Am I Magu?

The Blue Cliff Record, Case 31

Magu Circles the Chan Seat 

Magu went to Changqing* and, holding his staff, walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Changqing said, “Right, right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu then went to Nanquan and walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Nanquan said, “Not right, not right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu said, “Changqing said ‘Right, right!’ and you said, ‘Not right, not right!’ Why is that?” 

Nanquan said, “Changqing is right, but you are not right. Your action is the movement of the wind. In the end it will perish.”

*Chenzhou is the name of a place.

Philip asks me to find him a shakujō!

This is a real story, not a made up story that sings its own song into the wind.

In preparation for his Mountain Seat, Philip called me to his room and pointed me to the third drawer down in a small Japanese cabinet. 

He asked, “See that funny thing with all rings? It’s meant to sit on the top of a pole. Find me a pole. It has to fit on tight so that it won’t fall off.”

I picked up an odd looking thing, wondering what it was actually. About six rings held together by another brass ring right at the bottom of which was a kind of oversized thimble shape. It seemed to be about 2 inches in diameter but it was obviously Japanese and so it would be an odd metric size. 

Off I went around the corner to Cliffs Hardware with the funny brass thimble thing in my pocket to examine what poles they had in stock. I tried them all, and finally found a broom with a handle probably 56 inches long, but the top had been carefully rounded off so that hard edges didn’t cut the hard working hands of an overburdened housewife. It actually accepted the convex female shape of the jingle jangle thing perfectly. The broom part was detachable. It screwed otf.

I paid 15 dollars and ran back to Hartford Street. I showed Phil, actually I handed it to him so that he could examine it with his fingers, blind as a bat. He liked the way the pole met the ring that corralled the rest of the rings. Then I unscrewed the brush and handed him the pole as he stood up. He bashed it to the floor and shouted “Too short. Taller, kid, taller. I need to hold it about here and walk in a measured pace.” He put out his arm and I could see that the top of the pole was below his shoulder. It needed another foot.

I had kept the sales slip so I screwed the broom back on the handle and rushed back to Cliffs. But I couldn’t find another broom with a tapered stick that was long enough. So I looked at the long poles. I would have to take a chance and have one cut. The problem was that they were either way too thick and would never accept the jingle jangle thimble or way too thin and just didn’t have the substantial feel of a walking stick. There was a deadline. I had to choose and put my money down. Cut it to 72 inches at 3 bucks a foot. I took a chance. It offended my aesthetic sense though. A straight cut at the top of the thin pole set the jingle jangle thimble askew, but I could get some thin nails long enough to keep it from popping off.

Phil grabbed the stick and hit the ground. The rings were near enough to his ear to make the proper sound and he smiled. He draped some ribbons through the rings, and banged what was now his shakujō on each step as he descended the stairs into the zendo where inherited the Mountain Seat from Steve. 

Later though the stick did not support when it would all end. Blind as a bat he reached back for the chair that wasn’t there and fell, breaking his assbone, never to take a seat ever again. 

That is also true. The whole thing is True oh so true right to the metric size of the Jingle Jangle Rings and the Fall ass backwards which turned out Wrong oh so wrong. Right right.

The Verse

For each of us there is a place 

Wherein we will tolerate no disorder. 

We habitually clean and reorder it, 

But we allow many other surfaces and regions 

To grow dusty, rank and wild. 

So I walk as far as a clump of bay trees 

Beside the creek’s milky sunshine 

To hunt for words under the stones 

Blessing the demons also that they may be freed 

From Hell and demonic being 

As I might be a cop, “Awright, move it along, folks, 

It’s all over, now, nothing more to see, just keep 

Moving right along” 

I can move along also 

“Bring your little self and come on” 

What I wanted to see was a section of creek 

Where the west bank is a smooth basalt cliff 

Huge tilted slab sticking out of the mountain 

Rocks on the opposite side channel all the water 

Which moves fast, not more than a foot deep, 

Without sloshing or foaming. 

“The Bay Trees Were About to Bloom"

Tassajara, 11:II:79 

Philip Whalen

A Song for the Wind

Jingle Jangle

Bingle Bangle

Bingo Bango

Trimble Tangle

Tinkle Tango

Oh oh oh

No no no

Too short, too tall

Too thick, too thin

Too heavy, just right

Curmudgeon, 

Superlative Mudgeon 

Ah

Fly away

Spingle Spangle

Humpty Dumpty

Crummy Bunny

Tangle untangle

Bing Bang

Walla walla

Bang bang

Thump thud

The end

Good bye dear Phillip.

I am in tears.

Heels Outside The Door

“I gave up the heels but kept the skirt.”--Issan “Tommy” Dorsey Roshi


My friend, the Zen teacher Roshi Susan Murphy, verbally sketched the opening shot for a movie that she was thinking about doing. I titled it for her--“Issan, The Movie.” The camera focuses on the zendo porch where people have neatly, almost formally, arranged the shoes they shed before entering the meditation hall. The camera zooms in and scans the sneakers, Birkenstocks, flip-flops, and a lone pair of high heels.

I’ve always liked that visual. There’s a whole story in those few seconds. In my mind the slippers had to be red, perhaps even some rhinestones for dual use on stage.

But there was also a reference to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door, though the title seemed to suggest, unfairly in my view, an attractive woman and a sexual tryst outside the Buddhist Precepts. The door in question was not the formal entrance to the zendo but the door of Richard Baker’s private cabin at Tassajara, where the discovery of a woman’s shoes was the beginning of the unraveling of Baker Roshi’s tenure as Abbott. Though Downing claimed to stick to an objective rendition of a major rupture in the history of an important Western Zen Temple, the story that the title references belies that it includes a bit of muckraking. It was a scandal that keeps reappearing like a bad dream in the history of the San Francisco Zen Center.

How do we exorcize or excise a nightmare? Is it even possible? Can we just forget it, or in a more Buddhist-sounding directive, lay it aside?

This question has troubled the humans who practice since Lord Buddha walked out of his father’s palace. How do we carry the past? How do we deal with the results of our actions? When I first encountered this notion in my practice, it reactivated memories of the darker aspects of my own life. In the old story, we hear that the Buddha was troubled by the sight of sick people, desperate people, and dead bodies. I think that there’s a lot of philosophical thinking involved in that presentation, as if an abstract notion of impermanence and suffering presented itself for inspection and reflection. What if Siddhartha himself had visceral emotional human responses that included all the gray shades of hesitancy, infantile and magical thinking, bargaining, even second-guessing, and mistakes? These are the kinds of human reactions that we have to deal with.

Issan, Phil Whalen, and a few other friends were at the center of the San Francisco Zen Center storm, and they were people who did not turn against Richard Baker. Issan would not have blushed at the actual or imagined nubile figure in his teacher’s life, nor did he abandon his teacher. His own life had more than its share of dark and loving moments. He did not shun, renounce, ostracize, vilify, or denounce, though I’m sure many longtime friends encouraged, perhaps even nudged him in that direction. This does not imply that he tolerated or excused whatever behaviors might have occurred. Instead, his experience of human frailty or suffering allowed him a generous and compassionate understanding that we are all human.

This history of planting Zen practice in the West is filled with stories of men and women who came to Zen after deeply troubled personal experiences. Buddhism is not a religion invented to steer sinners towards repentance, nor is it a religion that requires sainthood. Practice allows us a certain degree of freedom from being attached to the past.

Issan became Richard Baker’s first dharma heir. For me, there is no mystery or magical thinking involved.

There was a choice in the matter, but he touched as little as possible. “I gave up the heels, but I kept the skirt.”




Sweeping darkness
into a corner
only makes the room
unbearably bright.
Better for the defilements
to be left undisturbed.
Let them glow like embers
drift away like ash.


Verse by Richard von Sturmer

Did Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan actually exist?

Syncretism, Syncretic Occultism, Carlos Castaneda and the Monetization of the Occult

When asked by an interviewer if don Juan Matus actually existed (as well as straightening out some inconsistencies in his personal biography), Carlos Castaneda replied, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics ... is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

What I take this to mean is that the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan was a convenient fiction made up by an anthropology student with a vivid imagination and a few too many peyote buttons. But Castaneda was a compelling story teller and we all believed it---and bought his books. It is not surprising that he and Naranjo became friends. He visited the early SAT groups, and perhaps used Naranjo’s group process to create his own Tensegrity, “the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest."

One very deep root of the modern Western Enneagram teaching is the small world of Latin American esotericism and its deep, though convoluted connection with native shamanism. Naranjo’s own story is tied up with that of Ichazo who was never very clear about his sources--usually some version of the story of stopping for lunch at an ordinary wayside ristorante in Argentina and the waiter handing him a note from a group of ordinary-looking men sipping afternoon aperitifs while exchanging the latest in their research of the inner workings of the human psyche. Another partially verified story is Naranjo’s journey to Arica Chile where, after some vague initiation into a mystery cult, receiving instructions from a Bolivian esotericist named Oscar Ichazo who by the way was guided by his spiritual guide, the highest Archangel Metatron, Naranjo went out into the Atacama Desert for 40 days, the driest place on the face of the earth (drier than the place where Jesus stood down the devil in his 40 day retreat). There he told us that he went through a rebirth experience, and that having been trained as a medical doctor, he could recognize all the stages of the embryo being formed, the organs beginning to function, etc. I remember at the time wondering how high he was when he told that tale, something about his intonation, and phrasing.

But I did believe that Don Juan was real until the raccoon encounter.

Naranjo’s house was down on the Berkeley flatlands. I can see the house clearly in my memory and almost remember the exact address--14 hundred something Alston Way. It was not in those days all gentrified but a modest, even run down neighborhood of California bungalows. There was a small creek that ran at the back of the property, and Claudio had thrown up a shack, his study house, on its edge. Carlos and Claudio were doing some kind of drugs, and a raccoon came and sat by the screen door watching them in a rather intense way, or so they said. Castaneda was sure that the raccoon had been taken over by a spirit being to deliver a message.

Guys, you were high and tripping out on a raccoon looking for a yummy garbage dinner. I'm not using science to validate sorcery, but I am suspicious of the drugs.