Did I miss Holy Week completely?

Easter was yesterday. Why didn’t it make a dent?

I noticed something that I found quite strange. 

I live in a non-Christian culture. There are Christians in India, of course, a sizable minority, but they are not visible. Their priests do not walk the streets of northern India, at least, dressed in distinctive clothing. Their churches are few. Their holidays are official, but they are often crowded with more than 30 others from Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. I have only a few Indian Christian friends; I do not seek out Christian rituals and communities. I am no longer seduced by the cultural trappings of religious Christianity, although I do from time to time feel what I can only describe as nostalgia.

Saturday was a difficult day for my small community. One of the families lost their only son, a bright, handsome young man, just 19 years old. He died on the back of a motorcycle coming home from the local Mela gathering; the driver, another young man, is still in a coma at the public hospital. Together with my friend Kumar, we went to the village ritual that accompanies death. The family was in a state of total shock. The women were gathered on the floor of a dark room with his mother, who sat silent and motionless. When I bowed to the father, the uncle, and brother of several of the men who work and do work for me, tears came to my eyes. 

Later at home, I realized that it was Easter in the West. In Europe, a well-intentioned Pope was doing something and saying something, but it seemed that most people were focused on the senseless barbarism of Putin’s army in Ukraine, actions that cannot in any way be connected to the ethic of Christianity. In America, people were arguing, fighting about vegetables, murder, and sex, and somehow connecting that with the slogan ”he is risen.” There was a Twitter storm with a clip of some lanky guy proclaiming his faith with a guitar and some terrible hymns to a captive audience of passengers on a plane at 36,000 feet. I wouldn’t have requested a parachute unless it went on the length of the Orthodox mass, but really, his faith has no manners. It just seemed like self-serving arrogance coupled with a strong dose of narcissism.

At this point in my life, I can no longer properly call myself Christian. The stories about Jesus seem to me to be just that, stories that may or may not strike a chord about living a full life with the rest of humanity trying to live their lives as best they can. They spring the myths and rituals of the pagan world in which they were born; perhaps some of those myths provide deep access to the mystery of human life, but for the most part I find them a distraction, even misleading. If push comes to shove, I would have to classify them as the artifacts, the “bricolage” of the predominant mystery cult, the one that won.

In the past, perhaps just a few years ago, when I was living in a more Eurocentric culture, I might have found myself at least paying some attention to the actions of the Pope during Holy Week. There was even a time when I did go to Church on this occasion. But what I noticed this year was barely a blimp on my emotional register, neither positive nor negative (even the singing nun type on the plane merited just a chuckle, no outrage). But I did catch a glimpse of how it is culture, the artifacts of dress and ceremony, the words of religious people, the songs, the conversations of friends and family, that carry and perpetuate what we call religious faith. And I asked myself, without them, what is lost? I was still able to be with a grieving family and share their sorrow. I did not miss Easter or Holy Week.

All of You Are Gobblers of Dregs!

Blue Cliff Record, Case 11 (the long version)

One day Huangbo went up in the hall and said, "What do you people want to look for?"
And he chased them with his staff.
The assembly didn't disperse, so he said, "The Great Master Nintou Farong [594-657, 5th gen] of Ox Head Mountain spoke horizontally and spoke vertically, but he still didn't know the key of transcendence. These days the followers after Shitou [700-790, 8th gen] and Mazu [709-88, 8th gen] speak of Zen and speak of the Way most voluminously.

All of you are gobblers of dregs. If you travel around like this, you'll get laughed at by people. As soon as you hear of a place with eight hundred or a thousand people, you immediately go there. It won't do just to seek out the hubbub.

When I was traveling, if I found there was someone at the roots of the grasses, I would stick him in the head and watch to see if he knew the feeling of pain. If he did, I could give him a cloth bag full of rice as an offering.

If you always take things this easy here, then where else would there be this matter of Today? Since you're called pilgrims, you should concentrate a bit.

Do you know there are no teachers of Zen in all of China?"


There is a lively, ongoing debate in an online Buddhist group about the nature of practice and enlightenment. Dosho Port published a piece on August 18th called “The Showa Dispute About True Faith.” He describes the efforts beginning in 1928 to make Soto Zen more compatible with “modernism,” including Christianity, by reframing its belief system. A dispute ensued. One side organized its material under the slogan, ‘Original Enlightenment, mysterious practice.’ The other side, the monk establishment, wanted actual practice verification.

I am vaguely familiar with this dispute about modernization in Japanese Soto Zen before the Second War, and the attempts to "translate" the doctrine, if I can use the word, to make it more understandable. There was an attempt to take a portion of Buddhist literature in Japanese, but also Chinese, and free it from its Medieval encapsulation. I went to Masao Abe's amazing classes when he was teaching in San Francisco at CIIS. He definitely comes from this school. I’m a former Jesuit, so I also delved into Kitarō Nishida and the Kyoto School’s adoption of Western philosophical discourse. 40 years ago, we all immersed ourselves in the extensive writings of D. T. Suzuki, who, I have to say, comes across more like an apologist or evangelist.

This may be a bare minimum to butt into this conversation, but I will. These efforts to strip the vehicle down to its essential parts leave just enough to work with. To begin, let me take the debate one step further and remove the parochial underpinnings.

My pared-down argument runs like this: an experience of liberation is possible for humans. We don’t quite know what it is because of the current condition of our minds: our mental acuity, the quality of our perceptive apparatus, a balanced or afflicted emotional state, plus I think we have to throw a good dose of fancy, magical thinking, cultural mythology, plus translation difficulties and the vagaries of language into the mix. My list is not complete--there’s a lot to sort out, but I think we can establish, or posit, three hypotheses:

1. Such a state or quality of freedom exists and can transform our experience as humans.
2. It is possible, even desirable, to achieve it.
3. We recognize that it will take effort, education, what we commonly call meditation, and possibly recalibration to achieve this experience.

We believe that certain people have had this experience, most notably the Buddha, but others too, for example, Eihei Dōgen, Linji Yixuan, Hakuin Ekaku, Je Tsongkhapa, and Shinran. Still, perhaps we could stretch our imaginations to include the current Dalai Lama. Maybe that auntie whom Red Pine encountered sitting in a cave in China, who never heard of Mao Tse Tung, but, forget about her, she never wrote anything down. We’re stuck with the guys, they’re all guys, who wrote, had secretaries, or disciples who took extensive lecture notes.

What did they write: of course we have the Sutras, plus other stories of the Buddha and his disciples; the enlightened guys also wrote descriptions of their experiences, some of which seem to be in coded language; thankfully there’s lots of poetry, balanced with carefully reasoned philosophy of mind and analysis of perception and experience; we have to include the myths, and what we call practice manuals, “how to” lists; there are some riddles that purport to point to the experience; then extensive records of the mental and yogic disciplines that practitioners used to achieve this state of liberation plus prescriptive injunctions and admonitions that have even been codified. There is also a large body of instruction material that has not been written down, which is generally reserved for advanced levels of practice.

But there are huge problems with all this literature. First is the language and translation. We're blessed to have an army of very well-trained and literate translators, but cultural and archaic understandings of the texts remain. Then there is the sheer volume and diversity of the materials. Even if we could determine their authenticity, ensure an accurate translation, and understand their precise meaning, we‘d still face the question of how to use them, along with many other questions.

Our Western Zen practice stems to some degree from these efforts to modernize. Harada Sogaku Roshi, and after him, Hakuun Yasutani, Kuon Yamada, and the Jesuit Roshis, Bob Aitken, and the rest of my crowd come from another strain of that same impulse to modernize, so that's what I was handed.

Schools of thought are schools of thought. What do we do with them? Again, for better or worse, they inform our practice.

First, I think that there's a logical fallacy in the way we understand these efforts at modernization. Following any time-honored system of training that we’ve been handed, we believe that if we accurately recreate the logic of the thinking, the order of the steps, the lineage of the teachers, then we can access the authentic experience of liberation. If we fail, then we did something wrong. Perhaps it is a road map, but we want it to be Google Maps, with the blue dot moving across the dashboard screen. Good luck with that. I will set up a dharma combat: can algorithms become enlightened?

Another knot appears when we identify the criteria for validating the credentials of a teacher from within this arcane body of knowledge, whether it’s inka or transmission or tulku. The checklist resides in experience outside ourselves and muddies the teaching as well as opens the door to abuse and exploitation. Call the dharma police to testify before the High Court.

Is this even good practice? I remember working on the koan “Mu” for years with Bob Aitken. I kept complaining in my very Jesuit way that it was all just a self-referential exercise in a closed system. He'd say, yes, it appears that way, and then he’d encourage me to continue. I did. In 1996, I was living with Maylie Scott on Ashby in Berkeley and still doing sesshin with Aitken and John Tarrant. One Sunday morning, I had to drive a rented truck back to Santa Rosa. As I was returning to where I’d parked it the night before, POW. All that self-referential mind swirling stopped, and I got it. It didn't matter if it came via some well-intentioned modernization efforts in a Soto Shu University in the 20s. It hit me. There was no turning back.

Of course, that experience faded soon enough, which presented its own dilemma, but it was enough to set me on my own path. I remember saying to Phil Whalen once what a shame it was that the library at Nalanda was destroyed--all that knowledge lost. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. Enough remains. Just enough.” I feel the same about any attempts to update our practice and make it modern or palatable or whatever. Enough remains, just enough. And, as thanks to Phil, I’ll add: “With any luck if we’re lucky.”

I don't want to take a path based on pious dreams and hopes, magical thinking, myth, or wild speculation. When coupled with a few token morsels of experience that we might be able to recognize in ourselves if we’ve spent any time on the cushion, we enter dangerous territory. I was lucky to be able to see something authentic in several teachers, among them Issan Dorsey, Phil Whalen, Maylie Scott, Bob Aitken, and John Tarrant. I trusted them and was able to just stick with it until I began to catch a glimpse for myself that something else is possible.

I didn’t shout but I’m still a big phoney.

Blue Cliff Record, Case 10

Let me begin with a snippet from the few introductory lines that Hsueh Tou calls the pointer: “If on the other hand, you neither face upwards or downwards, how will you deal with it? If there is a principle, go by the principle. If there is no principle, go by the example.”

The koan

After Mu Chou’s formula introductory question, “Where are you from,” in a reversal of roles, the shouting teacher gets shouted at.
Then Mu Chou said, "After three or four shouts, then what?"
The student had nothing to say.
Mu Chou hit him and said: You thieving phon[e]y.

It was sometime in the Fall of 1993. If Mu Chou asked me where I’d come from, I would have said “Hartford Street Zen Center,” but he would not have recognized our lives there. A small temple in the heart of San Francisco’s gay ghetto, it had never been your typical Zen Center even before AIDS. After I moved in in 1989, more than 80 men and one woman died in its 13 bedrooms. Our everyday life was centered around doctor’s appointments, dispensing medications, talking with friends and family about wills and funerals, performing funerals, cooking food, as well as two periods of zazen every day, plus a pretty standard Soto ritual. We attempted to establish a more formal Buddhist study program, typical of Western Zen centers, but the grief support groups drew more attendees. I have to add that my daily ritual usually ended with a bout of heavy drinking in a local bar a block away. It was more than a full-time job.

The concern of our zendo was the pain and fragility of life. It was inescapable. You could try to run away, and we all did from time to time in our own way. But now Issan was dead; Steve Allen had resigned as abbot and left for Crestone. And it was the end of Maitri Hospice being part of the Temple. Phil told me to get rid of it. It was Issan’s project, and he had other ideas about Zen masters’ dying. In retrospect, I think that he hated trying to live his life with everyone dropping dead around him. He might have accepted Issan’s invitation to move in because they were old friends; they had been in Santa Fe together, and they were Dick’s first real dharma heirs. But actually, I really think that one of his main motivations was that he was homeless and had nowhere else to go. He had set himself to master Zen, and though he had done his work deeply and thoroughly, he was still a human, and a frail old man.

We had been sitting all day, and I went into Phil’s room just before the closing bell. I remember quite clearly what transpired. It could be fairly labeled passive-aggressive. From time to time, I have been less than proud of my behavior, although I let myself off the hook with the recognition that I am also human.

I forget the exact reason I was so pissed off, but I was. Of course, I was burned out and disappointed, perhaps due to the changes at Hartford Street or Phil’s dismissal of me, but we were all a bit “reactive,” including Phil. That is the way with anger’s confusion--whatever remains, the angry mind latches onto like a life raft in a raging sea. With all that experience of dying, anger turned out to have been a clever student and strategized its survival with the cunning of a fox.

I remember that I’d determined beforehand that in this dokusan, I would not say anything. Just sit like a fat lump and keep my mouth shut. If I felt even the slightest inkling of the beginnings of a word, much less the formulation of a question, I would shut it down. I would kill an errant thought before it even showed its face. I would not recommend this strategy for inching towards happiness, but on occasion, it is interesting to test if it is even possible. Perhaps yelling the nonsensical “Katz” has some salvific result as it involves more of the spontaneous, emotive parts of the psyche, but my Mother had taught me that shouting was always bad manners. Despite learning that great Zen teachers favored this theatrical gesture as a pedagogy, I still believe my mother. Western teachers have tried to polish this skill, but when I hear them affecting a Katz shout, it feels contrived. Or embarrassing. It is still better than cutting off fingers and other outlandish external “shoves” designed to facilitate the dropping off of body and mind. Shouting is not a principle in Zen, nor is it really an example of anything but the coordination of breath and vocal cords.

So for whatever reason, I could never be a shouting student, and I sat. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was shouting inside, though I did feel a few interior bumps. And once in a while, Phil began to look up and begin to say something, but then he stopped too. And so on for a very uncomfortable span of time.

Then Phil faintly smiled and said, “Let’s go back down to the zendo and join the others.” I remember or imagined a feeling of disappointment in his voice. That was it. He didn’t call me a phony. Do you spell it with an “e”? Did he see through to my anger? It makes no difference. All things considered, he was very generous.

I said in the beginning that Mu Chou would not have recognized our lives at Hartford Street Zen Center. Perhaps I’m selling him short.

 

The First World War was family rivalry. Period.

Sobering thoughts about the sexual scandal of Prince Andrew and the ongoing saga of Harry and Meghan.

The royal families of Europe (and other parts of the world, for that matter), their wealth, legacy, and unchecked neuroticism, are a curse. And this curse spreads like a virus, catching up anyone in an infantile fantasy of real and imagined hurt.

I may be overstating my case just as the creators of “The Crown” have exaggerated and taken liberties with the more salacious peccadillos of the Windsor’s for TV ratings, but I have been watching the oversized, hysterical public reaction to Prince Harry’s exit, and wondering how the second son of a wife who was badly treated by a family intent on portraying a certain image garners so much press. I started following Quora on the royals and was disheartened to see how many royal watchers, both British and American, trashed Meghan and Harry for jumping ship and “disrespecting” HH Her Majesty the Queen, as if this was the end of the world. More disconcerting, it’s the same crowd that has adopted the stance of fast-talking Hollywood lawyers when it comes to defending the indefensible Prince Andrew’s pricey payoff to Virginia Giuffre. Let’s be honest--that alone should be enough to end the crown. It really is time to end the culture of rich, powerful men getting away with sexual abuse, but it is not going to happen. The Queen is not the Pope, even though she heads an apostolic church of some consequence, but her second son is not a priest and has not taken a vow of celibacy.

The consequences of these petty family squabbles don’t seem as consequential and deadly as the outbreak of WW1 or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but we avoid examining them at our peril. I would like to examine how public perception and obsession hold so much sway.

In an article excerpted from her book, “The Rhyme of History, the Lessons of the Great War,” historian Margaret MacMillan points to the ambiguity that still remains after more than 32,000 articles, treatises, and books have been published investigating its causes. Then she mentions Freud’s theory “narcissism of small differences,” Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen. The thesis, according to his 1930 “Civilization and Its Discontents,” is defined as “communities with adjoining territories and close relationships [being] especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation.” A few paragraphs further on, he says: “Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.”

Jonathan Swift, in his 1792 novel Gulliver's Travels, described this phenomenon when writing about how two groups entered into a long and vicious war after they disagreed on which was the best end to break an egg. It may be a stretch to compare the German naval expansion in the early XXth century to counter the British domination of the seas to breaking an egg, but the emotional tone of the humiliation of Harry and Meghan seems as senseless as the furor over the assassination of two royals in far away Sarajevo. When tied to the worldwide emotional reaction to the death of Princess Dianna, the connections become clearer and, I would argue, more troublesome. No one was about to go to war over the cloudy, unnecessary death of the British royal, but her involvement with an Egyptian lover, the rise of anti-Muslim feelings in the UK, did have a huge effect on political life in Britain and Brexit. One could argue that there were many other factors involved, and I will not protest. But a surefire way to concoct a recipe for an economic disaster is to mix in a pinch of salacious sex. Too much salt will spoil any good dish.

Archduke Ferdinand was not directly related to the German Kaiser Wilhelm or the Russian Czar Nicholas, who were uncles and cousins, but Ferdinand was tight with the Kaiser, and when the Serbs got involved, the consequences were catastrophic. 40 million people died in Europe between 1914 and 1918. Spoiled Wilhelm hated Edward for being what he considered a nitwit uncle, but Edward managed to pull his cousin Nicholas into his corner of the family fray. Their narcissism of small differences obscured any real solutions other than wholesale slaughter. They may have spoken different languages when haranguing their subjects, but they were all steeped in the same emotional language of pretty jealousy and privilege, and they duped the world into taking sides. The First World War was a family rivalry. Period.