Feed the hungry ghosts! Stop feeding greed!

I was part of more Zen ceremonies to appease hungry ghosts than seems reasonable for one struggling human. For five years, food offerings, incense, and chanting were part of every funeral during the AIDS pandemic at Maitri Hospice and Hartford Street Zen Center, and we did more than our share. Our procession included plates of fruit, sweets, and tea, as well as the ashes of the poor soul, appropriate gongs, bells, drums, rattles, and weird noise makers. The incense burner was chock full of the sweetest incense over thick glowing charcoal,

Haloween 

October 29th, 2011

Tonight the Castro will be crawling with lots of hot guys all dressed up. Included will be ghouls and ghosts of Halloweens past, present, and future! To mark the event, I am republishing a post I wrote for "spiritually incorrect" several years ago.

 

Years ago, our PZI meditation group worked with the koan, Save the Ghost. I began my own investigation by examining, with the true dharma eye, some of the more domesticated members of the ghost family—the ones hidden in my closet—spiritual versions of the Adams family, though with more insidious, annoying, painful bugs and tricks, plus a big dose of Freud.

This morning, as I was settling into my comfortable routine, checking email and editing yesterday’s writing, a far more vicious and pervasive monster trumped onto the stage, a Godzilla on steroids breathing fire hot enough to destroy little ol' me and my fantasy world with one big blow. It made its entrance with the announcement that the United States Senate could not find the votes, being too distracted by other important matters, making it "impossible" to pass any legislation to curb the continuing environmental degradation of the planet we all share. Hell no!

Actions speak louder than words! I’m issuing an immediate attention action alert to all Buddhists: Feed the hungry ghosts! Stop feeding greed! Remember that greed is not outside you or me. Own it or die.

Firstly, the oil spill, then the hand-wringing, then the brouhaha, then today the news that Congress will not pass an environmental bill (you’re kidding, right?), then the conflagration of billions of dollars of wealth (well, they say it’s just on paper—until you have to pay the grocer) in milliseconds because we have learned to grab so fast!

My mind- no, my gut drags me into dark thoughts about the greed that seems embedded in our culture, in the artifacts of modern life. We have created these monsters that feed on our greedy dark side. Starve them to death, or at least put them on Jenny Craig, which might be worse.

The Buddhist world has traditional remedies for dealing with powerful ghosts. Christian mythology has fallen angels to contend with. In Buddhism, these nasty, powerful beast-gods, through the power of blessed bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment, convert to the Way and become our guardians. The well-known Mahakala is this black protector with four arms and dripping skulls cinched round its belly.

My attention has recently been so focused on meditation and the images we use, hold, carry, and create that I searched for images of hungry ghosts. Almost immediately, I began to imagine that maybe I could concoct my own magical Tibetan-style visualization to help start the letting go, stamping out the destructive little mind.

I don't have much more to say. I’m just throwing my thought-concerns into the fire of the koan, along with some images that grabbed me. Am I done?

I found images of our phantoms and then tried to match them with what other Buddhist cultures have created by way of appeasements.

No, there is more! And yes, when I said, “other.” I came to the sudden realization that we spend far too much time whining and groaning, complaining and attacking the "other," trying to get some Asian recipe right as if that would save our skin. Goddamn, shut up, eat your hamburgers, eat your tofu burgers, then sit-stand-shout, “Thanks, ancestors, now here’s what we’re going to do.” We have to fill in the blanks ourselves.

America stands at the center of this man-made crisis. Are we going to be responsible? Or are we going to duck for cover under lovely Buddhist robes? The choice is ours, not some god's.

I could get behind creating new American Buddhist rituals to appease our hungry ghosts, though that is just a place to start. Don't let religion fool you. Actions have to equal words, even solemnly chanted ones.

When I speak of rituals for exorcising hungry ghosts, I’m not talking about Halloween in the Castro, though that might be a good place to start. Yeah, wait a minute. It certainly packs some powerful antidotes. We can't let tight-assed practice squeeze all the fun out of ritual. There's already way too much suffering.

I have even more to say. Another time.

The verse is from: “In the Cave of Sister Mary Kevin, Ursuline”

Alok asked me about priest-craft—
appeasing hungry ghosts with big bellies,
tight mouths, and one might presume assholes,
not to mention pussies. Forgive me, Sister.

The antidote contains no eyes, no ears, no tongue,
no body, no mind, no assholes
no thought, no perception, no old age, no ending of old age and death
—and no sex. You know that practice, Sister.

I knew, or at least said, more than I ought.
Phil told me that the rite was no more than sleight of hand:
chocolate, cardamom tea, ripe kiwis,
none of it really satisfying or nourishing.

Hungry ghosts think it’s dinner.
Anything looks like dinner when you’re starving.
Big bellies and big ears arise simultaneously –
evidence, your pictures of starving children in the Sudan.
Trick them. Stuff them with dharma.

No bellies. I know about greed firsthand.

_________________________

HAUNTING THE BUDDHA: INDIAN POPULAR RELIGIONS AND THE FORMATION OF BUDDHISM.

By Robert DeCaroli. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 230. 

ISBN 0-19-516838-0.

This intriguing book proposes that one reason Buddhism gained popularity in India after the royal patronage that propelled it into prominence in the centuries following Ashoka collapsed was the connection it forged with the local populace by building a reputation for subduing and converting bothersome spirit-deities to Buddhism. DeCaroli’s source material consists of texts and, equally prominently, Buddhist sculpture. This volume continues a trend in Buddhist studies, highlighted by the work of G. Schopen, to look beyond the moral and philosophical systematics that dominated Buddhist studies for a century and a half toward the material culture of Buddhism, a project that provides a much-needed and more accurate depiction of Buddhism as a multidimensional religion. Beyond the immediate confines of DeCaroli’s project, this volume sheds light on the deep historical precedents for converting negative spirits into positive ones in both Buddhism and Hinduism, an activity that remains fairly widespread today in the popular religious cultures of India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. While DeCaroli’s skills as an art historian clearly surpass his philological skills, this is nevertheless a well-balanced account of a unique development in the history of Buddhism. This welcome and accessible volume should find a place in an array of courses on Buddhism.

Frederick M. Smith, University of Iowa

"Mindfulness is Not a Part-Time Job."

A Dharma talk given by Issan Dorsey Roshi

Originally posted on 1/13/2012

This transcript appeared in the newsletter of the Gay Buddhist Fellowship in January of 1995, four years and five months after his death.

From Allen Ginsberg's collection

The other day, somebody asked me: “Are you always working on something?” Yes, we're all always working on something, but hopefully not up here in our heads, where lots of words obscure it.

I was talking with a friend about how useful it is to me to work with the phrase “coming to reside in your breath-mind.” I’d been thinking a lot about it. It was so interesting that I thought I’d never really heard it before and was just beginning to use it, but then I realized that it has been with me since I first started practicing; I'd just actually heard it deeply.

It’s a whole way of working with your mind in your Zazen.

I hope you won’t have to wait 20 years to start hearing how to work with this thing we call the mind. People who come to practice today immediately sit much more easily than we did years ago when I first began to sit at Sokoji Temple. I remember everyone sitting with their legs bent up for five minutes, then we’d lie down and moan. Now people come, and it’s like we already did that part for them. It’s almost like we have a shared body that has already gone through that preliminary stuff; people can already experience some aspect of Zazen practice and how we do it together. But we still have to be willing to explore and experiment.

First, we need a sense of humor and a willingness to explore and experiment with our lives and our discomfort. Sometimes we can sit for a few minutes, or even a few days, but at some point it gets pretty uncomfortable. It’s also uncomfortable for us not to invite our thoughts to tea and reside in our breath-mind.

“Don’t invite your thoughts to tea” is Suzuki-roshi’s expression, which I’ve always found useful. They are just words, and we have to remember that every human concept is just delusion. Still, we use words and need them to talk about our experience at least provisionally.

Lately I have been exploring this way of thinking with a friend who has AIDS dementia; the virus is living in his brain. I’m thinking about it, working on it, and talking with him because the virus that is attacking so many of us now ends up in the brain. Is there some way for us to experience that? I don’t know yet. My question is: how to be with people who have dementia, and how to experience dementia? We all have it anyway. It’s called delusion. Mind is always creating confusion, joy and pain, "like" and "don’t like," depression. But there is also a “background mind.” That is what my friend and I have been discussing.

Sometimes when I’m talking about this uncomfortableness, I talk about the five fears. One of them is the fear of unusual states of mind. How can we come to appreciate and respect this fear, rather than resist it? Can we enter our fear and allow new areas of uncomfortableness? When we can enter each of these new spaces, we can begin to look at truthfulness.

Why do we have to sit? Really, there’s no reason to sit. If we’re completely sincere, then there’s no reason to sit. But I’m not completely sincere, so I have to keep sitting to check. Even if we’re involved with unskillful actions, the one quality we should strive for is truthfulness. Truthfulness takes a total commitment to see all aspects of ourselves and our unskillfulness. If we can embrace the totality of ourselves, we can embrace the totality of others and of the world. We tend to think about things before we do them. When we see a beautiful flower, we say, “Oh, what a beautiful flower,” but “beautiful flower” is extra. Just look at the flower “with no trace.”

Suzuki-roshi wrote, “When we practice Zazen, our mind is calm and quite simple. But usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to concentrate on what we are doing.” This is because when we act, we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea. The traces and notions make our mind very complicated. When we do something with a simple, clear mind, we have no shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward.

Even with Zazen practice, it gets so complicated. We’re dissecting every aspect of what’s going on, reviewing and comparing. How do we keep it simple and straightforward? How do we come to know this basic truth of practice and Buddhism? The teaching and the rules can and should change according to the situation and the people we’re practicing with, but the secret of practice cannot be changed. It’s always true.

We teach ourselves and encourage ourselves by creating this space, this meditation hall, so we can begin looking at our minds. “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea.” “Where is your breath-mind?” I used to say, allow this kind of mind to arise. But now I’m saying, create "background-mind."

This practice is simple: watch your breaths and don’t invite your thoughts to tea. But not inviting your thoughts to tea doesn’t mean getting rid of thinking. That is discrimination. There’s no reason to get rid of thoughts; rather, have some blank, non-interfering relationship with them. Don’t make your mind go blank; rather, have a blank relationship with your thoughts. Begin to see the space behind and around the thoughts, and shift the seat of your identity out of your thoughts and come to reside in your breath-mind. We develop our intention to reside in our breath-mind by first bringing our intention to “breath as mind,” and then by shifting the seat of our identity from our thoughts to our breath.

This all ties in with how we use this space, this laboratory. We should be willing to explore with our lives, and this is our laboratory right here—how we use the meditation hall and how we use what happens outside of it. Mindfulness is not a part-time job.


If you want to see more about the life and teaching of this remarkable man, please visit: "The Record of Issan."

Half a Life Ago

It was almost exactly 38 years ago to the day that Issan welcomed me into the Zendo on Hartford Street. In about an hour and 10 minutes, he taught me everything I needed to practice Zazen, as indicated by Dogen Zenji, Suzuki Roshi, & Richard Baker Roshi.

I was in the midst of a personal crisis. By Labor Day, it was clear that my 19-year relationship was coming to a painful end. Though my partner and I still slept in the same bed, it seemed like months since I'd been able to sleep through the night. By 5 AM, I was awake, restless, and agitated. 

I’d heard that there was a meditation hall of some kind in the Castro. I either asked around or looked it up in the phone book (we still had them in 1988). A few minutes before 6 AM on a grey morning, I went down a few concrete steps on the right side of a small garden at 57 Hartford Street, opened a creaky door, and found myself alone in a small meditation hall. I took off my shoes and sat on a black cushion nearest the door in case I needed to escape quickly and quietly. I’d sat before, even done a few day-long retreats with a Theravadin teacher, but that had been at least a decade earlier.

At 6 sharp, I heard a few clacks, sounding like a wooden hammer, and another creaky door opening at the top of some narrow stairs that lead up to the first floor. A small man with a bald head slowly came down carrying a stick of incense. He seemed a bit frail, but he moved with grace and purpose. When he got to my seat, he bent down, smiled, and said quietly, “We sit facing the wall in this zendo.” I dutifully turned around. Then I heard bells and shuffling. A while later, I heard him get up, and within a few minutes I felt his index finger run gently down my spine. Immediately, something shifted in the way I was holding my lower back. Then, after some more time, there was another bell. I stood up, and Issan motioned for me to stand to his left. He handed me a card covered in plastic with a whole series of syllables.

He bowed nine times, and I followed. Then he did the whole service himself, lightly moving from drum to bell to altar, lighting incense and chanting those weird syllables. I had no idea what he was doing, but he moved with such grace and ease that I felt entirely comfortable. Then we bowed three more times. He bent down and folded up a strange cloth he’d placed on the floor; he looked at me and smiled. Then he said, “Don’t worry. If you keep coming back, it gets easier.

He disappeared upstairs, and I let myself out. I did keep coming back. There were a few more people most times. My sitting became steadier, more grounded. I learned when to bow and a few other things. A few of the chants also became easier to follow. When I joined the 6 PM sitting, I learned the Heart Sutra in English.

But looking back, there was absolutely nothing missing from Issan’s Zazen introduction: Do what you’re told, even if initially it seems to make no sense. Sit as straight as possible. Pay attention to your spine. Relax. Don't wiggle. Bow whenever you hear a bell and see others bowing. Watch the more experienced people during the service. Be respectful. Smile. Keep coming back. It did get easier.

Issan didn’t hug me and kiss my cheek that morning. He probably didn’t want to scare me off.

Oh, Issan, you were wonderful. Thank you.

Sex, Gossip, Religion? Can We Talk?

Originally published Thursday, November 18, 2021

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.–Carl Jung

I feel like I just stepped onto the set of "The View" and have been put on the spot for talking about priests, gurus, illicit sex, and sexual molestation. These words, coupled with the name of God, fling open the doors to intrigue, power, domination, manipulation, and forbidden pleasures. Has calling forth these dark forces stymied any ethical guidance?

Recently, a trusted friend stung me with criticism. She felt that some of my writing about the sexual behavior of teachers and students whom we both knew and had had some relationship with–Buddhists, Enneagram enthusiasts, meditators–verged on ‘gossip '–her words. Further, it gave fodder for some within our loose-knit community to lob attacks and discredit opposing positions. She felt that just talking about it might discourage people from undertaking the hard work of introspection, self-analysis, and meditation, which we’d like to encourage. And I also suspect that my friend feels the criticism is unfair on some level. This is the way of the world.

For me, with my Jesuit streak, this raises some thorny ethical questions. I know I have to discuss these issues openly, including my personal experience, but I want to avoid gossip and honor the confidence of friends and others I’ve known and worked with. I reject any underlying assumption that this situation is “the way of the world” and that we should be mute because some larger, more important matters are at stake.

In this essay, I will look at some of the implications of accusations of sexual misconduct, gossip, and spiritual practice. But first, I have to look at the conversations themselves and try to distinguish between gossip and real situations open to analysis and criticism.

Gossip is the “casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.”

In our current culture, it’s very politically, morally, and even spiritually “correct” to talk about the consequences of sexual conduct, especially if it’s misconduct. These conversations have their own cachet and rules. But this is nothing new, is it? Every religion on the face of the earth spends a considerable part of its capital trying to corral the impulses of the lower centers, legislate sexual behavior, and devise punishments for those who stray.

One of the main reasons for the #metoo movement, including digging into the egregious behavior of many in the formal institutions of religion, is that for generations, negotiating these tricky moral areas was secret; it was never talked about in polite conversations. No matter the consequences, even challenging the wisdom of saints, there is widespread public support for this type of investigation. When the Sainted John-Paul turned a blind eye to the sins of some men in his workforce, the lid blew off.

John-Paul allowed priests who molested boys and young men to remain in positions where they could continue to abuse. The church admits no error when it comes to declaring saints, but other consequences follow when this kind of conversation breaks loose and creates its own weather system. Humans love a good stoning when the clouds begin to threaten our comfortable sunny afternoon–especially if the miscreants appear to be having their cake [bought for them] and eating it, too. We’re talking about a tabloid version of the Salem witch trials with an emphasis on sleaze.

These are factual cases of unethical behavior and, as in the case of my own abuse, criminal behavior. There’s a lot of blame, from the butcher, the baker, to the candlestick maker. Michel Foucault argues that surveillance and punishment are part of a technology that poisons institutions from the top down. I will leave that analysis for a later discussion. For now, it is enough to note that the sins of pedophile priests are at least partially shifted to the institutional mechanisms that allow them to function and, more importantly, continue in positions of authority after they’ve been discovered.

Any slowing of monetary support forces hard questions about how a religious institution spends its political capital. If donations erode, is any revision or qualification possible? There’s a tendency for an institution, an organization, or a church to sweep this kind of behavior under the rug, particularly when exposure endangers a stream of income.

I have encountered this criticism: you were raped, but it happened 40 years ago. Get over it. The pain caused by the trauma is as much a result of my inability to move on and deal with my issues as it was Bob Hoffman’s fault for abusing one of his clients in Psychic Therapy. When a senior teacher of the Hoffman Process told me that I should move on, that it was only the result of my “patterns,” he was gaslighting me. The definition of gaslighting is to “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into doubting their sanity.” He wanted me to shut up, which is the response of a cult follower with zero integrity.

There are several other characteristics of this conversation about sexual abuse in spiritual groups that I’d like to highlight.

This conversation about clergy sexual abuse is, for the most part, taking place in rich, privileged parts of the world. But it is also privileged in other ways. Privileged describes a person as having special or unique advantages and opportunities. When used to describe a position in a conversation, analysis, or controversy, it points to an unfair advantage: insisting on a position because of the speaker's status rather than the merit of their cause.

It is a conversation of privilege in that the main actors are men and, in terms of “privileging” the conversation, the conversation deals with men in power. In a study, “Female Sexual Assault Perpetrators,” we see that only recently has any attention been paid to female offenders. They exist, of course, but the conversations we are dealing with only involve male perpetrators.

Whether by rank, authority of position, or what I will call “privileged knowledge,” a dominant voice shapes the conversation. People apply different moral indicators when dealing with clergy members, gurus, or spiritual teachers. Time-honored demarcations of power and authority that accompany sexual restrictions and practices are normally unquestioned. This complicates the discussion.

The issue of misogyny: the conversations in the Catholic Church have been focused on male clergy because the actors are male and clergy. The conversation is skewed by a strong undercurrent of misogyny also present. Some indicators would be the differences in the level of condemnation between men and women listeners; the conversation is also prejudiced by their high level of homophobia.

Let's look at some other characteristics of these conversations.

The conversation can quickly be shut down as gossip because it involves private behavior. For example, what happens in secret, in the bedroom, automatically becomes hearsay. When some secretly recorded tapes were circulated of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, "Uncle Teddy,” seducing seminarians at his private beach house, I posted them to a group of primarily heterosexual former Jesuits. The response was “just crickets.” Actually, they were so explicit and damning that most of the group just didn’t believe that they could be true. After a two-year Vatican investigation, McCarrick was defrocked. The crickets had been speaking loudly, but for my listeners, they spoke a coded language.
[Members of this group, some at great personal risk, tried to get this information to the Papal Nuncio as far back as 2011. If it made it to his desk, he forwarded it to Vatican bureaucrats who buried it for at least another decade, waiting for McCarrick's million-dollar checks to clear the Banco Ambrosiano.]Another indicator that the private nature of most behaviors prejudices the conversation is the evidence of widespread victim blaming. When a few victims of molestation by priests began to come forward, one of the most complex obstacles to highlighting the severity of the problem was the reluctance of other victims to speak openly, given that the abuse was sexual and, for the most part, homosexual.

There are divergent views of what is acceptable sexual behavior. The social norms in the gay community, and what is expected of a parish priest, a monk, or the leader of a New Age Spiritual Community, are quite different. Gender, marital status, age, race, level of education, income level, and sexual orientation all play a role in how severely or leniently we judge sexual misconduct.

There are even cases where sexual conduct outside the norm is excused because it is outside the norm. In an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Claudio Naranjo gave Swami Muktananda a free pass for breaking his religious vows: “My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on: to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean because he was not a lecher. He had a healthy sexual life. . . . “ In this regard, Claudio was far too optimistic. Although Muktananda retained some following, both in India and internationally, his sex life did not help his “cultural mission to be an educator on a large scale.” He proved unworthy of the kind of trust that is required for a spiritual teacher to function. But given Claudio’s logic, again it is the fault of those of us who are uneducated rather than "the one who knows," who is enlightened or has some special knowledge.

In my view, Naranjo also had a wildly exaggerated evaluation of the role of the trickster in a spiritual teacher–the devious nature of our egos can only be highlighted when we are tricked, or forced, into seeing our personality types, our behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets, and their consequences by unorthodox methods. This led him to place undue confidence in psychics like Bob Hoffman, Ann Armstrong, or Helen Palmer, and fourth-way teachers such as E.J. Gold and Henry Korman, who were bullies. This prejudice also tended to blur or excuse any sexual misconduct on the part of the male psychics or teachers.

People also tend to compartmentalize and separate the offense from other qualities, events, and teachings that they value. This includes both those who are not directly affected by the abuse as well as the victims. A Zen priest told me that he felt Katagiri Roshi “got a bad rap” because Katagiri had been an important positive influence during a particularly difficult period of the priest’s training. Katagiri, a married man and Zen teacher, had sex with students, but in the subjective evaluation of my friend, the Roshi had other qualities that outweighed sexual misconduct. In my own case, I refused to acknowledge the damage that Hoffman caused because he was part of a radical change in my life.

False equivalences ignore and/or exaggerate both similarities and differences. The distortion is particularly confusing and pernicious when it suggests that there is a moral equivalence between two or more things that are being equated–in the Katagiri case, individual sexual misconduct and teaching meditation, or in the case of Hoffman Process, the pervasive influence of parental conditioning and my personal transference to Hoffman, who was my therapist and counselor.

In summary, these conversations about sexual abuse are not gossip. They are not casual or unconstrained, nor are they easy to categorize. However, no matter the particular case, Catholic, New Age, or Buddhist, they all seem to contain several of these characteristics:

• They take place in rich, privileged parts of the world, but they are also privileged because the main actors are men.
• These are factual cases. For generations, they were kept secret, but now open discussion has widespread public support.
• They have developed their own cachet and particular rules.
• They erode public support for institutions; they undermine the authority of teachers.
• The conversations themselves are privileged because the speaker's status is used to support a position or the perpetrator.
• Some conversations are hard to understand because they use coded language. 
• They are prejudiced by misogyny as well as a high level of homophobia. 
• There is also evidence of widespread victim-blaming. 
• There are many divergent views of what is acceptable sexual behavior. People apply different moral indicators when dealing with clergy members, gurus, and spiritual teachers.
• People compartmentalize. The arguments contain many false equivalences that ignore and/or exaggerate similarities and differences when discussing cases. 

Agatha Christie, through her gossip detective Miss Marple, makes a strong case for collecting useful information by paying attention to the whispers and tell-tale signs of bad behavior. Marple entered the exclusively male realm of English detective fiction as a female outsider whose methodology veered from the careful Aristotelian observation of, for example, Sherlock Holmes. I might argue along with Christie that what is commonly called rumor or innuendo is sometimes the only reliable source for gathering key information about bad behavior and holding people to account. Some would even argue that dominant male actors created the blanket prohibition against gossip and gossiping to protect themselves.

What next? Is there a way to step out of a black-and-white set of responses and look at the situation differently? Maybe we already have. We’ve been forced to–a fact not yet recognized, accepted, or fully understood.