I didn’t shout but I’m still a big phoney.

Blue Cliff Record, Case 10

Let me begin with a snippet from the few introductory lines that Hsueh Tou calls the pointer: “If on the other hand, you neither face upwards or downwards, how will you deal with it? If there is a principle, go by the principle. If there is no principle, go by the example.”

The koan

After Mu Chou’s formula introductory question, “Where are you from,” in a reversal of roles, the shouting teacher gets shouted at.
Then Mu Chou said, "After three or four shouts, then what?"
The student had nothing to say.
Mu Chou hit him and said: You thieving phon[e]y.

It was sometime in the Fall of 1993. If Mu Chou asked me where I’d come from, I would have said “Hartford Street Zen Center,” but he would not have recognized our lives there. A small temple in the heart of San Francisco’s gay ghetto, it had never been your typical Zen Center even before AIDS. After I moved in in 1989, more than 80 men and one woman died in its 13 bedrooms. Our everyday life was centered around doctor’s appointments, dispensing medications, talking with friends and family about wills and funerals, performing funerals, cooking food, as well as two periods of zazen every day, plus a pretty standard Soto ritual. We attempted to establish a more formal Buddhist study program, typical of Western Zen centers, but the grief support groups drew more attendees. I have to add that my daily ritual usually ended with a bout of heavy drinking in a local bar a block away. It was more than a full-time job.

The concern of our zendo was the pain and fragility of life. It was inescapable. You could try to run away, and we all did from time to time in our own way. But now Issan was dead; Steve Allen had resigned as abbot and left for Crestone. And it was the end of Maitri Hospice being part of the Temple. Phil told me to get rid of it. It was Issan’s project, and he had other ideas about Zen masters’ dying. In retrospect, I think that he hated trying to live his life with everyone dropping dead around him. He might have accepted Issan’s invitation to move in because they were old friends; they had been in Santa Fe together, and they were Dick’s first real dharma heirs. But actually, I really think that one of his main motivations was that he was homeless and had nowhere else to go. He had set himself to master Zen, and though he had done his work deeply and thoroughly, he was still a human, and a frail old man.

We had been sitting all day, and I went into Phil’s room just before the closing bell. I remember quite clearly what transpired. It could be fairly labeled passive-aggressive. From time to time, I have been less than proud of my behavior, although I let myself off the hook with the recognition that I am also human.

I forget the exact reason I was so pissed off, but I was. Of course, I was burned out and disappointed, perhaps due to the changes at Hartford Street or Phil’s dismissal of me, but we were all a bit “reactive,” including Phil. That is the way with anger’s confusion--whatever remains, the angry mind latches onto like a life raft in a raging sea. With all that experience of dying, anger turned out to have been a clever student and strategized its survival with the cunning of a fox.

I remember that I’d determined beforehand that in this dokusan, I would not say anything. Just sit like a fat lump and keep my mouth shut. If I felt even the slightest inkling of the beginnings of a word, much less the formulation of a question, I would shut it down. I would kill an errant thought before it even showed its face. I would not recommend this strategy for inching towards happiness, but on occasion, it is interesting to test if it is even possible. Perhaps yelling the nonsensical “Katz” has some salvific result as it involves more of the spontaneous, emotive parts of the psyche, but my Mother had taught me that shouting was always bad manners. Despite learning that great Zen teachers favored this theatrical gesture as a pedagogy, I still believe my mother. Western teachers have tried to polish this skill, but when I hear them affecting a Katz shout, it feels contrived. Or embarrassing. It is still better than cutting off fingers and other outlandish external “shoves” designed to facilitate the dropping off of body and mind. Shouting is not a principle in Zen, nor is it really an example of anything but the coordination of breath and vocal cords.

So for whatever reason, I could never be a shouting student, and I sat. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was shouting inside, though I did feel a few interior bumps. And once in a while, Phil began to look up and begin to say something, but then he stopped too. And so on for a very uncomfortable span of time.

Then Phil faintly smiled and said, “Let’s go back down to the zendo and join the others.” I remember or imagined a feeling of disappointment in his voice. That was it. He didn’t call me a phony. Do you spell it with an “e”? Did he see through to my anger? It makes no difference. All things considered, he was very generous.

I said in the beginning that Mu Chou would not have recognized our lives at Hartford Street Zen Center. Perhaps I’m selling him short.

 

The First World War was family rivalry. Period.

Sobering thoughts about the sexual scandal of Prince Andrew and the ongoing saga of Harry and Meghan.

The royal families of Europe (and other parts of the world, for that matter), their wealth, legacy, and unchecked neuroticism, are a curse. And this curse spreads like a virus, catching up anyone in an infantile fantasy of real and imagined hurt.

I may be overstating my case just as the creators of “The Crown” have exaggerated and taken liberties with the more salacious peccadillos of the Windsor’s for TV ratings, but I have been watching the oversized, hysterical public reaction to Prince Harry’s exit, and wondering how the second son of a wife who was badly treated by a family intent on portraying a certain image garners so much press. I started following Quora on the royals and was disheartened to see how many royal watchers, both British and American, trashed Meghan and Harry for jumping ship and “disrespecting” HH Her Majesty the Queen, as if this was the end of the world. More disconcerting, it’s the same crowd that has adopted the stance of fast-talking Hollywood lawyers when it comes to defending the indefensible Prince Andrew’s pricey payoff to Virginia Giuffre. Let’s be honest--that alone should be enough to end the crown. It really is time to end the culture of rich, powerful men getting away with sexual abuse, but it is not going to happen. The Queen is not the Pope, even though she heads an apostolic church of some consequence, but her second son is not a priest and has not taken a vow of celibacy.

The consequences of these petty family squabbles don’t seem as consequential and deadly as the outbreak of WW1 or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but we avoid examining them at our peril. I would like to examine how public perception and obsession hold so much sway.

In an article excerpted from her book, “The Rhyme of History, the Lessons of the Great War,” historian Margaret MacMillan points to the ambiguity that still remains after more than 32,000 articles, treatises, and books have been published investigating its causes. Then she mentions Freud’s theory “narcissism of small differences,” Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen. The thesis, according to his 1930 “Civilization and Its Discontents,” is defined as “communities with adjoining territories and close relationships [being] especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation.” A few paragraphs further on, he says: “Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.”

Jonathan Swift, in his 1792 novel Gulliver's Travels, described this phenomenon when writing about how two groups entered into a long and vicious war after they disagreed on which was the best end to break an egg. It may be a stretch to compare the German naval expansion in the early XXth century to counter the British domination of the seas to breaking an egg, but the emotional tone of the humiliation of Harry and Meghan seems as senseless as the furor over the assassination of two royals in far away Sarajevo. When tied to the worldwide emotional reaction to the death of Princess Dianna, the connections become clearer and, I would argue, more troublesome. No one was about to go to war over the cloudy, unnecessary death of the British royal, but her involvement with an Egyptian lover, the rise of anti-Muslim feelings in the UK, did have a huge effect on political life in Britain and Brexit. One could argue that there were many other factors involved, and I will not protest. But a surefire way to concoct a recipe for an economic disaster is to mix in a pinch of salacious sex. Too much salt will spoil any good dish.

Archduke Ferdinand was not directly related to the German Kaiser Wilhelm or the Russian Czar Nicholas, who were uncles and cousins, but Ferdinand was tight with the Kaiser, and when the Serbs got involved, the consequences were catastrophic. 40 million people died in Europe between 1914 and 1918. Spoiled Wilhelm hated Edward for being what he considered a nitwit uncle, but Edward managed to pull his cousin Nicholas into his corner of the family fray. Their narcissism of small differences obscured any real solutions other than wholesale slaughter. They may have spoken different languages when haranguing their subjects, but they were all steeped in the same emotional language of pretty jealousy and privilege, and they duped the world into taking sides. The First World War was a family rivalry. Period.