tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55416700308045148092024-03-14T03:08:24.349-07:00ShoshinExplorations in meditation and Buddhism in the San Francisco Bay AreaMr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-36636996279211652272013-06-18T19:24:00.003-07:002013-06-18T19:24:43.123-07:00It's a trick<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Since I'm moving to the ends of the earth, I recently went to Wind in Grass for the last time. The others were nice enough to throw a party for me and invite me to say a few words about what I'd learned from practising with them over the previous three years. I guess it was my first dharma talk. It went something like this.<br />
<br />
'I wanted to tell you what I'd learned from being a part of this group, and a number of answers immediately sprang to mind. I've learned what Zen is, what Sanbo Kyodan is, what koans are. I've learned that to have an effect on how things are done in a group you have to step up and participate. I've learned that it's possible to have a group of young people come together to meditate in a way that's somehow both deeply committed and playfully irreverent.<br />
<br />
Somehow none of these answers felt right. I'll tell you what I think I've really learned from Wind in Grass in a moment, after a long digression or two. Because I also wanted to address something Michael brought up the other night. I'm referring to the strange fact that as Zen students we're meant to be doing two things at once: practising meditation earnestly, and giving up all thoughts of gain. But if we're already Buddhas and don't need to progress, why do we go on week-long retreats?<br />
<br />
First off, I want to give you a sense of what progress in meditation feels like. I took up meditation after my first year at college, near the end of which I started having a lot of pain in my face. The doctors all told me I was stressed, but that obviously wasn't right. After a while I realized that it might be, and cast around for things that might help me. I found a <a href="http://www.buddhanet.net/">website</a> with some instructions on meditation for beginners and went at it.<br />
<br />
The meditation I was doing involved focusing on your breath, and labelling thoughts as they arose. It's not our practice here, but it was helpful. After four months or so of sitting every day, I felt significantly better, like I was finally on top of my pain. If I have any allegiance to Buddhism, it's to a great extent because of the way, over those few months, the practice just picked me up and set me on my feet again. It's hard not to feel grateful to something that has that effect. <br />
<br />
That was progress. And it wasn't the only time I've felt I got somewhere through meditation. It happened again about a year after I'd come to Stanford. I hadn't been practising much, but started doing guided meditation with a <a href="http://www.peacerevolution.net/docs/en/peace-revolution-president-sith-chaisurote">grad student</a> from Thailand. This involved focusing on a visualized sphere of light in your belly - not out practice here, but helpful. Within a couple of months I felt more both sharper and more relaxed, better able to cope with things. That was progress.<br />
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A final example of progress came when I went on my first few PZI retreats. I'd never really gotten koans until I heard John Tarrant speak, guiding us to follow the koan wherever it led, the way you follow an old overgrown track in the forest. This is our practice here, and it helped me. I just fell into the practice, and it was transformative. That was progress too, I think.<br />
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So that's one side of the antinomy. We just do feel that we're progressing, and it's probably true to say that none of us would be here tonight if we didn't have some sense of what that felt like. At the same time, there's also a sense in which approaching meditation with some aim in mind is exactly the wrong way of doing it. And this is where we come to the two tricks I've put into this talk.<br />
<br />
The first way I'll talk about a trick is to say that meditation has a trick to it. It's not a trick like the one all the 11-year-olds knew back when I used to play SimCity, where you could type FUNDS and the game would give you more money. It's more a trick as in a knack, a style of doing things, like when someone tells you how to turn a key in an idiosyncratically sticky lock. The trick of meditation is summed up in the old koan: 'If you turn towards it, you turn away from it'. The paradox is that the only way you can progress in meditation is by giving up all thought of progress.<br />
<br />
The other trick is meditation itself. Meditation, I can tell you, is a trick. It's a familiar one. It's like when you book a hotel online through a website which shows pictures of a room with magnolia flowering outside your window and a pool with an infinity horizon on the patio. When you get there, there's a shitty plastic plant on the windowsill and a deck next to the parking lot with a filthy little plunge pool. You thought you were getting one thing but you got something else.<br />
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Meditation is like that, except instead of getting the plastic plant and the plunge pool you get to the hotel only to realize that there's an ocean right across the street and out the window a tropical rainforest. You would lay on the bed and flick through the 14 million available free channels, but the forest is much more interesting; the amenities of the hotel don't seem to matter any more. <br />
<br />
Meditation is like that. I started doing it to cure my toothache and came to feel I'd started a relationship with some inexhaustibly fascinating person who somehow was the same as the table and chair in my room. It did help my pain a great deal but perhaps only because the pain had ceased to seem so relevant; and by the time it had helped my toothache, it just seemed to matter less whether I was in pain or not.<br />
<br />
That's what I had to say about Michael's antinomy. I also hoped you'd indulge me with another digression, one that might make Elana throw something at me, since it's about how much I like Christianity. I was raised a Christian and it's always interesting to see how people in my family react to me being a Buddhist. When I went to Canada for Christmas my aunt asked me very respecfully on the first night whether I wanted a beer; they would be going to a church for a service, and I was free to come or not. I said I loved Christmas services, and was especially keen on beer.<br />
<br />
I've also been dating a Catholic girl for the past couple of years, and I've been going to church quite a lot. At first this was only out of solidarity, but it made me think a lot about what I prefer about Buddhism and what I still like more about Christianity. My main issue with Christianity is having to believe the story about a guy who rose from the dead, but there's one way relevant to this talk in which it things right. When I went to Rockridge the other weekend to visit PZI's new <a href="http://www.oaklandzen.org/">center</a>, I passed some Korean evangelical church. It sounded like there was some kind of sacred 80s disco going on inside, involving equal measures of synthesizers and songs of praise.<br />
<br />
That strikes me as exactly the right way of reacting to the universe. As Buddhists I don't think we celebrate enough. People come to Buddhism because it offers a way out of suffering, but this sometimes has the unintended consequence of making Zen centers feel like particularly grim hospitals. Our tradition always tries to remind us that there's really nothing to be healed; but even if there were, the right reaction might still be worship. If the only way of experiencing the rainforest is with a headache, I'll take it, and I'm taking pictures too.<br />
<br />
All of this was just a roundabout way of getting to what I've really gained from Wind in Grass. I've gained nothing. Instead, I've enjoyed every second: staring at the grain of the floorboards, getting splinters in my socked feet, looking over at people during meditation and wondering who's getting it on with whom. I've just enjoyed being here with you, and I want to thank you for being here with me while I did it'.<br />
<br />
As leaving presents I brought a book by Alan Watts, an English Anglican who turned into a Californian Buddhist. I also brought a little owl figurine. I spend much of my life studying classical Athens, so I guess in some sense I've always been an acolyte of Athena. She's the goddess of wisdom, so she's in the same line of work as Buddha. She's there on the altarpiece now with outsize eyes, symbolizing mindfulness and serving as a reminder that it's a good idea to look at things squarely - even when things go wrong, as they sometimes do in Zen groups. Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-22324352973726639682013-06-09T20:09:00.002-07:002013-06-09T20:12:11.030-07:00Meditation on drugs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Recently a couple of friends admitted something to me. They both asked me not to judge them, and then sheepishly told me they were taking antidepressants. On both occasions I looked back at them and said, 'Me too'.<br />
<br />
In fact, I've been taking them, off and on, for about a decade, ever since I began having chronic pain. After trying a number of different drugs, I was prescribed amitriptyline. It was easily the most helpful medication I'd been offered, and I've stuck with it.<br />
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Amitriptyline is an one of a family of older-generation drugs called tricyclic antidepressants. It affects the levels of both serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain, unlike the newer SSRIs, which more precisely target the reuptake of serotonin.<br />
<br />
Nowadays it's very commonly prescribed for chronic pain, usually at a lower dosage than is indicated for depression. I started off taking 20mg a day in England, which helped me finish my first degree but left me in considerable pain. <br />
<br />
In my first three years in California (with the help of more liberal doctors) I was on 100mg a day. I had periods when I was pain free, and though I did feel the side-effects (drowsiness and dry mouth) more strongly, I felt that the drug would never do me any harm.<br />
<br />
That all changed one winter when I started taking 150mg a day because of some extra pain deriving from some dental surgery. I began feeling very depressed, and noticed that I was twitching, itching, and sweating profusely all the time. <br />
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I didn't know it, but those were the symptoms of 'serotonitis', an overdose of serotonin. When I realized, I went cold-turkey, which immeditately made me feel better but which brought the same symptoms on in a more intense form. I remember sitting in the Castro Theater one night in that period, sweating and itching and twitching, watching some noir classic in a strange euphoria of relief.<br />
<br />
After that I was more cautious. In the last few years I've gone off the drug completely a few times, only to go back on it again. In some ways being off it isn't that different; I feel the pain much of the time in both states, but it feels more distant and manageable when I'm on the drug (and sometimes it's completely absent). <br />
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Both of my friends who talked to me about antidepressants had spiritual or religious doubts about taking them, so I thought I might raise the issue here. Are antidepressants antagonistic to a spiritual practice, or complementary? <br />
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I can't answer the question definitively, partly because there are a lot of different drugs and practices out there. But I have looked into this a bit online, and it might seem at first as if meditation and antidepressants are doing more or less the same thing, since they both raise levels of serotonin in the brain.<br />
<br />
This is actually more complicated than it seems, though. One recent <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14976457">Norwegian study</a> (with only 27 subjects) suggested that regular meditators had higher levels of serotonin than non-meditators, but that meditation itself seemed to <em>reduce </em>the level of serotonin in their blood. <br />
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An older <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/1/13/new-harvard-research-tells-how-meditation/">Harvard study</a> appeared to show that people who meditated produced the same amount of norepinephrine (a 'fight or flight' drug), but that it had ceased to trigger an emergency response in meditators. <br />
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So the scientific evidence on this appears complex, and I'm not particularly well-qualified to assess it. Looking at this from a traditional Buddhist angle also raises some <a href="http://www.inquiringmind.com/Articles/MedicineForTheBrain.html">hard questions</a>, such as whether antidepressants should be discouraged as intoxicants, or encouraged as pain-reducing medicines.<br />
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I'm not sure that I have much to add from than angle, either. But I can say a bit more about my own experiences of meditation and one kind of antidepressant, in the hope that it may be useful to other people who are in a similar situation.<br />
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I've practised meditation through the whole period I've been on amitriptyline, usually for twenty minutes a day, though occasionally less (and very occasionally more) than that. Of course all I can do is tell you what it felt like to me (which may not be unimportant).<br />
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I think that meditation without the drug is more challenging. My mind is more anxious and I'm distracted by pain more. On the other hand, it's also more rewarding, since the difference between my state of mind before and after sitting is more dramatic.<br />
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When I'm on a lot of the drug, meditation is often very pleasant. I breathe in, I breathe in, and it all flows along very pleasantly. But in some way it feels more superficial. I feel like things have gone more smoothly but that I have gained less insight about myself and my condition.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the plan is to go off the drugs. The plan (often revised) usually involves doing more and more meditation as I slowly come off it. Unfortunately, I've been too busy lately to commit to longer retreats of the kind I had in mind, so full implementation of the plan will have to wait a bit longer.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I try not to beat myself up about it. Some people take insulin for diabetes. Other take statins for high cholesterol. I take amitriptyline for chronic pain. I also meditate, which is cheaper and doesn't make my mouth dry. In other ways they're just two different things that help. Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-58132511912535813862013-06-02T21:05:00.002-07:002013-06-02T21:05:30.620-07:00Making it wrong<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
For the past year I've been living with two philosophers. Occasionally they leave books about ethics the kitchen table. One of those books made me think again about the Buddhist precepts I took <a href="http://mrpropter.blogspot.com/2012/07/breaking-entering.html">about nine months ago</a> now, and about the discussions with a teacher that led up to them.<br />
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I didn't take the precepts for purely ethical reasons. I did so mainly for other reasons - committing to a practice, a community, and so on. But committing to precepts clearly has an ethical dimension. So what does it mean to commit to Buddhist precepts? What are they? <br />
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I was inclined to viewing them as rules. In that interpretation, 'I vow not to kill' means that you can't kill anything under any circumstances. My teacher David favoured a more psychological interpretation. For him, not killing was about not killing your spontaneity or your vitality.<br />
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Both of these interpretations I found difficult to take. I found it difficult to take my own interpretation of the precepts as rules mainly because, if they were rules, I couldn't honestly commit to some of them. I found David's interpretation hard to take because it seemed to drain the precepts of all content, allowing him to take them to mean pretty much whatever he liked.<br />
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Consider the precept against intoxication. I took it to mean that you shouldn't drink or take drugs. If it meant that, though, I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to it. David thought it was about maintaining your attentiveness - whether you'd been drinking alcohol or not. <br />
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Extreme versions of these positions don't work. If the precept against killing means you can never kill anything, you might have problems dealing with hamburgers and Nazis, let alone E. coli. <br />
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If you think it is guiding you not to kill your spontaneity, you should say how you can tell it isn't guiding you not to kill your depression, or your murderous urges. You may choose to apply it to spontaneity because you like spontaneity. But then you're just adapting the precepts to whatever ethical assumptions you happen to have already.<br />
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You're also draining the word 'killing' of any content. If you take the precepts metaphorically, they can all end up saying the same thing: you shouldn't kill your vitality, you shouldn't steal your vitality, and so on. But there might be ten precepts rather than one because each of them is trying to tell you something different.<br />
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There is natural middle way between these two extremes. You might take the precept against killing to be advising you not to kill things - on a reasonable interpretation of what 'killing' consists in, and within the bounds of what might reasonably be expected of someone. So it might mean you have to become a vegetarian or a pacifist, but not that you can't take antibiotics. <br />
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This isn't a bad way of taking the precepts. It makes them possible to commit to while also preserving their natural meanings. On this reading, it's clear what the Buddhist path is; you may reject it, but at least it's clear what it would mean to embrace it. <br />
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The problem with this compromise position is that it's fuzzy. What is a 'reasonably interpretation' of what killing is? And what can reasonably be expected of people? Some people may find vegetarianism or pacificism as difficult to embrace as toleration of E. coli.<br />
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This objection claims that the precepts aren't informative enough. And that may well be. They may be best taken as guidelines rather than as a complete ethical system. They may simply point to things that are important ethically and ask us to be aware of them: be careful about killing.<br />
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The <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ys69fEWwz2AC&dq=jonathan+dancy+moral+particularism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jxSsUYbNEsa6iwLBx4GQCw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA">book I found</a> on the kitchen table was by a philosopher called Jonathan Dancy, and it helped me think about these issues. Dancy is a moral particularist: he believes morality isn't about rules but about context. That's closer to David's views than to my initial take on the precepts.<br />
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I didn't read Dancy's book through, but at this stage moral particularism doesn't strike me as particularly plausible. One view that Dancy canvasses in his book, though, was more helpful. This was the approach of W.D. Ross, whom I knew as a scholar of Aristotle. <br />
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If Ross had moved to San Francisco and become a Buddhist, he would have called the precepts <em>prima facie </em>moral claims. On this view, the precept against killing says that if an act involves killing, your starting assumption should be that it's bad. You may later revise this view, for example if you find out that the beings being killed are E. coli; but it's a good starting assumption.<br />
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There are all sorts of reasons philosophers nowadays don't like Ross' theory. Some of them aren't very important - such as the complaint that Ross should have used the phrase <em>pro tanto</em> rather than <em>prima facie. Pro tanto </em>reasons are reasons that other reasons may trump, whereas <em>prima facie </em>reasons may, on closer inspection, turn out not to be reasons at all.<br />
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Despite this infelicity of language, Ross' main idea is clear. Killing is a 'wrong-making' feature of actions. If it has killing in it, it's more likely to be wrong when looked at as a whole.<br />
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There are further complexities. You might (like my housemate) want to distinguish two versions of this idea. In the first, killing adds some wrongness into the mix. I may decide that killing E. coli with antibiotics is right in the aggregate, but there's still a bit of wrongness there (in the killing).<br />
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In the second, all we look at is the action as a whole. If we decide that killing E. coli is good in the aggregate, then we have to conclude that killing simply wans't wrong in that case. This is close to the epistemic claim that if killing is part of an action, it makes it more likely to be wrong.<br />
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I might be wrong, but I think that Ross' view offers us a pretty satisfactory way of approaching the Buddhist precepts (or any other ethical guidelines) that avoids the extremes of treating them either as inflexible rules or as nearly content-free suggestions. <br />
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Whether I think the ten Mahayana precepts really identify 'wrong-making' features of actions is another question. I actually don't have a problem with gossip, for example. I like gossip. Maybe I prefer the five Therevada precepts: killing is wrong-making, stealing is wrong-making, sexual immorality is wrong-making, lying is wrong-making, intoxication is wrong-making. As they say.<br />
Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-50637333665582447022013-05-26T20:43:00.000-07:002013-05-27T10:16:53.580-07:00Face to face<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Recently I went out for a drink with a friend who worries a lot about money. She worries so much, in fact, that she told me she'll only feel financially secure when she has about $80 000 dollars in savings. I said, 'Do you know that passage in the Bible?' (That's not something I say very often.) 'The bit about the lilies in the field?' I've sat through a lot of church services in my time.<br />
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'Look at the birds in the air', the passage runs. 'They do not sow or reap and store in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them...Consider how the lilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do not spin; and yet, I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendour was not attired like one of these...So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself'.<br />
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It's not great financial advice. All the same, there's something true and valuable about the main idea it expresses: we constantly fall into the habit of worrying how we'll survive, and yet somehow usually do. (Except when we don't, in which case there's really nothing to worry about). In case you're wondering, the lines are spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, the 1st-century CE religious leader. (And the lines are at Matthew 6.19-34.) <br />
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That's a strange way of introducing him, of course, because most people know who he is. All the same, it's often useful to look at things that are familiar to us as if we were considering them for the first time. That was partly what led me to read through the whole of the Bible over the last three years. I've already written about the Old Testament, and now I've finished the New Testament too.<br />
<br />
I thought the Old Testament was mostly <a href="http://mrpropter.blogspot.com/2012/04/testament.html">really bad</a>, in both the moral and aesthetic senses. Since I wrote about it, a few people have told me that I should have read it with a scholarly commentary or companion. And there's no doubt I would have gained a better knowledge of the text that way. But I didn't have time to do that. I also thought it might be interesting just to read the thing and see what struck me about it.<br />
<br />
The New Testament is a lot better than the Old Testament, in both the aesthetic and moral senses. For a start, it's much shorter, taking up around 300 pages of my 1000-page Bible. It tells a coherent story, running from Jesus' life, through the early history of the movement he founded, to the writings of one of that movement's early leaders, Paul. It's a bit repetitive, but it's not a bad thing for historians that it includes four different versions of Jesus' life.<br />
<br />
Jesus is a pretty nice guy, and his teachings have a lot of good in them. He thinks the peacemakers are blessed, wants us to love our enemies, and claims religion boils down to loving God and loving your neighbour. What he says at Luke 6.28-9 neatly encapsulates this side of Jesus: 'Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you.'<br />
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Jesus is also something of a revolutionary. Often this is a good thing: Jesus is impatient with pointless rules, and tells a rich man to sell all he owns and give his money to the poor. Sometimes, though, he can be a little unsettling. 'You must not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth', he says, strangely enough, at Matthew 10.34-6. 'I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son's wife against her mother-in-law'.<br />
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In other words, he is complex. Despite all his talk of love and forgiveness, he occasionally loses it and talks about how sinners will be flung by angels into a burning furnace, 'the place of wailing and grinding of teeth' (Matthew 13.47-50). He also believes that he is the Messiah and the son of God. <br />
<br />
But we are now in the murky territory of things the gospels attribute to Jesus, but which he might never have claimed to be true. All the gospels say that he was a miracle-worker, for example, and that he rose from the dead. <br />
<br />
One element of his teaching that emerges clearly is his belief that the world will end sooner rather than later. To be precise, he believes that the world will end in the lifetime of some of his disciples. As he says to them, 'There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power' (Mark 9.1).<br />
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That was what struck me about Jesus as described by the gospels. He's a religious leader with his heart in the right place but who also has a vengeful streak and who believes he's the son of God. His followers for whatever reason were inclined to attribute miracles to him. Finally, he explicitly predicts on several occasions that the world will end within the next century at the latest.<br />
<br />
That looks like an example of a falsifiable claim that was falsified, but that didn't stop the early Christians. The Acts of the Apostles were for me the most unfamiliar and surprising part of the New Testament. <br />
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On the one hand, they're heartening, the story of the survival and growth of a tiny sect in the teeth of violent repression. The early Christians are simple folk, and live in a kind of commune: 'Not a man of them claimed any of his possessions as his own, but everything was held in common' (4.32).<br />
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On the other hand, they can seem like a cult that comes under the increasing control of a violent and unscrupulous leadership. Peter kills two dissidents by miraculous agency (5.5-10), and claims the privilege of passing on God's word through the laying on of hands - a monoply he vigilantly protects (8.18-25).<br />
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Once we get to Paul, things have normalized somewhat. The Paul whose words we read in the letters is clearly the head of an organization, who is giving instructions to subordinates. At the same time, his advice is often wise, and always well expressed. The influence of Greek literature on his paradoxical prose style is noticeable; this is an educated man, learned and literate.<br />
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A lot of the highlighs I was read as a child were written by Paul, including the famous passage on charity (or love, depending on the translation: Cor. 13.1-14). He tells us that we brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out of it. He reminds us that we reap what we sow. He encourages us to be humble, helpful, and cheerful. In the best tradition of his master, he assures us that 'He who loves his neighbour has satisfied every claim of the law' (Rom. 13.8).<br />
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In Paul's writings there is no trace of Jesus the revolutionary. Instead, Christianity emerges partly as a way of being stable and dependable. As he says, you are free to do anything - but not everything is for your good, including extra-marital sex (Cor. 6-12-20). Members of the Christian community should be honest and upright and religious teachers should lead especially blameless lives. <br />
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Paul's moralizing often spills over into condemnations. Women were made from men, and therfore should be subordinate; a woman preaching a sermon is an abomination; in fact, women should just be quiet (Cor. 11.8-9; 14.35; Tim. 2.12). Homosexuality is unnatural and will be punished (Rom. 1.26-7). All of these judgments are extremely clear in the text. <br />
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Those were my main impressions of the New Testament. (Revelations is just batshit.) What conclusions do I draw from my reading of it? That Jesus meant well and was a charismatic leader but was probably delusional; that his followers very quickly clouded his life with stories about miracles; and that Christianity had both good and bad in it from the very beginning. I won't try to substantiate those judgments further; they're simply what I concluded after reading the Bible.<br />
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I was raised as a Christian, both at home and at school. Am I still a Christian? Culturally, yes: I still celebrate Christmas, have an understanding for Christian mythology, and am often moved by Christian art. I can't imagine being married or buried without some sort of Christian ceremony. <br />
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I also think that there is a lot in the New Testament that makes sense and is ethically valuable. It's just that I don't see why you need to believe the miraculous portions of the text to value kindness and humility. I also don't think that we should cling to every word of a book that advises us to punish homosexuals and prevent women from having a voice. <br />
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This is part of the reason I practice Buddhist meditation. It's true that the more Buddhist scriptures I read, the more offended I am by their <a href="http://mrpropter.blogspot.com/2013/01/dark-heart.html">nonsensicality and superstition</a>. But none of the Buddhist scriptures has quite the status or authority of the Bible; there are scriptures, but not one Holy Bible.<br />
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It's an interesting historical question how this came to pass. And an important one, too. It might explain why nobody (at least in the West) has ever told me that I have to believe anything at all about the Buddha's life, while most Christians would still say that believing in the resurrection defines them. It might explain how I can (at least in California) be a Buddhist without being a Buddhist. And why, until Christians stop being Christians, I can't be one too. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-47086019055215725522013-05-19T21:06:00.003-07:002013-05-20T14:14:28.636-07:00Giving freely<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A couple of months ago our teacher at Wind in Grass, David Weinstein, sent an email out informing us that he'd no longer be working with students who weren't members of Pacific Zen Institute. Since there's a charge for membership, this effectively meant that he wouldn't be working with people who weren't paid up.<br />
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David did point out that there's no minimum membership fee, so you could be paying as little as $5 a month. Also, we already give David the money in the donation bowl on the nights that he comes in<em>. </em>Finally, the change will really only affect one night a month, when David's there. So is this really much of a change?<br />
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I think it is, and I also think that it's a step in the wrong direction. (And I know that I'm not alone in feeling this way.) But before telling you why I should say that I have valued having a teacher in over the last few years. I also think David is a very good teacher (and I've been to quite a few Buddhist events since I moved to California).<br />
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That said, I think this move is wrong for three reasons. The most important one is that it brings us very close to paying for the <em>dharma. </em>But if Buddhist teaching is centered on doing without material wealth, giving generously to others, and so on, that seems like a strange situation to be in. Asking for payment undermines a central part of the message that we're trying to convey.<br />
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As I admitted above, we do give <em>dana </em>to our teacher anyway. So what's the difference? The main difference is that <em>dana </em>is freely given. In other words, it's a real donation or gift, and symbolizes the very values of generosity and unstinginess that we're promoting. It also gives us an opportunity to enact those values in giving freely what we can.<br />
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But paying for membership also creates a division between members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. This is the second reason I'm against it. People need to feel like they can come sit with us whenever they want, and not sit with us whenever they want, too. As Michael said to me, one of our main strengths is that we don't ask newcomers for any kind of commitment. <br />
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There's a related, practical issue. It may make sense for someone like me, who turns up every week, to pay a monthly fee for membership. But we have a lot of people who turn up once every two or three months. Are we going to have to start presenting them with a choice of either committing to membership or going elsewhere to talk to a teacher?<br />
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The final problem I have with this is more personal. It's that it brings WiG more clearly and firmly within the bounds of PZI. Of course, WiG has always, strictly speaking, been a branch of PZI, but most nights it doesn't feel like one - it feels like a bunch of friends meeting for informal meditation. I like WiG a lot, but have doubts about PZI. But other people may feel differently about that one.<br />
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I've deliberately dodged a big issue here, one I might get around to discussing in a future post. That issue is the whole question of how we should compensate Zen teachers, if at all. For now, I'm willing to entertain the idea that they should receive regular and generous donations, since they often do work comparable to Christian ministers, who are salaried. <br />
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But I'd still want to insist, at this stage, that they receive <em>donations</em>, and not pay. I'd also want there to be a way of collecting donations that doesn't divide people into an inside and an outside group. But these are just some thoughts from someone who's enjoyed having a teacher for the last three years and would like him to be able to work, at least occasionally, for no money at all.<br />
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<em></em>Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-41837507939176028172013-05-12T23:32:00.001-07:002013-05-12T23:32:20.163-07:00Buddhism without Buddhism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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After we decided to break up, my girlfriend and I turned to the question of <em>when</em>. Her preference was 'right away', whereas I favoured waiting until I was actually leaving, in June. In the end, we compromised. We would break up over spring break, at the end of a short road-trip up the California coast.<br />
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Part of the reason we could agree on the timing was because I'd signed up for a week-long <em>sesshin</em> at SF Zen Center that same week. I thought it would help me deal with the break-up. I had to write to the Ino to ask if I could only come for three days, and I did so with trepidation, because the practice at SFZC is strict. <br />
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I got an answer almost immediately: 'We will be happy for you to join us whenever you can'. It wasn't from Shundo but from the new Ino, Valorie. I also told her that I'd injured my knee and couldn't sit half-lotus. She said she'd arrange for a chair to be provided in the meditation hall.<br />
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We got back from our road trip at about 11pm. I got up the next day at 4am and walked to City Center. But I don't live in the Lower Haight anymore; I live on 24th Street in the Mission. So the walk had expanded since my last retreat at SFZC from five minutes to a bit less than an hour. But the pre-dawn hour is a fine one to be up in San Francisco.<br />
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This was my first retreat with a chair, and it was much more enjoyable because of it. I felt I could concentrate on my meditation rather than on simply making it through the next period without changing my position too many times because of the pain. I also joined the invalids no doing full prostrations in the various ceremonies, and that also helped a great deal.<br />
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I quickly got back into the rhythm of sittings, services, work, and eating. I was surprised to discover that I had a certain fondness for the Zen Center, even though I've never really liked the formal style of practice there. I even enjoyed the formal <em>oryoki</em> breakfasts, once I remembered how to do them. The night the <em>sesshin</em> ended I went to my first Passover <em>seder </em>at a friend's house, and took to it like a duck to water (or, as the Zen poet says, like a tiger making for the mountains).<br />
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There were two teachers, City Center Abess <a href="http://www.sfzc.org/cc/display.asp?catid=2,6,126&pageid=166">Christina Lehnherr</a> and lay teacher <a href="http://www.sfzc.org/cc/display.asp?catid=2,6,127&pageid=1308">Marsha Angus.</a> I met with Marsha and talked to her about fear. She had a background in various types of therapy, and struck me as very Californian. When I asked her about whether to accept thoughts or try to get beyond them, she said she'd need to have known me for longer to be able to answer that question.<br />
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In one of Christina's morning talks she told us her own story. Until she was 30 she was almost always depressed. She moved into the Zen Center and liked it, but left it for a year to make sure she wasn't simply trying to avoid life. She worked at a care home for catatonic patients.<br />
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It was hard. Her job involved feeding, cleaning, and clothing adults who couldn't move or communicate. One day she was about to undress someone to clean them when she was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of love and awe. Changing a grown man's diaper had sparked some sort of realization.<br />
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In another talk, she told us about someone she knew who married herself. At first I thought she had mis-spoken (her native language being German), but no - her friend had given herself a ring and taken herself as wife. Why? As an experiment in treating herself with as much forbearance and patience as someone she loved. <br />
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When I went to speak to her I talked about whether when I moved I would continue to think of myself as a Buddhist, or go back to just meditating on my own. She said I didn't need to make declarations one way or the other; I could just follow the path wherever it led me. 'Would you consider yourself a Buddhist?' I asked. The head of the San Francisco Zen Center, dressed in her ceremonial robes and in a room with at least three statues of the Buddha, thought for a moment and said 'no'. <br />
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I told her I wasn't upset about my break-up, which worried me. But we quickly found reasons why it might not have been so hurtful: the fact that it was mutual, and a product of circumstances rather than a falling-out. The main thing I remember was her saying to me that it was okay to be sad sometimes without a reason, but that it was also okay to be happy.<br />
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I didn't have any spiritual breakthrough during that retreat. Nor did I marry myself, although I may have come a little closer to engagement. I didn't get better at <em>zazen.</em> But sometimes in the half-hours between sittings, I would get a cup of tea and just sit out in the courtyard with the fountain and the flowers. I wouldn't try to meditate. I would just sit there, with the birds chirping and the thoughts tumbling over one another, and the water in the fountain splashing over and over on the stone.<br />
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Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-58727970830713028622013-05-12T18:41:00.001-07:002013-05-26T18:06:21.154-07:00The spirit of the way<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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He is perhaps best described as a free-lance writer, and he is best remembered for his books about Zen. Watts' 1957 book <em>The Way of Zen</em> 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, <em>The Spirit of Zen </em>(1936) that I read the earlier work instead. (I've since noticed a good, cheap edition of the later book on sale at <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/alley-cat-books-san-francisco">my local bookstore</a>.)<br />
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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 <em>Religion of the Samurai</em>'. 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Since I read Suzuki's <em>Introduction to Zen Buddhism </em>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? <br />
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A third theme of the book is Zen as a key into the cultures of China and Japan; indeed, the book is subtitled <em>A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East. </em>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 <em>jujitsu</em> and flower-arrangement, all the while avoiding asking how common (let alone representative) such practices are in the China and Japan of his day.<br />
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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:<br />
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'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."'<br />
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<em></em><br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-51511202999073624422013-03-17T20:55:00.001-07:002013-03-17T20:55:08.525-07:00Breaking the spell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This weekend, rather than spending my Saturday cycling up an enormous hill, I decided to sit on my ass all day. The Stanford Zen group (loosely affiliated with the Buddhist Community at Stanford) had organized a one-day meditation retreat in the <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/religiouslife/cgi-bin/wordpress/students/circle/">inter-religious center</a> on the top floor of the Old Union. Since I was going to be in the South Bay that weekend anyway, I decided to go along.<br />
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I don't really know the people in the Stanford Zen group, since their regular meeting is on Wednesday nights, the same night that Wind in Grass meets. They seem to be run by two or three serious-minded and dedicated undergraduates who organize the regular weekly sittings and the odd one-day event on campus.<br />
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I don't know what kind of crowd attends the weekly meetings, but the crowd that turned up yesterday was a mixed bunch. There were naturally a lot of students, both undergrads and grads. There were also a few people who lived in the local area and had come in for the day.<br />
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There were more Asian people than I see in the meditation groups I go to in the city. I've read that a feature of Buddhism in America is that so-called 'ethnic' (Asian) and 'convert' (European) Buddhists tend to gather in different groups. But the group that I saw yesterday seemed evenly mixed.<br />
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Seated opposite me were a Chinese mother and her son, who looked about 11. Every so often she notice him fidgeting and give him a sharp tap with her hand. I thought of how unused I am to seeing this sort of thing in a Buddhist context, whereas I grew up in a world where parents forcing their children to church was very familiar. There was a way in which the mother encouraging her son to meditate was sweet, but it reminded me how easy it still is in the West to forget about the more customary, religious aspects of Buddhism. I've met very few Buddhists in the US who didn't come to it voluntarily.<br />
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We had three periods of meditation with breaks in between. The meditation periods consisted of half an hour of seated meditation plus about five minutes of walking meditation. The breaks were ten minutes long. During the meditation periods people went for one-on-one talks with a visiting teacher, <a href="http://www.audiodharma.org/teacher/219/">Max Erdstein</a>. At one o'clock Erdstein gave a talk, followed by a Q&A.<br />
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In my interview with Erdstein, I talked to him about my experiences over the past few years: the initial experience of falling in love with a new group, my disagreement with John Tarrant, and then my increasing disillusionment with institutional Buddhism more generally. He told me that the inclination to test out a teacher was worth honouring, but reminded me that not all groups were the same. He told me to trust my instincts.<br />
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In his talk, he told the story of why he started meditating. When he was an undergrad at Stanford, he contracted a chronic illness that left the doctors perplexed. Out of desperation, he bought a meditation book and CD by Jon Kabat-Zinn. After a while, his health began to improve, and he stopped practicing. A few years later, while working at Google, the stresses of the job brought him back to it.<br />
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He said he remembers considering two paths through life. The first was trying to be so successful in business that he'd never be at a loss for anything. The second was trying to moderate his wants. He looked at people he knew who'd embarked on both paths. While he was often impressed by the top people in his company, it seemed to him like they'd acquired more skills than wisdom. Conversely, although his meditation teachers weren't perfect people by any means, they appeared to have a kind of depth, an level of insight about their own lives that seemed valuable.<br />
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He passed on a few similes that some of his teachers had used to describe what a meditative practice might bring. It was like when you're in the movie theatre, and you're entirely immersed in the world of the movie. Then, for some reason, the spell is broken, you look around you for a second and see how everybody else in living the ups and downs of the characters on the screen. You remember, just for an instant, that none of it's real. But then you return to the movie anyway, and somehow your pleasure in it is enhanced, not ruined, by your knowledge that it's all an illusion.<br />
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Or it was like going up in a plane to do sky-diving for the first time. You jump out of the plane, and for a moment it's exhilarating, you can fly, float, do somersaults. Then you're falling, it's horrible, and you realize that the parachute you'd been depending on is missing. Buddhism, Erdstein said, wasn't like being handed a parachute. It was like realizing that there isn't any ground to hit, that you'd go on falling forever, and that the falling really was like the flying you'd taken it for the moment after you jumped.<br />
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I found myself very moved by Erdstein's talk - but not so much by the analogies as by the personal narrative. That was partly because it was so much like mine. But there was something else, something I've noticed about dharma talks. When people offer advice, instruction, or admonitions, I usually find something within me resisting (which is a healthy enough reaction). When people just say plainly why they started meditating, I almost always hear in their experience an echo of mine, an echo that somehow confirms mine or at least keeps company with it.<br />
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I had to leave half-way through the Q&A, but it had been a great morning: twenty or so people in a simple room meditating together and talking about it afterwards. There weren't any statues, or robes, or all that much bowing. There was a teacher, but nobody demanding prostrations when I went to talk to him. The event was free: the first meditation retreat, in my three years in SF, at which nobody asked me for money.<br />
<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-71979661382022043932013-02-24T13:09:00.002-08:002013-02-24T13:11:58.069-08:00Showing spine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have a friend in England who occasionally sends me links to articles about meditation. They're usually more or less enthusiastic explorations of meditation or mindfulness. But a couple of weeks ago he sent me the recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/asia/zen-buddhists-roiled-by-accusations-against-teacher.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">New York Times piece </a>about allegations of sexual harassment against Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki.<br />
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It's all very sad. A few months ago, the same friend sent me a link to Sasaki's <a href="http://www.mbzc.org/">Mt. Baldy training center</a>. I spent a few minutes on the site and distinctly remember thinking, 'How nice, an old-style Zen center without any sign of untoward behaviour or controversy'. I sent an email back saying, 'Looks like a good place to do koan work'.<br />
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That judgment will have to be revised now. It seems that the kind of koan work that went on at Mt. Baldy involved women being encouraged to expose their breasts to the teacher as a way of 'showing' the answer. It also seems to have involved a lot of unwelcome groping, and the occasional tea-time at which the Zen master would do his best to seduce his students.<br />
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My own view of this is clear: Sasaki should be stripped of his status as a <i>roshi</i> and should never again be allowed to teach. More generally, Buddhist teachers who fail to live up to the few simple rules that govern their conduct - the norms that we apply to teachers of any sort in our society, as well as the basic ethical tenets of their own religion - should no longer act as teachers (at least for a significant period of time).<br />
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Western Buddhist communities need to apply these rules strictly for a number of reasons. We need to send a clear signal to those who might be interested in Buddhism that sexual harassment and abuse will never be tolerated. We need to affirm in a public way that everyone in our communities, from the most experienced practitioner to the complete beginner, partakes of a fundamental equality and is bound by the same rules. And we need to make it clear to those in authority that abuse of this sort will not be taken lightly, so that it is less likely to happen again - or, at least, so that it happens less frequently in the future.<br />
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This is, of course, not the first case of a Zen teacher abusing his authority for sexual gain. Part of what upsets me about the Sasaki case is that it is the latest in a long line of such cases. And nobody ever seems to learn from the past. Each time this happens we are told that next time, things will be different. More people are going to speak out earlier. Nobody is going to be hoodwinked by a charismatic teacher ever again. From now on, people will go into things with their eyes open.<br />
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Then the next scandal breaks, often revealing (as in Sasaki's case) that abuses had been going on for decades. That nobody had been brave enough to speak out against them (or only a few people, who were ignored or condemned by the community at large). That the master's inner coterie had done everything they could to sweep the allegations under the carpet. And that people calling themselves Buddhists had, on the whole, preferred perpetual forgiveness of the master to standing up for the rights of their fellow students.<br />
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If everyone agreed on what needed to be done, that would be one thing. If everyone agreed that what we need to do is ensure that our religious institutions are accountable and transparent, then we could start the conversation about how exactly we might go about doing that. Instead, as a glance at any online Zen forum will tell you, a lot of people think that we should avoid being too harsh, or judgmental, or hung-up on sex, or disrespectful of the tradition, or whatever. A lot of these people have the best of intentions, but it's worth pointing out why their arguments won't wash.<br />
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The first argument I've seen is that we shouldn't take action against teachers like Sasaki since to do so would be unkind. In other words, it would violate one of the core teaching of Buddhism, that we should be compassionate. Some people even claim that whistle-blowers like Eshu Martin - who broke the story of Sasaki's abuses with <a href="http://sweepingzen.com/everybody-knows-by-eshu-martin/">a letter</a> to Sweeping Zen - are guilty of triumphalism, or showboating, or of profiting from others' suffering. In any case, stripping an 105-year-old priest of his dignity can hardly be seen as the kind of acts Buddhist should be advocating.<br />
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The problem with this argument is that we can all agree to be kind, while disagreeing about what being kind should consist in. It's arguable that if we take into consideration everyone that might be impacted by this - including potential future victims of harassment - the kindest thing to do is to impose strict sanctions on teachers who do wrong. And while it's good to remind ourselves that showboating doesn't help, the actions of whistle-blowers can also easily be interpreted as acts of kindness, since the intention behind them is often to reduce future harm.<br />
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The second argument is a more sophisticated, more Zen and less Buddhist, version of the first. It is that we should avoid being judgmental of others, and that we should have a certain detachment from the judgments our minds often make. But it seems impossible to avoid judging altogether. In Sasaki's case, not taking any action would constitute a judgment just as much as taking robust action would. Given that we're all going to judge the situation in various ways, we need some way of arbitrating among judgments. So it's probably better to focus on whether a given judgment is accurate than to try to get rid of judging altogether.<br />
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The Zen recommendation to keep your thoughts at a certain distance is often a helpful one, in that it can prevent us from taking our own upset for a disorder in the world. But it's important to realize that <i>never </i>endorsing any of your own thoughts leads to an infinite regress. Radical doubt is simply impossible, because the thought 'I should never believe any thought I have' leads to paradox. People who say 'we should not judge at all' are caught in a bind; if we shouldn't judge anything, why should we judge what they say to be true? The healthy way of applying the original recommendation is to remember to take some time to gain some perspective on each thought as it arises. Eventually, though, you will have to decide one way or the other. <br />
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There's another reason that it's perfectly permissible to judge teachers like Sasaki by certain ethical standards. This is that they themselves have chosen to take certain vows and precepts as Buddhists and as Buddhist teachers. It's not like we're imposing some entirely foreign system of values on them that they never signed up to or saw coming. All Zen students who take refuge agree to the ten Boddhisattva precepts, among which is the precept against sexual immorality. Zen teachers are obviously bound by these precepts too - indeed, as teachers, we should expect them to be especially committed to them. And though ideas of what constitutes sexual immorality thankfully change over time, what Sasaki was up to clearly fits the bill.<br />
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This helps with a third common argument, that we in the West are too hung up on sex. Really (the argument goes) there's nothing intrinsically wrong about sex; and even if there were, the way we are reacting to the Sasaki scandal is exaggerated. In the normal course of things, teachers will sometimes have sex with students, and there's no reason for us to freak out about it. (This seems to be <a href="http://hardcorezen.info/zen-in-the-news/1676">Brad Warner's view</a>, though he is careful to draw a line between consensual sex between students and teachers and Sasaki's non-consensual groping.)<br />
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I don't want to revisit the issue of why consensual student-teacher sex is unacceptable, except to remind everyone that power differentials within Zen groups is often considerable. But I will say two things. The first is that in the case of Sasaki, it's clear that the vast majority of his groping was done without the consent of the women involved. You don't have to be prudish about sex to see why this is wrong. All you have to understand is that sexual choice is an important right, and that this right was violated by Sasaki's actions.<br />
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The second thing I'll say is that the idea that we should be careful about sex is not simply a Western idea. It is present in many Eastern belief-systems too. One of these is Buddhism. Both the ten Mahayana precepts and the five Theravada ones warn us to avoid sexual immorality. Of course, we can disagree about what sexual immorality is, and whether a particular person has committed it. But the idea that we are introducing Western concerns about sex into Buddhism is a non-starter: the concerns about sex were already there. <br />
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The final argument I want to confront is that stripping Sasaki of his authority as a teacher would be an affront to his ancient lineage. Now, I personally am moving towards the conclusion that we shouldn't have spiritual teachers at all: the potential for abuse is just too great. The claims of lineages seem especially spurious: even if were true that there were chains of teachers reaching all the way back to the Buddha, I still wouldn't see why that would necessarily make people at the end of those chains better teachers.<br />
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But I recognize that there are lots of good people who value lineages. I can certainly appreciate the intangible and yet real value of being part of an ancient tradition. And I have met and worked with teachers who had a lot of worthwhile things to say. Even if we grant that lineages should play a role, though, we might still want to take action to make teachers accountable. Indeed, people who value lineages should arguably be the most active in disciplining renegade teachers, since their transgressions visibly dishonour the traditions that those teachers claim to be part of. Besides, if we truly believe that the precepts reduce suffering, helping teachers to abide by them is a gentle act.<br />
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The bottom line in all of this is that we need to remain level-headed about meditation and meditation teachers. If a teacher in a high school sleeps with a student, he ceases to be a teacher. If a doctor fails to live up to a code of medical practice, he ceases to be a doctor. But whenever a Zen teacher is caught abusing his position for sex, and (moreover) contravening a clear ethical code he himself has signed up to and continually advocates, there is always a chorus of voices saying that no practical measures should be taken. Why?Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-74152580598395861142013-02-10T23:10:00.000-08:002013-02-10T23:10:28.904-08:00The mousetrap<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yesterday we decided to do some cleaning. We at Wind in Grass have been talking about this for some time, and now we've finally gotten around to it.</div>
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We meet every week in a space owned by the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House. The main building, designed by Julia Morgan, has several different rooms which always seem to be in use and which get a corresponding amount of upkeep.<br />
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The space we use is a kind of annex to the main building, except that it's actually entirely separate, and you can't get to one from the other. It also fronts onto a different street, so to get to us from the main building you have to walk around the corner and the down some steps.<br />
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That will get you onto Carolina, a street which plunges sharply downwards. From the top you get a marvelous view of the skyscrapers downtown and the Bay Bridge and the flashing Coca-Cola sign. To find us you have to break your downward plunge and take a sharp left into a little entranceway.<br />
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I love everything about our location, even though the first couple of times I tried to find the group I walked right by it. During one-days you can take food outside and eat it on the street and look out over the city like you were sitting on the grassy slope of a mountain. A few times I've gotten a lift downhill on Michael's scooter - a moment of pure experience if there ever was one. <br />
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I also love the space itself. It is down to earth, unpretentious, simple. It is basically a large rectangular room with four pillars near the center. In one corner there is a bathroom and on the far side there is a small antechamber leading to a slightly larger storage area. We have dokusan in the antechamber. It's good to practice with humility and simplicity, and easy to do so in a place like this. <br />
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On the other hand, those wooden floorboards are pretty rough, and it's not uncommon for people to get splinters in their feet while doing walking meditation. I like it to think it keeps us awake, but it's probably not the best introduction to kinhin for newcomers. The place looks generally dilapidated.<br />
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So we've finally decided to try to renovate it a little. Yesterday was the first scheduled day of work practice. We spent most of it clearing out the storage area. Apparently nobody had done any kind of sorting of the stuff in there since the 1970s. The result was a sort of archaeology.<br />
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The top layer was our stuff: a few large crates containing stuff for the tea, stuff for the altar, and two big piles of mats and cushions. The next layer down contained pictures and magazines and children's art projects from the 90s and 80s. The next two layers, Vietnam War posters and JFK campaign material.<br />
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After that things started to get ugly. At the lowest level the stacks of magazines started to dissolve into amorphous lumps of pulp. If you tried to pick a pile up half of it would come away in your hands. By this point you could see the ancient mouse-traps and the scatter of rat-droppings on the floor.<br />
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We pulled everything out and placed it into three piles: keep, throw, maybe. Miscellanea in the throw category included: a set of leather-bound volumes of the complete works of classic authors; a series of large plates for stamping pre-computer spreadsheets into being; milk cartons swilling mysterious liquids. <br />
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The keep pile included an old notebook in which someone had copied hundreds of passages of poetry and philosophy. I was going to throw it when Marika saved it for our liturgy. The maybe pile is still there: it is how objects that are too awkward to be carted to the dump have so far avoided destruction. There are also some pictures nobody wants but were too nicely framed to throw away.<br />
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It was all much worse than I had thought. Every month I've gone into the antechamber to meet with David, who sits right in front of the door to the storage area, blithely unaware of the rat-droppings carpeting the room behind him. <br />
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And every week we've sat in the main room practicing mindfulness, completely ignorant of the piles of rotting newsprint festering on the other side of the wall. There was all this trash right there, just beyond a space we felt so sure of. The hidden stuff was going to make itself felt at some point, so it's a good thing we dealt with it sooner rather than later. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-89085188736707734422013-01-20T19:24:00.001-08:002013-01-20T20:12:43.995-08:00Game of lives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This Christmas holiday, besides reading the Diamond and Heart sutras, I also finished reading Herman Hesse's <i>The Glass Bead Game.</i> 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 <i>Siddhartha </i>based on the life of the Buddha. <i>The Glass Bead Game</i>, his last novel and his greatest, is profoundly marked by Buddhist themes and perspectives.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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The narrative follows Knecht's progress from diffident pupil to <i>magister ludi</i>, 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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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).<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>The Glass Bead Game</i> 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.Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-55194010632094630382013-01-20T15:17:00.001-08:002013-01-20T17:53:53.723-08:00Brown bread<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last December I decided to sign up for a one-day retreat at Green Gulch Farm. It was led by <a href="http://www.peacefulseasangha.com/">Ed Brown</a>, a Soto priest who is also a skilled chef. He helped set up <a href="http://www.greensrestaurant.com/">Greens restaurant</a>, a Zen Center offshoot in the Marina district of San Francisco. He is also an expert break-maker. (Although I hadn't heard of Brown before the retreat, I was well-aware that they make their own bread at Green Gulch, having been made to lug sacks of flour into the kitchen during my first stay there.)<br />
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I was late getting there. When I reached the meditation hall the wooden slide doors wouldn't open; eventually someone heard me fidgeting with them and let me in. (Later that day I realized that there were tiny wooden bolts you had to slide to one side to be able to open the doors.) The meditation hall was only half full, with about 20 or 30 people having turned up for the one-day sitting. Brown was making some introductory remarks.<br />
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After a the first session of seated meditation, Brown sent us outside for <i>kinhin</i> (walking meditation). This time though it was more like the random mindful walking around I had seen at Spirit Rock than the controlled, group marching that was the practice at PZI and SFZC retreats. Instead of stepping slowly and carefully around the room in a circle, we went out into the fields and scattered thoughtfully in all directions.<br />
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There was a second dose of seated meditation, and then qi-gong. Qi-gong, it turns out, is something like tai-chi, or at least it is the way Brown teaches it. (He led off with the disclaimer that what we were about to do might not be qi-gong; he had once taught a class only to have someone approach him afterwards and insist that what he was doing was <i>not </i>qi-gong). It was peaceful enough, and a good way of shaking off the discomfort that comes with long periods of sitting.<br />
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After lunch there was a question and answer period, which was strangely enough before the dharma talk. (It was also a lot more interesting than the dharma talk, during which I drifted in and out of sleep a number of times.) Brown talked about the discomfort of a rigorous Zen practice, and though he said that he practiced a gentler 'Zen lite', he warned against trying too hard to make things comfortable. 'If you keep trying to make things comfortable for yourself, you'll reach a point at which even lying down isn't satisfactory, because even that's not quite comfortable enough.'<br />
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In the afternoon there were a couple of more periods of sitting bracketing a period of walking meditation. This time we walked indoors, since it was now raining outside. For the last period of sitting we faced into the room, so that we could see each other, the way I learned to sit with PZI and which I've always preferred to the SFZC norm of sitting facing a blank wall. (In City Center they even paint the windows white so that you can't be distracted by what's going on outside.)<br />
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At the end of the day my girlfriend picked me up and surprised me by saying she'd made a reservation at the nearby <a href="http://www.pelicaninn.com/">Pelican Inn</a>. She'd driven me up and had spent the day cycling up and down the coast (in the rain on the return leg). We sat by the fire in a very good imitation of a medieval English pub. I felt slightly stunned and giddy. It wasn't the pint of beer in front of me; it was the two hours of sitting behind me.<br />
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On the sign there was a depiction of a pelican, an old friend of mine from college. In the middle ages they took the pelican to symbolize Christ, believing that the bird (which often cleans its front-feathers with its beak) took pieces of its own flesh from its breast to feed them to its children. Not a comfortable procedure, surely; but you have to make your daily bread. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-84286764632696329432013-01-12T19:50:00.000-08:002013-01-12T19:50:01.897-08:00Dark heart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Recently I decided to start reading up on Buddhism. Of course I'd read introductory books before, but for a long time I avoided studying up on things, since I wanted to focus on the practice of meditation itself. But I've come to see this approach as naive - Buddhism in a complex tradition, and with so many different brands out there, it's worth being well informed.<br />
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Before the Christmas holiday I borrowed a book with the unpromising title <i>Buddhist Wisdom</i>. Instead of being a repository of bumper-sticker slogans, though, it in fact contained a translation and commentary of two of the most important Buddhist scriptures, the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. I thought it would be helpful to start with these, two texts which are central to almost all Zen schools and to many other Mahayana traditions.<br />
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Both of these sutras are part of the Sanskrit collection known as the Perfection of Wisdom (<i>prajnaparamita</i>). These scriptures are supposed to have been rediscovered in the possession of the serpentine kings, the Nagas, by the master Nagarjuna. Scholars used to date them to somewhere between 500 and 800 AD, but now prefer a much earlier date, somewhere around the turn of the millennium.<br />
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Both of them have a central place in most Zen practices, and I've heard them recited at both PZI and SFZC retreats. The Diamond sutra has the additional distinction of being the text that the all-important Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng (639-713 AD) was reading when he attained enlightenment. A Chinese edition of it from 868 AD, now in the British Museum, also happens to be the oldest printed book in the world.<br />
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So what did I make of these two holy texts? Very little, I'm afraid. Both are disquisitions on doctrine given by enlightened figures (the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra and Avalokitesvara in the Heart Sutra) to less enlightened disciples (one Subhuti in the first text and one Shariputra in the second). Both are concerned with meditation, enlightenment, and transcendence. Both emphasize the dogmas of non-attainment and no-soul, both central features of the Mahayana path.<br />
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Beyond this, I had trouble making head or tail of them. They are full of technical terms, many of them devotional in character (so the Buddha is at one point referred to as 'the Tathagata, the Arhat, the Fully Enlightened One'). The questions the text raises seem either like tricks ('Is there any dharma that the Tathagata has expounded?' answer: no) or like simple invitations to assent ('If there were as many Ganges rivers as there are grains of sand in the great river Ganges, would the grains of sand in them be many?' answer: yes).<br />
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If there is one part of these sutras that rises out of the quagmire of unrewarding obscurity, it is the famous statement in the Heart Sutra that 'form is exactly emptiness, emptiness is exactly form'. The teaching here is that of transience - objects are nothing but their passing away, and things passing is what objects are. This may be clear enough, but it is startling (or jarring) to see it presented as a plain contradiction in terms. We are back with Heraclitus: 'We are and we are not'.<br />
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I received little help from the commentary by Edward Conze, the Anglo-German scholar who did much to make Buddhist scriptures accessible to the West. Conze announces in his preface, 'What I have left unexplained, seemed to me either obvious or unintelligible', and he has left much unexplained, and therefore unintelligible to his readers, who may not find things as obvious as he seems to think they will.<br />
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If Mahayana Buddhism has positive doctrines, neither of these sutras make it easy to understand what they are. Instead, they wrap a few striking insights in a language which is difficult to penetrate, insistently contradictory, and over-pious to the point of sycophancy. I may yet become more used to this language and become capable of seeing through it more quickly. But at this point I must say that the Diamond and Heart Sutras will not be much help to those in need of help or understanding.<br />
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One reason I became interested in Buddhism was because it seemed to offer a religious path that was less littered with irrational belief than most others. The more exposure I get to ancient Buddhist texts, though, the more I'm convinced that this Western image of Buddhism as a rational religion is as much of an imposition on the sources as versions of Christianity that seek to downplay Jesus' resurrection, say, or his miracles. <br />
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What allows me to stay within the Buddhist tent is that nobody inside of it has ever insisted that I take what these sutras say as authoritative (though I have been asked to chant them a few times). And there's also the practice - sitting in silence, avoiding striving, trying to be kind - which somehow is never less glaringly the way no matter how much of a mess the texts make of pointing to it.<br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-4433727779763091342013-01-12T00:52:00.004-08:002013-01-12T00:52:46.067-08:00Conjuring a collective<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Things are moving at my home sangha, Wind in Grass, now a little more than three years old. The group was started by Michael, a dynamic young businessman who started practicing with Boundless Way Zen in Boston before moving to the Bay Area. A few times in the past couple of years he's asked regular members of the group how things might get better. One common suggestion was smartening up the space we use, in the basement of the Potrero Hill Neighbourhood House. My suggestion was always the same: make the group more cooperative and less hierarchical. Now it looks like both suggestions are being acted upon.<br />
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I'll update you on the upcoming makeover of our meeting space later (if work-practice is a part of any good retreat, then sanding and decorating can be part of this blog). This post will be about the effort to make the group more of a communal endeavour. Or, at least, it will be about trying to <i>keep </i>the group as informal and horizontal in organization as it has been for the past two years. In other words, it will be about the logic of collective action.<br />
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There are basically two ways that a group can organize itself. It can delegate the things it needs to get done to one or two people, or it can make a concerted effort at making things happen as a group. The first option is often the easier one, since it means that most people don't have to do anything. It's particularly tempting for a group like Wind in Grass, where (for various reasons), a few people are going to be more dedicated than others. But it's a dangerous path to start down, even with the best of intentions.<br />
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The reason it's dangerous is that the more tasks that are delegated to one or two people, the more power they'll have over the direction of the group, even if that wasn't their aim in the first place. It's in any case unfair to the one or two people taking on the extra responsibilities, who are carrying an increasing burden. The only answer to this is to insist that a broader section of the group gets the chance (and has the duty) to fulfill some of the community's essential functions. That way, both power and responsibility are distributed more equably and tolerably for all involved.<br />
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At Wind in Grass, Michael's usually taken the lead. That's partly because he founded the group, but partly because he's been the only one with the drive, commitment, and organizational nous to make things happen, week after week. Chris, with his long experience of Buddhism and Zen, has headed up the more religious side of our operations. And David, of course, is our official teacher and the closest thing we have to a priest or director. These three usually lead the meeting three weeks out of four (or five - which happens every few months)<br />
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The reform we've now decided to make is to invite some other regular member of the sangha to lead practice on the last Wednesday of every month. I was asked to make the invitations, and I have to say that it was tough going at first. There was more shyness than I expected; and some uncertainty about planning two or three weeks in advance. But as soon as one or two of us had sat on the hot seat, others were more ready to step forward. <br />
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With us, it's not a matter of doing a 30-minute dharma talk - you can do anything you want, really, as long as it involves some meditation. Most people simply choose a koan and then lead a discussion about it. I've done some experiments involving non-Zen forms of meditation. One brave soul did a (refreshingly Theravada) dharma talk. I've assured people that they're welcome to do magic tricks, a stand-up comedy routine, or a yoga session, but unfortunately nobody has taken up any of these opportunities yet. The crucial thing is that we've stepped off the default path of leaving everything to the willing few. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-73259862043140527242012-10-13T23:41:00.000-07:002012-10-13T23:41:48.057-07:00Mind the gap<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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 <i>Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. </i>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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>phowa</i> (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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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 <i>rigpa</i>, 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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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 <i>phowa</i> 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.<br />
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<i> </i>Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-82816949794235784682012-08-24T00:16:00.002-07:002012-08-24T00:16:54.639-07:00Green galaxy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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About a year and a half ago I had to go to the hospital because there was sand lodged behind my eyeball. I'd spent the day with my then girlfriend at Stinson Beach. It's a lovely place, the perfect Californian seaside town. Unfortunately the beach was rather windy the day we were there, and we spent a lot of it huddled under various shawls trying to keep the pebbly granules from assaulting the flesh on our faces. I lost that particular battle, and spent a few hours at San Francisco General getting my eyeballs bathed, a process which is less pleasant than normal bath-time, and not because of the absence of a rubber ducky. And I also lost that particular girlfriend a few months down the line. Funny thing though - about a year after that I was in Mill Valley for a friend's wedding and set off for the nearest beach with my current girlfriend. I'd forgotten the name of that beach-town, so you can imagine my bewildered sense of déjà-vu as we drove up a rather familiar winding road and then down to a windy beach. I didn't get sand in my eye that day, but I did notice something I hadn't the first time - the sign to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, pointing down the green hill into a secluded valley.<div>
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I'd heard of Green Gulch before, of course - it's one of SF Zen Center's three sites, the other two being the City Center I've written about here before and Tassajara Mountain Monastery. I'd looked into getting to Tassajara, but it's very remote, and also amazingly expensive to stay there as a guest (we're talking hundreds of dollars per night - in the range of four-star hotels). So I called Green Gulch and asked if there was any availability in August. They said I could stay for two days only - they were otherwise completely booked up. There are two types of guests - guest retreatants and guest students, and we got ourselves in the wrong place a few times by mixing the two terms up. Guest retreatants pay $60 a night, stay in very pleasant private rooms, and each day they meditate for two periods of 40 minutes and work for three hours. Guest students pay $20 a night, stay in less pleasant shared rooms, and their daily schedule involves four periods of meditation and six hours of work. Why pay if you're working? (Or, why work if you're paying?) I suppose there are overheads, and besides, I felt that $60 was a pretty good deal for the guest room that I got. </div>
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Since I don't have a car, I put my name up on the rideshare part of the website, but perhaps unsurprisingly it seems to be common for people to ask for rides there and not so common for people to offer them. I planned on getting public transport into the city and then making the three-hour hike across Golden Gate Bridge up to the retreat center, but the night before I was booked to arrive someone offered to give me a lift up. She was a ballerina working in San Jose who'd trained in Winnipeg and been raised by Washington state hippies as a devotee of a Hindu guru called the Hugging Saint (got that?) The other person in our carpool was a lady from New York State who was starting an MA in transpersonal psychology at Sofia University in Palo Alto (no, not Bulgaria). These are the the type of people you meet when you go to meditation retreats in California, and very pleasant they were. The ballerina wanted to get to Green Gulch for the public Sunday session, which features meditation and then a talk, and turned out to be almost exactly like a Saturday session at City Center, if slightly less well attended.</div>
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I can personally attest that the meditation hall at Green Gulch is the coldest place on the face of the earth. I proved this by shivering through a 40-minute meditation session and a 45-minute dharma talk, shivering even though I'd just bought a 'Green Dragon Temple' hoodie for $50 from the office. (I'd forgotten to bring a sweater in sunny Palo Alto, but it gets cold and foggy that close to the ocean.) The speaker that day happened to be Linda Cutts, the current Abess of Green Gulch. ('Abess' is a lovely word I learned in California for a female Abbott - one of the best things about American Zen is that the women get to practice and take up positions of authority on an equal basis with the men. There was even a Japanese female monk at Green Gulch, and I wondered whether she'd had to come to the US to be able to take a full part in the spiritual tradition of her native land.) Linda Cutts talked about turning 65 and thinking of things she now felt able to let go of, first on the list being boxes and boxes of old letters, some of them Mother's Day letters from her children. </div>
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She also talked about how the first time she went to City Center and everyone started bowing to statues of the Buddha she'd felt a strong reaction as a Jew raised never to worship graven images. She said she'd asked Reb Anderson about it and he'd replied, 'Oh don't worry about that - you're just bowing to your true self'. A crap answer (why would you need to put a statue of the Buddha at the front of the room if you were bowing to your true self?) but apparently she'd accepted it. And the liturgy at Green Gulch is very similar to that at City Center - lots and lots of bowing and lots and lots of chanting. I heard while I was there that they actually bow 9 times every morning rather than the traditional 3 because their founder, Shunryu Suzuki, had thought it would be good for Westerners to 'get their heads down'. Good or not, Zen Center types certainly get their heads down. Whether they can get their heads around the Japanese syllables they chant every day is another question - but the chanting certainly has a hypnotic quality which is powerfully tranquilizing, and that can be calming or worrying, depending on your point of view.</div>
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After the morning program we walked around the compound, which is beautiful in a slow, quiet way, with simple wooden buildings connected by boardwalks and walkways snaking through foliage and darting between huge trees. It's kind of like the secret camp they make in 'Robin Hood Prince of Thieves' that looks like a city of tree-houses, except this time with more of a Japanese touch. North of the meditation hall you walk down an avenue lined with flowers of every size and hue, followed by orchards, greenhouses with Buddhas seated cheekily among the potted plants, and finally the fields, scored with long rows of fat green stars pushing upwards. Then there's a gate, and you're back into ordinary beautiful California: a farm with horses, the predictably windy beach, and then a long path winding along the ocean. I walked to Pirate's Cove and back both days I was there, and it took about three hours. At night I'd hit the saunas, which are of a weird modern variety without steam but with infra-red rays instead. They're outside where the pool used to be, but it's been covered over with planks of wood to make a deck, who knows why.</div>
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Even with the three hour walk, the work, and the sauna (not to mention the meditation), I had a hell of a time getting to sleep the second night. That happened the first time I went to a sesshin at City Center. It's probably mainly to do with the jolt in your schedule you get from suddenly waking up at 4:30 rather than 8 every morning, but it doesn't feel like that. It felt both times as if two things had happened: 1) all the time I'd spent trying to be 'awake' had led me to be permanently <i>awake</i>; and 2) I'd lost all control over myself. On the first count, it was as if I was playing out some ghastly parody of the Buddhist ideal, always aware, constantly conscious. Every time I went into a half-dream I'd step back, cooly analyze it ('Oh look, you're falling asleep') and then automatically pull myself back into awareness of things around me, which I bloody well didn't <i>want </i>to be aware of any more. On the second count, after an hour or two of this I put some clothes on, stepped very briskly into the kitchen in the guest-house, and devoured an entire loaf of bread with the ruthless efficiency of pure want. An elderly Japanese man who was staying in the guest house came in as I was scoffing the loaf and looked rather bemused. </div>
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I actually liked the Green Gulch schedule more than the schedule at your typical sesshin, since there are only two hours of compulsory meditation each day, and that means that my legs hurt less. It also, unfortunately, means that there's more time for work, but I must say (and, amazingly enough, I can say) that work at Green Gulch is actually rather pleasant. Everything is highly ritualized. Every room, including the kitchen, has a little shrine in it, and before every period of work the whole team assigned to a particular task gathers in front of it to bow a few times, offer incense, and learn the names of newcomers. We even had a reading of about a page from Suzuki's <i>Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind</i> one morning. I am generally an ambivalent bower, but the little ritual seemed to endow the entire process with mutual respect and a kind of holiness - we weren't just dicing potatoes, but chopping them for our co-workers, for the Buddha (who likes potaotes every now and then), and what's more doing it with Beginner's Mind (or I certainly was, since even simple cooking tasks are genuinely entirely new to me). The man running the kitchen, Phil, was one of those religious people you like, with a smile constantly playing on his lips and around each eye. He even asked us not to talk in a way that didn't make us want to punch him.</div>
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The other nice thing about going up to Green Gulch rather than going to a sesshin is that you can talk to people at meals. The thing it seems natural to ask people as an opening gambit is always 'how long have you been here?' and there's a lot of variation in the response. One girl, who'd dropped out of college in LA, had been there a year and a half, basically since Stinson Beach had made its assault on my retina. Then there was a student who'd been there one day, like me. She was finding college stressful, and had turned to meditation for that reason, which neatly recapped my experience. There was also a classic old-style East Ender (of London, I mean) - he had the tattoos and the accent and the whole look. Apparently he'd fallen into a job at a meditation center in the Westcountry run by, wouldn't you know it, John Crook and Simon Child, the Western Chan people, the latter of whom gave a talk at Stanford only a few months ago. He told me how John Crook was one of those stiff-upper lipped Englishmen from the distant recent past and ran Zen retreats like a military training camp. At retreats he'd get everyone up in the morning to do jumping-jacks in the rain. I laughed a lot because I'd found out that John Crook had been at my school in England and I remember seeing a video of the place in the 1930s. Every morning at break they'd make all the students do jumping-jacks.</div>
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Pretty soon my two days at Green Gulch had come to an end. On balance I think I like it slightly more than City Center, and I may well go back as a $20 a night Guest student. Two hours of meditation a day is plenty, and getting some farm-work in between sits would certainly help me physically. Their style of Zen is as rigidly formal there as it is at City Center, but I'm slowly realizing that they don't kill you when you're slightly out of step. I know because I lived through a Zen disaster. After we went to the beach the first day I went to the meditation hall for the evening sit and service. I bowed to the Ino, I put my left foot first, I bowed to the Buddha or whoever that statue is, I put my hands together and in front of me like I had a stomach-ache. I bowed to the room and to the wall, and swung myself clockwise (clockwise!) to face the wall. As I pulled one of my legs into half-lotus, a thin but persistent stream of sand flowed down out of my turned-up trouser-leg. I'd carted it all the way there in the fold of my khakis - the beach had gotten me again. There was a long swirl of sand on my black mat like a galaxy. When the bell went I got up like any other po-faced Zen student and briskly swept my mat with a stern hand. </div>
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Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-60222240387842920542012-08-18T22:51:00.002-07:002012-08-18T22:51:18.854-07:00Translating quiet<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I don't know what's going on in China. I've never been there, in fact. Which is why when a member of the Buddhist Community at Stanford sent an email around inviting us to a dialogue with members of Beijing's Longquan monastery, I thought it was very convenient. I haven't always been a big fan of Buddhist events involving foreign monks, largely because their English is often very bad - no fault of their own (my Chinese isn't too hot either), but still hardly conducive to passive understanding, let alone dialogue. But I've been warming to this kind of event since writing this blog. It makes me feel very worldly and journalistic to go to talks by teachers from Japan, Tibet, even England - and I don't even have to do any traveling. They all come to the Bay Area, or we drag them here, because San Franciscans' hankering for gurus is on a par with Londoners' thirst for tea.<br />
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The other thing that's always put me off about monks is that they're always late for shit. Or at least, they're late for meetings with me. Once in the monastery of San Domingo de Silos in Spain - the monks there are the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chant-Benedictine-Monks-Santo-Domingo/dp/B000002SKX">Metallica of Gregorian chant</a> - a Benedictine fellow made my friend and me wait two hours to speak with him, and all we wanted to do was ask dumb questions about Catholicism for our school project. Then there was that guy from the <a href="http://www.dhammakaya.net/en/">Dhammakaya Foundation</a> who was studying towards a PhD at Stanford who used to hold regular meetings - and was late every time. This time the monk and his crew were about an hour late. Poor Rebecca from BCAS who organized the visit kept popping in, red-faced, to apologize and inform us that the delegation was on its way. At first they were in Berkeley. Then they made it to Palo Alto. At a certain point they'd found their way onto campus but had promptly gotten lost.<br />
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Being Buddhists, we hunkered down and made a show of being good at waiting. In fact we sat on the floor in a circle and meditated. After the first session everyone introduced themselves, and I was amazed to find myself face to face for the first time with members of the Stanford Zen group: I knew them immediately because they looked very serious and calm and introduced themselves as members of the Stanford Zen group. It felt strange to meet them, because we'd passed each other like ships in the night. When I'd first heard about them I was above Zen, and just wanted to meditate with the 'normal' Buddhists. Then I got into Zen through my Wednesday sitting group in San Francisco, and wasn't interested in attending evening events on campus. And it seems like I'll never have a chance to sit with the Stanford Zen people, since I'm a regular at Wind in Grass the same night of the week as they meet...<br />
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They seemed very nice and to know exactly what they were doing, despite there being no certified teacher around. But there were other people there who I knew from BCAS, like Forrest, the Chinese Master's student in something sciency, who occasionally came to afternoon meditation when I was there. It turned out that he was actually from Beijing, or had studied there, and had even been to Longquan monastery once or twice. He started telling us about how the monastery had been effectively left to rot at some point in the 1960s, but had seen a huge revival in recent years, not only providing a home for monks, but also welcoming thousands of lay Buddhists through its doors. There were quite a few Chinese and Chinese-Americans there, some of whom I'd seen at Buddhist events before. A few people were talking in Mandarin.<br />
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When the delegation turned up it was similar in its general <i>modus operandi </i>to the similar monk + hangers-on teams I'd seen with the Thai Buddhist community. There was a thin young monk at the center of everything bowing in all directions; he never seemed to have enough spare cloth around him to conceal all the objects he needed, which meant that people constantly had to hand him things and later take them back. This was the Venerable Wuguang, the first Chan Master I'd seen in the flesh (unless you count Simon Child, who for some reason I'm not counting because he's Western). Besides the brown and grey robes rather than the bright orange ones I'd seen in Thailand, not much differentiated him from the Theravada monks I'd met in the past, except maybe a bit more focused calm and a bit less ebullient smiliness. He sat down in the center of the circle.<br />
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Immediately everyone scattered from the area like frightened pigeons, but he repeatedly encouraged us to sit beside him, so I took one for the team and did. He seemed friendly enough. The session consisted mainly of us asking him questions in English, which a translator would then relate to him. He'd answer in Chinese, at which point that would be re-translated back to us. I seem to remember that most of the questions were about the place of Chan in modern-day China, the day-to-day workings of the monastery, and the interface between monks and lay practitioners. I got the sense that things were much stricter there than at even, say, the San Francisco Zen Center: the Chinese lay people seemed to live like the monks in SF, while the Chinese monks seemed to keep all the old vows of absolute celibacy and almost constant silence to the letter. I of course asked a question about accountability, and got a well-meaning but slightly bewildered response.<br />
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Some of our side were asking their question in Chinese as well as English, and eventually the session flipped to them asking us about ourselves. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and said a bit about why we liked meditation or Buddhism or had come to this event. All this was related to Wuguang, who smiled very approvingly at everyone after they'd said their bit. I wonder how it sounded to him to say that I'd taken up meditation because it helped with headaches, but he seemed to think it as good a reason as any. At the end of the day they started handing out gifts to everyone, mainly DVDs of prayers and chants. We were also warmly urged to check out their <a href="http://longquanzs.org/eng/index.php">website</a>, where they translate Buddhist texts into other modern languages, and also visit them in Beijing. Maybe one day I'll make it, so that I can finally say that I know the price of tea in China. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-11225724990815017502012-08-11T00:00:00.001-07:002012-08-11T00:00:10.227-07:00Over the bridge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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, <i>An Introduction to Zen Buddhism</i>, 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 <i>Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind</i>, 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.<br />
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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 <i>Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind </i>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 <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/0192853864">Very Short Introduction</a> </i>to Rahula's more scholarly classic <i>What the Buddha Taught.</i> 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.<br />
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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'.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-77242405445895044182012-07-28T23:56:00.002-07:002012-07-29T00:02:52.178-07:00Breaking an entering<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <i>Alles klar?</i><br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'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.<br />
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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 <i>swept and sanded the entire floor. </i><br />
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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. <br />
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He'd told Sara and Marika that it was traditional not to wear the<i> rakasus</i> (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, '<i>Looking long and hard/ Through the dark/ Never looking away/ But, who?</i>' 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. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-24957369728760040002012-07-14T22:25:00.001-07:002012-07-14T22:25:46.728-07:00Pain killers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A small friendly man with glasses slipped two white pills into my hands. I closed them over the pills and bowed to him. This was Day 2 of my second <i>sesshin </i>- meditation intensive - at the San Francisco Zen Center, and the small friendly man in glasses was Roger, who'd been my work-partner earlier in the day when we'd been assigned to sweeping the steps outside the temple. He'd said that he'd noticed I was struggling in the meditation hall, and indeed I was. I'd been sitting cross-legged left foot over right, then right foot over left, then kneeling with a cushion, then kneeling with a bench. I'd had pain in my legs and lower back as well as in my head and neck, which is where I usually have it. As we were sweeping the few leaves that had blown up the entrance steps onto Page Street, Roger offered to get me some Ibuprofen from his room upstairs. 'It really helps', he beamed.<br />
<br />
And indeed it did. That was the first <i>sesshin </i>I've made it through from beginning to end, probably because it was unusually only three days long. I'd stayed up at retreats for longer periods - five days in the case of one Pacific Zen Center <i>sesshin</i> - but I'd always missed either the opening or the closing ceremony. In the closing ceremony of this Spring <i>sesshin</i>, we all sat kneeling in rows with the two teachers - Wendy Lewis and Rosalie Curtis - sitting on chairs in front of us. We passed trays with nuts and dried fruit on them to each other along the row, bowing every now and then to say thanks. The people I'd just spent three days in silence with began to open up, producing accents I'd never expected to have to match with those particular faces. The Senior Dharma Teacher said, 'There's always a first <i>sesshin</i>, and only one'. I nervously offered my several failed attempts as counter-examples and said I was feeling pretty proud of myself just for still being there.<br />
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The last time I'd spent three days at SFZC had been during a seven-day intensive. I'd signed up for five days and made it through three, dropping out because the pain in my legs and back had started to keep me awake at night. This time everything felt less strange and less painful. The constant bowing I took in my stride, which bothered me in some way because I hadn't changed my intellectual objection to it; only my attitude had somehow shifted nonetheless. I genuinely enjoyed the ritualized <i>oryoki </i>eating, and this time not only the part when people in robes run down the meditation hall sliding a wet cloth along the wooden beams which separate the meditation mats from the floor. I was even able to see the fun in the 'random reading' of the Diamond Sutra: everyone was handed a translation and asked to read from whatever point of the text they wanted. Holy hubbub ensued. And I made it through the three days with pain, but without feeling that the pain was taking over me.<br />
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Why did I go back after the first retreat, when I'd decided that SFZC's stern style didn't appeal to me? I was about to move out of my room in the Lower Haight after nine months there, and I sensed I'd never again live within a stone's throw from a Buddhist temple. I wasn't feeling rich (not that I ever am), and I knew that I'd be able to cut costs by sleeping at my place and making the five-minute walk to the temple for the early-morning starts. And I'd been reassured by Victoria Austin's comments about SFZC's commitment to oversight and transparency during my interview with her. This time around, the atmosphere was pretty much the same, and all the things I took a dislike to - the excessive and pervasive formality, the arid dogmatism, the grim-facedness of it all - were, unsurprisingly, still there. Rosalie Curtis used her dharma talk partly to insist that things which beginners found rebarbative they would eventually uncritically accept. I agree, but is that really a good thing?<br />
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Wendy Lewis' talk was better. It was at least clear, well-prepared, and gamely delivered. She is also knowledgeable, with an MA in Religious Studies from SF State, and her sermon certainly had something of the academy about it. (She described Buddhism at one point as 'a non-theistic soteriological tradition'.) The <i>sesshin </i>was also kept ticking along with military precision by <a href="http://theinosblog.blogspot.com/">David Haye</a>, who would make a fine army officer if he ever wanted to trade compassion in for shooting people. I ended my second intensive at SFZC again feeling pretty sure that this particularly faithful rendering of Japanese Zen wasn't for me, but all the same recognizing that the temple is a unique place in the West and one that I've been lucky to be involved with. I don't know if I'll be back. As for Roger, he sold his highly successful café on Potrero Hill and has moved in as a monk full-time; he's traded in lattes for Ibuprofen, and I wish him and his co-residents as pain-free an existence as there can be.<br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-76893977869934453902012-07-07T23:46:00.000-07:002012-07-07T23:46:50.154-07:00Sylvan approaches<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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'As someone who was raised a Christian, became a Buddhist, and also practices classical Indian dance, I often find myself in turbulence on an airplane wondering who to pray to'. The President of the Buddhist Community at Stanford was introducing one of our recent visiting speakers, <a href="http://www.sylviaboorstein.com/about.html">Sylvia Boorstein</a>. Hannah'd been prompted to make the remark by an anecdote that occurs in one of Boorstein's books and which the speaker then retold for the audience after the introduction was finished. Boorstein had been traveling along winding mountain roads to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. She was in the front seat and could see all the way down the sheer cliffs on her side of the road. At a certain point Jack Kornfield, who was traveling with her, reached forward and asked, 'Are you scared?' Boorstein said, 'Yes'. Kornfield asked, 'Are you praying?' Boorstein again said, 'Yes'. 'To Buddhist gods or the Jewish one?' Kornfield pressed her. 'All of them', Boorstain replied. Kornfield said, 'Good'.<br />
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Sylvia Boorstein packed the house. The house was the sanctuary, a religious space on the top floor of one of the Stanford student-union buildings. Usually we get two or three people in there at a time for meditation, and maybe twenty if a local speaker comes. When Simon Child came from England there were thirty or so people in the audience. For Sylvia Boorstein they came out in droves, presumably down from Marin where Boorstain teaches, at Kornfield's Spirit Rock Meditation Center. They had the look of devotees on what Kornfield calls 'the upper middle path': older, white, earnest, wealthy. Boorstein herself fit right in, a kindly grandmother who's just made tea and now is going to tell you a story. And tell she did. There was the one about the trip to Dharamsala. There was the one about activism in the 60s. And there was the one about the hairdresser in France who asked her why she was always wearing a bracelet on her wrist. 'That bracelet was blessed by the Dalai Lama!' was her answer. 'If I had a bracelet blessed by the Dalai Lama, I'd never take it off either!' was, apparently, the hairdresser's reply.<br />
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There were lots of stories about the Dalai Lama. People like the Dalai Lama. He's like Nelson Mandela or the Queen - he's old, seems harmless, and he smiles a hell of a lot. Now, it's probably the case that his policy of peaceful negotiation with China has been better - or, at least, less disastrous - for his people than violent resistance against the world's largest army would have proven. There's no question that he deserved his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1989. And I have no wish to rehearse in full the standard attacks from the left that have been compiled by journalists such as <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-dalai-lama-a-life-less-ordinary-6168194.html">Johann Hari</a>: that the Dalai Lama is an unelected theocrat, that he has conceded too much to China, that he believes that disabled children are sufering for the karma of past lives. (It's worth pointing out here that Hari's interviews should be read with great care after <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100094268/busted-johann-hari-is-guilty-of-shoddy-journalism/">allegations</a> surfaced that he made much of them up.) All the same, there are a few things American Buddhists, and Americans sympathetic to Buddhism, need to realize and remember about the Dalai Lama.<br />
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First, the Dalai Lama is not the leader of world Buddhism. He's not even the leader of the most widespread sect of Buddhism, so that his position lacks the authority of, say, the Pope (a figure with whom he is often implicitly compared). He is a senior monk in one tradition (Gelug) within Tibetan Buddhism, and also fulfils a conventional role as the spiritual and political leader of Tibetans more broadly. Second, the Dalai Lama's type of Vajrayana Buddhism is an especially strange form of the religion, departing quite far from the orthodox Theravada path and even from the more florid offshoots of the Mahayana branches of Buddhism. It subscribes to the clumsiest and least rational forms of the doctrine of reincarnation: when one Dalai Lama dies, followers look for another by dangling the former incumbent's possessions in front of Tibetan babies, hoping their eyes will light up in recognition. Finally, the traditionalism of the Dalai Lama's practice leads him to take up positions that would shock most of his liberal fans in the West; he believes, for example, that anal sex is an <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_osnos">aberration</a>.<br />
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Some observers have also found him to be <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/books/review/Morris-t.html">intellectually underwhelming</a>. And then there is his closeness to celebrities such as Richard Gere. As with many public fugures, the list of complaints could go on and on. As I was preparing to write this post, however, I was afforded a reminder of the core integrity of the man. A correspondent sent me the news of the latest <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-death-of-yoga-student-ian-thorson---and-the-wall-of-meditative-silence-that-met-police-7821159.html#disqus_thread">scandal</a> in the perpetually scandalized world of American Buddhism. Ian Thorson, a graduate of Stanford, was found dead beside his girlfriend in the Arizona desert, after the two had left a silent retreat in the wilderness. The leader of the retreat (who'd studied at Princeton) was Michael Roach, who'd previously been married to Thorson's girlfriend. Although he'd taken vows of celibacy and poverty as a monk, Roach had recommended Buddhism as 'a path to prosperity', and had recently taken to <a href="http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20100211/Monk+y+Business+Controversial+NYC+guru+Michael+Roach">hitting the dance-floors</a> of New York. But when the guru traveled to Dharamsala with a group of students in 2006, the Dalai Lama refused to see him. Not even Tenzin Gyatso knew exactly what gods Roach was praying to on those winding mountain roads, but it's a fair bet that one of them was Moloch.<br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-60724654730075129762012-05-26T18:18:00.000-07:002012-05-26T18:24:32.780-07:00Coming back to earth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This morning I went back to the <a href="http://www.tsechenling.org/">Tibetan Tse Chen Ling Center</a> 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 <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?q=vajrasattva&um=1&hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&biw=1240&bih=651&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&tbnid=wvZMN5aDxercqM:&imgrefurl=http://www.artibet.com/vajrasattva-empowerment-march-10-2012/&docid=_mL3SZnWP2SumM&imgurl=http://www.artibet.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Vajrasattva.jpg&w=400&h=459&ei=DXTBT8yOM4Ke8gTmsMHNCw&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=177&sig=105644146197291807641&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=124&start=0&ndsp=26&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0,i:78&tx=90&ty=81">White Vajrasattva</a> 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'. <br />
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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 <a href="http://www.jasonnewland.com/">Jason Newland</a> 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 <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-international-san-francisco">Café International</a>, and picked up one of the array of hippy dippy Bay Area magazines they have on offer there. It was called <a href="http://commongroundmag.com/main-page.html">Common Ground</a>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-78993701101265581322012-05-12T12:57:00.000-07:002012-05-12T12:57:02.024-07:00Black widows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Mind training in seven stages, stone scorpions moving up the river, green female superheroes hovering above my head: these are the main things I think of when it comes to the <a href="http://www.tsechenling.org/">Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies </a>on Webster Street at Oak in the Lower Haight. After a few months of going to the SF Zen Center every Saturday I decided it was time to check out something in the Tibetan tradition, and I'd come across this place online. It's just up the street from me, but it's hard to tell that it's a Buddhist center from outside. What you see is just a largish San Francisco house, although once or twice I've stumbled across red-robed lamas when I've set off for runs in Golden Gate Park. Once you climb up the long stone staircase, you know you're entering a place of peace: there are potted plants and flowers all the way up, and a stone statue of the Buddha at the top. It's like the memorial staircase leading up to chapel at my boarding school: before evensong there were candles on either side. You had to keep silence, and if you didn't your friends would punch you on the arm.<br />
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The first time I went in I'd decided to show up for their Saturday morning, 9am meditation session, which is supposed to be welcoming to newcomers and seems to serve the same purpose as the 'Introduction to Zazen' period at SFZC. There was a determinedly kindly man with hippy jewelry and a pony tail who let me in. To the left there was a bookstore full of yellow and orange volumes about tantra by lamas called Rinpoche; there were also some large metal containers with tea and coffee. To the right of the entrance was the main part of the temple. At the far end of the smallish room was the kind of ritual paraphernalia I'd last seen at the Tibetan place I'd once frequented in London. There were seven glasses of water on the altar. There were statuettes of lamas with saffroned hats that made them look like they were portaging with bright yellow canoes. There were framed potraits of real lamas grinning piously and looking <i>nice. </i>On the walls were tapestries full of strange deities of various colours and shapes and sizes.<br />
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That first morning I happened to be the only person to show up for meditation, along with the man who was leading the session, a gentle middle-aged guy with glasses. We sat in silence for half an hour, and then for the next half-hour he read me the scripture the center had been working with for a few months, the Seven-Point Mind Training. The text as we have it was composed in the 12th century by Geshe Chekhawa, but the tradition was inaugurated by Atisa some three hundred years earlier. The Seven-Point Mind Training is not so much mind training and a set of ethical principles and pieces of advice on meditation practice; also, it has 59 points, though these are grouped into seven sections. These include genuinely helpful reminders ('Don't expect gratitude'), sensible but rather obvious reccommendations ('Don't eat poisonous food'), haunting but hard-to-interpret aphorisms ('Don't make gods into demons'), and bizarre proverbs ('Don't transfer an ox's load to a cow'). My favourite was 'Don't make sarcastic remarks'. Yeah, that's really going to work.<br />
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The following week I went on Sunday morning for the 10am dharma talk by the resident lama, <a href="http://www.tsechenling.org/dakpa.html">Ngawang Dakpa</a>. This time the room was full of extremely earnest Western students, most of the sitting cross-legged on cushions, wearing beads on their wrists, and taking notes in notebooks. Dakpa sat cross-legged on a raised platform at the front and began the session by chanting a series of Tibetan sutras in a guttural voice at an unfollowable pace. The Western students did their best to keep up, mumbling the weird syllables printed in their liturgical handbooks. The actual sermon was also in Tibetan, and was translated into English sentence by sentence by a thin white-haired Englishman sitting nearby (with occasional input from a very young Tibetan monk who seemed to have a better grasp of English than his elderly teacher). In my limited experience of Tibetan Buddhism it has always struck me that native Tibetans still seem to have a monopoly on teaching; I haven't come across senior American teachers in this school to compare with the convert masters at SFZC or PZI.<br />
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Partly because of this, I've always found that the cultural distance between the Tibetan teacher and the Western followers is often very great, even if the Western students have spent some time in Tibet. To the newcomer, the experience of trying to piece together what a lama is saying from a simultaneous translation is often nothing short of bewildering. Dakpa gave level-headed advice based on the Seven-Point Mind Training, but also enlivened his points with anecdotes from his youth (for example, the story of a monk who gave away all his possessions, only to have a change of heart soon afterwards and go around asking for them all back). At one point there was a story about a monk with evil thoughts who encountered a scorption underneath a stone. Here the translator looked puzzled, and the younger monk intervened. It was actually not a live scorpion, but a stone one. Everyone looked very relieved that the matter had been cleared up, so Dakpa went on to tell us how the stone scorpion travelled every year a few meters up the river, towards the stupa with the miniature stupa inside it.<br />
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Confused? I was. I was also surprised that there had been no formal meditation as part of the morning's service. So I went back two weeks later to the Saturday morning meditation. This time it was led by a different person, a younger man called Scott wearing an T-shirt advertising Iceland. He led us in the kind of visualisation exercise that I tend to think of as typical of Tibetan practices and that I'd come to the center partly to explore. After the usual calming preliminaries (easing tension in the body, watching the breath), Scott invited us to visualize <a href="http://www.fpmt-osel.org/gallery/tara.htm">green Tara</a>, a deity that was pictured on one of the tapestries hanging on the wall. She was a princess, sitting cross-legged; she had silver bracelets on her wrists, a crown on her head, and a large blue flower in her hand. On her face was an expression of serenity and compassion. Her body was green but immaterial, and she was floating right above our heads like a green light. We were invited to identify our mind with hers, and both of these minds with the minds of our personal teachers.<br />
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This was probably the most complex (and, frankly, trippy) meditation practice I'd experienced, so it's not surprising that I found it strange and difficult. I noticed a resistance within me to meditating on my teacher as if he were an object of religious devotion; I felt a resistance to visualizing a deity (although Scott said it was fine to see her as an archetype rather than an actually existing spirit). Above all, there was something that was just a bit Star Trek about a beautiful <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgG5M6ANn8&feature=related">green woman</a>. Beautiful? Well, I have to admit that when I was asked to visualize a woman, my mind immediately started visualizing a sexy woman. Since I'd just seen a trailer for the new Avengers movie, green Tara in her regal attire started out looking uncannily like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OJqPJRjHkE&feature=related">Scarlett Johansson </a>in a one-piece leather outfit. Then when we were reminded that G.T. symbolized active social virtues, she began to look a bit like my girlfriend, who does a lot of volunteering. Then we were supposed to integrate our personal teachers, so that green Tara - an alien avenger version of my girlfriend - started to take on some of the features of my teacher David, who is a man in his fifties with a white goatee.<br />
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All of this was very confusing, so I asked about it at the end of the session, half wondering if the instructor would be shocked by the places my mind had gone and cast me out on my green-woman-fancying ear. In fact he said that this was a very common reaction, and not at all to be discouraged, as long as the practioner was able to use the momentum of his natural desire for a greater enthusiasm for the practice. He said that human desire is actually welcomed in the Tantric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and that the Gelugpa school he was a part of sought to unite the Tantra and Sutra traditions. The danger was that students would misinterpret the advice and let themselves go, so that meditation turned into sexual fantasy, and an esoteric practice of liberation into a familiar habit of dependency. In this way, he said, Tantra was like walking a razor's edge between not using the energies you have natrually arising within you, and being wholly directed by those tendencies. I wasn't too worried: David did recently tell me that when he visualized Guanyin the image that most came to mind was <a href="http://www.myspace.com/madalfred1">Alfred E. Neuman</a>, so I took my experience in that spirit.<br />
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When I came out of the center and walked down the steps I noticed that the guy with the pony tail seemed to be holding a garage-sale. I asked him about it, and he told me that they were getting rid of all the stuff they didn't need for their impending move. Move? It turns out that the Tse Chen Ling Center will only be at its current location only for a couple more months. Where are they moving to? They're not sure, but they are looking for a smaller place, in the city, with good links to public transportation. It sounds like they have the resources to move, but haven't yet been able to confirm a new location. They'll need quite the moving van for all their ritual objects. In the meantime, they're there every weekend. Go up the stairs past the flowers and pass the stone Buddha, who may or may not be a scorpion mounting an aggressive (yet very slow) takeover against a stupa inside a stupa. Inside there are tapestries of kick-ass green superheroines, who will dance right above your head if you will only sit still and be quiet. Because, you see, though it might look like there are 59 stages to Mind Training, there are really only seven, and they are all right here. <br />
<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-39129452102065185332012-05-05T15:43:00.000-07:002012-05-05T15:43:05.865-07:00Attent chan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've been spending more time on Stanford campus again recently, and the other night had the opportunity of attending a talk hosted by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, in their <a href="http://hcbss.stanford.edu/programs/buddhism-modern-world-past-events">Distinguished Practitioner Series</a>. The speaker was Simon Child, a medical doctor and Buddhist teacher from England, and the title of his talk was 'Chinese Zen comes West'. Yes, 'Chinese Zen', because although Chan is the proper term for Zen's Chinese precursor, Child decided to use a number of Japanese terms in his talks, since it is Japanese Buddhism that has so far been more influential in the West and whose terms are therefore more familiar to a Western audience. Child is softly spoken, in his fifties, and has a gray beard, large glasses, and a passing resemblance to Oliver Sacks. Before giving the talk he led the audience in an optional half-hour session of meditation, during which he kneeled in <i>seiza </i>position with a bright yellow throw over his legs.<br />
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Child studied in England with John Crook, an academic ethologist who - I learn from Wikipedia - went to the same secondary school as the writer of this blog. Crook was in turn the student and protegé of Sheng Yen, a Chinese master who was born in Shanghai but emigrated to Taiwan after the revolution. Sheng Yen was a teacher in both the main schools of Chan, Linji and Caodong (or, in Japanese, Rinzai and Soto), and thus held lineages founded by Linji (810-866) and Dongshan (807-869) respectively. (Both of these strands trace their lineages back to Huineng, 638-713, the Sixth Patriarch, who is supposedly linked by a single line of descent to the First Patriarch Bodhidharma, who is 28 generations removed from Mahakashyapa, the only one of the Buddha's disciples who knew what he was up to when the Buddha's sermon one day consisted entirely of him holding up a single flower.) That, then, is how Buddhism got from Siddhartha Gautama to Simon Child, more or less.<br />
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Since Child's lineage has two separate strands, his practice also used two approaches, both of which I was somewhat familiar with from the Soto practice at SFZC and the more Rinzai style of PZI. Child's opening meditation encouraged us to become aware of various parts of our bodies in turn, before inviting us to integrate the discrete impressions of the separate parts of our bodies into a single sensation of presence. This is the method of silent illumination or <i>mozhao</i>, associated with the Song master Hongzhi Zhenje (1091-1157). When he talked about his group's Western Zen retreats, however, Child described a practice focused on <i>koans</i>, or, in Chinese, <i>gongans</i>, and especially on the 'head' of the <i>gongan</i>, a particularly crucial phrase or question that the student is invited to repeat to himself over and over again. This is the <i>huatou</i> practice advocated by Dahui Zong Gao (1089-1163).<br />
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The main subject of Child's talk was the coming of Chan to the West, some differences between Western and Eastern practitioners, and how to adapt Chan to a Western context while remaining true to the traditions of the practice. Child said that in his experience of doing retreats in Taiwan, the UK, and the US, Westerners tended to be more questioning of the practice, while Chinese Buddhists were more ready to follow instructions without challenging the teacher to justify them. He described the new style of Western Zen retreats that he and his colleagues in the <a href="http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/">Western Chan Fellowship</a> have been doing for two or three decades now, telling us how they combined traditional silent meditation with periods of spoken practice in pairs that are closer to Western psychoanalysis. According to Child, we should not be too wary of integrating therapy into Buddhism; after all, one of the Buddha's titles was the great physician.<br />
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I was very happy to hear what Child had to say about Chan in the West, since many of the issues he was discussing have been knocking around in my own head for quite some time. Child was very careful to avoid stereotyping Chinese and Western Buddhists while all the same making some generalized comments about his experience of practitioners of different backgrounds. But while Child seemd content to say that Westerners are skeptical and questioning of both teachers and methods because of their upbringing and leave it at that, I would prefer to go further. Asking questions, insisting on evidence, and auditing holders of authority do not simply reflect Western values; they are a way of going about things that reflect universal concerns not to be misled, fooled, or abused by others. In short, I am not sure whether seeking to unite Eastern mysticism and Western politics doesn't miss the point: what we should be seeking to synthesize are instead two systems with universal appeal, both centered around similar conceptions of human dignity.<br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541670030804514809.post-38776805884309771172012-04-29T22:24:00.000-07:002012-04-29T22:24:52.470-07:00Synaptic juice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The San Francisco Bay Area is its own little world. I don't mean that in the sense people sometimes mean it: the most reflexively left-leaning corner of America, one of the most pot-friendly, a haven and promised land for gays with the dubious luck to be have been born and raised in the Bible Belt. All those things are true, of course, and are worth enjoying, and maybe even being proud of: I have to say that I savoured the rare juxtaposition of a rock musical powered by drag queens on a recent Friday night with a meditation and service with black-robbed monks in the Zen Center the following Saturday morning. But what I appreciate most isn't the area's well-defined and well-known profile, but its less celebrated diversity: not the fact of weirdness but its multifacetedness, and even its coexistence with the humdrum. Alongside the gays of the Catro and the Mission's hipsters, there are also the yuppies in the Marina or the retirees of Marin. And maybe no region attracts as much interest from outside the area, and as much ambivalence from inside it, as the South Bay, not so recently rebranded as Silicon Valley.<br />
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The Bay Area's an interesting place to practise meditation for a range of reasons. There's a certain liberal tolerance of what others get up to, an open-mindedness about spiritual practices inherited from the hippy movement, and longstanding connections with Asia, as close to SF as to any American city. But one reason it's an interesting place to become acquainted with an ancient tradition is its hyperbolic modernity, its position at the cutting edge of scientific research and technological innovation. The cultures of Eastern mysticism and high-tech entrepreneurship come into contact more than you think, and have settled into a comfortable enough relationship: I only recently met a young man at SFZN who leads mediation sessions at Google, a company that regularly hosts talks by such mindfulness luninaries as Jon Kabat-Zinn. I have my doubts about the spiritual-technological complex, partly because the union of an ascetic tradition enjoining detachment and a computer industry focused on making a profit looks to me like an awkward hook-up. Still, like many an awkward hook-up, it's hard to deny after the fact that the experience has been interesting. <br />
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In the Bay Area, the junction of science and spirituality is something you can decide not to pursue, but which will probably thrust itself into your attention every few months regardless, so I thought I'd give you an update on a couple of recent experiences (that is, experiments) that I've had. The first was a result of an email that was sent around to the Buddhist Community at Stanford mailing list. Now, I've seen negative reactions to people using that list to send round requests to support the monks' protests in Burma, on the grounds that the issue was a political and not a spiritual one. But, this being Stanford, we quite regularly get emails from researchers - research, you see, is never political, especially when it might lead to the development of an iPhone app. And on this occasion the researcher involved offered us a coupon for Jamba Juice, and fruit smoothies can be counted on to constitute just too much temptation for any California Buddhist to resist. I signed up immediately, and booked a slot at Stanford's Calming Technology Lab. I never knew it existed, but as I can now assure you, it does.<br />
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I was met at the lab by a friendly young doctoral researcher called <a href="http://moraveji.org/">Neema Moraveji</a>. He fixed me up with an apparatus designed to track my breathing, which consisted of a band that I put around my torso and some wires He then asked me to sit at a desk and perform some simple tasks on the computer: one of them was to count down from a given number in sevens. After a certain point I was told to watch a video informing me that your brain performs better when you're calm, and that calm states correlated with states of deep, slow breathing. After that, I was told to try to deepen and slow my breathing, something I found surprisingly easy - maybe it's all the meditation, although none of the styles I practice encourage you actively to control your breath, just to notice it. Finally, I was asked to return to the exercises on the computer, and repeated them for a second time. The aim, as I understood it, was to develop technology that would encourage office-workers to slow their breathing, thus increasing both industrial productivity and inner contentment. Win-win.<br />
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The second recent experience of this type started after a pretty dry dharma-talk at SFZC. A young woman stood up after the Ino had finished his announcements and introduced herself as Kim Fisher, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She needed meditators to volunteer for an experiment she was conducting as part of her dissertation. CIIS is an institution that was founded in the early 70s by SF types connected with the human potential movement and interested in bringing together East and West, spirituality and science. They offer Master's courses in subjects like 'East-West Psychology' and 'Dance Therapy', as well as doctoral programs in Psychology and related disciplines. It's a small school with not a lot of money, so they were not able to offer me a boosted smoothie in return for breathing deeply. But I went along anyway to one of their buildings in the Upper Market area of town, just before the street turns really nasty.<br />
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When I went in Kim immediately asked me to meditate for half an hour in whatever style I chose. I knew that she was interested in testing intellectual performance, so I went for my concentration practice, after describing it to her. She had cushions and mats set out just like in the Zen Center and sat next to me when I sat. (Considering that she was doing that all day, her experiment must be affording her a pretty good chance to get some sitting in, dissertation research meeting Buddhist retreat.) After we'd finished I was called over to a desk, told a short story, and asked to repeat it word for word. Then I was shown a complex geometric object and asked to reproduce it on a piece of paper using only a pencil and memory. It looked like a 7-year-old boy's design for a space-ship. At a certain point the fire-alarm went off, which she said would probably force her to throw away some of my results. A week later I was called back in and I did similar tests but this time without meditating first.<br />
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I asked both of these researchers more about their projects, but it's understandable that they were cagey about the details, seeing that the studies were ongoing. On the other hand, it's not hard to guess that the basic methodology involved in both is to compare performance on mental tasks before and after meditative practices of various sorts (in the first experiment, it was the physiological correlates of relaxation that were tracked, whereas in the second meditation was left to each individual's own definition). Both studies were extremely interesting to take part in, and it's hard to be against learning more about meditation in this way (though I've had a go in previous posts on this blog). It will be key for both scientists, I would suppose, to restrict their conclusions to claims about the effects of meditation on subtracting by seven and redrawing space-ships, and not on global intelligence (whatever that is). And though (to be fair) neither researcher is explicitly excluding the spiritual aspect of meditation, it's hard not to feel that, in giving people an app that reminds them to take deep breaths rather than integrating them into a challenging ancient practice, they're missing out on something. What that something is can't be quantified; but so much the worse for quantification.<br />
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<br />Mr. Propterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04685921625906574030noreply@blogger.com0