Zen and the West

We understand the extent to which the contemporary West is animated by “prophetic faith,” the sense of the holiness of the ought, the pull of the way things could be and should be but as yet are not. Such faith has obvious virtues, but unless it is balanced by a companion sense of the holiness of the is, it becomes top-heavy. If one’s eyes are always on tomorrows, todays slip by unperceived. Zen comes as a reminder that if we do not learn to perceive the mystery and beauty of our present life, our present hour, we shall not perceive the worth of any life, of any hour.

Lifelong practicing Methodist and author, Professor Huston Smith in his forward to Philip Kapleau‘s book, The Three Pillars of Zen

A reminder: You’ll find the newest posts in the section on Zen Buddhism for the next couple of weeks, which begins in the March 2009 posts. Or, to make it even easier, sign up with the email subscription button up there on top of the other column and you’ll get all new posts sent to your email address no matter where they’re posted.

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Not Knowing

So much of Zen Buddhism is about not knowing. Irritating. I like to know. I like to think I know. I like to tell everyone in my life what they should do to improve their lives based on what I think I know. I wish I could say I’m being too harsh, too self-critical but I don’t think I am. But drop off your first-born for his first year at college and you find out just how little you really know.

(Again, I must apologize. Almost all that I’ve done in Zen Buddhism that leads up to this lies in raw notes in notebooks, soon to be transformed into posts so I can ONE DAY catch up with myself but I just can’t resist writing about some of this when it applies to what’s happening in my life right now. [I sure wish I’d thought about doing a blog from the first day I started this thing….] So, please don’t miss the new posts I’ll be adding fairly consistently this month starting just after the 6 March 2009 post…)

One of the central rituals in the Zen tradition is something called the face-to-face meeting (“dokusan“) with your teacher. In the Japanese White Plum tradition, as it is in many traditions, it’s a wildly ritualized one-on-one meeting the folks at ZCLA suggest having at least once a week. You wait in the face-to-face meeting line, sitting just like you sit in the zendo, on your cushion, meditating (“just sitting”) until you’re at the front of the line. When Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao rings her little bell, you signal that you’re coming by tapping a large iron bell twice. Then you walk down the hall with your cushion and your question. I think you’re supposed to talk about issues that come up in your practice but try as I might to get around it, I found out pretty quickly that “practice” is no different than your life. Sit still and what ever’s bugging you in your life shows up, like it or not. Every time I go in to that little room, with or without a question about Zen Buddhist practice in general or my efforts in particular, we somehow end up talking about my thinking and my ideas about life to which Roshi inevitably responds: “Is that true? Is that really true? How do you know?”

And there is always only one true answer: I don’t. I don’t know.

And then I trudge back up the hallway, cushion in my hands, convinced yet again about how little I actually know when I stop for a second to really question my assumptions.

For instance, when I dropped Luke and all of his stuff off at college for the first time, I was all set to indulge in the maudlin. I’d imagined it all: on the plane he played his part perfectly, falling asleep with his head on my shoulder as he always does. We shopped without rancor for the last few things, ate dinner with my parents as they live near where he’s going to college. I didn’t tear up in front of him but, in bed the night before, I went through all of those scenes of him as an infant, toddler, middle-schooler all in black etc and indulged. He was leaving. Our family would never be the same.

But then Luke veered from my script. He was supposed to hustle me off campus and then not call me for weeks because he was having too good a time. But Luke was miserable. Nothing was what he expected. He was panicked. And I went right down the tube with him. For days. Not completely. I did leave before I got involved setting up every last thing in his room for him. I did get on the plane and head home. I did keep the phone calls and text messages down below insane. But I took his panic and made it mine. I spun out all the possible scenarios – none of them good – about what his unhappy reaction meant about his immediate future and my parenting. And then I started to give advice. And obsess about what I could have or should have done, could say or should have said to make it better. I “should have” stayed to fix his room up because nothing is more depressing than a disorganized chaotic nest.

Then I finally remembered this “not knowing” thing I keep hearing about from the teachers at ZCLA. I don’t know if Luke’s unhappiness is actually bad for him. I don’t know if he’ll finally want to come home, I don’t know if staying is what HAS to happen, I don’t know how Luke should or shouldn’t help himself deal better with the transition and, what’s more, I don’t know, if Luke actually took any of my advice, if he finished setting up his room the way I thought he should, for example, that he’d actually be better off in the long run. I don’t know.

As soon as I really really realized that, I suddenly noticed what MY living room looked like. All around me were chaotic piles of clothes, books and CDs Luke had pulled out of his room to give away. And I don’t even want to talk about the stacks of books by the side of my bed. Here I am obsessing about getting Luke to set up and to clean up his new room so he’ll feel better about his life while sitting in a mess of my own. What better proof of how much I don’t know?

After a day and a half of staying off the phone, off the internet, so I could move the stuff off the living room floor and out of the house, I felt better.

Not knowing. I’m working on it.

Related articles that refer to “not knowing” or the people in this post:

— A lecture by Shunryu Suzuki
–a profile of Bernie Glassman, who was there at the beginning of the ZCLA)
— a Zen talk Korean Zen teacher Hyunoong Sunim
–a dharma talk by Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman on Shunryu Suzuki’s Beginner’s Mind
–podcast interview with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, part one, part two, part three

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Dire muck and the sun

Please note that this blog isn’t entirely caught up with where I am. I’ve spent quite a lot of time studying Zen Buddhism at the Zen Center of Los Angeles so I will be filling in the steps that have led me to this point in the next month so, apologies if the names and concepts in this post seem out of the blue. This also allows me to remind you to check in the so-called archives of past posts as you’ll find most of the new posts there in the weeks to come.

The damage done by this event keeps radiating out. One of the difficult parts is that no one in my family thinks they have the right to feel as knocked to our knees as we have been, as we are. This is the Burk family’s tragedy, this is the tragedy of Lily’s closest friends, her teachers, her intimates, not us. We can only imagine the depth of their anguish and stand on the side feeling impotent to help and, as I talk to more and more mothers and hear more and more stories about their children, I know how far and wide these feelings go, the impotence, the feeling that we don’t really have the right to be as devastated as we are, as if we might somehow add to the pain of those already in unimaginable pain if we did.

And so we sit in our houses. Or we sit in other people’s houses. We call. We hug our children if they want to be hugged. We feed them if they want to be fed. But we don’t know what to say. We don’t know what to do. There is nothing to be done.

I emailed Shingetsu and Roshi to let them know what happened. I’m not sure I would have thought to do that but I was supposed to meet with Shingetsu Monday evening – I’ve been working my way through the Buddhist Precepts with her – and I needed to change the schedule so I could be home at dinnertime. Roshi immediately added Lily’s name to the prayer service at ZCLA. And, when I went to meet with Shingetsu, the tiny British Buddhist Sensei tossed all proper Japanese ritual to the wind at first and stood up and hugged me. Hard. She then asked if it would be all right if she added Lily’s name to a list that would be chanted in a ceremony every day for forty-nine days.

“Why forty-nine days?”

“It’s the bardo, the time from physical death until–” Shingetsu held her fingers up in quotes: “reincarnation.”

I was grateful for Shingetsu’s finger quotes, her lack of certainty about reincarnation.

But what about Lily’s parents? The worst part of this is that there is absolutely nothing I can do for Lily’s parents except possibly to tell you — and anyone else who will sit still and listen — what a truly loving, smart, and kind being Lily was, how she made people laugh and feel seen.

Shingetsu suggested lighting incense for them. We did.

I’m not entirely sure what I felt about doing any of this. A part of me felt like it wasn’t my place to do this, that I should have asked someone’s permission first. Another called me fraud. But still another felt just the tiniest bit of relief that there was something, anything, no matter how small or even probably irrelevant, that I could “do” when part of the true horror of this is there is nothing, nothing that can be done.

Is this part of the solace people find in ritual?

After sitting in silence with Shingetsu for a bit, we talked about the horror, about the impotence, and most of all we talked about the feeling of shame that came up about having so many feelings when the tragedy wasn’t directly “ours.”

“But it is our tragedy. It did happen to us, to all of us. There is no separation. This is life. This is death. It’s all part of the same thing. The dire muck and the sun.”

The thing is, I know this is true.

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Change It. Now.

I don’t want to write about this. I really really really don’t want to write about this.

Yesterday I was standing on a bluff over the ocean when my husband and Luke told me that a girl in the eleventh grade was murdered. Lily Burk, a brilliant, talented, funny young girl who’d been in plays with Luke, went on an errand for her parents at two o’clock Friday afternoon and was abducted and then murdered. Her body was found in her parents’ Volvo. Blunt force trauma to her head, the Los Angeles Times website said last night.

Lily. She was in the class between Luke and Matt. Lily. She was sweet, gifted, kind, smart and a very, very funny on stage. Lily. Her parents’ only child. How blessed they must have felt for seventeen years. Lily. I looked forward to finding out what she was going to be, what she was going to do. Lily.

Lily Burk.

Now this is where faith is supposed to kick in, where faith is supposed to have answers. Does it? Does it really? Nothing, nothing can make sense out of this for me. My brain is stuck, scratching over and over again at these few horrific facts. Over and over again I can’t stop it, I can’t stop Lily getting in the car that Friday, I can’t stop filling in all the moments I don’t know, can’t know, won’t know, I can’t make time stop, go back, change, I can’t fathom the abyss of her mother and father’s anguish and I can’t do a thing to take even a tiny part of that from them, no one can, and I have to stand paralyzed as my oldest is slammed by inexplicable facts, inexplicable pain and, tonight when my youngest comes home from his summer program, my husband and I will be the ones to bring this horror into his life. He loved Lily. She saw him, liked him, was kind to him at a time when he needed it.

So this is the time when people turn to their faith, their belief, their spiritual leaders for answers, for comfort, right? Do you? Does it help? Do you get answers? Do you get comfort? Really?

Right now, slapping this grief down in front of any one human being, no matter how well-trained, no matter how much they believe and how thoroughly they walk their talk, feels unfair…to them and to me, like it’s a set-up for profound disappointment. It makes me feel like it’s just giving up, of bearing my neck to the wolf, that I’m just finding some way to accept – or at least live with – the unacceptable. What is it that I find unacceptable? Death and senseless destruction. I am in terror, pain, and rage because I want to do something, anything, about it and I can’t. Can’t. Can not. Nothing.

Last night I had dream after dream after dream:

Cars wrapped in white canvas like dining room chairs, Luke’s classmates walking thorough and around them, silent, sad.

I tried and failed to get home but highway signs were wrong and kept changing.

I sat, eating, at a metal table outside. The food was too expensive. I tried and failed to speak French to the owner. A storm came and I didn’t know it for a while until I realized I was soaked through and the umbrella over my table, which had been blown inside out apparently for some time, finally blew away.

And the last: I struggled with a display in front of pale blue fireplace mantle. A vase made of lavender paper was somehow held up in front on a web of string. But it kept tilting over and the flowers kept falling out. I kept trying to right it. I couldn’t. I finally gave up. It flipped over one more time and became a snowflake, the kind you make for a child.

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Snowflakes on a red hot stove

I was reading Red Pine’s (a.k.a. Bill Porter) translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra, one of the most important sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. In the discussion, Red Pine quotes Chen-k’o as saying that, once we realize the inherent emptiness of our so-called reality,

“…the light of the mind shines alone. When all the clouds are gone, the full moon fills the sky. thus birth and destruction, purity and defilement, completeness and deficiency are all snowflakes on a red-hot stove.”

“Snowflakes on a red-hot stove” – now THAT is excellent.

I was just thinking about that today when my youngest son, Mark, was talking about the lives of writers that he likes: this summer it’s Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, and the Bronte sisters. He knows so much about the lives they led while they wrote the books that he loves, the full human beings almost come alive for me. And then I realize how not alive they are. There’s a collision between all that energy I can still feel when I imagine who they were and the slapping fact of how quickly, really, it is all over.

There’s a line chanted at the end of some of the services at ZCLA – it’s an admonition of sorts – not to “squander your life” and to practice as though there were a “fire on your head.”

…or, perhaps, as though you were a snowflake on a red-hot stove.

 

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The Heart of the Perfection of Great Wisdom Sutra

 

This is the version they use at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. There are many different translations.

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita,
Clearly saw the emptiness of all the five conditions,
Thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.
O Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form;
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form;
Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness are likewise like this.
O Shariputra, all dharmas are forms of emptiness, not born, not destroyed;
Not stained, not pure, without loss, without gain;
So in emptiness there is no form, no sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness;
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena;
No realm of sight…no realm of consciousness;
No ignorance and no end to ignorance…
No old age and death, and no end to old age and death;
No suffering, no cause of suffering, no extinguishing, no path;
No wisdom and no gain. No gain and thus
The bodhisattva lives prajna paramita
With no hindrance in the mind,
no hindrance, therefore no fear,
Far beyond deluded thoughts, this is nirvana.
All past, present, and future Buddhas live prajna paramita,
And therefore attain anuttara-samyak-sambodhi.*
Therefore know, Prajna Paramita is
The great mantra, the vivid mantra,
The best mantra, the unsurpassable;
It completely clears all pain–this is the truth, not a lie.
So set forth the Prajna Paramita Mantra,
Set forth this mantra and declare:
Gat é! Gat é! Paragat é! Parasamgat é!**
Gat é! Gat é! Paragat é! Parasamgat é!
Gat é! Gat é! Paragat é! Parasamgat é!
Bodhi svaha!***
Prajna Heart Sutra

* Bill Red Pine Porter‘s definition: “unexcelled perfect enlightenment”
** Red Pine’s roughly translates this: “The Gone, the Gone Beyond, the Gone Completely Beyond” but suggests that the vibration, the sound, like in Hinduism, is as important if not more important than the meaning of the words themselves.
*** Again, Red Pine: “Bodhi…means ‘enlightenment’ adn svaha is exclamatory: “at last,’ ‘amen,’ ‘hallelujah.'”

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Tenets or actions, which come first?

 

I’ve started reading Karen Armstrong‘s book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Armstrong’s writing about the remarkable period she calls the Axial Age (900 and 200 B.C.E) in which most of our major religious traditions began: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Just a few quotes from the introduction:
 

“It is common to call religious people ‘believers.’ as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics… All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age…discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but..most of them refused to discuss it.”

Armstrong says the essential spirit of the Axial Age was this:

“What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved.”

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The Path to Purpose

So someone asked me to take a look at The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, a new book by Stanford University professor William Damon. I didn’t think I was going to end up writing about this but I can’t help it.

Professor Damon’s going after a critical problem in our society: the lack of meaning, the absence of a sense of purpose that so many of us feel. Of particular concern is the “generation of disconnected and unhappy kids” whose inner emptiness, whose lack of purpose is widespread. In his interviews and surveys of people between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, he says “almost a quarter of those we interviewed…express no aspirations at all. In some cases, they claim that they see no point in acquiring any.” Damon links this to an increase in the rate of suicide and attempted suicide. The reason? Professor Damon writes: “I am unconvinced by the ‘stress’ explanation. Hard work and competition have never broken the spirits of young people as long as they believe in what they are doing.”

This might be easy to dismiss as a developmental phase if Damon didn’t see evidence of a life-long problem emerging from this aimlessness in young adulthood. “In the long run, that lack of purpose can destroy the foundations of a happy and fulfilled life.”

As a parent and as someone who’s interviewed a lot of people just out of college who want an entry-level position, I couldn’t stop reading this book. Professor Damon is describing something we all know in our gut is true but hadn’t quite recognized with such clarity.

Professor Damon’s thesis is that schools and parents are failing to teach children how to find their purpose, why they’re learning what they’re learning. My guess is that’s because most of those parents, teachers and administrators may not have figured out their purpose either.

I remember a friend of mine in school – you probably had one like her, too – who always held up class room lessons, demanding to know why she should learn algebraic equations or about the Teapot Dome scandal or how photosynthesis worked. She wanted to know what possible difference it could make to her life. I’m not sure any answer would have satisfied her but Damon suggests that such moments could provoke a more meaningful learning experience. “Incredibly, in all my years as a scholar of youth development and education, I have never seen a single instance of a teacher sharing with students the reasons why he or she went into the teaching profession.”

In my very first documentary as a baby producer when I was just twenty-two, I spent months with a gang in San Jose, California, and the police who were working hard to curb their criminal activity. I can tell you that the very first sense of purpose those gang members ever had in their lives, they got the day they joined that gang. I spent more than four months talking to those guys. When I asked them what they envisioned for their future, I might as well have asked in Swahili. The future did not exist for them. They had no future picture of themselves nor any hopes or dreams. But, because of the gang, their day had structure, meaning, and purpose and, as flawed as those were, it must have been an enormous sense of relief to go from nothing to something.

Going one step further with this: I wonder what role a purpose-void plays in those who commit violent acts they say are based on their faith.

I remember the panic I felt before I graduated from college, wondering what I’d do for a living. I was clear that my choice couldn’t just be about what might earn me the money to live. I needed to believe in what I did, that I had to feel that it might make a difference. That thinking led me to choose to learn how to tell stories for a living because what little meaning I found in my life had come from what I’d learned from the stories people wrote or told me. I wanted to learn how to do the same for others. The incredible relief I felt when I hit upon my purpose I can still remember, I can even feel it, physically, in my body today. But I also remember how I felt before I figured it out, how desperate, lost, and hopeless I felt and how eager I was for someone, anyone, to tell me what my purpose was.

I was lucky no one ever did. I was lucky no one ever tried to make my purpose serve their purpose.

The central impetus for The Heathen has been my bewilderment about the conflict between people of faith. William Damon‘s The Path to Purpose has got me wondering if some of the source of that conflict comes from people desperate to find a purpose without knowing how to do it for themselves making them ripe for false clarity.

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Lost in transit

Why is it that whatever passes for my daily rituals, fledgling though they may be, get lost when I travel? And, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I’ve spent most of my life proud of my ability to adapt, to be happy in most situations, with most people, under many different circumstances. On vacation, especially in a group, I like being the “whatever” person. (* a note to those who know me well below…) I guess when I was growing up, I looked around my family of origin and figured there were so many opinionated people, I figured the full extent of my options were either to have an opinion and the argument that went with it or just go along and have a chance at some fun. It’s frankly not a bad way to travel with a husband and two teenagers as I care more about simply spending time with them than I do about where we actually go or what we actually do.

But somehow, once I pack that suitcase, I don’t just leave behind work and the daily to do lists, I leave behind even the things that have come to mean something to me. The result? I came home from this trip a bit sad and lost. Meditation? Once or twice in three weeks. Exercise? Only the walking that comes from wandering around in hilly places. Not bad but not enough for me. It wasn’t all gray. I played cards with Luke and Matt, listened to them laugh together in the back seat, watched the sun set with Kevin in more than one beautiful place, met so many lovely people, saw a rainbow with Matt when we really needed to see one, and I read a lot of Faulkner. But I spent way too much time focused on logistics and deciding where and what we were going to eat and dealing with credit card fraud alerts every other day, so much so, I began to wonder what I ever liked about traveling in the first place. Maybe I used to like leaving my daily life behind. Now, I hated that part of it. I really felt like I had vacated my life.

I must confess I also did way too much scrambling to make things work for everyone, even jumping in to solve problems that weren’t mine to solve, so no one would fall apart, all in the maniacal quest for the magical family trip.

And I wonder why I came home feeling the way I do?

But it was more than just the mother-in-charge thing… It wasn’t until I got back to my desk and found the passage from the Bhagavad Gita I love so much — “He who can see inaction in the midst of action and action in the midst of inaction, is wise…etc” that I got why I’d felt so lost in transit this time. I’d lost touch with some of the small actions I now take that help give me stability, peace, meaning: the time I spend every day alone; the time I spend meditating; the literature I reread most days because it helps remind me of what it actually important rather than what presents itself on a minute-by-minute basis as needing my attention. And it didn’t get lost because of the outside swirl of the people I love or even broken down rental cars. I simply didn’t understand it’s importance in my life and the need to make very sure I didn’t lose those small things I do every day simply because I was away from home.

I get it. Rituals are important.

[* Okay, my friends and acquaintances…I’m talking about vacation. Yes, I know and freely admit I have NEVER been the “whatever” person at work but that is another subject 😉 ]

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The Bowing Controversy or…To Bow or Not to Bow

I knew I had a hard time with the whole idea of bowing (see the end of the Path of Love) but I thought it was just my personality quirk. Then came all the hullaballoo over President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah on April 2nd. You’d think President Obama had floated the idea of making the king a cabinet member.

 

I thought it was my little old outsized ego that kept my spine rigid, unwilling even to try out this bowing thing just to see if I could at least come to appreciate why it’s so important in both Hinduism and Buddhism but here I find it isn’t just my problem, it’s cultural. We’re all raised to think bowing down before someone implies weakness or, worse, fealty or subservience to another.

It seems to me that how we greet one another is less important than that we do. I know that when I’m concerned more about how someone else sees me, more about making clear my power and its importance to me, more about making sure my position seems dominant from the get-go, my relationships don’t go very well. I’ve lived most of my life with that first in my mind and, boy, was that a waste.

All I can say is, the whole angry storm over the President’s bow at least made me feel that I am a real American, not just a real egotist.

(In case you’re interested, here are links to previous posts with some of my bowing challenges: Hemu’s Morning Rituals, First Teacher, Path of Love, Doing It, The Destroyer of Time…there must be a few more but, you get the idea. Most of the bowing is at the end of the posts…)

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