The End of The World as We Know It

And The End Period

Dasui Fazhen, "Shenzhao "
Case 29 Blue Cliff Record
Case 24 of The True Dharma Eye
Dasui and the Kalpa Fire

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say ice.

If koans have consequences, I would label this case a supremely consequential koan. Can I approach the end right now? Traditionally it is ascribed to a monk who lived in a hollowed out tree and gave away tea at a roadside stand, and who, at least judging from the teachings that have come down to us as they are held in several competing schools, was almost obsessed with finishing up. He came from the area that is now Sichuan and lived just before what we now consider the Golden Age of Chinese Zen so he was a bit too early and a thousand miles too far north to make it to Chan sainthood. But for Mr. Dasui Fazhen time and space were a secondary consideration.

The koan called “The Kalpa Fire” shows up at least three times in the collections, every time with a slight variation showing that the end of Everything will be total and complete even in the way we hold the question. The teaching goes deep, and follows different streams.

In the Blue Cliff Record, a monk almost seems to be musing about the final conflagration of the universe and wonders if anything will be left. Will this too perish? “This perishes,” said Dasui. “If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other?” “It follows the other,” said Dasui. Like night follows day, it will be entirely gone. Even night will no longer follow day. This could be the theoretical physicist’s answer.

In the version found in Andy Ferguson’s Zen's Chinese Heritage, the questioner monk refuses to hear the answer and goes off to consult another teacher who is able to turn his head around. The teacher tells Reverend Thick Head No End to rush back and apologize to Dasui. But by the time he arrives at Dasui’s hollowed out tree, he had perished. The monk rushes back to Touzi Datong who had set him straight but, alas by the time he arrives, Touzi had also perished. Perhaps he’s hinting that even the source of the teaching perishes along with everything else if I allow myself a metaphysical interpretation of the story line. The theoretical is starting to take an existential twist with perhaps a caution to listen to your teachers carefully.

Perhaps two hundred years later when the story reaches Japan, Dogen does not let the questioner off the hook at all. In his version, Case 24 of The True Dharma Eye, the monk questioner asks Dasui: “Can you tell me if this very place will also be destroyed?”

Dasui said, “It will.”
The monastic said, “If so, will I be part of it?”
Dasui said, “Yes, you will.”

From an abstract, objective acceptance of the harsh reality that the reverse Big Bang will end up in oblivion, through the gratitude we owe to the teachers who had the courage to insist on the truth of the teaching, and the fact that they too are subject to the same law, it gets really personal: yes, you will also perish. Gone are the questions of time and space, past and future and very distant future, so far out it is an abstraction I don’t really have to worry about, or certainly hope I don’t. In each moment when the moment ends, how does it end and how much carries over? Can I allow the moment to disappear in the fire of the kalpas and be free, and allow just what arises to come forth and support the next moment until it too no longer does.

Has Dasui served me a cup of Freedom Tea for free at his little stand?

Do I know enough to acknowledge a great man? Will I even know him? Someone asked Dasui “What is the sign of a great man?” Dasui answered, "He doesn't have a placard on his stomach." Having thrown another wrinkle into the conversation, I will leave it at that.

Raksha Bandhan

Tradition bids me tie a ribbon on your wrist 

To say that you and I are related,

And it will always be

No matter what

What husband, what wife, 

what daughter, what son,

What lover, what friend,

May kisses, caresses

Abound.

May wounds be few.

No matter what,

There will be love.

What prizes and honors won, 

Include the ones you lost,

What joy, what laughter, 

what grief, what loss,

What trouble, what pain, 

what fear, what tear, what discovery, 

Embrace it freely.

In this moment

You are my world.

We are blood and yet so different

It makes no difference

What barrier, what fence

What wall, what boundary.

Cross, venture, explore,

A postcard now and then might be nice.

Calls are also cheap these days,

But neither is required.

I know there are only so many 

Seconds, minutes, years granted to us.

Use them as best you can.

As best we can.

I will try.

Make mistakes,

I will join you.

We are forgiven in advance.

You are encouraged to make as many as possible 

Unharmed or even injured.

Try to stay safe.

Continue please. 

You encourage me.

Forgive me if I have hurt you.

It was not intentional.

I know that I can be blind and careless.

You are also forgiven.

The world as we find it

Is a blessing.

You are part of my world.

Sounds trite

But it’s true.

The innocent world of the cloister—celibacy, sex and art

Alécio de Andrade, The Three Graces (1970)

December 15, 2008

I met Maylie Scott at the Center for AIDS Services where she came twice a week under the guise of leading a writing group. I say guise not to ascribe any hidden motivation as if she were trying to convert the people she worked with to some Buddhist straight and narrow or any other hidden aim, but she was doing much more than teaching a creative writing course, She was a talented Zen teacher who had also been trained as a social worker. She was masterful. Our clients at the Center were drug addicts, some in recovery, some actively using; male, female and transexual sex workers; 50 or 60 gay men, pretty evenly split between middle class white men and African American ghetto smart street kids. The glue that held the community together was that everyone was dealing with a disease that in the mid-90’s was still a death sentence. They had a lot of their plates. In Maylie’s group they opened up and began to talk about themselves to a very sympathetic ear without a shred of judgment. 

Maylie was a divorced single mom with three adult kids. Her big California brown shingled house on Ashby Avenue was part of the divorce settlement with her ex-husband, a Canadian English professor at UC. After her kids moved out there were several empty rooms. Her mother had just moved from a Manhattan apartment where she’d lived since divorcing Maylie’s father. It had been many years of living alone. Mary was close to 90. She could still take care of herself and was mentally very alert, but obviously living alone in a New York apartment was no longer workable.

..

Maylie was one of Mel Weitzman’s senior students. She’s been working with Mel for more than 20 years, but, with the exception of several practice periods at Tassajara, she’d never lived in a Zen center. She was looking to form a loosely knit community not organized around a practice schedule. She asked if I would consider moving in. 

She invited me to join her and her mother for dinner so that I could meet her mother, and Mary got to give me her seal of approval. Mary was bright and curious to meet a potential new house mate. I’m sure that she wanted me to feel entirely at home as well as understanding the level of manners expected. When we sat down to dinner there was a lovely silver napkin ring at my place. It was engraved in an antique script with the initials LBC. It would be mine. In thanking her, I asked who LBC was? Oh she said someone in the family a generation back, Lawrence Baine Crandon. I said how lovely my grandfather was Lawrence and one couple among my parents' friends in Nichols where we grew up was Phil and Phyllis Crandon. Maylie was serving, but put down the spoon and looked at me with an impish grin, “We call him Uncle Phil, but he is really my mother’s first cousin. He is quite a character, don’t you think?”  I tried not to act as surprised as I was. I said that all the kids loved to go to visit Randy, their son, where we snuck down into the basement where Phil had a very elaborate and expensive HO2 model train collection with tracks that wound around almost every available space. 

Family with a Zen flavor.

This was the beginning of three very important years in my life. I finally began to allow myself to heal from the hidden personal costs of my work at Maitri Hospice, and I really began working with the koans which enriched my Zen practice. All the while Maylie with her steady practice was just there. She was lovely and so kind.

Sister Mary John Marshall and

Maylie Scott (Kushin Seisho)

I remember the day that Maylie Scott’s sister, Sister Mary John, came to visit their mother for what everyone knew would be the last time. I had been told that I would be sharing the bathroom with an Anglican nun who had rarely seen a world outside the walls of the 13th century Benedictine cloister in the south of England where she had lived for more than 35 years, but I was not fully prepared when I got up to find the damp, coarsely woven material of a medieval habit neatly stretched across the rod for the shower curtain.

Mary John was cut from different cloth than the liberated religious that I had known in the heady days after John 23 had thrown open the windows at the second Vatican Council. Sister Fayne RSCJ, for example, had gone to law school, taken the bar, and was living in a housing project in Washington D.C., advocating for the poor. A wonderful vocation but worlds apart from that of Mother Mary John. She was also worlds away from the extraordinarily beautiful pianist whom I met while visiting a university with a highly regarded graduate program in music. She belonged to a religious order with a very liberal bent, and had the heart breaking proclivity of falling in love with sensitive young Jesuits.

I wondered how I would get on with Mary John. She told me that, yes, she had met gay men before, the priest who usually celebrated Mass for the sisters was a curate in a nearby parish in Kent and indeed he was gay. He was celibate, and she just seemed curious about same sex relationships, not at all judgmental. In the same way, she also wondered how the women of her congregation were going to deal with the situation of female priests. She had just been elected abbess of her congregation, and they had just accepted as a postulant a woman from Texas who had been ordained. Would a woman priest in their own community say Mass for them? It would take some getting used to, but her sisters seemed willing to be open to any genuine movement of the Spirit.

But for the most part our conversations were very ordinary. Did I want her to do any weeding in the rose garden? Yes, she did know of the new hybrids developed by Austin. They were lovely. For those few weeks she stayed with us, I became rather used to seeing a religious habit hanging over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom.

And when she left I noticed that I had changed. Though our conversations had been rather brief for the most part, they were never guarded in some ways that I see in myself when talking with women. She seemed to be entirely relaxed with me. I did not pretend to be other than I am when I was with her, though during her stay I did not have my boyfriend spend the night as a gesture of respect for her religious vows.

I talked with Maylie after her departure and, yes, Maylie felt something too. We tried to find the right word. Perhaps it was “innocent” or “naïve,” not as describing someone who has refused to be an adult, but rather someone who has maintained a quality of openness to the world and, through their attention to their inner states, cultivates a state of mind that is simple and focused.

And that innocence is what I find so lovely in the picture at the top of my post—the three women covered in religious habits are just gazing at three naked female forms, pagan goddesses actually, and the woman on the left is holding the hand of her sister. It is not sexual in any way—they are sharing a view of a world that they have renounced. It is very innocent, perhaps naive. Perhaps even "childlike" in the best sense of the word.

I was reminded of Sister Wendy Beckett who did a wonderful series for public broadcasting about the great art displayed in the world's museums. When Wendy, standing in front of this painting by David Hockney,  'Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool', said lightly, “Oh David and his boys,” there was not a hint of judgment in her voice, and it allowed me to see the painting in an entirely different light—though not entirely asexual.

I have dinner with an Old Church Bishop

Hocus Pocus! My dinner with a bishop of the Old Catholic Church was right out of Buñuel.

I had dinner with the Bishop of the Western Diocese of the Old Catholic Church in America who by chance or grace, had recently been transferred from a laundromat South of Market to a substantial house in the Forest Knolls section of San Francisco, west enough to be deep in the fog bank, high enough to be swept by the same winds that blew the fog down from Twin Peaks into the Castro.

Out of the Jesuits for less than a few years, I had moved to San Francisco, and started my almost 2 decade relationship with TR. We lived at Haight and Fillmore on the fourth floor. It was just about the time that I began venturing into the Castro. Terry and I were in a relationship and, though I can’t remember if he was sleeping around, probably he was, I was trying very hard to have as respectable a relationship as my mother would have approved of, which was of course totally impossible.

I had begun to lead groups in the 13 week version of the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. Money was very tight; we charged something like $400, perhaps as much as $500 for the 13 week session, and each one of the partners had 3-4 clients. I needed supplemental income.

Terry was a cook and I was the night janitor at the Bakery Cafe, a hip eating place of “the new Castro” about 5 doors down from Harvey Milk’s Camera Shop. I would arrive at about 10:45 in the evening, just before closing. If I worked quickly, and the cooks had not spilled too much food on the floors, I could finish up between 2:30 to 3 AM, and would be headed home just about the time that the last of the forlorn cruisers would be tramping up and down Castro searching for a hookup. The scene was sexually charged even if a bit desperate and sad. It scared me a bit, but I tried to convince myself that it was part of our liberation movement.

Two brothers, one gay and one straight, had started their business in the neighborhood’s old Italian bakery. Looking over old floor plans that I found online, I remember the kitchen along the north wall just as drawn; the tables looked out into a well kept garden. It was idyllic, maybe even a bit hippie. Later in its history, the space would grow in fame and notoriety as the Patio Cafe. New owners took out the antiquated baking ovens in a futile attempt to modernize the kitchen and bring it up to code. Along the way they sacrificed the original name.

We had a general staff meeting once a week. At one meeting, a lawyer who was doing all the permitting work for the restaurant introduced himself, a smart handsome man who assured everyone that he was straight. He then told us that he had only one testicle, but it was very large, could do the work of four, was very well proportioned and not at all an embarrassment in the ritual of the California hot tub.

As we continued around the room with our introductions, not to be outdone by tales of a robust testicle, I volunteered that I had been a Jesuit for 11 years, and was beginning a new career in the human development industry. The lawyer started to smile widely, and, leaning into the table, told me that he was the Chancellor of the Western Diocese of the Old Catholic Church in America. I asked if he were ordained, and he responded that no, all that was required was a law degree plus good, or lucky, connections. Two of his clients, the owners of the notorious Slot Hotel South of Market, had discovered that the manager of the laundromat in the basement of their building was a legitimately consecrated bishop of the Old Catholic Church. I certainly cannot retrace the intricate web of intrigue that landed his excellency dead center in San Francisco’s gay leather community other than one thing leads to another. A broke gay bishop made his way from Utrecht to San Francisco with thousands of other gay men and women; the owners of a gay hotel had used their influence in the Episcopal Church to find a liturgical slot in the crypt of Grace Cathedral for their wash-spin-dry bishop; my lawyer friend became the diocesan chancellor for the Old Catholic Church; and an extremely skeptical Jesuit night janitor was slated to dine with a successor of the Apostles at a posh address.

My second hand orange VW Beetle was slightly out of place in the neighborhood, but I arrived on time, parked and was led into a small dining room, with a few other guests. It was high church, pressed linen tablecloth, matching cutlery, bright glasses and polished plates. We chatted until the bishop came downstairs in a flowing French style purple soutane. It was beginning to feel like a Buñuel film. We were introduced and then stood uncomfortably for the recitation of a rote prayer. I was seated next to the bishop across from the chancellor. The bishop with his very gay mannerisms was almost a caricature, but I actually found him very engaging. He was not the brightest marble ever to don a miter, but there have been far worse.

He meandered through pretty mundane “getting to know you” kinds of questions. When he asked me several questions about my Jesuit training, I mentioned that I had been at Woodstock College in New York before coming to Berkeley. He smiled and asked, “Oh, do you know Frank D.?” Of course I knew Frank, an extremely handsome Italian who was also gay. We were in the same year, and had a close, hesitant relationship that included a lot of flirtation. I’d lost track of him during my years at the Berkeley Jesuit Seminary. I was stunned.

“I ordained Frank and he’s now the Abbot of a small Benedictine monastery that I’m starting in Colorado.” Before I could say anything, he grabbed my hand and motioned for me to get up. “Do you want to talk with him?” In the seconds it took to mumble my assent, we were in the kitchen, and the bishop had taken the receiver off the wall phone and was dialing a number.

“Brother Frank, I have a surprise for you. Woodstock College, your class, here’s Ken.”

Then he handed the phone to me. Some awkward back and forth--we were both shocked--but in general a very friendly hello. From the whole exchange of words nearly 50 years ago, I remember one phrase quite clearly: “the bishop and I disagree about several things, but I love him.” I imagined that the monastery was for celibate monks and the bishop was more tolerant of same sex relationships than my gay Jesuit-Benedictine crush. Their love was not imagined.

Frank and I said goodbye with real heartfelt good wishes, and though I knew that I would soon lose track of him again, there was no regret. A sweet connection.

I never got to ask my question about the formula for the episcopal consecration that the Romans insisted the Anglicans got wrong and severed their connection to the Apostles. My Jesuit research had led me to the conclusion that it was a political move disguised in theological language. I suspect that the Bishop’s response would have been some reference to Utrecht. Formula, mode, substance might have been reduced to magic words, like hocus pocus. But he was far better than that. His instincts led him to uncover the hidden love between a man he’d made a priest and a stranger who’d appeared at his table, and this bishop followed his instincts.

The evening ended at 9. The bishop excused himself, explaining that he had to teach about the “Filioque Controversy,” and, because it dated from the 11th century, he had to brush up. It was at least important to know who said what, and what the consequences were. I thought that was a pretty solid theological procedure. Then he disappeared to probe the existence of the Holy Spirit, seeming to float up the stairs as lightly as he’d descended them. Could this have been a surreal sleight of hand with a touch of magic realism?

Some time later, maybe months, maybe years, I had some very pricey tickets to hear Gore Vidal in the Masonic Auditorium atop Nob Hill. I found a very tight parking space for the VW on Jones right behind Grace Cathedral, and, as I was rushing to my seat, I turned and looked through the glass door into the cathedral’s crypt. There was my laundromat bishop with full Roman style miter and regalia at the end of a procession. I remembered that his Slot sponsors had found an altar and chapel for him, in exchange for ensuring that the fundamental line connecting the Apostles of Jesus to the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco remained unbroken. I remember the coincidence of the two events quite clearly though my timeline is foggy; if the event at the Masonic Hall was connected with Gore’s run for the Senate, the date of sighting the bishop might have been as late as 1982.

Could I be accused of gonzo journalism, as if I were writing a report of a spiritual night out while on dope or some New Age high? I stand accused. It really did happen, and Gore’s “Live from Golgotha” is far more gonzo than I can muster.