August 6th, 1945, Carrying the Flame

This is a continuation of my earlier post about the movie Oppenheimer.

On July 31st of 1995, I drove with Maylie Scott from Berkeley over to Mayumi Oda’s house in Stinson Beach, just below Green Gulch Farm. I remember the day because it is the Feast of Saint Ignatius, and my friend Ty Cashman was living with Mayumi at the time. Ty was a friend who, like me, had been a Jesuit. Then we were both practicing Zen Buddhists.

The purpose of the visit was to receive a small flame that Mayumi had carried from the fire that burns at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima remembering the more than 140,000 innocent men women and children indiscriminately murdered on August 6th 1945. There’s an eternal flame in the memorial park commemorating the 15 kiloton bomb that burned at 4000 degrees Celsius at its center. Mayumi had kindled a candle there and somehow secreted it aboard her plane back to the US. My job in the passenger seat of Maylie’s small car was to guard that flame on the bumpy and twisty road back to Berkeley. From there it would be carried to light the candles for a ceremony that would begin the blockade of the Livermore Lab. Maylie had organized the protest with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship to commemorate the 50th anniversary. She and several others would be arrested and spend several days in jail.

I mention the Jesuits because one of the main reasons that a number of Jesuits have become dedicated Zen Buddhist practitioners is the leadership and inspiration of Father Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle, and Father LaSalle was in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. He was walking on a hill above the city, about 6 or 8 kilometers from the epicenter and was injured although I have no clear information about the nature and extent of his wounds. Another very important Jesuit Pedro Arrupe was also close to the epicenter, leading a class for the Japanese Jesuit novices. The windows and doors of the building were blown out, but I couldn’t find any record of reported injury other than radiation poisoning, and I don’t know the extent. Arrupe went on to be elected as the General of the Society after the Second Vatican Council, and was the General during my years as a Jesuit. LaSalle became a student of Harada Daiun Sogaku Roshi, and after Harada’s death, he continued to work with the lay master Yamada Koun Zenshin Roshi, a relationship that lasted for the rest of his long life. There have been more than 10 Catholic religious who have been authorized as Zen teachers who came to the practice through LaSalle. That is an amazing accomplishment. I could say that all three of these men, Arrupe, LaSalle, and Yamada have had a profound personal impact on my life though I never met them. And so did the dropping of the bomb. I was just 1 year and 72 days old. I have lived under the shadow of annihilation for 78 years along with the rest of humankind.

A woman friend thought that the most appropriate response to the bombing might be retreat to a cave or dark church. In fact LaSalle created a zendo for the Jesuits and other religious who sat with him. It is still beside a flowing mountain stream above Tokyo and he named it Akigawa Shinmei Cave. There is an appropriate time for the silent grieving along with an inner search. Arrupe and his novices immediately sprang into action, went down into the streets of Hiroshima and began to look after the wounded and dying as best they could. I don’t know what my response would have been. I do know that when Maylie went to jail, it was a work day for me and I could not join the protest. Besides, someone had to make sure that Maylie’s aging mother was taken care of whilst her daughter was being arrested.

When my friend David Weinstein was sitting with Yamada in Kamakura, he remembers seeing Father LaSalle coming from Dokusan often in the early morning. One day he was standing with Yamada Roshi and they waved goodbye to LaSalle. Yamada turned to David, and said, “there is the man who is always teaching me how to apply the koans to life.”

Father LaSalle is buried in Hiroshima in other "hibakusha," survivors of the immediate conflagration. They are the front line in our fight to ban these weapons, and why it was so important for Maylie to carry that flame from Hiroshima to the Livermore blockade 50 years later..

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.