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.
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