On the Lower Columbia River
Once during shosan I asked Sojun "If they call this the Middle Way, why is it so hard?"
After a moment, he replied "You must walk the edge of a sword before you can stroll the broad highway."
("shosan" is a public question and answer session with a teacher;
Sojun Mel Weitsman, transmitted by Shunryu Suzuki of the SF Zen Center,
was the founding teacher of the Berkeley Zen Center)
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Did the Buddha ever try to touch his nose with his eyes closed?
Have you? It’s an interesting exercise. Even if you miss the first time, you can probably reach the right spot on a second try without opening your eyes. Isn’t that amazing? It’s all thanks to what are known as proprioreceptors, nerve sensors whose sole function is to report on the state of your muscles and joints. The term proprioceptor comes from the Latin ‘proprius’, one’s own, and ‘recipio’, to receive, and that term was first used in 1906, a little over a hundred years ago. We can forgive Shakyamuni for being unfamiliar with the concept.
Proprioreception is sometimes referred to as the “sixth sense,” and if it had been known 2500 years ago, we might have a different understanding of the six sense bases, the fifth of which is “body consciousness.” Body consciousness is typically understood as the sense of touch and feeling external objects. But this is only half of the story; there is much more to our perception of our physical body. Consider an infant learning to walk: she is learning to coordinate information about the position of her limbs from the proprioreceptors with what she is feeling from her feet and seeing with her eyes. A truly Herculean task when it is all new territory! And when in walking we approach a curb, we are integrating information about the movements of our limbs and the tensioning of our muscles from the proprioreceptors with information from our eyes about what is in front of us to avoid stumbling at the critical moment when we reach the curb.
When we think about walking, we typically imagine a “pilot” residing in our brain that is taking in all of this information and sending out commands to the body in response to external stimuli and our internal desires. While information from the other senses may be a bit more obvious and easy to contmeplate, we are usually totally unaware of the input from the proprioreceptors. In zazen our knees may ache, but what is it that is doing the aching? I would suggest that this unawareness makes the information from the proprioceptors even more “insidious” in the formation of a false sense of self. In this regard, it is also interesting to contemplate so-called out-of-body experiences. When our imagined self confronts situations beyond previous experience, interesting things can happen. For real pilots, it can be dangerous.
Mindfulness exercises often focus on breathing, posture, and motion, often breaking down even a simple step into many constituent activities. Each of those small steps are informed by the proprioceptors, the “silent sensors.” Being aware of how we are able to monitor those moves is vital to full awareness. Thus, in the Satipatthana Sutta of the Pali Canon, we are directed to “study the body in the body,” and that “a monk is one who acts with clear comprehension … when bending and stretching his limbs.” There is not a passive series of positions, but activity with feedback about position, motion, and muscle tension. Even if one tries to sit motionless, the body is continually monitoring the tensioning of myriads of muscles to maintain that position. Knowing how that happens is part of studying the body in the body and helps develop mindfulness of the body.
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Finding the Mother Tree by Prof. Suzanne Simard
About the time that I first learned about the amazing network of fungal hyphae that links tree to tree in the forest, Suzanne Simard was 15. But while I just added it to a list of curiosities, she devoted her life to understanding the intricacies of this network. It was much later that I encountered her work while reading Richard Powers’ “Overstory.” Because I had spent an exceedingly miserable year in graduate study at Oregon State, I could hardly believe that she could have carried out part of this work at the same institution. And so I had to read her recent book recounting her life studying this mycorhizal network.
If you spend any time studying biology, you are reminded ad nauseum not to attribute human intent to biological processes: plants do not “want” to grow towards the light, for instance, they just do so as a result of differential growth rates. But when it comes to understanding evolution, this warning is always forgotten: plants “compete” for resources. Or in this instance, they “cooperate” via the mycorhizal network. But the human notion of competition presupposes a desire to gain dominance for selfish needs. The actual mechanisms of natural selection do not involve intention, of course, but the ideas are so commonly presented in terms of competition (and rarely cooperation), that one barely notices.
Even given my lackadaisical study of Dogen, the thirteenth century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, I can hardly read Simard’s work without recalling his “zenki“: total dynamic working. While Dogen phrases this in the ultimate puzzle of birth and death, it is nevertheless the way of all life. “Birth,” he says, is “undivided activity,” which is to say it is action without actor or “intent.” Furthermore, he says that the “undivided activity manifested previously does not hinder the present realization of undivided activity.” (I love the ambiguity of that word “realization”) Thus there is this astounding flow of chemicals we call nutrients and others we may call signals flowing through this vast underground network in undivided activity. It is life actualized at this very moment without actor or intent. We don’t need to think of it in terms of cooperation or competition: it is action empty of any constructed “self.” To my mind, introducing those human foibles into the realm of plant life is insulting to the plants.
I’m sure that in the author’s career in forestry, she was probably sneered at with the phrase “tree hugger,” but it is comforting to hear that she was also hugged by trees. Midway through successful chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer, she sits at the base of a maple tree: “I leaned my back against her, face to the warmth, and felt myself seep into her roots. Instantly I was inside my maple tree, her fibers interweaving mine, absorbed into her heartwood.” For most of us it is only when slammed against a wall that the imagined self gives way for such a moment.
What is perhaps the most astonishing assertion in the introduction is that “the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.” Simard notes that besides the astounding complexity of the mycorhizal network, there is also the exchange of chemicals found in human neuronal activity. At first this sounds absurd to me. Neurons are not just passive wires conducting electrical charges, they are active agents for impulses that jump from node to node along the neurons, and this is apparently absent in fungal hyphae; the chemical exchange at synapses is only one aspect of neuronal activity.
But we are endlessly confounded by the idea of sentience. I find it interesting that in the Pali Canon, “mind” is the “internal sense base” for the “external sense base” of mental phenomena, just as the nose is the internal sense base for the external sense base of smells. Bhikkhu Bodhi offers a couple of ways to interpret this, but in the end, he notes that regardless of the interpretation in the Abhidhamma, the intention “in the oldest Buddhist texts is an open question.” (In the Buddha’s Words, p. 310). And how is this different from “mind is Buddha,” or is it not?
Is it so far fetched then to suppose that it is only the complexity of our nervous system that allows us somehow to perceive sentience? And just as I can never really know how you perceive anything, why should I reject the idea that the forest, through its vast array of connections, is able to perceive sentience in its own way, as well? Maybe what we call “sentience” is just part of the total dynamic working of the universe manifesting through us just as it manifests in other ways through other systems. And how then can I reject the notion that the Mother Tree “wants” to send more nutrients to its own offspring as opposed to those of “strangers” as Simard has demonstrated. The constructed self deceives us in so many ways.
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A Poem for Ross
Ryokan hears a talk on Buddha Nature
Too many interruptions;
I rise at midnight to hear it all.
My old friend speaks of Buddha Nature.
Such a dangerous topic!
He jabs the straw man
And dust flies everywhere.
An old lame cat comes by,
Leaves clear traces.
(after Ryokan, listening to a podcast)
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The Heart Sutra
I have been impressed by the variety of ways people relate to this sutra. For me it is more like a very disturbing koan. I tend to be hopelessly analytical, so when I read something like “form is emptiness, emptiness form,” it immediately sounds to me like a logical assertion of a “necessary and sufficient condition” or an “if and only if” statement in mathematical logic: you can’t have one without the other! Now into my fifth decade of struggling with this, I can’t really say that I’m any more satisfied with any inkling of understanding, but I do find some comfort in relating this to Dogen’s discussions of space (or sky) which he seems to use interchangeably with “emptiness.” I’m especially fascinated by his fasicle on “Thusness” or “Inmo,” but that will have to wait for another time. And then if I even begin to move on to the other four skandhas, I’m hopelessly lost!
As to the history of the sutra, when I first read Xuanzang’s account of learning it from an ill monk that he had taken in, it sounded more like a literary conceit than a faithful accounting of events. (Sort of like the prominent Chinese poet/bureaucrats who spoke of their humble grass huts when they actually lived in substantial houses, though perhaps they had a specially constructed outbuilding for the purpose.) That was especially reinforced when he later accounts meeting the same monk during his travels in India, whereupon the monk reveals himself to be the embodiment of Avalokiteshvara. I tend to believe that Xuanzang compiled the sutra himself from fragments as Tanahashi documents. Given the lack of substantive evidence for any of the theories of its origin, I tend to think this version is at least as likely as any of the others! That was only reinforced by Tagawa Shunei in “Living Yogacara,” where he mentions that Xuanzang also “created” a Yogacara sutra, a sort of easy summary, by extracting parts from other more extensive sutras.
I might add that in “The Real Tripitaka,” Arthur Waley’s account of Xuanzang’s travels and subsequent efforts in translation, Waley mentions that the sutra that we have now was the second version that Xuanzang produced. Sadly, he doesn’t offer further detail, but I have to wonder what version Xuanzang recited for protection during his travels: was it the whole sutra or perhaps just the mantra? Waley also offers some insight into how Xuanzang’s translation workshop functioned which I found fascinating, but knowing nothing of either Sanskrit of Chinese makes it hard to grasp. Waley also mentions that there was a big demand for magical spells at the time, so Xuanzang was under some pressure to produce dharanis and such. That may well have contributed to his “translation.”
(In response to a talk by Hannah M.)
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Walking Meditation
“Walking meditation is practicing meditation while walking. It can bring you joy and peace while you practice it.” So wrote Thich Nhat Hanh in a beautiful little book on walking meditation edited by BPF co-founder Robert Aitken and published in 1985 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In his introduction, Robert Aitken states that “Thich Nhat Hanh’s essential message is ‘Engaged Buddhism,’ a message that emerged from the agony of his country under the domination of foreign colonists. It is not engagement for political power, but rather an active involvement in suffering. This engagement and involvement begins with the self, with an understanding of what is happening within, and also out there in the world.”
Thich Nhat Hanh continued that in walking meditation, “you have no purpose or direction in space or time. The purpose of walking meditation is walking meditation itself. Going is important, not arriving. Walking meditation is not a means to an end; it is an end. Each step is life; each step is peace and joy.” But it is all too easy to become focused on our own practice, to practice in a self-centered way, to ignore those walking with us and to walk in a mechanical way.
We walk in the presence of what can seem to be overwhelming greed, hate and delusion. The most insidious delusion is that we are all separate individuals walking alone, that we are not just different expressions of the same true nature. That we are more intimately connected with guards and prisoners than we can imagine. When we walk, we walk not as separate individuals, but as a community of practitioners, and we should appreciate that community deeply. But we also need to keep in mind our communion with the guards and inmates. And even, dare I say it, with the rocks and trees. In this society that is so focused on achievement and accumulating stuff, it is very difficult to let go of I/Me/Mine, but until we do, we are far from the Buddhadharma.
Thich Nhat Hanh recalls providing facilities in the meditation hall for amputees who had lost limbs in the war. He admonishes us to acknowledge our good fortune, “Be that meditative walker, practicing for yourself and for your friends who are sitting in chairs [or perhaps in prison cells?] and following your steps. Do you realize that you are walking for many of your fellow beings?” He also mentions an inscription that says “‘Each step will cause a breeze to rise.’ … The fresh breeze is the experience of peace and liberation which blows away the heavy heat of sorrows in your cycle of birth and death and bring joy and freedom to your life. My dear friend, won’t you try to walk this way? For our world?”
He concludes “Scented paths across the rice fields, shady bamboo-lined dirt roads, parks covered with dark-colored dry leaves — these are your paths for walking meditation; please enjoy them. They should not lead you to forgetfulness, but should bring you the necessary mindfulness so that you can see the real dramas of the world. Then every path, every street — from the back alleys of Beirut to the roads of Vietnam where mines still explode and take the lives of children and farmers — every path in the world is your walking meditation path. Once you are awake, you will not hesitate to enter those paths. You will suffer, but your pain will not come from your own worries and fears. You will suffer because of your kinship with all beings, because you have the compassion of an awakened being, a Bodhisattva. Then all your companions on the path you take will be invincible Bodhisattvas.” Let that suffering be your walking companion, as well. Know that suffering and experience it as a vital expression of your true nature, of life itself.
As you walk, I would suggest that you pay attention to the way your foot touches the ground. Be aware of how the ground supports you and spreads out to support everyone else. Be aware of the sun warming the pavement or the rain falling upon it. Thomas Merton wrote “rain is a festival,” can you feel it that way? Be aware of your breath. As you inhale be grateful for your life and the air that you share with everyone and everything in the world. As you exhale, be aware of your rebirth in every moment. Do not exclude anything, mindfulness that does not reach out to include all life is crippled mindfulness.
(Originally published on the now extinct Portland Buddhist Peace Fellowship website, bpfpdx.com)
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On reading Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My rakusu, Buddha’s robe, sits on a shelf, neatly folded in its case. Across the room a hand lens hangs on the same red cord that has held it for probably fifty years now. Almost like a talisman, it reminds me of many happy hours examining tiny bits of plants. So it was a great pleasure to read “I still have that [hand] lens, and wear it on a red cord, as I take my own students along the trails at Cranberry Lake….” in Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s first book. She continues “Three decades after my first look at mosses, I almost always have my hand lens around my neck. Its cord tangles with the leather thong of my medicine bag, in metaphor and in reality.” In some ways, it occurs to me that the rakusu, given to me by an elder in my lineage, may not be that different from a medicine bag, though I never wear it with the hand lens, and its straps are not likely to get tangled with the cord of the hand lens.
But I do find my thoughts tangled in other ways. She says that in “indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.” Is it too much of a stretch to see this as parallel to the five skandhas of Buddhism that describe the human experience: “form (body), feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.” She writes that the “scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind,” much as Buddhists consider how the mind perceives the world.
Unless you’re interested in mosses or knowing more about these humble non-vascular plants, this might not be a book of great appeal. But if I were to teach a course on the subject, this would be at the top of the reading list. So many texts by scientists are so dull, you expect the pages to crumble in your hands as if they had just been recovered from an ancient burial site. But here the methods of an open and inquiring mind are vital, and it is fascinating to follow the discovery with one of her students of the role that chipmunks play in establishing the separate, but seemingly identical, habitats of two species of moss.
And yet this book is also full of the same wisdom found in her later book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In the essay “Standing Stones” she recalls an experience of finding a way into a circle of stones packed so tightly together that it is hard to wedge through a narrow passage. “Within the circle of stones, I find myself unaccountably beyond thinking, beyond feeling. The rocks are full of intention, a deep presence attracting life…. I don’t know how long I was gone, minutes or hours. For that interval, I had no sensation of my own existence. There was only rock and moss. Moss and rock. Like a hand laid gently on my shoulder, I come back to myself and look around. The trance is broken. I can hear the redstarts again, calling overhead.” Is this different from what Dogen, the great thirteenth century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, called “dropping body and mind?”
And again, isn’t the life force that pushes a meadow mushroom up through the soil overnight that she describes here and in her later book, the essence of Dharma? While broadly referring to the teachings of Buddhism, “Dharma” in Chinese Buddhism frequently referred to understanding the natural functioning of things. That interest was inherited from the earliest Taoist writings that were probably contemporaneous with the historical Buddha. The renowned eleventh century Chinese poet Su Shi, on awakening to the sounds of a valley stream, penned this (as translated by Carl Bielefeldt):
The sound of the stream is [Buddha’s] long, broad tongue; The mountain form, his immaculate body. This evening’s eighty-four thousand verses How will I tell them tomorrow?
Dogen wrote two chapters of his masterwork, the Shobogenzo, inspired by this verse. And he dwelt frequently on how “the insentient expound the Dharma.”
In the same vein, Kimmerer wrote that in a peat bog “I am standing quietly on the surface of an earthly Drum, my feet supported by the floating Sphagnum, responding to the smallest movement, rippling under my shifting weight. I start to dance. In the old way, heel and toe, in slow tempo, each footfall rippling across the bog and answered by the returning wave rising to meet my step. My feet make a drumbeat on the surface and the whole bog is set in rhythmic motion. … It too is dancing deep beneath me, sending its energy up to the surface. Dancing on the Sphagnum, buoyant on the surface of the peat, I feel the power of connection with what has come before, the deep peat of memory holding me up. The drumbeat of my feet calls up echoes from the deepest peat, the oldest time. The pulsing rhythm, persistent, wakens the old ones and as I dance I can hear the faraway songs, the songs of the Water Drum in the medicine lodge…. Emerging like a vapor from the deep peat of memory come the farewell songs and the cries of the people marched off their beloved homelands, prodded down the Trail of Death at the point of a bayonet ….”
I am not much interested in religious syncretism, but as with Thomas Merton’s exploration of Buddhism, there is much to learn in dialog, much as teaching any subject can enrich one’s own understanding. Kimmerer also writes “I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses. On that day, when we rise to give thanks to the forest, we may hear the echo in return, the forest giving thanks to the people.” Or is it too much to hope that the forest and the people will be able to give thanks in unison?
(Originally published on the bpfpdx.com website)
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Gratitude and the Grammar of Animacy
In her essay, “The Grammar of Animacy” in Braiding
Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the shortcomings of
the English language for describing the life force that pushes a
meadow mushroom up through the soil overnight, along with so many
other commonplace occurrences. Learning how the indigenous
languages of her ancestors are based on such activity pushes her to
begin learning that language. Lamenting to an elder of her lack of
language with which to speak to the plants, he pats his chest and
reminds her that if she speaks from here, the plants will hear.
We tend to think that cognition is a function of our brain, and some
would say a function of the human brain, alone. But yet we continue
to locate emotion in “the heart,” vaguely and without thinking
much about how that pump could house emotion. But it is interesting
how we tend to locate the logical thinking of scientia in
the head, but emotional or intuitive knowledge, sophia, in
the heart. Could it be because we are unable to perceive the
physical functioning of the brain, but the activity of the heart is
so obvious? It reminds us that we exist in a state of flux,
everything without exception is impermanent and at the same time,
active and in motion. Do we intuitively understand without words
how the motion of the heart resonates with the flowing world around
us? Does our use of the word “state” fool us into thinking that
there is such a thing as a momentary fixed state that is not
in motion?
The Tang poet Su Shi (Su Tung-p’o) slept
one night by a mountain stream, the sound of which awakened him,
which he recorded as “the long broad tongue [of Buddha]”
Camping by mountain streams, I usually hear the voices of children
laughing and shouting. I guess we all hear different things, but
maybe they’re not all that different. Su Shi’s poem inspired
the brilliant 13th century zen teacher Dogen’s essay
Mountains and Waters Sutra which begins with an earlier
teacher’s statement that “The blue mountains are constantly
walking” and later he says “the tips of the mountains’ feet
walk across the waters, setting them dancing.” Further, he echos
another poem by Po Chu-i, “Although we say that mountains belong
to the country, actually they belong to those who love them” and
“We should realize that the mountains actually take delight in
wise men, actually take delight in sages.” We might interpret
“love” and “delight” as expressions of mutual intimacy.
In our Cartesian world where only fellow humans are deemed able to
understand speech, it may be hard to relate to such thinking. We
have innumerable names for objects, but few that deeply respond to
the activity of objects, that help us penetrate the flowing of
mountains. Dogen urges us to do so, whether our language
facilitates such understanding or not. Kimmerer urges us to find
that intimacy by living in gratitude for the abundance that
surrounds us.
We bow in gratitude to the providers of this food: Earth, air, fire, water, people, tools, plants, animals, Turned in the wheel of living and dying. Desiring the natural order of mind, Let us join our hearts with the one heart of the world Realizing the compassionate path of awakening with everyone. (Bird Haven meal chant)
(Originally published on the bpfpdx.com website)
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Intimacy Demands Activity
Years ago as part of Lay Ordination I gave a “Way Seeking Mind” talk in which I recalled a longing for a deeper intimacy with the natural world around me: the rocks and trees of the mountains and forests that I loved. But it was the question of birth and death that motivated my entry into practice. They say that when the need arises, your teacher appears, and I was very fortunate that that was the case. Little did I realize at the time how fortunate I was to enter the lineage of Eihei Dogen, and how his teaching responds to both questions.
Dogen had a unique way of expressing Dharma in his writings, most of which lay dormant for hundreds of years after his death. As a society evolves, so does its language, creating barriers to understanding what was written long ago. But that is not the only challenge to understanding Dogen’s writings, because he used language as a tool to convey insight that cannot be precisely stated in words alone. He often used poetry to convey his understanding, and created neologisms and used metaphors in a unique manner, often asking us to hold divergent views in mind at the same time thereby forcing the mind to go beyond linear sequential logic. This is true even of his prose writing, and it is unfortunate that even the best translations of his prose are not able to convey the way his words mean.
Early in Dogen’s teaching career, he summarized the core of his teachings in a letter to a student, a letter which he later rewrote and which provided an opening chapter to his masterwork, the Shobogenzo. In Shohaku Okumura’s translation, he says “In seeing color and hearing sound with the body and mind, although we perceive them intimately, the perception is not like reflections in a mirror or the moon in water. When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.” Dogen’s students would have been familiar with the moon as a metaphor for enlightenment and clear reflection as the function of an enlightened mind. To me they also connote passivity. And his students would have been familiar with “illuminated” and “dark” as references to the relative and absolute from teaching poems by Sekito Kisen and Huangzhi. Dogen could have explicated all of this at length, but he preferred a more poetic style that brought these images to mind, but urged the mind to go beyond dualistic understanding of academic philosophy and actually see and hear with the whole body/mind. Even to go beyond what Okumura would call “piddling enlightenment experiences” and actively function completely right here and now with the whole body/mind.
As I write this, the entire West Coast is in flames, the air is thick with wildfire smoke from hundreds of fires from the Mexico border to Alaska. I weep over the charred remains of forests I once roamed. People are forced to spend their days inside rather than bask in the glorious radiance of summer weather. Others suffer the consequences of breathing the air that coats their lungs and steals unknown days from their lives. If one can truly feel intimate with one’s surroundings, I wonder how it is possible not to be moved to act in some way to protect the forests, the air one breathes, the lives of people held dear.
Just as one’s understanding will never be the same as any other individual’s (“The marrow is not deeper, the skin is not shallower” was Dogen’s expression), so the path of action one takes will be highly individual, and just as we cannot judge the depths of another’s understanding, so it is equally invalid to judge the depths of another’s commitment to practice and activity. “Life,” “time,” “intimacy,” “activity”: they are all different aspects of the same truth.
(Originally published on the bpfpdx.com website)
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A Poem for Daisy
Does A Dog?
So tell me, Daisy, destroyer of tennis balls and pine cones,
Those big brown black-lab eyes, does a dog have Buddha-nature?
What about your new friend, Lola?
She reeks of strong puppy-nature, that’s for sure!
Sunday, I moved the zafu to the garden shed.
Bare wood, a pile of boards for an altar.
Tonight the rain drums on the roof,
Dribbles from shingles to puddles on the path,
Transports me across time and space to the attic
Of the big old house on Dwight.
No roosters here, nor fire trucks,
Only Daisy snuffling through the bushes.
She steps into the light from the candle,
Her big, blunt snout hovers over the altar
Next to the incense. Without a sound
She sets in place an old wet pine cone.
(Remembering the sounds heard in the attic zendo when the Berkeley Zen Center was on Dwight Way)