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.

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.”