Bread Karma

Made some soda bread yesterday. We like it. It's quick and easy. No multi-day fermentation of poolish and all the other wonderful yeasty complexity that goes into practically all other forms of bread-making. 

We'll make yeast bread from time to time, but it takes time -- generally all day or overnight or in some cases a couple-three days to get things just right. I think about the housewives who made their own bread daily or every three days or every week or whatever, and I truly wonder how they did it, how they kept their sanity, how they kept their energy level high enough to oversee their yeasty dough, to knead it, to shape it, to patiently let it rise, to bake and cool it, and then to slice it for toasting and serving. They made their own butter to serve with it, too. 

Skill is not the half of it. Much more needed to go into it than merely skill. That's the quality of the bakery in town where skilled bakers create dozens of loaves of simple-same bread every day. They are fine. But they also lack some of the character that the home baker gives to their bread-products. So, my admiration goes both ways, toward the home baker and toward the bakery-baker. Skill and character.

Soda bread is our preferred option when waiting for yeast dough would take too long. A soda bread has no yeast, just bicarbonate and "buttermilk." Well, you can't get real buttermilk at the grocery store in our little hamlet, so we make a substitute by putting a tablespoon of white vinegar in two cups of whole or 2% milk (we almost always use 2%). It works fine. 4 cups of AP flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste), 2 cups "buttermilk"; mix thoroughly but gently. Do not knead. Put on floured or cornmealed parchment on a baking sheet. Form into a round. Cut an X or cross into the top. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then 375 for 20 minutes more. Check for doneness by tapping on the bottom of the loaf. Sound hollow? It's done. If a little dull sounding, bake another 10 minutes or so. Cool enough to be able to slice without crushing-mooshing. Slather with butter. Eat.

No skill required. Not much patience, either. Character? Sure.

I don't know whether any of my ancestors were into bread making. Probably not. I know my mother never made bread in her life, and I doubt her mother or grandmother did either. My father couldn't be bothered, and his mother had servants to do the housework. Did they make bread? Maybe. Then going back a little farther to the Irish and German immigrants who started my father's line in America: did they make their own bread? I think probably they did. The Irish ones probably made soda bread. The Germans, yeast bread. 

I don't know enough about their lives in Ireland and Germany, and apart from the Great Famine and all the wars, I don't know why they left for America when they did c.1849-1854.

My father never talked about it. My impression was that his grandparents -- the immigrants -- never talked about it either. I know his Irish grandparents made up stories about who they were and where they came from and sometimes those stories changed so much they by the time they got to my father and me they were so tangled up they were little more than nonsense. When I started untangling those stories and got rid of some of the fantasy, the "real story" was perhaps much sadder than anyone wanted it to be -- thus the many made-up stories of some grandeur. As for the Germans, I never knew much of anything about them except that my father's German grandmother never learned English, so it was hard to communicate with her, and my father's mother was deaf, so it was hard to communicate with her, too.

Karma enters into the equation when I consider who these people were and who I came from. Jack Kerouac wrote a biography of the Buddha called "Wake Up!" in the years before he became famous after the publication of "On the Road" in 1957. It's very simple and straightforward, something like the Lives of the Saints (for children) in Catholic literature. In it, Kerouac proposes that what's called "karma" is in reality mostly a matter of genetic inheritance. Your past lives are for the most part the lives of your ancestors and your genetic inheritance comes through them to you. And that is the basis for your karma; but it may not be the whole of your karma. There may be other elements, known and unknown, that shape who you are. The Buddha, after all, discovers there is more to his Being than simply what he inherits from his ancestors. Oh, so very much more. He has karmic inheritance through many twisted, tangled paths. Lives upon lives. Buddhas upon Buddhas. Universes upon universes.

Becoming aware of it all can be overwhelming.

And so for most of us, we live our lives without becoming aware. It's easier and safer in some ways. But in others, it's unsatisfying. One still has questions; one still wants to know. 

I've found out, though, perhaps more than I wanted to know. But only so much, in the end, that I could handle.

The inheritance from my ancestors is very twisted and tangled, and some of it, I think, is very tragic, horrible, and deeply sad. This comes through both parents. For a time, I wondered if my father was actually my father, for we seem not to have hit it off as father and son at all. How could he be my biological father if we were so distant from one another and never truly connected? Well, but that's part of the karmic load, I came to realize, that I inherited, and not just from him.

Why, I wondered, was my mother so... disturbed and often cruel. What had I done to trigger her rage? But then, I came to understand that she, like me, carried a karmic load she could not dispense with, nor indeed could I undo the karma I was born with.

My mother's maternal grandfather was murdered by his mistress. Her father may have been murdered, too. Her insight into these events was that both her father and grandfather were "bad men." Both her husbands were equally "bad" -- or maybe worse. And that all transferred to me and my sister.  My mother couldn't help the way she felt about us and them. It was her karma.

Lord knows how far back any of this stretched. I would say as far back as any of her ancestors could be traced, and just so with my father's tangled ancestry. Who these people were is as complicated as the most complex bread-making we can imagine.

I think of a sourdough starter for example that takes literally forever and lasts forever -- or it can. The yeast from the air which starts the process goes back to the origin of yeast, whenever that was, and the process, when done correctly, can maintain the "starter" indefinitely, indeed forever. Creating the Perfect Sourdough Bread is seen as a goal in life for some bread-bakers, to the point of obsession, of trying over and over and over again to get it Just Right, and never quite succeeding. Perfection is just out of reach. Something wasn't done quite right, so try again. And again. And again. Karma is a lot like that.

And then there's me and my soda bread. One and done. 

It doesn't have to be Perfect. It doesn't take Forever. It's Good Enough.

All this is vaguely related to our study text for this Practice Period/Ango, "The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi." At some point, I think I'll try to delve into what it meant to me 50-some-odd years ago when I first absorbed the teaching. How it affected and led to a profound change in the course of my life, and yet how strong and heavy is the karmic load I carry.

One day.... 😉

Some Thoughts on Chaos and the Crazy

The other day, I was pondering the chaos and crazy some of my ancestors and relatives experienced in their lifetimes and now, and of course I was relating it to my own life, and I was extending that thought process to the chaos and crazy that's been afflicting the United States and the world at large for many long years now. 

As I go through these exercises, I start to see more clearly how we are not only all connected but in reality we are all part of the same thing, in Buddhist parlance, we are all the same thing. This was a realization I came to (in a form or flash of enlightenment) many, many years ago, but the details were always elusive. As I get older, the threads of connections and the ground state of being becomes clearer and clearer. 

Afghanistan is "falling" to the Taliban we're told, but in fact, it has never not been "fallen" and the Taliban (however they are conceived) have never not been pre-eminent. They are the Afghan people, whether our establishments and ruling class like it or not, know it or not, and beating them back can only be accomplished through a campaign of extermination, genocide in a word. That hasn't happened... not yet... so the end-state, outcome of the Afghanistan campaign was foregone: right back where we started from. 

The whole campaign was a crock from the get... in a manner of speaking. 😞

It was wrong and wrong-headed and it's led us back to where we began, or nearly so, as time is a spiral not a straight line. 

Not unlike the case of Vietnam, to which comparisons are made more and more starkly and openly. We've been down this road before, haven't we?

How many of our lives are just like that? In many ways, mine certainly is and has been.

What have we learned from our mistakes? What have I learned from MY mistakes?

And how much farther do we have to go?

I'm reminded of an opinion column by Mark Morford from 2017: 

HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR END TIMES, AMERICA?

Please read it. And realize he wrote this four years ago. How little has changed. Even though... everything has. 

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.