Making it wrong

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 about nine months ago now, and about the discussions with a teacher that led up to them.

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? 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

The book I found 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.

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. 

If Ross had moved to San Francisco and become a Buddhist, he would have called the precepts prima facie 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.

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 pro tanto rather than prima facie.  Pro tanto reasons are reasons that other reasons may trump, whereas prima facie reasons may, on closer inspection, turn out not to be reasons at all.

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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.

Showing spine

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 New York Times piece about allegations of sexual harassment against Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki.

It's all very sad.  A few months ago, the same friend sent me a link to Sasaki's Mt. Baldy training center.  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'.

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.

My own view of this is clear: Sasaki should be stripped of his status as a roshi 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 letter 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.

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.

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.

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 never 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. 

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.

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 Brad Warner's view, though he is careful to draw a line between consensual sex between students and teachers and Sasaki's non-consensual groping.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Conjuring a collective

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.

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 keep 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.  

Breaking an entering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvan approaches

'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, Sylvia Boorstein.  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'.

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.

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 Johann Hari: 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 allegations 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.

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 aberration.

Some observers have also found him to be intellectually underwhelming.  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 scandal 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 hitting the dance-floors 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.

Coming back to earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beating the drum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing (in the name of)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanghacest

This post will be about sex, so keep reading.  This first paragraph, though, will make another point about meditation and neuroscience (and if you're tempted not to read it first, just remember that skipping foreplay is bad karma).  There seems to be plenty of evidence that meditation will eventually change the structure and functioning of your brain, which sounds amazing, but which is actually less amazing than what people like Robert Aitken have been saying for centuries, that it changes your character and your way of experiencing the world.  But in any case, it's one thing to accept that the practice is transformative, and quite another to want to sign up to the particular transformation it offers.  I once read a report on a study suggesting that experienced meditators could eliminate their subconscious startle reflex.  I thought, 'Impressive', and 'Why the hell would I want to do that?'

I had an exchange of emails at one point with a friend who was at the time (and is still) studying philosophy.  I was already interested in Buddhism at the time, and had been telling him about the four noble truths and the eightfold path, which I'd learned about in Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught.  My friend (like many friends to this day) urged me to consider what he saw as the inhumanity of ideals such as the extinguishing of desire and the realization of selflessness.  I wondered whether the attempt to extinguish desire made us more inhuman than unthinking servitude to it; whether the realization of selflessness had led to greater acts of inhumanity than selfishness' full realization.  And anyway, though I didn't really want to extinguish my self or my desires completely, I knew I wanted to become less self-regarding and less anxious; and that was enough to keep me going.

I know what you're thinking: what does this have to do with sex?  Well, achieving the orthodox Buddhist ideal of exstinguishing desire would obviously involve extinguishing what for many of us feels like the tallest and hottest flame of all, sexual desire.  That's presumably the main reason that monks strengthen the traditional precept against sexual immorality into a vow of celibacy.  I remember reading about Buddhism in a comparative religion textbook we used at my secondary school called Six Great Religions.  There was a picture of some monks with shaven heads looking very silly and very pleased.  Next to them there was a text box saying: 'KEY IDEA: celibacy is key to spiritual development'.  I thought, 'Gosh'.  Although really, Christian monks have usually had the same idea.

I can sometimes see where they're coming from.  Being free from desires may sound unattractive, but it can really just be a way of being fully present in the moment: enjoying the way the sky is ripening to purple over the silhouette of your neighbourhood may be more difficult if you're thinking that you haven't gotten laid for a few months and need to be plotting how to put that right.  And I'm surely not the only twentysomething single in America to be weary of dating: all the fussing and striving that goes into finding someone to desire, pursuing them, and eventually either disappointing them or yourself.  One of the things I've liked about being in relationships it's easier to put all that to one side.

There is, of course, another side to the story.  Many people's most intense experiences of being alive have come from romantic relationships or sexual adventures, and some of them would no doubt insist that those moments were not merely physical but spiritual.  James Joyce seems to have been one of these people: the ecstatic vision that Stephen Daedalus has of the girl with bare legs at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is simultaneously a religious epiphany and an erotic dream come true (as well as an Ovidian metamorphosis, but we'll put her turning into a stork aside for now).  And there's a vein of tantric Buddhism that embraces this: there are even buddhas who are said to have come to realization in more senses than one. 

There's a Zen koan that asks 'Why can't the clear-eyed boddhisatvas ever sever the red thread?'  Nobody knows the answer, but John Tarrant thinks the question is about desire, and his view on this deserves some respect.  Chris Wilson talked one night about how those great old Theravadin monks, try as they might, could never really exstinguish all desire; and about how the Zen way was more to accept that the world we're in was a world of desire, whether we liked it or not.  I looked up to see my friend one seat over nodding vigorously.  Since joining the group, I've gradually pieced together the complex web of relationships, amicable and professional and sexual, that helped bring it into being, and the equally complex network of emotions, desire and love and hatred, that still holds it together.

I've always approached meditation groups as a refuge from all that.  Most of my Zen friends would probably remind me that there is no real refuge from desire, so I'd better stop pretending I can find one.  I won't pretend I've never felt attracted to anyone I sit with.  But I won't date within the community, just like I won't date in the department; call me Theravadin, but I'm not into sanghacest.  Occasionally, I look around the zendo at my dear friends, knowing that they're feeling impatience or anger toward someone, and feel glad to be free of it all (assuming I really am).  But more often, I watch them meditating together and bowing at one another, and become aware of a feeling in myself of admiraton, perhaps awe, even envy, that though they go on feeling lust or longing or regret or frustration at one another, they always do so, in this space at least, with compassion and dignity.

Zen people are assholes

Once there was a temple that was destroyed by fire; its great library was completely destroyed.  Priests from a nearby shrine came to the great temple concerned about the loss of ancient Tang and Sung dynasty texts.  The master told them, 'None of them have been harmed'.  'Where are they then?' one of the priests asked doubtfully; 'Would you show us the Tang edition of the Mahavairochana sutra?'  The master held up one hand.  The priests didn't know what to make of this, but another one asked to see the later translations of the Lotus Sutra.  Again, the master held up one hand.  He said, 'The covers were burned, but you can still hold the texts in your hand'.

That was one of the first koans I heard at Wind in Grass.  When it came to the discussion, everyone put their interpretive pennies into the hat.  When the Zen bug (which preceded the disembodied Buddha head) came to one hipster girl though, she just put up her hand.  She looked kind of pissed off.  Later on I got to know her better when she ended up being up at retreat the first time I went to one.  Before you eat a meal on retreat there's a weird ritual where a plate is passed around every table and everyone puts a morsel of food on it.  Then one person from each table takes the plate up to the altar and offers the food up.  The whole while everyone in the room is muttering a dark twisted form of grace in which we invoke all the demons and hungry ghosts, asking them to take our food and be at peace.  One of the first times I was involved in this I took a particularly plump raspberry and put on the offering plate.  A few seconds after the rite had been concluded the girl whispered harshly over at me, 'I can't believe you gave a whole fucking raspberry to the hungry ghosts!  They don't even exist!' 

Zen people can be assholes.  I don't mean that in a complaining way; it's just something I've noticed and appreciated.  It's part of what makes me feel at home at Wind in Grass, since there's a certain normality there.  The hipster girl told me how she'd been on a vipassana retreat for a whole month once.  It had changed her permanently and made her happy and all that, but one of the things that stuck in her mind was that it was impossible to go through doorways, because whenever you tried there'd be a smiling Buddhist on the other side inviting you to go through first (at which point you'd obviously have to smile back and insist that the smiling Buddhist go through before you).  That doesn't seem to be a problem at Zen retreats.  I was definitely intimidated by some of the people I saw at my first retreat, but then I got to know them better, and now they just scare me.

Ultimately, the practise is about compassion (like all true religious paths, perhaps).  But there's a lot of emphasis at the outset on authenticity, too: you never get the impression that people have plastered smiles on their faces, which has sometimes been my suspicion at meditation events of different persuasions (not that having a smile plastered on your face isn't better than having most other things plastered on your face).  If you're pissed or randy or distraught, the Zen prescription seems to be to just be pissed off or randy or distraught (and maybe: notice that you're pissed or randy or distraught).  Don't criticize yourself for it.  After a while you'll realize that being pissed, randy, and distraught are all fine states of mind to be in, and you won't be so desperate to change your state of mind or the state of the union.  And from below the surface of that equanimity compassion will bubble up naturally.

That's my understanding of the teaching at this point, and I don't like it all that much.  (So my understanding may still be imperfect, or the teaching may just be crap.)  But it does raise an interesting and obvious point about Buddhism: that's it's a capacious and varied set of practices, and it shouldn't be surprising that different emphases in terms of the ethics will lead to practitioners who react differently when they meet each other at doorways.  This also links up with the recent posts on meditation and neuroscience, since it's often amusing to me to read of studies that show how 'meditation' has this or that effect in the brain.  What kind of meditation?  Often they'll stipulate it's 'Buddhist meditation'.  Thanks.  (My former teacher Mike Hagerty's work is an exception in this regard, often describing in detail the particular type of meditation that's being studied).

It's pretty obvious, though, that different types of mental exercise will lead to the development of different features of personality, just as different physical exercises lead to the development of different muscles in the body.  That actually seems to be one of the starting assumptions of lots of meditative practices: people who do metta for example, are aiming partly to cultivate a generous attitude that will issue in right deeds and good action.  So it's no surprise that meditators who concentrate on an object of meditation will develop a certain one-pointedness, and that Zen types who just fucking sit for hours at a time will become increasingly badass.  I don't want to emphasize this too much, since in the end there seems to be something common to all types of meditation which just grants you peace in an unpredictable way (maybe in the way that all types of exercise make you feel slightly better somehow).  But it's worth noticing, and worth bearing in mind: be careful what you sit for.