts arising in day-to-day dealings with the propagation of communal Zen practice have not changed fundamentally over the centuries, and even millennia, since the inception of Buddhism.
I think it appropriate to raise some of these quintessentially Western attitudes that have come to my attention in the recent past, and especially during the pre- and post-COVID period we have all just come through.
Like most of Dogen’s teachings – which can sometimes come across as harsh shaming, or finger-wagging scolding – the old adage applies: “If you see yourself in this picture…” or “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Any and all criticism in Zen, whether implied or explicit, is intended to be reflected back upon ourselves, as in a Zen mirror, and not held up to denigrate others. This is in line with the Ten Grave Precepts, particularly those advising against discussing the faults of others, or praising oneself at the expense of others.
While we encourage independence of thinking in Zen, and further, claim that zazen is one of the only dependable ways of developing it to fruition, this does not imply that we then become the sole judge, and final arbiter, of all behaviors of others in the sangha. This is one of the many misconceptions, or delusions, that arise in community practice.
One of our longer-term members once declared, some decades ago, that, in his dealings with others, he saw himself as the kyosaku – the somewhat controversial “warning stick,” usually used to strike the shoulders to help you “wake up” during long retreats. He felt it was his role and, indeed, his responsibility, to administer the stick, metaphorically, to those he thought were out of line with the Zen Way. I reminded him, gently, that there is a reason why the stick has to be requested, in Soto Zen. We do not simply go around whacking people with it willy-nilly, without so much as a by-your-leave.
Dogen said somewhere that we should never regard ourselves as someone else’s “teacher.” If and when we put ourselves in the position of teaching others whatever we consider to be the necessary lessons in Zen, we should remember that in the design of communications, it is the message received – not the message sent – that counts. We may teach another person a lesson we think they need to learn, all right, but it is not likely to be the lesson we intended. Our actions will likely tell them more about us, than they do about them. Dogen admonished his young wards on this point, urging juniors, and seniors in particular, to avoid using harsh words and behavior in the unfounded belief that criticism, however warranted, will work to their benefit, or that of the target of their reproval, or of their fellow community members who may witness the confrontation.
In some general comments about one of the attitude adjustments that all students of the Buddhist way should adopt, Master Dogen stresses listening, over expressing your own limited understanding. Especially in the beginning of your practice and study of the buddha-dharma, which, remember, may require many decades to mature. His remarks seem as timely today as in the 13th century, and taken with the above quote, comprise as good a model of independent thinking and interdependent action that you may come across:
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These days, many people who are learning the Way listen to a talk on the dharma, and above all want their teacher to know that they have a correct understanding and want to give good replies. This is why the words they listen to go in one ear and out the other. They still lack bodhi-mind and remain self-centered.
First of all, forget your ego and listen quietly to what others say, and later ponder it well. Then, if you find some faults or have some doubts, you may make criticism. When you have grasped the point, you should present your understanding to your teacher. Waiting to claim immediate understanding shows that you are not really listening to the dharma.
Note that the popular trope – “in one ear and out the other” – is apparently not of recent coinage. We have to be careful of a certain cultural arrogance, in assuming that our present situation is overly unique. “It was ever thus,” as we say. Or, in Zen terms: “Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we; we in the future shall be buddhas and ancestors,” taken from Dogen’s Vow. But to become buddhas and ancestors we have to learn tolisten, and that entails learning how to listen; which means learning how to hear.
You may protest that you already know how to hear! That is, you are hearing, and have been doing so all along. But training in design thinking, particularly in the Bauhaus tradition, says “not so fast.” You may think you are hearing, seeing, and feeling, but are you really? Drawing, photography, and the other visual arts are all considered ways of training the eye to truly see. The audial arts – music, singing, et cetera – are likewise ways of training the ear to hear. Kinetic body work – dance, theater, athletics and so on, train the body to feel, and to move in gravity with efficiency and elegance.
Similarly in Zen training we find expressions such as attributed to Dogen’s teacher in China, Tiantong Rujing, where he said something like, paraphrasing freely, “gouge out your eyes so that you cannot see and then you may be able to see for the first time...” cut out your tongue, plug up the ears, burn the body, etc. so that they may be replaced with the true body and senses of buddha-nature. This, obviously, on a much deeper level than the Bauhaus training is shooting for. But simply on a social level of discourse, the need to listen is greater than ever, what with all the voices vying for our attention.
With the recent burgeoning of interactive meetings on the internet – which incidentally, Master Dogen did not have to contend with, fortunately for him – we have witnessed a dramatic evolution of etiquette in public dialog. Standard admonitions include not interrupting the speaker; keeping your comments brief so that more attendees have an opportunity to participate; directing your comments to the moderator or guest panelist and avoiding cross-talk; and generally resisting the impulse to hijack the proceedings to pursue your own agenda.
This syndrome has long been a known issue in American Zen circles, where even in intimate, in-person settings, when called upon, certain members of the audience will suddenly turn to the audience to share their viewpoint, rather than deferring to the person hosting the dialog. This is at a minimum impolite, if not downright rude. But this is America, where all opinions are considered equal, especially by those who hold them.
Dogen goes on to modify his admonition to privilege a discerning silence over blurting out our opinion at every opportunity; giving it some time to gain clarity; then engaging the dialog in a respectful way. Application to today’s social media transactions is too obvious to point out, but I could not resist. Later on, Dogen repeats this instruction, indicating that the issue had arisen again, in real facetime dialog:
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Students of the Way, when you practice with a certain teacher and learn the dharma, you should listen thoroughly again and again until you completely understand. If you spend time without asking what should be asked, or without saying what should be said, it will certainly be your own loss. Teachers always await questions from their disciples and give their own comments. You should ask again and again to make sure even of things that you have already understood. Teachers also should ask their disciples whether they have really understood or not, and thoroughly convince them (of the truth of the dharma).
Taking Dogen’s point, and following along the lines of appropriate attitudes and behaviors in the context of Zen community — including its traditional respect for seniority and today’s smugly iconoclastic attack on anything that smacks of authority — the usual caveats regarding comparisons between our practice of Zen and that of the ancients, particularly the social or sangha dimension, include the disingenuous excuse that in the time of Dogen and before, male patriarchy and misogyny were prevalent in society, so the societal norms, mores and memes do not apply to us in modern America. To which our female members and others would likely react with a great rolling
of the eyes.
Furthermore, the thinking goes, the practitioners of that time were primarily monastic. Thus, the rules and regulations (J. shingi) governing the behavior of nuns and monks were themselves not characteristic of the larger community in those days. That is, they were even less egalitarian than conventions prevalent in the cities and villages, among the leadership structures of the times, and so, therefore, how much more so today. A closer reading of history might expose the relatively mythological status of these notions, but we cannot be faulted too much for trying to back-plot our current views of what is right and wrong – including ethical behavior and social injustice – to a place in history where our perspective may have had little or no relevance whatsoever. We like to imagine that the arc of history is bending toward the modern concept of justice, as Master Martin Luther King suggests.
Admittedly, the language and culture of Buddha’s and Dogen’s times were somewhat determinative, if not dispositive, of the form and character of Zen practice of the time, both on personal and social levels. Particularly on the level of personal practice — by which term today, we primarily refer to zazen — the tangible differences might be somewhere in the 5% range of effectiveness on outcomes, including such technical developments as those of clothing and seating options. In other words, Zen “gear” has undergone its own cultural evolution.
But the age-old relevance of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path still holds. In the social sphere is where we will find the most salient differences that cause confusion, and to which we may point, if we are inclined to mount challenges to Zen orthodoxy.
In this regard — the social propagation of Zen — I want to share a few reminders about our root lineage. Matsuoka-roshi was definitely not in a class by himself. He belongs to a small, rarefied club of ancestors who not only took on the propagation of Zen in their time and cultural milieu, but also transported, imported, the face-to-face practice and transmission of Zen to a whole ‘nother country.
O-Sensei joins the likes of Bodhidharma, who sojourned to China, apparently on foot, from the Indian subcontinent around 500 CE. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Eisai Zenji and Master Dogen, who in the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively, traveled by sailing ship to China, bringing what they experienced there back to Japan. In the process Eisai revitalized Rinzai Zen, which had been predominant in Japan for centuries. Dogen Zenji introduced Soto Zen, emphasizing zazen over all other methods, around 1225.
Matsuoka-roshi brought Dogen Zen to this continent in 1940, though the much longer journey by steamship may have been relatively safer, than those of Eisai and Dogen in ancient times. The period between each of these seminal international importations of Zen averages just over 700 years.
I am gratified to be the recipient of the benefits of these great founders of our Zen past, as one of the current successors of Matsuoka-roshi. I am also somewhat concerned with the future of Zen, including the vitality of the branch of the tree that I have cultivated here in the Southeast Region of the USA. Thus this analysis. If you have any questions or comments on this subject, I would like to hear them.
Tune in to the next episode of UnMind as we explore the future of Zen in America a bit further, with an intent to understand how the hybrid nature of our online and in-person interface may effect face-to-face transmission, for good or for bad, or, more likely, both.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Continuing with our theme: the importance of independent thought and interdependent action to the future of Zen in America, we must define the design intent of our program in the current context of uncertainty. The accelerating pace of change, including geometrically expanding attractions and distractions in the secular and now digital world, gives our task a certain urgency. As we touched on last time, from Master Dogen’s record of live teachings late in his career, Shobogenzo Zuimonki:
Even in the secular world, it is said that unity of mind is necessary for the sake of maintaining a household or protecting a castle. If unity is lacking, the house or the castle will eventually fall.
Similarly, Honest Abe declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The great unifying principle underlying Zen, then, is this “unity of mind.” But it begs the question of what precisely we mean, by “mind.” Usually our mind – the “monkey mind” anyway – is anything but unified. It may indeed be unified against all comers; or unified in its stubborn clinging to its own opinion; but it is not unified in the sense that I think Master Dogen meant. And it is not the mind characterized by dependent thinking and codependent action, as in “we are of the same mind,” or “like-minded people.”
As in the past, the future of Zen comes down to the transmission of this unified mind, which cannot be transmitted directly. Transmission of the method of unifying the mind – which is one meaning implied in the Japanese word sesshin, an intensive, extended retreat – is where we can focus our attention, and plan the design intent of our process around it.
In a present and future world increasingly transformed by digital technology and virtual engagement, we may need to rethink the traditional parameter of face-to-face transmission, honored as the most efficacious pedagogy in the history of Zen.
However, when we can meet in a virtual room from virtually anywhere in the world, the face-to-face connection becomes one of interfacing video screens. This option was not available in the history of Zen, to belabor the obvious. Objections to an argument that this kind of transaction may suffice to transmit the Dharma include that the perceived teacher-student environment may be colored by such tinkering as phony backgrounds and visual enhancements of lighting and filters, along with stage-setting and costuming designed to play to the camera. In the context of direct Dharma transmission, these amount to additional layers of delusion heaped upon the underlying distortions of conscious perception and conception built into the monkey mind.
What is missing in the virtual world is the rest of the story, what transpires behind the screen – the day-in and day-out mutual observation of behaviors and attitudes under less-than-ideal or challenging circumstances – wherein transactional exchanges of personalities and communication in the real-world dynamic of the teacher and student relationship enables “coming to accord” with the teacher’s worldview, which is hopefully “Right View.”
In Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi, he points out the importance of this relationship and its hoped-for outcome:
From the first time you meet a master, without engaging in bowing, incense offering, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.
Along with establishing the secondary supporting role of Zen’s protocols, rituals, and the written record, he goes on to declare that this “dropping off” of body and mind is tantamount to Buddha’s insight, and that it completely transforms your world:
When even for a moment you express the Buddha’s seal by sitting upright in samadhi, the whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal and the entire sky turns into enlightenment.
Later in the same passage he profiles the transition that occurs when the student becomes the master:
Those who receive these water-and-fire benefits spread the Buddha’s guidance based on original awakening; because of this, all those who live with you and speak with you will obtain endless buddha virtue, and will unroll widely – inside and outside of the entire universe – the endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnamable buddha-dharma.
The telling phrase is “all those who live with you.” A compelling question for lay householder Zen practitioners today is, Do we need to actually “live with” a teacher, or within a residential community, in order to apprehend the true Dharma? And if so, how do we go about implementing that design intent, within the practical constraints of maintaining a household, holding down a job, and raising a family? Or do we all have to become monastics? In which case, Zen is just another program for a privileged few.
Dogen’s effusive celebration of awakening to the truth of Buddhism as received wisdom includes – and is implicitly dependent upon – your relationship with your teacher. In Dogen’s narrative, he must be referencing his lived experience with Rujing in China. But it raises the question of exceptions to the general rule, such as the example of Shakyamuni himself, or Huineng, Sixth Patriarch in China. The case that one absolutely must have a teacher cannot be made – any more than it can be proven that one absolutely must practice zazen – in order to experience the insight of Zen.
In research circles, we hear phrases such as “participant observation” to define this kind of intimate, all-embracing investigation of another person’s world and approach to coping with it. The adage about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes captures the difficulty of getting far enough beyond ourselves, to be able to truly understand the worldview of someone else. In the martial, plastic and performing arts and crafts, as well as trades, guilds, and other apprentice-journeyman-master modes of learning, we see parallels to that of the Zen master and student, where the craft is transmitted mainly through nonverbal observation, closely following the approach of the trainer until it becomes second-nature to the novice.
But in the complex society that we encounter today, the possibility and potential payoff of living together, in order to effect a transmission of mind-to-mind seems more and more a pipe dream of a past reality that may no longer apply, and in fact may never have been the norm. Garnered from such collections as “The Transmission of the Lamp” from Song dynasty China, anecdotes from the millennia-long history of Zen begin to look like a mixed bag of long-term and short-term encounters and exchanges between masters and students, and master to master, as well as between students.
The resultant impression is that handing down the Dharma from generation to generation was largely a matter of monastics living in large and small communities, but also hermits living in isolation, being visited by other monks and nuns on pilgrimage, and occasional lively set-tos with lay people, women in particular. Notable exceptions to the monastic model include influential lay practitioners such as Vimalakirti in Buddha’s time, and Layman Pang and others later in China and Japan.
A line in the seminal Ch’an poem Hsinhsinming says, “For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases.” The operative phrase here might be “in accord with the Way.” The “Way” being the Tao of Taoism. Which is a catchall phrase for the natural order of things, with which we want to come into harmony. This unified mind is the Original Mind, capital O – capital M – which we rediscover in our meditation, after sitting still enough and upright enough, for long enough.
So the central focus of our practice in the personal sphere has not changed, and our marching – or sitting – orders remain the same: hie thee to the cushion. With or without a teacher. Secure in the assurance that when the time is ripe, your teacher will appear. In due time, you may even find yourself in the unenviable position of being regarded as a teacher of Zen.
Further on in the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, the great founding Master talks about what it takes to herd the cats:
5 — 17
There is a proverb, “Unless you are deaf and dumb, you cannot become the head of a family.”
In other words, if you do not listen to the slander of others and do not speak ill of others, you will succeed in your own work. Only a person like this is qualified to be the head of a family.
Although this is a worldly proverb, we must apply it to our way of life as monks. How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.
Thank you, Dogen, for your candor and real-world practicality. It certainly resonates with my experience. If we read between the lines, we can see that Dogen’s life, and that of his monks, was apparently not always as ideally serene and transcendent as we may prefer to imagine. People are people, and were the same hot mess in 13th century Japan as they are today. Maybe even worse.
In the next segment we will continue with past as prologue to present, and present as perhaps prescient for the future of Zen. Your comments and response are, as always, welcome and encouraged. You know where to find me.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the last UnMind segment on “Election Year Zen,” we stressed Zen’s emphasis on thinking independently and acting interdependently, as a kind of rule of thumb for approaching the quadrennial campaign and politics in general. Returning to the main theme running through the UnMind podcast, the intersection of design thinking and Zen, the importance of independent thought and interdependent action to the future of Zen in America, and the world at large, takes on an even more central role. Especially in the context of Buddha’s teaching of the codependent origination of all things sentient – the comprehensive model of the Twelvefold Chain. Physics might agree that even the insentient universe is co-arisen, despite the singularity of the “Big Bang.”
The following thoughts were first shared in my opening remarks for the Silent Thunder Order’s annual conference in 2022, themed “Clarifying Interdependence.” The title of my address was “Future Zen: Thinking Independently; Acting Interdependently”
Buddha himself was clearly an independent thinker, the original Order of monks and nuns, an example of interdependent action, choosing to relinquish their place in the social order and hierarchy of the time, with its rigid caste system. Buddha was also a problem-solver of the highest order, having defined the problem of existence itself in terms of suffering, and prescribed a solution based on the real-world context, articulated as the Middle Way, and modeled as the Four Noble Truths, including the Eightfold Path as the plan of action.
Simply stated, the propagation of genuine Soto Zen practice in America is the logical extension of that plan, but in order to realize that potential, we must adapt the design intent of the Zen mission to the cultural and technological evolution that has taken place over two-and-a-half millennia. Nevertheless, the basic challenge to practice has remained the same. As we chant in the Dharma opening verse:
The unsurpassed, profound and wonderous Dharma is rarely met with
even in a hundred thousand million kalpas.
Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it.
May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s truth.
Accepting that the unsurpassed Dharma is rarely realized, even under the best of circumstances, we proceed with the Zen mission with lowered expectations, commensurate with geometrically expanded distractions currently on offer. These days, Buddha would not draw the typical crowd that attends a professional sports venue, nor even smaller concert venues. He might attract a considerable following online, however.
Seeing and hearing the Dharma is now often first encountered online, via searching the plethora of web sites devoted to posting the teachings of Buddha and his successors, by following podcasts, or downloading audiobooks. “Doing your research,” as we say. For my generation, television may have been the medium in which one first discovered the hoofprints of the ox, in the form of the “Kung Fu” series of the 1970s.
Seeing and hearing the true Dharma – as well as accepting and maintaining it – is still, however, a low-tech enterprise, requiring only the instrument of the human body, sitting upright and still in meditation. Unfolding the meaning of it, however, is another matter altogether, a near-impossible order of difficulty. In effect, it has to reveal itself to us.
Meanwhile, we face a variety of conflicting interpretations of Zen, from the cultural milieu and idioms of today. For example, Zen is not really, or merely, a social program, as many of its proponents seem to feel. Interdependent action certainly entails the recognition of suffering in the form of social injustice, and the principle of karmic retribution does not explain or justify ignoring the suffering of others. The teachings of Buddhism are meant, first and foremost, to provide a mirror to ourselves, reflecting the good, bad, and the ugly without discrimination; focusing our attention upon our own follies, foibles, and foolishness; definitely not to be held up to criticize others.
Our implementation of the “design of Zen” to-date – including the incorporation of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center (ASZC) in 1977, and the umbrella organization of the Silent Thunder Order (STO) in 2010 – has been intended to establish and maintain a stable training center, along with a service organization as we attracted affiliate centers, to facilitate the process of propagating what is called “Dogen Zen,” with the same intent of its 13thcentury founder, and his successors, especially Keizan Jokin Zenji.
I use the term “design,” as this has been an intentional design process. ASZC is the home temple & training center of the STO network of affiliates, resulting from a group process of the individual efforts, financial support, and community service of hundreds of people over the past half-century or so. In carrying out this design intent, we are extending the legacy and lineage of our founding teacher, Matsuoka-roshi, who would frequently remind us that “Zen is always contemporary.” In a book surveying the origins of Zen in America, “Zen Master Who?” (2006), by James Ishmael Ford, we learn:
Soyu Matsuoka ranks with Nyogen Sengaki and Sokei-an as one of the first teachers to make his home and life work in North America. He also seems to be the first teacher to clearly and unambiguously give Dharma transmission to Western students.
I would add that these pioneers of American Zen also belong in the rarified ranks of those ancestors who traveled great distances and crossed cultural boundaries to bring the genuine practice to another country, a whole other continent, like Bodhidharma, and Dogen Zenji.
Sensei, as he modestly asked us to call him, also is credited with opening the first Zen meditation hall, or zendo, for westerners. Needless to say, I was one of those Western students he transmitted, though he did so informally, rather than by the formal standards of Soto Shu, the headquarters in Japan. We inherit his estimable legacy and lineage, as well as those of the Kodo Sawaki-Uchiyama lineage, thanks to Shohaku Okumura-roshi. We also enjoy a link to that of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi through Seirin Barbara Kohn-roshi, who graciously agreed to be my Preceptor for my formal Transmission, or “Shiho” ceremony, after hosting my 90-day training period at Austin Zen Center in 2007. We may be somewhat unique in the American Zen cohort, having received formal recognition from three recognized priests, including pre- and post-WWII generation Japanese patriarchs, as well as an American Zen matriarch. Let us do what we can to honor our predecessors. We honor them most appropriately by thinking independently and acting interdependently.
Before considering the future of Zen in America, we could do worse than to take a look at its past.
In the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, collected and compiled under the direction of one of his dharma successors, Koun Ejo Zenji, some of Master Dogen’s more offhand comments and spontaneous inspirations are recorded, apparently with little editing, much like our publications of “The Kyosaku” and “Mokurai,” the collected talks of O-Sensei.
Dogen instructed,
4 — 13
It is said in the secular world that a castle falls when people start to whisper words within its walls. It is also said that when there are two opinions in a house, not even a pin can be bought; when there is no conflict of opinions, even gold can be purchased.
Even in the secular world, it is said that unity of mind is necessary for the sake of maintaining a household or protecting a castle. If unity is lacking, the house or the castle will eventually fall. Much more, should monks who have left home to study under a single teacher be harmonious like the mixture of water and milk. There is also the precept of the six ways of harmony.* Do not set up individual rooms, nor practice the Way separately either physically or mentally. [Our life in this monastery is] like crossing the ocean on a single ship. We should have unity of mind, conduct ourselves in the same way, give advice to each other to reform each other’s faults, follow the good points of others, and practice the Way single-mindedly. This is the Way people have been practicing since the time of the Buddha.
Echoes of Honest Abe’s house divided against itself… a footnote explains the “six ways” reference:
*The unity of the three actions – those of body, mouth, and mind, keeping the same precepts, having the same insight, and carrying on the same practice.
This same precepts, insight and practice includes the harmony of sameness and difference, not an absolute identity. The milk-and-water bit reminds me of Sri Ramakrishna’s expression that, like the swan, you have to be able to drink only the milk, mixed with water, to grasp the truth of this existence. This is the nonduality of duality.
So here is the great unifying principle underlying Zen practice from the time of Buddha and Dogen down to the present. The past is prologue to the present, as is the present to the future, of Zen. This may not be true of our contemporary cultural and political institutions, however, as we are witnessing. Let us turn to Zen for something more substantial to hang our hopes on for the future.
We will have to leave it here for now. Be sure to join us for the next three segments of UnMind, which will round out this contemporary take on the design intent of future Zen.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the last episode of UnMind, we concluded our review of the design intent of the Three Treasures of Buddhism. In this segment, we return to the current state of the campaign for political leadership of the country. My intent in these essays regarding the practice of Zen in an election year cycle is not to persuade or convince anyone of anything, other than the efficacy of sitting in zazen to straighten this mess out for yourself. I will try to make the case that it ‑ the political discourse ‑ is not at all disconnected from the Three Treasures. After all, the design of the three branches of government, and even partisan politics, are nothing more than manifestations of the community writ large – however subject to manipulation and distortion by special interest groups and individuals who may not honor the harmony of the larger Sangha, as their highest ideal.
To be clear, I am not interested in getting out the vote, or influencing your vote. I regard politics as only one of the multifarious – and perhaps nefarious – arenas of civic action available to us in modern times. But because the unremitting and relentless campaign is currently taking all the oxygen out of the air, and threatens to do so for some time, more than ever should we turn to our own council, and tend to our own knitting, on the cushion. Zen meditation provides a safe haven, a dependable redoubt, for refreshing our resolve to take action in the most compassionate way, but informed by the wisdom of the ancestors. The political pageantry of the moment is subject to the cardinal marks of dukkha – impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality – perhaps more than any other dimension of existence. We can regret, or rejoice, at its passing.
It is also a given that most of those in positions of power and influence do not have the wisdom and compassion of the Dharma forming their guiding principles, nor even that of the founding documents of the republic. Nor can we claim that the clarity of Buddha’s wisdom, or buddha-nature, resides at the heart of the American cult of the individual.
In spite of the complexity, confusion, and downright contrariness of human nature, in coming to terms with the polity, I think I speak for all the ancestors of Zen in saying that our recommendation remains the same, regarding the spectrum, or spectacle, of governance across the countries of the globe, and the span of centuries since the advent of Buddhism in India.
Physical samadhi is first in priority – more centered and balanced, less off-kilter, in the form of sitting upright and still, in zazen as well as kinhin, walking meditation. Then follows emotional samadhi – manifesting as more calmness, less anxiety. Then mental samadhi – fostering more clarity and less confusion, especially as to the deeper meaning and ramifications of the compassionate teachings. And finally, social samadhi – finding more harmony and less friction, in personal and social relationships. Girding our loins, as it were, with the “sword of Manjusri,” cutting through delusion, and reentering the marketplace with bliss-bestowing hands.
By starting at the center of things, the personal sphere, eventually we may find our way in the social, natural, and even the universal spheres of influence that surround us, bringing the eyes and ears, and helping hands, of the bodhisattva to bear upon the suffering of the world. A large dollop of humility, and perhaps a healthy sense of humor, may be in order.
We have introduced the notion that what we are doing in Zen training is, after all, only developing our penchant for independent thinking, along with its counterpart, a capacity for interdependent action. This is the tightrope we walk, while keeping all the balls in the air, of the many influences surrounding us. The nexus of near-infinite causes and conditions can bring about analysis paralysis if we succumb to the usual approach to defining and solving problems based on self-defense. What is called for is recognition and acceptance of the Japanese proverb cited by Master Dogen: “Fall down seven times; get up eight!” We need to give ourselves permission to fail in the social realm.
Partisanship in politics requires that we suspend independent thinking. We are often prevailed upon to subscribe to views and opinions that may not be fully vetted or justified, in order to take advantage of the opportunities of the moment, to win over sufficient numbers of voters to the cause. But when we examine the sources of the ideological divide, it seems that underlying factors, which would fall into the skandha of “mental formations,’ or unconscious volition, may play a greater role than we think.
Further to the point, a recent article in the New York Times by Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College, titled “Are You Thinking for Yourself?” approached the problem of ideological division from a demographical perspective:
If you’re trying to guess whether people are Republicans or Democrats, knowing a few basic facts about them will take you a long way. What’s their race and gender? How far did they get in school? What part of the country do they live in and is their community urban, suburban, or rural?
He goes on to support the point with examples, which we will not detail here. His basic conclusion is that your demographics often determine what you believe, in regards to your general worldview, as well as political leanings. A seemingly determinative factor is that of the influence of parents and family. A majority of partisans of the new generation reflect the ideology of their parentage, apparently going back for generations.
From this we might conclude that the vast majority of voters are going to be biased in favor of their family and social history from childhood – nature and nurture – and not likely to be persuaded by rational or ideological argument to switch allegiances. This suggests that the majority of campaign messages and ads attempting to sway so-called independents and moderates to join one camp or another may be a waste of time and money. It might be more effective to track the generational histories of constituencies, homing in on the genetically captive audience, known colloquially as “the base.” New coalitions may be limited by this unseen dimension, holding steady through generations.
Please indulge an exercise involving simple mathematics, something we do not often engage in to make a point about Zen, or the teachings of Buddhism. But we have to admit that a major factor in differentiating our lives and times from those of our Zen ancestors is the burgeoning population and geometrically expanding demographics of the modern age. Pardon me while I “do the math,” with an assist from my onboard calculator, using search results from online sources, both inaccessible to the ancients.
The current US population is estimated at about 333 million, of which roughly 240 million, or 72% of the total, are eligible to vote. In 2020, around 66% of those eligible actually registered and voted, a record, but representative of less than 50% of the total population. The Democrat candidate won the election with a little over 51% of the vote, while the Republican candidate lost, with about 47% of the vote. Political spending in the 2020 election totaled $14.4 billion – more than doubling the total cost of the also record-breaking 2016 cycle – according to opensecrets.org. So the last victory came at a cost of about $2000 a vote, if my math is correct.
Even though a record 60-plus percent of eligible voters turned out in the 2020 election, the final decision was made by a miniscule fraction – 0.03% -- of the total, assuming the count was accurate, and that my math is close enough for jazz. Throw in the electoral college, with its handful of “swing states,” and the final decision comes down to a cohort less than the population of the metro area of Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.
Yet the winners (and losers) not only endeavor to rewrite history to favor their cause, they also claim to enjoy the mandate of “the American people,” a tiny portion of whom actually put them in office. Or threw them out.
The losing side famously claimed the election was stolen through voter fraud, though the electoral college tally came in at 306 to 232, a decisive difference, along with the overage of multiple millions of voters in the popular vote. But, as we hasten to say, that’s a story for another day. Who are we to argue the truth of politics? Zen calls upon us to challenge the truth of our very senses!
So we have to look at whatever leaders we get as being “the leaders we deserve,” in the context of a system demonstrably incapable of representing the “will of the people,” let alone “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The fact that a large percentage opt out, and others are disenfranchised, belies a foundational tenet of the democratic republic: “one man-one vote.” This remains an ideal, one that may be forever out of reach, even with our vaunted technical connectivity. It may come down to a matter of free will, or the inexorable ignorance of the modern hoi polloi. Nobody is legally required to vote, after all, which may be a good thing. Further into the article, Gross generalizes:
Although there are certainly people whose politics defy generalization, the underlying demographic tendencies are powerful predictors of belief – powerful enough that elections have become as much a turnout game as an exercise in persuasion.
Do tell. But if it takes $2 grand a pop to get a single person to the polls, one has to question whether it is possible to turn that massive a “push” into a “pull,” to borrow from marketing terminology. Of course, there are those who would question whether it is wise to target people who are disinclined to vote in the first place. How informed would their choices likely be, if they are finally dragged out of their inertia, and into the polls?
Gross concludes his essay with a turn to something deeper, the humanity underlying our behavior, including political activism:
By all means, let’s duke it out in the public sphere and at the ballot box. You’ll fight for you interests and I’ll fight for mine. That’s democracy in a big, diverse, boisterous nation.
But if we could bear in mind that we sometimes stumble into our most passionately held beliefs, the tenor of our discourse might be a bit saner and more cordial. The fact that we are all deeply social creatures, in politics and otherwise, underscores our shared humanity – something that we would be wise to never lose sight of.
Whether or not you agree with the implicit assumption that making the tenor of our public discourse saner and more cordial would be a good thing – many seem to feel the opposite, that the squeakier the wheel, the more grease it will get – most would probably agree with the appeal to our shared humanity, and recognize the lamentable truism of frequently stumbling into our most passionately held beliefs.
Aye, there’s the rub – that our actions within the social sphere, including the political arena, are too often based on belief, rather than reality. Here is where Zen comes in.
The deeper implicit assumption is that our shared humanity is necessarily a good thing. But I think Buddhism points to something deeper. We do not aspire to human nature in Zen – we aspire to buddha nature. Meaning to wake up to the deeper meaning and implications of our lives – our very existence – beyond the immediate and local causes and conditions impinging upon us, including the political machinations of our fellow travelers.
Again, my intent in these essays is to emphasize the necessity of the practice of Zen in an election year cycle, not to persuade you of anything, other than the efficacy of sitting in zazen to straighten this mess out for yourself. That said, or resaid, I do encourage you to vote. You will make the right choice, informed by your meditation, I am sure.
In the next episode of UnMind, we will return to considerations of more broadly focused adaptation of design thinking principles of problem definition and potential solutions in everyday life, of which politics is only one, if one of the most noisy and noisome.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the last two episodes of UnMind, we continued our review of the design intent of the Three Treasures of Buddhism, first focusing on joining the Sangha, or Zen community; then on studying the Dharma. In this segment, we will analyze practicing what Buddha himself did, the central and indispensable method of Zen’s meditation.
I have written extensively elsewhere on how zazen differs from other styles of meditation. Herein we will examine its more physical aspects, and how they may help determine its effectiveness. While the other two legs of the Buddhist stool are necessary for a well-balanced Zen life on social and intellectual levels, zazen is the most crucial and pivotal practice on the personal level. According to Soto Zen, upright seated mediation is necessary to open the Dharma gate to genuine insight. It is Dogen’s “excellent method,” that he asserted “carries on the Buddha’s teaching endlessly.”
When we examine in minute detail the sitting posture, the full breathing cycle, and the focus of attention recommended in zazen, we cannot help but feel incredulous at its simplicity, that something so basic and simple as sitting still enough, upright enough, and long enough, could have any substantive effect on consciousness itself.
When it comes to design intent, usually we can look for ways to tweak the design of a given product or process, here and there, to see if we can improve it. Zazen is already so simple that those tweaks have been done, and long ago. There is not much to the method that can be further refined, or eliminated. The zafu itself, the sitting cushion, is likewise nearly irreducibly simple, a design presumably first developed in China.
In production processes used to implement various design-build systems, we look for what are termed “secondary” operations. They may force changes in the setup of the assembly line; or call for additional equipment; or require multiple phases. We may find that we can eliminate certain of these extra steps, or combine them with other operations, to make the process more efficient, i.e. streamlined. Early examples include the Ford assembly line. It is important to arrange the steps in any production process in the proper sequence, to avoid wasted time and motion. A technical early version of this approach is called “critical path management,” or CPM. One of its terms, the “true antecedent,” a critical piece in getting the sequence right, might apply to Zen.
What would be the true antecedent to insight ‑ Buddha’s awakening ‑ to take the least obvious, but penultimate example? In Soto Zen, we would lobby for zazen, probably. But, as Bodhidharma is credited with saying, meditation it is not absolutely necessary to insight. He indicated that all one has to do is “grasp the vital principle.” In other words, no causal connection can be dependably established between the act of sitting in zazen, and the triggering of Dharmic insight. It happens that most of us are not ripe and ready enough for that level of grasping, and we are carrying a lot of conceptual weight, so we need to spend some time in our meditation, to jettison the excess baggage.
The great Indian sage is also recognized for bringing the direct practice of zazen to China. He created a model during meditation of four levels of observation: the breath; physical sensations; emotional sensations or mood swings; and conceptual constructions. Notably, his four-pointed model is in itself such a construction. One conclusion that he drew from this approach is that, like the breath, we realize that the other three dimensions are impermanent, ever-changing. And so must be the observer.
Using Matsuoka-roshi’s threefold division into what he termed “dispositions” – posture, breath, and attention – we can examine them one at a time to determine their design intent. A caveat: “design intent” is more tightly focused than intent in general. It is connected to function, as in the old design saw coined by 19th Century architect Louis H. Sullivan, “form follows function.” Of course, our larger or deeper intent in practicing Zen goes to the Buddhist skandha of “mental formations,” sometimes rendered as intention, motive or desire; the multivarious purposes underlying the “three actions” of body, mouth, and mind. That may be a subject for another time.
For now, let’s begin by looking at the posture. Of the four cardinal postures – standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, as mentioned in the Metta Sutta – why would sitting be the posture of choice for meditation? For one, it is obviously the most efficient in terms of energy consumption, other than lying down, compared to which, sitting is more conducive to alertness, as we are accustomed to sleeping in a horizontal position.
The upright aspect of the sitting posture is crucial. Aligning our bilaterally symmetrical skeleton and musculature is the most direct way to achieve equipoise, a state of equilibrium within the forcefield of gravity. When the body is arrayed in this position, the spine and spinal cord become our “zero axis” in spacetime, the center of our being in the matrix of the proximate physical causes and conditions of existence. This is the physical basis of “samadhi” ‑ centeredness and balance ‑ the key to entering stillness.
Arching the small of the back, and pulling back on the chin, we establish two pressure-points, one at the base of the spine and one the base of the neck, which pull the spine into its natural s-curve, resulting in what Matsuoka-roshi described as a “sitting-mountain feeling,” one of immense stability. He would comment that when the posture is reaching a state of perfection, it feels as if you are pushing the crown of your head against the ceiling, like a column or post. But with the caveat that we always aim at the perfect posture, never imagining that we have achieved it.
Standing shares this upright alignment, but the entire weight of the body is delivered to the roughly square foot of the surface area of the feet and ankles, rather than distributed over the three-pointed base of the cross-legged posture (“full lotus,” J. kekka fuza), or similarly, the kneeling posture (J. seiza). Walking is obviously infinitely more complex, though walking meditation (J. kinhin) is certainly effective, dubbed “zazen in motion.”
Minimal supporting gear is the one concession that Zen seems to make to our natural desire for physical comfort, perching on a cushion (J. zafu) on top of a square mat (J. zabuton) or kneeling on the seiza bench. But I think the lift has to do with maintaining the proper disposition of the angle between the upright spine and the body’s main hinge at the hip joint. We sit slightly forward on the cushion or chair so that the hips are above the knees, at an angle of about 10 or 15 degrees to the floor. This allows the weight of the trunk and upper body to distribute equally between the knees resting on the mat and the “sitz” bones that form the bottom of the pelvis.
These two arching protuberances form a kind of built-in rocking chair, which, when the lower back is properly arched, provides a stable base on the cushion or kneeling bench, as well as on a chair. In the cross-legged postures in particular, when resistance arises in the knees or in the back, it is our body telling us that we are pitched too far forward, in the former case, or leaning too far backward, in the latter. Matsuoka-roshi often noted that we have to keep making small adjustments to the posture over time, “working your way through every bone in your body,” to finally find that “sweet spot” right in the middle.
The rocking motion that we are encouraged to engage at the beginning and end of each session of zazen helps us find the center of the upright and balanced posture. Starting with a large, arcing pendulum swing to the left and right, forward and back, and / or around in circle, we gradually decrease the length of the arc to a smaller and smaller swing, or spiral, until it comes to center. In this way we can correct our own posture from time to time, and particularly when first settling into the posture. It also allows for the body’s muscles and connective hard tissue to stretch and adapt for the greatest level of comfort. Zazen, as we say, should be the “comfortable way.”
Reversing this motion at the end of the sit, starting with a small, then gradually larger pendulum swing, allows the body to loosen up, and relieve any numbness that may have set in during the session. Numbness does not necessarily indicate poor circulation, but the natural adaptation of the body to sitting still for long periods of time.
In summary, we are looking to recover, or rediscover, the natural posture. In more primitive times, our ancestors sat around the campfire, sitting upright and still while hunting, in order not to spook the prey. Your body knows this posture. Listen to it. The design intent of the zazen posture is, in one sense, to return to our normal, natural posture, while remaining fully alert.
The same may be said of the breath. The natural breath adapts to the pressures of the moment. When walking or running, we palpitate, breathing rapidly, and often, irregularly. When we lie down to sleep, our breath slows down to a more regular rhythm. Sitting in zazen is a bit like falling asleep while staying awake.
Our body knows this natural breath, just as it knows the upright, balanced posture. In zazen, we relinquish our usual effort to control the body in terms of resistance to pain, allowing ourselves to go beyond our normal comfort zone. Likewise, we drop our tendency to control the breath, other than occasionally counting it, or some other measure of inducing more strict observation. We begin to see the breath slowing down as the body settles into stillness. If we pay close attention, we can feel our heartbeat slowing as well. We enter into a deeper stillness, our more natural state of being.
While adjustments to the posture are primarily physical, we move beyond the purely physical as we turn our attention to the breath and attention itself. Traditional zazen instructions emphasize attitudinal adjustments, observing the natural process of breathing and thinking with scientific detachment, and less controlling impulses. This is especially helpful in dealing with the tendency of discriminating mind (S. citta) to vacillate, from one extreme position to another, just as the breath is continually shifting from inhaling to exhaling. We are all bi-polar to some extent. The analytical function of the mind is skewed toward self-survival, triggering the so-called “monkey mind,” that frantic, chattering creature behind the all-too-familiar internal dialog.
The idea of “breath control” is ingrained in the culture, perhaps primarily through the popularization of yoga in the West, but also incorporated in such areas of endeavor as athletics, aerobic exercise, and technical training in singing, or playing wind instruments. The body is actually controlling the breath, in a subliminal context of oxygen deprivation relative to the degree of physical exertion involved in sitting, standing, walking, or lying down, exercising or running, as the case may be. Our degree of control over the breath on a conscious, intentional level is minimal. The main reason Zen meditation asks us to focus our attention on the breath is that, usually, we do not. Raising awareness of the cycle of breathing ‑ which is, after all, our main lifeline ‑ returns our attention to what is most important in life. The heartbeat represents a deeper level, the metronome of life.
When we turn our attention to attention itself, we have reached the apogee of attention, having come full circle. Now, we are paying attention to attention itself. Here is where we begin to see the genius of Tozan Ryokai’s cryptic: “Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words; like facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other.”
Bodhidharma was not contemplating the wall, as the visiting pundits of China thought; he was contemplating nothing in particular, everything in general. Or we might say he was contemplating contemplation itself. The “self selfing self,” as Uchiyama-roshi termed it, in his unique turn-of-a-phrase, conjuring a “turning phrase” (J. wato) to describe the indescribable, the ineffable essence of objectless meditation (J. shikantaza).
Here, once again, we have come to the end of language. As I closed the session on the design intent of Dharma, Buddhism’s truth is uniquely experiential. Master Dogen’s intent is the same as that of all Zen ancestors past, future, and present: apprising us of the futility of pursuing literal, linear understanding, especially in its manifestation as verbal expression. We are to turn our attention, instead, to the immediate and intimate, dropping away of the self of body and mind, before interpretation can interfere.
For more detail on Zen’s meditative approach to posture, breath and attention, listen to UnMind podcasts #119, #120 and #121.
In the next segment, we will return to examining the passing pageantry of the endless, unremitting quadrennial, election-year campaign, from the unique perspective of Zen Buddhism.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the last segment of UnMind, we took up the most social of the Three Treasures: Sangha, or community. In this segment, we will continue with our analysis of the design of Dharma study; and in the next, that of Buddha practice, Zen’s unique meditation, or zazen. These three constitute the highest values and manifestations of Buddhism in the real world, and the simplest model for the comprehensive nature of living a Zen life. They are regarded as three legs, without any one of which the stool of Zen is unstable. Design intent is reflected in their modus operandi, message, and method, respectively.
Dharma study consists in reviewing and contemplating the “compassionate teachings,” the message transmitted by Shakyamuni and the ancestors down to the present day. While they were all, in effect, “speaking with one voice,” nonetheless Dharma ranks second in importance and emphasis, as an adjunct to meditation, just as Sangha comes in third, in providing the harmonious community and conducive environment for Zen. As referenced in Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi:
Grass, trees and walls bring forth the teaching for all beings
Common people as well as sages
The “walls” are the infrastructure that was built around personal and communal practice in the form of our sitting space at home, grass hut hermitages, and meditation halls of temples, centers, or monasteries. This is the millennia-old design-build activity of the ancestors attested to by the stupas of India and the monasteries of China, Tibet, Japan, and the Far East, the legacy inherited by modern proponents of Zen in the West.
Dharma likewise has been codified, collected, and contained in tangible documents, originally in the form of rice paper scrolls, now in books distributed worldwide in hardbound and paperback format. My own two current volumes in print ‑ “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen” ‑ were actually printed and bound in India, the home country of Buddhism They are also, or will soon be, available in electronic form, as eBooks and audiobooks accessible to virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime.
It is as if Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion – s/he of the innumerable eyes and ears needed to see and hear the sights and sounds of dukkha in the world, with innumerable arms and hands bringing the tools necessary to help ‑ has come to be manifested globally, in the form of the worldwide network of mobile media. By means of which her ongoing witness to the suffering of the world is also recorded for posterity. Thus, the potential for Dharma to have an effect on the world at large has expanded exponentially, as in the vow: “I take refuge in Dharma, the compassionate teachings.”
Taking refuge in the Dharma means returning ‑ or “fleeing back” ‑ to the original truths or laws of existence, and our place in it. Consider what the first teachings of Buddha really had to say, and what was their intended effect upon the audience. The First Sermon lays out the essential logic of the Middle Way, and its avoidance of extremes of attitudes and approaches to the fundamental problem of existence as a sentient, human being.
The design intent of the Dharma as expounded by Shakyamuni Buddha, was, as far as we can determine from the written record, to correct the conventional wisdom of the time, which I take to have been primarily based on beliefs and doctrines of Hinduism. One well-known example is his teaching of anatta or anatman, a refutation of the Hindu belief in a self-existent soul, or atman. Not being a scholar, I am basing this on my scant study of the canon and the opinion of others more learned than I.
Considering how the Dharma was first shared gives us an insight more technically oriented to the intent of its design. In the beginning was the spoken word of Siddhartha Gautama, similar to the Bible’s creation story. Buddha never committed a single word to paper, or so we are told. It is also said that he “never spoke a word,” a comment I take to mean that while language can point at the truths of Buddhism, it cannot capture them. Buddhist truth is uniquely experiential. It has to go through a kind of translation into language that is beyond language itself, as in the last stanza of Hsinhsinming‑Trust in Mind:
Words! The Way is beyond language for in it
there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today
Later given the honorifics of “Buddha, ‑ fully awakened one” and “Shakyamuni ‑ sage of the Shakya clan,” and others, ten in total, Siddhartha’s First Sermon to the five ascetics with whom he had been practicing, begins with:
O monks, these two extremes ought not be followed by one
going forth from the household life. What are the two?
There is devotion to the indulgence of self-gratification
Which is low, common, the way of ordinary people
Unworthy and unprofitable
There is devotion to the indulgence of self-mortification
Which is painful unworthy and unprofitable
Avoiding both these extremes the Tathagata has realized the Middle Way
It gives vision it gives knowledge and it leads to calm to insight to awakening to Nirvana
The intent of the content was to dissuade these monks from continuing to follow the dictates of their method of asceticism, which Buddha had found to be ineffective, to say the least. And to hold out the hope that if they were able to relinquish their own opinions of the truth they were seeking, and the method for apprehending it, they would be able to accede to the insight that he had experienced directly in meditation, the “middle way.”
“Tathagata,” by the way, is also one of the ten honorifics accorded to Buddha later in the course of his teaching career, meaning something like the “thus-come one.” It was most likely appended to this narrative when finally committed to written form, some four centuries after-the-fact.
But our point is that the spoken language was the medium in which the teaching was first shared. Buddha was said to have spoken Pali, which is similar to, and perhaps a dialect of, Sanskrit. The theory I have heard explaining why they were not recorded in written form is that they were considered sacred, and writing them down would have made them vulnerable to accidental or intentional change. The oral tradition was more dependable in terms of preserving them with their original intent intact.
So the “design intent” of Buddha’s use of kind or loving speech was not the usual intent of language in general. It was intended to encourage others to apprehend the “Great Matter” of life-and-death in the most direct way, the only way, possible. Buddha recognized that there was no way of sharing his experience with others in the ordinary sense, so he resorted to parables and analogies, to allow his audience to see themselves in the pictures he painted, and to transcend ordinary understanding in words and phrases, or the pursuit of information, the usual application of language.
The later codifying and organization of the original spoken teachings into the Tripitaka or “three baskets” was designed to allow teachers and students to study the voluminous canon in an orderly way, and to prioritize their approach to it in digestible bites. It was most likely understood that the existing literature of the time ‑ which had to be scarce, compared to today’s glut of publications – was to be absorbed in concert with practicing the meditation that had led to Buddha’s insight to begin with. As Master Dogen reminds:
Now all ancestors and all buddhas who uphold buddha-dharma
have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright
practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling samadhi
Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way
It was done so because teachers and disciples
personally transmitted this excellent method
as the essence of the teaching
In the authentic tradition of our teaching
it is said that this directly transmitted straightforward buddha- dharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable
The design intent of the teachings has been, from the very beginning, the direct transmission of the buddha-dharma, what Matsuoka-roshi referred to as “living Zen.” In the daily lives of monks and nuns, frequent repetition of chanting selected teachings enabled the monastics to deeply assimilate them. Master Dogen was known for connecting each and every regular daily routine with brief recitations, such as the Meal Verse, in order to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane, the physical and the spiritual.
Codification of the koan collections of Rinzai Zen ‑ some 1700 strong according to tradition, later organized into five sets by Hakuin Ekaku Zenji, the 18th Century Rinzai master ‑ represent design efforts to structure the lore and legacy of Zen’s anecdotal history of exchanges between masters and students available in progressive levels of difficulty, enabling accessibility of the apparent dichotomies of Dharma. Soto Zen simplifies the approach even further by regarding zazen itself as representing the living koan, requiring nothing further to complement, or complicate, the process of insight.
All the various models of buddha-dharma developed by the ancients qualify as efforts in information design ‑ visualizing images and what is called “pattern-thinking” ‑ that allow us to grasp the form of the Dharma beyond what mere words can convey. The Four Noble Truths comprise the first historical example of these descriptive models, including the prescriptive Noble Eightfold Path. Tozan’s “Five Ranks” and Rinzai’s “Host and Guest” come later, but have the same design intent – to help their students get beyond the limitation of the linear nature of language. My semantic models of the teachings, published in “The Razorblade of Zen,” represent more contemporary cases in point.
Nowadays ‑ as testimonial evidence indicates, from one-on-one encounters in online and in-person dharma dialogs with modern students of the Way ‑ people are no longer studying buddha-dharma as they may have throughout history, when documents were rare. More often than not, they are reading more than one book at a time, in a nonlinear process I refer to as “cross-coupling”: simultaneously absorbing commentaries from one author or translator along with others; or perhaps comparing the teachings of more than one ancestor of Zen to those of a different ancestor.
This may be an artifact or anomaly of the ubiquitous presence and availability of Zen material in print form, as well as the encyclopedic scope of online resources on offer today. It seems that in every category, and every language, we have at our fingertips a greater textual resource than ever conceivable in history, dwarfing the great libraries of legend. We can “google” virtually anything – no pun - with a few strokes of a keyboard. In addition, Artificial Intelligence threatens to bring together summaries and concoctions of content at the whim of any researcher; documents are readily searchable for those who wish to quantify uses of words and phrases at any point in history, teasing out trends and making judgments as to the hidden patterns in historical evolution of ideas.
In this context it is difficult to ascertain the design intent of dharma as articulated today. It is not easy to discern the intent of the publish-or-perish, rush-into-print crowd, or to judge whether a given piece of contemporary writing is worth our effort and time to read.
Fortunately, Zen offers a wormhole out of this literary catch-22. Zazen provides recourse to an even greater inventory of databases, built into our immediate sensorium. We can always return to upright sitting, facing the wall. This is where we will find the nonverbal answers we are seeking so feverishly, and somewhat futilely, in “words and letters” as Master Dogen reminds us in his seminal tract on meditation, Fukanzazengi:
You should stop pursuing words and letters
and learn to withdraw and turn the light on yourself
when you do so your body and mind will naturally fall away
and your original buddha-nature will appear
This stanza is sometimes interpreted as a slam on the nature of contemporaneous Rinzai practice predominant in the Japan of Dogen’s time. But I think we should take a broader view of the great master’s intent. He is merely cluing us in to the fact of the futility of pursuing literal, linear understanding of the Dharma in its manifestation as verbal expression. We are to turn our attention, instead, to the immediate and intimate presence of the self of body-and-mind ‑ beyond, or before, words can interfere. Here is where, and now is when, we will witness the full force of the design intent of the Dharma.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the next three segments of UnMInd we will take up the Three Jewels, Gems, or Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha - the highest values of Buddhism - from the perspective of their design intent. Buddha practice - time on the cushion dedicated to recovering our original, awakened nature ‑ is the most important dimension in the Zen, or meditation schools. Dharma study – reviewing and contemplating the teachings transmitted by Shakyamuni and the ancestors down to the present day ‑ comes second in importance and emphasis, as an adjunct to meditation.
While participation in and service to the Sangha ranks third in the tripartite hierarchy, all three legs of the stool are considered essential to leading a balanced life of Zen. It will be most appropriate to take them in reverse order, beginning with Sangha, or community, the one most fully integrated with the social dimension. The Refuge Verse, usually chanted on a daily basis, and translated variously, reads:
I take refuge in Buddha
I take refuge in Dharma
I take refuge in Sangha
I take refuge in Buddha the fully awakened One
I take refuge in Dharma the compassionate teachings
I take refuge in Sangha the harmonious community
I have completely taken refuge in Buddha
I have completely taken refuge in Dharma
I have completely taken refuge in Sangha
The act of taking refuge may be interpreted in a variety of ways; from the New Oxford American Dictionary:
• a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble: he was forced to take refuge in the French embassy | I sought refuge in drink.
• something providing shelter: the family came to be seen as a refuge from a harsh world.
• an institution providing safe accommodations for women who have suffered violence from a spouse or partner.
Its etymological origin is defined as:
late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin refugium, from Latin re- ‘back’ + fugere ‘flee’.
Over the two-and-a-half millennia of the history of Buddhism, the communities of monks and/or nuns originating in India may indeed have comported with all of the above definitions at one time or another, with the possible exception of seeking refuge in drink, which may be more characteristic of lay practice. Certain modern Zen masters have been known for their fondness for sake and beer, as was Matsuoka roshi.
The dictionary definitions share a decidedly fraught connotation of seeking “shelter from the storm,” to quote Master Dylan. But when we look at the role of the Zen community in the context of modern-day America, we can see that taking refuge in the sangha has less wary, socially positive functions as well – beginning with that of providing community, itself. True community is an increasingly rare commodity in today’s mobile society, where we as householders may or may not know our neighbors; and if we do, we may not for long, as they, or we, may move several times in one lifetime. In ancient India, China and the Far East, people may have been more likely to stay put in their birthplace, unless they were driven to flee danger or trouble. Today, we have displaced persons approaching an estimated 110 million, the largest refugee population in history.
When we analyze the design intent of western Zen communities, which manifest a mix of traditional protocols and adaptations to modernity, we have to take into account that the monastic model is no longer the predominant form, outnumbered as it is by the expanding cohort of lay householders. People of all walks of life are taking up the practice of Zen in their daily lives ‑ including participation in programs offered by Zen centers and temples in their neighborhoods, or within a reasonable commute ‑ returning to families and professional livelihoods, partaking of practice opportunities when and where they can fit them in. I call this “guerilla Zen”: we hit it and run; hit it and run; engaging more formal training with a simpatico group, while sustaining daily practice at home, at work, and at play. Everything is eventually subsumed under Zen.
Churches and other associations share this paradoxical characteristic, caricatured by the “Sunday saints, Monday sinners” trope. Zen centers do not typically preach morality from the pulpit, but offer some degree of sanctuary in which members can retrench, to reenter the fray of daily life from a more balanced perspective and stance. This is reflected in the Sixteen Precepts of Zen, which we will not detail here, but include such social parameters as not killing, stealing or lying, not indulging in gossip, and so on.
The key characteristic by which a Zen sangha is defined is captured in the expression, “harmonious community.” We all belong to, or partake in, various communities and subgroups in our personal, family, and professional lives, but not all of them would meet the high bar of harmony that is associated with a Zen community, or that of a church. We are expected to leave our lesser angels at the doorstep, and aspire to a higher level of behavior, particularly with regard to our fellow seekers of awakened awareness.
Compared to other socially-determined groups, such as those found in retirement homes, extended care facilities, private clubs and gated communities, one difference is that a sangha welcomes all comers, however diverse in terms of age, gender, income, background and education, or other social factors by which groups tend to discriminate. “Birds of a feather” and all. Zen groups assume that members are like-minded in their pursuit of the Dharma, and it quickly becomes apparent when newcomers join a sangha for all the wrong reasons. Attendees joining Zen retreats or undertaking residential practice are analogized to stones tumbling in a stream, rubbing all the rough edges off, until we become smooth and polished – harmonious - in our interactions with others.
Several dimensions of the Zen environment yield clues to its design intent, and where it may differ from other communities. These will vary from group to group, based on the history and traditions unique to each lineage, the legacy of its founders, and, of course, personalities. Generally, we are encouraged to overlook minor superficial differences in protocols and procedures, focusing on the underlying intent of propagating Buddha practice - meditation; and promulgating Dharma – study of the teachings; the two highest-ranking values in Zen. Let’s look at a few characteristic behavioral forms and features to be found in multiple “practice places of buddha-tathagatas everywhere,” to borrow a phrase from Master Dogen:
OBSERVING SILENCE
An emphasis on observing long periods of silence is unusual in most public gatherings, noting exceptions such as monastic assemblies devoted to vows of silence, or Quaker congregations. Restraining speech can feel awkward, even artificial; but in time it becomes a welcome source of respite and relief from the usual pressure to engage in small talk in most social and fellowship settings. In Zen, special attention is given to being mindful while others are meditating, taking heed to move quietly, as well as foregoing unnecessary speech.
MAINTAINING SIMPLICITY
Visual simplicity complements acoustical silence in the form of clutter control, straightforward layout and organization of the space and furnishings, and movement through it. The meditation hall, or zendo, is a particular focus of this principle, but it applies to all the shared public spaces of the facility. The catchphrase is “leave no traces” - which has personal meaning in terms of attachment and aversion - but is manifested in communal environs by putting things back where they belong, fluffing sitting cushions, straightening shoes on the shoe shelf, and so on. Emphasis is on reducing distraction that might intrude upon or interfere with the experience of others.
CLEANING
Part of the process of achieving simplicity is the ritualization of temple cleaning, in Japanese, soji. Matsuoka-roshi would often say, “Cleaning is cleaning the mind.” The very act of decluttering the space relieves the mind of mental clutter. He would say “I like to keep it empty around here.” It is understood that “the dust itself is immaculate,” of course, that nothing is really “dirty” in any absolute sense. But attitudes and approaches “providing a space conducive to practice” – a unique definition of generosity, or dana, offered by a senior member of HH the Dalai Lama’s inner circle, when giving a talk at ASZC some years ago – are meant to accommodate the relative level of perception, that “cleanliness is next to godliness,” as cited by St. Thomas Aquinas.
TRAINING
Cleaning the environment is a specific activity within the larger category of Zen training in general. We train ourselves to serve the community through these various activities, while at the same time serving our own needs for simplicity, silence, and so on. We train in what has proved necessary to establish and maintain sustainable group practice in the public sphere. Aspects of how we approach this in the context of community may begin to bleed over into our personal lives at home and at work. We may find ourselves growing more attentive to our home or office environment, assuming more ownership and authorship over their functions, and their impact upon mindfulness on a daily basis. Training in Zen manifests this “halo effect,” a natural enhancement of Zen awareness.
BOWING AND CHANTING
The intent of Zen ritual may not be apparent at first blush, and so is widely subject to misinterpretation. It looks, on the surface, much like any other service one might observe, in Protestant or Catholic churches, as well as synagogues. Some are put off by the bowing and chanting, reading in such connotations as worship, public religiosity, and obsequiousness, which are all inappropriate projections. While the various formal protocols that have evolved around Zen practice have practical effects of cohering the community, their intent is largely personal.
The Buddhist bow, for example, represents, on one hand, the person we are trying to improve; and on the other, the ideal person we want to emulate, our original buddha-nature. But the palm-to-palm hand position, or mudra in Sanskrit ‑ called gassho in Japanese ‑ symbolizes that just as our two hands are part of the same body, these apparently opposing selves are also just one, or “not-two” as the Ch’an poem “Trust in Mind” reminds us. With repetition, the bow eventually becomes empty of inappropriate connotations. Like emptying a teacup, so that it can be refilled with deeper meaning.
Matsuoka-roshi would often remind us to “Chant with the ears, not with the mouth,” and that the concrete chanting, itself, is the true meaning of the chant. In other words, listen deeply to the chant, which is a Dharma teaching - not a prayer or worship - so that the act of chanting in a group becomes deeply meaningful on a personal level.
In professional design circles, these seemingly innocuous, everyday conventions of maintaining order in space, and harmonious dynamics in time, cannot be overlooked. They are, indeed, regarded as essential deliverables in retail and other commercial environments, where the adverse effects of clutter and noise can be measured in financial terms as loss of business and customer base. The influence of environmental factors may be less obvious in the personal realm. But in the world of Zen, they can provide powerful aids to finding and sustaining harmony with the Great Way, from Zen’s roots in Taoism.
For further pursuit of the symbolism and design intent of the Zen space and protocols, I refer you to Matsuoka-roshi’s early collected talks, “The Kyosaku,” where you will find a chapter on the various elements to be found in most zendos. Meanwhile, remember Master Dogen’s admonition in “Jijuyu Zammai – Self-fulfilling Samadhi”:
Without engaging in incense offering, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance or reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit and thus drop off body and mind.
Sangha, community service, is important, but only to the extent that it provides the conducive environment for Buddha practice and Dharma study.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In this segment, as promised, we will return to the seemingly zero-sum game being played out in the political arena, under the rubric of “Election Year Zen,” episode #3.
As I pointed out in closing the second segment: This, too – “politics” is the Dharma. While the course of action that Buddha and the Ancestors of Zen undertook, within the constraints of their cultural context, may not have had obvious political motivations, the very act of establishing and maintaining Zen practice whether in the form of intentional communities such as a monastery, or less ambitiously, a neighborhood temple or even a hermitage the effect of doing so upon the local society, and by extension upon the powers-that-be of the era, must have had undeniable political ramifications. Variations on this theme are recorded throughout the history of Zen.
In our life and times, as of the last UnMind posting we had just passed Super Tuesday in this year’s campaign cycle, and now have witnessed the POTUS deliver the annual State of the Union (SOTU) address. Which has, willy-nilly, evolved into a “state-of-the-campaign” address, over the last several 4-year election cycles, as just another blip on the screen of the endless, unremitting campaign, earning its own alphabet-soup acronym S-O-T-U – abbreviation.
But before we get into the implications for Zen and its relevance to our lives, let me restate a caveat that not only bears repetition, but apparently, and unfortunately, requires it. That is, that Zen, or Buddhism, is not intrinsically political. Or, as is usually stated, it is apolitical. As I characterize it, using my favorite prefix, Zen is un-political.
Nonetheless, I am painfully aware that any message about politics, however well-intentioned, is in danger of being interpreted as political, even partisan, in nature. This is a modern catch-22 that has less to do with content than it has to do with context, owing to the highly partisan cultural and ideological divide that has infected the populace with a social and mental virus more virulent than COVID 19. I had forgotten that the virus had made its debut on my birthday, until I came across this reminder in the news feed:
How quickly we forget. I would say “how quickly they forget,” but that would lend to the “us and them” divisiveness plaguing us today. It is just that kneejerk a reaction. I didn’t read the promised “update on where things stand,” but we can assume that it claims some upsides, such as that the virus seems to have been relatively tamed, at long last. But one downside is that the political picture has, if anything, gotten worse.
Both sides of the chasm that is the partisan campaign seem to be bullish on their chances, but could not be more different in their platforms, or lack thereof. Whichever team you are pulling for, you may be reading, or dreading or reading into the content of this segment, to conform to your political perspective. I ask you to take a moment to evaluate whether or not that is so. It is a subtle, subliminal, and insidious phenomenon. A curse.
I sometimes wonder if my birth date is also more of a curse than a blessing. The tsunami and meltdown at Fukushima also occurred on March 11, earlier in 2011. If my birth is a kind of curse, it calls into question all of the Panglossian views of this existence as the best of all possible worlds. Maybe this is, in actuality, “Earth 2.” In the penultimate stanza of the Metta Sutta or “Loving Kindness Sutra” it says:
Standing or walking; sitting or lying down; during all one’s waking hours
let one cherish the thought that this way of living is the best in the world
Even this most benign paean to hope: “May all beings be happy”; would most likely be twisted to conform to a one-sided view of reality, if it became just another bumper-sticker in today’s cavalier campaign.
Moving right along: POTUS kicked off the SOTU with a reference to 1941, the year of my birth, citing FDR’s New Deal, which, incidentally, kicked off the alphabet-soup metaphor for the multivarious departments Roosevelt created – the FBI, the CIA, and so on and on and on. He also mentioned Harry Truman, claiming the mantle of both past presidents, while highlighting the current threat to the very institutions of government, and the emphasis on defending democracy, that they and Ronald Reagan, the other party’s past leading man, ostensibly championed.
Which brings us to another point about nonpolitical outcomes of purportedly political decisions: the WWII bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Which, for those of us who have inherited the legacy and lineage of Zen from our Japanese predecessors, constitutes a koan of truly agonizing proportions. Just as we cannot condone the “collateral damage” inflicted upon innocent civilians and children in the case of Russia and Israel relentlessly bombing Ukraine and Gaza, respectively; we cannot justify the nuclear hell released upon the citizens of Japan by the self-same POTUS “Give-‘em-hell-Harry” that we admire for the accomplishments of his administration. We all share that karma. The atrocity was committed “in our name.” I was about five years old.
Mass bombing of civilians is mass murder. It cannot be rationalized as an act of politics, but represents the collapse, the total bankruptcy, of the international political system. Resorting to brute force in conflicts that our so-called political leaders fail to settle politically means they should be relieved of duty. They are incompetent. This does not ignore the necessity of military defense, in proportional response to military aggression. But it does suggest that the tactics of nonviolent diplomacy need to arise earlier in the process of negotiating conflict, whether on an international, local, or personal scale.
Buddhism’s doctrine of the myth of self seems the place to start, in positing a Buddhist take on these destructive horror shows. And why the impulse to understand the “other,” and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution, does not arise earlier in the process, if ever.
The recent repurposing of the American military forces to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to Gaza may constitute a silver lining in the otherwise gloomy forecast. Let’s engage in a common design-thinking exercise, the “What if?” scenario. What if the overwhelming power of the military could be used as a non-partisan policing function, forcing a cease-fire before the conflict reaches a set limit of civilian casualties, say 5,000? What if humanitarian aid stood ready-to-go near the hot spots of the world, inserted into the area early on, before the match lit the tinderbox? To those who would argue that the expense would be unbearable, I simply point to the much more massive cost of the bombing itself, not to mention the daunting scale and scope of the cleanup and rebuilding of the aftermath, which, of course, profits certain interest groups immensely. We have a saying in design circles, that there is never enough time and money to do it right the first time, but there is always time and money to do it over. What if we could flip that formula, on a global basis. The alternative seems to be “Earth 2.” Some seem resigned to its ultimate triumph over reason and compassion, called “Armageddon”; others seem fully devoted to making sure that the apocalypse comes to pass, fulfilling their favorite prophecy. Proving them, finally, “right.”
It would be the ultimate irony, would it not, if the end of civilization, and the extinction of the human species, comes about not of necessity but from a failure of will, fueled by misinformation? That a small percentage of the population with their fingers on the buttons not only do nothing to prevent the final catastrophe, but actually help to bring it about, based on their religious beliefs? Which then turn out to be wrong! No rapture, no kingdom of God on earth ruled by a savior. Just the rubble of what was once a great potentiality, laid waste by ignorance. Not a dystopian future, but no future at all. The greatest category mistake and unintended consequence in history, accidentally bringing human history to an end. What if this planet of ours turns out to be Earth 2, after all?
This is your, and my, karmic koan-du-jour. Answer quickly, or receive thirty blows of my stick!
In the next series of segments, we will return to more prosaic, everyday explorations of Zen and design thinking, while keeping an eye on the ongoing campaign. In May, we will take another look at the developments to date, with a somewhat jaundiced eye to their relationship to the compassionate teachings. Meanwhile, study your ideology thoroughly in practice.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Monday, March 11, was my birthday, as I mentioned in the last segment of UnMind. Wednesday, March 27th, happens to be my late brother’s birthday. So in his honor, let us continue exploring the theme of Time — its seeming passage and constant presence. He was a professional jazz pianist and teacher of music, and so was fully immersed in time. Once upon a time, while discussing time signatures in music, such as four-four time, three-four time — the familiar waltz tempo — and so on, he leaned toward me, a mischievous smile on his face, saying that, “You know, there is also ‘one-one’ time” – counting off with his forefinger: “One-one-one-one.” He and I had many such dialogs at the intersection of music theory and Zen thinking. He has since passed on, sitting in with that great jazz combo in the sky. I bet he draws a crowd.
(Some of the material in what follows originally appeared as my Dharma Byte of the month, titled “Swords into Plowshares,” in 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing.)
In that message, and at that time, I made the point that privileging the survival of the oldest is not Nature’s way; it is usually the survival of the fittest. It is not natural to put younger members of the species at unreasonable risk, in order to protect the older members. This goes against the natural order, as we witness in survival strategies of wildlife, as well as in social structures of the earliest human tribes. The survival of the species dictates age-related triage, in favor of those most likely to survive, to live longer, and to reproduce. Exceptions always arise to prove the rule; Nature is not simple.
Yet humans reverse this natural logic, in wartime as in the example of the military draft, as well as in recruiting methods for police officers and firefighters. People in their late teens and early twenties often enter into dangerous occupations, in service to the larger community. Those who study such things tell us that neurological networks, including the brain, are not yet fully formed at that age, recognition and fear of mortality typically arising about the mid-twenties, when the brain finishes wiring, as we say. We were doing it again in the face of the pandemic, sending younger first responders into the fray, while protecting elderly and senior members by isolating and quarantining them.
I have reported on my own encounter with COVID 19, which dragged out for the better part of a year, beginning with a three-month up-and-down sickbed recuperation from congestion and other flu-like symptoms, followed by slow recovery of lost strength, flexibility, balance, energy, and the kind of “brain fog” associated with “long covid,” the lingering effects on the nervous system. As part of that recovery, I developed an aggressive approach to the sitting posture and its relationship to the breathing process of Zen meditation, as well as to walking meditation, with its focus on physical balance.
At about the time I began returning to morning meditation sessions, the new era of private billionaire space exploration was heating up, with more frequent launches than ever seen in the history of NASA. Perhaps this was a subliminal prompt to my beginning to count my breaths down to zero, in contrast to the usual counting up from one to four or more, and avoid counting beyond ten, as are common recommendations in Zen.
With an initial, deep inhalation, I would hold the breath for a count of eight or so, while doing a full-body crunch, tensing the core muscle groups, as well as my newly stiffened legs, and weakened arms and shoulders. With the exhalation, I would intone “nine,” then “eight” for the next cycle, and so on, down to “one,” and finally, “zero.” After repeating this pattern for a half-dozen times or so, I would settle more quickly and deeply into the period, while the counting and muscular effort naturally subsided.
A curious thing began to happen each time I would reach zero in the count. By then, my breath would have slowed to five or so cycles per minute, and I could feel my heartbeat. So I found myself counting my heartbeat, instead of my breath. Or rather, noticing how many heartbeats accompanied each cycle of breath. The heartbeat is clearly the metronome of our instrument, the body. And number, or counting, is clearly fundamental to our worldview, intrinsic to all design thinking and measurement, and basic to Zen’s nondualism: “leaping aside from the one and the many,” as Master Dogen reminds us.
As my breath slowed to a lower, slower tempo, my pulse also slowed, synchronizing with the breath. This resulted in a profound degree of stillness in both posture and breath, as well as fixed gaze, affecting my overall sphere of attention, reminding me of Matsuoka-roshi’s comment that the “real zazen” is manifested when the posture, breath and attention all come together in a “unified way.” And that it feels as if you are “pushing the crown of your head against the ceiling” — “mountain-still” stability. I began to feel that unification viscerally, encompassing the apparent “outside” and “inside” dimensions of awareness. Familiar, but more intense than ever before. I call this “returning to zero.”
There are many phrases in the lexicon of Zen that seem to be pointing to this same kind of experiential phenomenon, such as Master Dogen’s “backward step”; the ancient phrase “Shi-kan” meaning something like “stopping and seeing”; the “shamatha-vippasana” pairing of insight meditation; et cetera. The process of letting go — primarily of our own preconceptions, interpretations, and opinions of direct, sensory experience; and by extension, of our concepts and constructions of the world, trying to explain this reality to ourselves — seems inherent in all major systems of cultivating realization. That the method is so quintessentially physical, is what is striking about the Zen approach to just sitting still enough, straight enough, for long enough.
The idea, or concept, of “zero” has philosophical and psychological implications as well. The common trope of the “zero-sum game” is a case in point. The definition online:
A zero-sum game is one in which no wealth is created or destroyed. So, in a two-player zero-sum game, whatever one player wins, the other loses. Therefore, the players share no common interests. There are two general types of zero-sum games: those with perfect information and those without.
This amounts to another version of the meme: that if there are winners, there must be losers, so there can be no actual win-win. This ignorant assumption unfortunately informs much of what passes for political discourse, and socially conservative ideology.
I refer you to the lectures of R. Buckminster Fuller for a fuller exposition of the limitations of the view that there is not enough to go around, and the survival of the fittest means that we must, above all, ensure that we get ours, to hell with the losers. Such innovations as the guaranteed minimum income are beginning to crack the facade of this fundamental error.
The last line, concerning the dual nature of the zero-sum game being dependent upon “perfect information,” may provide a clue as to how the notion of winning and losing connects — or doesn’t — to the personal practice-experience of Zen. Beyond a direct “return to zero” — the personal dimension of awareness on the cushion — there is a returning to zero on the social level, as well as within the natural and universal spheres. In his rephrase of a Ch’an poem, Zazenshin, meaning something like “lancet” or “needle” of zazen, Master Dogen wraps up the penultimate stanza with:
The intimacy without defilement
is dropping off without relying on anything.
The verification beyond distinction between Absolute and Relative
is making effort without aiming at it.
This experience of “intimacy without defilement” is the zero sum point of zazen: nothing to be gained and nothing lost; nothing excluded and nothing extraneous, nothing to share with others – it is too intimate, too close in time and space. The fact that at this point we cannot rely on anything, is another aspect of Zen’s “zero” sum. We sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us, including all the tricks and trinkets we have painstakingly assembled in our toolkit. Our toolkit is exhausted, the tools we usually rely on, relatively or absolutely useless. “Absolute and Relative” constitute one of the last resorts of dualistic thinking; the fundamental bifurcation of “truth” in Buddhism is usually stated as absolute truth versus relative truth. So this “verification” must be of a different order altogether, one that is immeasurable. So far beyond any measurement, is this realization — though there is continuing effort, it is no longer aiming at anything.
This means that there is ultimately nothing of significance to gain or lose in relationships in the social sphere, nor do we have to distort our relationship to biology, our connection to the resources of Natural ecology. In terms of resolving the Great Matter of life and death, we can embrace the inevitability of aging, sickness and death as the central koan — one that comes bundled with birth — the illogical riddle of existence itself. We no longer have to rely on life, itself. Here and now, we arrive at the final zero-sum game.
Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, and its resurrection, as do modern Christians; or in reincarnation, as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus; or rebirth as taught by Buddha, as a corrective to reincarnation; we finally come to face our mortality close-up and personal. It is natural, and universal, whatever its interpretation by the social milieu in which we find ourselves. According to an old Zen metaphor, the only “mate” who will accompany us to the grave, is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, power, or powers of reasoning we may have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of fate and vicissitudes of fortune encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death.
Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally, we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon our reliance on reason itself — spawn of philosophy and that other kind of Enlightenment, the triumph of reasoning over belief. Instead, we find verification of our Zen practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”
Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find oneself, at a pass that is not really negotiable, in any ordinary sense. Paraphrasing Seikan Hasegawa, a Rinzai master, from The Cave of Poison Grass, he reminds us that putting off confrontation with this particular koan of aging, until we find ourselves on the death-bed, is futile: “like eating soup with a fork.” We need to confront this koan when we are young and vigorous — “Stamp life and death on your forehead, never letting it out of your mind” — another Zen pearl of wisdom long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die: Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.
When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her relentless, unforgiving and unsympathetic scythe, as being no different from the sword of Manjusri, cutting through our final delusion. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.
As Kosho Uchiyama reminds us, our whole world is born, and dies, with us. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” In contemplating our inevitable demise as a loss of something, we have to remember that it amounts to returning to where we came from, a kind of null hypothesis that the effect we are dreading is not measurable, or sums to zero:
In scientific research, the null hypothesis is the claim that the effect being studied does not exist. Note that the term "effect" here is not meant to imply a causative relationship.
That last caveat calls to mind the famous Zen koan concerning Baizhang, or Hyakujo, and the fox. The point goes to the question of whether or not an enlightened person would be subject to, or free from, the law of causality. The ancient master responds: “Free from,” and is condemned to be reborn as a fox for five hundred (fox) lifetimes. Baizhang kindly corrects his confusion with something like: “One with causality” or “We do notignore causality,” which liberates the old man.
If we fear death — or, conversely, seek it out; fearing life, instead — we have made an assumption that we know what life is, but do not know what death is; or, conversely, that we prefer death over life; or vice-versa. Either side of this formula ignores the fact that the overall equation inevitably sums to zero.
I came across a pamphlet titled “The 11th Hour,” in my brother’s hospice care clinic, wherein its Christian, female author clarified: Birth is the death of whatever precedes it; death is the birth of whatever follows” — refreshingly without bothering to define the “whatever.”
In the next segment — speaking of zero-sum games — we will return to pick up the monthly thread of “Election Year Zen,” now that we have surpassed Super Tuesday, in this year’s endless campaign cycle. This, too, is the Dharma.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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BRINGING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
It might be said that the function of the discriminating mind (S. citta), in the most general sense, is to render what is perceived as chaos into what may be perceived as order. Of course, this is not an original idea, and has an associated idea that chaos, as we perceive it, may be thought of as a higher level of order, one that is not accessible to our perception. This idea resonates in both the world of Zen and that of art and design thinking.
One would have to speak of a relative degree of order versus a notion of absolute order. However chaotic reality may appear, it is following physical laws that suggest an underlying order that is simply not a respecter of persons, or of the sensibilities of humans. We must come into compliance with reality, rather than expect reality to conform to our expectations or preferences. This, I think, is the fundamental basis of the concept of the “Way” in Taoism, and an underpinning of Zen as it developed in China. However, the Way in Buddhism, as I understand it, is not a hypothesis or theory of objectified reality outside the observer, but exists only in complementary balance with the person.
Our observation of perceived order also exhibits relative degrees, or a spectrum from one extreme to another. For example, our house may be a mess inside, but look orderly on the outside, unless we get evicted and our possessions are dumped on the street. If you peer into parked cars on any city street, they will tell you a story about the person who drives them, or lives in them. Some definitely have that lived-in look, while others are pristine, even sterile-seeming, as are some homes. If you have ever seen the French movie, “Mon Oncle,” or “my uncle.” you may remember its satirical take on the super-white, stainless steel interior, and the housewife’s gloved approach to maintaining its spotless state. My best friend in high school lived in a home where the floors of the living rooms were covered with shag carpet, which was newly popular in the 1950s, but theirs was brilliant white. We had to remove our shoes to enter the house, which was peculiar to me at the time, but later became second nature after being exposed to the Japanese culture, beginning with the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago, in the 1960s. Sensei had us stand at the door with a basket of clean socks to hand to the barefoot hippies coming in off of Halsted Street. In his eyes, they must have appeared as complete barbarians.
If you are in someone’s home as a guest, you might take a peek in the medicine cabinet. There you will see an indication of the sense of order of your host’s mind. (I have never done this, of course; it is very rude.) What is on the shelves, and where, and whether the medicines are outdated, may paint a portrait of how obsessive-compulsive — or happy-go-lucky — your friends may be. Bear in mind that for a couple living together, these issues become instantly, and infinitely, more complicated. Who does what and when, and who is responsible for the resulting mess, becomes entangled in the relationship. Master Dogen, who transplanted what is now called Soto Zen to 13th century Japan from his sojourn in China, used the word katto to identify entanglements, using the analogy of twining vines, like wisteria. This applies not just to the tyranny of possessions and environments, but to the subtle entanglements of relationships themselves.
Other examples of refined order, from the human perspective, include such storage-and-retrieval systems as fishing tackle totes and sewing boxes, where the necessity for “a place for everything and everything in its place” determines the efficiency and effectiveness of the endeavor of actually fishing or sewing. I inherited an antique sewing box, with its many spools of colored threads and implements of sewing wonderfully arranged in stunning order, formerly in the control of a friend’s grandmother. Somehow my son and daughter, under 5 years old at the time, got into it and turned order into chaos, probably in about 5 minutes, when the array of organization had likely developed over five years or more of grandma’s life. There was no way I could put it back in order.
Workshops are another example, where attention to the organization and design of the environment can begin to overwhelm the prospect of actually getting anything done. The project of organizing the process can distract our attention from doing the project itself.
In the course of organizing my various studio and shop environments over time, I have developed what I call the “Island of Sanity” approach. It took me 50 years or so to learn that table tops are not for storage. I strive to keep the tables clear of any clutter, including tools, even during the process of working. “Clear the decks” is the trope. The “work,” the piece under construction, or a painting, is the only item that is allowed to occupy the table top. I have found that laying tools on the table means that when I need to move the work, the tools often get in the way. So I keep a side table as home for the tools.
On the tool table, I keep the various tools in play in a neat array, rather than mindlessly piling them on top of each other. In the hurly-burly of executing a project, the tool table often becomes disorderly. I occasionally reorganize it quickly, so that the tools are side-by-side in a scannable row, not overlapping. This way I can quickly recognize and seize the particular tool I need when I need it. Others have refined these approaches.
Allowing a relative degree of perceived chaos in the work environment seems to be a necessary evil. Otherwise, we may be driven to distraction by trying to improve the process, and never finishing the project. What is sometimes called “completion anxiety” may set in. As long as we are working on a project, but have not brought it to conclusion, it can remain forever perfect in our mind’s eye. When it is finished, it is just what it is, warts and all: imperfect. Everything is somewhat imperfect; or at best, relatively perfect.
In my case, maintaining islands of sanity creates the proper balance for getting things done, with minimal stress on the mind and body. What the particular balance amounts to, and what works best for the individual, seems to be a personal trait. Some people can work efficiently in a virtual pile of clutter; others are highly dependent on a visually uncluttered workspace. Einstein’s office — which is preserved intact even today, as a memorial, just as he left it — is said to be an exceptional example of “meaningful clutter.” Whether yours is meaningful, or not, is up to you to determine.
Clutter control is a recognized discipline, a known issue in interior design of environments, whether working or living spaces, public or private. The “rising tide of clutter” can overwhelm any space. Just tune into one of the current spate of television shows on hoarding, to see some of the worst-case scenarios.
Contrast becomes important in being able to see the shape of a tool, to state another obvious point. Vertical walls for storing tools often consist of white pegboard for this reason. I have learned that I lose my eyeglasses less often if I remember not to place them on a dark surface, into which the dark frames blend and disappear. The inverse is true when retrieving a light-colored object. Dark backgrounds are called for.
Along with many of my contemporaries, In the 1960s I experimented with so-called psychedelic or psychotropic drugs. One memorable experience found me sitting in my basement shop, trying in vain to sort various items of hardware into appropriate category designations for storage and retrieval. All items share many characteristics in common with others, and it actually was not clear which were the priorities. For example, many fasteners (of which there are many kinds) may be made of metal, and so “go together,” but are designed to fasten many different materials, such as wood, as opposed to metal. In the case of fasteners, we end up with so many leftover screws, nuts and bolts, et cetera, from our projects, that it becomes a more-and-more time-consuming process just to keep what you may never use in some kind of order. I have seen everything from homemade systems utilizing salvaged glass jars, lids attached to the underside of shelves, allowing the jar to be unscrewed with one hand; to endless aisles suffering from over-choice, and designed systems for storing virtually endless categories, sizes and types of fasteners, in hardware and big-box stores. The world is really too much with us, in these categories.
An example from retail, that might not be obvious to the customer, but is well known to the insiders, entails the arrays of shoes at your local shoe store. The stock is usually stored in back, where the various sizes of a given style can be efficiently stacked and retrieved in labeled shoe boxes. The storefront, by contrast, displays all the shoes in their best light, putting our best foot forward, literally. Usually the smaller sizes are displayed, not only because they take less room, but because they are usually more aesthetically pleasing than bigger sizes of the same style and color, vestiges of ancient foot-binding in the East. A little-known fact is that the array has the appearance of more styles and colors than are actually in stock, because the merchandisers display them by style, by color and other attributes: the same shoe will appear in two or more displays throughout the store.
As a boy, I used to wonder why my father had so many pairs of shoes in his closet, when I had only one or two. Now I have more shoes than he did, accumulated over time, because the size of my feet stopped changing, and I found different needs, or lack of need, for different types and styles of footwear. Imelda Marcus is the poster girl for this category of disorder, with her 3,000 pairs of shoes.
Produce in a grocery store is another example. People generally like to pick over produce, selecting the best ones, leaving the fruits or vegetables that are less appealing in looks, apparent freshness, et cetera. For this reason, pre-packaged produce is a harder sell. This is why we see monstrous stacks of open produce in brightly-lighted bins, in most modern food supermarkets. Which, by the way, are destabilized when 10% are removed.
To see, a bit more clearly, how fundamental the process of sorting is to the basic function of perceived order — including storing and retrieving things — try to imagine a contrarian approach, such as displaying books by color, say, or clothing grouped by fabric, rather than size or style.
I have witnessed the tendency to over-organize — or organize by inappropriate groupings — in my own efforts to achieve order, in striving to make sense of my environment. One example is that I tend to group and store like things together, such as putting any and all writing pens in the same place. Or I may do the same with my collection of eyeglasses, which has accumulated over time through misplacing, replacing, and rediscovering spectacles. Problem is, I need a writing pen at different places at different times, yet I do not want to have endless writing pens scattered all over the place. I know people who collect fine writing pens, and wonder if it amounts to a compulsion, or a stubborn resistance to the decline of handwriting, in favor of the word processor — with which, incidentally, I am writing this essay, from handwritten notes scrabbled on various sheets of notebook paper, noted when I was away from my desktop.
We tend to blame linear thinking as the main culprit behind chaos, and all of this need for — and inability to find, or sustain — order. When we begin to consider that everything we regard as belonging to one category actually belongs to many others — perhaps an infinity of categories, if we parse it finely enough — a kind of insanity or cognitive dissonance, a lack of mental order — begins to come into play.
This is, in Zen, or Taoism, the point at which we begin to “confront the mystery,” from the Tao te Ching:
Caught by desire, we see only the manifestations;
Free from desire, we confront the Mystery.
“The one and the many” are indeed like the yen and yang of our discriminating mind. That phenomena and noumenon exist in complementary embrace, or the endless dance of becoming, is not immediately evident, when we are just trying to get through the day. This is why, and how, it becomes important to take a break, and to sit on it for a while. Hopefully, when we stop striving, the immanent order of emptiness underlying the alienating appearance of form will become manifest. But as Master Dogen mentions in Genjokoan, don’t look for it to appear in your perception:
Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge,
or is grasped by your consciousness;
although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent.
The inconceivable may appear as chaos; the underlying order may not be apparent. Chaos may be embraced as a higher form of order, or an elevated degree of complexity, in which any discernible pattern is elusive; while perceived patterns of order may be similarly interpreted as artificially lower levels of chaos, or higher degrees of superficial simplicity. Upon closer examination, perceived simplicity devolves into the complexity of chaos, e.g. on the subatomic or quantum level; whereas chaotic complexity gives way to serene simplicity. “All things are like this,” to borrow another vintage Dogen-ism; the vacillation is built-in, from duality to nonduality and back. Enjoy the ride.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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Monday, March 11, 2024 is my 83rd birthday, and coincidentally the deadline for this segment of UnMind, in order to drop on Wednesday the 13th. I did an exercise in visualizing my personal timeline this last year, and will share it with you in this installment. You will have to visit the website to see the illustrations (link), but for now, as we say in professional design circles — when a design board presentation got lost in checked baggage — “Picture this, guys!” Been there, done that.
I began by laying out my life in decades, starting in 1940 when I was conceived around July, born 9 months later in 1941, and — incidentally, not coincidentally — the year that Matsuoka-roshi arrived in America.
Picture a spreadsheet 10 columns across, headed 1940,1950,1960,etc. up to 2030; by 6 rows down, with categories: Geographical, Societal, Marital/Familial, Educational, Formal Zen, and Professional. You get the idea. Then fill in the blanks with locations like Centralia, IL (my home town), Chicago (where I did my advanced schooling), Atlanta, GA (my adopted home town), Europe and Japan, traveling on design and Zen business — my lifetime “ecological sweepout,” as Bucky Fuller calls it. Big events like WWII, Korea and Vietnam; the end of the Cold War; Covid, etc.; and lesser ones such as “Born 3/11/41,” 1st & 2nd Marriages, Father & Mother dying; BS & MS degrees, etc., populate the cells. Plus Zen turning points such as meeting Matsuoka-roshi, Lay Ordination, ASZC & STO Incorporation, publish date of my first major book, “The Original Frontier”; and finally, career benchmarks such as teaching at U of I & the School of the Art Institute, various corporate ventures, and my current art dealer, Kai Lin Art Gallery, complete the exercise to date. I recommend you try something similar, to get an overview of your life.
By the way, that expression, “conceived,” is interesting from a professional design perspective. We have what we call “concept design,” the initial stage of ideation, wherein few to none of the details of a design solution to a problem have been worked out. The spit-balling, brainstorming phase. Which seems to apply pretty aptly to that embryo in the womb — an inchoate mass of tissue that will, some nine months hence, come popping out into the world — if not “fully-formed,” as Buddha, in his miraculous birth, was said to have been. Not only that, but he immediately took seven steps in each of the cardinal directions; and, pointing one forefinger to the heavens above, the other to the earth below, declared: “Above the heavens and below the heavens, I alone am the most honored one!” If, indeed, this story is true, then, indeed, he would have had to have been. Or at least one of the most highly-honored ones.
But of course, we take this tale with a huge grain of salt, perhaps even a saltlick block, like we used to put out in the pasture for our horses, on the farm where I grew up. My only claim to fame regarding an unusual birth came to light when my mother later confessed that she had tried to abort me by jumping off the back porch, which was what passed for birth control in those days, today referred to as “reproductive health.” Mom and dad already had “a boy for you and a girl for me,” in the persons of my older brother and sister — one darkly handsome, the other blond and beautiful, respectively — and the budget from the newspaper route they ran was already strained. I got my revenge by being born with an enormous head, which, because I was upside-down in the womb, I attribute to all that jumping.
For some reason, my life seems to have morphed through the various “times-of-life” cycles — used to sort demographics in social research — in near synchronicity with the decades, as measured by an admittedly arbitrary calendar, called the Gregorian, which, according to the wizards of Wikipedia:
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.
Glad we got that cleared up. Now, we can see clearly the absolute degree of arbitrariness inherent in our concept of measured time. We can’t even measure the time of day, the calendar year, or the planet’s revolution around the sun, without resorting to infinitely endless decimal places. So much better than that antiquated Julian thing, though. And, “close enough for jazz,” to most intents and purposes.
As you can see by looking at the first chart, my geographical sweepout was rather limited to my home state of Illinois in my 20s, other than a couple of junkets to California, until I moved to Atlanta in my 30s, then finally went abroad on business in my 40s, and to the Far East in my 50s, on behalf of Zen. My family did not have the kind of resources that would have financed a “grand tour” of Europe in my formative years. This charting of your life on a single sheet of paper turns out to be an exercise in humility, when you realize how little you have done, and how brief your lifespan really is. We will return to this subject in the context of the “lifespan chapter” of the Lotus Sutra.
In the second spreadsheet, I extend the timescale to 80-year spans — extending back to 1460, and forward through 1540, 1620, 1700, etc., and finally my own era of 1940 through 2020 — shrinking my personal timeline down to two columns out of ten, roughly 20% of the larger span of five centuries or so. Visualizing only one row, encompassing the societal level, a distinct pattern emerges: major events, especially in the USA, seem to happen in 80-year cycles, going back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War and including World War II, which was just heating up when I came on the scene. Sure enough, when I Googled it, I found that this pattern of 80-year cycles is a known phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the “Strauss-Howe” theory, derived from critical events in the history of America, as well as the rest of the globe.
The Strauss-Howe generation theory describes a recurrent cycle of same-aged groups with specific behavior patterns that change every 20 years. According to this theory, an 80-year cycle is crucial, when every four generations is associated to a crisis that impacts the ongoing social order and creates a new one.
A startling personal finding popped out like a sore thumb: at 80 years old, I was 1/3 the age of my native country, the good old USA. A person 80 years old at my birth would have been born around 1860, the Civil War; one 80 years old at that time would have been born around 1780, the time of the Revolution. The reference to Armageddon in the final column, finally coming to pass within 80 years from now, is only partially, and hopefully, tongue-in-cheek.
Expanding the timescale even further, the third spreadsheet encompasses twenty-five centuries since the advent of Buddha in 500 BCE, to the current 2000’s, again shrinking my personal tenure to a vanishingly small portion, less than ten percent of the total, if I live to be 100. Which is unlikely. Although, as Matsuoka-roshi would often say, “Zen keeps the men younger, and the women more beautiful.” I can’t really explain my relatively good health and wellbeing in any other way.
To close this segment, let us consider some of the statements attributed to Buddha at the end of his life, in the Lifespan Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, ostensibly uttered as he was about to enter Pari Nirvana:
To the deluded and unenlightened I say that I have entered nirvana
although in fact I am really here.
For the sake of these sentient beings I teach that
the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable.
The light of my wisdom illuminates immeasurably
and my lifespan is of innumerable kalpas.
This has been achieved through long practice.
You wise ones do not give in to doubt! Banish all doubt forever!
The Buddha’s words are true never false.
Here, we find one of the most controversial of all claims in Buddhism, which begs credulity — similar to the resurrection of Jesus — along with that of his virgin birth. Even the idea of Pari Nirvana smacks of “woo-woo,” given our skeptical scientific setting:
In Buddhism, parinirvana is commonly used to refer to nirvana-after-death, which occurs upon the death of someone who has attained nirvana during their lifetime. It implies a release from Saṃsāra, karma and rebirth as well as the dissolution of the skandhas.
Bows to our fellow travelers at Wikipedia, once again. But while we can readily embrace the dissolution of the skandhas — or aggregated form, sensation, perception, intention and consciousness, upon the onset of death, it seems mere speculation that anyone might find total release from the ocean of Samsara, the cycles of karmic consequence and rebirth, that Buddhism teaches as theories of the laws governing sentient existence.
But Buddha seems to be pointing at something else, a kind of permanent existence that is not limited to the form of our present, impermanent body-mind. Like the timeworn analogy of the ocean and the waves, the eternal lifespan of Buddha implies that whatever is here has always been here, and will always be here, if in different form. A wave returns to the ocean, but does not, cannot, drown; being of one and the same substance.
I will leave it to you, as usual, to “thoroughly examine this in practice,” as Master Dogen kindly advises. This is not a cop-out. If reality could be explained in words, it would have become commonplace knowledge long before 2500 years ago. The original language of our original mind is still in place. All we have to do is develop “the eyes to hear and the ears to see” it. The method for developing this transcendent, trans-perceptual wisdom is stunningly simple: just sit still enough — and straight enough — for long enough. And listen up — to the “sermon of no words.”
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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As promised, at the beginning of each month in 2024, we return to the topic of “Election Year Zen,” with my “DharmaByte” column (DB) for the Silent Thunder Order monthly newsletter, followed by my first subsequent “UnMind” podcast (UM) of the month. To review the underlying rationale for this approach to a topic most practitioners would prefer to avoid, please refer to last month’s DB and UM if you have not already done so.
In an earlier DB from June of 2023, I had broached this subject gingerly, and I touch upon it in my second major book, “The Razorblade of Zen.” In the newsletter column, I make the point that partisan politics in general is not a topic we would recommend bringing up in the context of the meditation hall — in Japanese called the “zendo” — a sensitive point which had come up in dialog with one of our affiliated Zen centers (quoting myself again):
In a recent meeting with one of our affiliate centers, the focus was on “The Platform Sutra of Huineng,” in which he admonishes all to not find fault with others. One of the members who helps organize these events sent me some questions she wanted me to address, including the dilemma of how we are supposed to not find fault with people who are waging war on others, and committing atrocities such as bombing cities, civilians, and children. She was concerned that raising these issues might be too personal, in the context of a Zen community, where the underlying premise might be to provide some shelter and sanctuary from the insanity of the world. But I assured her that, no, these very events are apt examples of the very ignorance, and resultant unnecessary suffering, that are pointed to in the foundational teachings of Buddha. And that she is right to raise such questions in the context of Zen practice in modern life.
It is my understanding that in the monasteries, and perhaps the smaller temples in cities and villages of the countries of origin of Zen Buddhism, the custom is to have little or no speaking in the zendo itself. As I learned in 1989, when visiting Eiheiji, the training monastery established by Master Dogen in the 13th century, ceremonial services are typically conducted in an entirely separate building, as are formal talks and other forms of dharma study.
This tradition has carried over into the American Zen community, where we are encouraged to leave the zendo quietly after the meditation and gather in another chamber before engaging in dialog. So the idea that we preserve the sanctity of the zendo, and the sanity of its attendees, has some legs. There are good reasons for the specific designs of the protocols we have inherited from Zen’s storied past.
However, in most smaller temples and training centers, having multiple rooms, let alone separate buildings, in which to conduct various activities is a luxury that many cannot afford. This is the reason both the main altar (J. butsudan) and the smaller zendo altar dedicated to Manjusri are often in the same room, separated by space, or located on different walls of the meditation hall. So we compromise, and hold competing sessions at different times. The meditation hall becomes the dharma hall, then reverts back, when sitting in zazen. Silent, upright seated meditation is the hallmark of Zen, taking precedence over all other activities, fostered by instruction periods for newcomers.
However, Zen is not unconnected from reality outside the temple, and the zendo does function as a kind of social sanctuary, as does zazen itself, in the personal sphere. We can manage to accommodate both personal practice and social service functions in the same space, by scheduling them at different times. This does not mean, however, that everyone has to participate, just as everyone need not attend all newcomer instruction sessions. Which is why instructions are not given with every session in the zendo.
Members who do not want to discuss buddhadharma on any other than the personal plane are welcome to avoid attending dharma dialogs that have a social slant. But if we prohibit such discussions, we are sidestepping our civic responsibility, which, if you study the Buddhist canon, from Buddha on down to the present day, you will see that the ancient sages and their modern counterparts have not shied away from the subject.
When it comes to indiscriminate bombing of civilians and children, we are no longer in the realm of politics. If we are silent, we become complicit. Buddha, I believe, would have spoken out against this betrayal of compassion and wisdom. As did Matsuoka Roshi, concerning the corrupt regime in Vietnam, and other atrocities of his time. We can look to the teachings and meditation practice of Zen Buddhism to find a degree of solace and sanctuary from these insults to humanity, but we cannot run, and we cannot hide from them, ultimately. But we do not have to join the partisan divide, either.
To provide some historical context for this discussion, we refer to the foundational documents of the founding fathers of this nation, the oldest surviving democratic republic. In the prior installment on this matter, we quoted the famous first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Let us continue with the second section:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Aye, there’s the rub: if “all men” — which phrase we now define to include all women and all children, of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and countries of origin — are indeed created equal, and endowed with “unalienable rights,” then there is no rationale, no excuse, for waging war in which innocents are slaughtered as “collateral damage.”
— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
If the very purpose of government is to secure such rights as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then the institutions of government — including first and foremost the military — must be prohibited from depriving citizens of any country of these rights, with or without the concept of a “Creator.” They go on to define the remedy:
— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
So here is the ostensible rationale for the recent attempts to overthrow the present government, though the events of January sixth clearly appear to have partisan roots. At the time of this writing, of course, this ultimate right was claimed in the context of Great Britain’s “crazy” King George, and his autocratic grip on the colonies. The history of protests of the original tea party and privileged Tories — loyalists and royalists, or “King’s men” — illustrates that the times were probably as divisive, or even more so, than our present partisan divide. Anticipating that this passage might be construed to lend support to purely partisan motives, the framers optimistically hang the hope of future jurisprudence on the dictates of prudence itself:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Leaving aside for now the determination as to which causes should be eschewed as “light and transient,” this suggests that this call to arms is based on the degree of oppression the hoi polloi are willing to bear. This returns to the theme of the last segments of UnMind, with their emphasis on the intersection of design thinking and Zen, where in both arenas, one of the central questions bearing on happiness and suffering is, How much is enough? If the majority of people are fat and happy, and “kitchen table” issues — the price of eggs, bread and butter — are relatively bearable, little attention will be devoted to overthrowing the government, no matter how corrupt. “Let them eat cake” works, if there is fairly widespread access to cake.
The division of the citizens into haves and have-nots, with those at the top of the game, the “one-percenters,” raking in wealth that is unimaginable, and inaccessible, to the rest, may be much more exaggerated today, as well as more obvious and available to scrutiny, owing to the ubiquitous availability of 24/7 real-time news media.
A recent newspaper column revealed the staggering increases in incomes of the country’s top three or four wealthiest individuals, compared to their more meager incomes of only a few years ago, alongside the minimum wage, which has remained static in the same time period, This disparity of incomes has national and international implications as an impetus to immigration, to make matters more complicated. You may argue that these captains of industry deserve the income they earn, but that stretches the concept of earning to the breaking point. You cannot “earn” this level of income in any rational sense of the word. Corporate income comes from “owning,” not earning.
We are not going to solve these problems in this analysis, but we can at least compare and contrast the current cultural norms and memes that attempt to justify them, with the teachings of Buddhism, such as encouraging us to engage compassion in dealing with our fellow travelers in the dusty realm of Samsara, the everyday world of patience. So we have to practice patience with a situation that seems to have no justification whatever, or very little from this perspective.
While the case can be made that not all people are created equal, it can be argued that to the degree reasonable, the playing field should be leveled. A child born with a silver spoon in their mouth, whether currently or 2500 years ago, is no more deserving than a child born into a family that doesn’t even own a spoon. To argue that those parents should not have children who cannot afford to have children ignores the reproductive drive of the species, which pays little regard to the material circumstances of its sperm donors and receivers.
Once a child is born, it has the same potential for realizing its buddha nature as any other child, regardless of the causes and conditions into which it is born. And we cannot misuse the Buddhist take on karma and karmic consequences to dismiss these disparities, nor the social injustices that often accompany them, out of hand. The teachings of Buddhism were never intended to be held up to others as a criticism or justification for inaction, but to be reflected back upon our own follies, foibles and failings. This is the “mirror of Zen,” which reflects the good, bad, and the ugly without discrimination. We come to see ourselves in this mirror, along with all others, in our extended dharma family. Buddha was said to have come to see everyone as his “children,” and not in a condescending way.
To close this segment, I will lean on Master Dogen’s admonition to “thoroughly examine this in practice.” Let us return to our cushions, but not turn our back on those who have not even been exposed to this excellent method. Our mission is clear. We need to wake up on every possible level. Compassion and wisdom — like charity — begin at home.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In our last segment of UnMind, on the meaning of “less is more” — a central axiom of design thinking coined by the famous architect, Mies van der Rohe — I introduced the notion that this adage may be usefully applied to Zen, as well. The simplicity of lifestyle and paucity of possessions surrounding the history of Zen, in China and Japan in particular, speaks to the general question regarding happiness and satisfaction in life: How much is enough? In this segment we will consider how “more” can often be “less.”
When we reach a certain level of stability in the normal stages of life in the “first world” countries of modern times, we may find that we have an overabundance of personal possessions: a complete household, and maybe a summer home as well, with the requisite home furnishings; maybe one or two vehicles, a boat, maybe even a private plane. At a certain point, unless we can manage the upkeep and maintenance of all our many acquisitions, our possessions begin owning us. That is, an increasingly large percentage of our time is devoted to taking care of the many things that we do not actually use very often, and probably don’t really need, in any realistic sense. Then comes the de-cluttering and downsizing, just to get back to a normal state of affairs — where we can spend our time on those aspects of life that we find most important and rewarding, such as family, friends — and, in Zen, personal insight into existence itself.
In examining our approach to Zen meditation, in the context of “less is more,” we see clearly that excess accumulation of material goods is not of much use, and can readily form yet another barrier to simplification of all the demands on our time and attention.
When it comes to meditation, we consciously choose to pay attention to the basics of existence, including the body and its posture, the breath and its pattern, and the mind and its machinations. In doing so, we witness the natural functions of the monkey mind as setting goals, ruminating over the past and worrying about the future, and so on. In order to simplify our task of waking up to reality as it is, we can recognize when we are setting goals, for example, and choose to stop setting goals, at least in terms of our meditation.
So I launched into the discussion of subtracting such elements from our practice, as we witness them arising, resulting in the concept of “goalless” meditation, which in itself may be defined as a “goal.” Or “timeless” meditation, where we set aside the burden of timing our sitting period, and allow ourselves to reenter real time, which has nothing to do with measurement. Eventually our meditation can become “effortless” — where we have been doing this for so long that, like driving a car, it really doesn’t require any conscious effort; and the physical effort has become second nature, so no big deal.
SENSELESS MEDITATION
Extending this idea, the various dimensions we observe in zazen, such as the six senses, yield the possibility of “sightless” meditation; “soundless” meditation; “odorless” and “tasteless” meditation; and even “sensationless” meditation, which would be akin to physical Samadhi, I suppose. It would also entail “weightlessness,” when our BMI and gravity come into perfect balance.
MINDLESS MEDITATION
And finally, “emotionless,” as well as “thoughtless,” or “mindless,” meditation — which latter would conventionally be interpreted as a pejorative. But in Zen, the “don’t-know mind” is valued most highly. Emotional Samadhi: less anxiety, more serenity; mental Samadhi: less confusion, more clarity. Eventually, “social Samadhi”: less friction, more harmony in relationships with others, as well as being comfortable in your own skin.
FORMLESS MEDITATION
From the perspective of posture, breath, and attention, which and when they all come together in a unified way, as Matsuoka Roshi would often say: “This is the real zazen”; we find ourselves practicing “posture paramita”: aiming at the perfect posture without ever imagining we have achieved it, another of Sensei’s Zen “secrets.” Through a process of profound sensory adaptation, we arrive at “formless meditation,” not only in terms of physical posture, or form, the first of the five aggregates, but also “mental formations,” the mysterious fourth skandha, meaning underlying motives, intentions, desires, and so forth, the psychological level of motivation. All gone away.
CONSCIOUS-LESS MEDITATION
The natural evolution of our approach to meditation would then naturally and logically lead to a kind of “conscious-less” meditation, an expression so countercultural that it requires a hyphen. The fifth aggregate comprehends the other four, in that we are, or become, conscious of form, sensation, perception, and mental formations, on deeper and deeper levels. Until we apprehend the “flip-side” of each, as the Heart Sutra indicates: “no form, no sensation, no perception, no mental formations”; “until we come to no consciousness also,” as the original English translation we used at Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago rendered the line. We are conscious of the other four — until we are not; and then we are conscious of consciousness itself — until we are not. This steady progression through — and adaptation to — the aggregates, outlined in the Surangama Sutra, is attributed to Buddha himself. So I am not just making this up as I go along.
BREATHLESS MEDITATION
That our meditation becomes “breathless” at some point may not be obvious — not in the sense of “breathless anticipation” — but in that we are not doing the breathing to begin with; the body is. So when we relinquish the idea of “control”: of the posture, the breath, and the direction of our attention; the natural posture, the naturalbreath, and the natural, or original, state of mind can come into play. We return to our original mind and body, which as Master Dogen reminds us, will unmistakably “drop off.” In good time.
OBJECTLESS MEDITATION
When our attention — and intention — come together in a unified or holistic way, then it may be said that our meditation has become “objectless.” Both in the sense of the senses and their objects merging in nonduality, and in the sense that we no longer can articulate any specific intention, underlying our practice. It has become “shikantaza,” the Japanese expression for the inexpressible unified field theory of conscious awareness. But we should not become enthralled with this as a concept, which threatens to morph into an expectation, rather than an aspiration. If we understand that “form and reflection behold[ing] each other” is the necessary and natural inflection point that meditation inexorably leads to — or returns to, to be more precise — we cannot go far astray.
CONCEPTLESS MEDITATION
This suggests yet another “less is more” dimension of meditation: that it can be utterly devoid of concepts, associations, or connotations, of any kind. This we might define as “pure” meditation, in the Zen sense of “purity” as nonduality, rather than conventional connotations of morality. No concept, however broad and deep its scope, can capture the breadth and depth of the effect, meaning, and implications of zazen. This is why the content and intent of Zen is sometimes referred to as “The Great Matter,” capitalized.
HEARTBEAT MEDITATION
On a less transcendent and more practical level, I would like to share with you some of my more recent discoveries in zazen fostered by my contracting COVID 19 in December of 2022, followed by a roughly three-month recovery period, amounting to an enforced “ango,” or traditional practice period, of ninety days. During this time, I lost a lot of strength, flexibility, balance, and coordination; and experienced the “mental fog” associated with the worst aftereffects of the pandemic, though I am not inflicted with “long covid” but only the exacerbated effects of aging in combination with the disease.
In taking the posture during this time, crossing my legs was increasingly difficult, and the resultant stiffness in my knees threatened to strain a tendon. So I took to sitting on the edge of the raised bench, with my feet on the floor. Getting up from the floor when manning the timekeeper (Doan) position became an agonizing exercise in finding the leverage to stand up. So I moved to chair-sitting. This adaptation to aging is not unusual, by the way — several veteran adepts have found that, by their mid-sixties, they could no longer sit in lotus posture.
In order to recover my ability to sit with stability while cross-legged, I began taking a more aggressive approach to the posture and breath, as well as to walking meditation, to compensate for the loss of my youthful vigor. My long-term engagement with kinhin, I am convinced, explains my relative sense of balance, compared to others my age.
In implementing this more active approach to the posture and breath, I discovered that I would begin feeling my heartbeat after holding my inbreath for a count of eight or ten, realizing that the tempo of the counting corresponded to the heartbeat. It is as if your heart is the metronome, counting off the time signature of your instrument, the body. By doing a full-body “crunch” while holding my breath, my spine would pop and pull into its natural s-curve, arching the small of the back forward and down, and pulling back and up on the chin, exaggerating the “cobra-rising” rigor of the upright seated posture.
Exhaling, I began counting the heartbeat instead of the breath, noticing how the two are synchronized. Gradually, as the breath slows down, so does the heart, from 2 beats per in-breath and out-breath to four, then longer sequences of pulsation as the outbreath, in particular, slows down to a soothing rhythm. Repeating this cycle of squeezing and letting go, the relaxation response begins to set in, embracing the squeeze-and-release cycle of the heart itself, allowing more relaxation time between pulses.
I could go on into more detail about how this rhythmic process smooths itself out until, as Matsuoka Roshi would say, the breath seems to come and go through the whole body, like a frog sitting on a lily pad, breathing by osmosis through the pores of the skin.
HEALING MEDITATION
I am convinced that this process of observing the integration of posture and breath has therapeutic, or healing, properties; which have immediate benefits of calming the nervous system, and long-term effects promoting longevity. The main benefit of longevity being that it affords a greater chance to wake up fully, in the Zen sense, during this brief lifetime.
You might consider expanding this discussion in your own words — such constructions as “compassionless” meditation — to consider whether the concept of compassion that you may be harboring actually conforms to the true meaning of the word, which is to “suffer with.” If you come up with any confounding notions along these lines, please feel free to share them with me. It may prompt a beneficial exchange as to the “limitless” meditation that is zazen.
In the next segment, we will return to consideration of “Election Year Zen” — with all the real-world ethics and civics implications that this focus implies. Please join in the dialog.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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In the last segment of UnMind, the second installment discussing the sameness and differences I have noted in teaching Zen or design as a profession, I wrapped up the essay by mentioning the concept of “control,” as it might apply to either or both:
In meditation circles, we often hear phrases such as “controlling the breath” or “emptying your mind of thoughts.” These represent attitudes 180-degrees from that in Zen meditation, which is not one of exerting control, but rather relinquishing any real or imagined level of control.
Using that as a springboard for this segment, let’s examine our approach to Zen meditation, in the context of the well-known adage from minimalist design, “Less is more.” According to Google:
Minimalism is exemplified by the idea of “less is more” as first coined by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The idea that less may be more, in applying the method of zazen, is implicit in many dimensions of the character of Zen training, from Buddha’s Middle Way of moderation to the “chop wood, carry water” practicality of the Chinese history, the seven items a monk was allowed to own, and the sparse serenity of the zendo interiors of Japan, with their starkly minimalist sand and rock gardens.
The Institute of Design, during my years there in undergraduate and graduate studies, was housed in the basement of Crown Hall, while the Mies school of architecture was on the upper floor. His contribution to minimalist architecture lay in the combination of glass and steel to construct high-efficiency buildings, of which Crown Hall was an early archetype.
Another aphorism from design thinking that I mentioned:
...there are many design ideas that are simple in concept, but difficult in execution. Zen may be the poster boy for this truism. Zazen is irreducibly simple in design, but Zen can be maddeningly difficult in daily execution.
This is where I would like to begin this segment. Thinking about meditation, particularly Zen’s zazen — as I understand this “excellent method,” as Master Dogen repeatedly referred to it — it occurred to me that during zazen, as a process of “unlearning,” or “subtracting” the preconceptions we harbor as to our conventional take on reality, we might usefully question a variety of such attitudes and concepts, as to whether we are unintentionally, perhaps even unconsciously, striving to attain something as a presumed goal of our practice. Only if we recognize that we are doing so, can we then consciously relinquish that particular problematic attitude or opinion, and see what it is like to sit without it getting in our way. A number of these came up for me, which we can consider one at a time, perhaps extending into the next segment. They are expressed herein with the suffix of “-less,” which implies “the absence of.” Let’s begin with the very idea of goals in general, embracing the approach of “letting go” of our predilections.
GOALLESS MEDITATION
Of course, we all sit in meditation with some kind of goal, whether simply to calm the mind under stress; to get back to normal; or more deeply, to “wake up” to reality, which might be said to be the principle goal of Buddhism. But Master Dogen cautions us, in “Principles of Seated Meditation—Fukanzazengi,” to avoid taking goal-setting too far:
...think neither good nor evil, right or wrong
thus stopping the functions of your mind
give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha
In other words, resist setting up what seems a more lofty goal, in place of the pedestrian objectives we might associate with meditation. Which begs the question, can we do away with all goals and objectives, at least while we are sitting? We might say that it is not that Zen meditation has no goal, but it is just that the actual goal is too deep and too broad to be expressed in words, especially a priori. We meditate to discover the goal.
TIMELESS MEDITATION
Most instructions for meditation include imposing time constraints on it, for example by setting a timer, using an app with a built-in alarm, burning a stick of incense, or following the schedule of timed sessions on retreat, or during daily practice at a Zen center. When we experience the latter, sitting with somebody else tracking the time, we feel somewhat liberated from the necessity of thinking about the time, or paying attention to the clock; someone else is doing that for us. When we take a turn as time-keeper (“doan” in Soto Zen), we experience the discipline of being responsible for others’ time on the cushion. Both are highly recommended.
But someone once said that in zazen, “the barriers of time and space fall away.” When I see someone restively glancing at their watch in the zendo, I will often ask to borrow it. Then, they are unable to indulge their fidgeting obsession with time, at least while sitting.
This goes to the larger question of all the measurables associated with our meditation — such as how long we sit, how often, how regularly, et cetera — which are not as important as the immeasurable aspects: that we simply never give up. We keep returning to zazen, in good times or bad, for whatever time we have available for it.
I recommend that occasionally, perhaps the next time you sit in meditation, that you forego your tendency to time the period. Sit without any stopping time in mind. Then you may finally reenter real time, which is not measured; indeed, it is not even measurable. You may find that time is all you really have; that in fact, you have all the time there is.
This reality of real time versus measured time is captured in the sardonic expression — “The man who has one watch always knows what time it is; the man who has two never knows for sure” — attributed, as many such wisecracks are, to Chinese origin.
EFFORTLESS MEDITATION
In his paraphrase of a brief Ch’an poem about meditation, titled “Zazenshin,” meaning something like an “acupuncture needle” or “lancet” for zazen — something exceedingly sharp or pointed — Master Dogen points to the true meaning of “right effort” toward the end of the poem:
Intimacy without defilement
is dropping off without relying on anything
Verification beyond absolute and relative
is making effort without aiming at it
“Making effort” includes assuming the posture, which is not always easy, especially when we overdo it; and breathing, which can be labored, especially when we catch a cold, or during flu season.
I have heard that the posture should feel more like a stretching sensation than physical effort, and that the breath should be more like a sigh than belabored breathing. My root teacher, Matsuoka Roshi, said “the breath should be like a gate swinging in the breeze, first this way, and then the other way,” a rather pleasant, languid, relaxed image. And, he would say, “Zazen is the comfortable way.”
This should give us pause, in our pursuit of overweening effort, characterized as “macho Zen,” which we get from our impression of Rinzai’s more driven practice of externally-imposed discipline. I suspect that this meme is more a social dimension of the culture, than having anything to do with the reality of Zen practice — other than inculcating a sense of urgency: that we have no time to waste, in getting after this most important and central “great matter.”
In the next segment of UnMind we will continue with this exploration of the “less” side of the practice. As a semantic curio, the English meaning of the prefix “un” — which in my dharma name means “cloud” — connotes the “opposite” of something, or something very different, as in the “un-cola” campaign promoting the soft drink Seven Up, which I know dates me. It is similar in effect to the suffix “-less,” which connotes the “absence” of something.
If you have any suggestions along these lines for me to entertain in the next segment, let me know. My list is quite long, but there is always room for one more consideration to eliminate, from distracting us from our meditation.
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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.
Producer: Shinjin Larry Little
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