Breaking an entering

Once when I was at secondary school I turned up to rugby practice wearing a green shirt.  This wasn't usually unusual, but it turned out to be unusual that day - when I looked around, I could see that every other player on my team was wearing a blue jersey instead.  The master gathered us round and told a parable: 'Once there was an Italian soldier', he told us, 'who said, "It is not I who is marching out of step - it is all the others!"'  Since the word had apparently fallen on stony ground, he pointed at me.  'In just the same way, our young Canadian might say today, "It is not I who is wearing the wrong shirt, but all of you!"'  The boys, suitably instructed, suddenly decided to find this very amusing indeed.  Strange, because that argument had always seemed to me to be a very promising line of defense.

This episode came back to me last week when I took refuge - Buddhist confirmation - at a ceremony at Wind in Grass in San Francisco, because when I arrived at the ceremony, I had no idea what it would involve.  (Afterwards an older friend asked, 'Haven't you ever been to a refuge ceremony before?'  Um, no.  This is the sort of thing people only ask you in California.)  At some point in the ceremony Chris Wilson said that our community was founded on the idea of not knowing.  You can say that again.  Of course, I'd been discussing individual vows with my teacher David Weinstein over the phone, once a fortnight, for the last few months in preparation for the ceremony.  But I didn't realize that we would be expected to give personal responses to every precept as they came up.

The girls had their notebooks ready - I could see their scrawled, cryptic responses on every page.  They looked deep.  Sara said, 'You're some kind of improv artist, aren't you?'  There were lots of people there, many more than the usual five to ten quiet souls who tend to turn up to our weekly meditations.  There were people I'd seen on Pacific Zen Institute retreats, including some who'd led exercises or done talks, and who doubtless knew an ill-prepared regugee when they saw one.  There were people I'd never seen before, parental types and cool kids and beautiful women, all clambering through the door to get a look at us.  It was the most people I'd ever seen in that space, with the possible exception of the workshop on the body, which had involved up to thirty adults moving around the room pretending to be blind.

It was also the most ceremonial occasion I'd ever seen at Wind in Grass.  There was even an order of service, which I flipped through desperately as soon as I got my hands on to try to get a glimpse of what was to come.  On the cover of it was printed 'Entering the Way' and a picture of a dog leaping off a dock into a lake, tail up, tongue out, eyes bulging in blissful brainlessness.  The 25-minute meditation period had been burning with worry round the edges and had now collapsed into clumps of ash.  David was sitting at the front with everyone else in a huge ellipse around the edges of the room and speaking about how he'd decided to change all the words used in the traditional English-language refuge service because they'd rubbed him up the wrong way.  We'd all agreed that 'Entering the Way' was better than 'Taking the Vows' beforehand.

On the night it emerged that he'd gone further along the same lines as that early change, replacing 'vows' with 'intentions' and 'I vow to (+ infinitive)' with 'I take up the way of (+ gerund)'.  He'd also got rid of all references to 'the Buddha'.  I'm usually up for a bit of iconoclasm, and I am all for updating translations every now and then, but I must say this last change came as something of a surprise.  When David said, in explanation, 'I don't need the Buddha', I got a chill down my spine; I don't like it when American Buddhist leaders say things like that, if only because the Buddha is usually the only person they have to answer to on anything.  But of course David was right in principle: I remembered my favourite story about the monk who threw a statue of the Buddha of the fire because he was cold (the monk, not the Buddha).  When reprimanded, he pointed out that he'd only put wood on a fire.

David was saying, 'When he got up from under the tree, people asked him "What happened to you?" and he said, "I'm awake" - "I'm Buddha", and unfortunately the name stuck, and now we have this whole religion'.  I saw Chris adjust his position slightly on his chair.  But with the preliminaries over, it was now time for some chanting, which Michael fulfilled with his usual aplomb.  Next up, the vows, sorry, intentions.  The format was announced: Michael would ring the bell, everyone would chant one of the vintentions, and then we would give our individual responses to them.  Of course the first response to the first intention ('I return to [not 'take refuge in'] awakening') went to me.  I said what I thought I thought: meditation was about waking up from what you thought was important in your thoughts to what you thought was a distraction in the world around you.  Alles klar?

David said, 'What about awakening?' and I said that meditation was a model for the rest of life: waking up from your obsessions into the unfamiliarity of everyday happenings.  I hadn't realized this was going to be an interrogation.  But then he moved on.  Sara and Marika were reading out exquisite postmodern verses, terse, spare, moving.  Jean-Paul had turned up late but was now throwing up little flags of verbal weirdness in response to every challenge - whether in surrender or celebration, it was hard to tell.  Something in me learnt the rules of the new game, and anyway the intentions were coming quick and fast, so I turned into Wittgenstein too.  'I take up the way of not killing' became 'Loving my brother, who's a trained killer'.  I'd remembered talking to David about I couldn't really be a pacifist with my family (and beliefs), and somehow this had been transmuted into silver in the intervening downtime.

The quickfire format drove me to a few other responses that felt authentic.  Asked to enter the way of not being stingy, I said, 'This one is impossible for me' (which may not count as entering the way, but was certainly not breaking the precept against lying).  When it came to lying, I said 'This one for me is still about trying not to lie', since I'd found the interpretation I'd been offered - not lying to yourself, etc. - wishy-washy and evasive.  But some of my own answers sounded just as wrong as they escaped  from what Homeric heroes went around calling 'the fence of my teeth'.  My answers to the precept against intoxication and against abuse of sex both sounded the same - I took the intention in both instances not to indulge in drugs or sex for any but two reasons: getting high and pure lust.  In both cases, there was a pure thought behind it, but when it came out I wondered whether I'd betrayed myself.

'Betraying yourself' is ambiguous, obviously, implying that you've shown something true as well as cheating on someone inside you.  My discussion with David had turned on the idea that both drink and sex were not bad things, as long as they weren't used solely to fill a void, supply a crutch, prop up a dependancy.  I remember reading a piece by Chesterton ages ago to the effect that the only real reason to drink is not for medicinal purposes but because it's fun - which was also, he believed, the only real way to reap its health benefits.  One of my concerns about getting into American Buddhism had always been that people here want to make things easy for themselves, twisting the precepts to say what they can live with, not what they've always meant.  But more than that I've feared that the confirmation ceremony would turn me into a joyless prig, readier to carp than cartwheel.

So if the ceremony preserved and showcased that ambivalence, my wholehearted dedication to both living well and letting live, perhaps that's not such a bad thing.  In any case, that part of the game-show was finally over.  Chris Wilson had been asked to provide a welcome to the community, and he hit the nail on the head.  There was an elephant in the middle of the room and he pointed at it.  'Many of you who've come to see your friend or loved-one take refuge tonight might be concerned about this being a cult' - the elephant looked down at the floor - 'but really, there are no gates to this community.  No gates to stop you coming in, and no gates to shut behind anyone once they're inside'.  Chris was probably one of the only people there who would say without hesitation 'I'm a Buddhist', and he'd taken the whole ceremony on the chin.  He'd also, in his sixties and with a history of heart trouble, surreptitiously entered the hall the day before and single-handedly swept and sanded the entire floor. 

Talk about showing the way.  When the ceremony was over, this being Wind in Grass, there was a party.  There was wine but I went for the organic lemonade - I'm not going to be living in San Francisco forever.  I was feeling a bit strange about the ceremony but Adam looked at me and said, 'Dude, you look radiant - I've never seen you looking this happy', so I must have been smiling.  Interesting, because usually I think I'm smiling and people come up to me and tell me I'm looking glum.  After half an hour or so I had to catch the train down to Palo Alto, where I'm living for the summer.  I read my Greek history book and thought about the last phase of the ceremony, when David had given me the name 'Curious Owl', not knowing that I am a scholarly devotee of Athena the grey-eyed.

He'd told Sara and Marika that it was traditional not to wear the rakasus (ceremonial bibs) he was giving them in the bathroom, but 'I think that's wrong, because if it's not in the shit and the piss, where is it?'  I closed myself in the jogging metal bathroom of the Caltrain and looked at the poem David had written for me,  'Looking long and hard/ Through the dark/ Never looking away/ But, who?'  I looked at the certificate he had written it on, wondering whether I would file it away quietly among my diplomas, take it to my parents for framing, or set it on fire some day in a field among riotous drunkenness, like my exam notes after finishing my GCSEs.  I looked down into the toilet and smelled the urine of a thousand techies swishing darkly below.  I looked long and hard and didn't look away.  I didn't need to ask who or why.  It was a perfect moment.

Coming back to earth

This morning I went back to the Tibetan Tse Chen Ling Center on Webster for their morning meditation.  Like the first time I went, I was the only punter, and, like the second, I was led through a bizarre series of visualizations involving deities (or half-deities, who knows) that I'd never made the acquaintance of before.  This time rather than Green Tara it was the turn of White Vajrasattva to take a spin above my head, to be blended with the image of my teacher David, and finally to be melded into the rather tired Satruday morning consciousness of Yours Truly.  Vajrasattva is associated with purification, so the meditation also involved calling to mind any little mistakes I'd made in the past few days, visualizing them as inky spots in my body, and then imagining them being eradicated as my torso filled up with white light.  Later on, I was asked to think of my frailties as puss or faeces that was being flushed out of what the instructor euphemistically referred to as my 'lower orifice'.  Later still, they were insects being driven from my mind out of my mouth and nose.  I thought, 'Yuck'.

At the same time, I could see how these visualizations could be understood as a more vivid form of some of the mental exercises I'd been led through by Jason Newland in his free chronic pain MP3s.  Many of them ask you to visualize your body as free of pain and whole, and this did in my case seem to have an effect on my suffering - hardly surprising, if the recent trend of research that sees pain as part of the brain's image of the rest of the body is on the right track.  Nonetheless I was a bit put off by the repellant nature of some of the Tibetan imagery.  I went to do my laundry, sat in Café International, and picked up one of the array of hippy dippy Bay Area magazines they have on offer there.  It was called Common Ground, and contained a piece on the commune in Marin once inhabited by Alan Watts, plenty of ads by charlatans claiming they could heal you with their 'intuitional insight' (which apparently is hereditary), and an interview with a former NASA astronaut who had an epiphany on his trip back from the moon and has since had his eyes opened to the truth about UFOs.

If there's one quality I admire in others and want to cultivate in myself these days, it might just be open-mindedness.  Still, I have other values (like a commitment to some minimal sort of analytical rigour), and the juxtaposition of ads for blatant fraudsters with notices about Buddhist retreats made me frightened - as happens every now and then - that what I was getting into by taking refuge is just another wacky superstition.  It made my ask myself again why I've chosen to take the precepts, as I'll be doing in a ceremony in July in a sort of Buddhist confirmation ceremony.  In the past, I've explored this question from the angle of what events or experiences led me to take that decision, a narrative approach that has much to recommend it in religious matters.  But there is also a more intellectual side to the story, or at least a rational one: I took the decisions for certain reasons, and it's these reasons that I return to when I'm feeling the pangs of doubt.  Which, naturally enough, I often do.

My attachment to Buddhism (if that's not too uncomfortable a phrase) stems mainly from my love of meditation, but of course meditation is something you can do in a secular tradition without taking any ethical precepts.  The reason I began to want to take up the ethical precepts was partly due to the intuition that meditation - developing knowledge of my own mental processes - was better if I avoided being a dick, and that not being a dick was easier when I made sure to meditate.  On a basic level this is simply a matter of being more contented, calmer and more patient after sitting.  And it also has to do, I think, with developing the ability to step away from the places your own thoughts or feelings are pushing you.  But there is a level at which the connection between meditation and ethics is even simpler than that, since both consist partly in returning to things we already know or sense are true.  This is why the precepts often seem pointless to people - everyone knows that stealing or killing is bad; who needs a bunch of vows to tell them that?

I spend a lot of time around academic philosophers, and they'd be eager to point out at this juncture that ethics is a rather complicated affair.  What is lying?  Would you tell the truth to an assassin who came to your door asking where your housemate was?  And so on.  Of course, we can all admit that ethics is a complicated affair in such extreme cases, and that its basic contours are fuzzy around the edges.  But doing good is an endeavour separate from academic philosophy; it's healthy to bear this in mind if you want to avoid being disappointed with either pursuit.  And nine times out of ten we know more or less what to do; maybe we don't do it at the time because we're angry or lustful, but most people looking on at the time, as well as we ourselves with hindsight, agree more or less about what was right.  That's why most people find it hard to disagree with any of the Ten Boddhisattva Precepts just as they have a hard time knocking many of the Ten Commandments.  Neither provide all the answers in all cases (especially the philosophical thought-experiments), but they remind us of something.

And what they remind us of is that we know, more or less, where to go in order to avoid being a massive prick.  They don't flesh out the content of what it is not to steal, or what it is not to lie, or what it is not to abuse sex, but they do remind us that speech and taking and shagging are areas of life that we might find it useful to be careful about.  This lack of content has actually been a boon to such basic ethical systems, since it has allowed them to remain true in the face of cultural change.  My friends in San Francisco take a rather different view about what constitutes sexual immorality than the average medieval Tibetan lama (I assume), and yet it remains true even in San Francisco that cheating on your partner with their sister (say) is probably not the right thing to do.  So the taking of precepts functions like many of the other aspects or religious practice: it reminds us of what we already know, of ourselves.  When I sit and meditate every day it's partly just to remember what I knew when I was lying in my back yard as a child, watching the clouds wander across the sky. 

Beating the drum

 
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that while I'm keen on meditation, I'm also aware that there have been problems in American Buddhist organizations, and especially in Zen groups in which there isn't a sufficient level of oversight or criticism of the head teacher of master.  You'll also know that I've had my doubts about John Tarrant, the head teacher of Pacific Zen Institute, which is the larger organization of which my smaller sitting group, Wind in Grass Sangha, is a chapter.  I found out online that John has been accused of misconduct - 'professional, sexual, and organizational', to use the words of Nelson Foster, a rival and critic - and so have talked to a few senior members of the organization to hear their version of events.  I also talked to my main teacher, David Weinstein, about the same topic.

All these sources admitted that John had made errors of judgment in the past - usually involving dating students - but they all ultimately defended him, saying that none of his mistakes could be considered harmful.  But since I found it hard to find out the truth about what had gone on in the past, and since my real concern was not that John had dated students but that he had refused to be accountable to them or to his own teacher Robert Aitken, I decided to talk to him myself about what had happened.  Of course, I appreciated that it was hardly a gentle act to dredge up someone's sexual past, and I felt myself that it was no easy one, since I'm relatively new to Zen and teachers are treated with some deference.  Yet at the same time my mind was clear: if John answered my questions reasonably, or gave reasons why he could not answer them, I would continue to go on PZI retreats; if he reacted unreasonably, I could be sure that I didn't want to associate with him further.

Besides the occasional one-day event, I only ever see John at retreats in Santa Rosa, and I felt asking him about the issues I had on my mind during dokusan - a kind of one-on-one interview with a teacher somewhat reminiscent of confession - would be the natural thing.  I felt nervous going into the interview room, but reassured myself by reflecting that John had extensive experience both as a meditator and a teacher; I also knew that other, older students had aired similar issues with him before.  When I went in, he asked me how things had been going, in his usual, friendly enough manner.  I told him there was something I wanted to talk to him about, and that I felt very much at home at WiG, had learned a lot from his talks, and had enjoyed my previous retreats.

I then tried to put what I was about to ask in context, by saying that when I'd decided to take refuge I'd felt the need to better inform myself about American Zen, and had found out about the serious abuses committed by teachers such as Richard Baker and Dennis Merzel.  On reflection, this may have been a mistake - whereas I'd meant to make my questions look understandable by putting them in the context of my learning about misdemeanours by other teachers, I think John took me to be accusing him flat out of having been up to the same kind of thing.  Although, come to that, John's first response to what I'd been saying was to say that Dick and Genpo were friends of his, and that 90% of the things people had said about them online weren't true.  I found this surprising, since it was my understanding that Baker and Merzel had both admitted that they had been involved in adulterous affairs.

I also told him that I'd been writing a blog in which I'd raised some of these issues, which seemed to make him angry.  He said that people criticizing each other on the internet was just like two 12-year-olds playing first person shooter games, or like a food-fight in a meal hall, and added that he didn't see a point in responding to it.  This appears to have been his position all along - not to respond to criticisms at all, and to retain a dignified silence.  And if you spend any amount of time looking at the unseemly controversy surrounding Merzel, for example, you can see where he's coming from.  At the same time, I think it's also important to see that many of the people criticizing teachers and passing on information about them are acting with some sort of integrity: they're trying to encourage transparency, or accountability, or hold true to the precept against lying.  But when I put this to John, he again reacted angrily, saying that all critics were motivated by spite or envy. 

This began a new phase of our interview, in which he questioned why I'd decided to take the precepts in the first place.  This seemed to me to be a strange thing for a Buddhist teacher to be doing, on the face of it, although I can understand that someone might be taking the precepts for the wrong reasons.  He asked me whether I even knew why I was taking them.  When I responded, 'I think so', he immediately contradicted me, saying 'No, you don't'.  Now, I can accept that embracing 'not knowing' (as the koan puts it), and not being sure about our own mental stories can sometimes be a healthy thing, allowing us to release our hold on certain obsessions and delusions.  But it did strike me as odd that while I didn't seem to have permission to make even tentative statements about my own mental states, John allowed himself to make very confident pronouncements on my mental states.  It seemed like an element of Zen psychology was being used as a way of shutting me up.

His main gripe about the way I seemed to be approaching the precepts was that I was doing so in a moralizing way.  When I asked him if he thought the precepts weren't about morality, he said that they were to some extent, but that he didn't want to be in a community where people were policing each other.  And I can certainly see the dangers of becoming a religious prig.  At the same time, is there anything wrong with members of a community supporting themselves in sticking to the key elements of a practice they've all freely committed to?  I suppose I do take the precepts to be concerned above all with morality, which isn't to say that you have to be perfect to take them, just that you should make an honest effort to abide by them.  But maybe there is room for reasonable agreement on that point.

By the last ten minutes or so of the interview he had calmed down considerably.  He asked me why I'd begun practising in the first place, and I told him that it was because of chronic pain and anxiety.  (Earlier, he'd said, 'Look at you, you're anxious', as a way of backing up his claim that all my concerns were reducible to paranoia; I'd replied, 'I know - that's partly why I'm here'.)  After this, he became more sympathetic, and we settled back into what I take to be the usual pattern of his interviews with students, where he dispenses advice to the troubled.  At one point he even said that I could ask about whatever I wanted and criticize whatever I wanted, though since he'd spent the first two thirds of the interview trying to convince me my concerns were entirely a result of paranoia and priggishness, I found it hard to take this as sincere.

At the end of the interview I repeated what I'd said at the beginning, just to make sure he heard it - that I thought PZI was wonderful in lots of ways, and that I was grateful for his teaching.  I shook his hand, as warmly as I could (admittedly not Zen practice, but a sincere effort on my part), and he banged his drum, signalling the next person should come in (which seemed brusque, but is the standard way of ending dokusan).  I went back to the meditation hall and sat for one period or two - I'm not sure - with thoughts racing around in my mind.  I realized that I wasn't going to get much meditating done in my emotional state, so I asked an older member of WiG to come take a stroll with me outside.  When I told him I'd approached John and that he'd reacted angrily, his reaction was, 'Shit!  Shit!  Fuck!  Christ!' and that John's reaction was a matter of personal disappointment to him.

He also defended John, saying that it was sesshin, which involved putting fifty people together and limiting the amount of time they slept (to seven hours a night or less).  (I've heard this excuse before for blow-ups on retreat, but if the traditional way of doing things does encourage mindfulness and compassion, why the occasional explosions?  And if it doesn't, why not change it?)  He reminded me that John spent hours at a time working with people in physical pain or psychological anguish, paid only by donation, and suggested that for all his failings, John had probably done more good than harm.  And I agreed with this - but failed to see why we shouldn't encourage him to reduce the harm.  I was also told that someone had once characterized John's leadership style as recalling a maxim of British diplomacy in the imperial period - 'never explain, never apologize'.

My older friend urged me to try to talk to David again before I left.  I was snuck into David's interview room just as the bell went for dinner.  David suggested that John hadn't heard all the positive things I had to say about PZI, but I insisted that I'd made the point doubly clear.  He also said that the issue I'd raised was a sore spot for John, since he'd been criticized for it so much in the past.  And I definitely understood that, while failing to see how accusing me of being delusional constituted a mature way of reacting to my concerns, whatever the soreness.  David said he'd talk to John about our interview, and that he'd look forward to see how things unravelled.  I told him I hadn't wanted the interview to go badly.  He said, 'I know that, but John may not, because he doesn't know you, and so he also doesn't understand how what you did was courageous.'  I left that night, my mind as clear as day.  

Killing (in the name of)

 
'I vow not to kill' is the first of the ten precepts, and it looks like an easy one to fulfil.  I haven't killed anyone, at least not knowingly or deliberately, at this point in my young life, and I can't imagine doing so in the future, although times change.  Since I moved to California I've gradually become a vegetarian: first I stopped cooking meat at home, then I stopped buying it when I was out, and finally I began to tell people I was a vegetarian and to refuse meat when it was offered to me.  Admittedly, I did it only partly for ethical reasons, and partly because doing without meat is cheaper and healthier.  And admittedly, the ethical reasons which did figure in my decision - the grotesqueness of factory farming, the unnecessary suffering caused to intelligent beings like pigs - didn't center on an aversion to killing animals for food.  Still, it's reassuring to realize that I don't regularly incentivize the unnecessary slaughter of animals.

Although I still eat fish, mainly because they're good for you and a fine source of protein, but also because I like to think that I agree with Kurt Cobain: it's okay to eat fish, because they don't have any feelings.  And I eat plants, but they're not sentient, so they don't count, right?  I'm on shakier ground when it comes to pacificism, that other great Californian fad that you might think is part and parcel of the Buddhist way.  The problem is, I still remember reading as a teenager George Orwell's denunciation of the pacificism of the intellectuals of his time, and even though I'm Mr. Propter and Aldous Huxley was among the most prominent of the 1930s peaceniks, it always struck me that Orwell had the better of that particular argument.  In particular, it seemed that the pacifists had a hard time saying what action they would take against fascist aggression, or how inaction would be in any way acceptable in the face of the Axis powers.

Part of this is bred in the bone.  I was born into an army family and raised mostly on army camps across Canada and Europe.  My father spent most of his career training and developing tanks, making sure that they could drive over knife-edges of sand and ultimately that they would be good at killing lots of people quickly.  My brother has spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and though the ostensible end in view was bringing democracy and stability to troubled lands the means employed doubtless sometimes involved killing people.  If there are always going to be Nazis and Taliban in the world, someone will have to stand up to them; and if they refuse to back down, standing up to them may ultimately mean killing them.  My teacher David Weinstein told me his first Tibetan teacher admitted that if there was a terrorist threatening to hijack an airplane he was on, he would consider compassionately hitting him on the head with a hammer.

David came to our Wind in Grass sangha the other night and announced he would give a talk.  He told us about a lady who had mice in her house.  She wanted to kill them but she was a Buddhist so decided not to.  Instead she caught them, except she eventually became convinced there was really only one mouse, a fact she confirmed by painting one of his nails crimson and letting him go - sure enough, the next mouse she caught had had the same manicure.  This was like the old story of the student who saw a spider drop down in front of his face every time he meditated.  He brought a knife to his meditation and the spider only got bigger; eventually his teacher told him to bring a brush instead, and to paint an X on the spider's belly as soon as he saw it.  He did that and the spider went away.  That evening, much relieved, he took his clothes off to have a bath and found a big X painted on his own tummy.

The talk went down well.  The three or four newcomers who had turned up that night were taking the first sips of their tea as he started by declaring that he'd been thinking a lot recently about killing.  Ashley came in just as he'd finished telling us about the mice and the spiders and explaining that we had mice and spiders in our brains.  I asked David whether you could build channels and obstacles for the mice, jumps and wheels they could run in.  Michael said it felt like the mice came from outside of the house and David told him to paint them and look at his belly.  David told us there were no cats and that, as a Zen teacher, he was of course the mental equivalent of a cat.  When Ashley drove me home that night, she expressed some confusion about the discusssion period, the cats and mice and spiders and Michael's belly.  I told her the stories and that cleared things up, or not.

Not killing in the Pacific Zen school seems to mean primarily not killing your thoughts, your temptations, your spontaneity.  The obvious objection to that recommendation is that sometimes we have to kill our spontaneity in order to stay alive or to avoid doing somethig awful.  The rejoinder is that we don't actually have to kill the evil mind-mice or slice up the spiders of temptation with smuggled knives; actually, trying to kill the beasties only makes them stronger.  Instead it's better to mark them with a brush and some ink or nail-polish.  And that helps you see that there's only one mouse that might as well become your pet, and that there's actually no spider at all, there's only your hairy belly that you can live with, since after all you've lived with it all your life.  You see the anger and the lust come and go, and imagining you can kill either doesn't help you become kind or strong.

Hence the story about the master and the official out walking when a rabbit saw them and ran away.  The official asked the Zen master, 'Why would a rabbit run away from you?'  The master replied, 'Because he knows I like to kill'.  Humans eat rabbits and rabbits eat lettuce and bears eat humans though lettuce doesn't: there's no way out of the chain of suffering and enjoying and maybe it's better not to pretend that there is.  You're certainly not going to impress the official if you pretend you're never hungry and end up chasing after the rabbit.  I like to hate and desire and be self-regarding and self-loathing, but it's only when I try to eradicate and annihilate and deracinate those mice, throwing nails at them and bowling balls and napalm, that they grow fangs and shells and develop cloaking devices.  But it's hard to stop doing it - you see, I like to kill.  And I'm sure I'll keep doing it.  I vow not to kill. 

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. 

Sesshin obsession

Why do I even bother?  If Zen is traditionally so hierarchical, and its teachers wield peculiarly unconfinable types of authority, why am I still getting deeper into PZI and preparing to become a card-carrying Buddhist (without a card)?  Part of the answer is that I think that convert Buddhism in the West is a religious tradition at a revolutionary moment; less dramatically, it's a practice whose forms are undergoing an unusual amount of scrutiny as newcomers imbued with Western scientific and political convictions look for something to put their minds at rest.  I want to be a fully committed part of the Western Zen community - which involves, in my view, exposing it to honest criticism when it looks like there's a need for it - partly because it presents me with an exciting and worthwhile project to be part of. 

But of course, there'd be no point in taking the time to commit to or constructively criticize a project if you didn't see any value in it, and that brings us back once more to the question of why I think a spiritual community is such a valuable thing.  And that brings me back once again to the experience of PZI retreats, and to my third ever sesshin, the autumn session of last year, when I stayed for six days and five nights.  (Meditating all day can be a shock to the system, so I'd decided to work my way up to a full week-long practice session.)  I thought I'd arranged a lift up to Santa Rosa with my friend Sara, but she'd gotten a different impression, and anyway had just come down with the flu.  So I phoned an immaculately composed Zen student from Santa Cruz and asked her at about an hour's notice to come through San Francisco and pick me up.  It was once again a quiet drive up, either because my friend was already in her Zen Zone, or because I'd just made her drive through a city full of traffic (or both).

As it turned out, this time the retreat wasn't in either of the buildings just outside of Santa Rosa that I'd been to before, but at a more remote location somewhere around Occidental, an giant's step or two closer to the Pacific.  As we got closer to our destination, the roads got narrower and windier, and the trees grew taller and started huddling around the car like pedestrians in some crowded metropolis.  The place itself was another Christian retreat-centre, but this time it felt less like a convent or a hostel and more like the base for a Scout-camp or a souped-up tree-house.  Parts of the dorms upstairs had no windows, only screens that let the air breathe in an out of the room, one to ten to one again.  When you looked out the windows of the dining-hall downstairs there were trees so close you could touch them, and hundreds of others farther away that made you remember how depth is a startling thing.

By this time, most of the faces around me were familiar rather than startling.  I worked in the kitchen with Socrates, who turned out to be called William and to be a master soup-chef as well as a peerless trumpet-tooter.  I worked away at my dissertation-reading during break-periods beside the professorial room-mate at my first retreat, who was engaged in seemingly inexhaustible paperwork for his academic department.  I recognized the jolly French professor with clever socks, the serious silver-haired woman who oversees my perennial requests for financial aid, the Santa Rosa Unitarian minister with the square glasses.  I still embraced my WiG friends when I saw them like a castaway clinging to the fragment of a mast.  Ashley was there, a reassuring presence; Sara beat the flu eventually and got there; Michael chatted to everyone with unrestraned loud friendliness as his daughter crawled around the Zendo making the serious faces crease.

I also renewed my affairs with two people I'd fallen in love with on my first retreat, one man, one woman.  At some point when I was making tea I turned and looked down to see the diminutive Chinese artist Alok looking up at me like I was a redwood reminding him how height is a startling thing.  He said, 'Hey, Short Stuff.'  He looked eighty at least, and had apparently brought his new girlfriend with him; since she complained at one point of having done 'one too many prostrations' in Tibet I assumed it was a good match.  One day David Weinstein the teacher told us we didn't have to say grace, apparently just to confuse us, but Alok and his partner went up to the altar with offerings and performed their own little rite, just the two of them, grateful for the food or for eating it together, or just hedging their bets.

The periods of discussion are one of the things I like most about PZI, partly because my resistance to top-down teaching gets to steal a nap (though our head teacher John Tarrant's replies can sometimes, in the Japanese tradition, verge on put-downs), but mainly because you get to meet and learn from all the people who've been silently meditating next to you all day.  At one point in a discussion about refuge vows Alok started talking about how he'd made a vow to his partner; when John asked if that was necessary he said 'Yes and no', and then, 'It wasn't as if the ladies were queuing up', which made me chortle.  (John said, 'Well, I don't know.')  He said that after he stopped being a Christian minister, he'd switched from prayer to meditation, and hadn't prayed in years; but when he met his girlfriend,  'I got down on my knees and prayed to God that if I were meant to be with this woman, he would let that happen; and if we weren't meant to be together, he would let that happen too'.  Logically, it struck me as the most pointless prayer ever; but it was about putting your heart in the right place.  It all is.

He also talked about how he'd originally been reluctant to become part of a religious community, especially a Buddhist one, since 'Why be a Buddhist when you can be a Buddha?'  But he said he'd more recently decided he wanted to become a full member of PZI, but hadn't been able to find a job in Santa Rosa.  I found it quite touching the way he yearned to be closer to the group and its regular meetings.  (Once or twice unconditional statements of dedication to the community of this nature got me thinking frightenedly about whether I was being drawn into a cult, but only once or twice.)  As for the second person I'd fallen in love with, the beautiful old lady, she told us that after many years of practising with others she'd reached a place in which she felt only a great tenderness towards others, and towards herself.  John said that comment would be the right note to end on; I agree.