Dharma Logic

Because cross-country skiing exists, there is non-cross-country skiing. Because poetry exists, there is non-poetry. Because breathing in exists, there is breathing out. Because hatred exists, there is compassion. Because greed exists, there is generosity. Because birth exists, there is the unborn. Because death exists, there is no-death. Because the self exists, there is no-self.

And when you hear about no-self don't be sad, as Yasutani Roshi once remarked. Thanks to no-self, the entire universe is self.

On Devouring and Being Devoured

Deep winter nights definitely encourage and evoke inwardness and stillness—a chance to stop and reflect on what's vital. In deep zazen we devour the breath and the breath devours us. There's no separation. The barking of the neighborhood dog devours us. The sound of traffic replaces us. The cell phone in the other room rings in the center of the mind.

We light lights and come together in gratitude for each other and for being alive. We're pretty sure the sun's long days will return but what about this planet? What about us humans and the blind devouring we do so brilliantly at the expense of others? We're sophisticated when it comes to manipulating the physical world but so primitive when it comes to living together in peace on this great earth here in deep space (see photo above). And this time can also be hope's rekindling--that this silent night is indeed a holy night. That all can never be lost. After all, our true nature—buried here, realized there—and shared with coffee grounds, supernovae, maggots, and ferns, is unborn and undying.

Buddha's Enlightenment Day

Thanks to James Ishmael Ford's blog Monkey Mind for this video posted today, the day widely recognized as the anniversary of the Buddha's supreme enlightenment. It's gratifying to see scientists speak in a more holistic way than usual, ie, that our investigation into the nature of the cosmos is, in fact, the cosmos investigating itself, the cosmos being aware of itself. We are made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan says. We are star stuff. It's all star stuff and our neverending practice and joy is uncovering this living reality for ourselves, beyond mere intellectual understanding or belief. This wood stove. These cold, snowy hands. This sleepy dog by the fire. When we wake up, the world wakes up.

225 Words or Less

There's something inherently daunting about trying to describe or talk about the Dharma or Zen or just the practice of sitting. Words can't reach it and the Zen adepts of old would often respond or teach non-conceptually by remaining silent, shouting, drawing an enso like the one above, or even hitting disciples who asked questions like: What is Zen? What's the teaching of the Buddha? What's the point of practice? Who am I? But sometimes it's necessary to say something and it's not just zen masters who get asked about it.

I've been co-leading a small (3 to 4 people) weekly nonsectarian meditation group in town at the local yoga studio and recently wrote something about meditation for their newsletter. Here's what I wrote (see below). What would you say about meditation, without using Buddhist or Zen jargon, in 225 words or less?

Meditation gives us a chance to bear witness to and reconnect with our inherent wholeness. It's a radical and ancient practice of throwing everything away and coming home to the breath, to this unique, non-returning moment.

For some reason, our personal narratives don't want to lose their authority over our lives, whether they say we're superior, fundamentally flawed, both, or somewhere in between. But with sustained practice and patience, it's possible to loosen their grip and we find that our strictly defined edges begin to soften. The sleep-walking fog begins to lift and we see more and more clearly that, in fact, we and the world are not two. There's nothing fundamentally outside us, nothing alien, nothing lacking. Yun-men, a 10th century Zen master, put it this way: "My body's so big there's no place to put it."

The ongoing challenge is to bring the practice into the very center of our busy lives where it can function for the benefit of ourselves and this planet. The less we're entangled in private agendas, the more we're able to step forth and live freely, authentically, and compassionately. Our work and relationships become fueled more and more—not by incompleteness or insecurity—but by a natural generosity of heart and mind. Many people find it encouraging, supportive, and enjoyable to sit with others regularly. Drop by any Wednesday morning!

The World Series, Your Life

Henry David Thoreau famously believed that the vast majority of people "lead lives of quiet desperation." Imagine Thoreau saying this today on Larry King Live or on Oprah!. I think he'd probably sound like some condescending dean or like he was getting ready to introduce the Thoreau Personal Empowerment Plan. But surely most people feel at some point that something profound is missing from their lives—a personal, direct connection to something sacred and eternal. It may be just a vague yet deep dissatisfaction, regardless of material wealth, success, fame, etc., a kind of gnawing discontent with things as they are. In any case, I don't think our culture really knows how to deal with this rich, existential aspect of being human--sometimes called the dark night of the soul at its most intense--other than providing ways to avoid it, numb it, or explain it away. This is of course prima materia for the arts and for most spiritual paths. I remember telling my Zen teacher early in my training that the universe was meaningless and I had no idea what to do with my life. He said, very sincerely, "Excellent. Now you can use that to really dig in and practice."

The so-called mid-life crisis is waking up in our 40s or 50s and realizing that we've neglected something important in all our doing and striving, and now we need to circle back--a very rich, important rite of passage for many people. And sometimes, as Thoreau knew, we never wake up. When people asked Buddha, "Are you some kind of god or deity?" his response was, "No. I am awake." Of course this is not the ordinary state of wakefulness which we distinguish from R.E.M. sleep. This is the great awakening to our mysterious, indestructible true nature.

In the 2009 World Series, Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees (love him or hate him) was struck by the baseball three times while at bat. Regarding the third hit, he said "...that at-bat kind of woke me up a little bit and just reminded me, 'Hey, this is the World Series. Let's get it going a little bit. So it worked out." He went on to hit a home run in Game 3 and drove home the go-ahead run in the ninth inning of Game 4 with what, he said, was the biggest hit of his career. The Yankees won the Series.

Well, this life is the World Series. Here we are, circling an orb of burning helium planted miraculously on this remarkable planet. Where did you come from? Where are you going? The stakes are much higher than winning or losing a baseball game. What wakes you up?

What time is it?

If past and future are private/social constructs and the present is ungraspable, how do we understand time? It's so easy to think of time as passing us by or passing quickly but aren't we right here in the river with it, as it?
.
Nagarjuna (150-250 CE): "Time has no concrete reality."
.
Robert Aitken Roshi (b. 1917 CE): "Time and no time, substance and the void, existence and nonexistence - these are the traditional dyads of the human program. With zazen we find the Middle Way and the hoary concepts of dimension drop away."
.
Bob Weir (b. 1947 CE) of the Grateful Dead: "What I like best about music is when time goes away."

Zen is sometimes equated with philosophy, but the two are very different. The former is "thinking about thinking," according to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, and the latter is a path beyond words and silence. Accordingly, philosophy texts and Zen Buddhist texts differ in at least one fundamental way. Philosophy texts seek to say something new in the usual way while Zen Buddhist texts seek to say the usual in a new way. Put another way, a philosopher's task is to refute or complicate previous understanding through the use of logic while a Zen student's task is to allow body and mind to drop away and see with Buddha's eyes and hear with Buddha's ears--to experience directly what her teacher and the many thousands of ancestral teachers, monks, nuns, and lay practitioners over the past 2500 years have realized, and make it her own.

John Daido Loori Roshi (1931-2009)

In 2008 the Denver Zen Center dedicated the June sesshin to John Daido Roshi who had just started aggressive chemotherapy for lung cancer. I happened to be jisha and so called Zen Mountain Monastery to let them know of the dedication. Daido's assistant said that earlier in the day he had joked about people not realizing that the cure was killing him, not the cancer. I never had the privilege of meeting him, but I wasn't surprised to hear that he hadn't lost his sense of humor.

In one of his teishos, Daido Roshi talks about Huike, disciple of Bodhidharma, who famously cut off his arm and stood in the snow to prove his mettle and be accepted as a student. Daido then addresses us, here in the 21st century: "Save your arm. Double your sitting." Easy to say, tough to do. Tougher, in some ways, than cutting off your arm. And that's an aspect of Zen: easy to talk about, but demanding to realize. As a teacher of Zen, Daido seemed somehow both innovative and uncompromising: a blend of old-school and avante-garde. From my vantage point in Colorado, he loomed as one of the few true dragons on the east coast. Thanks to his tireless commitment and creativity, Zen Buddhism--in the ten directions--has been and will be immeasurably richer and deeper.
.
.
gate, gate, paragate, parasam-gate, bodhi-svaha!
.
.

Everything is cosmic!

There's a single frame in a Robert Crumb comic strip (I'll replace Mr. Natural here with it, if and when I find it) with a close-up of a typically bugged-out Crumb character who seems shocked and panicky—sweating profusely, eyes popping—saying, "I...I just realized. Everything is cosmic!" Yes! There's no place more cosmic than right where you are, no activity more cosmic than what you do each moment. How could there be? There's no place more enlightened than this place, no moment more enlightened than this moment, no Buddha more enlightened than this very person. Each one of us is, dude, way cosmic. We are fundamentally without bounds, without definition, ungraspable, birthless, deathless. Walt Whitman said: "I am vast. I contain multitudes." The only question is: to what degree do we realize it? Can we drop the fabricated "I" who thinks I'm in here and everything else is out there?

I'll sign off with some sections from a long, mongo-cosmic poem by Antler:

Rebecca Falls Epiphany
We wish that benificent beings from Outer Space
would land on Earth and bring us the Vision we need
to save us from destroying the world.
We wish a spaceship would come from Outer Space
and transport us to its planet's utopia
where creatures exactly like us but enlightened
or creatures very different from us but enlightened
exist.
We wonder if some of the people we know
aren't possibly from Outer Space,
Or complete strangers of unearthly beauty
or great tender geniuses of love,
poetry, music, dance, art—
are they not emissaries from "out there"?
We wonder if possibly we are
Outer Space Reconnaissance Consciousnesses
programmed not to awake till now,
Cosmic Reconnaissance Renaissance Consciousnesses
programmed not to awake till now.
What is my Mission on this planet?
What am I here for? What am I here for?
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Suddenly we realize WE ARE FROM OUTER SPACE!
WE ARE CREATURES FROM OUTER SPACE!
EARTH IS OUR PLANET IN OUTER SPACE!
We don't have to go in a spaceship from Earth to the Moon
and take Mescaline and look back at our Earth
or walk in space after smoking
millions of joints
to realize we're in Outer Space!
We are just as much in Outer Space
wherever we are on this Planet
as we'd be on our moon
or any moon in our solar system
or any solar system in this galaxy
or any galaxy in this universe
or any universe in the pastpresentfuture!
We are as much creatures from Outer Space
as lifeforms anywhere in this galaxy
or any galaxy!
There's nowhere in the Universe
that is more in Outer Space
than we are!
We live in the Universe!
It's not "out there."
It's not just something we see in movies
to eerie music.
We don't have to read science fiction
to make love voluptuous cricketsinging nights
under all the stars.

Each of us should be as much an apparition as Bigfoot
or LochNess Monster!
Each of us should be as much an apparition as the Being
coming down the ramp of the spaceship
from "out there."
How dear this Earth becomes then!
How sacred every wild place and creature
that remains!
How insidious and lamentable the vast factory's pollution
and overpopulation disaster more disastrous
than all the dead in every human war!
How clear it becomes to us then
that no one should have to be a slave!
That everyone should be a creative genius of tender love
and loving creator of music or poetry,
painting or dance,
endless continued gentle passionate creations
of human mind!
Behold the lilies, they neither spin nor sew!
Think of the whales! They don't punch timeclocks!
They don't need Christ or Buddha
to be enlightened.
Everyone's life should be devoted to enlightenment!

Ah, I feel the key, for me, to perceiving, entertaining,
and embodying Infinite Space and Eternal Time's
Ultimate Implications
is to be found in the deepest solitude I can find
in the non-human Manifestation of Cosmos
in that realm called Wilderness Reality.
What does Contemporary Poetry Scene in America
have to do with this?
Do I live in America?
Do people who are dead continue to argue
whether there is life after death?
This is Heaven!
I don't have to die
to be Immortal!
I don't have to die
to be in Eternity!
To feel in this flash of existence
in the Antler form
the unending Amaze!
O Poets are Emissaries from Outer Space
descending their spaceship ramps
and their visionary message to Earth
shall be heard around the world!

Herman Hesse's novella Knulp is a great tale about the wisdom of not-knowing and our obligation to trust and rest in that vast space. It's a story about a man named Knulp (spoiler alert!) who spends his life wandering from town to town, from relationship to relationship, from job to job, never committing, never tying himself to anything or anyone. He's sort of monk-like but without any intentional matrix of practice. At the end of the story we find him dying in a snowstorm, believing that he's wasted his life. But he has a moment of clarity, a vision of God who says, "I wanted you the way you are and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought a little homesickness for freedom." What's so great about this story for me isn't that there's some secret significance or mission we each have but simply that each one of us belongs here in a very deep, undeniable way. Despite what we may sometimes believe or despite what other people or some cultural norm or government may say. Not only do we belong but we ourselves are intimately woven into the heart of the mystery of the world. If we look deeply enough we see that our lives and this mystery itself are not separate—even if we can't articulate why we're alive or what we're doing here. And even if we can articulate the whys and the whats of our life, surely it's an incomplete grasp. Surely, the most profound meaning of our lives lies far beyond words and worldly understanding. When replying to the question Who is this speaking to me? put to him by Emperor Wu, Bodhidharma famously said, "I do not know."

From the Greek philosopher Parmenides in the fifth century BCE to Beckett and Sartre in the 20th century, the concept of nothing gets pretty bad press, whether pitched as ontological anti-matter or a gut-churning absence of meaning. But the nothing of Zen is entirely different. It’s sometimes more accurately rendered as no-thing, signifying the absence of any single entity separate from the cosmos. Likewise, no-self doesn’t mean I don’t exist, but that I don’t, and can’t, exist apart from the plenum. As Yasutani Roshi (1885-1973) once said, “When you hear about no-self, don’t become sad. Thanks to no-self, the entire universe is self.” A millenium earlier, Yun-Men (d. 949) put it this way: “My body’s so big there’s no place to put it.” Since Zen is vastly different from the discipline of philosophy, the idea is to realize the ground of being directly. The implications are significant. It's impossible to harm another being when one realizes that from horizon to horizon it's all one body. No one knows why, but when we're not in the way, wisdom and compassion replace us.

The word "save" has a lot of weird baggage and turns off a lot of people as though Buddhists are supposed to fly around like superheroes saving all mere mortals. So perhaps one way to savor more deeply the vow to save all beings is to see it as realizing the unborn original mind--since there is nothing outside this mind. As one Zen teacher put it: "We save the many beings by including them." To save the many beings, then, is to see that, indeed, “the numberless sentient beings are just one good person” (from Zen Dawn, JC Cleary, trns). Then we grock Pai-Chang when he asks: "Where is there a Buddha appearing in the world? Where are there sentient beings to be saved?"

And on good days, ol' Yoda is correct: there is no try. There is only this neighbor who needs help starting his car, this child struggling with homework, this sick dog. There's no sense of me helping you or you needing saving. No separation. Not two. It's more like--oh, this needs tending to and simply acting with no sense of doing or saving and no expectation of repayment or gratitude. Just a natural, spontaneous gesture like smiling or standing up. No one, no thing holding us back. It's simply what manifests when we forget ourselves.

.
.
.
.
sacred & profane
both

obscure the moon
.
.
.
.

Zazen 2


Curdled laugh
of coyote illuminating

the hull of a dinghy scooped
into granite two miles
above the sea

The air is news

Cold declares treeline;
lichen storms quartzite

It's difficult not to wonder sometimes how the Dharma will fare as we race toward ever-more dazzling bio-tech intimacy, with The Singularity looming as the evolutionary event horizon where all boundaries between the digital and the human vanish. This recent article in the The Atlantic addresses the increasing complexity of the human/tech mosh pit and our apparently increasing intelligence as a result. Will interest in Zen Buddhism & spiritual practice in general decrease as we become more & more entranced by digitalia? Will it increase? Will all ancient bodymind practices (poetry-yoga-meditation-prayer-art) be seen more and more as quaint and irrelevant? Will samadhi become downloadable? Can we digitize Original Mind? Can we live-stream kensho? Will our kids have virtual spouses? Does it matter? Seems like one of the big questions of the day...
(image: 'Two Blind Men Crossing a Log Bridge'' by Hakuin Ekaku)

“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” So begins the novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent in Jim Harrison’s collection of the same name. Sounds like a distant echo of Yung-Chia, who, in China about 13 centuries ago, said “Just get to the root—never mind the branches!” in his "Song of Realizing the Way" (from The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, Nelson Foster & Jack Shoemaker, Eds.). Yung-Chia was probably not talking about civilization in the way Harrison was, but the parallel is interesting. Who am I? What, after all, is this dance of birth and death all about?

Harrison considers himself first and foremost a poet, rather than a novelist or essayist, and is an avowed non-Zen-Buddhist. But it's pretty clear that a lot of his work hikes in, among, and through the provinces of Zen. His work also occasionally shows up in publications like Tricycle, or the great under-read anthology Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry.

Here are two nonsense-free Harrison poems from that anthology:

DOGEN’S DREAM
What happens when the god of spring
meets spring? He thinks for a moment
of great whales travelling from the bottom
to the top of the earth, the day the voyage
began seven million years ago
when spring last changed its season.
He enters himself, emptiness
desiring emptiness. He sleeps
and his sleep is the dance of all the birds
on earth flying north.

KOBUN
Hotei didn’t need a zafu,
saying that his ass was sufficient.
The head’s a cloud anchor
that the feet must follow.
Travel light, he said,
or don’t travel at all.

Yes. We can now eat freshly-baked muffins and enjoy other cushy amenities at the Mt. Everest basecamp (17,600 feet).
Could it be that scaling Everest has been pretty much de-clawed as an authentic existential adventure as more and more people pay lots of money to be ferried to the summit by sherpas who climb ahead setting ropes and routes for their clients? Is it still a frontier? I'm sure I'll never know. But at least we have the inner voyage, the discipline of meditation, which brings us to--and is itself--the untrammeled wilderness of original mind.

"Pain in the knees is the taste of Zen," says Peter Matthiessen, and I agree (during sesshin anyway.) But the sound of the garbage truck backing up in the alley is also the taste of Zen. All we need to do is enter. Or better yet: all we need to do is not resist our intimacy with the sound of the garbage truck backing up in the alley.

White hair's very, very hard to change,
and real gold can't be manufactured.
To get rid of the ailments of age,
there's just one thing: study the Unborn!

--Wang-Wei, from his poem "Fall Night, Sitting Alone"

Space out, notice it, come home. That's zazen: drifting, noticing the drifting, coming home. Coming home to this breath exclusively. Coming home to Mu. No end, no beginning.

"We must be prepared for a lifetime of practice" says Nicki Doane, yoga teacher, in the liner notes of her DVDs. True for yoga, true for Buddhism. Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly (as we chant in the Great Vows) in all manners of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Surely this means we need to do our best to sit every day. Philip Whalen said he was a professional Zen Buddhist because he sat every day. Norman Mailer said the same thing about writing: a pro is someone who writes every day whether or not she feels inspired. But hopefully we sit not because we feel we have to, but because we want to, because the practice itself is a gift that opens us and keeps us open.

Zazen 1

being devoured
by the sounds
of Speer Boulevard

"My body's so big there's no place to put it." --Master Yun-Men

Zen Buddhism is either legitimate or not. If not, it's a 2500 year-old multi-level marketing scam. We might say this of any religion or spiritual path, but with Zen we can find out in this lifetime—right now in fact—whether or not it's legit. No need to wait for an afterlife.

Zen Buddhism, the living 2500 year-old spiritual discipline illuminating the path beyond all words--sometimes by using words.