Beginnings of praise for a Zen Master's book

Phil Whalen was losing his eyesight. He was legally blind and the page appeared as just a blur. We would read aloud for him every day. If it was an author or a book he knew, he would finish the sentences. Other times he would simply vanish into a world of his own thoughts. I could use the term “to fly away" because that’s what it looked like to me. At other times there might be a request for a short piece for an anthology or small literary magazine. Usually he would remember something that he’d written long ago. He would ask you to go back to the beginning and read it again, and then again, editing and rearranging the words in his mind’s eye, muttering “too many words, too many words.” Once he had me read long sections of a draft of Dick Baker’s magnum opus, a book that he’d already received a large advance for but for which Dick couldn’t seem to quite find the right words. After a few pages, Phil who was usually very deferential to his teacher, said something like “Fuck it. He just wants me to praise him, but dammit, it’s not a book. Praise, praise him. I get it, he doesn’t want to make a mistake. He hasn't. He can’t, but it’s boring.” 

Whatever became of it? Let me google and see if it was ever published.

https://www.dharmasangha.org/news/original-mind

Ok from this short bit it’s pretty good. Heartfelt and still quirky. 2007. I read the first drafts that Phil complained about in his very circumspect, curmudgeonly voice. That was probably 1992 or 3. Phil died in 2003 so there’s five years that Dick might have contemplated Phil’s critique. But I doubt it. Dick probably certainly found other ways to hold off his publisher. He could string him along for a couple of decades for sure. Maybe not with the written word but the spoken word, Dick has a gift. (And I proved this to myself again by reading a 1994 Tricycle article, an interview Dick did with Sugata Schneider, The Long Learning Curve An Interview with Richard Baker Roshi.)

LOL the reviews on Amazon are hilarious! Pretty much mirror the scuttlebutt that I’d heard way back when! https://www.amazon.com/Original-Mind-Practice-Zen-West/dp/1573221104/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1676539755&refinements=p_27%3ARichard+Baker-roshi&s=books&sr=1-3

But my question is what makes a Zen book good, or even worth reading? I can separate out a few types of writing. 

One is the practice manual. A lot of Bob Aitken’s work falls into this category. He worked with students and was very conscious of both his limitations as well as his responsibility. He wrote about sitting, the precepts, the koans. I liked his books more than his talks which were for the most part duller than dull. He had a hard time taking off his professorial lecture hat, but he was wonderful when doing personal practice discussions, truly intimate. I experienced both so when I read his books I carry the voices I remember into what I hear. I also hear what I am sure were gentle suggestions of his wife Anne, and in some places the literary panache of his student John Tarrant.

And Bob was a real master. He often said to me that his only useful job description was encouragement. This is exactly what he set out to do, and with all his limitations, he did it.

One of the pitfalls of this kind of writing is the reputation that either follows or precedes the author or teacher. And this is the problem with Dick Baker’s writing. There’s a lot of history and hours of dharma lectures from a brilliant teacher who got into some very hot water. He also had to write a book that wouldn’t just be a hollow echo of his own teacher’s famous Zen Mind. (He could have started with a different title! Ordinary Mind sounds like a thesaurus translation of Beginner’s Mind). I suppose if you want to light a fire under your practice, start some trouble and try to get out of it. If something begins, even if it’s outside your control, circumstances pile up a barrier that’s a lot to cut through. I would personally prefer smaller fires, but I also know that things happen and that a fire has its own mind.

Then there’s the commentary type of writing. That’s very tough. You have to have chops before you pick up the pen or open the computer. They seem to fall into two groups. One is for the teacher’s students or others in the lineage who can’t sit and do dokusan. They are usually in modern times transcriptions of lectures by a brilliant busy teacher, edited and reworked for a larger audience. For the heavy lifting in the premier example of this work, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, we have to thank a woman named Trudy Dixon who was apparently dying of cancer during the editing process. In the olden revered times, we are told that these commentaries were taken from the crib notes of monks in the lecture hall. A nice mirror image.

Then there’s a respected teacher bringing their understanding to a topic that is of more general interest. My favorite writer in this genre is Susan Murphy Roshi. She is an accomplished writer, so the territory is not something that she started when she began her practice. I loved her book on sexuality in zen practice, red thread zen. These are unapologetically descriptions of how she’s used the practice in her life, even in extraordinary times and circumstances. Her latest title is Minding the Earth, Mending the World: The Offer We Can No Longer Refuse. I admit to a strong personal bias with regard to Susan. She is a teacher who has deeply touched my life.

One of Susan’s teachers, Ross Bolleter wrote another kind of commentary, based on an important root text in the practice: Dongshan’s Five Ranks. It is much more difficult and probably for students with some meditation experiences. He says “Zen language is not independent of Zen itself.” This is tricky ground. We enter a world that is usually called technical language, but it is not meters, the speed of light or symbolic logic. Rather it is a world in which ordinary descriptors themselves point to something beyond ordinary language.

And the last type of zen writing that I want to talk about is really an adaptation of a particular western type of religious confessional: the apologia. It usually is a highly personal story of how an encounter with the transcendent was transformative. In some ways, even though most zen authors would consciously avoid the grandiose path of Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, there are usually echoes of the peach tree, transgression, compunction, and transformation. What makes this kind of Buddhist writing so difficult to both read and write is that the focus on the self is ultimately about moving beyond the self. That points to a level of mastery of Buddhist practice which is key to making the book useful or even readable.

It’s why I don’t begrudge Richard Baker the years between reading the first drafts of his book to Phil and it's finally making it to words on a page. Like the title of the interview 30 years ago, it can be a long learning curve. 

Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake.

It’s no secret that I think that Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake that’s sucked up more spiritual oxygen than it’s worth in its rather brief history. Ex Cathedra has about as much to do with the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus as the proclamation of Charles III as king certifies the divine right of the British monarchy to rule the fate of nations. Zero, except for his bank account. What we are witnessing now is the slow, painful demise of a spiritual monarchy and the upset of curial hangers-on and courtiers who have been sucking the papal tit for money and power for a century and a half. It’s not pretty but it’s entirely predictable. The rub is that this proclamation can’t be wrong no matter how wrong it is, or the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

It was a California Jesuit, perhaps John Loubonis or Gene Bianchi, who retorted to one of my historical analyses: “remember the logical fallacy ‘post hoc, propter hoc.’” My worthy opponent was defending arguments in favor of the truth of the doctrine of papal infallibility. The fact that Pius IX surrendered the Palazzo del Quirinale to Victor Emmanuel when he lost the Papal States, his army of 15,000, his rights, privileges and income as one of the kings of what we now know as the the Republic of Italy of course has nothing to do with shoring up his spiritual authority at a time when he lost everything else on which he imagined that authority rested. Of course not. It was just a quirk of fate or a pure coincidence that allowed him to reassert a doctrine lurking in the shadows until a political upheaval allowed the truth to reveal itself.

In the cult of objective spiritual truth, it is vital to dissociate the muck of historical circumstance from the hard work of doing logical analysis. Post hoc ergo propter hoc* is what is known as “informal fallacy.” It refers to assumptions embedded in ordinary language. “I saw Johnny on the street just after the bus left the station” does not necessarily imply that Johnny took the bus from Bakersfield. If I needed to demonstrate that Johnny took the bus, of course I could just ask Johnny to show me his bus ticket, or search his pants pockets for the incriminating evidence, but then there is still the possibility that he might have picked up a ticket from a real passenger who’d dropped it on the sidewalk or had boarded the bus in Oakland and disembarked on 6th Street. Nothing is certain. But I am certain that the Roman church is pulling a fast one. They’re not showing the ticket from Bakersfield.

After all this you might think that I am actually interested in the pope’s infallible words. I'm not. I was curious that Benedict, recently of happy memory, said he was no oracle, but he could be given the proper conditions. Even John 23 said something to the effect that “I am infallible but you’re not going to hear it from me.” So these guys hold the authority of the oracle in their back pocket just in case. Meanwhile it has caused immense disruption and controversy across doctrinal Christianity. This interests me. The church is standing in its own way.

Why and how? I think that the “why” is self-evident. The “how” might require some digging, but let’s dig.

Avery Dulles became very conservative in his later years. I asked him why he supported this kind of centralized authority, and he said that his argument rested on the Ignatian principle of “Thinking with the Church.” I should have countered “even if that thinking is wrong?” But I didn’t. I was intimidated by the obligations of friendship and his red hat, but after John Paul 2 strongly reiterated the centralized power of papal authority, any further discussion was over as far as Avery was concerned.

This was not always the case. During a symposium about the Jesuits’ connection and promise to hitch their horses to the papal cart, a strategy that proved immensely successful, I asked a simple question: why? Avery said that despite everything, any problems or contradictions, we obeyed because of “filial piety.” That was enough. I then asked how we could support something or someone on a premise that was actually different from his understanding: how could we justify believing one thing when the person-in-question actually said something different about themselves? He reiterated his statement about filial piety, but later privately said, “I really didn’t answer your question did I?” He did not, and I cannot accept a pious notion of piety to guide us. Today I would phrase my question differently, “Why do people believe nonsense?” Usually because of laziness, or fear, or tradition, none of which are good reasons.

I am quite sure that we will never hear any infallible words from Francis. The question is whether or not the absurd travestry of papal monarchy will simply die off without being addressed directly. The opposition is gathering its forces to nullify any work by the upcoming synod.

*Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: 'after this, therefore because of this') is an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy. A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc ('with this, therefore because of this'), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical fallacy in which one event seems to be the cause of a later event because it occurred earlier. [1]

Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because correlation sometimes appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.[2]

A simple example is "the rooster crows immediately before sunrise; therefore the rooster causes the sun to rise."[3]

Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa

15th December 2011

Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."

This morning I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because--his words a loose translation from the Hindi--“we don’t want fags.” Ah! homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.

I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.

Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Arc of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.

I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I did speak with the guy who felt trapped there, and moved him up to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.

After leaving Maitri, and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers called us. The Center had been started by a few of the men Missionaries, and particularly one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.

When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews--Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker, case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge handsome grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.

So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and gave of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did--until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji was not going to be happy if she discovered that her name was associated with the project--that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.

After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So of course they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.

I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul wind up No-Where, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”

And finally, from an interview with Christopher who makes my point very concisely:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html

Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a by-word for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?

Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.