How a blind monk might respond to my piece

After reading my last post “It is Universal" Doug McFerran posed some great questions about the language of "Enlightenment.” He closed by saying, “What I would really like to hear is how a blind monk would respond to your piece.”

I would too. His name was Zenshin Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002). He gave me lay ordination 33 years ago. I lived and sat with him in the zendo at Hartford Street for more than 6 years. Though I loved Issan and learned from living with him as he was dying, I was formally Phil’s student. Phil was the Beat poet who was known as the poets’ poet. He read at the Six Gallery the same night that Ginsberg read Howl. He was obviously upstaged. 

Phil was legally blind when I met him. He had figured out how to get around. As with other blind people I’ve known, his sense of hearing and touch had recalibrated to some degree to make up for his loss of sight. He could go up and down the stairs to the zendo and find his seat and bowing mat. He loved to eat so he certainly could locate food on the table and in the refrigerator, though he often needed help. Vague shadows were the only information that his eyes delivered. He had glaucoma which had been misdiagnosed 20 years earlier. Being perpetually broke, I imagine that he’d gone to the cut rate optometrist who had dropped out of medical school but hung out a shingle in the Tenderloin. 

I assume that Phil had a photographic memory. If I asked a question while we were sitting in his library office, he would say, “Check out old Yampolsky, page 54, third paragraph from the top of the page. You’ll find the book in the middle cabinet, third shelf, about three in from the right.” And god dammit, it would be there. He was the most well read man I have ever met. He loved books and words. He could quote pages and pages of poetry. People were always a challenge for Phil, but he tried his level best. I suppose that I had as close a relationship with him as he had with anyone, and I learned an enormous amount, but we both had to work at it.

When I write about Buddhism and search for an appropriate English word, I often ask my memory what Phil might say. This is not reliable, and perhaps as hopeless as consulting a fake optometrist so I exercise caution. Phil distrusted Plato and would always hedge his use of any philosophical language with words of caution. When it came to Buddhist terminology in English, he would usually begin with the technical Japanese word from the Soto dictionary, then he would foray into the antecedents in Ch’an, or Chinese Zen, and then finally refer to the Sanskrit terms that were developed by the early Mahayanists. 

So yes, enlightenment is just the normal way that Western Buddhists have described the the experience of Kenshō (見性), a Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means "seeing", shō means "nature, essence". It is usually translated as "seeing one's (true) nature", that is, the Buddha-nature or nature of mind. Kenshō is an initial insight or awakening, not full Buddhahood. Then Phil would have directed me to the Heart Sutra, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya where the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara  directs Śariputra,one of the Buddha’s disciples to examine form and emptiness, and then tells him that there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, etc. We are off into.an examination of emptiness (śūnyatā): all phenomena, known through the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas): form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (saṅkhāra), perceptions (saṃjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna) are empty. Bad translations and advanced philosophical study aside, in Zen temples, the 100 line version of the Heart Sutra is usually chanted, sometimes in phonetic Sinojapanese, after a meditation period. 

When I finished the last piece. “It’s Universal,” I asked myself what was missing. I had tried to lay out some of the areas and things that might be perceived differently when we have some experience of kensho, or enlightenment, but that is not a definition. Then my mind went in several directions. First I remembered the many times I had a complaint about sitting and not getting something. Phil would most often get to be the strict Zen teacher. He’d say, “You’re not sitting enough.” Or if we were sitting in his library he would say look at what old Dogen says in his Shōbōgenzō: “You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will manifest itself. If you wish to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.”

Rather than try to parse 12th century practice instructions from the monk’s hall, I will tell an old Irish joke that illuminates old Dogen. A hapless American tourist is lost in Dublin. He is looking for the Cathedral and just can’t find it. He sees a pub. Surely these guys will be able to give some direction. He stands at the end of the bar and asks “How do you get to Saint Patrick’s? The answer comes back, “You can’t get there from here.”

So we are looking for some experience in meditation. That is all the Zen means--Meditation Buddhism, but that language won’t sell soap, body oil or relaxing massage.

My friend Rob Lee lived at the Page Street Zen Center for many years. The zendo is in the basement. There are windows on the Laguna Street and Lily Alley sides and from some of the seats in the zendo, a clear view of what used to be pre Loma Prieta Earthquake the Fell Street Off Ramp. When a newcomer came for meditation instruction in the late afternoon, some bad bad zen students who were instructing them would sit them in one of those seats. At just about 5:30 cars coming off the freeway unto Fell would catch the last bit of sun disappearing over the hill and it would reflect off the windscreen. The new meditator was treated to a flash of enlightenment the first time they sat on the cushion.

Language about the experience of meditation also plays tricks. 

I will end with a memory of that Blind Monk. One morning coming up from the zendo, Phil got to the top of the stairs and a bird started chirping in the backyard. He sang out, 

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!

It is Universal

Some rumblings from my Bangkok hermitage.

27 January 2024.

This is not an argument for or a defense of the thesis that there is a universal creed under all the vagaries of the religious expressions of humankind. That's an old theosophical trope. I refuse to engage its tired argument or bask in its self-justifying cliches though I’d like to make a joke if I could. I always hope that the right words will coalesce at an opportune moment but my jokes are usually pretty lame. Regardless, all day yesterday and this morning I have been tossing around odd impressions and telltale fragments from three conversations that have cleared the horizon of my recent thinking.

The first thread of this conversation is Joan Didion, a woman writer whose creativity and imagination and skill we have rarely seen on our American continent. I was watching a documentary about her on Netflix. She said that in the 50’s when she got her first job out of college and moved to New York from California to take the coveted position as a staff writer at Vogue, she could easily identify the women executives who made the decisions at the magazine. They all wore hats and gloves. The “girls” who did the work, the staff writers, secretaries, stylists, copy editors, and mailroom clerks did not wear hats except when the weather dictated. Having just researched Saint Charles Borromeo for another piece, and seen his gold mitre and stole, I thought there might be a universal dress code embedded in human nature: you know who’s in charge by their hats.

The second thread of conversation has to do with the theological term transubstantiation. Perhaps it has been elevated to the level of doctrine, but it’s certainly not a term that would even have been recognized among early Christian believers, not even the Grecophile Paul. My twisted mind flashed to Og Mandino’s characterization of Paul as “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” without whom, according to the Think and Grow Rich crowd, the gospel would have languished in the backwaters of Judea. But I think that the credit has been misappropriated: the honor belongs to Aristotle who, mixed in with a few Neo-Platonists, really deserves credit for promoting the Jesus sayings, stories and beliefs in the predominant culture. A simple test proves my point. Would you say that in the seminary curriculum post Reformation and certainly in the Jesuit Ratio, was Thomistic theology given equal weight with textual study of the gospel texts? Clearly more. We learned more, or spent more time studying Aristotle's notion of substance than we did about the possible early forms of liturgy. This is a snapshot of Aristotle’s chokehold on our thinking, locking in definite notions about the nature of God, the divine characteristics of the Lord Jesus as Son of God as well as the continued presence of the Lord in our midst. Q.E.D Maybe Jesus and Aristotle deserve equal doses, but actually, Aristotle gets the upper hand because he allowed for science and logic to sneak in the backdoor..

And the third strand of this thread comes from a conversation that I had with my Zen teacher Ed Oberholtzer a few weeks ago. He said that he felt that our thinking about theological matters is hedged in by imagined people, places, times and events. We think that without the Lord Buddha sneaking out of his father’s castle on or about 563 B.C.E., we would not have the possibility of being enlightened. Then he said it is entirely possible, even probable that some group besides Buddhists would hit on the right conditions to produce that insight that is liberating, “maybe even that group of former Jesuits you talk about.” It is probable that this insight is reproducible, and given the realm of human possibilities, that it has already been replicated. We just haven’t heard about it. Do I nominate Bob Kaiser, Bob Brophy, Pope Francis, or Marko Ivan Rupnik for Zen Master?

Bad jokes aside, where does this lead and what are the conditions that make this experience of enlightenment or liberation possible?

The first condition has to do with those hats. It’s not that an examination of past decisions is not interesting, important or even valuable to our exploration, but let’s not be distracted by fancy hats. They are just culturally conditioned fashion. The colorful signs of power were among the first things that the Reformers cut when their movement gained traction about 500 years ago, but it was not too long before a new style was in vogue and captured the imagination of the people they wanted to win over. So in any case beware hats. Don’t hesitate to wear a rainhat in monsoon or a toque when your ears might freeze. And give the drag queens a lot of leeway. They keep us honest, but recognize that the texts that made it to the inked pages were put there by the women who wore the hats.

The second condition has to do with the limitations of human thinking. It’s always difficult to thread the needle isn’t it? It’s more difficult when you’re wearing a straight jacket but think it’s a Roman toga. So much of what I currently “think about thinking” or even “non-thinking” has to do with my work with the concepts derived from the Nagarjuna School of Buddhism that I feel a bit tongue tied. I often think that I don’t have enough time left to fully appreciate the contribution that this revolutionary thinker made in the development of the Mahayana, and that makes me feel like I’m probably missing something important. Still the lessons that I’ve learned by trying to understand the thinking of the Mahayanist, and especially the Zen guys I spend most of my time with, changed my life. I did the most difficult training, the one that I undertook in a rigorous way that young people usually do when they first start to ask the hard questions about life in a system that pretended to be open when in reality it was designed to answer objections rather than explore. That in itself allowed me to see its limitations. Following a line of thought is just that. It doesn’t lead to the discovery of truth with the big “T.” 

I also really appreciate that this use of the brain is groupthink, and I don’t mean the usual negative connotation of the phrase, but rather thinking together in a group of men and women to really get it. This makes me appreciate the many parts of managing an open conversation with lots of people contributing.

And the third condition is the one that Ed alluded to. It was in the context of some koan work that we've been doing for several years, but his point was that even if all the great Masters of the non-dual way were extinguished and their writings disappeared, it would not be forever before some other humans discovered this unique and powerful way of looking at our world, ourselves, and our interactions. Although not immediately recognized or available, It is not divinely revealed, and its discovery is not confined to a particular time and place. Given that there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of men and women, possibly including some Jesuits, who have demonstrated that they are themselves Buddhas, well you get my point. 

The joy and promise of this fact about Buddhism is often hidden or disguised. It is very hopeful. The implications of it are revolutionary: we only have this moment and this place in these particular circumstances to work with which is why the day that I have fretted over writing this and making it sound rational and cogent and persuasive might have been a waste of time, but I had some fun which is not a forbidden pleasure,

Will the Palace of Westminster go up in flames?

Bangkok, Thailand

March 30th 2023

Will the Palace of Westminster go the way of Notre Dame, and post Brexit, will there be a way to pay for its rebuilding? 

There is a ton of evidence of the danger and appropriate concern for the dire situation. Fires and plans, debates and more plans and politics. Ah, yes how could the home and symbol of the British Parliamentary system be destroyed without a lot of very civil shouting? There was an attempt to sift out the political warfare and get on with rebuilding, The oversight committee released An Independent Options Appraisal Report (8 September 2014) detailing the projected costs, timetables and other pertinent materials. That was almost 10 years ago. But the Tories have been in charge and Brexit took the wind out of the political sails as well as money out of the coffers. The projected cost was far too much for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Rees-Mogg could hardly do without the proper backdrop for his mumbled theatrics.

So they decided to throw the entire deliberation back into play. A political football. When I heard that the clown Rees-Mogg was involved, I knew that all sanity had been thrown to the wind in a plethora of incomprehensible high brow language and a penury of common sense. Let’s hope that they can get the project underway before something far more destructive than the fire of 1834 brings Westminster down once again. We know that post-Brexit there will be no money to replace the building. Rees will have to hold forth in a thrown-up Parliament of concrete blocks.

The Test of Suffering

After he read my last post, my friend James Ismael Ford asked, ”And then what are the consequences of much of Buddhism in the West's proximity to the self help industry? I look forward to your analysis.”

James, Who am I to be splitting hairs in what appears to be a somewhat technical Buddhist dispute about suffering and the causes of suffering? Suffering, real and imagined, is the reason why our western version of Buddhism gets entangled with the Self Help Industry. It’s hard for me to be objective. I’ve got a pony in this race. It was a very personal experience of suffering, both real and imagined, that led me to a cushion in a zendo. That’s factual, and I am not alone. And this personal experience has helped me with what I will call “a working position” for my own life--If it helps relieve suffering, it is worthwhile.

The question itself is not easy. Without trying to be all super Zen and theological, it is a bit like the challenge that the Fifth Patriarch announced in the Platform Sutra. The head monk wrote for the gradualist position, “Little by little, one small speck of suffering at a time, wipe the mirror clean and do your best to keep your house in order,” while our disruptive hero, Hui Neng blasted the Big Bang Zen position, “The mind is not a mirror. It’s all Suffering and it’s not. Open your eyes to Emptiness. That’s always here.”

To reintroduce the Self-Help Industry: there are as many valid reasons to put some money down and sit in a hotel meeting room for several days listening to Werner Erhard as there are to shy away and continue a relatively boring day to day routine. (For the record I have spent far more than several days with Werner’s programs and think that my dollars were well spent). Weighing the positive and the negative is actually not much different from the way I list my personal reasons to distrust Buddhism, to avoid the teaching or dive into the Tao. It’s a choice.

I am no expert. Here in Bangkok, I live by myself, and spend much of my time alone. Of course I am not a recluse in a cave in the remote hinterlands of China; I have cable and wifi. I meet and talk with other people, family and friends, though by choice in small doses, but most importantly I have time to meditate, read, reflect, and write; I feel an obligation to use this gift wisely. I haven’t answered my own question, but I am inching closer to what I have at stake in any answer, and as I do I feel a great deal of gratitude that I have been given enough freedom to explore the question.

I try to sit for at least two, sometimes three periods a day. It is something I look forward to, now that I am almost 80 and have given myself permission to sit in a chair. Recently I started to end with a private ceremony. I wanted to put an end to my formal meditation and boot up the computer with some equanimity. One of the English versions of the Heart Sutra allows me to acknowledge that all there is is the moment right here in front of me. I feel some confirmation that in fact I am Buddhist, at least in the sense that I want to see an end to suffering, mine as well as other peoples’, and most importantly, that I am willing to dedicate myself toward that goal.

Suffering is not fun. But I have observed that there isn’t just one kind of suffering as if it had a unique DNA marker. I have explored the kind of suffering that comes from some indulgent interpretation of past events or being deprived of some imagined right to exercise my power and grab what I think I need. Then I stand back and see how different that is from the unimaginable suffering of innocent settlers in the kibbutzim on the borders of Gaza and the equally horrific suffering of Palestinian mothers and children caught in crossfire with nowhere to turn, I know that my petty suffering is just that, petty and self-serving, and there is almost unendurable suffering. There is no way to take back the actions that have caused it.

In my next post I will examine the Self-Help Industry through the Test of Suffering.

It’s a cult damn it. Nothing more.

“Love your kids more than evolution requires.”--David Brooks

I was just listening to a podcast by Andrew Gold interviewing Jon Atack (A Piece of Blue Sky) about Charlie Manson and Scientology. Alack describes a cult in its simplest form as a group that reveres a particular leader or doctrine. Bow down and surrender. Isn’t that the first thing you heard after you’d knocked on the door?

A general rule is that cult leaders are not necessarily brilliant, or enlightened, or even educated. As a matter of fact, very often they are none of the above, but they know how to weave a spell, to hypnotize, to create a myth, and make promises that sell themselves. The best and the worst are con men (or women) with an uncanny ability to mirror our personal insecurities and then reflect back a crafted solution that pays them usually more than its real value..

In the late 1960’s, particularly in California, there emerged a new group of high-flying self-help gurus who promised a level of personal awareness that would free us--if we worked with them. We were told that we’d been programmed by a familiar network of parents, schools, pastors, priests and rabbis, tribal culture, liberal (or conservative) political prejudices, the sexual taboos that hounded us along with innumerable generations before us. The gurus pointed to obvious evidence and we jumped at a ready solution. We’d all suffered through the deadening post war social homogenization. We’d all experienced the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation, driving under our desks since the first grade (I remember these drills today when the threat of armed maniacs in schools is very real and certainly statistically more deadly). The Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love erupted and, I think, clearly demonstrated a deep hunger for relief.

The new age gurus promised that we could be deprogrammed from this hypnotic state. This was an attractive offer. It was pretty much universally agreed among my affluent college educated peers that we were all caught in the thrall of automatic action and reaction. We also felt that our personal level of discomfort was somehow unfair. It was just hard to name the culprit. We were told that the buck stopped with us, but we had to pinpoint who we were “being” when push came to shove. A friend paid a sizable chunk of money to spend a long sleepless weekend sitting on the floor of a yoga studio asking and answering the repeated question of “Who are you?”

We were told that any possible freedom or newly discovered enlightenment would require work. We rolled up our sleeves and opened our wallets, or at least contrived alternative ways to pay for services. There were groups, and rivalry. Bob Hoffman bad mouthed Werner Erhard. Mainline Gurdjieff groups paid no attention to Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram. Gurdjieff teachers questioned the credentials of people who set themselves up as doing “The Work.” Oscar Ichazo sued Helen Palmer, and Scientology had a very long list of defectors in the docket, including Werner Erhard’s est.

The infighting became cannibalistic. Here’s an example--Scientology sued the Cult Awareness Network which bankrupted them with the huge expense of legal fees to defend themselves. Scientology through an agent then purchased the shell of CAN for the fire-sale price of $25,000 and made it an arm of the Church of Scientology who became the resource for distraught parents whose children had become Moonies, an Osho Sannyasin--or recruits for Scientology’s Sea Org. (And the Scientologists in charge took their jobs very seriously. I was on the phone with them when a concerned family member raised concerns about the “human-development” seminar company I worked for. They knew the precise questions to ask to uncover a cult).

This kind of feeding frenzy spread like wildfire in dry grass. Not only were our leaders fighting amongst themselves, with lawsuits and unbecoming slander and innuendo, we took on each other with a righteous, determined vengeance to do the hard work of Ego Reduction. If we were not aware of our patterns of programmed behaviors, rackets, bank, negative behaviors, without lapsing into passive aggressive behavior ourselves, how could we root it out? Like good soldiers in the war against the dark side, we ganged up on each other, all with some expression of gratitude or at least lack of complaint. In retrospect our behavior was more like gang bangers than seekers after truth or truth warriors. It also served a dual purpose. It deflected attention from the leaders who were more like tribal Neanderthals with automatic weapons than compassionate enlightened beings acting for the deepest good of all humankind.

I knew one of these gurus for almost 30 years. It was an on-again,off-again acquaintance. Bob Hoffman was a very difficult man, most likely suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder. I cannot say that he was dumber than a stump. I don’t know his IQ though I do know that he dropped out of school in about the 6th or 7th grade and never received a GED. For the almost 30 years I knew him, he never finished a book though he did try several times. He opened E.M. Forster’s “Maurice” when he heard that it was his gay novel, but he never finished it. He told me that the storyline was too bleak. He also tried Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man," but lost interest when he realized Isherwood was not Danielle Steel. He asked me to fill him in on the end of the story. He was disappointed. He loved a happy ending.

Hoffman channeled the Quadrinity Process from his spirit guide, his psychotherapist, Siegfried Fisher. Because it came from “the other side” Hoffman claimed the highest level of validity. He would stand in front of a group and ramble. I never saw him go into anything like a trance. Most times the sessions were recorded and Hoffman had them transcribed, edited and cleaned up by a small group of people who had had, admittedly, some rather remarkable personal experiences following this other worldly methodology. Because Hoffman tried to hide that he had actually been Fisher’s patient, the whole tale became twisted with lies and information that was “somewhat less than factual,” and it became ripe ground for manipulation. In my personal case the abuse was both emotional and sexual.

When I read some well thought out passage online attributed to Hoffman, I know that it was obviously written by a ghost. Hoffman liked it short, dirty and crude. His teaching style was in your face aggressive. On a scale of professional to barbarian, he was unapologetically barbarian. He “broke you down to build you up,” and you had to be grateful for his gifts of wisdom. You did things his way or you’d be shut out. Some of the people who succeeded him will boast they never stooped to or countenanced his crude confrontation, that they told him so to his face, brave souls. They stretch the truth. Everyone of them would have to admit to strained working working relationships. At some point everyone close to him just blocked his ranting, and as long as he got paid, he learned to live with it.

But the adjustments, the edits, the lies are necessary. Hoffman is still the guru face of the Process that bears his name. It is a cult. Is there something more? Is there anything that can be saved from this river of teaching? I will also try to tackle the question of whether the Western adaptation of Buddhism loses something by closely identifying with the Self-Help Industry. Stay tuned.

Big Changes for Jesuit Spirituality

Newsflash! Pope announces changes to the Spiritual Exercises

13 March 2024

Pope Francis will hold a joint press conference with Arturo Marcelino Sosa Abascal SJ, the Father General of the Society of Jesus to announce the first major revision of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius in 500 years. This follows the discovery of a document found in Saint Ignatius’s desk with instructions not to open until the tenth year of the reign of the first Jesuit Pope. 

The Jesuit Curia has released a translation of the text of Saint Ignatius's letter.

Rome, January 4, 1556

As I near the end of my life, I pray (and worry) constantly about the future of our Company. Although it seems to be thriving, supplying extremely well trained priests to stem the tide of the reform movement and missionaries around the globe, something haunts me. The vision that I had by the River Cardoner is fading. I have been particularly troubled by the prospect of losing that vision after I die.

The administration of the Society will not suffer, there are plenty of talented men, but I fear our collective understanding of God’s will is more than slightly cloudy. .I am worried for the visionaries. Our men are certainly a cut above regular priests. We have a lot of second sons of high ranking families, bright kids, eager, many are extremely devout, but it is almost that they do everything too perfectly. The gay ones have to hide out because there are so many trying to prove themselves. Damn macho post medieval tribal culture is deadly.

Then I had an experience with a young applicant to the Society, a mestizo who came back with some missionaries from the Americas. He can neither read nor write, and his Latin is rudimentary so I had to have him work in the kitchen while he catches up, but he claimed to have had a vision of the Blessed Mother that directed him. He started to talk to me about it, and I was very moved. I have weighed the spirits carefully and it is clear to me that Mariano had an authentic vision.

Mariano says that the Virgin told him that we Jesuits place too much emphasis on earning God’s Love. I blame myself for the emphasis on love through actions and not in our hearts. (Love is expressed through actions, but it has to do with intent). He says that the Virgin told him that priests who are privileged and jealous of their position become blind to the immediacy of God’s love and can’t see that this love comes without any conditions. He’s absolutely right, but centuries of fighting have conditioned us to enforce conditions rather than seeing beyond them.

I would turn our enterprise over to Mariano if I could. I know that this is God’s will, but I can’t execute it. The Inquisition would go ballistic. The Pope’s funding scheme for Saint Peter’s would collapse. The Society would split apart with the infighting. Sometimes I am tempted to just let the cards fall where they may, those snobby Jesuits who spend years studying the minute distinctions in the writings of Avicenna and Aquinas need to do more quiet meditation, but I will have to leave that aside. I have decided to send Mariano into hiding,

This is where I am being led right now. I have to get this young man to safety and protect his vision. The time will be ripe at some point, but not at this moment. Until then we must protect this inspiration. The fires of the Inquisition need to be extinguished, and warring factions need to at least reach a detente. The church does need reform and a strong hand is necessary right now so fight fire with fire, but make sure that the proposition of “ends justify means” is discussed in the ratio. Keep an open mind. Things change.

I have authorized the foundation of a clandestine cell of Jesuits near Buenos Aires in the New World. Mariano will lead this small community. Their practice will be kept alive by recruits from the indigenous community that they will serve for as long as it takes. I want to keep the flame alive while things sort themselves out. Mariano has told me that the Virgin told him that Jesuits will begin to practice the quiet meditation that Xavier wrote about from Japan, and she approves. I find that perhaps the hardest thing to believe of all the wonders he shared with me, but I suppose it is possible.

Mariano has my permission to restructure the Spiritual Exercises. I will note them here so that anyone who reads this will know that I approve of the changes. He has turned them on their head. The first week will be the Contemplatio ad Amorem. The main meditation instruction will be the fourth method, to follow the breath as it rides on the sound of a word in prayer. Mariano says that human beings can find God in all things instinctively. He is right. In my version of the Exercises I thought I had to lead the retreatant by the nose. We don’t need to go through hell to experience the Presence in rocks and stones, mothers and babies, even in the clanging of pots and pans.

This experience will be the basis of the meditations on the events and sayings in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ during the second week which will stand as they are with the exclusion of the stories about Mary. The third week also remains as it is, but without my interpretation. We can approach the meditation on His sacrifice and death and allow them to speak for themselves, and create their own inner narrative. But again the story of Mary going to the tomb will be left for the entirely new fourth week.. 

The new fourth week is a series of meditations which Mariano received in his vision of the Blessed Virgin. She was the person who really allowed God to become human. I hope we don't have to wait 500 years to experience how Mary the Virgin can help guide us to continue the Incarnation, but 500 years is just a drop in the bucket of eternity. We can all begin to experience immediacy right now in the moment. We don’t have to wait. Waiting for the present moment is an oxymoron. However the changes in my Exercises will have to wait.

Mariano tells me that in the clandestine Buenos Aires cell, washing dishes will be part of everyone's daily practice. It should smooth out the rough edges between Avicenna and Aquinas. There may be random occurrences in the universe, but few mistakes.

Father Ignatius

That’s just the way it is in Buddhism

I want to respond to Doug McFerran’s comment on my post "How this Jesuit became Buddhist.": Doug is an old friend whom I met through a group of former Jesuits. He said that it seemed to him that I always needed a teacher, and that he was the opposite. After I got over being defensive, I thought “good point: do we need a teacher and what for?” I had to give up feeling that I am just some weak ninny follower who needs a guru, but I can do that. There is almost universal insistence across all Buddhist schools that the transmission of the Buddha Dharma requires a student-teacher relationship. It’s not just a way of buying the teacher’s dinner, or maintaining a school’s stronghold on a student's mind and pocketbook. That’s just the way it is in Buddhism. 

Buddhism is not a revealed religion. There is no deposit of faith that closed with the death of the last of Buddha's original disciples. Of course there are lots of texts, many more that actually probably should be considered than what comes to us as the gospel of Jesus; there is also a lot of history, teachers fighting with each other, sects, scandals and disputes, all the usual stuff of human interactions. But ultimately only our own experience shows us the path. That is all we got. When the Buddha died (if I can paraphrase and even if I am not allowed to, I will), he said, “You’re on your own. I’ve given you 40 years of training. I hope it actually did some good. Everything is always changing. You’ll have to hold up your experience carefully and examine it. Try not to take any wooden nickels.”*

The result is that although there is a huge body of textual material, we have an oral religious tradition. It’s been sliced and diced by thousands and thousands of monks over approximately 93 or 95 generations since the parinirvana of the Lord Buddha, but if you want to do Buddhism, you find a teacher. My cab driver in Bangkok, in the West we’d call him a pious man, said to me, “I have a lama.” He doesn’t just go to church. At the very core of his personal practice is a person we might recognize as a monk or teacher whom he talks to about his life. The Dalai Lama has teachers, the best that money can buy, but there are men who are his teachers. He’s supposedly an incarnate Bodhisattva but he has teachers. Go figure. Every monk and nun, every student, most pious laymen and women where I live in northern India also have teachers. They probably don’t talk to them on a regular basis as we do in zen, but at some point when they decided to practice their Buddhism, to “take refuge,” a teacher accepted them, and usually gave them a new name. I have a Tibetan name that Kalu Rinpoche, one of HH’s teachers, gave me in about 1976 and another Japanese name that Phil Whalen gave me when I took the Bodhisattva precepts as a layman in 1991.

In Catholicism we have confession and the other sacraments as a way of making the invisible world present, an outward sign of an inner grace. In Buddhism we meditate, we might take the precepts and we talk. If you’re lucky you will find someone whom you can really talk to. Stuff happens in meditation. It just does. I wouldn’t say that we “deal with it” or as we might say in the West, “handle it” by talking about it, but the actual conversations become part of the practice. It is difficult to explain. Let me tell a story. Father Eimyo LaSalle was the Jesuit priest most responsible for the extraordinary number of Jesuits who have been trained and authorized as Zen teachers in their own right. He is the root teacher of a new lineage of Christian Buddhists. He was never publicly recognized as a teacher in his own right, but I am quite sure that his teacher, Yamada Koun, recognized him. I am in this same lineage. My friend David Weinstein was also a student of Yamada Roshi. David tells the story of often seeing LaSalle, then well past 90, at the zendo in Kamakura doing formal interview with his teacher. One morning David was standing with Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “there is the man who taught me how to practice the koans in life.” Teacher/teaching is not as straightforward as the English word suggests.

A liturgical note: in every Buddhist temple I’ve gone for teaching, there is singing before and after. Inevitably there is a chant that lists all the ancestors, usually with a lot of words of gratitude. On September 6th of each year, there is a founder’s ceremony at Hartford Street, and the names of Issan’s teachers from Siddhartha Gautama through Indian, Chinese, Japanese and American teachers (in an abbreviated form--there are officially more than 90 generations of teachers) are chanted. And then we all ask that his teaching--Issan’s--go on forever. We are not saying that Issan was “the Buddha,” but we acknowledge that he was a vehicle for the teaching and that he made it his own. 

When I first came to the Hartford Street Zen Center, every few months a group of monks, mostly from Japan but several Western Buddhists as well, would come by to visit the hospice. I would serve tea, maybe they stayed for zazen, they talked with Steve, Issan and Phil. They asked as many questions as they answered. They were not coming by to inquire after the health of Issan who at this point already had some notoriety as the former drag queen monk. They came to examine how the dharma met the real circumstances of the epidemic in that moment. They came to test Issan’s dharma. 

I work with the koans. After more than a thousand years of koan practice, there are several “Koans for Dummies” books that Japanese monks use to cheat, pass and get a cushy assignment. They were usually hidden in the monastery toilets and a few translations are floating around Western centers in various places. (My days of seeking out a rich temple gig are long past, not to say that I haven’t picked up a clue or two from the manuals when I was stuck). What is also true is that teachers who have been authorized to teach are also given another book, “A thousand years of  teacher’s notes,” including lots from the oral tradition--great responses, lines of inquiry, questions to ask, even gestures to look for. So when I decided to study the Blue Cliff Record, I went looking for someone who was authorized to teach it. My friend James Ismael Ford put me in touch with one of his senior students, Ed Oberholtzer. Ed and I have been working together every week for more than two years. Ed’s good. He encourages me. He never gives me an answer and when I want to peek at the precious marginalia, he will only talk about it after I have had some insight myself. Is this better than working on my own? Of course. Does this mean that neither of us go out check some juicy piece of modern Zen scholarship about a text, teacher, or sociology? We share it.

And now for the last question that I see at this point: Does anyone need any of this to be happy, or to get enlightened?  As you might have guessed, several Buddhists have already considered the question and formulated an answer. Doug, you are an Arhat, a category and description for men and women who have gained their own enlightenment. They looked at the world of samsara and they got it. They found the key and unlocked the door, and achieved a high state of inner peace. They are also called Shravakas, but I think that refers more to the library/self-help stage. But tradition also says that they still haven’t really fully got it. At least in the Mahayana, they are still not bodhisattvas, that is beings who are dedicated to the enlightenment, the freedom of all beings. There’s still too much self there, and for the Mahayanist there is No Self. If you want to figure out what that means, you might need a teacher.

And one last knot in this thread: Having a teacher, at least in my experience, is still very rich. Times are changing.  As I said I still work with a teacher. It’s part of Buddhist practice. Since I began to practice meditation, study the scripture and, most importantly, work with the koans, I have had several teachers. I do better than if I were working on my own. I know that from experience. I would describe it more like a mentor relationship, but that seems to describe a higher and lower position. Some of the people that I have talked with have less experience than I do. At this point they all are younger, but in the relationship I consider myself on equal footing. There is always something to learn. 

* *Buddha  gathered with his monks encouraging them to continue practicing everything he taught them long after he was gone. His words, translated into modern English: “I was only able to point the way for you.” He furthered: “All individual things pass away. Strive on with diligence.”