Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, pray for me, a sinner.

The traditional vow days in the Jesuits are feasts of the Virgin Mary, today, August 15th, and September 8th, her birthday. I took my simple religious vows on September 8th, 1968. It was common for most young Jesuits to take Mary as their “vow’” name. So I might have said, “I, Kenneth Maria Ireland, vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.” I asked to keep my given name, and it was granted. 

As far as my Marian faith goes, I am a pretty stripped-down basic gospel kind of guy. Some of this can be traced back to my Calvinist heritage; my father was a Yankee free thinker, and there was some rebellion against the rigid Irish nuns who taught the Baltimore Catechism by rote. I have zero desire to make a pilgrimage to Fatima or Lourdes. Apparitions are far too spooky for my rational mindset. I’ve always held that Mary's “Dormition” is far more palatable than her bodily transportation to the Gates of Heaven. I prefer myth when it comes to such matters. The infallible pronouncement of Pius 12 happened when I was 8 years old; even then, I wondered how something this momentous could be hidden and unrecognized for such a long period of time. I said the rosary every day when I was in a Jesuit house of formation. We all did. I liked the repetition of the words of a simple prayer and the contemplation of the mysteries I took to be more like visualizations of scenes from the stories told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (John is a bit too gnostic). 

By Erik Cleves Kristensen - House of the Virgin Mary

When Ashish and I visited Ephesus, after tromping through the amazing Roman ruins, we took a small jitney several kilometers high up into the bluffs overlooking the ancient harbor to what is known as Mother Mary’s House. According to legend, Saint John, the gnostic one, took Mary to the small community that Paul had founded in that Roman colony after the death of Jesus. She was to spend the rest of her days protected from the turmoil of James’s Jerusalem Church. Of course, her presence also legitimized the ascent of the Jesus congregations of Greeks and Romans who were not observant of Jewish law and customs, but I will leave that side for polemicists to hash out.

When I got on that small, rickety bus, it had been more than 35 years since I left the Jesuits and 30 years of practicing Buddhist meditation. I’m just giving some background about the mindset of the guy who headed up Mt. Koressos (Turkish: Bülbüldağı, "Mount Nightingale") to the place that Saint Anne Catherine Emmerich had seen in visions as Mary the Virgin's last earthly abode.

It fit the parameters of a place that I could envision for the house of Mother Mary. Being there was wonderful and peaceful, with a genuine feeling of the Transcendent. No throngs of the faithful seeking miracles, no massive basilicas commemorating a Saint’s vision, no sellers of Marian trinkets and memorabilia. There were perhaps a dozen religious women, maybe less, quietly tending simple gardens and very austere shrines. We wandered wherever we wanted and stopped when we felt the urge. No one exhorted us, telling us what to believe or how to pray. There were few votary candle boxes like the ones I remember from the Irish parishes of my youth in front of Saint Mary’s statues. There was only one donation box near the exit.

I felt a real sense of freedom when I boarded that rickety little bus for the scary ride back down to Selçuk. I had been in the presence of the Virgin, and my mind was allowed the space to take whatever tack was appropriate for the time and place.

Eucharistic Flop, a lifeless, bloodless sacrilege

Why the Eucharistic Congress was not just a costly, meaningless show but a sacrilege: many of my ex-Jesuit friends fault it for being an anachronistic diversion from the nuts and bolts, tedious work of Tikkun, repairing our torn and frayed world with poverty, migrants, homeless people, misfits, fundamentalist racists, children murdered in Gaza and Ukraine, conscripted soldiers slaughtered, terrorists assassinated by high tech missiles that can find your bedroom window. The list seems endless. Worse for the activists is the fact that it seemed to be orchestrated by an increasingly right-wing leadership in the American Church as a counter punch for what they see as the activist agenda of the liberal Jesuit Pope. 

All those cogent reasons are, well, very cogent and appropriately political. What better way to shore up the memory of our forgotten religious life, where the priest was god's representative, and we faithful cowered in pews on the designated night and sang “Tantum ergo Sacramentum,” not having a clue that Thomas wrote those words after he had the experience of seeing all the hundreds of thousand words of very cogent theology disappear like so much straw and less idea of what any of it meant. I loved singing genitori genitoque, especially when we got to procedenti ab utroque, meaning that any meaning came from somewhere else, and I had no idea where although that was bad translation. But in general, now that my Latin is better than before a Jesuit education, I find the whole affair poorly conceived from somewhere else.

I was saddened by the silly parades, with thousands of altar boys in black and white, priests in white and gold, and bishops in lots of gold and big hats, stumbling along with no sense of what a religious procession might look like. They might have been trying to be regal and dignified, but actually, the volunteer fire department does a better job marching behind their red trucks on the 4th of July than these school boys could muster behind the crudely decorated trailers that were being dragged by the best trucks that the diocese could borrow from the Knight of Columbus who had a concrete company. Firefighters have a purpose. A New Orleans funeral marching band has a purpose. These jokers were doing something that they had been ordered to do. That seemed to be their only purpose.

The problem for me, however, goes beyond the aesthetics of mounting a religious festival with the obvious political agenda of lending support to an anachronistic, monarchial church of yesteryear. It is in the trivialization and even commercialization of God’s Presence. If I can be bold, even Thomas missed this. We are not worshipping a thing, a piece of flat, tasteless bread that has been magically changed by uttering magic words. When I bow before the Great Sacrament, I bow to the Presence of God. It is present, it is immediate, it is transformative. Instead of a flat, lifeless speck of white carbohydrate, it is love, intimacy, and mystery. All that got lost, not just lost in the sense that there was a piece missing and we knew that something was missing. It was lost in the sense that the ceremony didn’t even point to that Great Presence that is with us but invisible to our ordinary senses. Maybe Thomas, you did get it--Sensuum defectui..

And how much money did this farce cost?

The Road to Rohatsu

Ryutan’s Candle and Kenosha

Mumonkan Case 28

The original Chinese Goang

Longtan Chongxin (Dragon-Lake): Because Deshan Xuanjian asked more and more and night arrived, Tan said, "The night is deep. Sir, why don’t you go to lie down?"

Shan thereupon gathered his precious baggage, hoisted the [door] blind, and then exited. He saw the outside was pitch dark, withdrew, turned around, and said, "Outside is pitch dark."

Tan then lit a paper measuring candle and gave it to him.

Shan intended to accept it, but Tan then blew it out.

I was driving from Santa Fe to Crestone with Baker Roshi for my first Rohatsu sesshin. It was going to be just Baker and me for the four-hour drive. I was assigned a lot of packing tasks; his instructions were very exacting. I remember quite clearly that I had to fit the large densho bell into the trunk of the car. There were other bells and zendo items that were needed to keep the schedule and turn the Wheel of the Dharma. 

It was probably between 4 and 5, and already getting dark when we drove out Cerro Gordo Road. We were due by 9 to formally open the sesshin; I thought that we might have been late, but Baker Roshi knew the route very well and had the trip planned to the second. I’d heard about his legendary fast driving but felt reasonably comfortable.

We talked about Phil Whalen, Issan, the Hospice, and food. Then the conversation turned to losing normal mental ability, Alzheimers, and AIDS dementia. I was somewhat concerned about Issan’s losing his faculties during the last phase of his disease and asked about the effect of meditation and the blurring of our normal sense of time. I spoke of one guy in the Hospice who couldn’t even remember the past of 5 minutes ago and was completely unable to foresee any future. Given that he was a dying man, it actually seemed to be a blessing.

Baker told me that I probably shouldn’t worry too much. He mentioned something one of his old friends in Japan, Nanao Sakaki, the godfather of Japanese hippies, said when his memory was fading after he crossed 80 years, “I can’t remember what I didn’t need to know anyway.” 

I asked David Chadwick if he remembered if he had any more details about Nanao's condition. David pointed me to a conversation he had with Nanao before he died. David talked about a mutual friend who had colon cancer. Nanao seemed to follow the conversation but asked the same question several times, “What did he have?” "Shiri," David repeated, patting his butt, but said that he’d already answered the question.

Nanao wasn't fazed. "Kenbosho," he said. "I have kenbosho." David asked if that meant senility or Alzheimer's. Nanao wasn't exactly sure. But he was quite cheerful about it.

"Ah, kenbosho is very good," he said. "No need to remember anything anyway. My mind is becoming more empty and free every day! This is a very good thing. I like kenbosho very much."

After crossing Four Corners, the last 40 miles north up Highway 17 from Amoroso to Crestone, the road becomes totally flat, level, and straight for as far as my eye could take it to the edge of the car’s headlights. The night was very dark, with no light for miles; the sky seemed to be painted a deep penetrating purple that went all the way to the moon, but I didn’t really notice. I thought that we must have been late, and Baker Roshi might have been driving even faster, but it also might have just been my fear. I think we were riding in a BMW, but it might have been a Mercedes. I am not interested in cars; however Roshi's love of fast cars is legendary and actually got him into some trouble. He turned the conversation towards how German engineers make sure that the mechanics of the automobile are tip top because driving on the autobahn was very fast, and Germans demanded strict safety protocols and no speed limits. He joked, they at least needed the assurance of safety even if a ruse.

Suddenly the Roshi turned off the car’s headlights. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted. I was afraid. We were bolting up the highway at what seemed to be breakneck speed. After a few seconds, perhaps a minute, but certainly far too long in my judgment, Richard turned on the headlights again, and said with a little chuckle that we were lucky that no other driver had decided to turn out the headlights on their car to experience the beauty and depth of the dark night.  

I gradually regained my composure, but my perception of the night had changed. It opened up and I was so aware of the beauty of the night above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I was just part of a vast universe beyond any explanation. 

The Diamond Sutra says, “If there is even a bit of difference, it is the distance between heaven and earth.” If Deshan (Tokusan) had been a better student and actually understood before he went all out with his over-the-top melodramatic burning of the scripture, he would have saved generations of Zen students a lot of pain. But perhaps he thought that Longtan (Ryûtan) was equally dense, and the enthusiasm of a teaching moment simply overwhelmed him. It was I who needed to shed my unsentimental Jesuit training in order to catch the beauty of fire.

Within 25 minutes, we arrived on time to a waiting hall of people all sitting in good posture. I found my seat. The days rolled on; the sun came up; the stars appeared again. I heard the Temple bell ring, and I woke up.

I returned to Santa Fe with some other friends and quickly fell into a round of gatherings and holiday parties. I called Southwest Airlines and postponed my departure several times. I was having fun. 

Then, just after dinner at Robert Winson’s house, someone handed me the phone. It was Issan. He’d tracked me down. He asked how I was doing and how my sesshin had been. I told him that I thought Sante Fe was beautiful and just amazing with all the luminaria and snow.

“Oh yes,” he said; I remember his words exactly, “all those cute little mud houses. You know that the effect of sesshin can be like a drug trip, and it’s wonderful, but we need you here. Why don’t you come home?”

I called the airport and booked the next flight to San Francisco. It was time to return to my immediate experience of day-to-day life at Maitri Hospice where the moment of living life was always in the shadow of knowing that it will end sooner than we might have dreamed..

  

Daido Loori’s verse:

Within darkness there is light;

within light there is darkness.

If you really see it,

you will go blind.

Tarrant Roshi concurs.

"The Three Key B’s of Buddhism: Bowing, Boring and Bliss," by Phil Whalen & Ken Ireland

 

Phil with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa

Bowing, Boring, and Bliss

I recall a talk about “Bowing” by Zenshin Phil Whalen at the Hartford Street Zen Center. Damn, I loved his talks. He was, without a doubt, one of the most literate men ever to don the robes of a Zen priest anywhere, at any time. And if you want to challenge me, I’ll be suiting up on the Dalai Lama’s debate ground up here in McLeod Ganj. 

But first things first—I was going to try to record the talk, but I was my usual bumbling self with electronic equipment, and I couldn’t get the machine working in good time. Being his usual patient self, he yelled at me, saying that we didn’t have all day and, anyway, some things were just not meant to be recorded. Sometimes, words are purposefully impermanent. It was not like he was going to recite some goddamn hidden, secret sutra for the last time before he croaked.

So I lost the talk, but I am going to do my best to reconstruct it from the basic “B’s” as I remember them.

He began by saying that if he really wanted to write a bestseller, his publisher would insist that he come up with a title like the “The 10 Recondite Rules for Clean Buddhist Living” or something like that. So let’s give it a try: “The Three Key B’s of Buddhism, Bowing Boredom and Bliss.”  Perhaps Phil’s publisher was onto something. More than 20 years have passed, and I still remember long sections of his talk (it’s also true that, as with many teachers, he returned again and again to his favorite topics, like an old horse headed back to the barn).

When he was in Japan, in the monasteries and temples there, everyone bowed three times. People just always bowed three times. But for those who couldn’t count, he said, before he just sat down to begin his talk, he bowed nine times. We all bow nine times at Zen Center; why is that? Well, he said, when the first students gathered around Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco, they went to him one day and complained, “Roshi, we love you, but we’re Americans, and we don’t like all this bowing. We don’t understand it. So why are we doing it?” And the Roshi said with a smile, “Oh, so you don't like bowing three times? Good. Perfect. I think we should bow nine times. Better that way, More practice.”

So we bow nine times. Better that way. Practice.

Phil then told an anecdotal story about some legendary old Japanese teacher way out in the middle-of-nowhere backcountry who was revered for the callous on his forehead. He explained himself: one of his first teachers had scolded him for being stubborn and told him bowing would be a good practice. So he began bowing. He never stopped. He discovered that the body is stubborn and the mind is stubborn. He said that he would stop when he stopped being stubborn. So he just kept bowing and thus the calloused forehead. In one way or another, we’re all like that.

Then he said that Zen students actually have it very easy. In Tibet, all the new monks bow 100,000 times before they do anything. It’s called Ngondro, and it involves the whole body, not just your forehead, hands, arms, knees and feet touching the floor but your whole body flat out, like you were a swimming fish, and it’s so strenuous that it takes a lot of effort to reel back and bounce back up. Do that a hundred thousand times. I’m told that it’s a purifying exercise. But it’s not done with some idea of repentance like Christian pilgrims bowing every three feet along the Camino de Santiago. It’s done because we practice meditation with every bit of ourselves wholeheartedly, fully, without reservation, holding nothing back. 

And then he said that anyone who’s lived in Asia knows that bowing is just good manners. It’s a sign of respect. You tilt your body down, your eyes are not focused on the face of the person you’re greeting, and your whole body is lower. Of course, you’re going to bow lower to a king or abbot. There’s a whole book of bowing etiquette: you bow very slightly to someone who’s your equal, but your bow is lower when you greet your parent or someone who’s older out of respect. That’s why we bow to our teachers in a formal situation. We’re showing respect and love. And we show it by using our whole body and mind. Our mind bows down, and for maybe an instant, we’re slightly less arrogant. We have to throw every bit of being into the bow.

But the most important thing, and here is a place where I actually have Phil’s own words, from his notebooks from Tassajara, we have to make it our own. In the rule-infested monastery or practice center, we ask ourselves, are we “bowing to rules rather than using them? We must contrive to be Buddhas & patriarchs rather than students who are good at following schedules (and bowing).”

But you’ll notice, he said, we follow a certain order in the zendo—we bow to the cushion, then everyone else in the room, and we sit. How strange, bowing to the cushion. We’re not bowing to a Buddha or a person. You can think of it any way you want to. Sometimes, I like to think that I am bowing to the practice, but that is really way too abstract. Sometimes, I do it just automatically, without thinking much of anything. But in any case, we just do it. What you think about is probably not important.

Now we get to the B for boring.

We sit, and almost immediately after, we learn to sit with only slight discomfort. Our bodies become both more relaxed and more alert, and we get bored. We all have our own experiences, but I’ll tell the world I get bored.

But then the mind, it’s like fiddling with a bungled up ball of twine, if you try to untangle it when you’re frustrated or angry, the knots are just going to get tighter. You’ll be looking for a knife (He laughed). I’ve pictured the mind as a bag of worms or a net of living anchovies. But you get the point; it’s a conundrum, it’s a mess. It may be filled with ghosts or paranoia or algebraic equations. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s just there, all tangled up. 

So there’s this big mess of thread sitting in your mind, and you just begin to play with it without much purpose, no rhyme or reason. You tug a bit here and notice that’s a bit looser over there, but you’re relaxed, and maybe you follow the thread to a knot that looks tight, but on closer inspection, it loosens up and falls away. And maybe after a while, there’s just a whole mess of lovely threads in front of you, and though you really don’t fully grasp how it happened, there it is.

Then the bell rings. 

I’ll end by quoting Mr. Robert Bly, who tells us to follow our bliss. Of course, Mr. Joseph Campbell has also told us to follow our bliss, and he did it on the Public Television Station, so it must be something worth doing. But I was watching Bly talk about it on the TV and found him quite interesting, if not persuasive—because bliss is not something I can buy, like the gummy bears I get at Walgreens. It’s just there. 

Some very fussy Buddhists might describe it as a fruit of meditation. If you hang out long enough, it’s just there because it’s always been there, but you wake up, or you open your eyes, or you open your heart. I’ll agree that it’s just there, and it really doesn’t matter how it got there. But this is something it shares with gummy bears: when you taste it, you know that it’s a gummy bear.

Sometimes, it might feel like something is lost in the process. Bly quoted a poem by Antonio Machado, which I quite like.

The wind one brilliant day called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

The wind said, “In return for the odor of my jasmine, I’d like all the odor of your roses. ”

[Machado said,] “I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden are dead … ”

The wind said, “Then, I’ll take the withered petals, and the yellow leaves, ”

and the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself, “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I think that’s enough for today. Keep bowing. Thank you.