"It's a Cookbook!"

No. Not really. The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi which I've been studying every day during this practice period/ango is not a cookbook...

And yet. And yet. 

I first absorbed it around 50 years ago. It was a Dharma Transmission poem/document, yet I understood it was chanted by all at the zendo at the City Temple in San Francisco where I was at the time, and I couldn't quite understand the purpose or merit of chanting it. So often that's just uncomprehending rote practice. It's not particularly meaningful.

And when I see so many people struggling with this teaching during the practice period -- oh my yes -- I think that chanting the teaching every day or whenever is possibly what's getting in the way for so many. 

For something Zen, the teaching is very straightforward and simple. It's like a quick sketch, though. Part of Dharma Transmission, it's not the Dharma transmitted but an outline of it in one sense, the essence of the Dharma in another. A memory jog for someone who's been in Dharma Training for years and years. Or for someone who hasn't been in monastic practice, like me, it's a crystallization of the Dharma Essence. The core of the practice. The essence.

But of course, as a literary construct, it isn't the actual Thing, for there is no Thing in actuality. As a construct, it's a lot like a recipe, ergo in a sense, it is a cookbook. 

When I stopped sitting zazen regularly, I was living in San Francisco. This was during the Jim Jones/People's Temple era. There were a lot of nascent cults and cultists around. It was post-Hippie, but there was still plenty of Counterculture, much of it by then a kind of money-making grift or in some cases outright crime. Now of  course that definition will change with time, so I'm not being judgmental. It's merely a case that the Counterculture, for all its merits and good works was also the hothouse of so much that was not merit or good works. It was, for its time, the epitome of selfishness and self-absorption as well.

Unfortunately, in those days, I saw the City Temple of the San Francisco Zen Center in the same way -- an epitome of selfishness in the guise of Zen from ages past. This was judgmental, and I'm not sure it was either appropriate or useful, but it kept me away from there, away from the form while still continuing the practice on my own. I had a Zen corner in my apartment just as I had had pretty much everywhere I'd lived, and I sat zazen at least once and often twice a day for 20 minutes to half an hour at a time. Longer, in those days, seemed like overkill. 

But much as I recognized the zeitgeist of selfishness in others and the context of their lives, I too was being selfish. For heaven's sake. If you're seeing it in someone else, you're seeing it in yourself. You are seeing yourself. So as I sat my selfish zazen, recognizing my own selfishness, and sitting anyway, something changed. Sitting zazen one day, I entered what I came to call The Void. This was not the calmness of counting breaths, or contemplating a koan (which you don't do during zazen anyway) or a meditational state (samadhi). No, this was something else, very much something else, a state of both oneness and nothingness, a unification with what we might call The Ground State of Being. There was no there there, there was no not-there there. It was all One and all Nothing. 

Magical in some ways, maybe. Terrifying in others.

And Zen practitioners had been warned about this. It could happen, this entering The Void, at almost any time in one's practice, and if it did, don't take it as Enlightenment, because it probably wasn't. Though it might be. Instead, let it happen, don't try to manipulate or control it (you can't) and get with a Dharma teacher to help understand or grasp or accept what happened. 

Well, my Dharma teachers were the texts I studied frequently but not rigorously -- it wasn't scholarly study at all -- and memories, you might say, of Suzuki Roshi who had brought Zen as I knew it to America. 

Suzuki Roshi had died not long before I moved to San Francisco, but around the same time as his death, a collection of his talks was published -- "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" -- that I gravitated to and therein found the purest, clearest essence of what is I could imagine. 

So those were my Dharma teachers, and to a one, they said to me: "Don't get caught up in Experience, whether that Experience is The Void or something else. Don't be caught up. Let go. Come to know your nature and your purpose, but avoid getting caught up them, either." 

Let go.

It's all so much more and larger than you are. Let go.

After some experience with sitting and The Void, I let go of them. Every time I would sit zazen, I would enter The Void, and then I came to realize that The Void was a constant. It wasn't happening just when I sat. It was always. The Void was never not there, but I was in and part of the material world, not The Void, and thus had a purpose and that was To Serve. 

How we get to the point of recognizing the purpose To Serve, I still don't know, but it happened, and the Jewel Mirror Samadhi was a part of it. In fact, it pointed the way and was the foundation of a pretty fundamental change in my life. 

I've described the "dream" of leaving my apartment, walking to Union Square, sitting zazen on a bench with an old Chinese gentleman, walking around the Square, and then to Market Street, and back up to my apartment on Geary, and having the whole scene repeat during zazen practice last year. This actually happened after my encounter with The Void in the '70s, and it was part of what led to changing my life.

That it came back so clearly and stunningly last year was startling to say the least, and it's been something of a struggle to suss out why. I don't necessarily have an answer, but it is what it is. 

I left San Francisco and dedicated whatever remained of my life to finding out and acting on the needs of others in my immediate realm. 

And absorbing the Jewel Mirror Samadhi was key.

A cookbook? Sure, why not?

The raccoon roars like a lion. Kitten purrs in my ear.

Bodhisattvas Again

Zen liberates bodhisattvas into the world of presence. 

That's what I call it: "World of Presence", our ordinary, everyday perception of reality.

As we know, however, that's an illusion.

A dream as it were.

It doesn't have any ultimate existence.

But because it is our general, ordinary perception of reality, and we conduct our lives within it, the bodhisattva's presence is also called for and called forth.

The bodhisattva, on the path to Buddhahood, lingers in the World of Presence, the material world, to help guide other sentient beings to liberation and Buddhahood for themselves. The Bodhisattva vow is to liberate all sentient beings. 

Buddhahood is ultimate liberation from suffering (ie: living in the World of Presence) we are led to believe, and many of us do believe it, and yet some of the sutras says that Buddhahood is itself an illusion, a dream as it were, and there is no ultimate liberation from suffering because there is no suffering at the ultimate level of... well, what is it?

"It" is the wrong term. There is no "it."

If we actually probe to the limit of perception/existence, delve as deeply as possible into the material world, we find, perhaps to our surprise, that there is no there there. Nothing, in other words. What we regard as "something," or "anything" or "everything," is not there. There is "nothing" there -- emptiness, void. Absence of "thing."

That is the ground state we can perceive if we delve deeply enough, from which "thing" -- everything -- arises. Because it is a ground state we can perceive if we delve deeply enough, probe with our minds and with our tools, it too is an illusion, That is not the ultimate. But it is the ground from which, thorough which, everything else manifests.

We cannot probe any deeper with our minds or with our tools, but we know there is a deeper inconceivable "reality" underlying it. "It." But there is no "it."

Bodhisattvas are called forth to help with compassion those on the journey through the material world, perhaps toward Buddhahood, or perhaps not. It doesn't matter. A bodhisattva is a teacher and a guide and a helper. Bodhisattvas are everywhere: not only teachers, guides, and compassionate caregivers. We often don't recognize them or we take them for granted out of habits of mind that simply don't recognize much beyond our own selfish needs and desires. The gift of a bodhisattva can go unnoticed in the press of events and the furious activity of the moment. But they are there, all around us, right next to us, and yes, sometimes the bodhisattvas are we ourselves.

We may not recognize the bodhisattva in ourselves. 

Vimalakirti takes on all the gods, buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks and laypeople alike in his teaching we're studying in this Fall Practice Period. Though a layman himself, he doesn't hesitate to correct and instruct those around him, no matter their status, when he perceives them failing or flailing in their efforts to observe the proper forms of observance and devotion. 

In a sense, he tells them to throw it all away. None of it means anything. It accomplishes nothing. At best, observance is an empty gesture; at worst it's merely fraud.

Live your life. That is practice.

Other bodhisattvas, even the Buddha himself, say the same thing. Your life is your practice. Focus there, not outside yourself, not on some arcane ritual, not on sitting in meditation. 

None of it matters.

In Zen, sitting is a duty, but it's not a product, and it is not meant to produce anything. We don't sit for a purpose. We sit to sit. 

Sitting is and isn't a means, skillful or otherwise, toward some end other than sitting. It is a means because sitting can be like opening a window beyond our usual expectations or experience. It can be. It isn't always. 

It isn't a means because there is nothing ultimately beyond it. We sit to sit, no other purpose. But in sitting we can gain a more complete comprehension of ourselves. 

Our roshi got into a bit of hot water a while back by saying that we sit with intention, aspiration, and/or motivation. We don't. Later on, roshi corrected this notion by saying "we sit to sit." No other reason or aspiration in sitting. But our lives -- which include sitting! -- are motivated with intention and aspiration, in the Bodhisattva Way to liberate all sentient beings from suffering. 

We take vows as Zen practitioners, after all. Bodhisattva vows. 

And none of us is perfect. That's all right. 

The Zen of Being Assaulted, The Zen of An Assault, The Zen of Being

Those of us who practice some form of Buddhism -- for me it's a sort of slap-dash version of Soto Zen -- do so with the certain or uncertain knowledge that things as they appear to be, things as they are, aren't.

Maybe it was that suspicion that led us to Zen or Buddhism in the first place, the suspicion that what we could perceive was not all of reality, wasn't reality at all. Through the practice of Zen -- or most any form of Buddhism and many other spiritual endeavours -- we come to a better understanding of the incompleteness of ordinary perception, and if we're diligent or lucky enough, we might gain the ability to perceive much deeper or more fully into 'what is.' Suchness.

The practice is a form of training that alters our consciousness, and for most of us, there is no going back once that's happened. What we perceive and the way we perceive it goes through a transformative process which I can't explain though i have experienced it a number of times over the decades  - satori and samadhi they call it -- that is often taken as 'enlightenment' though I doubt it's anything like that of Shakyamuni Buddha's Enlightenment. Or maybe it's the same. I don't know. It can be debated to the finest of grains, and yet cannot be resolved. We know it when we feel it, but what it is, who can truly say?

I came to Zen at a difficult time in my life, the dreaded teen-age years, awkward adolescence. Zen practice helped to get me through it, and it's helped to ground me through an often chaotic life ever since. I'm grateful, since otherwise I probably wouldn't be here to tell the tale. 

Part of Soto Zen and much of Buddhism in general is the recognition that our Buddha nature is to serve. This is often expressed as following the Bodhisattva Way, living a Bodhisattva life. That was the study we engaged in during the intensive Spring Practice Period Ango I participated in earlier this year. 

Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life was our text. He'd run away to a monastery -- run away from the kingship he was supposed to assume on his father's death, run away to the largest and most famous Buddhist monastery and teaching institution Nalanda -- where he found himself beset by bullying and self-doubt. He felt he didn't fit in on the one hand and he was the victim of constant abuse on the other. He felt like leaving the monastery, running away again, but what would be the point? Instead, he stuck it out and in the process formulated the Guide which he presented as a teaching to the other monks at Nalanda, probably to much mockery and derision, but which has long survived him and them and Nalanda itself (destroyed during the Moslem invasion and conquest of northern India in the early 1200s.) 

While bemoaning his fate throughout the Guide, Shantideva argues compellingly for keeping on with the practice and developing bodhicitta, awakened compassion on behalf of all sentient beings, perhaps most especially those which had been his tormentors. 

It's not really necessary to go into all the details, for we have other things to do, but the point is that one on the Bodhisattva path is called to serve with compassion those they meet along the way with the intent of bringing them along to Enlightenment or at a minimum helping them to do so.

I never knew I was on that Bodhisattva path myself, because that really wasn't a conscious part of my practice; compassion, service to those I encountered along the way was simply what I did naturally, or so I thought, and there was no great argument or self doubt about it.

And so time passes, much time, and time came to a few days ago, and an encounter with someone new to me, a youngish man maybe 30 years old, tall, muscular, blond, standing across the street from my house staring at me as I trimmed weeds in my front yard. I greeted him simply and informally and asked if there was anything I could do. He stood still for a moment then came threateningly across the street, getting right up to me, and after some back and forth it appeared that 1) he was on drugs, possibly meth, and not fully aware; 2) he was delusional, paranoid; 3) he had a violent intent. 

What was I to do? I'm a pretty frail old man these days (though I don't like to admit it), and he was young and strong and full of rage and paranoia and whatever substances he had ingested or injected. I asked him, "Is there anything I can do for you?" He fumed and raged some more, ordering me to stay away from the children who lived in the house where he was staying and threatened dire consequences otherwise, and I told him not to worry, I had no interest in the children and that I was going in to my place now. He stomped away back into the house where he was staying.

I didn't think that that was the end of it. I thought there would be more somehow, when or where or how I didn't know, and fleetingly I thought I had met the image of Death -- and not for the first time -- and that he would be back.

Sure enough. 

The next day, I was sitting in my chair in my living room taking a break from trimming weeds in the back  when I sensed someone standing behind me, and I turned and it was him. He'd come into my house through an unlocked gate and door to the laundry room and kitchen, quietly -- I had no idea -- and stood with a hammer or ax in his hand, breathing hard, ready to commit mayhem and violence. I got up and told him to get out of my house. He advanced on me, threatening without words, waving his weapon around, breathing hard, eyes riveted on me. He got within inches of my face. I could smell chemicals in his body, alcohol on his breath. He advanced and retreated, waving his ax or hammer around, passing it from hand to hand, threatening me with it. He said little, maybe nothing most of the time as I remember almost nothing of what he said. The closer he got to me, the more threatening he was, the less I felt fear. 

I said, "What's wrong? You can tell me. What's wrong?" When I did, he seemed to calm down for a few moments, but then he would become emboldened and puff up and wordlessly threaten me again, and I repeated "What's wrong?" several more times. Each time, he would seem to calm down for a moment or two. He went to the french door in the living room and I said, "You can leave that way if you want." He opened and closed it several times and seemed to be bewildered by how to work it and the screen door beyond. He motioned me to come to the door, and I did, and I tried to show him how easy it would be to leave that way, but he pulled me away from the door and shoved me back toward my chair, threatening with his weapon, which I saw now was a tomahawk, and becoming more and more agitated. I asked him his name; he said I didn't need to know. I asked him again what was wrong. He said nothing. I asked about Barbara who lives across the street. He said she wasn't there -- and I flashed on a vision that he'd murdered her. I asked about the kids, Barbara's kids, and he became enraged: "What do you want with them?" and became threatening again. He told me to sit down, pushed me into my chair. "What do you need? How can I help?" I asked him. He breathed hard, waved his weapon around and all of a sudden hauled off and whacked me hard on the forehead with it. I got up, shocked, blood gushing from the wound, and shouted at him "Get the fuck out of my house, NOW!" He retreated, bewildered, but he didn't leave. "Look what you did! GET OUT!" I shouted as blood dropped in big splashes on the floor, down my face and arm. As I shouted at him, my wife came from the bedroom where she'd been napping. "Who are you? What are you doing here? Get out!" she shouted at him, and he seemed to retreat somewhat further, but he didn't leave. She shoved him, but he stood still. I looked around, saw my phone on the chair arm, and took it into the bathroom and locked the door and called 911. 

I could hear my wife at first shouting then talking calmly to the man with the tomahawk in the living room as I reported what had happened to the dispatcher. I staunched the blood from the wound with paper towels while I talked to the dispatcher and listened for anything in the living room. 

I heard my wife say, "Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you?" meaning the man in the living room, the man who had assaulted me. I did not hear him speak at all. But later she would tell me what he was doing: going to the french door, opening and closing it, and seeming to be bewildered by it. Then he went to the front door, she said, puzzled by how to work the lock on the screen door. Then she said he went toward the bathroom door, and she saw an opportunity to escape. She said she ran across the street, calling on Barbara to help but realizing eventually that Barbara wasn't there. She said she saw the man with the tomahawk coming across the street toward her, and she realized she was in a sense trapped and she had to be calm. Suddenly, she said Barbara's huge Pyrenees dog appeared beside her and sat down as the man got to Barbara's front gate. "Is this your dog?" she asked. "Yes," said the man. She said, "You know he gets out and runs around. You really need to keep him inside the gate or he'll get hurt." She said she showed him how to keep the gate latch closed as she inched out of the yard while he went inside it with the dog. They passed so close to one another they touched. He didn't seem to know who she was, and he didn't try to harm her. She would tell me that she thought Douglas, the dog, was her angel at that moment. She said with the guy inside the gate, she could escape and she ran across the street to the house next door to ours trying to raise help, but no one came to the door. The first police car arrived seconds later -- no more than five minutes after I called -- and my wife told him where the man was. He took his AK style rifle and went to Barbara's house where the man surrendered without a fight.

Shortly many police and sheriff's deputies arrived, my wife came back to our house, and I could hear her say through the bathroom door, "Are you all right?" and then "The police are here." I was still on the phone with the dispatcher, who was talking to the police and with my wife. 

I said, "OK," and still bleeding and woozy, I came out to witness the rest of the drama unfold. 

There was of course quite a lot of drama to come, but it was anti-climax, so it's unnecessary in the context of this story.

I'm OK, and I'm extremely grateful that my wife was not harmed and was able to handle the situation so calmly and well. She said she was trained to do it when she worked at the courthouse in California, and she was surprised and delighted that her training came in so handy in real life. 

We had used similar tactics in dealing with this violent stranger. Be calm, express concern for his well-being, offer to help, don't agitate him, don't threaten. My approach was through my Zen training and practice, her's was through professional situational training in a courthouse setting. It's not much different. Someone is violent and seemingly out of it, you do better to try to empathize than to confront and further agitate. 

The fact that I was assaulted and wounded in this encounter with a "demon" was in a Zen context something like the shock that sometimes accompanies Zen training -- of which there are many stories. The shock from the Zen teacher whacking the student or pushing him into the mud or from life-experience is supposed to lead to satori -- sudden enlightenment -- and sometimes it does. Physical wounds can happen, but they heal. The point is to awaken. And by awakening, more fully take in the nature of things. 

I see what happened in those terms, and the awakening is still unfolding. So many layers of lessons. What happened was not the first time I have faced "Death." Far from it. Each time, I learn, but not always as quickly or as much as I should. The lessons and awakening and enlightenment this time is coming in spurts, not all at once, as each layer peels back. I physically sleep a lot since the events described, and I see it as symbolic of my non-awakening. And then when I'm awake, realizations tumble down on me. So much illusion and delusion still to dissolve away.

Just a part of the realization, the Zen of Being, is that "I" am not. Not separate, that is. Each element, every participant, was "me." I confronted myself, I was saving myself, I whacked myself on the head with a tomahawk, I was my attacker, I was my wife, I was the police and medics who came to help. I was the ER personnel who seemed overwhelmed by the crush of patients,  and I was every one of those patients. 

I've since talked to Barbara our neighbor with whom this stranger was staying. He's now in jail on a no bail warrant, and he probably will not be released before trial. Well... you never know. Judges in New Mexico are notorious for releasing people they shouldn't. Barbara says he's an old friend of the family who'd been in rehab but had gone AWOL and he had discovered his brother in bed with his girlfriend. Which was why he was staying with Barbara and her family. Further, he was diagnosed schizophrenic and had not been taking his medication since departure from rehab. He'd self-medicated instead. He'd always been nice to her and she let him stay at her house out of loving kindness  -- and in hopes that he would be able and willing to help her get the house fixed up. But he'd been acting odd since he got there. She knew he'd been partying and suspected he'd taken some drug but she didn't know what. She did not, she said, expect him to be violent, though she said he'd run off a pizza delivery guy and another friend of the family who came to visit. She said he was seeing every man as a predator. But she was shocked he'd invaded my home and attacked me. 

She wanted him to get help because "he's really a good guy" and he's fine when he's taking the right meds and stays away from drugs he shouldn't be taking. But this time he went way over the edge, and she was really sorry for what had happened to me. 

Of course, we hear these kinds of stories a lot, and many of us become numb to them. Too many "really good guys" turn into violent monsters, no? Statistically, no. It doesn't happen a lot. It happens much less statistically than it used to, but it still happens, and the victims are multiple, often whole communities with tragic consequences. "Something should be done," but nothing seems to work, right?

Well, actually, some things do work, and they're not always what we think. The guy who assaulted me is in custody, and he should stay there for a long time. Some are saying permanently, and in a sense I agree. But not in the sense of imprisonment, because I don't believe in imprisonment except for the most incorrigible and the most dire crimes. 

No. If this guy is schizophrenic and if medications do work (I've known a number of schizos who are fine on appropriate meds) then he should be confined for so long as necessary to 'train' him to use the correct medications essentially automatically. And to stay away from self-medication substances. As you might expect, there's a Zen program for that. 😃

There are still many more layers to this incident, and I might describe more in time. But for now, let us be grateful.

So... Another Bite At the Apple So To Speak

Chapter 5 of A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life (Guarding Alertness) was the study we were engaged in when we were treated to... The Man Who Knows Everything the other day. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had, shall we say, a negative reaction to his presentation and had to work through some things during and afterwards to guard their own altertness in the face of his onslaught. Hm. Well, anyway, last evening we had another Dharma talk on the same chapter, this time from one of the center's own staff a teacher, prison counselor and priest, the same one with whom I had practice interview a few days ago, and his focus was on one aspect of the chapter, an aspect I really hadn't noticed previously (no surprise):

Procrastination

A very commonplace human trait, no? Well, yes. Oh yes. How well I know! We put off tasks -- or a least I do -- sometimes over and over again because..... ? Well, why? 

I thought of one of many things I've been procrastinating over, this one for more than a year: trimming some of the dead branches from the trees around our place.

It's a complicated, potentially dangerous task that requires:

• planning
• preparation
• proper tools
• right state of mind
• agility
• confidence
• determination
• energy
• skill

Hopefully a helper, too. Well, my helper hasn't been around for quite some time. Exactly what happened to him, I'm not sure. But I haven't seen him, and I'm afraid he may have passed away. The last time I saw him he was not well, and what with the COVID and all... He stopped coming around and no one I've talked to has seen him for months.

As for the other things, I have assembled tools, done some planning, but I'm not very good with much of the rest. I cut down one branch last year that was touching an electric line, and I wouldn't say it went exactly well. I think I missed getting brained by the falling branch by a couple of inches probably because I'd miscalculated where I should place the ladder. As it was, the falling branch ripped my shirt and put a welt on my back. It wasn't a serious wound, but it gave me pause. 

I don't have a lot of agility because my joints have stiffened, but I can get around and climb a ladder and such. I may be slow, but I get there eventually. My confidence level -- that I can do these things -- is not quite as high as it once was, but as a rule, if I set out to accomplish a task I believe I can get it done. If I start, I am generally determined to finish and usually do so unless something completely unexpected interferes. 

My energy level is better since I started taking prednisone again last fall when I was feeling immense fatigue almost all the time. It's a consequence of my condition and the medications I take, and there's not a lot I can do about it. Low doses of prednisone, though, help. Fatigue is going to dog me no matter what. But we learn to cope with it -- well, that's something of a stretch. Let's say I make do.

My skills are so-so. I can do the task, but not as well as a professional might. This has been my way through thick and thin most of my life with pretty much anything. I can do things. But do them well? Enh. Maybe. Maybe not.

State of mind is the one that has kept me procrastinating, I think more than anything. If I don't feel I'm ready, I'm not going to do it, whatever it is, and getting ready can take a long time. Or readiness may never come.

I'm procrastinating. I admit it. It's no shame in my view. I'm simply not ready to take on this important task of trimming dead branches yet. I may never be. My intent may be there, but if I don't feel I can mentally and physically accomplish it with relative safety for myself and others, I won't do it. Some would call that "wisdom." Others might say "cowardice."

Huh. Back to the Beginning Again

That's pretty much how this practice period has been going. I keep circling around, not to start over so much as remember the shreds and tatters of the Dharma I lost along the way, go back and pick up some of and then some more of what I left behind, not to have it as in possession but to  recall and incorporate it into my present being. 

Sitting Zen opens the doorway you might say, and my sits are just to sit. Doorways open or they don't but when a doorway is opened, there's no need for a longer sit at that time. That's why they vary in length, up to an hour but usually much shorter. And more frequent than the zazen schedule at the zendo. Chopping wood and carrying water is practice just as sitting is. "Chopping wood and carrying water" is a metaphor for daily activities, doing what needs to be done, while practicing Zen; in fact, the activity itself becomes  practice. Eventually, your life and being, my life and being, is practice. 

Years ago, I was there, or as nearly there as I think I was able to get. I'd absorbed as much of the sutras and the Dharma and the Buddha nature of all beings and non-beings as I was going to at the time, and in my sits I had entered The Void, where there was nothing, no thoughts, images, plans, desires, distractions, or delusions. Just pure emptiness. 

If I had had a teacher at the time, I have little doubt that I would have been told that "The Void" I encountered was a delusion. Quite likely dangerous. And I should let go of it. In fact, I may have encountered that idea in my studies without a teacher. At any rate, whenever I sat in those days, I would immediately go to Void state, whether or not it was a delusion, and from my perspective, it wouldn't let go of me. 

This happened toward the end of my year or so residence in San Francisco. I'm not well-adapted to living in cities at all, and at the time (mid-late '70s) San Francisco had a distinctly odd vibe. There was all this alternative New Age pseudo spirituality going on, and there were hustlers everywhere of every kind imaginable. It was a cacophony of yada yada all the time. The Counterculture had mostly imploded, but its echoes lingered and San Francisco was still the heart-center of what could be, what ought to be. The City was filthy, deteriorating and unhealthy, however. Not at all the image it liked to project. That perception may have been a factor of where I was living, too, on the border between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, a territory filled with dregs and aspirations and desires.  I tried to keep my path narrow, but I couldn't keep it narrow enough, and in the end, it was simply more than I could bear with any kind of equanimity to be there. 

And So...

Round and round. The enso is the image of a usually incomplete circle rooted in the Zen conception of our path on earth. A Dharma Wheel of sorts, but not exactly. It doesn't have spokes. Just a void in the center and a circular path around it. And another void on the outside of the path.

 It's the image of the circle I've been going round for ages. I'm about to take another lap.

Study, yes much study this time around, and all of it, well almost all, reminds me of just how much study of the sutras and the Prajnaparamita I've already done. Is there anything I haven't already read? Any talk I haven't already heard? Any awakening I haven't already experienced?

Of course there are plenty of them. Oh, so many. But at some point the Zen master pushes the student off the veranda and into the mud. Mud is better than words. That's satori.

My study texts this practice period are growing in number. Good thing most of them are online and I don't have to carry around a rucksack full of books, which, back in the day, I basically did. There were so many books, so many sutras, so many commentaries on the sutras, so many practice manuals and so many commentaries on the practice of Zen, so many haiku expressing the essence of Zen, and on and on and on, words, words, words.

Texts:

Before I started this practice period, I read Big Sur by Jack Kerouac and saw the movie of the book several times. It's the somewhat fictionalized story of Jack's deterioration into alcoholism and madness after the success of On the Road. This bhikkhu, Jack, went to pieces. Success made him crazy. Or did it? 

The expectations that others placed on him because of his success with On the Road were closer to the source of his mental and physical collapse. But those expectations weren't exactly the reason why. 

Perhaps unknowingly, he'd created an image of himself in the book (On the Road) that was nothing (much) like him. In some strange reversal of roles, many people seemed to believe he, Jack, was like the character Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) which is just completely backwards. I didn't read On the Road back in the day; I can't say why. What I can say is that I purchased three Jack Kerouac novels one summer day in 1964 or 65 at Tower Books. They were: Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Desolation Angels. 

Why those and not others? Who can say? By the mid-'60s, Kerouac had published a fairly large body of work, but I remember on the shelf at Tower there weren't that many of his books. It's possible only those were there at the time, though I imagine that as his most popular work, On the Road  was also there.

Whatever the case, I read -- no, I practically devoured -- Dharma Bums first. My god, what a story, what a tale, what astonishing journey, upanddown California, mountains, valleys and coastline, and back again. Scenes of endless parties in Bay Area shacks, Oakland, Berkeley, Marin. Trails to nowhere and the sea, mountain climbing in the highest high Sierras; tramping on freight trains to the moon.

Hiding out in a fire lookout shack in the Cascades, cruising through the Skid Row of Seattle. What a tale, what an amazing adventure. Throughout, Jack (called Ray) and Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) commit Zen lunacy, practice Buddhism, become Bodhisattvas, and revel in their Awakenness and eccentricity. Wow. Where did this come from? Zen? What's Zen? I had only vague notions of Buddhism at the time, but Zen? Nah. Nothing. 

Practically everyone from that Beat era is dead now, but Gary Snyder is still alive, and supposedly he doesn't like being categorized as a Beat poet, though he is an acknowledged Zen Master. If it hadn't been for him, it's unlikely many of the Beat writers would have delved into Buddhism as deeply as they did.

But in my adolescence, none of this was known to me. I wanted to find out. What is Zen?

I started reading Big Sur and I stopped and didn't pick it up for a long time because it was tough, hard, hard, hard on the psyche and the emotions, and still there was Zen, which I realize now was what kept Jack from going completely over the edge at the time, but later it wouldn't/couldn't save him.

Finally, Desolation Angels: I may have got only five pages into it. It's something of a sequel/continuation/ expansion of Dharma Bums, focused on Jack's time at the fire lookout shack on Desolation Peak in Washington. I've figured out this was in 1955 or 56 (but I'm sure adepts know exactly when Jack went up to Desolation Peak). So it wasn't long before he hit it big in the literary firmament. Zen is not only still there, it is at the core of his being on top of the mountain.

So OK, I've said many times now how important Kerouac was to my interest in and discovery of Zen and the Bodhisattva Way and all that. 

For this practice period, Dharma Bums became one of my texts, and I finished re-reading it a couple of days ago. It's as inspirational, aspirational, and as moving now as it ever was back in the day. A Zen lunatic bhikkhu wandering, wandering and never quite finding what was already there. When I finished the book, I realized, perhaps for the first time, how closely my own wandering mirrored his. Perhaps it was for the same purpose. I don't know. 

Other texts: Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, the primary text assignment that we were given. I've read it in the Stephen Batchelor translation and listened to two versions in audiobooks. I had only read excerpts in the past, and having now read and heard the whole thing, I'm not sure it's particularly helpful. Setting aside the florid language, it seems to have been written to avoid the point rather than to make it. To hide it, if you will behind a screen of beautifully carved marble and gem encrusted draperies, Not unlike Indian architecture, often very beautiful but very concealing. And, too, it's not unlike the way I've experienced how East Indians avoid direct statements when speaking about pretty much anything, always curving around or sidling into whatever it is. Shantideva does that too, and for me, it's annoying and frustrating. But that's my Western mind putting up barriers.

When you can sit with two of my other texts this practice period, the Diamond Sutra, and The Platform Sutra, and be relieved by their utter simplicity and straightforwardness, Shantideva's indirection is perhaps unnecessarily burdensome. Although both sutras have extensive commentaries, you don't really need them to grasp the meaning of the texts. It's right there, unhidden, though complete understanding takes some effort. Both Sakyamuni (as the World Honored One in the Diamond Sutra) and Hui-neng (as The Master) in The Platform Sutra make it if not easy, at least comprehensible and direct. 

There are probably a dozen other Buddhist texts I'm using as guides and helps during this practice period, and I'll be meeting with another Dharma teacher later this week so there might be more texts added to the pile, but that's OK. Mud is still better than words, but the words are there -- and are still needed -- so long as we are thought-ruled creatures. 

Other realizations (satori): the sentient beings we as Bodhisattva vow to Awaken and liberate: nearly all of them are already Awakened and liberated. They can teach us, and many do if we pay attention. Those who aren't and need our help are becoming more and more difficult to reach. (I might expand on that another time.)

Another: Bodhisattva's deep compassion for all sentient beings is not fundamentally in the material world. It is a matter of mind-Awakening more than anything else, so that in many cases, Bodhisattva compassion, bodhicitta, doesn't involve physical charity or even concern for physical/emotional well-being at all. Satori:  I've been doing it wrong all these years. And I, praise be, am not the only one. 

Soooo.....

Nearly every Buddhist teacher I've ever seen or listened to starts most talks with the extended "Sooooo...." often followed by a long pause before offering something along the lines of a koan, a puzzling but universal truth, or contrary-wise, a generous welcome and asking for a count of one sort or another. "How many of you have done X, Y, or Z? Hands?" Usually all three in sequence.

This is standard. It's what you do when sitting on the raised cushion before an assembly of disciples and students. "Soooo........" Even the Dalai Lama does this. Or even especially he does it...

We've been studying the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life which I recall reading some excerpts from many years ago, but I had never read the whole thing, and now that I have, I understand why it was excerped rather than presented whole back in the day. Shantideva wrote in the 800s AD in India, and his audience was pretty clearly other privileged princelings of the region and era like his former self. He wasn't writing for the rabble in the streets -- who couldn't read anyway, so what would be the point, right?

So when we approach this work, we're approaching as if he'd written it for us -- we, the equivalent of the street rabble yet we who believe we are as high and mighty as the princelings of Old India -- when he didn't. I'm struck by how often Shantideva lards his work with line after line of praise and flattery and images of showers of gold and jewels and scented waters that would appeal to the vanity and pecuniary interest of the princes and kings of yore. For us today, this is nonsense, this is bullshit. Manjushri Bodhisattva would cut through all the not necessary bullshit, no? Yet line after line, there goes Shantideva again. What is he doing?

In a flash of insight (sometimes called satori, but maybe it wasn't) it occurred to me he was trying his best to appeal those myriad princes, kings and potentates of Old India and convince them to be better, behave better toward that rabble, themselves and one another and learn to act in the Bodhisattva Way, the way of compassion for all sentient beings (and later, for some, non-sentient and non-beings) and the way of complete dedication to bodhicitta -- bringing enlightenment and end to suffering for all beings and the whole wide world. The basis of Mahayana Buddhism of which Zen claims to be a part.

Shantideva was trying to argue, persuade, and cajole his peers to be better, show themselves as better than they had been, to learn, grow, and unselfishly give and be bodhisattvas themselves.

We are not his peers. This does not diminish his teaching or argument in any way. What it means is that our approach to the Bodhisattva Way of Life must be from a different direction. Most of us are not in charge of much of anything. Few of us have power over many others. For the most part we do not determine conditions of life or death for someone else. Therefore we do not live the lives of princes and potentates -- though our egos may tell us otherwise (smile emoji).

So how should we approach it? What does bodhicitta mean from the bottom up rather than the other way around? What does it mean to bring enlightenment and an end to suffering for all beings when you're not a prince or king or potentate -- and you don't have the power to do it?

So what do you do when you're functionally powerless even over most aspects of your own life, yet you are called upon to adopt the Bodhisattva Way and act on bodhicitta on behalf of everyone and the whole globe?

Especially what do you do when your betters, if you want to call them that, those who do have power and responsibility, act as if they don't. And in many cases behave worse than the worst of the potentates of old?

This is a consideration that I have yet to see enter into this practice period or indeed into much of Zen practice at all. Often enough, even Sakyamuni Buddha doesn't enter into it, either. The Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, are usually everywhere. Oft-times I wonder if I'm practicing Buddhism without Buddha. Or rather All-Buddhas/No-Buddha. (When someone asks me, "What is Zen?" I might say, "I don't know what Zen is. It's a contradiction.")

The class issue, I think, is important, and it runs through Buddhism and every branch of Buddhism from the outset, though often it's ignored today. Or rather it is pretended not to matter. 

After all, Sakyamuni Buddha was a prince, groomed to be king. His rivals and most of his followers were of the ruling class of his time and place as well; according to tradition, he learned from and opposed the Brahmans of his era (though others contend there was no such class in those days).  He may have wanted Enlightenment to be shared by all, and he may have sometimes been seen among the Lesser Orders, but he was not one of them, nor were most of his followers. They were aristocrats. 

Shantideva's situation parallels the Buddha's. He lived many hundreds of years after the Buddha and in a different part of India, but he, too, was a prince groomed to be king who renounced his titles and temporal authority to become a mendicant monk like the Buddha. He wrote extensively, which the Buddha (apparently) did not. He wrote what look like appeals to his aristocratic peers to become Bodhisattvas, Awakened Minds and Hearts, compassionate toward all beings. On the way to Buddhahood.

"All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all equally come a Buddha." The prayer given by Jack Kerouac to Gary Snyder as recorded fictionally in "Dharma Bums" (1958).

That is as concise a distillation of the Bodhisattva Way as I've seen. 

Sakyamuni and Shantideva were arguing strenuously for their aristocratic class to be better, to become bodhisattvas and act with humility and compassion toward "all sentient beings" which includes the rabble in the streets, but except in the abstract, do not become "of" them. The abstract being the realization that all are equal because all are One-NotOne.

And I look around at the others I am among in the Zoom practice period and I see that the vast majority are professional women of a certain age, mostly in the helping/caring professions, and, from what I've seen over time, that is the class (if you will) that this center focuses on. They are the ones to be reached and persuaded to be like bodhisattvas. To follow the Bodhisattva Way and become Buddhas.

They aren't aristocrats in the sense of having much temporal power in the political sense. But actually, they do have a lot of power, indeed power of life and death if they want to use it, in their capacity as healthcare professionals. 

And as I have listened to them talk in Enso meetings, oh, do I hear the same arguments over and over, the same woe is me, the same lack of understanding or rather lack of Enlightenment when they argue with themselves and their beliefs too much. Roshi advises "Don't overthink it..." but I'm not sure that's heard. Or if it's heard, it's not understood, not yet. For the rational argument is often a refuge when the Three Gems aren't enough. 

In my early practice days, I was instructed those precepts ("Buddam saranam gacchami, Dhanam saranam gacchami, Sangam saranam gacchami," or "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha") could be interpreted this way: "The Buddha is within you, the Dharma is you, the Sangha is with anyone you find on the Dharma Path, even if they don't know it."

For me, much of this is old hat. I learned a great deal -- sometimes unknowingly -- as a wandering bhikkhu for so many years. Some of the people in this practice period have long experience practicing zazen -- one of the teachers said she was taught zazen practice at the Berkeley Zen Center in 1971 when she was 19. And she's been doing it ever since. 

Another has talked about her experience at the San Francisco Zen Center beginning shortly after Suzuki Roshi died, also in 1971 I believe.

I go back before that, 1964-65, also through contact with the San Francisco Zen Center, but not through physical presence at the SFZC. No. Even when I lived in San Francisco, I chose not to visit the Center, in fact, I consciously stayed away, though I continued to practice. It had become a very fashionable and "hip" religious institution in the city, as had at the time the People's Temple and other New Age, New Consciousness institutions of Spiritual Growth and Perpetual Development (yada yada.) I saw them all as money-making businesses, some of them outright scams. Cynical, I know. But something had really changed from the early days, pre-hippie, pre-New Age, etc. of Zen in San Francisco and what it became and what it was by the mid-70s when I lived there. It had become so fashionable that people jockeyed to sit zazen at the new location because, you know what, they might be sitting next to someone famous! Damn, at the time, I was working with famous people every day, and I was not inclined to sit with them in the zendo.

So I continued regular practice on my own until I left San Francisco just before the People's Temple disaster.

Then I continued wandering and intermittent practice. Satori. Another instance of sudden "enlightenment:" I realized why I stopped regular practice once I moved out of San Francisco and went roaming all over the country. A long strange trip.

Which is off track and not the subject of these posts... (wide grin emoji)