Am I Magu?

Case 31: Magu Circles the Chan Seat 

Magu went to Changqing* and, holding his staff, walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Changqing said, “Right, right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu then went to Nanquan and walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Nanquan said, “Not right, not right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu said, “Changqing said ‘Right, right!’ and you said, ‘Not right, not right!’ Why is that?” 

Nanquan said, “Changqing is right, but you are not right. Your action is the movement of the wind. In the end it will perish.”

*Chenzhou is the name of a place.

Philip asks me to find him a shakujō!

This is a real story, not a made up story that sings its own song into the wind.

In preparation for his Mountain Seat, Philip called me to his room and pointed me to the third drawer down in a small Japanese cabinet. 

He asked, “See that funny thing with all rings? It’s meant to sit on the top of a pole. Find me a pole. It has to fit on tight so that it won’t fall off.”

I picked up an odd looking thing, wondering what it was actually. About six rings held together by another brass ring right at the bottom of which was a kind of oversized thimble shape. It seemed to be about 2 inches in diameter but it was obviously Japanese and so it would be an odd metric size. 

Off I went around the corner to Cliffs Hardware with the funny brass thimble thing in my pocket to examine what poles they had in stock. I tried them all, and finally found a broom with a handle probably 56 inches long, but the top had been carefully rounded off so that hard edges didn’t cut the hard working hands of an overburdened housewife. It actually accepted the convex female shape of the jingle jangle thing perfectly. The broom part was detachable. It screwed otf.

I paid 15 dollars and ran back to Hartford Street. I showed Phil, actually I handed it to him so that he could examine it with his fingers, blind as a bat. He liked the way the pole met the ring that corralled the rest of the rings. Then I unscrewed the brush and handed him the pole as he stood up. He bashed it to the floor and shouted “Too short. Taller, kid, taller. I need to hold it about here and walk in a measured pace.” He put out his arm and I could see that the top of the pole was below his shoulder. It needed another foot.

I had kept the sales slip so I screwed the broom back on the handle and rushed back to Cliffs. But I couldn’t find another broom with a tapered stick that was long enough. So I looked at the long poles. I would have to take a chance and have one cut. The problem was that they were either way too thick and would never accept the jingle jangle thimble or way too thin and just didn’t have the substantial feel of a walking stick. There was a deadline. I had to choose and put my money down. Cut it to 72 inches at 3 bucks a foot. I took a chance. It offended my aesthetic sense though. A straight cut at the top of the thin pole set the jingle jangle thimble askew, but I could get some thin nails long enough to keep it from popping off.

Phil grabbed the stick and hit the ground. The rings were near enough to his ear to make the proper sound and he smiled. He draped some ribbons through the rings, and banged what was now his shakujō on each step as he descended the stairs into the zendo where inherited the Mountain Seat from Steve. 

Later though the stick did not support when it would all end. Blind as a bat he reached back for the chair that wasn’t there and fell, breaking his assbone, never to take a seat ever again. 

That is also true. The whole thing is True oh so true right to the metric size of the Jingle Jangle Rings and the Fall ass backwards which turned out Wrong oh so wrong. Right right.

The Verse

For each of us there is a place 

Wherein we will tolerate no disorder. 

We habitually clean and reorder it, 

But we allow many other surfaces and regions 

To grow dusty, rank and wild. 

So I walk as far as a clump of bay trees 

Beside the creek’s milky sunshine 

To hunt for words under the stones 

Blessing the demons also that they may be freed 

From Hell and demonic being 

As I might be a cop, “Awright, move it along, folks, 

It’s all over, now, nothing more to see, just keep 

Moving right along” 

I can move along also 

“Bring your little self and come on” 

What I wanted to see was a section of creek 

Where the west bank is a smooth basalt cliff 

Huge tilted slab sticking out of the mountain 

Rocks on the opposite side channel all the water 

Which moves fast, not more than a foot deep, 

Without sloshing or foaming. 

“The Bay Trees Were About to Bloom"

Tassajara, 11:II:79 

Philip Whalen

A Song for the Wind

Jingle Jangle

Bingle Bangle

Bingo Bango

Trimble Tangle

Tinkle Tango

Oh oh oh

No no no

Too short, too tall

Too thick, too thin

Too heavy, just right

Curmudgeon, 

Superlative Mudgeon 

Ah

Fly away

Spingle Spangle

Humpty Dumpty

Crummy Bunny

Tangle untangle

Bing Bang

Walla walla

Bang bang

Thump thud

The end

Good bye dear Phillip.

I am in tears.

Heels Outside The Door

“I gave up the heels but kept the skirt.”--Issan “Tommy” Dorsey Roshi, The Boy as Pretty as the Girl Next Door

My friend the Zen teacher Roshi Susan Murphy verbally sketched the opening shot for a movie that she was thinking about doing. I titled it for her--“Issan, The Movie.” The camera focuses on the zendo porch and where people have neatly, almost formally, arranged the shoes they shed before entering the meditation hall. The camera zooms in and scans the sneakers, Birkenstocks, flip flops and a lone pair of high heels. 

I’ve always liked that visual. There’s a whole story in those few fleeting images. In my mind the slippers had to be red, perhaps even some rhinestones for dual use on stage.

But there was also reference to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door, though the title seemed to suggest, unfairly in my view, an attractive woman and a sexual tryst outside the Buddhist Precepts. The door in question was not the formal entrance to the zendo, but the door of Richard Baker’s private cabin at Tassajara where the discovery of a woman’s shoes was the beginning of the unraveling of Baker Roshi’s tenure as abbot. Though Downing claimed to stick to an objective rendition of a major rupture in history of an important Western Zen temple, the story that the title references belies that it includes a bit of muckraking. It was a scandal that keeps reappearing like a bad dream in the history of the San Francisco Zen Center. 

How do we exorcize or excise a nightmare? Is it even possible? Can we just forget it, or in a more Buddhist sounding directive, lay it aside?

This question has troubled the humans who practice since Lord Buddha himself walked out of his father’s palace. How do we carry the past? How do we deal with the results of our actions? When I first encountered this notion in my own practice, it reactivated memories of the darker aspects of my own life. In the old story we hear that the Buddha was troubled by the sight of sick people, desperate people, and dead bodies. I actually think that there’s a lot of philosophical thinking involved in that presentation as if an abstract notion of impermanence and suffering presented itself for inspection and reflection. What if Siddhartha himself had visceral emotional human responses that included all the gray shades of hesitancy, infantile and magical thinking, bargaining, even second guessing and mistakes? These are the kind of human reactions that we have to deal with.

Issan, Phil Whalen and a few others were at the center of the San Francisco Zen Center storm as people who did not turn against Richard Baker. Issan would not have blushed at the real or imagined nubile figure in his teacher’s life, and did he abandon his teacher.  His own life had more than its share of dark and loving moments. He did not shun, renounce, ostracize, vilify, or denounce though I’m sure that many longtime friends encouraged, perhaps even nudged him in that direction. This does not imply that he tolerated or excused whatever behaviors might have occurred. Rather, his own experience of human frailty or suffering allowed him a kind of generous and compassionate understanding that we are all human. 

This history of the planting Zen practice in the West is filled to overflowing with stories of men and women who came to Zen after deeply troubling personal experiences. Buddhism is not a religion invented to steer sinners towards repentance nor is it a religion that requires sainthood. Practice allows each one of us a certain degree of freedom from being attached to the past.  

Issan became Richard Baker’s first dharma heir. For me there is no mystery or magical thinking in that.

There was a choice in the matter, but he touched as little as possible. “I gave up the heels but I kept the skirt.”

Sweeping darkness

into a corner

only makes the room 

unbearably bright. 

Better for the defilements 

to be left undisturbed. 

Let them glow like embers 

drift away like ash.

Verse by Richard von Sturmer

Did Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan actually exist?

Syncretism, Syncretic Occultism, Carlos Castaneda and the Monetization of the Occult

When asked by an interviewer if don Juan Matus actually existed (as well as straightening out some inconsistencies in his personal biography), Carlos Castaneda replied, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics ... is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

What I take this to mean is that the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan was a convenient fiction made up by an anthropology student with a vivid imagination and a few too many peyote buttons. But Castaneda was a compelling story teller and we all believed it---and bought his books. It is not surprising that he and Naranjo became friends. He visited the early SAT groups, and perhaps used Naranjo’s group process to create his own Tensegrity, “the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest."

One very deep root of the modern Western Enneagram teaching is the small world of Latin American esotericism and its deep, though convoluted connection with native shamanism. Naranjo’s own story is tied up with that of Ichazo who was never very clear about his sources--usually some version of the story of stopping for lunch at an ordinary wayside ristorante in Argentina and the waiter handing him a note from a group of ordinary-looking men sipping afternoon aperitifs while exchanging the latest in their research of the inner workings of the human psyche. Another partially verified story is Naranjo’s journey to Arica Chile where, after some vague initiation into a mystery cult, receiving instructions from a Bolivian esotericist named Oscar Ichazo who by the way was guided by his spiritual guide, the highest Archangel Metatron, Naranjo went out into the Atacama Desert for 40 days, the driest place on the face of the earth (drier than the place where Jesus stood down the devil in his 40 day retreat). There he told us that he went through a rebirth experience, and that having been trained as a medical doctor, he could recognize all the stages of the embryo being formed, the organs beginning to function, etc. I remember at the time wondering how high he was when he told that tale, something about his intonation, and phrasing.

But I did believe that Don Juan was real until the raccoon encounter.

Naranjo’s house was down on the Berkeley flatlands. I can see the house clearly in my memory and almost remember the exact address--14 hundred something Alston Way. It was not in those days all gentrified but a modest, even run down neighborhood of California bungalows. There was a small creek that ran at the back of the property, and Claudio had thrown up a shack, his study house, on its edge. Carlos and Claudio were doing some kind of drugs, and a raccoon came and sat by the screen door watching them in a rather intense way, or so they said. Castaneda was sure that the raccoon had been taken over by a spirit being to deliver a message.

Guys, you were high and tripping out on a raccoon looking for a yummy garbage dinner. I'm not using science to validate sorcery, but I am suspicious of the drugs.

 

Your Way, Our Way or the Highway? A Cautionary Tale.

A friend told me that he received some advice from a Daoist master. I automatically distrust some Western dude sporting an ancient Chinese title. I immediately think it’s an esoteric label to make him credible. Honestly I can’t really say that I understand what Daoism is, and I certainly haven’t the faintest idea of what it might have been meant in China in the 6th century BCE, but I’m equally sure that Master X has no secret information. The friend of course didn’t actually repeat his Taoist teacher’s advice. I’m sure that I would be required to fork over a handful of cash before I had the pleasure. We are a gullible lot. 

When I investigated my initial response, I discovered two basic questions: First, what prejudices spark my immediate response? And second, what criteria can I use to trust a teacher and what he or she teaches? These are separate questions. It is important not to discover one answer and think that it provides a solution to both investigations. It is easy to conflate the answers: Just because I have discovered that I am distrustful for X reason, the teacher and his or her teaching is not automatically trustworthy Or the flipside: Because I find this or that teacher personally trustworthy, therefore my suspicions about his or her spiritual lineage must be mistaken. 

These questions are separate but interrelated: How can I recognize what I call “authentic” practice; and what makes a teacher trustworthy? They bite their own tail. Some people, even trusted teachers, have counseled me to trust my feelings. But when I honestly examine them, I find a twisted mess. I was told to just sit and they will sort themselves out. I sat. Perhaps a few of the knots disentangle, but oftentimes no clear direction emerges. Judging by the solutions that appear in real time, there are no easy answers. 

In what I see as an attempt to deal with this dilemma, sometimes in western Zen circles we practitioners get lost in a lot of talk about “our” way, the Rinzai Way, the Soto way, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. This jabber is barely distinguishable from cultish blabber. 

In 1990 when nearly 100 men were dying from AIDS in San Francisco every week, I was talking with a bright, engaging woman who came to sit zazen at Hartford Street. She asked some questions about the Hospice and Issan. I invited her to come back, perhaps become a hospice volunteer. She begged off, explaining that she was very involved in her practice at “the big Zen Center.” I remember her words exactly. “We do the real Japanese Buddhism: we bow at everything every time we turn around.” I confess to having a few judgmental thoughts. While we were cooking for dying men, and sitting with them when they took their last breaths, she was bowing in every doorway and to a statue at the top of every stairwell.

Perhaps there was something about the dying, knowing that you’re dying and the emotions that stirs up. I cannot say. Several of Issan’s close students didn’t visit him when he was dying. Some actually disappeared when he started to get sick later explaining that they couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. I met him when HiV started to ravage his body and mind so that is really the only Issan I knew. It was his gift to me, and my good luck. But on the other hand, when I listen to stories of Issan at Tassajara or at Zen Center, Green Gulch or Santa Fe. I am certain that dying Issan was the same man dedicating himself diligently and completely to the practice.

I never saw the woman again. She never met Issan. At some point she might hear stories at Zen Center about him. In my gut I feel that she missed an opportunity to experience a man who lived out the teaching until his last breath, but I also know that Issan would never have faulted her for avoiding him and bowing every time she turned around. He was so non-judgement and tolerant. I also admit to applying a little pressure on the woman--I needed help at the hospice--and I also admit to feeling slightly superior in my role running the hospice which was of course real practice. I can’t set my experience center stage for applause, but on the other hand, I need to avoid rote answers, or getting caught up in some cultural forms that I don’t understand as if they unlock some esoteric secret. 

Quick change of scene

Listening in on a recent discussion bemoaning the death of Zen in Japan--so many first-son priests escaping the lifeless tedium of administering the family's temple business, my mind went back to a morning I spent looking over the library at Hartford Street, searching for a book that might unlock the mystery of the universe. Trained as a Jesuit, I hoped to find an answer, even a coded one, recorded by someone at some time in some place that might point me in the right direction.

I picked up a volume and read about the third and final destruction of Nalanda, including its vast library, and started a conversation with Phil Whalen. I was more horrified at the loss of the sutras, mahayana texts and commentaries, including all the works, notes and who knows what else of the pivotal scholar Nāgārjuna than I was by the wanton murder of thousands of monks and teachers. I blurted out something about the horror of burning books to Phil who was sitting in his chair across from me. He just looked up, smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. They left us enough, just enough.”

But Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji is not alone in trying to destroy the dharma by burning books and killing monks and nuns. Beginning in 1950 Mao and the People’s Liberation Army systematically destroyed monasteries and burned as many sacred texts as they could lay their hands on in Tibet. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration began the campaign of Haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈), literally "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni," which led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as sacred texts. The Taliban destroyed huge ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan early 2001 which shocked the world and was soon followed by the regime’s defeat, but it did not prevent them from reasserting their hardline earlier this year.

So while I deplore book-burning and destruction of religious art, their preservation is not a necessary condition for our practice. The loss of cultural Japanese Buddhism, centuries old beauty and tradition, including bowing to everything all the time, is a real loss, but I might have to let it go.

How much remains? Just enough if they left an instruction manual or we figure out how to use it.