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.

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sacred & profane
both

obscure the moon
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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