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.

Mind the gap

A man is hit by a truck somewhere in Tibet.  As he lies dying by the side of the road, a red-robed monk hurries up to him, rouses him, and leads him through an elaborate ritual.  When the monk has finished, the man dies, apparently in peace.  This is one of a number of wonderful tales of old Tibet told by Sogyal Rinpoche in his Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.  Some are believable, others less so.  But the book as a whole is a warm and candid overview of the practice of Tibetan Buddhism by an acknowledged master with considerable experience of teaching to Westerners. 

I took this book out of the library (a cardboard box) at Wind in Grass before heading to Europe in September.  I'd heard it was a classic and wanted to have a survey of the Tibetan path after my exploratory incursions into the Tibetan Tse Chi Ling center in the Lower Haight.  It does offer a good introduction to Vajrayana thinking and I can see why it's become a classic, since it's engaging and clearly written.  Having said that, my sense that I was getting the best possible presentation of Tibetan orthodoxy made it easier for me to recognize that this particular style of Buddhism is not for me.

The book is actually many books in one.  It's a repository of yarns about the great masters and odd characters of a Tibet that was lost under the tank-tracks of the Chinese invasion.  It's a memoir of Sogyal's own experiences of that world, and a tribute to his various teachers.  It's an accessible handbook of the most important Tibetan meditation techniques, especially those focusing on the hour of death, like phowa (the practice the monk administered to the man dying on the road).  It's a meditation on death itself and of the way it's approached and handled in traditional Tibetan and contemporary Western culture.  And it's a guide to and defense of traditional Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about death, rebirth, and karma.

In this last aspect, Sogyal has been very impressed by accounts of near-death experiences, which he sees as confirming traditional Tibetan teachings about the stage of transition between life and death.  For a fuller defense of the doctrine of reincarnation, he turns to scripture, where he finds appealing analogies for the way consciousness might be passed on - the transference of a flame from lamp to lamp, for instance.

Later in the book, though, we're plunged into an eschatology that such attractive images can't justify.  We're told, for instance, that we'll wander for 49 days after our deaths as invisible homunculi, during which time our karma will sweep us towards a good or bad rebirth.  It reminded me of Aquinas, whom I studied at college, whose Five Ways argue that a God (at least, a first mover of the chain of causation) must exist, but which do nothing to legitimate the entire panoply of Catholic religiosity that the philosopher goes onto sanction in the rest of his work.

I was also reminded of religious types who stop you in the street by asking questions like, 'are you interested in life?'  The answer is yes, of course - but the connection between that affirmative answer and their crackpot theories of what valuing life should consist in almost always seems a great deal more tenuous than they take it to be.  Sogyal is not quite as vapid, but the transition from his statements about the importance of death to his detailed descriptions of his own culture's account of death is at many points an uncomfortable one. 

Still, there is much to cherish here.  The book is steeped in a ready ecumenism which often has its author recommending that people meditate on an image of Jesus if they prefer him to the Buddha; the Virgin Mary often features as an acceptable substitute for Avalokitesvara.  The sketch of meditation at the start of the book as a time when the mind is allowed to sink into rigpa, the ground of being, is one of the best that I've come across.  And there are plenty of statements which did strike me as straightforwardly true, such as the tendency of our developed lifestyles to make the mind skittish and distracted. 

If old-fashioned religiosity isn't your thing, be prepared.  Sogyal will assure you of the occurrence of several miracles, including the manifestation of a 'rainbow body' at the death of his teacher (an event which was sensed, he insists, by monks hundreds of miles away).  And although he usually tries to hone in on the essence of a practice for Western consumption, he still lists the full mantras that you should use to ease your loved one's journey across the gap between death and rebirth. 

Since I was often touched by this book and the practices it described, I tried one at Wind in Grass the other night.  I simplified the phowa practice, invited everyone to picture themselves as drops of water merging with a great ocean, or as a candle-flame being absorbed in a greater light.  People here take readily to this kind of experiment, which I'm grateful for, and most of them seem to have enjoyed it.  One woman said that as a vet she encounters death all the time, and it's good to have a way of dealing with it that isn't simply pretending it isn't significant.  I told them I wanted to try the practice as an experiment, not because I thought we were all going to die after the session.  Although, of course, as one person pointed out, at some point we were.



 

Over the bridge

Here I am again, not writing a blog post.  To be more specific: 'Empty-handed I go, and behold the spade is in my hands;/ I walk on foot, and yet on the back of an ox I am riding;/ When I pass over the bridge,/ Look, the water isn't flowing - but the bridge sure does'.  I stole that from the fifth-century Zen poet Fudaishi, and it doesn't make much sense.  I stole the poem from D.T. Suzuki's book, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, which I decided to read the week I did a three-day retreat at San Francisco Zen Center. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki is not to be confused with SFZC's revered founder Shunryu Suzuki; though this in fact often happened, and the priest is said to have invariably responded to being confused with the scholar by saying, 'He is the big Suzuki.  I am the little Suzuki'.  Top of my list for things to read that week had been the little Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, but there wasn't a copy of it in the library, so I went with the big Suzuki's introduction instead.  It turned out to be exactly as nonsensical as Fudaishi's poem.

Despite its emphasis on approaching things as if for the first time, I get the feeling that the beginner is not well served by the existing introductory books on Zen.  If you read the reviews of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind on Amazon, you'll see the occasional note of pious praise punctuating a flow of complaints about the book's incomprehensibility.  Introductory books about Buddhism that are clear, succinct, and accessible are not hard to come by at all, from Damien Keown's Very Short Introduction to Rahula's more scholarly classic What the Buddha Taught.  But for some reason the Zen sect has trouble making itself understood.  Insiders say that this is because the tradition contains mysteries that you can only appreciate if you find them out for yourself; cynics on the other hand will insist that the lack of clarity is a feature of a system that aims mainly to erect high fences against outsiders.  But not only is the language designedly obscure in order to keep people out; how well you can master its eccentricities determines an internal hierarchy, topped by teachers who can say whatever comes to mind.

I can't say how true that was of Zen as practiced at various periods in its long history, but American Zen certainly seems reasonably open to newcomers.  On the other hand, it still has problems with internal hierarchy.  But if you want a satisfying brief statement of crazy Zen, look no further than Suzuki's book, which has a chapter in it entitled 'Illogical Zen', and several more whose content would have justified similar titles.  Many of these chapters seem to consist entirely of mad koans whose point always seems to be the same: abandon all theory and grasp the reality right in front of your nose.  You might think telling that to people in plain language might be enough (and would also allow the ideas behind the recommendation to be criticized), but there's always the counter that people need to be surprised, confused, or shocked into dropping their stories and theories and excuses.  At times, there is an attractive rebelliousness about this tendency.  When Joshu was asked, 'Isn't it a praiseworthy thing to pay respect to Buddha?' he replied, 'Yes, but it's better to go without even a praiseworthy thing'.

After a few of these stories, though, one's patience runs thin.  Suzuki retells one in which the philosopher Doko came to a Zen master and asked, 'With what frame of mind should one discipline oneself in the truth?'  The master answered unhelpfully but typically, 'There is no mind to be framed'.  Doko was a reasonable man, so he persisted.  'If there's no mind to be framed, what are all these monks doing here?'  The master was an unreasonable man: 'No monks here'.  The philosopher was exasperated, and asked, 'How can you tell me a lie like that to my face?'  His Zen antagonist wasn't fazed: 'I have no tongue'.  Finally, the philosopher gave up, admitting to the master that he had trouble following his reasoning.  'Neither do I understand myself', said the master, perhaps with a feeling of triumph, but maybe just with the guilty sensation you sometimes get when you know you've been unreasonable to someone who was just looking for some simple answers.

Suzuki himself presents these stories with apparent approval, but by the end of the book he's doing what the master in that last koan refused to do: he's explaining why there are so many Zen monks in the East, and telling you what they're up to.  That's where the radical antinomianism of Zen breaks down, when it's faced with the undeniable fact that Zen is not just the direct seizure of what's there, but a set of practices and institutions that are as strict and concrete - if not more so - than piano-lessons and the swim club.  And it's probably a good thing that the absurdity gets tired and goes to bed at some point, because there's a point  - somewhere in that story I just quoted - at which it starts to make a fool of itself.  I'm no fan of ossified institutionalism, especially in religious traditions that are supposed to be about compassion and humility.  But I'm also no fan of nonsensicality and claims to have gotten beyond rationality once and for all - the perennial excuse for bad philosophy, or just run-of-the-mill sloppy thinking.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not the kind of rationalist who thinks that reason can explain everything and is universally applicable to every situation life throws at us.  I'm also not so ignorant as to believe that humans are entirely rational creatures - our minds are indeed like icebergs, with the rational tip distracting us from darker masses below the surface.  But I also think that there's a difference between admitting that there are certain situations that rational thought doesn't enter into - falling in love, say - and claiming that such situations trump, disqualify, or defeat rationality in all its forms.  Zen koans, just like faith, may bypass rationality or transcend it, but to say that they preclude or discredit it is going too far.  Indeed, to say that is to fall foul of some well-known philosophical traps.  All of these traps are set by irrationalists themselves when they go to the extreme of saying that nothing makes sense.

If nothing makes sense, neither does the proposition, 'Nothing makes sense', in which case nobody has any reason to believe it; indeed, it has no meaning at all.  Socrates skewered Parmenides by wondering whether his claim that all truths are relative was itself relative.  If it was, Socrates had no reason to go along with it; if it wasn't, the claim provided a counter-example to itself.  The logical positivists declared that all meaningful sentences had to be testable or analytic; but since 'All meaningful sentences have to be testable or analytic' turned out to be neither testable or analytic, it couldn't be meaningful.  And if all the thoughts and stories in your head - as Zen seems to suggest - are equally meaningless, then so are thoughts about Zen and the thoughts of Zen.  Of course, that is a conclusion that most Zen masters would willingly accept, but it leaves them in a dangerous place, where anything can be said because everything is equally senseless.

And that seems to bring Zen perilously close to nihilism, an association that Suzuki is eager to fend off. It's true, he says, that Zen declares that everything is empty, but what emerges when that is realized is joy in the present moment.  But isn't joy in the present moment empty too, bringing us back to nihilism?  Zen sets up an emptiness vortex that it's difficult for Buddhism to escape.  Maybe it's just that I'm skeptical that compassion is really what does emerge when people are convinced that anything goes - maybe what more often emerges is the domination of the less by the more bold, of the more by the less scrupulous.  Which is why my confirmation got me thinking about whether I'm really a Zen person rather than an ordinary old Buddhist.  After all, though Theravada belief is radical enough - it denies the existence of stable individual identities, for instance - it is understandable and coherent.  If you get the feeling that the bridge is flowing under you rather the water, maybe it's time to go back to the four noble truths.

On the lawpath

 
'What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind'.  So begins the Dhammapada, the third-century BC compilation of aphorisms traditionally attributed to the Buddha himself which is generally recognized as one of the most important Pali scriptures.  When I first started meditating, I had little interest in reading ancient Buddhist texts, and what interest I had was mediated through my knowledge of Latin and Greek, later descendents of the ancient Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali.  When I got involved with a Zen group in a lay lineage, this evasion of texts - unusual for me, a professional classicist - became even more pronounced.  Even though we worked regularly with koans spoken into the room, the emphasis on the direct apprehension of the real drove me to the cushion, not to the library.

Now that I'm in the process of taking refuge (a sort of Buddhist confirmation), I've decided that I need to open my eyes a bit and explore what it is that I'm getting into.  This is the case even though I was drawn into Buddhism not because I found its philosophical system noticeably more sound than others I'd encountered, but because I found the practice of meditation helpful.  Deciding what to read, and what to read first, has been difficult.  In contrast to Judaism or Christianity, Buddhism has no single holy text that stands unchallenged at the top of a hierarchy of sacred or inspired works in the way that the Torah and the Gospel (and the Old and New Testaments) are ranked above the Talmud and the Church Fathers, or Maimonides and Augustine.  And the canon of Buddhist sacred texts is large: besides the Pali scriptures - more than ten times longer than the Bible on their own - are the large number of other writings in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan.

Fortunately, my choice is limited to the books I can borrow for free from the 'wine-box of wisdom' at Wind in Grass Sangha and from the library at the interfaith center at Stanford.  (I could turn to academic libraries, but that would feel too much like work.)  After skimming the titles once or twice I settled on the Dhammpada, in a slim Penguin volume translated and introduced by Juan Mascaró, the Mallorcan polymath who has the unusual distinction of having translated several works from one of his non-native languages into another.  The Dhammapada seemed to fit the bill: it looked venerable, authoritative, and old - and when it comes to figuring out traditions, the very beginning is often a very good place to start.  It also looked short, and at this stage of my pratice and my career I have no interest in wading through endless sutras, nikayas, pitakas, or any other sorts of basket.

The most striking - though hardly surprising - feature of the Dhammapada for someone engaged in modern lay practice is that its focus is rather starkly on monks and hermits, full-time mendicant holy-men, and not at all on working people who meditate in their spare time.  It may even seem as times as if monks alone are capable of achieving nibbana (the Pali version of nirvana): 'Few cross the river of time and are able to reach nirvana: most of them run up and down only on this side of the river'.  Connected to this foregrounding of professional meditators is an acceptance that the path of spiritual development is difficult and that it has many discrete steps.  There is nothing here of the Zen insistence that the practitioner is already perfect, already a Buddha.  And this, of course, is one of the main differences between the orthodox Theravada philosophy of the Dhammapada and the reformist Mahayana perspectives of most of the people I sit with in San Francisco.

But to stop here would be to give this ancient work short shrift.  Its chief merit is the lucid simplicity of its verses.  Some would no doubt complain that it sometimes verges on simple-mindedness, but it more often transcends doctrinaire Buddhism in apothegms that would seem equally true in any tradition.  Mascaró in his introduction juxtaposes its verses with choice passages from the Spanish mystics, especially Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz.  Such games of syncretism - like that played by Aldous Huxley in his Perennial Philosophy - are easy and pleasant enough to play, though it must cross our minds that in such vast and complex traditions, one can find what one likes, and therefore write whatever narrative one likes too.  Nonetheless, there is such a thing as truth that never dies.  'Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love.  This is a law eternal.'

The fall of tortoises

Zen Buddhism advises you to step off the 100-foot high pole, but though last week's post was a cliffhanger, I won't walk off that particular cliff until next week.  This week I prefer to talk about a Japanese man who pretended to be a cat.  But wait!  I can explain, though not entirely.  My sister lived in Japan for four years (and now she has lived in Korea for the same amount of time - you can read her blog about it to the right of this post).  During the whole time she lived in that fascinating country, I never visited her once.  Japan, you see, is far away, and in any case I was more interested in traveling to Italy back then.  I also never knew that I'd become interested in Zen; not to imply that Zen has anything to do with Japan, but you know what I mean.  Despite my never visiting her, she did send me innumerable postcards and also give me a number of Japanese novels for Christmas.  I've read one of them now, I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume (in translation!), and I thought I'd tell you about it.

I am a Cat is narrated by - you guessed it - a cat.  Soseki originally wrote only a single short-story employing that particular narrative technique, but when readers whined for more he ended up expanding the story into a full-length novel.  The novel shows the strain of having to stretch out such a simple idea over hundreds of pages: soon enough, the focus shifts away from the cat and his thoughts to the lives and conversations of the characters the cat is constantly watching.  The main character is Sneaze, the cat's 'master' (though we know who is really charge).  A bumbling schoolmaster, he enjoys frequent visits by his friends, Waverhouse, a cynical free-thinker, Coldmoon, a young scholar, and Singleman, a Zen practitioner.  The novel has not one plot but several, as various fads and schemes pass into Sneaze's consciousness and - not too long aftwerwards - out of it.  It is written in a light, whimsical, and thoroughly English style, reminiscent of nothing so much as P.G. Wodehouse. 

Soseki's novel is not Zen scripture in the sense of the Diamond Sutra, nor Zen literature in the sense of the Blue Cliff Record, nor even a Zen book like Bring me the Rhinoceros.  But it does arguably get to the essence of Zen in a fairly direct way, partly simply by swapping the heroic narrator Western readers have been used to since Conrad for an ordinary domestic cat.  But the cat also makes statements that could pass as pithy summaries of the Zen approach to things: hearing humans muttering about how life would be so much easier as a cat, he observes that 'if they really want their lives to be nice and easy, it's already in their own good power to make them so.  Nothing stands in their way.'  There are also occasional references to Zen institutions and traditions, often lightly mocking, such as the story about His Ineffable Holiness the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng, who discovered that placing one's buttocks on a cold stone was a reliable corrective for rushes of blood to the head.

But a more serious case for Zen is made in a long speech in which Singleman tries to convince his friend Sneaze that however hard you try to fix things, new problems will always arise.  'For the real issue', he goes on, 'the problem in your mind, remains unsettled, however hard you wrestle it around, until your dying day...Nobody, however mighty, can do as he likes with the world.  None can stop the sun from setting, none reverse the flow of rivers.  But any man is able to do as he likes with his own mind.'  Hence the importance, says Singleman, of a systematic program for developing control of the mind, and that is what Zen offers.  He ends by quoting a stirring quartet supposedly composed ex tempore by Sogan, a 13th century Chinese master, when faced with decapitation by a Mongol swordsman, which ends with the defiant declaration 'One is not awed/ by threats of such a blowless blow'.  (The Mongol swordsman was apparently so disconcerted that he dropped his sword and fled.)

Singleman's comments are predicated on a distinction between Western 'positivism' and Japanese quietism: 'The progressive positivism of Western civilization has certainly produced some notable results, but, in the end, it is no more than a civilization of the inherently dissatisfied.  The traditional civilization of Japan does not look for satisfaction by some change in the condition of others but in that of the self.'  Placed in that light (and described in that manner) the traditional Japanese way certainly looks attractive, but Western readers may want to reassess their initial reaction after reading one of Singleman's examples: you may, he says 'live under an oligarchic government which you dislike so much that you replace it with a parliamentary democracy', but changing it will do no good.  After a century of Japanese history, this doesn't just look flaky: its falseness has been demonstrated by events.

But it would be misleading to present Singleman's views as if they were straightforwardly those of Soseki, who later on exposes his Zen character to considerable mockery at the hands of Waverhouse.  Waverhouse even claims that Singleman's Zen proselytizing has driven people insane.  One man, he says, 'went to the Zen center at Kamakura [where my teacher David Weinstein studied] and there became a lunatic'.  Another, with a tendency to gluttony, began mixing up his koans and his meals, and 'on one occasion, he informed me somewhat ponderously that beef cutlets might soon be coming to roost in my pine trees'.  Some of Singleman's own statements don't even require outside ridicule: when asked how to practice Zen, he replies: 'There's really nothing to learn.  Just concentrate, as all the Zen masters advise, on the pure, white cow which stands there in the alley.'

But however much institutionalized Zen is - quite rightly - pilloried in the novel, the cat often returns to the essential teachings.  'The proper study of mankind is self', he reflects at one point.  'The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars - they are all no more than other names for the self.  There is nothing a man can study which is not, in the end, the study of the self.  If a man could jump out of his self that self would disappear at the moment of his jumping.'  And he tells a story (if this isn't a koan, what is?) about how the playwright Aeschylus thought so much that his hair fell out, at which point he was killed by a passing eagle who decided to try to smash open a tortoise's shell by dropping it on the Greek's shiny pate, which it had mistaken for a stone.  There is no finer use of the Classics than this little anecdote; and no finer admonition about the dangers of thinking too much.

Brave yellow hay

Old-time (13th century) Zen master Dogen said that studying the way is about studying the self, so here's more about me (not the real me; the pseudonymous one I'm more sure about).  Seeing that he's a fictional character, it's not all that surprising that there's no good picture of Mr. Propter out there on the internet, so I had to make do with one of Aldous Huxley for my blogger's profile instead.  When I introduced Mr. Propter a few weeks ago, the introduction amounted to a summary of some of the central ideas in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (to give the longer title of the US editions of the book).  There Huxley comes across as rather straightforwardly as a proponent of a certain kind of social and political detachment, and more centrally of a particularly uninstitutionalized form of religious experience.  He is, to put it more simply, a mystic, or at least an admirer of mystics.  But if you read some of Huxley's other novels you come away with a quite different impression.

At first sight, Huxley's novelistic career presents a rather unusual development, progressing from the light-hearted yet mordant satires of the 1920s, to the spiritual and psychedelic utopianism of his final novel Island.  The strangeness of writer's artistic trajectory is mirrored by what seems an unusual course through life for Huxley the man.  Scion of a distinguished intellectual family - Matthew Arnold the poet and critic was his grandfather, and Thomas Henry Huxley ('Darwin's pit-bull') his great uncle - Huxley received the conventional education of an English gentleman, attending Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford.  By the end of his life, Huxley had relocated to California and transformed himself into a disciple of the neo-Hindu mystic Prabhavananda and an enthusiastic advocate of New Age causes.  The Doors of Perception, his report on his experiments with mescaline, published in 1954, went on to become one of the literary touchstones of the counter-culture of the 1960s.

Once you scratch the surface, though, and read through a few of Huxley's novels, this bewildering career begins to take the form of an understandable enough progression.  It is true that the early novels are taken up almost entirely with the witty but ultimately meaningless chatter of the English upper-classes, and that the rather perfunctory episodes that punctuate their dialogue are chiefly calculated to expose the hypocrisy and moral emptiness of that particular slice of social life.  In a characteristically inconsequential tale-within-a-tale embedded in Huxley's début, Crome Yellow, published in 1921 and set in an aristocratic country-house, a naive young suitor makes the acquaintance of three ethereally spiritual sisters, who declare their distate for the 'coarse' activity of eating.  Later, he unintentionally comes across them feasting surreptiously in a hidden chamber, their hands clutching chicken-drumsticks to their mouths.

And yet it is possible to discern something else beneath the impeccably witty surface of these early books.  What that something else is precisely is difficult to tell, but it's unmistakably present.  Mr. Gumbril, the hapless anti-hero of Huxley's 1923 follow-up Antic Hay, in a rare break from galivating around fashionable London, reflects that there's 'a quiet...in spite of everythng, at the back of everything.  Lying awake at night, sometimes - not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep - the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece...The quiet grows and grows.  Beautifully and unbearably.  And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps.  Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances...Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can't face the advancing thing.  One daren't.  It's too terrifying, it's too painful to die.  Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone.  Think of the women you'd like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends...'

There are similar moments in Brave New World, Huxley's 1932 vision of a scientific future which has rather surprisingly proven to be by far his most enduring work.  The world of the novel is both utopian and dystopian.  All sources of pain and discomfort have been removed by scientific progress and the systematic application of reason; and if anything does go wrong, citizens can have recourse to soma, a kind of souped-up valium that acts as a panacaea for mental anguish.  But precisely because of this, life has lost all meaning.  A hint of where that meaning might still be looked for comes when Mustapha Mond, the Contoller, decides to suppress a new book because its ideas might lead people to 'lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness'.  And as the Controller concluded, this was quite possibly true, 'but not, in the present circumstance, admissable.' 

Huxley's denigration of chemically assisted happiness in Brave New World sits rather uneasily with his later eager adoption of drugs as shortcuts to spiritual experience.  And for those inspired by Mr. Propter's advocacy of an autonomy grounded in meditative practice, Huxley's later championing of the psychedelic cause can seem something of a disappointment.  As late as 1952, in his non-fiction work The Devils of Loudun, Huxley explained that there were two paths for those seeking to transcend the dissatisfactions of the ordinary self:  downward transcendence, sought for in alcohol, which provided some refuge, but at the cost of the obliteration of all consciousness; and upward transcendence, which offered an escape from the mundane while preserving, and even enhancing, clarity of thought.  Huxley died in 1963, too early to witness the discrediting of psychotorpic drugs as a toll-free highway to higher consciousness.  But the quiet lurking below the chatter of his earlier novels can still remind us to listen out, every once in a while, for footsteps.


 

Mr. Propter's koans

It's been some weeks since I told you about my real self, so I thought it might be about time that I told you about my fake self as well.  It is was when I was (really) living in Italy that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Propter.  He was in a novel called After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley (pictured - no, not there).  I'd read some of Huxley's earlier novels, mordantly satirical and sharply witty observations of the social life of the English upper classes, and enjoyed them well enough.  If you're careful you can detect in them the seeds of the meditative mysticism that would later reach full bloom in Island, Huxley's final novel, and that would eventually collapse into the championing of psychotropic substances in such works as The Doors of Perception.  But I don't know of a fuller or more coherent expression of Huxley's mature views on meditation, God, and much else besides, than that communicated through the speeches of the character Mr. Propter in the first part of After Many a Summer.

The novel follows the progress of Jeremy, an English historian, on his mission to the lavish mansion (modeled on Hearst Castle) of the oil-baron Jo Stoyte.  Jeremy has been employed to examine the manuscripts in the Stoyte private collection, but soon becames absorbed in the drama playing itself out among the residents of the mansion.  Pete, a young idealist, is hopelessly in love with Virginia, Stoyte's unreasonably young and desirable girlfriend, who is cheating on her wealthy lover with the house physician, the cynical and manipulative Dr. Obispo.  Down in the valley, vigilantly independent of Stoyte's money, the luxuries of his mansion, and the lure of his girls, lives Mr. Propter, a retired professor, who dedicates himself to silent contemplation and living off the land, all the while humouring Jeremy, mentoring Pete, and nudging Stoyte towards a more compassionate treatment of his workers.

We first meet Mr. Propter hitching a ride in the car that takes Jeremy to the mansion.  When we next meet him, he is sitting and watching the sun go down and meditating on koans.  Of course, that's not how Huxley describes it, but that's pretty much what's going on.  Sitting alone, he asks himself 'What is man?' and contemplates the answer given by Pierre de Bérulle, the 17th century cardinal: 'C'est un néant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s'il veut'.  As if that weren't enough, he then asks himself, 'What is God?' and whispers to himself the definition offered by the 13th century mystic John Tauler: 'God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working'.  Like those of any koan practitioner, his thoughts then wander from the object of meditation to thinking about other matters, in this case, how to improve the lot of Stoyte's employees.  But he soon brings them back again:

'Little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself intoa kind of effortless unattached awareness, at one intense and still, alert and passive - an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words.  But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness - what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking?  And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself...The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality...'

Mr. Propter sets out his philosophy in a series of conversations with Jeremy, Stoyte, and above all Pete, who becomes a kind of apprentice, across three or four of the central chapters of the novel.  Fundamental to Mr. Propter's modus vivendi is a 'skeptical attitude of mind', maintained in the face of  political creeds at both ends of the spectrum, nationalism of any sort, and even organized religion.  Despite his work on behalf of exploited labourers, the only liberation worth seeking, in Mr. Propter's view, is a spiritual liberation: 'Liberation from time...Liberation from craving and revulsion.  Libration from personality'.  The end of liberation is so important that it structures Mr. Propter's ethical system, in which a good act is simply 'any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it'.  Science and art are good, bad, or simply indifferent depending on whether they aid or hinder people on the way to this over-arching end.

Once we appreciate the importance of liberation in Mr. Propter's system, it becomes easier to see why he rejects attachment or devotion to any other cause.  After all,  'scientists and artists and men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal.  But what is an ideal?  An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspects of personality...And that's true...of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation - liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God'.  And even among those who feel the desire to search for God, 'most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour'.  So where might they find the real God?  Only in contemplation, 'in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness'.

Mr. Propter's determination to achieve spiritual liberation is accompanied by an eccentric desire to free himself from political and economic dependencies of all sorts.  He has solar cells and his own generator so that he can live off the grid; he grows his own vegetables in a greenhouse and builds his own wooden furniture in a workshop.  His explanation for all this is that he is a 'Jeffersonian democrat'.  What does democracy have to do with anything?  He answers simply, 'The more bosses, the less democracy.  But unless people can support themselves, they've got to have a boss who'll undertake to do it for them.  So the less self-support, the less democracy.'  Hence his interest in the generator, which promises to 'help to give independence to any one who desires independence'.

Unsurprisingly, Huxley's Mr. Propter is a pacifist, though his answer to the question of what we should do about Fascists ('something appropriate') is unreassuringly vague considering the year in which the novel was published (1939).  He is also, very surprisingly indeed, committed to violent revolution, although here too concrete details are disturbingly scarce.  He says only that he is willing 'to do active work on the techniques of a better system' and to 'collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization.'  His final comment on the topic - 'incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high' - should be chilling to anyone who has lived to the end of the 20th century. 

So Huxley's hero is hardly an unblemished role-model for the would-be contemplative, the ardent democrat, or even for those (and there are a lot of them here in California) looking to go back to the land.  All the same, he possesses what he calls 'the most characteristic features of an enlightened person's experience', that is, 'serenity and disinterestedness'.  In him, Huxley has provided us with a portrait of someone who has worked towards 'the absence of excitement and the absence of craving' without losing any of his humanity.  And how is he going about it?  As he tells Jeremy and Pete, there is really only one way - the path of direct experience, looking at reality head on.  They can go and look at it just as they can go upstairs to look at the priceless paintings on the walls of Stoyte's mansion.  Except that in this case, 'there isn't any elevator.  You have to go up on your own legs.  And make no mistake...There's an awful lot of stairs'.

Cutting a diamond

When I first started practising Zen, I liked it so much and found it so intriguing that the last thing I wanted to do was read books about it.  Most of my life is reading books, and I didn't want a dusty intellectualism to distract me from what I take to be the center of the practice, meditation.  Since I decided to take refuge, it's occurred to me that that approach might be irresponsible: since a confirmation ceremony involves getting into something, it might be a good idea to become better informed about what it is I'm getting into.  So I've now taken a couple of books out of the 'Wine-box of wisdom' which serves as our lending library at WiG.  My first Zen book was John Tarrant's marvelous and perplexing Bring me the Rhinoceros, which confused the hell out of me and made me cheerful.  Over the Christmas break I worked through my second, Robert Aitken's more conventional Taking the Path of Zen.  

Robert Aitken was one of the first native-born Americans to become a Zen master, at least in the traditional sense of being a recognized successor in one of the Japanese lineages.  Captured by the Japanese while working as a civilian construction worker on Guam at the outset of the Second World War, Aitken spent the next few years in an internment camp.  It was in these unideal circumstances that he discovered Zen, the shapeless mould into which the rest of his life would be poured.  After studying English and Japanese literature at the University of Hawaii, Aitken made a series of trips to Japan to study at various monasteries.  He had a miserable time, with his stiff Western knees constantly swollen and painful from being forced into half-lotus; eventually he contracted dysentery and spent a brief period of time in hospital.

By his own account, Aitken was also suffering on the inside; he refers to this time as the 'dark night of his soul'.  Slowly, though, he began to see the point of certain koans and to make progress, even breakthroughs ('a bit of light') in his practice.  By the 1970s he had established a zendo in Hawaii, and in 1985 he received full authorization as a Zen teacher from Yamada Koun.  He was also writing books, the most famous of which was probably The Mind of Clover, on Zen ethics; for Aitken, ethics was ultimately inseparable from politics, and he gained some prominence as an activist, co-founding the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.  Aitken's prose is direct, concise, sharp.  It is often drily ironic.  At one point in the book I read he talks about a man who always used sitting periods to try to solve his practical problems; he soon left the zendo.  Aitken comments, 'Perhaps he had solved all his problems'.

There are many senior members of the Pacific Zen Institute who knew Aitken personally.  Some of them carry on key aspects of his teaching, as Chris Wilson does by continuing to do work on behalf of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.  I've asked several of my older friends about Aitken, and their accounts are strikingly similar.  They all start off by saying that they respected Aitken, that he had integrity, but that he was also incredibly fussy, or pernickety, moralistic, an old New England schoolmarm.  My teacher David told me that as soon as he started studying with Aitken, he had the sense that the roshi didn't really understand him or see him fully.  When he told Aitken this in a private interview, Aitken simply said, 'That's you', and rang the bell (which means: leave).  Years later, the two men happened to be in Japan at the same time and met up to have dinner.  As the noodles were being brought to the table, Aitken looked across at David and said, 'You know, it was me too'.

The practice community that Aitken founded in Hawaii was called the Diamond Sangha, and it grew to have several offshoots in both the United States and Australia.  Since part of the mission of this blog is to increase transparency, I thought I would note down what I've found out about the lineage of my teachers in California, with the important disclaimer that this information has been gathered haphazardly and at second hand.  PZI's head teacher John Tarrant was the first dharma heir (student who became a teacher) of Robert Aitken.  Like most of Aitken's other dharma heirs, including Nelson Foster, who was Aitkens's successor as head of the Hawaii Diamond Sangha, Tarrant initially taught explicitly in Aitken's lineage, heading a group called the California Diamond Sangha.  Around the turn of the millenium, Tarrant chose to dissociate himself formally from the greater Diamond Sangha and from Aitken's lineage, renaming our group the Pacific Zen Institute.

When I ask people why this happened, I hear various different stories, but there are two main ones.  Both of them seem to be true, and both undoubtedly had a role to play in the development of an independent Western Zen lineage.  The first story is that Tarrant broke away from the Diamond Sangha because he and his group wanted to develop different ways of doing Zen, an experimental approach that offended Aitken's relatively conservative religious sensibilities.  This seems to chime with what I've seen at PZI (compared with the SF Zen Center) in terms of a relaxation of traditional forms, as well as with the impression I have of Aitken from reading his book and talking to people who knew him.  The other story is that Tarrant had a sexual relationship with a Zen student, Aitken tried to discipline him for it, and the result was a falling-out between the two men that led ultimately to John cutting ties with his former teacher's lineage and institution. 

The whole reason I'm writing this blog, of course, is that I don't now much about Zen (see title), but anyone who's read an introductory book can tell you that there are various sects, the two most popular being Rinzai (which uses koans) and Soto (which doesn't so much).  Though Tarrant's teaching centers on koans, his inheritance is ultimately not from Rinzai but from a third and relatively new sect called the Sanbo Kyodan, and more particularly from a lineage called the Harada-Yasutani line.  Named after two twentieth-century masters, this line emphasized lay practice (teachers can marry and don't have to shave their heads!) and inter-religious dialogue (many of Yamada's students were Catholics), as well as less praiseworthy endeavours such as Japanese militarism (a sorry story for another time).  This is the line of John Tarrant and David Weinstein, and explains why they aren't celibate and have hair, if nothing else.  Not that lineages really matter, of course, or that there's really more than one; after all, as a Chan teacher once said, there's really no such thing as Chan, and there are certainly no teachers.