Allen and Phil's last conversation

I can’t say that I had a front row seat, but I got as close as he allowed, even to his friends. I was present at all their meetings when Allen came to Hartford Street during the years that I lived with Phil. Perhaps a few others acted as his amanuensis, but I picked up the task whenever I could, knowing that it was a rare privilege. I answered the door and made the tea. It happened in what were our public room so it was appropriate to be there, but I was polite, kept my mouth shut and listened carefully. 

They were giants and yet in some ways they acted like kids on a sandlot. Of course they were older so the shouting was replaced with lots of pauses, keywords that brought a chuckle, “do you remember…” followed by the briefest notation said more than enough. They were old friends who never had enough time together, old friends at the end of their lives who realized that there was never enough time but what did remain was precious and had to be enough. They always seemed to pick up exactly where they left off. I sat trying to hear where there was perhaps new insight, but their love for one another, the appreciation and respect between them was so thick it didn’t matter.

Their meetings were like clockwork. Phil was always getting ready to go to the zendo as he did twice every day, and that took at least an hour. Allen would arrive at 3:30, 4 at the latest. It never went much past 5:30. Allen would always politely excuse himself saying that other friends were waiting. Allen was a creature of the night, and Phil only operated in daylight where he had a fighting chance of avoiding the sharp edges of furniture and the unexpected drop of steps. Dinner or lunch for some reason were never included. Perhaps it was the noise of a restaurant, or that they wanted to get to the part that mattered, being with one another.

Allen had become what he always wanted, a public figure whose opinion was sought after, a poet whose work was respected, a firebrand who fought for things he really believed in, even if it was Nambla. I cannot say if Phil was happy being a Zen monk with the same certainty. I never got the sense that he had really found a true vocation, but it was a job he relished, and he did it so thoroughly and thoughtfully that he appeared happy though there was always some dogged anger that would appear when you least expected it. There were other rewards for him, like really discovering his true nature which is not an insignificant prize. 

Phil had a small circle of devoted friends, and they were faithful. He was a great raconteur and lively companion. They would come and visit, Lou Hartman, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure,

but I only saw Phil cry twice. By the time that Issan took his last breath, it was the end of such a long difficult process that there were not many tears. Our breathing, all of us had been as hard as his as we sat by his bed. We were too worn out to cry. No tears.

But when Phil  told me the story of the search party for Lew; how Gary had organized a posse looking and hoping that he was not lost, his eyes filled with tears. He loved the guy. 

He loved the way he used words, and they had the same mistress, all words in the English dictionary. Phil is the only man I know who actually read the whole thing, page after page, line after line. 

There was no trace of Lew”s body. Maybe he’d jumped into a hidden car and escaped to Mexico. No, that was just wishful thinking  He had killed himself or fallen into a deep ravine. He and Gary had both known he was depressed. No words could help.

Tears. Just the memory and tears. It was still raw.

I was with Phil when Allen phoned to say that he was going to die. My memory says that we were sitting in the living room at Hartford Street, but I actually think we were in Phil’s small apartment in the basement of the hospice, in the small room that opened onto the garden. That is where Phil’s phone was, and I am certain that Allen used that number. Phil had been expecting a call. Allen was due to visit and Phil would have known the exact dates. Allen would have also known when was the best time to reach Phil whose schedule was almost set in stone. He smiled broadly when he said hello and then fell silent. His face lost all expression.

There were very few words, “”I’m so sorry. Yes I understand that you won’t be able to travel to the West Coast again. Give my love to Gregory. I love you. Good bye.” There are times when even words fail. They were both poets and both Buddhists so they’d pushed words’ limits. 

He put the receiver down and told me that Allen was going to die, that he had cancer and there was no hope. Then he started to cry and asked to be left alone. I knew that there were tears on both ends of the call. I told him that I was available to get anything he needed and shifted into the Maitri’s office which was in the adjacent room. At 5:30 he emerged from his bedroom in his robes and silently began up the stairs towards the zendo. Sitting was at 6.    

Lord Krishna comes to tea

 I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room where he sat down and quietly continued his reading.  Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea.

I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving what my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos, and I loved their laughter. It was poking fun without the slightest hint of slighting someone.

Phil of course knew Allen’s long time companion, Peter Orlovsky, and talked openly about Peter’s drug addiction. Phil joked to me about Allen being a follower of “the Cult of Boys,” but this was the first time that Allen had brought a young lover with him. Phil was not very interested in sex himself, reinforced or dictated by his isolated personal habits, but I knew I would be looking for Phil’s reaction. How would he treat a young lover?

The young man and I sat a short distance from Phil and Allen. There were barely pauses in their conversation. It doesn’t matter what it was about. It could have been Buddhism, Trungpa, Diane de Prima or other poets who passed through the Disembodied School at RMDC, or even where to get the best Chinese food in San Francisco. They were friends, and though we weren’t excluded, we were not included. What was clear is that his young companion admired Allen. He hung on every word, carefully listening to each line, laughing when it was appropriate. Allen for his part was attentive to the young man. Not condescending or at all lecherous, he was careful that his friend was treated like an invited guest

Yes I admit that I entertained the possibility that there was some kind of coercion behind the young man’s presence. The age gap was enormous, and there have always been rumors about Allen’s sexual exploits. I also had a distasteful experience of being manipulated by an older man. But at least that afternoon, I was not sitting with a boy-toy but a bright young man who genuinely liked older men.

I’d been reading Christopher Isherwood’s tribute to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood asked the Swami a hesitant question about a new relationship with a young man. Isherwood confessed that, given his experience in the stiff Victorian world of English Catholicism, he was expecting a censorious pronouncement. Instead Prabhavananda told him to treat his lover like Lord Krishna.

Then it hit me. I’d been to tea with Lord Krishna.

A year later I was sitting with Phil when Allen called to tell him that he was dying. Phil cried. 

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!

Your Way, Our Way or the Highway? A Cautionary Tale.

A friend told me that he received some advice from a Daoist master. I automatically distrust some Western dude sporting an ancient Chinese title. I immediately think it’s an esoteric label to make him credible. Honestly I can’t really say that I understand what Daoism is, and I certainly haven’t the faintest idea of what it might have been meant in China in the 6th century BCE, but I’m equally sure that Master X has no secret information. The friend of course didn’t actually repeat his Taoist teacher’s advice. I’m sure that I would be required to fork over a handful of cash before I had the pleasure. We are a gullible lot. 

When I investigated my initial response, I discovered two basic questions: First, what prejudices spark my immediate response? And second, what criteria can I use to trust a teacher and what he or she teaches? These are separate questions. It is important not to discover one answer and think that it provides a solution to both investigations. It is easy to conflate the answers: Just because I have discovered that I am distrustful for X reason, the teacher and his or her teaching is not automatically trustworthy Or the flipside: Because I find this or that teacher personally trustworthy, therefore my suspicions about his or her spiritual lineage must be mistaken. 

These questions are separate but interrelated: How can I recognize what I call “authentic” practice; and what makes a teacher trustworthy? They bite their own tail. Some people, even trusted teachers, have counseled me to trust my feelings. But when I honestly examine them, I find a twisted mess. I was told to just sit and they will sort themselves out. I sat. Perhaps a few of the knots disentangle, but oftentimes no clear direction emerges. Judging by the solutions that appear in real time, there are no easy answers. 

In what I see as an attempt to deal with this dilemma, sometimes in western Zen circles we practitioners get lost in a lot of talk about “our” way, the Rinzai Way, the Soto way, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. This jabber is barely distinguishable from cultish blabber. 

In 1990 when nearly 100 men were dying from AIDS in San Francisco every week, I was talking with a bright, engaging woman who came to sit zazen at Hartford Street. She asked some questions about the Hospice and Issan. I invited her to come back, perhaps become a hospice volunteer. She begged off, explaining that she was very involved in her practice at “the big Zen Center.” I remember her words exactly. “We do the real Japanese Buddhism: we bow at everything every time we turn around.” I confess to having a few judgmental thoughts. While we were cooking for dying men, and sitting with them when they took their last breaths, she was bowing in every doorway and to a statue at the top of every stairwell.

Perhaps there was something about the dying, knowing that you’re dying and the emotions that stirs up. I cannot say. Several of Issan’s close students didn’t visit him when he was dying. Some actually disappeared when he started to get sick later explaining that they couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. I met him when HiV started to ravage his body and mind so that is really the only Issan I knew. It was his gift to me, and my good luck. But on the other hand, when I listen to stories of Issan at Tassajara or at Zen Center, Green Gulch or Santa Fe. I am certain that dying Issan was the same man dedicating himself diligently and completely to the practice.

I never saw the woman again. She never met Issan. At some point she might hear stories at Zen Center about him. In my gut I feel that she missed an opportunity to experience a man who lived out the teaching until his last breath, but I also know that Issan would never have faulted her for avoiding him and bowing every time she turned around. He was so non-judgement and tolerant. I also admit to applying a little pressure on the woman--I needed help at the hospice--and I also admit to feeling slightly superior in my role running the hospice which was of course real practice. I can’t set my experience center stage for applause, but on the other hand, I need to avoid rote answers, or getting caught up in some cultural forms that I don’t understand as if they unlock some esoteric secret. 

Quick change of scene

Listening in on a recent discussion bemoaning the death of Zen in Japan--so many first-son priests escaping the lifeless tedium of administering the family's temple business, my mind went back to a morning I spent looking over the library at Hartford Street, searching for a book that might unlock the mystery of the universe. Trained as a Jesuit, I hoped to find an answer, even a coded one, recorded by someone at some time in some place that might point me in the right direction.

I picked up a volume and read about the third and final destruction of Nalanda, including its vast library, and started a conversation with Phil Whalen. I was more horrified at the loss of the sutras, mahayana texts and commentaries, including all the works, notes and who knows what else of the pivotal scholar Nāgārjuna than I was by the wanton murder of thousands of monks and teachers. I blurted out something about the horror of burning books to Phil who was sitting in his chair across from me. He just looked up, smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. They left us enough, just enough.”

But Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji is not alone in trying to destroy the dharma by burning books and killing monks and nuns. Beginning in 1950 Mao and the People’s Liberation Army systematically destroyed monasteries and burned as many sacred texts as they could lay their hands on in Tibet. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration began the campaign of Haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈), literally "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni," which led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as sacred texts. The Taliban destroyed huge ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan early 2001 which shocked the world and was soon followed by the regime’s defeat, but it did not prevent them from reasserting their hardline earlier this year.

So while I deplore book-burning and destruction of religious art, their preservation is not a necessary condition for our practice. The loss of cultural Japanese Buddhism, centuries old beauty and tradition, including bowing to everything all the time, is a real loss, but I might have to let it go.

How much remains? Just enough if they left an instruction manual or we figure out how to use it.

Philip Asks Me the Big Question

 Was Phil as confused as he pretended to be? Or was he just being a wily old fox?

Mumonkan Case 2 

Hyakujô and the Fox 

Whenever master Hyakujô delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. 

The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” 

The man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man. In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain as a priest. On one occasion a monk asked me, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' Because of this answer (For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness), I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a turning word on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.” 

Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” 

The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened

It was Saturday morning. Only a few minutes remained until the last period of meditation ended. Zenshin was set to descend the stairs to the zendo and begin the ritual of opening the dharma. He was legally blind. It all required a lot of effort and planning. He was going to give a talk on this koan, Hyakujô and the Fox.

I was being his jisha and carried the incense. When we paused at the top of the stairs, he suddenly decided that he needed to check the exact wording of the old man’s question. Phil, another old man, could not make a mistake. He asked out loud, “Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?  What was his answer, yea or nay? What did it say exactly? Is the man free from Cause and Effect, or is he still trapped?” 

Then he asked me, “Check it out in the Mumonkan, will you?” But the tone of his voice sounded more like a command. He appeared agitated. He seemed to expect that I should have had some ability to find a particular case. “It’s very famous, he said. “It's in the Mumonkan. It must be on the shelf in the living room somewhere. It’s a very important case.” 

I have described his ability to find page, paragraph and sentence of an author he loved in his meticulously arranged library, but that morning, standing in the living room at Hartford Street, the books on the shelves were a total disorganized mess.

With the koans, or at least at that particular moment, my ability completely disappeared. When I eventually located the Mumonkan, he said he could not remember the case number, and he seemed to be blaming me for not supplying the missing information. Eventually, making us only a few minutes late, I read, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' 

Phil said, “Good. His first answer is no. Thank you.” Now he was prepared to open the dharma. I remember nothing about his talk. Questions tumbled over and over in my mind--not just is the enlightened man free from the law and cause and effect, but what exactly are we trying to free ourselves from anyway? What part of my life did I need to unyoke to be happy

A few years later I sat with this koan for days in the damp woods of Camp Meeker. When the sun came up till the day darkened, I thought of Phil, his blindness and his generosity. The wily old fox had given me a koan filled with indecision, red herrings, witchcraft and a few wrong answers, probably just traps or misdirections laid out with skill.  He told me that he thought he remembered it correctly, but he wanted to double check it. What was this puzzle that he had to get right? 

Philip was a man whose life, almost all of his waking life not occupied with meditation, was devoted to language and the written word. I can attest that words were his lovers, and he returned the favor. Now he couldn’t read at all anymore. He was almost completely blind and the reason was simply misdiagnosed glaucoma which would have been easily treatable. What a tragedy. If only a doctor had been able to give him the correct word for his blindness and not assigned some rare disease that only one a thousand get. Or if he had only gotten a second opinion when the highly recommended quack told him to kiss his sight goodbye. Maybe not as bad as 500 lives as a fox, but close.

Sometimes the law of cause and effect seems filled with random errors. Perhaps the law is quirky and poorly administered?  The koan says “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” 

The zen Master says he's happy to have saved us all!

Phil’s verse:

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

by Philip Whalen

I praise

 those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                      splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                      caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

(Right. It's blurry.)

Phil, dreaming of gummy bears, sees angels descending.

 The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Now Phil was dying. Perhaps as long as a year before, he’d reached back for his chair which wasn’t there and fell breaking his assbone. Thus began a slow decline. I was alarmed. It’s hard to say that a Zen Master, especially one that I loved, had given up on life, so I won't. But progressive blindness had stolen the delight of seeing words on a page, physical pain made the formal posture of zazen impossible and now immobility obliterated the comforting routine of meditation, gabbing, study, jokes, and food. Not physical therapy with Baker Roshi’s student Joe Muscles, not Chinese food with taro root, not even gummy bears, could turn the tide. The ever present good cheer, except when it suddenly disappeared, felt concocted. The veneer was wearing thin. I didn’t feel the bitter resignation of a person fed up with life. It was more a sense that he’d just had enough. He invited the dying to begin, and the invitation had been accepted. It would be long and slow.

Some sages claim that this was a good way for a meditator to die, as if waving a long slow goodbye to everything that had been assembled to make you--a precious death. In a way I feel that this is a bit like sticking a smiley face on a Hallmark condolence card. It masks the uncertainty of each piece tumbling into oblivion. Phil was always so kind to those who were helping him, but on the other hand he couldn’t hide the day to day frustrations. 

He would rail at the dying steps prescribed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, saying "I have to decide if I’m at the bargaining stage or the resignation stage.” But he seemed to be following them exactly, or at least that was the framework that I carried into my conversations with him. I actually felt that he’d only taken baby steps away from the anger stage, but all that is extremely subjective. Perhaps I was still angry with him for ending the Maitri experiment, or screaming at me in the hallway, or harping on that old time religion. 

Zenshin’s mind had always been clear as a bell, much clearer than his vision. His memory for words, phrases, even pages in a book, had been almost photographic. I wonder how much of this was compensatory.

Once when I was entertaining some weird questions about presumed Kundalini energy in meditation, what Phil called the “squigglies,” he said, “Ol’ Luk Luk has something to say about that.  ”Middle case, third shelf, second from the left. (I think it was Charles Luk’s “Secrets of Chinese Meditation, but it might have been “Empty Cloud.”) Page 63, middle paragraph, beginning at the forth sentence. That’s the interesting part. Read back to me. Then he gently told me that focusing on the heart might be good practice rather than chasing swirling whirling wisps of energy all over the place.

Another time when we were reading “Scenes from the Capital,” we got to a part where he talks about Gerald Manley Hopkins. He started to recite “The Windhover” not with his flat voice, not with his whimsical voice, but reverently, almost like plainchant. When he stumbled, he pointed to the first case, second shelf, 12th book from the right, page 43, “Just start reading.” 

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

When I was sitting with him in a bright room of the Zen Center Hospice on Page Street, he asked me, “Do you see them?”

“Who?”

“The angels.

“No actually, I don’t. Where are they?”

“Right there, floating around,” pointing towards the upper corner to the left of his bed.

“No, I still don’t see them.”

“Look, goddamn it.” His voice sounded plaintive, perhaps wistful.

“What do they look like?”

“Just like the ones on the Macy’s gift bags.”

“I can’t see them Phil, what would you like me to do?”

“Call the police, they’re reliable.”

Together we looked. I could see nothing while at the same time I wondered where his mind had gone. The Mind is a terrible thing to waste, he used to joke. What mind? Here we were using what was left to search for angels.

The angels on the Macy’s bag too “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”

When he died I arrived late to the crematorium in South City, Baker Roshi read a line from one of his poems about delicious raspberries. Then we filed past, bowed and placed a raspberry in the plain box that held his body. 

Contrary to Zen custom, I visualized dumping buckets of crimson raspberries gashing gold-vermillion. I couldn’t stop myself.

Slurping is Zen

 “If slurping is zen, that means that loud, ostentatious slurping must be god damn close to enlightenment.” Zen Master Q

When I first sat down with the man after he’d been named head priest, he began a long talk about wood, wind, fire and water in traditional Chinese medicine. His line of questioning puzzled me. He seemed overly intent on learning where I was on this strange wellness scale and what I should do to right my balance. Over the course of our conversation I learned that he was almost always cold and had killer headaches which should have been my clue: he had no idea what he was talking about but hoped it might help him. What this had to do with meditation or zen was beyond me; what this had to do with me was also beyond me unless he was angling for my sympathy. Nonetheless I hung in for almost an hour. I did observe that I could be assured that when it came to wearing a robe of the proper color for an esoteric ceremony, or at least one that didn’t clash, I would be in good hands, but that I shouldn’t trust him to diagnose Chinese wind malfunction. If I were training myself to ask pertinent questions, I might have tried “why don’t you shut up?” 

I remember one afternoon when I sat down to noodles with Phil Whalen in Chinatown. He was extremely happy. He said that the best way to handle personal frictions in the sangha was to invite the warring parties out for a plate of noodles. This was in his view the key to good spiritual leadership--the way they did it in the old country. Not a bowl, not a dish, but a plate, plenty all around, and that slurping was not just OK, but expected. Apparently after enough slurping together with the smiles that the lovely warm tastes brought to everyone’s lips, disagreements would vanish like the mirage they were, like everything is. Or so he thought. The conflicts raged on. I finally figured out that he loved a plate of noodles, and that he loved food.

 ramen properly) from the ramen master.

There are hazards for Westerners trying to do Asian religious practice, and I just scratch the surface. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. We start by imitating, like a child learning language. Everything new has a name. We point and ask what is that? We do everything our teachers do as precisely as we can. We walk, we dress, we eat, we chant, we sit, we chuckle, we pout, we guffaw, we bow, we prostrate, we suck our lips and fumble our chopsticks, we hush our harsh voices as if that would quite our cavorting western minds, and we at least pretend that we are listening and observing. We stop saying thank you because gassho sounds more holy, more proper. The irony is that in the end we really only end up being poor imitations of a bit of cultural hanky panky. I had issues with all of it, but I did it nonetheless.

Why could I not learn that slurping is zen? This is what is offered, like the proper scent of aromatic oil with a bony finger pressed on the right acupuncture spot, or the stinky smell of burning sage brush chasing away the bad spirits, helping increase the proficiency of my erections and enhancing sex. I really have very little affinity for Japanese cultural artifacts though I do love sushi. 

It is not us, or more precisely, not exactly the real me that I thought I’d find if I spent years pretending that it might help me be more the me of my dreams and fantasy. 

Phil would laugh and say that many of his fellow religionists from the old country thought that Americans could never really do zen anyway. But if they “came round” and asked questions, Japanese zennists would do their best to answer, whether or not they had a good answer. They had to. It’s in the job description. It’s also the script: question, answer, response, wash, rinse, repeat. A cultural anthropologist might begin to examine if there is any real learning going on, or perhaps if there were a real zen master on the horizon he or she might be able to detect a dud. But I find cultural anthropologists only slightly helpful and have a hard time listening to the Zen master who is doing Chinese medicine to cure headaches while fretting about the color of his robes. Regardless, this is the soup that I landed in. I have to let it cook.

I want to talk a bit about cooking the stew. I need to smell something more than burning sage or Zen aroma oil, more than a mediocre rendition of a Japanese recipe. Smell is universal. It doesn’t need a cultural anthropologist or a skilled linguist to squeeze the meaning. If it’s good there’s an instant response. Sometimes there is an ingredient that I might have been trained to hate. Thus I might lie and say, “I’ve developed a taste for Filipino Bagoóng alamáng,” but for the most part, perhaps after some initial hesitation, I can smell something good on the fire, or at least be able to discuss my attraction or aversion without putting on a fancy, culturally appropriate uniform. 

Although Phil claimed that he was not a Soto priest, and he said exactly that on more than one occasion, he wore the uniform and carefully performed the rituals. I didn’t really believe him and thought that he might have just had some technical objection, or was teaching me to try to look deeper, or perhaps he really did believe that only Japanese could really ultimately get zen.

I lived with Phil at Hartford Street Zen Center from 1989 to 1994. I moved in towards the end of October of 88 and Phil moved in in January of 89. He had been living with Britt Pyland for a year after he left Santa Fe and his long tutelage with Dick Baker, but despite his deep friendship with Britt, he wanted to have a real zendo with a formal structure. Over the 5 years we lived together, he was in the zendo every morning at 6 AM and every evening at 6 PM. I don’t think he missed one session. Perhaps I’ve forgotten once or twice that illness kept him in bed.

Conversation with Phil was marvelous. He did love his food and could weave a spell describing the ingredients of the real Chinese menu at Nam Yuen Restaurant in Portsmouth Square that he, Allen, Kerouac, Gary and a host of others went to after anyone published a poem, had an inspiration, got laid, or just came by for lunch. It was a place that didn’t fear the true flavor of taro root. Phil could talk about anything if prompted, but he rarely talked about poetry, and hardly ever his own. (He once lectured on HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS, but prefaced it by saying the Roshi told him to). However he would quote pages and pages of other poet’s work he admired, all the sonnets of Shakespeare, pages of Whitman, stanzas of Wordsworth and Blake, but not much of his contemporaries. No Ginsberg for example, although he might say he remembered one about a guy in a supermarket, go look it up. Once he quoted a fairly long piece by Gary Snyder. The experience of hearing poetry was different than talking about it, or analyzing it. When someone asked about Gerald Manley Hopkins, he answered by reciting carefully each word of the first long stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland.

He was perhaps the most widely read man I’ve ever met. He was also legally blind in those last years, and we read to him. He had a personal library of maybe a thousand volumes. It was stored in four plain wooden bookcases, pretty simple standard fare. I helped move him in when he arrived at Hartford Street, and moved the library once more when he shifted to small set of rooms with a private bathroom in the basement of a building we took over next door to #57. He was stern and demanding as a work boss. There were a precise number of bank boxes. Each row from each case had an exact order. You couldn’t mix them up because he would never be able to reconstruct the idiosyncratic Whalen system. But when he said “Kid, get that book by old Luk Luk (Charles Luk, Buddhist monk and writer), second case, third row, sixth book on left, open to page 58 and read the line, I think it starts at 6,” I got his logic. The first time he did it, I was flabbergasted. By the 20th time, I thought that he had to have a photographic memory. It was uncanny. But that is how a blind man who has a long standing love relationship with the written word organizes his library, his life and his practice.  

People often ask, they wonder how a Westerner might come to a spiritual practice that is so difficult to translate from the culture of Japan. It is not like turning the texts of the sayings of Jesus over to a group of translators well versed in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. Bowing and sitting don’t translate except in sore joints and training the attention. The nuance and delicate meanings are not easy even if we understand canonical Japanese. The standard answer is that we are in pain, life is suffering is a core principle that the Buddha taught, and he also pointed to a difficult path that leads to freedom. Abstractly, that is a good answer to an abstract question. But there are several pitfalls to picking up a manual of mental health from an Asian tradition and prescribing a remedy for an unfavorable shift in the wind whose expiration date had passed by several millennia. 

So yes, it is almost a universal truth that we approach the Great Way carrying our experience of pain and dissatisfaction. But we also smell something in the air, we hear something in the poetry. We bring all of ourselves, not just our pain. Even if we’re blind, there is a love for words that we can hear. Let freedom ring.

 

True practice & authentic teachers

There is a lively on-going debate in an online Buddhist group about the nature of practice and enlightenment. Dosho Port published a piece on August 18th called “The Showa Dispute About True Faith.” He describes the efforts beginning in 1928 to make Soto Zen more compatible with “modernism,” including Christianity, by reframing its belief system. A dispute ensued. One side organized their material under the slogan, ‘Original Enlightenment, mysterious practice.’ The other side, the monk establishment, wanted actual practice verification.

I am vaguely familiar with this dispute about modernization in Japanese Soto Zen before the Second War, and the attempts to "translate" the doctrine, if I can use the word, to make it more understandable. There was an attempt to take a portion of Buddhist literature in Japanese, but also Chinese, and free it from its Medieval encapsulation. I went to Masao Abe's amazing classes when he was teaching in San Francisco at CIIS. He definitely comes from this school. I’m a former Jesuit so I also delved into Kitarō Nishida and the Kyoto School’s adoption of Western philosophical discourse. 40 years ago, we all immersed ourselves in the extensive writings of D. T. Suzuki, who, I have to say, comes across more like an apologist or evangelist.

This may be a bare minimum to butt into this conversation, but I will. These efforts to strip the vehicle down to its essential parts leave just enough to work with. Actually they might not have gone far enough. To begin, let me take the debate one step further, and remove the parochial underpinnings.

My pared down augment runs like this: an experience of liberation is possible for humans. We don’t quite know what it is because of the current condition of our minds: our mental acuity, the quality of our perceptive apparatus, a balanced or afflicted emotional state, plus I think we have to throw a good dose of fancy, magical thinking, cultural mythology, plus translation difficulties and the vagaries of language into the mix. My list is not complete--there’s a lot to sort out, but I think we can establish, or posit, three hypotheses:

• Such a state or quality of freedom exists and can transform our experience as humans.
• It is possible, even desirable, to achieve it.
• We recognize that it will take effort, education, what we commonly call meditation, and possibly recalibration to achieve this experience.

We believe that certain people have had this experience, most notably the Buddha, but others too, for example Eihei Dōgen, Linji Yixuan, Hakuin Ekaku, Je Tsongkhapa, Shinran, but perhaps we could stretch our imaginations to include the current Dalai Lama, and maybe that auntie whom Red Pine encountered sitting in a cave in China who never heard of Mao Tse Tung but, forget about her, she never wrote anything down. We’re stuck with the guys, they’re all guys, who wrote, had secretaries, or disciples who took extensive lecture notes.

What did they write: of course we have the Sutras, plus other stories of the Buddha and his disciples; the enlightened guys also wrote descriptions of their experiences, some of which seem to be in coded language; thankfully there’s lots of poetry, balanced with carefully reasoned philosophy of mind and analysis of perception and experience; we have to include the myths, and what we call practice manuals, “how to” lists; there are some riddles that purport to point to the experience; then extensive records of the mental and yogic disciplines that practitioners used to achieve this state of liberation plus prescriptive injunctions and admonitions that have even been codified. There is also a large body of instruction material that has not been written down that is generally reserved for advanced levels of practice.

But there are huge problems with all this literature. First is the language and translation. We're blessed to have an army of very well trained and literate translators, but cultural and archaic understandings of the texts remain. Then there is the sheer volume and diversity of the materials. Even if we could determine their authenticity, be sure we have an accurate translation, and be able to determine their precise meaning, we‘d still be stuck with the question of how to use it, actually lots of questions.

Our Western Zen practice stems to some degree from these efforts to modernize. Harada Sogaku Roshi, and after him, Hakuun Yasutani, Kuon Yamada and the Jesuit Roshis, Bob Aitken and the rest of my crowd come from another strain of that same impulse to modernize so that's what I was handed.

Schools of thought are schools of thought. What do we do with them? Again, for better or worse, they inform our practice.

First I think that there's a logical fallacy in the way we understand these efforts at modernization. Following (any) time-honored system of training that we’ve been handed, we believe that if we accurately recreate the logic of the thinking, the order of the steps, the lineage of the teachers, then we can access the authentic experience of liberation. If we fail, then we did something wrong. Perhaps it is a road map, but we want it to be Google Maps, with the blue dot moving across the dashboard screen. Good luck with that. I will set up a dharma combat: can algorithms become enlightened?

Another knot appears when we identify the criteria for validating the credentials of a teacher from within this arcane body of knowledge, whether it’s inka or transmission or tulku. The checklist resides in experience outside ourselves and muddies the teaching as well as opens the door to abuse and exploitation. Call the dharma police to testify before the High Court.

Is this even good practice? I remember working on the koan “Mu” for years with Bob Aitken. I kept complaining in my very Jesuit way that it was all just a self-referential exercise in a closed system. He'd say, yes, it appears that way, and then he’d encourage me to continue. I did. In 1996 I was living with Maylie Scott on Ashby in Berkeley and still doing sesshin with Aitken and John Tarrant. One Sunday morning I had to drive a rented truck back to Santa Rosa. As I was returning to where I’d parked it the night before, POW. All that self-referential mind swirling stopped and I got it. It didn't matter if it came via some well-intentioned modernization efforts in a Soto Shu University in the 20's. It hit me. There was no turning back.

Of course that experience faded soon enough which presented its own dilemma, but it was enough to set me on my own path. I remember saying to Phil Whalen once what a shame it was that the library at Nalanda was destroyed--all that knowledge lost. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. Enough remains. Just enough.” I feel the same about any attempts to update our practice and make it modern or palatable or whatever. Enough remains, Just enough. And, as thanks to Phil I’ll add: “With any luck if we’re lucky.”

I don't want to take a path based on pious dreams and hopes, magical thinking, myth or wild speculation. When coupled with a few token morsels of experience that we might be able to recognize in ourselves if we’ve spent any time on the cushion, we enter dangerous territory. I was lucky to be able to see something authentic in several teachers, among them Issan Dorsey, Phil Whalen, Maylie Scott, Bob Aitken. I trusted them, and was able to just stick with it until I began to catch a glimpse for myself that something else is possible.