It's a trick

Since I'm moving to the ends of the earth, I recently went to Wind in Grass for the last time.  The others were nice enough to throw a party for me and invite me to say a few words about what I'd learned from practising with them over the previous three years.  I guess it was my first dharma talk.  It went something like this.

'I wanted to tell you what I'd learned from being a part of this group, and a number of answers immediately sprang to mind.  I've learned what Zen is, what Sanbo Kyodan is, what koans are.  I've learned that to have an effect on how things are done in a group you have to step up and participate.  I've learned that it's possible to have a group of young people come together to meditate in a way that's somehow both deeply committed and playfully irreverent.

Somehow none of these answers felt right.  I'll tell you what I think I've really learned from Wind in Grass in a moment, after a long digression or two.  Because I also wanted to address something Michael brought up the other night.  I'm referring to the strange fact that as Zen students we're meant to be doing two things at once: practising meditation earnestly, and giving up all thoughts of gain.  But if we're already Buddhas and don't need to progress, why do we go on week-long retreats?

First off, I want to give you a sense of what progress in meditation feels like.  I took up meditation after my first year at college, near the end of which I started having a lot of pain in my face.  The doctors all told me I was stressed, but that obviously wasn't right.  After a while I realized that it might be, and cast around for things that might help me.  I found a website with some instructions on meditation for beginners and went at it.

The meditation I was doing involved focusing on your breath, and labelling thoughts as they arose.  It's not our practice here, but it was helpful.  After four months or so of sitting every day, I felt significantly better, like I was finally on top of my pain.  If I have any allegiance to Buddhism, it's to a great extent because of the way, over those few months, the practice just picked me up and set me on my feet again.  It's hard not to feel grateful to something that has that effect. 

That was progress.  And it wasn't the only time I've felt I got somewhere through meditation.  It happened again about a year after I'd come to Stanford.  I hadn't been practising much, but started doing guided meditation with a grad student from Thailand.  This involved focusing on a visualized sphere of light in your belly - not out practice here, but helpful.  Within a couple of months I felt more both sharper and more relaxed, better able to cope with things.  That was progress.

A final example of progress came when I went on my first few PZI retreats.  I'd never really gotten koans until I heard John Tarrant speak, guiding us to follow the koan wherever it led, the way you follow an old overgrown track in the forest.  This is our practice here, and it helped me.  I just fell into the practice, and it was transformative.  That was progress too, I think.

So that's one side of the antinomy.  We just do feel that we're progressing, and it's probably true to say that none of us would be here tonight if we didn't have some sense of what that felt like.  At the same time, there's also a sense in which approaching meditation with some aim in mind is exactly the wrong way of doing it.  And this is where we come to the two tricks I've put into this talk.

The first way I'll talk about a trick is to say that meditation has a trick to it.  It's not a trick like the one all the 11-year-olds knew back when I used to play SimCity, where you could type FUNDS and the game would give you more money.  It's more a trick as in a knack, a style of doing things, like when someone tells you how to turn a key in an idiosyncratically sticky lock.  The trick of meditation is summed up in the old koan: 'If you turn towards it, you turn away from it'.  The paradox is that the only way you can progress in meditation is by giving up all thought of progress.

The other trick is meditation itself.  Meditation, I can tell you, is a trick.  It's a familiar one.  It's like when you book a hotel online through a website which shows pictures of a room with magnolia flowering outside your window and a pool with an infinity horizon on the patio.  When you get there, there's a shitty plastic plant on the windowsill and a deck next to the parking lot with a filthy little plunge pool.  You thought you were getting one thing but you got something else.

Meditation is like that, except instead of getting the plastic plant and the plunge pool you get to the hotel only to realize that there's an ocean right across the street and out the window a tropical rainforest.  You would lay on the bed and flick through the 14 million available free channels, but the forest is much more interesting; the amenities of the hotel don't seem to matter any more. 

Meditation is like that.  I started doing it to cure my toothache and came to feel I'd started a relationship with some inexhaustibly fascinating person who somehow was the same as the table and chair in my room.  It did help my pain a great deal but perhaps only because the pain had ceased to seem so relevant; and by the time it had helped my toothache, it just seemed to matter less whether I was in pain or not.

That's what I had to say about Michael's antinomy.  I also hoped you'd indulge me with another digression, one that might make Elana throw something at me, since it's about how much I like Christianity.  I was raised a Christian and it's always interesting to see how people in my family react to me being a Buddhist.  When I went to Canada for Christmas my aunt asked me very respecfully on the first night whether I wanted a beer; they would be going to a church for a service, and I was free to come or not.  I said I loved Christmas services, and was especially keen on beer.

I've also been dating a Catholic girl for the past couple of years, and I've been going to church quite a lot.  At first this was only out of solidarity, but it made me think a lot about what I prefer about Buddhism and what I still like more about Christianity.  My main issue with Christianity is having to believe the story about a guy who rose from the dead, but there's one way relevant to this talk in which it things right.  When I went to Rockridge the other weekend to visit PZI's new center, I passed some Korean evangelical church.  It sounded like there was some kind of sacred 80s disco going on inside, involving equal measures of synthesizers and songs of praise.

That strikes me as exactly the right way of reacting to the universe.  As Buddhists I don't think we celebrate enough.  People come to Buddhism because it offers a way out of suffering, but this sometimes has the unintended consequence of making Zen centers feel like particularly grim hospitals.  Our tradition always tries to remind us that there's really nothing to be healed; but even if there were, the right reaction might still be worship.  If the only way of experiencing the rainforest is with a headache, I'll take it, and I'm taking pictures too.

All of this was just a roundabout way of getting to what I've really gained from Wind in Grass.  I've gained nothing.  Instead, I've enjoyed every second: staring at the grain of the floorboards, getting splinters in my socked feet, looking over at people during meditation and wondering who's getting it on with whom.  I've just enjoyed being here with you, and I want to thank you for being here with me while I did it'.

As leaving presents I brought a book by Alan Watts, an English Anglican who turned into a Californian Buddhist.  I also brought a little owl figurine.  I spend much of my life studying classical Athens, so I guess in some sense I've always been an acolyte of Athena.  She's the goddess of wisdom, so she's in the same line of work as Buddha.  She's there on the altarpiece now with outsize eyes, symbolizing mindfulness and serving as a reminder that it's a good idea to look at things squarely - even when things go wrong, as they sometimes do in Zen groups. 

Face to face

Recently I went out for a drink with a friend who worries a lot about money.  She worries so much, in fact, that she told me she'll only feel financially secure when she has about $80 000 dollars in savings.  I said, 'Do you know that passage in the Bible?'  (That's not something I say very often.)  'The bit about the lilies in the field?'  I've sat through a lot of church services in my time.

'Look at the birds in the air', the passage runs.  'They do not sow or reap and store in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them...Consider how the lilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do not spin; and yet, I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendour was not attired like one of these...So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself'.

It's not great financial advice.  All the same, there's something true and valuable about the main idea it expresses: we constantly fall into the habit of worrying how we'll survive, and yet somehow usually do.  (Except when we don't, in which case there's really nothing to worry about).  In case you're wondering, the lines are spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, the 1st-century CE religious leader.  (And the lines are at Matthew 6.19-34.) 

That's a strange way of introducing him, of course, because most people know who he is.  All the same, it's often useful to look at things that are familiar to us as if we were considering them for the first time.  That was partly what led me to read through the whole of the Bible over the last three years.  I've already written about the Old Testament, and now I've finished the New Testament too.

I thought the Old Testament was mostly really bad, in both the moral and aesthetic senses.  Since I wrote about it, a few people have told me that I should have read it with a scholarly commentary or companion.  And there's no doubt I would have gained a better knowledge of the text that way.  But I didn't have time to do that.  I also thought it might be interesting just to read the thing and see what struck me about it.

The New Testament is a lot better than the Old Testament, in both the aesthetic and moral senses.  For a start, it's much shorter, taking up around 300 pages of my 1000-page Bible.  It tells a coherent story, running from Jesus' life, through the early history of the movement he founded, to the writings of one of that movement's early leaders, Paul.  It's a bit repetitive, but it's not a bad thing for historians that it includes four different versions of Jesus' life.

Jesus is a pretty nice guy, and his teachings have a lot of good in them.  He thinks the peacemakers are blessed, wants us to love our enemies, and claims religion boils down to loving God and loving your neighbour.  What he says at Luke 6.28-9 neatly encapsulates this side of Jesus: 'Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you.'

Jesus is also something of a revolutionary.  Often this is a good thing: Jesus is impatient with pointless rules, and tells a rich man to sell all he owns and give his money to the poor.  Sometimes, though, he can be a little unsettling.  'You must not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth', he says, strangely enough, at Matthew 10.34-6.  'I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son's wife against her mother-in-law'.

In other words, he is complex.  Despite all his talk of love and forgiveness, he occasionally loses it and talks about how sinners will be flung by angels into a burning furnace, 'the place of wailing and grinding of teeth' (Matthew 13.47-50).  He also believes that he is the Messiah and the son of God. 

But we are now in the murky territory of things the gospels attribute to Jesus, but which he might never have claimed to be true.  All the gospels say that he was a miracle-worker, for example, and that he rose from the dead. 

One element of his teaching that emerges clearly is his belief that the world will end sooner rather than later.  To be precise, he believes that the world will end in the lifetime of some of his disciples.  As he says to them, 'There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power' (Mark 9.1).

That was what struck me about Jesus as described by the gospels.  He's a religious leader with his heart in the right place but who also has a vengeful streak and who believes he's the son of God.  His followers for whatever reason were inclined to attribute miracles to him.  Finally, he explicitly predicts on several occasions that the world will end within the next century at the latest.

That looks like an example of a falsifiable claim that was falsified, but that didn't stop the early Christians.  The Acts of the Apostles were for me the most unfamiliar and surprising part of the New Testament. 

On the one hand, they're heartening, the story of the survival and growth of a tiny sect in the teeth of violent repression.  The early Christians are simple folk, and live in a kind of commune: 'Not a man of them claimed any of his possessions as his own, but everything was held in common' (4.32).

On the other hand, they can seem like a cult that comes under the increasing control of a violent and unscrupulous leadership.  Peter kills two dissidents by miraculous agency (5.5-10), and claims the privilege of passing on God's word through the laying on of hands - a monoply he vigilantly protects (8.18-25).

Once we get to Paul, things have normalized somewhat.  The Paul whose words we read in the letters is clearly the head of an organization, who is giving instructions to subordinates.  At the same time, his advice is often wise, and always well expressed.  The influence of Greek literature on his paradoxical prose style is noticeable; this is an educated man, learned and literate.

A lot of the highlighs I was read as a child were written by Paul, including the famous passage on charity (or love, depending on the translation: Cor. 13.1-14).  He tells us that we brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out of it.  He reminds us that we reap what we sow.  He encourages us to be humble, helpful, and cheerful.  In the best tradition of his master, he assures us that 'He who loves his neighbour has satisfied every claim of the law' (Rom. 13.8).

In Paul's writings there is no trace of Jesus the revolutionary.  Instead, Christianity emerges partly as a way of being stable and dependable.  As he says, you are free to do anything - but not everything is for your good, including extra-marital sex (Cor. 6-12-20).  Members of the Christian community should be honest and upright and religious teachers should lead especially blameless lives. 

Paul's moralizing often spills over into condemnations.  Women were made from men, and therfore should be subordinate; a woman preaching a sermon is an abomination; in fact, women should just be quiet (Cor. 11.8-9; 14.35; Tim. 2.12).  Homosexuality is unnatural and will be punished (Rom. 1.26-7).  All of these judgments are extremely clear in the text. 

Those were my main impressions of the New Testament.  (Revelations is just batshit.)  What conclusions do I draw from my reading of it?  That Jesus meant well and was a charismatic leader but was probably delusional; that his followers very quickly clouded his life with stories about miracles; and that Christianity had both good and bad in it from the very beginning.  I won't try to substantiate those judgments further; they're simply what I concluded after reading the Bible.

I was raised as a Christian, both at home and at school.  Am I still a Christian?  Culturally, yes: I still celebrate Christmas, have an understanding for Christian mythology, and am often moved by Christian art.  I can't imagine being married or buried without some sort of Christian ceremony. 

I also think that there is a lot in the New Testament that makes sense and is ethically valuable.  It's just that I don't see why you need to believe the miraculous portions of the text to value kindness and humility.  I also don't think that we should cling to every word of a book that advises us to punish homosexuals and prevent women from having a voice. 

This is part of the reason I practice Buddhist meditation.  It's true that the more Buddhist scriptures I read, the more offended I am by their nonsensicality and superstition.  But none of the Buddhist scriptures has quite the status or authority of the Bible; there are scriptures, but not one Holy Bible.

It's an interesting historical question how this came to pass.  And an important one, too.  It might explain why nobody (at least in the West) has ever told me that I have to believe anything at all about the Buddha's life, while most Christians would still say that believing in the resurrection defines them.  It might explain how I can (at least in California) be a Buddhist without being a Buddhist.  And why, until Christians stop being Christians, I can't be one too. 

The spirit of the way

About a year ago a friend in England sent me some CDs.  He'd done so before, and usually they contained music by obscure UK bands from the 60s and 70s.  This time, though, they contained lectures by Alan Watts, like Aldous Huxley (and Mr. Propter) a Californian Buddhist who was also a transplanted Englishman.

Watts is often called a philosopher, although he had no formal academic training in that field.  He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, at the heart-centre of Anglican Christianity.  After moving to the US, he qualified as an Episcopalian priest, only to renounce his vocation a few years later.  He moved to California, ending up in a circular house in an artists' colony in Marin County.

He is perhaps best described as a free-lance writer, and he is best remembered for his books about Zen.  Watts' 1957 book The Way of Zen was one of the first widely read books on Buddhism in a Western language.  I meant to read it, but its title is so similar to that of Watts' first book, The Spirit of Zen (1936) that I read the earlier work instead.  (I've since noticed a good, cheap edition of the later book on sale at my local bookstore.)

One of the things that strikes me whenever I read Western books about Buddhism from the pre-war era is how rare they were.  Their writers seem to be working in a vacuum of accurate knowledge about Eastern religions.  In his Foreword, Watts states that before the First World War there was 'only one work on Zen in any European language - Kaiten Nukariya's Religion of the Samurai'.  He also claims that his bibliography - which runs to little more than two pages - is an exhaustive list of the books on Zen that had appeared up to the date his book was published.

Watts is therefore reliant on a few personal channels between Buddhism and the West.  One is Christmas Humphreys, the English barrister who founded the Buddhist Society of London and who is the dedicand of Watts' book.  Another is D.T. Suzuki - not to be confused with SF Zen Center founder Shunryu - whose many books for Western audiences Watts credits for a growing interest in Buddhism among Americans.

Since I read Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism only a year ago, his influence on Watts was quite clear to me.  Like Suzuki, Watts moves from a vague yet appealing characterization of Zen in purely psychological and mystical terms to a concrete description of practice in a Japanese monastery.  Like Suzuki, Watts never faces up to the obvious question: if Zen is a way of thinking free of limitations, why are there all these strict practices? 

A third theme of the book is Zen as a key into the cultures of China and Japan; indeed, the book is subtitled A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East.  This theme is treated mostly in the final chapter, which is the weakest part of the book, or at least the part that feels the most dated.  Watts moves from Zen and samurai through jujitsu and flower-arrangement, all the while avoiding asking how common (let alone representative) such practices are in the China and Japan of his day.

In spite of its limitations, though, the book is a valuable one.  Watts has an intuitive understanding of religious phenomena and writes in a way that is both unpretentious and engaging.  The book is not for scholars, but may be for practitioners.  It is full of passages that perfectly encapsulate the essence of some of the central ideas in Buddhism.  Let's end with Watts' lucid description of karma:

'A man may be free to travel where he likes, but there is no place on earth where he can escape from his own karma, and whether he lives on a mountain or in a city he may still be the victim of an uncontrolled mind.  For man's karma travels with him, like his shadow.  Indeed, it is his shadow, for it has been said, "Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark."'

Game of lives

This Christmas holiday, besides reading the Diamond and Heart sutras, I also finished reading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.  Hesse was a German (later Swiss) writer who was deeply influenced by Eastern mysticism.  He traveled to India and Sri Lanka, practiced meditation, and wrote a novel called Siddhartha based on the life of the Buddha.  The Glass Bead Game, his last novel and his greatest, is profoundly marked by Buddhist themes and perspectives.

The novel takes the form of a biography, written in the distant future, of one Joseph Knecht (whose life is in the narrator's past but the reader's future).  Knecht's life plays itself out in the utopian realm of Castalia, a 'pedagogic province' that has been set up to protect and foster learning and the arts after a period of warfare.  The most promising pupils in every school in the land are sent away to Castalia, where they receive an extensive and varied education before joining the order of scholar-monks.  Joseph Knecht is among them.

The scholar-monks of Castalia spend their time engaged in the study of literature, history, languages, physics, mathematics, and music (they are especially keen on these last two).  They are also devoted to meditation.  But the activity they value most highly is one they invented themselves: the glass bead game.  This is a sort of game that is also a public performance, in which the artistic and scientific productions of the past are condensed and translated into an array of glass beads that provide unsurpassed material for contemplation.

The narrative follows Knecht's progress from diffident pupil to magister ludi, the Master of the Game and one of the chief officers in the Castalian elite.  It also describes the master's eventual decision to leave the order to dedicate himself to teaching in the outside world.  Since the hero of the novel ultimately repudiates Castalia, it might seem that we are being led to mistrust, rather than encouraged to realize, the ideal which the province represents.  But a number of elements in the novel conspire to ensure that our view of Castalia cannot be entirely negative.

The narratives of two characters in particular make the case for the defense.  The first is the Music Master, the high-ranking yet humble official who first discovers Joseph Knecht's promise as a boy.  In his old age, the Music Master attains a sort of enlightenment - described in the most orthodox Buddhist terms, yet without dogmatism or pretentiousness.  The second character is Plinio Designori, a politician who had some experience of Castalia as a boy, but left it to return to the workaday world.  Overwhelmed with anxiety, he exemplifies all the harm the world can do, and thus (by implication) showcases the real value of contemplative repose.  

The message of the novel is perhaps that meditation and learning are fine (even indispensable) things, but that they need to be put to the service of others to have any value.  This is the point of minor characters such as Elder Brother, a sinologist whose reclusiveness comes ultimately to seem selfish, and Father Jacobus, the Benedictine monk who criticizes the Castalian order for not submitting itself to a guiding deity.  This is also the point of Knecht's final renunciation of the Castalian way of life.

If the novel has a weakness, it is in the final part of the narrative of Knecht's life, when he returns to the world to teach but dies soon after.  Hesse clearly wanted to make Knecht into a Christlike figure (he dies while trying to engage with a pupil by swimming across a lake with him), but I would have liked to see evidence of a more genuine educational contribution to a larger number of students (his one pupil is the privileged son of Plinio Designori).

If this is a weakness, it is quickly compensated for in the novel's final section, a collection of three stories that were supposedly written by Knecht as school exercises but which Hesse originally wrote as previous incarnations of the novel's hero.  The first story imagines Knecht as a rainmaker in a primitive village who eventually sacrifices himself to the weather gods to appease his people.  The second reintroduces him as Josephus Famulus, an early Christian ascetic who serves others by hearing their sins and forgiving them.  The last and longest of the three stories is set in ancient India.

This last life tells the story of Dasa, a prince who is raised as a shepherd, ignorant of his true pedigree, because of palace intrigues.  In this brief narrative, Dasa gains a kingdom and loses it, gains a wife and loses her, fathers a son and loses him.  In the background is Dasa's growing relationship with a holy man who sits in silent meditation in the forest.  At the end of the story is a Borges-style twist that forces us to reevaluate what is actual and what is illusory.

The interest of the final three tales lies not only in the number of fine passages that they contain, but in the question of their relationship to the main narrative of Knecht, the supremely sophisticated master of a future artform.  All of the stories show some appreciation for learning, while making clear that true attainment comes only with service.  They also suggest that a form of devotion that combines deep contemplation and useful action can provide a refuge, perhaps even a release, from the turbulent trajectories of our lives.

I was disappointed with the Diamond and Heart sutras partly because in their dry intellectualism they failed to provide an appealing picture of what a good life looks like.  This is precisely what The Glass Bead Game is ultimately all about - ironically, the abstruse intellectual exercise of its title is eventually displaced from the center of our attention.  In the lives of Knecht, Famulus, and (especially) Dasa, we find as attractive and as vivacious a presentation of the central tenets of classical Buddhism as I have seen anywhere.

Brown bread

Last December I decided to sign up for a one-day retreat at Green Gulch Farm.  It was led by Ed Brown, a Soto priest who is also a skilled chef.  He helped set up Greens restaurant, a Zen Center offshoot in the Marina district of San Francisco.  He is also an expert break-maker.  (Although I hadn't heard of Brown before the retreat, I was well-aware that they make their own bread at Green Gulch, having been made to lug sacks of flour into the kitchen during my first stay there.)

I was late getting there.  When I reached the meditation hall the wooden slide doors wouldn't open; eventually someone heard me fidgeting with them and let me in.  (Later that day I realized that there were tiny wooden bolts you had to slide to one side to be able to open the doors.)  The meditation hall was only half full, with about 20 or 30 people having turned up for the one-day sitting.  Brown was making some introductory remarks.

After a the first session of seated meditation, Brown sent us outside for kinhin (walking meditation).  This time though it was more like the random mindful walking around I had seen at Spirit Rock than the controlled, group marching that was the practice at PZI and SFZC retreats.  Instead of stepping slowly and carefully around the room in a circle, we went out into the fields and scattered thoughtfully in all directions.

There was a second dose of seated meditation, and then qi-gong.  Qi-gong, it turns out, is something like tai-chi, or at least it is the way Brown teaches it.  (He led off with the disclaimer that what we were about to do might not be qi-gong; he had once taught a class only to have someone approach him afterwards and insist that what he was doing was not qi-gong).  It was peaceful enough, and a good way of shaking off the discomfort that comes with long periods of sitting.

After lunch there was a question and answer period, which was strangely enough before the dharma talk.  (It was also a lot more interesting than the dharma talk, during which I drifted in and out of sleep a number of times.)  Brown talked about the discomfort of a rigorous Zen practice, and though he said that he practiced a gentler 'Zen lite', he warned against trying too hard to make things comfortable.  'If you keep trying to make things comfortable for yourself, you'll reach a point at which even lying down isn't satisfactory, because even that's not quite comfortable enough.'

In the afternoon there were a couple of more periods of sitting bracketing a period of walking meditation.  This time we walked indoors, since it was now raining outside.  For the last period of sitting we faced into the room, so that we could see each other, the way I learned to sit with PZI and which I've always preferred to the SFZC norm of sitting facing a blank wall.  (In City Center they even paint the windows white so that you can't be distracted by what's going on outside.)

At the end of the day my girlfriend picked me up and surprised me by saying she'd made a reservation at the nearby Pelican Inn.  She'd driven me up and had spent the day cycling up and down the coast (in the rain on the return leg).  We sat by the fire in a very good imitation of a medieval English pub.  I felt slightly stunned and giddy.  It wasn't the pint of beer in front of me; it was the two hours of sitting behind me.

On the sign there was a depiction of a pelican, an old friend of mine from college.  In the middle ages they took the pelican to symbolize Christ, believing that the bird (which often cleans its front-feathers with its beak) took pieces of its own flesh from its breast to feed them to its children.  Not a comfortable procedure, surely; but you have to make your daily bread.  

Dark heart

Recently I decided to start reading up on Buddhism.  Of course I'd read introductory books before, but for a long time I avoided studying up on things, since I wanted to focus on the practice of meditation itself.  But I've come to see this approach as naive - Buddhism in a complex tradition, and with so many different brands out there, it's worth being well informed.

Before the Christmas holiday I borrowed a book with the unpromising title Buddhist Wisdom.  Instead of being a repository of bumper-sticker slogans, though, it in fact contained a translation and commentary of two of the most important Buddhist scriptures, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra.  I thought it would be helpful to start with these, two texts which are central to almost all Zen schools and to many other Mahayana traditions.

Both of these sutras are part of the Sanskrit collection known as the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita).  These scriptures are supposed to have been rediscovered in the possession of the serpentine kings, the Nagas, by the master Nagarjuna.  Scholars used to date them to somewhere between 500 and 800 AD, but now prefer a much earlier date, somewhere around the turn of the millennium.

Both of them have a central place in most Zen practices, and I've heard them recited at both PZI and SFZC retreats.  The Diamond sutra has the additional distinction of being the text that the all-important Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng (639-713 AD) was reading when he attained enlightenment.  A Chinese edition of it from 868 AD, now in the British Museum, also happens to be the oldest printed book in the world.

So what did I make of these two holy texts?  Very little, I'm afraid.  Both are disquisitions on doctrine given by enlightened figures (the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra and Avalokitesvara in the Heart Sutra) to less enlightened disciples (one Subhuti in the first text and one Shariputra in the second).  Both are concerned with meditation, enlightenment, and transcendence.  Both emphasize the dogmas of non-attainment and no-soul, both central features of the Mahayana path.

Beyond this, I had trouble making head or tail of them.  They are full of technical terms, many of them devotional in character (so the Buddha is at one point referred to as 'the Tathagata, the Arhat, the Fully Enlightened One').  The questions the text raises seem either like tricks ('Is there any dharma that the Tathagata has expounded?' answer: no) or like simple invitations to assent ('If there were as many Ganges rivers as there are grains of sand in the great river Ganges, would the grains of sand in them be many?' answer: yes).

If there is one part of these sutras that rises out of the quagmire of unrewarding obscurity, it is the famous statement in the Heart Sutra that 'form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form'.  The teaching here is that of transience - objects are nothing but their passing away, and things passing is what objects are.  This may be clear enough, but it is startling (or jarring) to see it presented as a plain contradiction in terms.  We are back with Heraclitus: 'We are and we are not'.

I received little help from the commentary by Edward Conze, the Anglo-German scholar who did much to make Buddhist scriptures accessible to the West.  Conze announces in his preface, 'What I have left unexplained, seemed to me either obvious or unintelligible', and he has left much unexplained, and therefore unintelligible to his readers, who may not find things as obvious as he seems to think they will.

If Mahayana Buddhism has positive doctrines, neither of these sutras make it easy to understand what they are.  Instead, they wrap a few striking insights in a language which is difficult to penetrate, insistently contradictory, and over-pious to the point of sycophancy.  I may yet become more used to this language and become capable of seeing through it more quickly.  But at this point I must say that the Diamond and Heart Sutras will not be much help to those in need of help or understanding.

One reason I became interested in Buddhism was because it seemed to offer a religious path that was less littered with irrational belief than most others.  The more exposure I get to ancient Buddhist texts, though, the more I'm convinced that this Western image of Buddhism as a rational religion is as much of an imposition on the sources as versions of Christianity that seek to downplay Jesus' resurrection, say, or his miracles. 

What allows me to stay within the Buddhist tent is that nobody inside of it has ever insisted that I take what these sutras say as authoritative (though I have been asked to chant them a few times).  And there's also the practice - sitting in silence, avoiding striving, trying to be kind - which somehow is never less glaringly the way no matter how much of a mess the texts make of pointing to it.

A testament

Around the time that I was becoming aware that I was going to become deeply involved in Zen Buddhism, I decided to start reading the Bible.  Not its greatest hits, not passages I could remember from chapel at school, but the whole damn thing from beginning to end (in translation, admittedly).  I figured that if I read a book a weekend, I could be done in about a year.  Why did I decide to do this?  A range of reasons.  I had a copy of the book at home, and don't have enough money to buy new books (especially Buddhist books, which are always pricey).  It's undoubtedly one of the classics of world culture, so I thought I should have some familiarity with it.  It might teach me more about the ancient societies of the Near East and so help me put my own work on classical Greece into perspective.  Finally, I was expecting it to be, if not the good book, at least a good book, full of memorable tales, powerful phrases, and ageless wisdom.

It's been about a year and a half, and I've now finished reading through the whole of the Old Testament, so I thought I'd tell you how it went.  To sum up, the Old Testament is rubbish.  More precisely, it is terrible, since 'rubbish' captures the wearying incompetence but fails to communicate the active maliciousness radiating from many of its pages.  I remember reading a quotation to the effect that the God of the Old Testament was the most unpleasant character in any work of world literature.  It struck me at the time as the sort of exaggeratedly aggressive claim made by atheists with an axe to grind.  But after reading through the whole book, I must say that it strikes me as true.  Yahweh hates everyone but his chosen people, and takes a childish joy in annihilating his enemies.  He wreaks horrible revenge even on his own people for petty transgressions of his pathologically fussy law, killing people for collecting firewood on the Sabbath, for example.

There are a few passages in the Old Testament that unambiguously condemn homsexuality (like Leviticus 18:23).  There are many more which are clearly misogynistic (like Leviticus 12:1-6, in which a woman is said to be twice as unclean after giving birth to a daughter than to a son).  Granted, most ancient societies were misogynistic (though the Greeks rarely had problems with homosexuality), so perhaps we should judge the people of the Old Testament by the old standards of their time.  But even in this perspective, they and their God seem peculiarly vicious, for example in several times putting to death everyone, without exception, in the cities they conquer (Deut. 2:34; the Greeks tended to kill all the men and let the women and children live on as slaves).  Among all the sacred slaughter and self-righteous hatred, a few episodes of bizarre cruelty distinguish themselves by their sheer randomness, like David's wedding-gift to Saul of two hundred freshly plucked Philistine foreskins (1 Samuel 18:27).

But the problem is not only that the people and God the Old Testament describes are pathological, but also that for the most part the Old Testament simply does not work as literature, let alone as transcendent revelation.  It is incoherent, patchy, and all in all shabbily written.  Why does the Lord put a mark on Cain, 'in order that anyone meeting him should not kill him', (Genesis 4:16) when there is nobody else around on earth yet?  Why do we need to know, in the midst of one of the interminable lists of names that the Old Testament goes in for, that 'this is the Anah who found some mules in the wilderness while he was tending the asses of his father Zibeon' (Gen. 36:26)?  Even as ancient history, the Old Testament does not really work: its ideological biases are painfully obvious, it jumps around between equally repetitive accounts of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and written as it is from the often confused and inevitably parrochial Jewish perspective, it fails to give any clear idea of what exactly is going on.  Jerusalem is often taken, but it is usually hard to know who has taken it.

I should make clear at this point that I don't write any of this with pleasure.  I have an interest in religious syncretism, and am attracted to the idea that all the great religions say more or less the same thing once we look beyond the particular words in which they are saying it.  So I was hoping that the Old Testament would help me relate the Christianity of my youth to the Buddhism that's become my daily practice.  But there's no use mincing words or shrinking away from my own impressions: the Old Testament is on the whole a boring, confused, and evil book, and the less time you spend with it the better.  This is doubly disappointing to me because there are so many Jews in Buddhist groups in San Francisco who keep up a dual practice in the temple and the synagogue and who build bridges between monotheistic and atheistic religions (like Tova Green at SFZC).  I am forced to believe that the modern Jews I know who are open-minded and generous have become that way not because of their sacred text but in spite of it. 

I also want to add that I haven't posted this in a spirit of religious one-upmanship.  I haven't had time to read through many of the ancient Buddhist scriptures, but I have no doubt that they contain an equal or greater amount of inconsistency, randomness, and sheer nonsense as their Jewish counterpart (partly, admittedly, because they are so much longer).  I doubt that they contain quite as much malicious war-mongering, but I'm well aware that Buddhist societies have inflicted their fair share of that all-too human brand of suffering.  Nonetheless, I would notice here that the undisputed centrality of the Old Testament (or at least the Torah or the Pentateuch) means that its deficiencies drag down Judaism with it to a much greater degree than any specific sutra can ever drag down Buddhism.  It may not be fair, but Buddhism's lack of a stable hierarchy of texts allows it to slip out of accusations against any single passage.  Judaism doesn't have that luxury; and nor does Christianity.  But that is for another day, and another post.

I should end with some exceptions to what I have said above.  There are a few books of the Old Testament which are readable (Ruth), exciting (Daniel), or even profound (Job).  But the most spectacular exception of all is Ecclesiastes, a 3rd-century BC treatise traditionally attributed to Solomon.  If I had any rabbinical authority (I don't unfortunately - can you tell?), I would reccommend tearing out all the other books of the Old Testament and letting this book stand on its own.  'Emptiness, emptiness, all is empty' it begins, like the Bodhidarma in the first koan in the Book of Serenity.  'The end of all man's toil is but to fill his belly, yet his appetite is never satisfied' it goes on, like the Buddha in the Dhammapada.  It continues: 'Better one hand full and peace of mind, than both fists full and toil that is chasing the wind'.  Solomon reccommends hard work and feasting as the only real response to the all pervading emptiness, not meditation and oryoki, but it is hard not to see in his brief letter the very spirit of Zen. 

Refuge in the wilderness

A few months ago I decided to take refuge, that is, to take formal vows as a Buddhist; since the particular form of the vows that I'll be swearing have been handed down by Zen lineages, I suppose that will make me a Zen Buddhist.  Since I was raised as an Anglican Christian and am a fundamentalist atheist (that is, non-theist) by conviction, this seemed to be exactly the right thing for me.  I won't pretend that I've reached this decision without some doubts, most of which have to do with subject of my last post.  But I thought I'd write a few words tonight about how I got to this point in my life.  I've described before how I came to meditation through a combination of chronic pain and lapsed Christianity.  I've described how for many years I practised meditation on my own.  So why make a specifically religious commitment?

Like most questions, this one can be answered in several ways.  I can tell you a narrative about how I found myself scheduling conversations with my teacher David Weinstein so that I could prepare for the ceremony known as jukai this coming Spring.  (People in Pacific Zen Institute and elsewhere seem to see this as a kind of confirmation, although I've heard students at San Francisco Zen Center speak of it as 'lay ordination'.)  I can tell you the intellectual reasons for wanting to commit myself to a certain set of practices.  And I can tell you why it seemed right on some visceral level for me, at this stage of my life, to begin defining myself without embrassment as a religious person.  Let's begin with the first, since stories often represent the form of explanation that is most immediately accessible to our understanding.

When I was still in my first or second year at the Anglican secondary school I went to in England, many of my friends went through a process leading to a confirmation ceremony.  Most of them did it almost automatically, and although I don't doubt that there were a few sincere souls, the prospect of confirmation gifts form relatives seemed to figure prominently in their decision-making.  Since I had already started to have doubts about Christianity, and since these doubts were only growing the more I started to find out about theology (and biology), I chose not to take part in the ceremony.  It wasn't a huge thing at the time, but since then there have been moments when I've felt estranged from a tradition that in many senses I feel is unmistakably my own.  Though I've been to a lot of church services of various denominations in my time, I've never once taken communion.

On my third and most recent PZI retreat John Tarrant used several of his evening talks to bring up the refuge ceremony and wonder aloud whether it was a tradition that we still felt had its place in a Westernized, progressive practice.  The reaction in the discussion periods was mixed; I felt myself that while I liked meditation and had no problems with the basic ethical precepts, I wasn't really a Buddhist, at least in the cultural sense.  What made me more open to the entire process was David's talk about the first time he took refuge in Nepal.  It wasn't so much the exotic narrative or the touching analogy with his marriage that drew me in, but the way in which he spent most of the talk admitting that he wasn't sure whether or not he was a Buddhist.  Precisely because he didn't insist on Buddhism as the only path, or advocate it out of some tribal loyalty, I felt more interested in adopting it myself.

The analogy with marriage provides the best way of explaining on a rational level why I feel that taking religious vows is something I want to do.  There is a sense in which there is no reason why two people in love should swear oaths that they will support and care for one another in the future.  You might think that they should care for one another as long as they feel like it, and then go their separate ways.  At the same time, the oaths they swear add some amount of reassurance that one of them won't simply abandon the other when things get too tough.  As the frequency of divorce demonstrates, the added security offered by vows sometimes don't amount to much, but they do amount to something, and that is often enough.  Taking vows to care for youself and others through a religious path that you find inspiring or reliable works in the same way, by giving you an additional motive to keep going when times get tough: to be true to yourself, to be faithful to an oath you swore to yourself alone.

This knowledge that you yourself have committed yourself in the past to a set of practices is reinforced when other people know that you have.  That they know that you've committed yourself to cultivating awareness and kindness towards others will support your practice in various subtle way, just as people knowing you're married will lead them to expect certain types of behaviour from you that might like to pursue for your own reasons.  A friend of mine has told me how comfortable he feels talking to women with his wedding ring on, since it makes it less likely that things he says will be misinterpreted.  I've started wearing beads; I'm not sure that many people make the association with Buddhism, but I guess the ones that do might be less likely to put pressure on me to do various sorts of things I might not like to do for my own reasons.  But there's a less rational reason for wearing them, too.

The less rational reason is that I feel that I want to declare myself as a religious person.  Not in the sense of making an annoucement with a loud-speaker that henceforth I'm going to be calmer or more ethical than other people, but simply in the sense of ceasing to be embarassed about what I am.  After practising various forms of Buddhist meditation for almost a decade now, and after being a member of almost half a dozen different Buddhist communities, I think it's high time that I admitted to others as well as myself that I'm a Buddhist.  I wouldn't know a traditional Buddhist festival if it hit me in the face (assuming they do that), and haven't read many Buddhist sacred texts; I do still celebrate Christmas, ever more lustily, and keep going back to the Western classics.  But I've looked around me and, as I move nearer to my thirtieth birthday, I know where I want to place my bet for a happy life.  It's a confirmation and a gift from someone close to me, all at once. 

This is your brain on meditation

Let's return to the question of the scientific evidence for the benefits of meditation, making the scope of our enquiry slightly broader than pain this time around.  There seems to be a lot of research out there suggesting than regular meditation can improve your overall health, reduce anxiety and depression, and even make you smarter.  As far as I can tell, the claims seem to be true, though I wouldn't be surprised or dismayed if some of them turned out not to be.  But I want to make two points here: the first is that it has always seemed to me that the hardest way to get the benefits of meditation is to try to get the benefits of meditation; and the second is that health, cheerfulness and smarts are all very well, but there's a way in which meditators who focus on getting them are missing out on something much better and readier to hand. 

There are plenty of meta-scientific studies out there showing that research on most novel medical treatments follows a consistent pattern: at first, the new technique is acclaimed, as study after study demonstrates that it has incredible benefits, low costs, and few side-effects.  After a while, there's a reaction, as studies appear that imply that the vaunted effects represent little more than the action of placebo.  In a final stage, researchers settle into a consensus that the novel treatment, though not the panacea it had at first seemed, is also not the fraudulent practice some had accused it of being.  And something similar may well be in store for research on meditation, scientific research into which is still relatively young.

On the other hand, meditation itself is not a new practice but an ancient one, dating back at least 2500 years.  There's a sense in which anyone who has met an experienced and authentic meditator - a monk, say - knows that their practice has developed certain character traits, whether or not they want to develop those traits themselves.  And there's a sense in which what neuroscientists look at (brain waves, neurogenesis, activation of various areas of the brain) are phenomena of secondary importance when it comes to meditation.  We don't experience the ion channels in our neurons, can't tune into our brain waves, don't feel our amygdala lighting up the way it does on a scan.  But we do feel better about the world after sitting still for a little while, and that may be all the evidence some of us need.

Still, it's encouraging to see how the initially sceptical scientific community in the West has fallen slowly but surely head over heels for meditation.  There have been a number of crucial contributions.  One was the medical researcher Herbert Benson's work on the 'relaxation response' and its health benefits in Boston in the 1970s.   Another has been the cooperation encouraged by the spiritual leader Tenzin Gyatso between neuroscientists and advanced meditators at the annual Mind and Life conference, inaugurated in 1987.  And another was the neurologist James Austin's 1998 book Zen and the Brain.  There are now centres dedicated to meditation research across the US, including one at Stanford.

And what have all these researchers found?  I can't hope even to survey the findings of the thousand or more studies on meditation that have been published since the 1970s.  But here a few especially suggestive findings.  Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee studied 201 African Americans in their fifties and sixties who had been diagnosed with heart disease, following these subjects' health over nine years.  Half the group was assigned to a course on diet and exercise, while the other half enrolled in a meditation class.  At the end of the study, the researchers found that the incidence of heart attack and stroke in the group of meditators was only about half the rate in the control group.

Similarly spectacular results were reported for the treatment of depression in a study carried out at UCLA.  The group of subjects is this case was a worryingly small one, of only 36 people, all of whom had been diagnosed with clinical depression, and all of whom were taught to meditate.  Reported symptoms of depression in the group as a whole had nearly halved after three months, and the benefits were retained for the rest of the year.  (The three-month duration of the activation period, reported in a few studies I've seen, chimes with my experience.  It was about three months after I'd started meditating for the first time than I began to feel I had a real handle on my facial pain).

Another smallish study from UCLA looked at the brains of 44 people, half of whom had practised meditation for several years.  MRI scans showed that the hippocampus - an area of the brain associated with memory - was significantly larger in the brains of the meditators than in the control group.  Admittedly, this may have been because people with large hippocampi are pre-disposed to meditate rather than because meditation increases the size of your hippocampus.  But researchers at Harvard and Yale have interpreted similar results as suggesting that meditation actually stimulates the production of more grey and white matter in regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex. 

This is just a glance at a few studies on three aspects of health that meditation has been claimed to improve.  But it looks like we have a simple technique that is free, has no side-effects, is available to everyone, and that reliably makes people healthier, happier, and cleverer.  I'm not in a position to be able to offer any sort of reliable meta-analysis of this research, but the balance of evidence seems clear.  But though I suppose that meditation might make you healthier and happier and smarter, I don't think people should meditate in order to achieve these goals.  I don't really think people should meditate in order to achieve other goals either.  The thing is, I don't think people should meditate to achieve any goals at all.  In fact, meditation for me is partly about realizing that there aren't any goals you need to achieve apart from appreciating the amazing show the daylight is putting on for free.

My first problem with meditating for health and happiness (or even wealth, as I'm sure some do) is that it makes the practice into another kind of striving.  Even sophisticated (or just plain honest) Christians like C.S. Lewis have always stressed that prayer isn't about getting what you want, but about putting your heart in the right place so that you want (or at least accept) what you get.  And as a matter of observation it seems that you only stop being nervous about a presentation when you stop making its success such a big deal; you only stop worrying about a date when you realize that your happiness isn't going to depend on its outcome (though your ego might); and that in general, and paradoxically, things only start falling into your lap once you've sat down and given up reaching for them.

My second problem with focusing excessively on the medical gains of meditation is that it misses the real windfall.  When they asked Gautama what he'd gained from enlightenment, he reportedly (I get this from Henry Miller) replied, 'Nothing - and that's exactly why it's enlightenment'.  Stopping worrying about your job, your health, even your family, must all ultimately be part of an understanding that there's nothing you can possibly lose (or fail to gain) that will take away this moment, with the lamplight and the stillness and sounds of the night.  And it may be that that realization will heal your heart and grow your brain.  I don't care.  I sit in the half-light, listen to the silence, look around at the restful objects teaching me how not to move, knowing there's no improvement I can make that will make this moment more true.

Some light on me

Since I'm writing under a pseudonym, maybe it's a good idea if I tell you a little about myself and how I reached this wonderful end point of being a bewildered beginner at Zen.  Well, I was born in Calgary but never really lived there.  I lived in England but I'm not really from there.  I study ancient Greece from hypermodern California.  And I know a thing or two about Augustine and Aquinas but couldn't really tell a Dogen from a Hakuin at this stage.  Despite that, there are two main things that have apparently made me well-suited for a Buddhist practice: being a Christian and being in pain.

What kind of Christian was I?  Several.  My first great teacher was my mother, who seems to know nothing about Christian doctrine and cares even less.  My earliest memories of organised religion are of stuffy churches in army barracks that we went to as a family every Sunday as an obligation.  But once I remember we were swimming in the lake outside our family cottage, the sun was laying down a line of light on the water like a blurry path, and my mother was telling me that this was what was wonderful about Christianity, that it wasn't about any particular God but just enjoying being in that light.  Even then the comment struck me as pretty obviously false, but I sensed that behind or beside it was something interesting.

When I moved to England I went to a traditional Anglican boarding school where we were made to go to Chapel three times a week, sometimes four.  There was also an optional candlelit mass on Friday nights that I would go to.  I remember sitting in a pew at one of these and looking up at the light falling on the stone arches opposite me.  At some point the Reverend asked us in Theology what being a Christian was all about.  We suggested love, kindness, going to church, but all those answers were wrong; apparently the core of the faith was to believe that Jesus redeemed our sins by dying on the cross.  I decided that I either didn't understand that or did and didn't believe it, so I must not be a Christian.  It didn't make me sad, because I was sixteen, but later I'd miss that moment in chapel.

Near the end of my first year of university I started feeling pain in my face.  The doctor told me I needed to relax, so I went to Italy for the summer, drank lots of red wine, and started meditating after reading an article about it on the internet.  I did it in secret and pretended I was doing something different if someone caught me in the act, like wanking.  After a while my facial pain got better and I felt like something interesting was just behind or underneath the light falling on the wall in my room.  Then I got hit on the head playing rugby, and have had a headache ever since.  I stopped meditating because it scared me to think of what might be happening to my concussed brain.  I tried exercising three times a day, not drinking tea, drinking a bottle of wine every night, switching girlfriends.

And somehow I was still meditating, not every day or every other day, but occasionally.  I joined a group the term I did my final exams at Oxford and didn't like it much, but felt lighter walking home hugging my cushion.  I went to a temple in London and didn't like that much either, but remember once noticing the way the light was falling on a tree outside and kind of enjoying it.  When I moved to California, I found myself studying what I loved with a group of close friends in a land of eternal sunshine, but for some reason I was still suffering.  I tried taking more pain medication, using anaesthetic patches on my neck, getting a tooth removed.  And somehow I kept meditating, off on and on, and then suddenly on and on, every day, with a new technique another grad student taught me.

I still use that concentration practice, but there was something about it that pushed me more towards discipline than freedom.  I spent a year being unhappy but calm and wondering if I was simply calm but unhappy.  When I walked into Wind in Grass I found a bunch of nutcases in party hats who seemed neither calm nor happy but keen on wondering.  I didn't take to some of the traditional koans - I couldn't care less about whether the dog had buddhanature, whatever that was.  I didn't like the liturgy, especially when we chanted about people like Guanyin - who was he?  But every so often I'd find myself sitting there, wondering at the pain and the play of light, and I'd be in the lake with my mother, the chapel in England, and also no other place but here, after all this time the only real place to be.

Ordinary writing

Whenever I join a new meditation group, the first thing on my mind is resistance.  I didn't like the way the group in Oxford shackled my mind to counting individual breaths, instead of letting it roam off in search of the place it started from (as had been my private practice).  I didn't like the way my first teacher at Stanford invited us to visualize a ball of light at the centre of the body - what about the breath?  The doubts I had about the various styles of meditation extended to the guiding philosophies of these different communities.  The temple in London was too ornate and decorated, too distracted by liturgy and ceremony.  The neuroscientist who led my second group at Stanford sometimes seemed a shade too secular for my tastes.  Where was the religion?

For several weeks after my first visit to Wind in Grass, I didn't like it (and not because of continuing death threats, which I did like).  There was an older man who preached to us in a black bib adorned with what looked like a wooden curtain-ring.  Was he a priest?  The tall confident businessman kept talking during meditation, and rather than offering guided relaxation he usually provided an anecdote about a student's barely comprehensible question and a master's spectacularly unhelpful answer.  ('Does a dog have buddha-nature?' 'No' - though in the other version of that one the master answered, 'Yes').  And when the older man spoke to us, he would sometimes inform us  that we were all - including yours truly, who'd walked in the door three weeks previously and who was secretely still visualising balls of light - buddhas.

This post is for the people who ask me what Zen is.  Since they are asking me, the answer they'll get isn't going to be learned, or even well-informed (after carefully avoiding studying it, I have so far succeeded in preserving a virtually unsullied ignorance).  But it's an answer of sorts, and here it is.  What I've found most distinctive about the approach of the Americans in party hats (that is, the Zen buddhas) are two things.  The first are koans, riddles or anecdotes or poems or prayers that originated as scraps of conversations involving the old Chinese or Japanese masters that somebody somewhere found helpful (or unhelpful) and wrote down.  The second is the emphasis of direct perception, the constant reminders that we may be on a path, but we're also already at our destination and just need to realize that by looking up.

Nobody really told me what to do with the koans the first few times I went to Wind in Grass, though I've since discovered there are two rules: (i) there is no wrong way of working with a koan, apart from thinking that you're doing it wrong; and (ii) there is no right way of working with koans.  The first few koans I heard went into one ear and burned up in a ball of light.  My first ever reaction to a koan was to laugh, which it turns out is the most respectful way of taking them.  The one that made me laugh was the one about the student who goes to the master complaining of being anxious, unhappy, the lot.  She tells him to spend the next year greeting everything that happens to him with the thought, 'Thank you very much; I have no regrets whatsoever'.  He tries it and it fails miserably.  He goes back to the teacher and tells her.  She says, 'Thank you very much; I have no regrets whatsoever.'

There are lots of koans that get us to the second thing I've found characteristic of this approach, the affirmation that we're already here.  In one, a student asks a master, 'What is right speech?' and he replies, 'Your question'.  In another, the student asks what the way is (which seems like a good question); the answer is 'ordinary mind'.  The student wants more guidance; 'How do you turn towards it?' he presses.  And the response comes, 'If you turn towards it, you turn away from it.'  (Thanks.)  Sometimes the koan seems to be hinting that even when you're searching for something, you might already have found something in the searching.  One student told his master about the brilliant, beautiful light that was on the margins of his conception, but that receded from his grasp whenever he reached for it.  'Forget about the light,' said the master; 'tell me about the reaching'. 

When Chris told our group that we were all buddhas, he was working along these lines.  But I admit that at the time I was scandalized.  The arrogance!  I suppose that somewhere inside I had been thinking of Siddhartha Gautama as unapproachably virtuous, almost divine, like Jesus (even though I stopped believing Jesus was divine when I was 15, and was attracted to Gautama because he wasn't like Jesus).  But of course all 'buddha' means is 'awake'.  There's a story that they asked Gautama if he was a god and he said, 'No, I'm human'; and then they asked, 'So what makes you different', and he said, 'I'm awake.'  That's all.  And it makes you wonder what makes your sleep so sound, and why you're apparently so convinced you're always dreaming.

Sometimes I worry whether this approach isn't slightly too empowering: if we're perfect already, and only have to wake up and realize it, why bother being honest or kind, or with any of the ethical precepts in the Eightfold Path?  The response I've heard is that once we come to realize that nothing needs to be added to this moment (yes, this one), there won't be any desire to cheat or take.  I'm still working with that answer, letting it be a koan.  In the meantime, I think of the lines from the Japanese master Hakuin Ekaku that we sometimes speak together, that 'this very place is paradise/ this very body the buddha'.  It's like what my Baptist grandmother used to say in New Brunswick, that whatever we did, God still loved us.  And it's like the words I read in a book that some freak gave me one day on Oxford Street, by a Hindu guru: 'There will come a time when you realize that all you want or need is Krishna, and Krishna is already here'.