Satori

NOTE: This was written just before the end of the practice period.

One more zazen session this morning, then we're "done." Well, not "done" done, but in the sense that we can return to Normal Life after one last zazen and a final wrap-up council slated to end at noon.

If this practice period and sesshin have had an effect, then we'll continue zazen, study and practice, and it was clear to me that some of the participants are already living practice all the time. 

Some activated bodhicitta at birth if not before. And they have been living the bodhisattva way of life ever since. Maybe they know, maybe not, but I doubt that doing this practice period has changed them in any way or made them better bodhisattvas. They didn't need Shantideva's Guide to tell them what to do. 

But maybe they needed something else, like reinforcement, community, reminders and strength.

Bodhisattvas may be imagined as examples of perfection, but living bodhisattvas generally aren't. They're far from perfect, they fail, they face struggles and heartbreak like anyone else, and they go on. I recognize so many "natural" bodhisattvas who have affected my own life.

At first, I was reluctant to accept Shantideva Bodhisattva's endless plaint as all that worthwhile. Many people reject it in whole or in part because it's just so.... whiny. (Also gravely misogynistic and otherwise offensive to modern sensibility.)

I tried to analyse it from a class perspective, and I think that still needs to be done. Who he was and what environment he came from is, I think, crucial to understanding what and why he wrote. He wasn't "just anyone" (much as Sakyamuni Buddha wasn't "just anyone.") He was a prince, son of a raja if not a maharaja, who, when his father died, was to be placed on the throne himself, and who instead ran way to a Buddhist monastery. Not just any monastery either, but Nalanda, the greatest Buddhist institution the world has ever seen. And there he faced challenges to his very being that he could not imagine.

I know the Dalai Lama has great fondness for Shantideva and his Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life and teaches it often. Why? Could it be that this particular work has special meaning to those whose lives have been turned upside down by choice or circumstance and who need to regularly reinforce their practice (faith, if you will) that they can do and are doing what's right?

Yes, I think that's a big part of it, and it's a big part of why it was being taught during this practice period. The COVID you see has turned all our lives upside down, and we don't yet know when -- or if at this rate -- it will end. 

The psychological and emotional toll has been immense, especially for those in the helping professions -- which seemed to be most of the participants in this practice period, bordering on 90%.

Lives have been ended by the hundreds of thousands, millions world-wide. A horrible period of political unrighteousness has still not completely ended. Isolation and fear and doubt have compounded in so many of us. 

Apart from the clerks at the grocery store and post office, medical professionals are about the only people I've been dealing with face to face regularly for over a year. I know they've been having a hard time, at first really hard, and I've expressed my sympathy, but during this practice period, I've come to a much better understanding of how hard it's been and still is. Worlds turned upside down repeatedly. And much, much worse for many.

I have a wood carved Buddha on an altar that I've bowed to every zazen session. He's modeled on the Kamakura Daibutsu in Japan, I believe the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world. I painted him gold  -- the Kamakura Daibutsu was gilded at one point -- so that he would not fade into the mirrored background. The Buddha on my altar appears to be deep in meditation, but his facial expression has always puzzled me (it's even more apparent on the huge bronze original.)  Then it came to me. It's the expression of profound heartbreak that he has not been able to save, deliver, rescue all sentient beings as a Bodhisattva despite what Shantideva tells us a Bodhisattva must vow to do.

Next to him is a wood carving of the Laughing Buddha that was so popular in the West for so many years -- but you don't see him much any more. It was such a popular image that my father had a small one on his bookshelf in Iowa when I was born, and my mother apparently took it with her when she divorced him because I remember it fondly standing on our bookshelf in California, laughing with hands raised high overhead. (Come to think of it, maybe it was hers to begin with...)

On the other side of the Daibutsu is a wood carving of a Chinese mendicant monk smiling at the Buddha.

There are other images: a horse and an elephant, both references to the life of Shakyamuni, a carved wooden zebra, a carved wooden duck (sentient beings) a brass cricket, a bronze dragon, a ceramic tree coming into bloom with tiny birds on its branches, a greenstone carved abstract figure that could be someone practicing zazen, gourd figures that Ms Ché and I made one Christmas at the Cherokee club, flowers, many flowers and flowering branches, and an incense burner. 

We have several other altars in the house. One for dead friends. One for Native figures. All are sites of honor, and the Heartbroken Buddha altar for now has pride of place.

In addition to the other things mentioned on the Daibutsu/Heartbroken Buddha altar, there's a kerosene lamp, an electric candle, five cranberry colored sherry glasses, a photo of Ms Ché smiling at her desk at work 20-30 years ago, and a Midcentury clock to tell the time. These tchotchkes sort of wound up there without great intent, but somehow they seem to belong. 

Behind the Buddha stretching the width of the altar is a Craftsman mirror in an oak frame. It was part of a collection of Craftsman furniture I picked up at a thrift store many years ago. Draped across the top of the mirror is a length of sari silk, deep, deep teal blue, sprinkled with golden embroidery spots that look something like stars.

It's very crowded, this altar, and any critic would point out it's "Not Zen" at all. That's correct. 

As mentioned in another post, I long ago let go of any attempt at emulating Japanese style or adopting the pretense of Going Japanese. It's not who I am.

Yet I still practice zazen? Sure, why not?

But right now, it's time to chop some wood and carry water.

🙏 ॐ

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.