On Losing Weight

I've lost about 40 pounds in the last few months. I need to lose 10 or 15 pounds more. But at this point, my clothes are mostly too big, I've got to punch more holes in my belts, I have more energy and can perform more tasks, and losing weight has proved to be quite a counter to the persistent fatigue that is a consequence of rheumatoid arthritis. 

I was at one point getting so heavy (at 240+ pounds) that I could barely get around, but sitting still or lying down was very uncomfortable too. I set a goal to lose weight, but even though I changed my diet, nothing seemed to happen for months. Then all of a sudden, weight started coming off, and I've tended to lose about a pound a week ever since -- with several plateaus along the way when nothing came off for a week or two.

I never consciously tried to lose weight in the past. In fact, for most of my life, I was darned skinny, tallish and not very well-built at all. A "rail." I didn't start gaining weight until I stopped smoking in the early '90s, but even then, I didn't weigh much above 180 or so -- which was still 40 pounds more than I'd weighed when I was smoking. Then when I developed rheumatoid arthritis about 6 years ago and was treated with large doses of prednisone, I gained weight at a remarkable clip, and even when I stopped taking prednisone, I kept gaining weight. 

It's only been about a year and a half ago that I set a goal of losing weight, at least 50 pounds, and less than a year since I actually started seeing weight loss. 

I feel better, much better. My rheumatoid arthritis is largely under control. I have not had a flare in several years, medications have been reduced, and overall, I'm well enough to accomplish much or most of what I set out to do. 

There is still so much more that needs doing. 

One of those things, of course, is this One Last Trip to California. I'm looking forward to it, and yet... there is a finality to it, a closing chapter, that I am struggling with. Ms. Ché isn't going, she has other plans (one of which involves taking a very sick cat to the vet) and she believes she is needed more here at home than on the road with me. And I think about how many times she and I made the trip between California and New Mexico on our own -- she often to attend writers' conferences, me to rest and work on the house -- and the times we came here together though we were still living in California. 

As we age, we see things differently, and reminiscence comes to the fore. As elders, we have stories to tell, and Ms. Ché has spent much of her life preparing to tell quite a story. I've been telling mine all along. But she's held back, mulling over the best way to communicate her extraordinary life. She's done it in plays and poems and creative nonfiction, but she's got so much more to add. I think that's part of what she'll be working on while I'm gone.

As for me, it's more like touching elements of the past, touching lightly, remembering positives, and doing a brief Kerouac-ian pilgrimage along Highway 1, Big Sur and Bixby Canyon and all that, just because. More than just that, though. There is a kinship that goes back a long way, and it's a form of honor. I wouldn't be back with Zen, for example, without Ti Jean's inspiration so long ago that came back in a flood. 

So. 

That's a minor update. Nothing more...

Wake Up -- A Life of the Buddha by Jack Kerouac (1955)

Wow. I has no idea. I did not know that Kerouac wrote this until I found a reference to it in a paper on Gary Snyder a couple of weeks ago.

In 1955 Kerouac was not yet famous or the icon he would become after the publication of "On the Road" in 1957. Kerouac was still in precarious circumstance when he set out to write "A Life of the Buddha" but it doesn't really show in the work itself. There is very little of Kerouac in the book unlike most of his others which are so deeply personal.

No, "Wake Up" is a more or less straightforward retelling of the Life of the Buddha from the Sutras in English for Americans, and as approachable as any number of Catholic "Life of St. So-and-So" pamphlets and books. Or more pertinently, "The Life of Jesus."

In fact, that seemed to me to be the model Kerouac followed in writing his "Life of the Buddha."

And he makes explicit comparisons between Jesus and Sakyamuni Buddha in a few places. He sees them as kindred spirits. 

Which of course many people do. And in a sense they probably were. In their own times and later.

Much is made in Kerouac biographies of his strict Catholic upbringing and strenuous Catholic belief. Yet from my perspective having read some though not all of his books, he had submerged most of his Catholicism in a conceptual Buddhism that encompassed the "good parts" of Catholicism and left the rest behind.

He was a practicing Buddhist but not a practicing Catholic (though he could be).

I'm still not entirely sure where he picked up his Buddhism. It's clear from "Wake Up" and other works that he's studied Buddhism deeply and for quite a long time, too. None of it is unfamiliar to him. He could be a Dharma teacher if he wanted to be, and in some passages of some of his works, that's exactly what he was.

I'm assuming he must have encountered Buddhist teaching in New York in the early '50s, perhaps through Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs, maybe among others of the Early Beats. I don't know. But I feel it had to have been years before he wrote "Wake Up" -- or it wouldn't have been as sensitive and as straightforward a telling as it is. 

I came to Zen in the mid-'60s through Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" (1958), but from all the evidence, Kerouac is not really a Zen practitioner; Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) in "The Dharma Bums" is. Kerouac's Buddhism is more Indian or Tibetan, Theravada rather than Mahayana, whereas Snyder's is becoming very strict and Japanese in the book. At the end, Snyder has sailed off to Japan to join the Sokoku-Ji temple monastery in Kyoto where he will learn and practice for years, and return to America as a Zen Master --  in I believe 1965. 

And it will change him. I would say not necessarily for the better, but that's just me. 

From "Wake Up" and other works, I get the impression Kerouac was very much a Believer in Buddhism, much as a Catholic or other Christian believes in Christianity. 

From a Buddhist perspective, that's a mistake, perhaps a critical one, because Buddhism is not a religion. You don't believe in Buddhism, you practice it. The Dharma is a path, way, not the end point. Nirvana comes or not, but it doesn't matter. As long as you stay on the Dharma Path (following the precepts, etc.) then you're on the road to Enlightenment, and once Enlightened, you're on the road to Nirvana -- eventually. Don't worry about it. Just follow the Path. Keep going. Don't give up, even if you fail, make mistakes, or get confused. 

As I was taught many years ago, "The Buddha is within you, the Dharma is you, and the Sangha is with whomever you find on the Dharma Path -- even if they don't know it."

So there were times when I was reading "Wake Up" that I felt Kerouac was making an attempt to "own" the Buddha, something like Christians "own" Jesus and the Gospels. It won't work very well, at least not in the form of salvation. There is no salvation as such in Buddhism. As I said to one of the Dharma teachers, my practice is "chopping wood and carrying water." In other words, my practice is my life. ("The Dharma is you.") Whatever I do, day by day, even hour by hour, is practice. And it is never perfect, never ideal, never complete. Whatever is, is. 

I think about Kerouac ("Ti Jean" as he referred to himself from time to time. I think it was his mother's endearing name for him) and how he drank himself to death in 1969, still I imagine believing in Buddhism and probably believing that drinking to excess for as long as he did -- until it killed him -- was a form of practice, and in a sense, of course, it was. Of course he was violating the precepts, but that's what people do. Drinking to excess is a direct violation of the precepts, as were so many of the other things Kerouac did during his brief life. Some Buddhists would say (and I suspect he would say) that he was living out the karma he was born with. Interestingly, the way he presents karma in "Wake Up" is essentially no different than genetic inheritance. He wrote in 1955 at a time when psychological inheritance was being made much of in plays and movies like Maxwell Anderson's "The Bad Seed," essentially arguing that what you inherit from your ancestors -- including your "mind" and its many impulses -- is immutable and inescapable. 

Rhoda Penmark was a murderer because her mother's biological father was a murderer. She had inherited the "psychopath" gene from him. There was nothing (much) she or anyone else could do about it. 

That's as may be. The Buddhist path says there is something you can do about it by following the precepts and the Eightfold Path. In that way it's something like AA or psychotherapy. No matter what your karma -- or genetic inheritance -- you can be in charge of your own life and change what you do and what you leave behind, though it may take many, many lifetimes to work out all that "ancient twisted karma" you're born with.

I don't know what sort of ancient twisted karma Ti Jean may have inherited. I've read that he was alienated from his father, but I know no details. Also that he was very close to his mother and sister, though their relationships were clearly complicated. The loss of his brother when he was a child was very troubling for him. And at least from the time he was at Columbia and soon thereafter, he acted kind of wild and crazy given the conformity of the times. Yet except for his alcoholism and frequent heavy drug use (mostly amphetamines and marijuana), he was never as wild and crazy as some of his Beat friends and colleagues proudly were and as he sometimes says he wishes he could be.

But "Wake Up, A Life of the Buddha" isn't about Kerouac. 

It's about Siddhartha Gautama, Sakyamuni Buddha, World Honored One, as told by the Sutras and commentaries, interpreted "for Americans today" by Jack Kerouac. As I say, I did not know he wrote this until I did some research on Gary Snyder and found a reference to it in a scholarly paper about Snyder. Snyder became an acknowledged Zen master -- as no doubt he still is -- and Kerouac wrote "Wake Up" during the period he and Snyder were palling around and climbing Sierra peaks and such well before Snyder left for Zen studies and practice at a monastery in Japan. 

To me, "Wake Up" follows the standard stories of the Buddha's life, Enlightenment and teachings very closely. It's not any more embellished than the usual stories are, but there are several passages of deeply felt poetics in the work that are more Kerouac than the Sutras. Yet they stick with the story. They are not out of place. 

It's just too bad this is not a more widely known work than it is. 

Ridiculous and Useless

Practicing zazen is ridiculous and useless. That's the point, no?

No.

There is no point. You do it to do it. That's it. Nothing more. The ridiculousness of sitting, the uselessness of sitting simply are. They're not the point of anything, they merely exist. 

When I sit, I sit. I adopt partial posture while sitting on a straightback antique oak kitchen chair with a quilted cushion on the seat. My back is straight-ish, not uncomfortably or rigidly so. My head is slightly down. My hips are solidly placed forward rather than back into the chair. My feet are flat on the floor, legs slightly apart. My hands are placed in the "cosmic mudra" position, palms up, left hand's fingers on top of right hand's fingers, thumbs barely touching, oval space open between thumbs and fingers. The hands land on my lap and rest there, but they can be raised slightly above the lap and come to rest just below the navel. When sitting, my eyes are usually open, gaze somewhat unfocused ahead and down. Not actually looking at anything (most of the time) but not not looking either. 

To the extent I meditate while sitting, three aspects come to the fore. 

First, to concentrate on breathing and body. Counting breaths, but only as a counter to passing thoughts. Otherwise just breathe and be conscious of breathing. Be aware of the body and body sensations. I'm particularly sensitive to joint issues, and when they arise, I note them and also note that body is more than joints; paying attention all the way up and all the way down and inside and out. 

Second, mantras. There are lots of them. At any time, one can pop into consciousness to counter passing thoughts or just be running in the background something like a drone in East Indian music. And then be gone like the thought that might have been countered. Only to come back again.

Third, koans. Insoluble puzzles of words and mind. Nonsense. Paradoxes. Again, as counters to passing thoughts, there and gone.

There are other elements that can happen. Some can become meditations. One that I've feared and consciously avoided is a return to "The Void." A state of emptiness that I encountered many years ago while practicing zazen and did not want to return to without a guide or teacher. 

Well, I've learned that once there, it never leaves. Or rather, you never leave it. Or... It's ever-present, prior to, and everlasting. It is what I called "the Ground State" of everything and nothing simultaneously. All phenomena arise therefrom, but "arise" is not the correct description. Nothing arises, in other words. And there are no phenomena. Everything is Nothing. All the time and everywhere. There is no time, no where. 

And I've always had guides. I've always had teachers. I wasn't always paying attention.

Yes, we live in the material world of consciousness, separateness and phenomena, and yes, they're not "real." They are illusion. The "reality" to the extent we can comprehend it -- imperfectly at best -- is found in that Ground State, which perceptively is Nothing. There's literally Nothing there.

Yet that No-Thing is Every-Thing. And that "there" is not.

Get it?

The paradoxes and contradictions have led to endless commentary on being-no being, Enlightenment, and what the holy hoo-hah this Sakyamuni Buddha character was getting at. 

During this practice period, there's been almost no mention of Sakyamuni. The focus has been on sad, bewildered Santideva and how he overcame the demons of self-doubt and other people's mockery and criticisms to follow the Prajnaparamita and become a Bodhisattva at Nalanda.

They tell us -- maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong -- that most of those who enter the Buddhist monastery never become Enlightened. They don't become Buddhas. Most never become Bodhisattvas. When they die, they don't enter Nirvana. That seems sad. But I believe it.

What then is the point of the monastery, Zen Buddhist or any other?

On the one hand, yes, the monastery is as ridiculous and useless as practicing zazen. There is no point, as it were. 

And yet... and yet...

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Oh goody. The Book came, the one I ordered from Indiana. And neat, it's got underlining, check marks and a few comments by its previous owner(s). Yay. The Book: Jack Kerouac's "Wake Up, A Life of the Buddha" (1955) that I didn't know existed until recently when I read about it in a commentary on a book by Gary Snyder. 

This should be interesting.

I suspect one reason bhikkhus, bonzes, and monks fail to reach Enlightenment is because they're always being diverted by things like this.