UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

Returning to the twists and turns of the endless, meandering 2024 campaign for POTUS, and looming uncertainty of threatened challenges to the vote promising to bollix up the results, the question arises as to what this may have to do with Zen.

The dedicated Zen guy who produces the UnMind podcast suggested that we take up the premise of the “Bodhisattva ideal” in Buddhism, comparing and contrasting behaviors and apparent attitudes of the candidates — and politicians in general — to this lofty ideal and aspiration.

Somewhere in the copious Zen literature I came across the proposition that governmental leaders find themselves in positions of power owing to karmic merit accumulated in past lives, apparently whether they know it or not. We can suppose that this quaint notion arose in the context of predominantly Buddhist societies, such as that of Ashoka the Great in India, or in the later empires or principalities in China. It requires quite a stretch of the imagination to interpret our current political situation from that standpoint, though an online meme that one of the candidates is the “chosen of God” is even more ludicrous to contemplate.

Looking at the meaning of “Bodhisattva” thorough the eyes of Google, the first hit that comes up is from the University of Washington, Seattle-based home of the Huskies, the first thing that comes up on their homepage. We will defer any consideration of college football as the key branding element of UW, and higher education in general, for a later segment. Their more-or-less traditional definition of the Bodhisattva assumedly comes from their comparative religion department:

Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment. There are many different Bodhisattvas, but the most famous in China is Avalokitesvara, known in Chinese as Guanyin. Bodhisattvas are usually depicted as less austere or inward than the Buddha. — https://depts.washington.edu

Parsing this definition, I have a few quibbles. We prefer the use of “enlightening” beings as it indicates a process in which all of us comprise a work in progress, whereas “enlightened” indicates a state of completion. No true bodhisattva would ever claim to be enlightened in that sense. In the sense of enlightened self interest and the best interests of others, yes.

Then there is the idea of “entering paradise.” The Buddhist term “Nirvana” is not pointing at another dimension or plane of existence, but the true nature of this world in which we find ourselves — so-called “Samsara.” As Master Dogen reminds us, “actually, the Other Shore (of Nirvana) comes to us”; we do not go to it. As Shohaku Okumura-roshi once mentioned, “Everybody says they want to go to Nirvana. But when you go there, there is nobody there. Only bodhisattvas can go to Nirvana, and they choose to stay here. So our charge is to change Samsara into Nirvana.” This is what Dogen means by saying the other shore comes to us. 

The reference to “many different Bodhisattvas” and the most famous being Avalokitesvara, Guanyin in China, or Kanzeon in Japan, reinforces the notion that bodhisattvas are a special class of beings, outside the kin or ordinary mortals — much like the icons of other religions, such as canonized prophets, saints and saviors, or demigods. My understanding of the Zen ideal is that we are all bodhisattvas, whether we know it or not. 

And finally, the reference to their relatively diminished austerity seems somewhat overwrought. My reading of the original teachings attributed to Shakyamuni reveal a profound humility and accessibility, and a remarkable empathy for his audience, that any bodhisattva would aspire to emulate. Awakening of the Bodhi mind is concomitant with the Bodhisattva vow — to help all others before reaching the other shore — according to Dogen, who should know.

So how do our current carriers of partisan banners stack up against this image?

I would suggest that their motivations have little or nothing to do with entering paradise, for one. So in that, they are like bodhisattvas — but focusing their efforts on the present and immediate future of prosperity in the secular sphere — not the spiritual realm. In American politics, and perhaps that of Western countries in general, there is an underlying implication that behavior in the societal sphere is indicative of one’s “values,” which tend to land in the ethical, moral, and spiritual column. This may be a vestigial remnant of the puritan ethic that pervaded the early migrants to these shores, the after- effects of which we witness today, including in the performative permutations of partisan politics.

But, quoting myself in an earlier UnMind segment, there are brute behaviors of our fellow-travelers in this particular time and space that cannot be excused as politic: 

When it comes to indiscriminate bombing of civilians and children, we are no longer in the realm of “politics.” If we are silent, we become complicit. Buddha, I believe, would have spoken out against this betrayal of compassion and wisdom. As did Matsuoka Roshi, concerning the corrupt regime in Vietnam, and other atrocities of his time. We can look to the teachings and meditation practice of Zen Buddhism to find a degree of solace and sanctuary from these insults to humanity, but we cannot run, and we cannot hide from them, ultimately. But we do not have to join the partisan divide, either.

In the same episode, we provided some historical context by referring to the foundational documents of the Founding Fathers, including the Declaration of Independence, with particular attention to the second section:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This begins to sound a lot like the Bodhisattva ideal applied to the salvation of others, at least in the secular realm. If we are all equal, we all have equal potential to wake up in the most comprehensive sense, as did Shakyamuni Buddha. We also innately deserve to be treated with the highest degree of respect from our peers. And each and all have equal claim to life — within the realistic constraints of aging, sickness and death; to liberty — in the sense of true liberation from our own ignorance, and the imposition of that of others upon our lives; and the pursuit of true happiness, which does not derive from materialistic sources.

Perhaps our political leaders are doing their level best to secure the rights, at least in their secular manifestation. But compare to the Bodhisattva vows, which address serving, or saving all beings, on another scale altogether; two translations give us a better insight into their broader and deeper meaning:

Beings are numberless I vow to free them

Delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them

Dharma gates are boundless I vow to enter them

The Buddha way is unsurpassable I vow to realize it

However innumerable all beings are

      I vow to free them all

However inexhaustible my delusions are

      I vow to extinguish them all

However immeasurable the dharma teachings are

      I vow to master them all

However endless the great way

      I vow to follow it completely

I leave it to you to decide whether or not, and to what degree, your candidate for the highest office in the land, the most powerful secular position on Earth, are in harmony with these compassionate aspirations. But remember that the teachings of Buddhism were never meant to be held up to criticize others, but to reflect back upon yourself and your own behavior. The mirror of Zen reflects all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — without discrimination. You and your behavior are also reflected in that Precious Mirror.

When we mention Zen practice these days, we usually mean sitting in Zen meditation, or zazen. It was not always so. In Bodhidharma’s time, “practice” meant observing the Precepts in daily life, discerning to what degree our behavior is comporting to their admonitions. If memory serves, this is found in “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma” by Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine.

Similarly, when we speak of studying the Dharma, we typically mean reading the written record. It was not always so. When Buddha was alive, the teachings were spoken. You literally had to go listen to live lectures and, later, memorized recitation, to hear the Dharma. This was apparently true of all teachings of all sects at that time; the oral tradition prevailed. It was some four centuries after the Buddha’s death, when his utterances were first committed to written form.

With the advent of the Internet we have many more opportunities to “hear the true dharma” — a Dogen coinage with a deeper meaning — as expounded by others in the form of podcasts such as UnMind, audiobooks and other modern marvels. But we have to call into question whether we are hearing the Dharma truly. Whether the meaning we extract from listening to the efforts of others to express this subtle and inconceivable teaching is anywhere near to the original meaning that the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, intended, or for that matter that of any of his many successors in India, China, Korea and Japan, and the other countries of origin.

I am not suggesting that we engage in a scholarly examination of the provenance and evolution of the Three Baskets — or Tripitaka in Sanskrit. I propose that we are challenged to attempt to render the meaning in the modern idiom, which involves extracting them from their original cultural context, and embedding them in ours, as well as expressing them in the vernacular, including the language of modern science and philosophy.

For one thing, this means divesting the ancient liturgical passages of jargon — primarily the obscure and seemingly mystical terms, mostly from Sanskrit — such as “samadhi” for example —  that some contemporary writers seem prone to sprinkle liberally throughout their publications. The downside to this tendency is that it creates an impression that the author actually knows what these terms mean, whether you, dear listener,understand them or not.

Another consideration is what is called the “theory-laden” aspect of the semantics of language, as well as our interpretation of direct perception. This conditions the impact that Zen masters’ behavior, as well as that of their “turning words” — in Japanese, wato — can have on their students. This concept was introduced to me by George Wrisley georgewrisley.com, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Georgia, author of texts on Dogen and Zen, who generously made several technical contributions to my books, “The Original Frontier” and “The Razorblade of Zen.”

Professor Wrisley pointed out that, in the now-famous records of Zen students’ exchanges with their masters, including extreme gestures they resorted to, in trying to help the student wake up to the reality of Zen — shock tactics such as shouting, and sometimes striking with a fist or staff — each student’s reaction to the abuse was entirely dependent upon their belief, or innate “theory,” that the teacher was enlightened, and so could “do no wrong,” to oversimplify the point.

Ordinarily, if someone hits you with a stick, your reaction would not be one of profound insight, and undying gratitude for the “grandmotherly kindness” of your abuser. Today it would likely trigger a lawsuit.

The ancient ancestors of Zen seem to have an intuitive grasp of the importance of language and its effect on our perception of reality, as indicated in lines from the early Ch’an poems, such as:

Darkness merges refined and common words

Brightness distinguishes clear and murky phrases

And:

Hearing the words understand the meaning

Do not establish standards of your own

In Zen, of course, experience comes first, expression a distant second. The interim state, and where we can get it wrong, consists in our interpretation of direct experience, both on the cushion and off. As another ancient Ch’an poem has it:

The meaning does not reside in the words

but a pivotal moment brings it forth

And yet another:

Although it is not constructed

it is not beyond words

Hopefully we have, or will have in future, experienced this pivotal moment. Meanwhile, we are dependent upon words to parse this teaching, and to express it, both to ourselves as well as to others. We can use words to encourage all to go beyond language, and even ordinary perception, in direct experience in zazen. In the face of this design intent of the Dharma, the past efforts to translate it into various languages, and the present effort to paraphrase it into the modern idiom, seem worth the time and trouble.

In this spirit, let me share with you my paraphrase of the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, or Great Heart of Wisdom Teaching, with which, hopefully, you are familiar. This is a work in progress, subject to revision.

The typographical layout available on the UnMind podcast page is designed to facilitate scanning and reading the text while chanting it aloud, usually accompanied by drum and gongs. You might follow it with your eyes, while you follow my words with your ears. In this way, you will absorb a multi-sensory experience, which may be more revealing than hearing or reading alone. I will simply recite it here, a capella:

ESSENTIAL TEACHING OF PERFECTING WISDOM

When any and all Awakening Beings

deeply and directly experience the process of perfecting wisdom,

they clearly see that all five traditional components of sentience

are fundamentally free of permanence and separate self-existence;

this insight relieves all unnecessary suffering.

Respected seekers of the truth, know that:

the apparent form of our world is not separate from its impermanence;

impermanence is not separable from appearances;

“form,” or particles of matter, is innately “emptiness,” or waves of energy;

conversely, emptiness is innately form.

All sensations, perceptions, and underlying mental formations,

as well as consciousness itself, also manifest as complementary.

All existent beings manifest elemental impermanence,

imperfection, and insubstantiality:

they neither arise nor cease, as they appear to do;

they are neither defiled nor pure, but nondual in their nature;

they neither increase nor decrease in value or merit.

Therefore know that, given the relativity of the material and immaterial,

there can be no fixity of form; no tangibility of sensation;

no persistence of perception; no infallibility of mental formations;

finally, there can be no absolute entity of consciousness.

More immediately, the principle of complementarity entails that there can be

no eyes, ears, nose, or tongue, as such; and thus, no body;

likewise there can be no “mind,” as a separate substance;

it follows that, in spite of appearances,

there can be no independent functions of

seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching;

nor can there be unconstructed objects of the mind;

no independent realm of sight, nor that of any other sense organ;

nor any realm of mind-consciousness as a whole.

This means that there can be neither ignorance in the absolute sense,

nor any extinction of ignorance in the relative sense.

Neither can there be sickness, old age and death as absolute states;

Nor any extinction of sickness, old age and death as relative states.

In light of the implications of this insight,

suffering intentionally inflicted upon oneself and / or others can come to an end,

stemming as it does from confusion as to root causes;

while natural suffering such as aging, sickness, and death cannot end.

Thus there can be no isolated “path” leading to cessation of suffering;

there can be no essential “knowledge” to gain, in any conclusive sense;

and no “attainment,” of any consequential kind.

Since there is nothing to attain,

all Awakening Beings rely totally on simply perfecting their wisdom;

their body-mind drops away, functioning fully with no further hindrances;

 with no dualistic hindrances, no root of fear is to be found;

far beyond confused worldviews,

they abide in nondual spiritual liberation.

All Awakening Ones of past, present, and future

rely on the perfecting of this deepest wisdom,

thereby attaining unsurpassed, complete, insight

and letting go of the attainment.

Rest assured that perfecting wisdom

is the most excellent method;

the serene and illuminating discipline; the unsurpassable teaching;

the incomparable means of mitigating all suffering;

and that this claim is true, not false.

We proclaim the transformational perfecting of wisdom:

Gone, gone to the other shore; attained the other shore; altogether beyond the other shore, having never left; the other shore comes to us; wisdom perfected!

I do not claim to have captured the essence of the original chant. The afore-mentioned Buddhist scholar and Ch’an translator Red Pine, in his modern translation “The Heart Sutra,” tells us that this condensed version of the larger sutra extolling the emptiness of all existence, including the Dharma, was published in China around 900 CE. This was done in order to counter a prevailing trend toward erudition as the indicator of enlightenment, a distortion of the true Dharma that has occurred more than once in history. Another famous example is that of Master Huineng, sixth ancestor in China, who publicly tore up copies of the sutras to make a similar point. Buddha-dharma is manifest in nondual reality as lived, not contained in writing as doctrine.

In a future segment of UnMind, we will take up another of my hopeful efforts at paraphrasing the Dharma. Meanwhile I encourage you to try your own hand — or more precisely, your mouth and mind — at putting one of the historical teachings into your own words. You might want to compose your own version of the Precepts, for example. When and if you do so, it may force you to consider the true meaning of these teachings which — through the sheer repetition of chanting them repeatedly over time — begin to sink into our stubborn monkey minds. But the downside of repetition is that they may become rote recitation, in which their deeper meaning and direct relevance to our contemporary lives may be lost.

Not to worry, however — combined with the nonverbal silence and deep stillness of zazen, where we can begin to experience the meaning of the expression — we cannot go far wrong.

After taking a hiatus this summer, we return to the political fray with an eye toward its implications for our lives and our pursuit of a more perfect union with the teachings of Zen. It is a good thing that we did not try to say anything about the campaign at the beginning of August, in light of the whiplash nature of rapid-fire developments on that front. Anything we had to say regarding predictions or outcomes would have been instantly irrelevant on a day-to-day basis, rendered moot by the exhaustive political melodrama playing out in the media.

One of my online dharma dialogs brought up the question of agency, as in how much effect can one person really have on the direction the country is moving as a whole, not to mention the looming consequences of climate change on a global scale. It may help in setting the context, to recall my model of the Four Fundamental Spheres – those arenas of activity and influence that we all encounter on a daily basis.  

The four spheres, visualized as nesting in a concentric array, start with the Personal at the center; surrounded by the Social, which includes the political; then the Natural sphere, the world of our surrounding planet and its atmosphere; and finally the Universal, extending into outer space. Our sense of agency and influence diminishes as we move outward from the Personal, inversely proportional to the influence of the surrounding spheres on our personal bubble. It is necessarily an asymmetrical relationship, an understatement of cosmic proportions.

Politics is the social sphere on steroids, we might say. It is a mixed blessing in that even those who emphasize our worst angels in the struggle to swing a majority, reveal, unintentionally, the dark underbelly of human nature. Which can be clarifying and even healthy, depending on what we do with it.

These days , many of my online dharma dialog calls, dokusan in Japanese, reveal the anxiety that comes with the uncertainty of living in “interesting times,” as in the ancient Chinese curse. We might prefer to ignore the political realm altogether, but unless you are willing to become a hermit and remove yourself from society in some extreme manner, you cannot avoid the consequences of the political actions taken by others, in the cultural hothouse of modern civilization, whether urban or rural. The question arises: Is Zen (& zazen) merely a coping strategy? Or is it only reinforcing our personal status-quo? Or, conversely, can it enable us to change and adapt?

I solicited suggestions for this reboot episode from my producer and publisher, the former being an American citizen currently living in the Southwest, the latter a Canadian living to the Northeast. Here is a sample of what they suggested:

I think there's something in here about a cautionary tale for people looking to religious leaders for signals on how to vote. I've seen some other Zen leaders on social media endorsing candidates - which is fine, but they wield a lot of power, and Zen really is about thinking for yourself on your cushion. Maybe religion is separate from politics, and that's ok. 

It also might be interesting to discuss how to have compassion for the “other” – be it democrat or republican – as one cannot exist without the other; and neither are really separate.

I was gratified to see the reference to my past emphasis in this series on the value of independent thinking, and engaging in interdependent action, which I propose is one of the outputs of Zen training. As opposed to co-dependent thinking and action, another way of characterizing the partisan divide. If we are developing the ability to think independently of the political forces impinging upon us, and the freedom to act interdependently with cohorts on both sides of the divide, then our Zen training can contribute to evolving the more perfect union that is given lip service in the social discourse.

Referring back to the previous UnMind series of three segments on aging, sickness and death, the Three Marks of Buddhism’s worldview, I want to reiterate that the paranoid style in politics seems most likely to stem from irrational fear of aging, sickness, and dying, the personal dimensions of the universal traits of anicca, dukkha, and anatta, or impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self. When we throw the “Three Poisons” of greed, hatred, and delusion into the mix, the result is a true witch’s brew. This is the old “divide and conquer” strategy.

The question of how to have compassion for the “other” – be it democrat or republican – goes to a more non-dualistic reading of the seeming divide between irreconcilable opposites. When we look at what conservatives are trying to liberalize, and what liberals are trying to conserve, we see that the labels are not really getting to the essence of the conflict, but merely exacerbating it. The issue of factionalism was raised in the early founding documents of the American experiment as a potential threat to the republic, but since one party cannot exist without the other, and neither is really separate from the body politic, they are mutually defining, and can be complimentary. The real conflict goes to the personal dimension, where we find the question of: “How much is enough?”

How much is enough to live happily, and is there enough to go around? Are the global shortages of food, drinking water, clean air, housing, and the hierarchy of physical survival needs real, or are they the consequence of negligence and malfeasance on the part of greedy, profit-driven special interests?

Have we as a species been on a decades-long binge of “Hotel-California-everything-all-the-time” wretched excess and the bills are just now finally coming due? Can we all downsize our lifestyle to a level that relieves the burden of the disposable consumption society?  

When we look to the example of our forebears in the history of Zen, and, indeed, in the early days of democracy in America, going back no further than my grandparents’ generation, we can detect vestiges of a much more moderate way of living that recognized reasonable limits to the answer to how much is enough.

Of course there were contemporaneous avatars of wealth and power, living out the lifestyles and fantasies of the rich and famous. And the human slaves of earlier periods in history have been replaced by the “energy slaves” of modern technology, as Bucky Fuller pointed out. In that sense, wealth, as the commonwealth, has been redistributed more widely, but there is still an unseemly preoccupation in some quarters with amassing financial resources beyond the scope of what any one person, family, or corporate entity, can possibly need, or spend, within one lifetime. Except, perhaps, as a defensive reserve to defend against future lawsuits. Or, perhaps, to invest in initiatives for future cultural evolution. But do we really need to terraform Mars, for example, when we cannot even make the Earth function as our home planet?

Back to the personal sphere of meditation, and its connection to the social sphere of politics. If we accept the suggestion that our Zen practice is indeed a kind of generalized coping mechanism, it begs the question, Coping with what? Master Dogen asks, about two-thirds of the way through Fukanzazengi–Principles of Seated Meditation:

Now that you know the most important thing in Buddhism

      how can you be satisfied with the transient world?

Our bodies are like dew on the grass

      and our lives like a flash of lightning

Vanishing in a moment.    

By this point in the long tract of instructions on physical method and philosophical attitude he picked up in China, the first piece he published as a manual of meditation for his student followers, he has made perhaps a hundred different points about what is important in Buddhism. So what he means by “the most important thing” is subject to some interpretation. Just as it is in our modern milieu. What is, after all, the most important thing? Not just in meditation, but in all your daily actions, as Dogen emphasizes in the same writing.

Media mavens, including pre-digital traditional channels and ever-expanding post-digital modes, are constantly promoting what they want us to pay attention to as “news,” what they consider the most important events and issues of the moment in the 24-7 news cycle. Most of it is designed to capture eyeballs, ears, and clicks, in order to develop ratings that are used to rationalize the cost of ad buys and other kinds of participation in the public arena, or direct sales. Which items are delivered to your doorstep in ever-greater frequency with minimal effort on your part. Except for disposing of the mountain of packaging and shipping materials.

Turning our attention back to the cushion and the wall, the most important thing at the moment cannot be the passing pageantry of the political campaign. Unless you are running for office, or working for someone who is. One important thing is to understand or appreciate the importance of the political to the personal, in particular, your personal sphere. While the central personal dimensions of aging, sickness and death can definitely be affected – directly or indirectly, positively or negatively – by the political arena, it is not typically the most proximate cause of any of the three. And the last thing that you are likely to be thinking, on your death bed, is that you wished you had spent more time on politics.

Some ancient sage said to “stamp life-and-death on your forehead and never let it out of your mind.” I am sure he was not morbidly obsessed with death, but that his life, and ours, takes a major part of its central meaning, and sense of urgency, from the fact that birth is the leading cause of death. This, to many, would seem to be wrong.

But if you think about it – or as Dogen says, “examine thoroughly in practice” – this idea that something is wrong, it appears that it may only be our opinion. We may be wrong. Reality cannot be wrong. Nature cannot be wrong. But we may be wrong. Only we human beings can get this wrong. And then we blame others, turning against our fellow human and other sentient beings. As the Tao te Ching says, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.”

We can blame our situation, with some justification, on others, including the pols. But the blaming does not solve the basic problem. Perhaps this is getting at the most important thing. Accepting and admitting that the suffering in the world that may be considered wrong, or unnecessary, is caused exclusively by human beings, based on their assessment of their world as somehow “wrong.” This is the kind of suffering that can end, seen in the clear light of emptiness in zazen.

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

Following on the previous UnMind series of three segments on aging, sickness and death, the Three Marks of Buddhism’s worldview, we will expand our scope to the broader world of international conflict, characteristic of our modern world, where Buddhism’s three conditions of existence are also manifested, if in a more universal form. Traditional definitions of these basic aspects of life are universal in scope: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self (Skt. anicca,  dukkha, anatta). We can see clearly that in today’s world, these givens of existence are not warmly embraced on the social level in America, let alone on national or global levels, which surely follows from their avoidance on the personal level.

Beginning with Buddhism’s “compassionate teaching” – the Dharma – we find that along with the three marks of aging, sickness and death, Buddha promulgated the “Three Poisons,” usually rendered as “greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly.” What a witch’s brew is conjured, when we mix the six ingredients together.

In the context of aging, greed becomes the longing for longevity, the overreliance on meds to avoid the ravages of illness, and extravagant, catastrophic efforts at prolonging life at all costs. Anger and hatred arise when we are denied the ability to forestall aging, when we are overcome by a pandemic, and when we blame widespread death and destruction on others. Delusion and folly ensue when we act on our mistaken beliefs, attacking others for the natural consequences of our collective and individual actions. The unexpected consequences threaten us all, whether in our dotage or full-flowering youth, with the Four Horsemen – plagues, famine, and the predations of war, and not necessarily in that order. Just who is to blame for this situation and how can we hold them accountable?

In the worldview of Zen, everything, including charity, begins at home. To quote Master Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The first embrace of reality is to “study the self.” The second is to “forget the self,” as Master Dogen reminds us in his famous teaching, Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point.Actualizing the fundamental point of existence requires that we embrace our own aging, sickness and death – the close-up-and-personal reality of impermanence, imperfection and insubstantiality, including our precious self – while recognizing that greed, anger and delusion are fueling the fires of discontent, leading to blaming others for our personal predicament. Sometimes, others are to blame for making things worse, of course, just as we are to blame for making their world more crowded. Stop the world and let me get off. Would it were so simple.

The blame game can range from blaming our parents for our birth, on one extreme, to blaming those others most distantly related to us by blood. I read somewhere that the furthest removed any human being can be from any other human, biologically speaking, is something like 26th cousin, if memory serves. One wonders, with the growth in population, whether that tenuous kinship is getting closer, or further apart, as time goes by, with 8 billion people and counting.

I also read of a laboratory experiment, some years back, where they used the classic maze of rats to find out what happens when you simply keep adding rats to the maze, without letting any escape. At one point of increasing density, the rats begin attacking each other. They “blame” the others for their own discomfort, apparently. The analogy to human population should not be lost on anyone. The anxiety and outright hostility associated with immigration on a global basis is too obvious a parallel to ignore.

Or we can aim all of our blame at the political system, or the candidate du jour. Now that the “debate of the century” has landed with a thud, the rats are having a hard time deciding which of the two leaders of the rat pack is most at fault.

Much of the anger and hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by underlying fears, exacerbated by perceived worsening conditions, including density of population. The identified “foreigners” – bringing unintelligible languages, peculiar cultural customs, and bizarre belief systems – induce anxiety, stereotyping and suspicion amongst native populations, triggering the threat of the privileged being “replaced” by them in the great scheme of things. This probably arises from a tribal, protective social instinct, linked to the survival of “our kind.” Hyped to the max by political opportunists, into the bargain.

But on a more personal level, this anxiety, amplified by mob hysteria, surely finds its origin in the triple threat of aging, sickness and death, that is inborn with each individual. Birth is the leading cause of death, after all, like it or not.

This perceived threat, however irrational, is tied to what biologists call the survival instinct, or imperative. Reality is not a respecter of persons. But biology is designed to privilege survival of the species over all comers, adapting to ever-changing circumstances. Natural and artificial changes in context often outpace and outmaneuver biology, engendering threats to survival, to cycles of “extinction panic,” or to actual extinction of the species, potentially including humanity. Cultural evolution – our ability to pass on technological advances to the next generation, and their ability to further improve on their cultural inheritance – is ensconced in the social sphere. But it likewise runs into trouble when it is not agile enough to keep up with the rate of change of conditions to which it is adapting, in the natural and universal spheres. Such as climate change. Aye, there’s the rub.

“Survival of the fittest” is the shorthand catchphrase for dumbing down Darwin’s elegant and complex theory on the “Origin of Species.” To find a cogent example of society’s collective resistance to this notion that we privilege the fit, we need look no further than the recruiting, drafting and conscription of young men and women – the “fittest” – into the modern military – the main mechanism oriented to societal survival – across the globe. Civilian leaders, and those at higher command levels, manage to keep a safe distance from the front lines, so as to return to fight another day, one assumes. But the survival of the oldest is not Nature’s way. It is not natural to put younger members of the species at risk to protect older members. Witness the wolf pack.

This biological imperative dictates an age-related triage, protecting those most likely to survive, to survive longer, and to reproduce. Yet humans do the opposite in wartime, and did it again in the face of the pandemic, by sending younger first responders into the fray, while protecting elderly and senior leaders through isolation, quarantine and access to medical care. Notwithstanding how miserable a failure that effort turned out to be, the point is still well-taken. Of course, from a practical perspective, the young provide the necessary numbers, and the vitality, needed on the frontlines. Even if senior members of society were willing to take point in crisis conditions, the question would be whether or not they are able to.

Setting aside such considerations of the neurotic societal implications of turning younger generations into cannon and virus fodder, what will it take to finally bring about world peace? Can we beat our swords into plowshares, turn intercontinental ballistic missiles into spaceships, cyberwar into cyberfun?

The current national debate is styled as a contest between democratic governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” striving toward a “more perfect union” of the republic; versus power elites exerting autocratic control over a hopelessly divided populace. The appeal of the latter is understandable for the “haves,” those who already enjoy a relative elite status of economic and social privilege. They stand to come out on top, liberated from the messy business of compromise with those on the bottom end of income equality. Likewise, the uneasiness of the “have-nots” is easy to understand. They see themselves as already victimized by the unlevel playing field, touted as equal opportunity for all.

This, it would seem, is the real wall that is being built, not on the border, but right down the middle of the country. Its building blocks consist of the institutions installed by the founding fathers, rearranged to reassert the original privilege of white, land-owning males. But is all this – the daily fare being served up by the media and opposing forces – really the root of the problem?

Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, or reincarnation, as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus, or resurrection, as do modern Christians, we finally come to face our mortality, in person. In Zen, the only mate who will accompany us to the grave is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, or powers of reasoning we have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of behavior and vicissitudes of fortunes encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death. The same may be said of family, though better to die surrounded by loved ones than alone, or surrounded by hostiles, I suppose.

On the cushion we sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us in his version of “Needle for Zazen (Zazenshin),” including all the tricks, trash and trinkets we have assembled in our toolkit. Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon reliance on reason itself, spawn of philosophy and the other kind of Enlightenment. We find verification of our practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”

Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find ourselves, at a pass that is not really negotiable, in any ordinary sense. All the stages of grief prove futile in the face of the relentless process and progress of biology. We need to confront reality when we are young and vigorous, as in “Stamp life and death on your forehead, and never let it out of your mind,” paraphrasing a truth long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die. Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.

When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her / his relentless, unsympathetic and unforgiving scythe, as being not at all different from the sword of Manjusri, hopefully cutting through our final delusions. Just as hopefully, the passing pageantry of life, particularly the concurrent social-political dimension, will have little or nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding the last breath we take. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.  

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

Closing out our exploration of the “three marks” of dukkha, in this episode we will take a look, close-up-and-personal, at death. In summary, our confrontation with and embrace of the three marks varies according to their universal natures, as well as to our personal nurturing in their recognition and acceptance.

Aging is predictable, but typically sneaks up on us, moving far too gradually to register in our youth, even nowadays with our ubiquitous mirrors, selfies, and TikTok videos – none of which our ancestors had in abundance. Today’s living generations may be the most self-conscious in the history of humankind. The famous “polishing a tile to make a mirror” koan anecdote reflected the fact that mirrors were originally of polished metal. Narcissus, remember, fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. By contrast, Tung-shan, a 9th century monk, was enlightened upon seeing his face for the first time, reflected in the water. A contemporary stand-up comic, who shall remain nameless, asked, “Did’ja ever look in the mirror in the morning and think, “That can’t be accurate!”?

Sickness, whether life-threatening or not, can land like a ton of bricks, flattening you for the moment – and often for the foreseeable future – with the rate of recovery dependent upon many factors, including aging. Sickness can often be the death-knell, as a diagnosis of cancer once was. As one ages, the body becomes less immune to the predations of bacteria and viruses, it seems. Today the threat of mental illness, leading to suicide, also looms large.

Usually, the threat of death from natural causes may be safely ignored, postponed, or even denied, until it can’t.  But sudden death is even more unpredictable than sickness, and can come in such a variety of modes today, including natural and man-made disasters, which are popping up with greater and greater frequency, notably side-effects of climate change, such as the ever-increasing statistical rate of death from extreme heat. America seems to be the poster-boy for death by guns, accidental or intentional, now one of the major causes of death for children in the USA. Death from complications in childbirth is still far too common, particularly for non-white women. And then there is always stress, aggravated by habits such as smoking. If one thing doesn’t get you, something else will, in the end. Death and taxes, as we say.

I must note in passing that much of the hysteria we witness on ideological and political fronts of the public discourse seems motivated by an underlying fear, which appears to stem from the triple threat of aging, sickness and death. Witness the “worship of youth” culture, “self-improvement” programs, and anti-aging products aimed at prolonging vim and vigor and extending life itself as long as possible. 

This primal, largely subliminal fear is often projected onto the identified “other,” a form of transference that – like the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” trope – deflects self-criticism, in favor of defining each and every conflict in terms of self-preservation, and resorting to blaming others. As the Tao te Ching reminds us, “When the blaming begins, there is no end to the blame.” Buddha’s original analysis of the constructed self’s fundamentally dissatisfactory nature of reality, and our place, individually and collectively, writ large. The most dissatisfactory of all affronts and indignities to our ego are the three marks.

If, on the other hand, we could all embrace, in all humility, the realities of aging, sickness and death as being perfectly natural and okay, the resulting equanimity of outlook might go a long way to ameliorating the insane intensity of conflict in the world. Aging gracefully includes embracing illness and death as built-in, intrinsic to the natural order of things. How much of our time, energy, attention and resources are dedicated to resistance to this fact – a fundamental denialism that leads naturally to the abdication of truth – in favor of our favorite fantasies as to the nature and central meaning of life?

A young Rinzai Zen priest named Hasegawa published a book titled “The Cave of Poison Grass.” He mentioned the fact that most people seem to postpone confronting reality until, finally, they are on their death bed. He declared that this is too late – “like eating soup with a fork” – a memorable phrase. He insisted that we have to confront this “Great Matter” of life-and-death while we are young, and have sufficient strength and energy to overcome it.

In the lore of Zen there is a Till-Eulenspiegel-like narrative that captures its sometimes irreverent attitude toward life and death, supposedly a true story. A monk realized that he was to die soon, and began asking other monks what they knew about, or had heard about, others dying. He was curious to know if anyone had ever died standing on their head, but nobody had. So sure enough, when the time came, he stood on his head in the corner and died. His sister happened to be a nun, and when she came to visit for the funeral, the corpse was still standing there in the corner. In disgust, she kicked it over, declaring that he had never had any respect for anything in life, and he still had no respect in death. The story goes that they buried him upside-down.

An old saying in Zen says to “stamp life and death on your forehead and never let it out of your mind.” This is not a mark of morbid obsession with death, but simply recognizes that there is no life without death – birth is the leading cause of death.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that life inevitably passes back into the great remix that is the universe – the wave returning to the ocean – we embrace the inevitability of “shuffling off this mortal coil” as a kind of relief. As Mark Twain was said to have asked, when in his old age reporters inquired as to whether he wasn’t afraid to die, why would he be afraid of returning to where he came from?

It is the stuff of science fiction to imagine a future in which medical science has treated the phenomenon of dying as an unnecessary aberration, a kind of illness, and come up with techniques such as cryogenic freezing of human remains, genetic mutation, and cultivating transplant organs and limbs to achieve what is, for all practical purposes, human immortality. The question becomes, would you really want to live forever?

Life takes a great deal of its meaning from the inevitability of death, which is often considered in opposition to life. But Master Dogen treats both birth death as another nondual, complementary dyad, from Genjokoan–Actualizing the Fundamental Point:

Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash you do not return to birth after death

This being so it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death

Accordingly birth is understood as non-birth

It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth

Accordingly death is understood as non-death   

Birth is an expression complete this moment

Death is an expression complete this moment

They are like winter and spring

You do not call winter the beginning of spring nor summer the end of spring

In this wonderful analogy, Master Dogen places birth and death on a continuum, each as an “expression complete this moment,” and yet undeniably entangled. We might ask: An expression of what? and the answer would seem to be “life itself.” So birth, which we celebrate, and death, which we mourn, are seen to be inflection points, rather equal in import, in the continuum of life.

When my older brother was dying in hospice, I spent about a week attending on him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. I picked up a pamphlet at the clinic where he was cared for, called “The Eleventh Hour.” It was written by a Christian woman, a clergy member or teacher of some sort, but she never once mentioned Jesus or God. One line I recall said something like, “Birth is the death of whatever precedes birth. Death is the birth of whatever follows death.” Very Zen.

I hope this brief foray into the most dispositive and determinative factors defining our life experience helps to allay any unreasoning fear you may have of these time-honored Three Marks. Along with Buddhism’s Three Poisons of greed, anger or hatred, and delusion or folly, they form the nexus of all that is wrong with the human universe in the personal sphere. When we move into the next outer layer, the social sphere, we confront them on a more global scale as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Today we might be coerced to add even more unintended consequences to the deluge, including increasing population pressure and worldwide immigration, as well as advances in technology that tend to frustrate, rather than facilitate, our presumably inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Speaking of which, in the first UnMind episode of the upcoming month, we will look over our shoulder once again to the dread prospect of Election Year Zen, which is gaining on us, assessing whether or not we can see any light of compassion or wisdom at the end of that maddeningly long tunnel. Please add a seatbelt to your zafu and strap in.

The haiku poem on the “grim reaper” is from a 2020 series called “Dharma Dreams from Great Cloud.” The text, titled “Swords into Plowshares,” will form the basis of July’s UnMind. If you have any remaining questions as to why I feel it important to examine the current political pageantry from the perspective of ancient Buddhist teachings, which may strike you as outdated and irrelevant, please email me about it.

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

Continuing with a consideration of the realities of day-to-day Zen practice in the context of Buddhism’s central teaching of dukkha – natural suffering writ large – the second of the “three marks,” or characteristics of existence from a human perspective, is usually named as “sickness” or “illness.”

Please note in passing that illness, from the perspective of Chinese medicine – which may be closer to its cultural connotations in ancient India – denotes a lack of centeredness, or balance. Something is out of kilter – the yinyang of it all – when we fall ill. Nowadays, of course, we have much more access to many means of tracing and tracking the origins of our maladies, to environmental and other sources.

Quoting from the Tricycle web site again, we find a less personal, less specific definition of the three:

...all phenomena...are marked by three characteristics...: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana.

Sickness is not called out specifically as one of the many causes of suffering or dissatisfaction, possibly for reasons of cultural context and medical acumen 2500 years ago. We will get around to that throwaway line exempting so-called “nirvana.”

I can personally testify to the dissatisfactory and suffering nature of sickness, from my experience contracting Covid-19 in 2022 and, more recently, a suddenly bloated GI tract blockage that had me hospitalized overnight, and bed-ridden for over a week.

The pandemic occasioned such wide medical suffering and social unrest that Shunei Oniuda, the president of Sotoshu Shumucho, Zen administrative headquarters in Japan, addressed it from the Buddhist perspective in a public message:

I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences for those who have lost their precious lives from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and offer a prayer that they may rest in peace. For those who have been affected by this illness, I pray that they will recover as soon as possible, and I would like to offer my deepest sympathy to their families and relatives who have also been affected by this illness. Also, my thoughts are with all those experiencing tremendous difficulties whose lives have been affected by the spread of this epidemic and the need to stay home.

Then Mr. Oniuda relates some interesting facts providing context for the present:

In the Kamakura Period of Japanese history when Dogen Zenji was teaching, there were times when cool summers caused by climate change often brought poor harvests. There were outbreaks of plague, and, during the Great Kanki Famine (1230-31), it is said that about a third of the population of Japan perished. In times such as these, Dogen Zenji emphasized that these were the very times to not neglect the Buddha Way.

Who is to know it the changes in climate at that time were as precipitous and global as those we are seeing today. As an island nation, Japan is likely more subject to extremes in weather because it is surrounded by ocean waters. A caveat – in our fraught divisive times, it may be necessary to point out that this recollection of similar disasters from the history of Zen – though on a much smaller-scale – is surely not intended to support either side of the ideological argument. Instead, it reinforces the premise that Zen is a practice fully prepared to meet, head-on, the vagaries of life, whether of natural, man-made, or a combination of those causes and conditions.

Note that he offers condolences to those who died first, rather than to the survivors; which is characteristic of Zen funerals. The sermon is actually directed to the deceased.

While emphasizing the need for disseminating accurate information, and recommending that all concerned follow the practical recommendations for exercising due diligence in preventing the spread of infection, President Oniuda refers back to the compassionate teachings of Zen’s founders, as they apply to this current, international crisis:

It is in such a time that the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, Dogen Zenji, and Keizan Zenji are necessary. Shakyamuni Buddha taught right view, right speech, and right practice in the face of the sufferings of sickness and death.

Right view, speech and practice – conduct exhibited in crises – do not follow the mob:

Even if people are agitated or anxious in the confusion caused by others who are fearful and buy up or hoard food and other goods, let us act calmly. Let us act in accordance with the spirit of Dogen Zenji’s teaching of the intention of first saving others before ourselves and in accordance with the Bodhisattva’s Four Embracing Actions. This is to naturally practice the way of benefitting others.

Compare to the panic mode triggered by the pandemic in most circles of the population. Then the President’s message brings it home, uniting both social and personal spheres:

Also, Keizan Zenji taught that we should have compassion and love for all things, that we should sympathize with others’ sufferings as if they are our own, and that with the mind of compassion we should be diligent in the practice of zazen. I encourage you to endeavor to practice zazen during this time that we must spend quietly at home.[1]

So the prescription for practice in Zen remains the same in good times or bad, whether we find ourselves in truly dire straits, or operating under relatively ordinary pressures of meeting the daily needs of ourselves and the community: Hie thee thither – back to the cushion. His message is directed not just to monastics but to householders as well. And by no means is zazen prescribed as an escape from the wolves howling at the gate, but the most direct and efficacious way to meet them where they are coming from.

Matsuoka-roshi would sometimes say, “If you get sick, you just get sick; if you die, you just die. But meanwhile, do what the doctor says.” He frequently made the point that his fellow countrymen and women were usually calm in the face of calamity, whether in the form of personal trauma of getting bad news in a clinical or hospital setting, or even a prognosis of eminent death. This equanimity he attributed to their having been raised in a culture that embraces aging, sickness and death as natural and foreordained, rather than in one that approaches them with fear and loathing. Even young children in Japan are, or used to be, exposed to the teachings of Buddhism, and the practice of zazen, as a regular part of their upbringing.

We like to think that Buddha’s experience under the Bodhi tree that night so long ago represented the absolute apogee of good health and wellness, in all its dimensions – physical, mental, emotional, and even social. Yet it included the robust embrace of the ineradicable marks of biological, sentient existence: impermanence manifested as aging; suffering manifested as illness, both physiological and psychological; and no-self arising as the specter of death, the fear of non-existence on the personal plane.

It seems that our modern obsession with youth and longevity lobbies against any wide acceptance of these natural marks, or transitions, of our existence as human beings. But all sentient beings are subject to their inevitability - no exceptions, theistic beliefs notwithstanding. Perhaps this may be seen as the true source of the neurotic aspects of this age of anxiety. We are confronted with these marks on a progressive basis, as we age and become increasingly infirm, or frail. It is best to engage them on the cushion, when we are young and strong, but better later than never.

In the next segment of UnMind, we will take up the meaning of death, in the context of Dharma as the compassionate teachings. Until then, do not hesitate to allow your view of aging, sickness and death, your personal take on mortality, to enter into your zazen. It cannot hurt, and cannot be avoided in the long run.

[1] Published on Soto Zen Net (www.sotozen-net.or.jp) on April 3rd, 2020

Translated by Soto Zen Buddhism International Center

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

Returning from the political fray to the realities of daily life on Earth 2 — as the current popular trope would have it — I would like to delve into one of the teachings of Buddhism and Zen that may contribute to its misperception as being overly pessimistic. The “three marks” of dukkha, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “suffering,” or “unsatisfactoriness.”

Usually, “dukkha” is related to specific aspects of life, specifically “aging, sickness and death,” as the three characteristics of all sentient existence. From the Tricycle web site we find:

The Buddha taught that all phenomena, including thoughts, emotions, and experiences, are marked by three characteristics, or “three marks of existence”: impermanence (anicca), suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha), and not-self (anatta). These three marks apply to all conditioned things—that is, everything except for nirvana. According to the Buddha, fully understanding and appreciating the three marks of existence is essential to realizing enlightenment. (It is a schema that is accepted in both Theravada and Mahayana schools, but more emphasized in the former.)

Here we find a much broader, less personal definition of the three than “aging, sickness and death,” but as human beings, we are naturally more concerned with how they apply to our wellbeing most immediately and intimately, than how they function as universal principles. It seem to me that much of the chaos and uncertainty that we are currently witnessing in the social sphere is animated by the unsuccessful resolution of our personal relationship to these three marks, along with the built-in resistance to embracing them fully, with any measure of equanimity.

As an octogenarian, I can personally testify to the inevitability of the first two, and their power taking precedence over all other dimensions of daily life, in due time. All you have to do is live long enough to find out for yourself. However, the Buddha apparently came to this conclusion, or confrontation, relatively early in life, in his mid-thirties, when we would expect him to be in the prime of life, though 2500 years ago, life expectancy was not what it is today.

Let us consider each of them one at a time, from a problem-definition and problem-solving  perspective. In passing, let me recall that the least emotionally-laden definition of dukkha is, simply, “change.” Nothing personal about it.

Buddhists may be said to believe these teachings, rather than “believing in” them, as some of the online commentary would have it. As with all of the “compassionate teachings,” one’s own first-person, experiential evidence will drive home the validity and veracity, as well as the long term priority, of these findings and conclusions of the Buddha. The only question becomes how – how do we comport ourselves in the context of these dominant aspects of our existence?

The existence of suffering itself Buddha said we are to fully understand. And from the above quote, that understanding must of necessity begin with recognizing and appreciating these three most immediate considerations of life, beginning with aging, or impermanence. It does not help much to place our own impermanence in the context of universal impermanence. Misery may love company, but not that much.

It might help to consider the question, When does aging begin? At the moment of birth? At the moment of conception? The current flap over in-vitro fertilization – as part of the larger ethical and ideological debate around all things related to birth control, or the larger category of reproductive health in general – illustrates that aging is actually well under way before conception. The eggs and sperm involved have limited viability, aging out of their own, micro-world shelf lives. 

Owing to a welcome assist from modern medicine, many of us can expect to live increasingly long lives, with notable exceptions in the form of further life-threatening causes and conditions attributed to the very success, and lack of due diligence, of the human species.

In Zen, we hear various expressions such as “every moment reincarnation,” from my teacher, for instance. We read Master Dogen’s framing of birth and death as “expression(s) complete this moment.” Buddha himself was said to have mentioned something to the effect that, owing to impermanence, there must be permanence. His monks were said to have been happy to hear this. One of the theories that I have read, attempting to explain the success of Buddhism spreading throughout history in its countries and cultures of origin, is that Buddha’s followers were so relentlessly happy.

So there is a kind of pervasive optimism in Zen and Buddhism, which is hard to explain in the context of impermanence and aging, let alone sickness and death. But just consider, in your own mind for a moment, the possibility that there were no aging. That we would all remain “forever young,” in the memorable phrase from the Bob Dylan tune. What would be the implications, both long- and short-term, of this reversal of biology?

What if we did not age? (We can leave the discussion of illness and dying to upcoming segments.) Buddha rejected such speculation as ultimately futile, if taken seriously, but here, we want to treat it as a mere “thought experiment,” for the sake of shedding light on the actual causes and conditions of our existence, no harm no foul.

In design circles this is a recognized process, called “synectics,” engaging in the seemingly irrelevant on the chance that it might turn out to be relevant. It is related to “Hegel’s Dialectic,” seeing the existing “thesis,” a present manifestation of reality as impermanent, enabling our recognition and even ability to predict the emergence of the “antithesis” on the event horizon. The model goes on to predict the merging of thesis and antithesis into the new thesis, which arises, abides, changes and ultimately decays and disappears with the next cycle. And so on, and on, forever.

Not coincidentally, this terminology of “merging” is used discerningly by Master Dogen in his envisioning the process of Zen realization in Shobogenzo Bendowa, if memory serves (emphasis mine):

In stillness, mind and object merge in realization

and go beyond enlightenment

If we consider aging in this startling, single-point reflection, how does that look? Buddha says, toward the end of his First Sermon:

My heart’s deliverance is unassailable

This is the last birth

Now there is no more becoming

If indeed it is possible to come to the end of “becoming,” is that tantamount to the end of aging? Is the essence of what Buddha and Dogen realized is that everything “else” is obviously aging and becoming something else? And must include the one observing the change. And that it has always been thus, from the very beginning. So what could go wrong?

Just consider: If the very conditions that we all naturally worry about – all too often to an excessive, obsessive degree – have always obtained in the universe, long before our birth in this lifetime, and likely to persist and pertain long after our death; how can there be anything fundamentally amiss? Not that it’s the best of all possible worlds, thank you Pangloss. But really, as a design-build professional, I can fantasize that I was in charge, and made the primordial decisions that determined that, if there is to be sentient existence, what will that look like? How do I make that work?

But most ordinary human beings do not have that kind of hubris. They palm the fundamental questions off to a divine entity, the wizard’s intent hidden behind the curtain of appearances. We simply accept the givens, try to understand and embrace them, and go from there. But there must have been a “before” – before the Big Bang, or the alternative Bounce. There must have been something – the “sound of silence,” and maybe nascent thought — preceding the “Word.” But then, all heaven and hell breaks loose, and here we are. In this moment.

None of this explains anything, of course. Whatever framework we have been given to comprehend the brute fact of existence was totally made up by others. You learned that. And it can be unlearned. Zazen seems mainly a process of unlearning what we think.

The very idea and ideal of longevity has only one value in this context, according to my feeble grasp of Zen’s teachings: A better chance to wake up!

In witnessing – or better, contemplating – aging, I am oft reminded of the unforgettable couplet from musical Zen master Dylan:

Ah but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

My sense of the relevance of aging and impermanence in the context of meditation and Dharma teachings is that, like the questionable linearity of the so-called “arrow of time” in theoretical quantum mechanics, taking the view that time is passing in a direction may be entirely arbitrary. What we may perceive — and more problematically, what we may interpret — as aging, may indeed be true, but only half the reality, as with all dualistic thinking. Perhaps we are growing younger at the same time, disencumbering ourselves with learned inhibitions, rules and regulations that no longer apply, as we mature to embrace emptiness.

My idle conjecture on aging represents yet another variation on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. This bears repetition: Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are nonetheless sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.

In the next UnMind segment, we will take up the more abrupt, if no more tangible than aging, mark of “sickness,” which for some reason is not called out as such in the early translation. Maybe the prevalence of illnesses of all kinds was so much a part of daily life that it did not emerge as a perceivable isolate in the social awareness of the time.

Meanwhile, as Buddha himself suggested, don’t take my word for any of this. Check it out for yourself, on the cushion, and off.

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

Once again, allow me to address the sentiment prevalent amongst many Zen groups that the political realm is, and should remain, outside the pale - when it comes to topics appropriate to the scope of Buddhism and Zen. The “tongue of the Buddha” represented by the short, curled ceremonial stick carried by Zen priests (J. nyoi or katsu) is said to be “long and wide,” encompassing all four spheres of influence and action in my semantic model of real world Zen practice: the personal; the social; the natural; and the universal. In the social sphere, the political climate surely played a huge role – in Buddha’s life and his decision to form the original order of Buddhist monastics – as well as in China, Japan, and other countries of origin.

In our present situation, the incoming flack from the campaign looks more and more like the damaging hail from the record-setting onslaught of tornadoes and hurricanes being visited upon an ever-wider swath of the United States each year, in an ever-lengthening storm season, leaving major and minor damage in its wake. Unintended karmic consequence on a geologic scale.

Looking into the rear-view mirror of history, we find that this — the issue of political leadership — has been a “known issue” throughout the development of Zen. From Taoism’s roots in China, in “The Way of Life, According to Lao Tzu” (Capricorn Books, 1962), translated by Witter Bynner:

17

A leader is best

When people barely know that he exists,

Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,

Worst when they despise him.

‘Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you’;

But of a good leader, who talks little,

When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,

They will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’

Compare to protestations of wannabe leaders competing in the current campaign.

Peering even further back into the fog of time, from “The Teaching of Buddha” we find the Buddha challenging philosophical and astrophysical speculation, as well as questioning the design intent of the optimum social order. In a shorter quote within a quote from last segment:

In the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal?... In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society?

He follows with the  admonition that:

If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.

In other words, whatever the political situation in which you may find yourself, get your personal priorities in order. Like everything else in life, the present political realm is impermanent, imperfect and insubstantial, the three marks of dukkha, the universal principle of change. Which change we find, more often than not, not to our liking.

Then, after relating the famous metaphor of the man pierced with a poison arrow, he reminds us that: 

When a fire of passion is endangering the world, the composition of the universe matters little; what is the ideal form for the human community is not so important to deal with.

Consider the various “fires of passion” now threatening our world on all fronts, and demanding a majority of our available bandwidth.

Later, putting a fine point on it, the sage focuses squarely on personal training, while not ignoring the social, natural, and universal matrix of problems in which a person, then or now, is firmly enmeshed:

The Buddha’s teaching contains what is important to know and what is unimportant.

Therefore, people should first discern what is the most important, what problem should be solved first and what is the most pressing issue for them. To do all this, they must first undertake to train their minds; that is, they must first seek mind-control.

We have received our marching orders. “Mind-control” in this context does not carry the modern connotation of “brain-washing,” but the “discipline” side of the Eightfold Path: right effort, mindfulness, and meditation. In discerning the “problem that should be solved first,” we can not simply ignore causality – including proximate causes of political influence upon our lives. Perhaps the best way to deal with the repugnant pettiness of partisan politics is to continue comparing to the prescripts of Buddhism and Zen.

The Repentance Verse, as translated by Shohaku Okumura-roshi in the Soto Zen Journal in February of 2004, on the Bodhisattva Precepts, is a good place to begin:

All the twisted karma ever created by me, since of old

Through beginningless greed, anger and ignorance

Born of my body, speech and thought

I now make complete repentance of it all

“Twisted” may have overwrought undertones of neurosis, unlike the translation we usually chant. We repent our “past and harmful” karma – the litany of unhelpful, self-centered actions, and unintended consequences thereof – that we now “fully avow.” In other words, we are ‘fessing up, admitting that “mistakes were made.” Note that all this, however, comes with the territory of being a human being subject to the “three poisons,” various forms of greed, hatred and delusion that, though “born of this body, mouth, and mind,” comprise the “three actions” that can get us into trouble.

How genuinely are our favorite candidates for public office manifesting this kind of self-awareness, accepting responsibility? How well are we, ourselves, doing in this regard?

Okumura-roshi highlights the next steps in the traditional Precepts ceremony:

The Three Refuges

We then take refuge in the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha is the one who awakened to reality. The Dharma is reality itself, the way things truly are. The Sangha are the people who aspire to study and living according to the teaching of the reality of all beings.

Taking refuge means, literally, returning to our true origins: our awakened nature; the reality in which we find ourselves; and like-minded folks struggling on the path. In today’s political climate, the very notion of a shared reality seems under assault.

The Threefold Pure [Precepts]

Next, we receive the threefold pure precepts: (1) the precept of embracing moral codes, (2) the precept of embracing good deeds, (3) the precept of embracing all living beings. These three points are the direction we walk on the Bodhisattva path.

Morality, as conventionally understood, also seems to be on the chopping block, or at least up for sale, in this election year cycle. Perhaps it was ever so, with one party’s “good deeds” being another’s social injustice. How do we embrace “all living beings,” when there are so many of them, competing for the same resources? And where, we might ask, have all the bodhisattvas gone?

The Ten Major Precepts

The ten major precepts are: (1) do not kill, (2) do not steal, (3) do not engage in improper sexual conduct, (4) do not lie, (5) do not deal in intoxicants, (6) do not criticize others, (7) do not praise self and slander others, (8) do not be stingy with the dharma or property, (9) do not give way to anger, (10) do not disparage the Three Treasures.

We also express these prohibitory precepts with their positive side – “affirm life,” “be giving,” “honor the body,” “manifest truth,” and “proceed clearly” respectively – for the first five above, given to new initiates, for example. The second five are given to those who enter the formal path, with respect to the social consequences of representing Zen to the public, and so bear more scrutiny in the context of our political social servants. How closely are candidates for office at every level adhering to these admonitions, setting aside the Three Treasures, of which they may have little or no awareness.

We could go on, with endless examples from the written record of Buddhist principles. For example, if we look at the Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva path, we find:

Beings are numberless; I vow to free them

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them

Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them

The Buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realize it

Compare to various positions, platforms and policies proposed by pols and pundits – on immigration; income disparity; education; conventional truth; and the place of religion – in our efforts toward a “more perfect union.” How we doin’ on those fronts?

Jeffrey Lyons, a political science professor at Boise State University, found that “roughly three-quarters of kids who have two parents of the same party will fall on the same end of the political spectrum as their parents. As kids are growing up, their parents have an enormous amount of power in shaping their views.” (From: “Are Politics Hereditary?” – The Atlantic Jun 1, 2018).

If true, this demographic factoid simplifies the picture enormously. We might conclude that the vast majority of voters are going to be biased in favor of their family and social history from childhood – nature and nurture – and not likely to be persuaded by rational or ideological argument, to switch allegiances. So much for independent thinking.

So, once again, we return full-circle to the cushion. Do your own research, draw your own conclusions from your findings, and make your own recommendations to yourself for improving your chances of acting compassionately and wisely in the marketplace of politics, as well as within the community of folks who would rather not have to deal with politics at all. The ability to do so is surely more dependent upon our personal approach to meditation, than upon our social skills. Only if we are independent of the influence of ideology and partisan political pressures can we act interdependently for the good of all.

We will revisit the political scene in July, when we celebrate Jukai, true independence. Until then, “Don’t give up!”

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

In looking forward and anticipating the future of Zen in America, once again it may behoove us to take a look in the rearview mirror. According to research reported by one of my future lineage successors – in a years-long series of talks he gave on the history of the transmission of Zen – things did not always go swimmingly when the big cheese finally kicked the proverbial bucket, to mix a metaphor or two. The resultant chaos was not quite as bad as that brought on by the “To the strongest!” gambit attributed to Alexander the Great, settling the question through violence rather than voting, an approach that has gained fresh meaning in recent political campaigns.

In fact, one might reasonably question the validity of any aging, declining leader naming their own successor in the first place, in the face of diminishing mental acuity and physical vigor. What part of “declining” do we not understand? How many political leaders have we witnessed who hang onto power way beyond what the dictates of the natural process of aging-out would suggest?

Matsuoka -roshi was born in November of 1912 and died in November of 1997. He was and is my “root” teacher, in the common parlance of Zen. It is his legacy and lineage that we celebrate during Founder’s Month each November, and which I have done all in my power to preserve, protect, and to propagate. Kongo-roshi, or Richard Langlois as I knew him in the 1960s, was O-Sensei’s immediate successor at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Chicago (ZBTC). He was born in 1935, but died unexpectedly in 1999, only two years after O-Sensei’s parinirvana. This unfortunate turn of events brings to mind the oft-misquoted but always pertinent couplet:

The best-laid schemes ‘of mice and men’ gang aft a-gley,

and lea’e us naught but grief and pain, for promised joy

Thank you, Robert Bobby Burns, from his poem “To a Mouse.” This is not to suggest that planning, as such, is totally useless, or generally ineffective, but any succession planning is clearly a special case. In Zen’s historical record, the cohort left to pick up the pieces and carry on were comprised of more than one individual, in many cases.

It appears there is a common pattern of two or more Zen successors stepping in and divvying up the role previously played by the retiring guiding teacher. They were often of very different personality types, bringing different sets of skills and attitudes to the table, not necessarily the same as their mentor’s. This is also common in the business world, when the CEO is replaced by less-experienced executives.

It took me a few decades to realize that I am not Matsuoka-roshi, and that my students are certainly not me. I could not simply continue doing my best imitation of Sensei, oblivious to the fact that my students were approaching Zen practice very differently from my own early days. I had to have flexibility of mind to innovate, not just to imitate.

Nor can I compare myself to Okumura-roshi – who officiated my formal transmission –with his historical roots in traditional Zen training in Japan. His successor Hoko Karnegis was recently chosen – how and why, I have no idea, and do not need to know. But I do know that she, who generously wrote the foreword to my second book, “The Razorblade of Zen,” is definitely not a Shohaku clone. The character of the community changes with any change in leadership. But its mission and reason for being need not.

I recognize that as founder and guiding teacher of ASZC and STO, I am a “transitional figure.” As are we all – in the ultimate, biological sense – given the inevitability of “aging, sickness and death.” Matsuoka-roshi was certainly a transitional figure, becoming a living example of the “man without a country.” He was no longer fully Japanese, nor was he completely American.

It should be noted that all truly transitional figures necessarily appear as somewhat ridiculous, in the eyes of their contemporaries. It becomes necessary to embrace certain contradictions, many that are counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. If you don’t quite get the point, just picture myself, or yourself, fully enrobed, walking into a Starbuck’s.

These transitional aspects of grafting a living tradition onto a new host culture can be considered a necessary and temporary period of adjustment. It is going to entail, and even require, independent thinking, as well as Interdependent action. Perhaps more than anything, it will require focus and perseverance, keeping the eye on the prize, or at least on the ball, in light of the many diversions and apparent obstructions in the path. The Ch’an poem Sandokai–Harmony of Sameness and Difference puts it succinctly:

Not understanding the Way before your eyes

            how do you know the path you walk?

Buddha himself is said to have recognized the many blind alleys and dead ends that can get in the way of the simple pursuit of the only truth that matters. In “The Teaching of Buddha,” chapter two, “The Way of Practical Attainment” we find the following:

1. in the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant.  Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.

Like his successors in India, as well as those in China, Japan, and the Far East, the clarity of focus comes through loud and clear, in the context of the seductions of the universal, natural and social spheres. The ancestors of Zen are all speaking with one voice, as far as to where we are to direct our personal attention is concerned. Perhaps this singular emphasis – on avoiding the pitfalls and temptations of following cultural memes and tropes as to what is truly important in life – is even more critical in modern times.

When we finally join a fully functioning Zen community, we naturally become possessive and protective of it. We worry about its stability, from both fiscal and psychological perspectives. If its leadership appears unstable, we hesitate to invest too much time and effort into participating in it, both from personal practice and social administrative perspectives. These are natural impulses, and rational as well. We have all witnessed too many betrayals of our trust and confidence by misguided leaders of supposed religious and educational institutions, in America and elsewhere. This is why harmony is the main watchword for the Zen community. And the main reason its members are encouraged to be circumspect in discussing the supposed faults of others.

But I want to impress upon you a deeper confidence in Zen. Not to worry — Zen will survive. It was here before you were, and it will be here after we are all long gone. Zen has survived, and even thrived, for over two and a half millennia, and that is only the recorded history of it. It surely began long before Buddha’s life, and will survive as far into the future as the human species, which, admittedly, is looking a little iffy just now.

Zen will survive because it is not “Zen.” Zen is just a name, a label that we throw at something that has no name. This discovery of Buddha, even in our times, is primordial. It is nothing more than “waking up,” in the most universal, deepest and broadest sense of the word. It is awakening to reality. That simple fact may need our protection, from the vicissitudes of current cultural ignorance. But it comes with the territory of being a fully conscious human being. It will not go away with time, as long as humans survive.

This is why the definitive dimension of sangha is “harmony.” Fostering disharmony in the Zen community is a cardinal sin. As Master Elvis reminds us, “We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds.” The sangha itself is like a cloud – after my dharma name, “Great Cloud” – constantly evaporating and recondensing. If you do not think so, stick around for a while. We have had literally thousands of people come and go over the decades, and sometimes return after decades. That they come and go is no fault of our own, or of theirs. It is merely the manifestation of their life stories, the cloud endlessly evaporating and recondensing.

In Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks, “The Kyoksaku” and “Mokurai,” he shares his perspective on the future of Zen, including the meaning of a Zen temple. We are carrying forward his mission of propagating Zen in America, on the premise that he expressed, that Zen is relatively “dead” in Japan; and would find its rebirth in America:

A Zen temple is not a debating place — especially about Zen. Zen was never meant to be debated.  It was meant to come into your lives to quiet them and for you to live as a Buddha.  If you know Zen, your voice will be quiet and your words will be few. Great wisdom does not need many words to express itself. “Those who speak do not necessarily know.”

Master Dogen also mentioned of the tendency of individuals to want to express their understanding of Zen to all who will listen, including the local guiding teacher. It is a known issue in history, and one of many such attitudes that have persisted down to today. But if we see it for what it is – the natural desire of a person to have their own understanding of Zen recognized, and their efforts in support of the temple appreciated – this, too, can be accommodated in our ongoing program of propagation, as a teaching or learning moment.

Buddha himself was said to have been assailed by an earnest young seeker, who prevailed upon him to answer the “Ten Cosmic Questions” from what passed for the philosophy of the times: how it all began, how it will all end, et cetera. Which Buddha considered hopelessly speculative, somewhat specious, and not at all to the point of addressing the real problem at hand, that of dukkha. The young man insisted that unless Buddha answered, he, the young man, could not accept him as his teacher. Shakyamuni is said to have pointed out to this sincere but presumptive aspirant that he – Buddha, was under no obligation to be his – the young man’s, teacher. And he – the young man, was under no obligation to be his – Buddha’s, student.

We have adopted a similar motto for our practice centers, which was initiated by an early Rinzai pioneer to America, Sokeian-roshi: “Those who come here are welcome; those who leave are not pursued.” We have a similar middle-way approach to donations, first expressed by our initial practice leader of Southwind Sangha, our Wichita affiliate: “No donation required; no donation refused.”

All of the above represent variations on the theme of thinking independently and acting interdependently. Sitting in zazen with the Zen community, we are still sitting alone. Any time we sit alone in zazen, we are joining the larger community of Zen practitioners. Somewhere in the world – at any time, day or night – someone is sitting in Zen meditation. We need flexibility of mind to approach Zen practice in this nondual sense, outside of time and space.

In the first UnMind segment in June, we will return briefly to our exploration of “election year Zen,” with whatever challenges appear in the campaign in the interim. Until then... just keep sitting.

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little

We closed the last segment with a quote from Master Dogen from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, regarding monastic practice in 13th century Japan:

How do we practice the Way without being disturbed by the slandering remarks of others, and without reacting to the resentment of others, or speaking of the right or wrong of others? Only those who thoroughly devote even their bones and marrow to the practice can do it.

These instructions and admonitions for practicing the Zen Way and maintaining harmony in the Zen monastic community, from over 800 years ago, come across with great currency, as if Dogen may have been attending some of our past board meetings. It just goes to show that people have always been people, and that conflicts arising in day-to-day dealings with the propagation of communal Zen practice have not changed fundamentally over the centuries, and even millennia, since the inception of Buddhism.

I think it appropriate to raise some of these quintessentially Western attitudes that have come to my attention in the recent past, and especially during the pre- and post-COVID period we have all just come through.

Like most of Dogen’s teachings – which can sometimes come across as harsh shaming, or finger-wagging scolding – the old adage applies: “If you see yourself in this picture…” or “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Any and all criticism in Zen, whether implied or explicit, is intended to be reflected back upon ourselves, as in a Zen mirror, and not held up to denigrate others. This is in line with the Ten Grave Precepts, particularly those advising against discussing the faults of others, or praising oneself at the expense of others.

While we encourage independence of thinking in Zen, and further, claim that zazen is one of the only dependable ways of developing it to fruition, this does not imply that we then become the sole judge, and final arbiter, of all behaviors of others in the sangha. This is one of the many misconceptions, or delusions, that arise in community practice.

One of our longer-term members once declared, some decades ago, that, in his dealings with others, he saw himself as the kyosaku – the somewhat controversial “warning stick,” usually used to strike the shoulders to help you “wake up” during long retreats. He felt it was his role and, indeed, his responsibility, to administer the stick, metaphorically, to those he thought were out of line with the Zen Way. I reminded him, gently, that there is a reason why the stick has to be requested, in Soto Zen. We do not simply go around whacking people with it willy-nilly, without so much as a by-your-leave.

Dogen said somewhere that we should never regard ourselves as someone else’s “teacher.” If and when we put ourselves in the position of teaching others whatever we consider to be the necessary lessons in Zen, we should remember that in the design of communications, it is the message received – not the message sent – that counts. We may teach another person a lesson we think they need to learn, all right, but it is not likely to be the lesson we intended. Our actions will likely tell them more about us, than they do about them. Dogen admonished his young wards on this point, urging juniors, and seniors in particular, to avoid using harsh words and behavior in the unfounded belief that criticism, however warranted, will work to their benefit, or that of the target of their reproval, or of their fellow community members who may witness the confrontation.

In some general comments about one of the attitude adjustments that all students of the Buddhist way should adopt, Master Dogen stresses listening, over expressing your own limited understanding. Especially in the beginning of your practice and study of the buddha-dharma, which, remember, may require many decades to mature. His remarks seem as timely today as in the 13th century, and taken with the above quote, comprise as good a model of independent thinking and interdependent action that you may come across:

6 — 12

These days, many people who are learning the Way listen to a talk on the dharma, and above all want their teacher to know that they have a correct understanding and want to give good replies. This is why the words they listen to go in one ear and out the other. They still lack bodhi-mind and remain self-centered.

First of all, forget your ego and listen quietly to what others say, and later ponder it well. Then, if you find some faults or have some doubts, you may make criticism. When you have grasped the point, you should present your understanding to your teacher. Waiting to claim immediate understanding shows that you are not really listening to the dharma.

Note that the popular trope – “in one ear and out the other” – is apparently not of recent coinage. We have to be careful of a certain cultural arrogance, in assuming that our present situation is overly unique. “It was ever thus,” as we say. Or, in Zen terms: “Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we; we in the future shall be buddhas and ancestors,” taken from Dogen’s Vow. But to become buddhas and ancestors we have to learn tolisten, and that entails learning how to listen; which means learning how to hear.

You may protest that you already know how to hear! That is, you are hearing, and have been doing so all along. But training in design thinking, particularly in the Bauhaus tradition, says “not so fast.” You may think you are hearing, seeing, and feeling, but are you really? Drawing, photography, and the other visual arts are all considered ways of training the eye to truly see. The audial arts – music, singing, et cetera – are likewise ways of training the ear to hear. Kinetic body work – dance, theater, athletics and so on, train the body to feel, and to move in gravity with efficiency and elegance.

Similarly in Zen training we find expressions such as attributed to Dogen’s teacher in China, Tiantong Rujing, where he said something like, paraphrasing freely, “gouge out your eyes so that you cannot see and then you may be able to see for the first time...” cut out your tongue, plug up the ears, burn the body, etc. so that they may be replaced with the true body and senses of buddha-nature. This, obviously, on a much deeper level than the Bauhaus training is shooting for. But simply on a social level of discourse, the need to listen is greater than ever, what with all the voices vying for our attention.

With the recent burgeoning of interactive meetings on the internet – which incidentally, Master Dogen did not have to contend with, fortunately for him – we have witnessed a dramatic evolution of etiquette in public dialog. Standard admonitions include not interrupting the speaker; keeping your comments brief so that more attendees have an opportunity to participate; directing your comments to the moderator or guest panelist and avoiding cross-talk; and generally resisting the impulse to hijack the proceedings to pursue your own agenda.

This syndrome has long been a known issue in American Zen circles, where even in intimate, in-person settings, when called upon, certain members of the audience will suddenly turn to the audience to share their viewpoint, rather than deferring to the person hosting the dialog. This is at a minimum impolite, if not downright rude. But this is America, where all opinions are considered equal, especially by those who hold them. 

Dogen goes on to modify his admonition to privilege a discerning silence over blurting out our opinion at every opportunity; giving it some time to gain clarity; then engaging the dialog in a respectful way. Application to today’s social media transactions is too obvious to point out, but I could not resist. Later on, Dogen repeats this instruction, indicating that the issue had arisen again, in real facetime dialog:

6 — 14

Students of the Way, when you practice with a certain teacher and learn the dharma, you should listen thoroughly again and again until you completely understand. If you spend time without asking what should be asked, or without saying what should be said, it will certainly be your own loss. Teachers always await questions from their disciples and give their own comments. You should ask again and again to make sure even of things that you have already understood. Teachers also should ask their disciples whether they have really understood or not, and thoroughly convince them (of the truth of the dharma).

Taking Dogen’s point, and following along the lines of appropriate attitudes and behaviors in the context of Zen community — including its traditional respect for seniority and today’s smugly iconoclastic attack on anything that smacks of authority — the usual caveats regarding comparisons between our practice of Zen and that of the ancients, particularly the social or sangha dimension, include the disingenuous excuse that in the time of Dogen and before, male patriarchy and misogyny were prevalent in society, so the societal norms, mores and memes do not apply to us in modern America. To which our female members and others would likely react with a great rolling

of the eyes.

Furthermore, the thinking goes, the practitioners of that time were primarily monastic. Thus, the rules and regulations (J. shingi)  governing the behavior of nuns and monks were themselves not characteristic of the larger community in those days. That is, they were even less egalitarian than conventions prevalent in the cities and villages, among the leadership structures of the times, and so, therefore, how much more so today. A closer reading of history might expose the relatively mythological status of these notions, but we cannot be faulted too much for trying to back-plot our current views of what is right and wrong – including ethical behavior and social injustice – to a place in history where our perspective may have had little or no relevance whatsoever. We like to imagine that the arc of history is bending toward the modern concept of justice, as Master Martin Luther King suggests.

Admittedly, the language and culture of Buddha’s and Dogen’s times were somewhat determinative, if not dispositive, of the form and character of Zen practice of the time, both on personal and social levels. Particularly on the level of personal practice — by which term today, we primarily refer to zazen — the tangible differences might be somewhere in the 5% range of effectiveness on outcomes, including such technical developments as those of clothing and seating options. In other words, Zen “gear” has undergone its own cultural evolution.

But the age-old relevance of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path still holds. In the social sphere is where we will find the most salient differences that cause confusion, and to which we may point, if we are inclined to mount challenges to Zen orthodoxy.

In this regard — the social propagation of Zen — I want to share a few reminders about our root lineage. Matsuoka-roshi was definitely not in a class by himself. He belongs to a small, rarefied club of ancestors who not only took on the propagation of Zen in their time and cultural milieu, but also transported, imported, the face-to-face practice and transmission of Zen to a whole ‘nother country.

O-Sensei joins the likes of Bodhidharma, who sojourned to China, apparently on foot, from the Indian subcontinent around 500 CE. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Eisai Zenji and Master Dogen, who in the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively, traveled by sailing ship to China, bringing what they experienced there back to Japan. In the process Eisai revitalized Rinzai Zen, which had been predominant in Japan for centuries. Dogen Zenji introduced Soto Zen, emphasizing zazen over all other methods, around 1225.

Matsuoka-roshi brought Dogen Zen to this continent in 1940, though the much longer journey by steamship may have been relatively safer, than those of Eisai and Dogen in ancient times. The period between each of these seminal international importations of Zen averages just over 700 years.

I am gratified to be the recipient of the benefits of these great founders of our Zen past, as one of the current successors of Matsuoka-roshi. I am also somewhat concerned with the future of Zen, including the vitality of the branch of the tree that I have cultivated here in the Southeast Region of the USA. Thus this analysis. If you have any questions or comments on this subject, I would like to hear them.

Tune in to the next episode of UnMind as we explore the future of Zen in America a bit further, with an intent to understand how the hybrid nature of our online and in-person interface may effect face-to-face transmission, for good or for bad, or, more likely, both.

* * *

Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little