It's a trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving freely

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.

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.  Finally, the change will really only affect one night a month, when David's there.  So is this really much of a change?

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).

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 dharma.  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.

As I admitted above, we do give dana to our teacher anyway.  So what's the difference?  The main difference is that dana 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.

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. 

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?

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.

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. 

But I'd still want to insist, at this stage, that they receive donations, 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.

The mousetrap

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.  

Mind the gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



 

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.

Zen cricket

You may have read the phrase 'Zen cricket' on this blog.  I had a go at explaining what Zen is in my second or third ever post; so now here's a shot at explaining cricket, prompted by someone asking me about it the other night.  Cricket is a sport played by men in white trousers with red balls (and green knees).  The pitch is a circle or ovoid of whatever spatial extent happens to be available on your local green; it may include holes, hillocks, or trees.  At the centre of the pitch is a wicket, which is a rectangle of flattened grass, and also refers very confusingly to the two wooden constructions set up at each end of the wicket: yes, at each end of the wicket (rectangle of grass) there are two wickets (wooden things).  The wooden things actually consist of three sticks called stumps and two twig-sized bobbins called bails.  If a red ball knocks the bails off the stumps while you're standing nearby with pads on your legs and a bat in your hand, you're out.

This usually happens after a chap at the other end of the wicket (grass) propels the ball towards you at high speeds.  He does not throw it; this is strictly forbidden.  Instead he must sling it down onto the wicket (grass) with a rigorously straight arm after going through what looks like an attempt at doing trikonasana (triangle pose) in the middle of a forty-yard dash.  You make runs by smacking the ball back at him as hard as you can, or by politely stopping the ball in its tracks and running away.  If you successfully abscond to the other wicket (wood), that is one run, but be careful where you hit the ball!  There are men in white trousers cunningly placed all around you at positions known as slip and gulley and silly mid-off.  A friend of mine at silly mid-off once took a ball smack in the forehead.  It left a red dot that made him look as if he'd experienced a sudden conversion to Hiduism.  He was standing about two feet away from the batsman; hence the silliness.

The first cricket match I ever played ended with 137 runs for us and 4 points for them.  It was a draw (a tie).  This is one of the central ways in which cricket is like meditation: you never really win, but then, you never really lose either.  You'll doubtless be dismayed to learn at this point (after slogging through two paragraphs) that the phrase 'Zen cricket' you've seen in this blog really has nothing to do with a fusion of Japanese spiritual rigour and English sporting eccentricity, interesting though that particular combination would no doubt be.  Instead, the Zen cricket is simply a green plastic bug that hops around from student to student as we speak our minds in the green green field of our Wind in Grass zendo.  Why then did I just give you a delightfully unhelpful description of the English sport of cricket?  Two reasons.  The first is because I've realized that Zen is the last refuge for authentic Englishness; but more on that in a later post.  The second is to introduce a post on our Zen games.

You see, one of the things I've been up to on this blog is giving you the lowdown on what we get up to at Wind in Grass.  We do something different every week of the month: so far I've covered the dharma talk, interviews with a teacher, and community night, and our Zen game nights are the only regular event left.  (Not counting what we get up to on the fifth Wednesday of months with five weeks, when all hell breaks lose, anything goes, and we meditate and walk and drink tea.)  Dharma talks and dokusan are venerable Zen and Chan traditions, and community night is our way of honouring the sangha, but how Zen games fit into the tradition is anybody's guess.  I'm told our teachers approve of our experiments (and this is partly why we like them).  But I must confess I can't really tell you what Zen games are.  I don't think Michael could either, and he runs them most nights.

We've already established on this blog that Wittgenstein was a Zen master (along with Socrates).  In the Philosophical Investigations there's a lot about games, because the word 'game' was a good example in the master's mind of how words meant: there's no essential quality that chess and tennis and manipulation share that makes them all games; rather, they're all linked to each other at different points, the way members of a family resemble each other through different features.  Our games are also like that, though like many things that change a lot they tend to have the same form every month.  After we meditate for half an hour, Michael invites us to meditate again for two or three minutes on something in particular: complaints we have, for example, or why we're here.  Then the Zen cricket does its innocent grasshoppery rounds through the tall grasses of the half-light we sit in. 

If I'd been called into construct a religious group a few years ago, the last thing I'd have done would be to put a businessman with a law degree in charge of organizing it.  And that, it turns out, would have been an enormous mistake, since one of the best things about Wind in Grass is that it's so well-organized despite all the informality, and most of that is Michael's fault.  Everbody gets to speak one at a time, for as long as the Zen bug is with them.  As Michael says, this isn't to put anybody on the spot; it's just because we want to hear what everyone has to say, and because we suspect that extroverted people don't have a monopoly on wisdom.  A- fucking -men.  People comment on what they came up for them in the experimental supplemental meditation party.  And more times than not, that somehow hands the rest of us, and them,  a shiny reflective fragment of their entire lives.

Once there was a game about complaints; I thought I would win, since I thought I had some pretty solid complaints about my life.  Naturally I was aghast when it turned out that other people were also bloody good at suffering; half of them at least had more heartbreaking misfortunes than my own, damn them.  Once there was a mind game about the Buddha; I talked about killing him, Chris told us all he did was wake up, Mick discussed his hairstyle.  Everybody said something completely different about the same bloke; it was like watching Citizen Kane.  Once Toby led a Zen game which was apparently a well-known mindfulness exercise.  Not well-known to me; she gave us raisins and I immediately asked her whether I could eat mine.  It turned out that was the game; we were meant to look at the raisin, smell it, listen to it, sense it and undress it and snort its pheromones.  At some point I'd realized I'd eaten one of mine before she'd told me I could, which I meekly confessed to later. 

I'm not sure who told us to play games like this, to conduct these trailblazing experiments, to muck about in the sandbox; but it's always a new enough joke to feel like an ancient practice.  We are all, we working young of San Francisco on winter nights, Englishmen on village greens in high summer.  Somehow we've figured out that the best way of making use of the space and time we have is to play a careful, bizarre, and elaborate game with each other.  At the centre of it is a red ball that means pain; it will hit you in the head in no time if you're silly and stand too close.  We launch it at other with stiff arms after cartwheels, swing at it wildly with bats, or wait in the outfield watching affectionately its suprising career.  Sometimes we can see it, high in the blue sky, hurtling towards us.  It looks very much like a fearful thing from underneath; but all of us are shouting out to catch it, because we know that there's nothing more joyful than to catch it in your smarting palms and to hurl it up again sky-high.

Night community

I used to prefer cats to people, but recently I've been coming round to the human race.  When I first starting meditating, I saw no reason to do it with anyone else; actually, since it seemed like kind of a weird thing to be doing, I prefered nobody else to be around when I was doing it.  I remember reading a passage in one of Christmas Humphreys' books where he says that Buddhists don't really do community; they just read books and meditate at home on their own.  I found that reasuring, since I never really liked having to talk to people after church.  Once when I went to a Quaker meeting with a friend he said, 'We like to think of coffee after Meeting as an integral part of Meeting, but I'm not very good at that'.  So we left without talking to the welcoming older people, and I was glad: they looked boring.

At some point I realized that I was so busy with working, playing, and drinking that I wasn't anywhere near meditating every day.  I thought that joining a group would provide me with some extra motivation or will-power, and I was right.  Even though I didn't take to the group in Oxford in a big way, I met some apparently normal British students who were into meditation and weren't shooting for a certificate in yogic flying.  I talked every now and then to the teacher about meditation, and that made me want to try out the advice he'd given me, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  And when we sat, I couldn't get up and absent-mindedly start perusing books as I sometimes found myself doing at home.  I had to meditate, and that reminded me that I liked meditating, actually rather a lot.

When I moved to Battersea I found that there was a very good chess club down the road and a very ornate Buddhist temple.  There was an altar or three at the end of the meditation hall, any number of snarling deities or half-deities wielding all manner of blades, candles and flowers and mandalas and gilt-framed photographs of reincarnated Rinpoches.  There was a complex series of bells, deep bells and tinny bells and jangling bells, to tell you to start meditating or stop, to start walking or stop, to make tea or drink it or listen to the dharma talk or do one yourself.  The people were the kind of Western Buddhists who started sentences with phrases like, 'When I first started down The Path...'  A man from Toronto gave me some useful hints about meditation, but it wasn't enough to keep me going back more than once or twice a month.  The chess club was great though: I went every week.

At Stanford the chess clubs was rubbish: everyone was analyzing and talking about math.  It was only in my second year that I started turning up to the meditation sessions advertised online in the Old Union.  There was guided meditation offered by a young man that looked to me like your typical Stanford grad student - clean-cut, Asian, serious and pragmatic - except that he had a certain calmness about him.  After a few sessions stubbornly doing my own practice, I decided to give his visualizations a try, if only as a matter of personal courtesy.  I ended up coming every week, even during breaks when I'd be disappointed to find no-one there.  Sometimes it was just the two of us; usually two or three others came.  There was a medical student, an tiny Indian girl, a middle-aged woman in philosophy.  We talked a little bit after the meditation about how we'd felt, and all the things we'd thought.

The year after Sith graduated I found what I'd thought was my ideal group.  There was no hierarchy, though there was a Religious Studies student who'd been a novice monk and answered my questions about monasteries in South-East Asia.  We'd meet, sit in our own ways for half an hour, and then disperse without saying much more than hello, goodbye, and thank you.  The following year afternoon sessions were led by a happiness researcher who drew something of a larger crowd.  There was a young techie who told us how meditation sometimes made him burst into laughter for no reason, a chilled-out Brazilian with an afro who just couldn't stop smiling, an anxious undergraduate who said looking at the contents of her own mind terrified her.  And all these groups were my sanghas; this year I've started staying for dharma circle in the same space.  Another year, another community.

If I'd been given the power to create my own ideal meditation group, it wouldn't have looked like Wind in Grass.  There wouldn't have been any koans, for a start, since I've always been a small-vehicle guy when it comes to meditation.  There wouldn't have been discussions or Zen games or dharma talks.  There certainly wouldn't have been statues of the Buddha, candles, or incense, not to mention disembodied heads, energy eggs, or Zen crickets.  But part of joining any community is being with people who have different preferences than you do, and different ideas.  If they didn't, it wouldn't be a very interesting group to be in, since you'd never learn anything.  Sometimes when I'm sitting in Wind in Grass I come across a rich tenderness in myself towards our altar, a drawer with a table cloth over it loaded with paraphernalia.  I didn't realize I would like it; thank goodness someone else did.

Once when I was on retreat one of the more severe looking students told me I should bow when approaching the teacher's room, bow after I'd gone through it, and then bow to the teacher before sitting down.  The next time I went into the room I did just that, and David looked at me and said, 'Dan probably told you to bow - which is sweet, since he's trying to make younger students feel at home.  But you should know that I couldn't care less.'  Since then, I don't bow to David (I shake his hand).  But for the rest of the retreat I still bowed to Dan.  You bow to Dan by bowing before entering the room to speak with the teacher.  I know Michael likes bowing too, so sometimes I bow to Michael.  You bow to Michael by bowing before sitting down, before serving tea, before lighting more incense.  And it seems fair enough, after all the bowing he's done for us by organizing Wind in Grass.

Once a month we have Community Night, when our practice is even less formal than usual (which you'd think would be difficult, but somehow we manage it).  There's a beautiful baby girl stumbling headlong around the zendo, gooing and gaing and aiding our meditation - she's a year old, the same age as my niece in distant England.  Our artist friend Mick, who left for Mexico last year, is here in the form of a wax energy sculpture on the altar - he is disguised as an enormous translucent egg.  My friend Ashley is sitting across from me cycling through memories of sticking needles into people therapeutically, which is her day job.  Marika is here with her boyfriend, Michael is here in his business suit, Raffy is looking clean-cut.  We are huddled in our wooden hide-out like revolutionaries or terrorists dedicated to doing nothing.  This is my secret society of friends, my sworn conspiracy of meditators, my night community.

Work in the room

The third or fourth time I turned up for meditation at Wind in Grass I found that they'd hidden a man with a white beard in the closet.  The space we sit in has a rustic, outdoorsy feel, even though as soon as you step outside you can see the densely clustered towers of the downtown area sparkling away beside the Bay Bridge.  Every time you walk in the door it's like going on an urban camping trip.  The wooden floorboards are rough and unsanded (some work practice we never seem to get around to), and throw up splinters that unquestionably help with mindfulness when we're doing walking meditation in our socks.  In the corner there's a wooden door with a catch and behind it there's a small space between the wall behind you and the sloping bedrock of Potrero Hill.

That night they'd announced that the teacher David would be coming.  After we started meditating the girl to my left put the disembodied head of the Buddha in my hands and disappeared into the corner.  Beneath the noise of the heater you could hear hums and haws and sometimes an explosion of laughter.  After twenty minutes or so she came back to her cushion.  I passed the head of the Buddha on to the person to the left of me and opened the door of the closet.

In the closet there was an empty chair, and across from it another chair with a man with a white goatee in it.  Next to him there was a little table with a bell and some other curious objects on it.  Around his neck he had a kind of apron like the one I'd noticed Chris wearing, only this one was yellow and sparkly, as if he had taken care to dress up extra silly to keep the children entertained.  He looked friendly and glad but also kind of mischievous, as if he were savouring the happy outcome of a recently executed practical joke. 

This, I later learned, was our version of dokusan, a private interview with a Zen teacher.  (This was also my first encounter with a Zen teacher, although I'd foolishly taken the other chap with the black bib as a teacher, because he had taught me things.)  I've heard that in Japanese tradition the interview can be quite confrontational, with the master throwing the student a koan immediately upon entry and ringing the student out of the room with the bell if a satisfactory answer is not forthcoming.  When I heard this I immediately felt at home, realizing that the Japanese had invented the Oxford tutorial.  'How did the ancient Greek city-state get there?'  'How do you stop the sound of the distant temple bell?'  Ding-dong.  We've all been there.

My actual experience was much more disconcerting, consisting as it did largely of patience.  I sat down and waited for the teacher to say something, and he sat there and smiled.  At a certain point we started talking about meditation.  I'd already been practising for seven or eight years but immediately felt that everything was upside down.  More precisely, I felt like the strange man sitting opposite me was flipping my brain over, repeatedly and lighthearetdely, the way you flip a fried egg over on a frying pan.  Flip, flip.  This is your brain on koans.  And my koan was to stop the sound of the distant temple bell.  With what?  How come?  No idea.  It was like an extra secret dangerous mission from the spy agency that you couldn't refuse. 

I've since had many sessions in the room with David Weinstein, in Wind in Grass, on retreat, in somebody's house in Alameda, over the phone.  Somtimes we talk about meditation, which I thought is what I was meant to be doing at first (and that may be right; I don't know).  Sometimes we talk about what's going on in my life, which I was pretty sure was wrong, until I found out that's what most people in Wind in Grass were doing (not to say that it isn't wrong; it may be).  And sometimes we talk about stopping that damn bell from clanging in that distant bloody temple.

After I'd put forward my interpretion of the koan, my thoughts concerning it, and my complaints about it ('My koan doesn't appear to be working'), David started asking me to show him how to stop the bell without using words.  I have no idea how to do this, but I've figured out that figuring something physically is a big part of koan work, the only way, David told me, of getting the understanding into your bones.  I will work on that.  In the meantime, I look forward and backward to meeting strange men with white beards whenever I enter the closet.  There I am with Socrates in the Agora, finding out thay I have no idea what piety is.  With a priest in the half-darkness, admitting that getting everything wrong is alright.  With Wittgenstein in the deckchairs, a fly being coaxed towards the open end of a bottle.

Ordinary writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beginning Post

About a year ago, I walked into a community centre in San Francisco and made the acquaintance of some nice young people wearing party hats who threatened to kill me.  I'd just moved to the city from the South Bay, had been practising meditation for about seven years, and wanted to find a group in my neighbourhood - Potrero Hill - that I could sit with.  Luckily, I didn't have to look very long or very hard, since I soon saw flyers for a Zen group that called itself the Wind in Grass Sangha.  I jotted down the details, even though I'd never been attracted to Zen among sects of Buddhism.

Actually, I'd never been that attracted to any of the sects of Buddhism, thinking of myself primarily as an agnostic with a Christian background who liked meditation.  But if I'd been forced to choose one school it would have been a strain of what I considered the no-nonsense orthodox tradition (Theravada), rather than one of various florid offshots of the Mahayana tree that took root later on.  I looked up the website of the group advertised on the flyer and was put off by all the activities they seemed to be engaging in: group discussions (not what I was looking for), Zen games (pretentious-sounding), and koan practice (which looked like a distraction from the concentration meditation I was used to).

Nonetheless, the group did meet almost unbelievably close to my new room - a less than five minute walk up to the crest of the hill, from where you could see the whole city lying spread out and sparkling before you, and down again to Carolina Street.  It actually took me a few weeks to find the place, but when I did, I felt immediately at home, possibly just because the people there were near my own age, clearly not Buddhists from birth, and obviously the kind of people who had other things going on in their lives.  That night we sat outside on the balcony, with the Bay Bridge standing behind us in the distance like some mechanical caterpillar petrified in the act of clambering across the bay.

A tall confident man in a business suit was telling us a story about a student who wanted to reach enlightenment.  He went to a teacher who told him to meditate for a year and come back then if he hadn't reached enlightenment.  After a year of disappointed application, the student came back to the master to report his failure.  The master told him to try again for a month and see what happened.  Surely enough, the student returned again, dejected, and fared no better after another week of practice and then a single day.  Finally, the master said, 'Meditate for the next hour, and if you don't reach enlightenment, I'll kill you with this knife'.  Lo and behold, the young man had an awakening.

It just so happened that the night I walked in was the group's one-year anniversary, and that's why everyobdy was wearing paper party hats.  Since nobody had reached enlightenment after a year (or maybe since they all had, and just wanted to have some fun), our practice that night was to meditate with a a stalk of burning incense in our hands, imagining that our lives would end when the incense burned out.  I wasn't sure if I knew how to wake up completely in such a short span of time, so I concentrated on the glowing tip of the incense as it moved down towards my fingers.  In the discussion, a clean-cut man with German accent said that he'd given up meditating before the end, and had surrendered to enjoying the moment, just being on the balcony above the bridge and the bay.

I got away without anybody killing me, but then, I hadn't reached enlightenment either - at least, I didn't think so.  I'd also decided that the people in this group were unserious, crazy, and possibly dangerous.  Some part of me had also apparently decided that I'd be going back the following week, and that's exactly what I did - and I've been back virtually every week since then, with a break while I was away in Europe over the summer, until now, when we're again nearing a group anniverary.  The people in that group have become my community, and some of my most trusted friends in the city.  And Zen has become the path I took and have walked down for a year - a route I know little about, from a country whose language I don't understand, but which seems to lead somewhere interesting.

I'm starting this blog for a range of inter-related reasons.  One is that it's a central idea in Zen - stressed by Shunryu Suzuki - that there is much to learn from the mind of a beginner, even for a master, and I hope that the thoughts and impressions of a tyro in the practice will be interesting to others.  Another is that it's often difficult to explain to my friends and family exactly what I'm up to when I go to Zen, and this will provide an account of my activiites and reflections for those who want one.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want this blog to help make our group the best that it can be, transparent to outsiders and comfortable with  internal criticism.

Over the past year, Wind in Grass and Pacific Zen (the institute of which we're a chapter) have given me an inspiring glimpse of the value of a religious community.  But too many communities of this sort have been corrupted by the failure of members to speak frankly to each other and to outsiders about the sort of problems that occur naturally in any human group.  I feel immensely lucky to be among a group of people who are as committed to open-minded experimentation as they are to valuing the religious traditions they have taken as their own.  And I think that the best way I can help out is by putting into public space a frank record of my ideas and experiences as someone approaching an ancient practice with a beginner's mind.