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,

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.

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.