First seven day retreat at Green Gulch monastery

Seven days in a monastery, with seven periods of meditation (zazen) per day and three hours of classes per day and working in the kitchen and washing dishes and getting up at 4:20 am – understandably I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t be able to do this.  Even a young person, even a relatively healthy person would have difficulties.  But, I was able to follow the schedule, and I loved it! 

Sometimes I was so tired that I literally could not walk a straight line; I would not have been able to pass a test for a DUI. There were times in meditation that I felt as if hot lava was flowing down my neck and shoulders and back.  There were times that I felt as if little bugs were crawling all over my face, but I managed to sit without moving.  Why would I voluntarily do this to myself?  But there were times that I felt a kind of peace and calm, and rather than going forward to the practice, it came forward to me.  Make sense?

I especially loved the classes by Rev. Okumura on Dogen’s fascicle Only a Buddha and a Buddha.  He mentioned “dropping away of body and mind,” an important experience for Dogen.  I asked him, “I would like to know more about ‘dropping away of body and mind.’  I know I am entering the realm of trying to attain something (a kind of no-no in Zen), but I find it hard to believe that in my zazen there is dropping away of body and mind.”  I was surprised by Rev. Okumura’s answer.  In summary: don’t ask.  We are always trying to understand meditation or aim for something in meditation, but this is not possible.  This is all just conceptual.  Just sit.

I did, however, experience a kind of dropping away of my mind.  One morning I looked at the clock and it was 4:20.  I got up and got dressed and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth before everyone else.  I wondered why it was so quiet in the guest house.  I looked at my clock again:  1:30 am.  I was so embarrassed that I went back to bed fully clothed.

Once in the kitchen, I was supposed to crack 70 eggs.  I cracked 17 and then added on a piece of paper the 30 eggs in the flat of eggs in the carton, and that equaled 47.  Then I figured that 70 minus 47 equals 23, so I cracked 23 more eggs.  The problem is, I forgot to add the 30.  So, in all I cracked only 40 eggs.  Since they were to be used for frittata, there would have been a lot of hungry people, if I had not remembered in zazen, “Oh my God, I didn’t actually crack the 30 eggs, I just wrote that number on a piece of paper.”  Immediately I rushed to the kitchen to tell the cook.  He just laughed.  I was glad that zazen was good for something.

In a monastic setting, if you are alone, you know you must be in the wrong place.  Several times I wondered, “Where is everybody?”  And then I knew I was supposed to be washing dishes or attending a work meeting.  Kind of humbling.

It is impossible to explain why this seven days was so wonderful.  Certainly the classes were great, and the beauty and harmony of everyone moving in unison in the zendo was great.  But ultimately it makes no sense that I now want to do a two month monastic retreat.

Longing for Completion

I truly admire those people who remain single and alone and happy!  But it may be true that most of us seek a life partner, and that we feel most whole when we are in relationship.  When I was in my thirties and single, I desperately wanted a husband.   In fact, I felt lonely and depressed.  Everyone seemed matched up but me.

I met Brad when I was thirty-nine, and we have been harmoniously and happily married for twenty-five years.  Our marriage is amazingly effortless – what a gift!  But I am realizing that there is a deep longing, a kind of deep grief, even in the most perfect marriage. 

Brad longs for God, and I long for…well, I am not sure what I long for.  

I have been with yoga gurus and Zen teachers.  Whenever I have developed that deep bond of love and devotion with a teacher, I become overwhelmed with a sense of love and grief and longing.  I used to ask myself of Baba Muktananda, “What do you want? Do you want to sit on his lap?” I know that no teacher can satisfy that longing.  The teacher can only evoke that longing.

Recently a senior student at Everyday Zen asked me, “Were you held by your parents?”  I knew I was at the edge of a precipice when I said, “No.”  She helped me see that that longing and grief is primal, is pre-erotic.  One might be tempted, perhaps, to see this as a matter of poor parenting or a dysfunctional family (which mine became).  But I think it is much more than that.

Brad says that this longing is a gift.  I think it is a deep longing for completion.  All the yogic and Buddhist teachings say you are already complete.  Maybe, but clearly I don’t feel that!  Now what?

One could experience completion or wholeness in each person you meet.  On every meeting. This is remarkable to contemplate!  And one can certainly sense completion while being in nature.

I am wondering, now, whether this seeking for completion is never-ending, that completion is never complete.  While always seeking, always going deeper could be a good thing, I wonder if the grief and pain of separation will ever go away?

Irrepressible love

The Buddha taught skillfulness.  With intention, attention, and effort, one can approach the goal of freedom.  So if you have an afflictive thought/emotion such as anger or desire, he taught that you can identify that afflictive thought.  You can see that the thought/emotion will harm yourself or others.  In the same way, you can see that putting into action an afflictive thought such as anger or desire, one will cause harm to oneself or another.

He taught that having realized this, one can choose renunciation of the thought and action.

Wouldn’t this be wonderful!  But the deepest afflictive emotions cannot be reasoned with.  They cannot be persuaded to go away.  Yes, one can effectively restrain oneself from acting on these thoughts, but they may never go away. Over time – maybe long periods of time – the thoughts can erode into less compelling psychic forces.  But in the meantime what can we do?

I have a friend who is in a profound state of anger and shock, because her husband of fourteen years left without a word or a warning.  I have a former husband, who is now a friend, who is dying of incurable lung disease.  My friend and former husband have just fallen in love.  This is wonderful!   Love is irrepressible, as it should be.  There are deep, psychic forces, like love, that are irrepressible despite the “prognosis.”  Love is not normally thought of as afflictive, but it often is a cause of pain.

Irrepressible.  So maybe trying to make these emotions go away, or trying to be skillful to effect renunciation, won’t work.  What is left is to accept them, to live with them.  If the emotion is love, then whole-heartedly accept that loving, even though you know it could be painful.  My friend and former husband know that pain lies ahead.  He will die within the year, and she will lose him.  But they are going into this with eyes wide open, and hearts wide open.

To accept that there is suffering and pain, and yet to love with our whole heart is the nature of being alive.

Buddhism talks about “letting go.”  But it may be that letting go is the letting go of resistance – of pushing away, of trying to isolate and protect oneself.  Letting go may be a kind of surrender to your life as it actually is.

Soto Zen Hierarchy (2)

It feels safer to have postive thoughts about one’s religious practice.  Devotion and faith and being positive are essential, but one cannot throw out one’s critical thinking. 

I read that scholars have shown that this direct, one-to-one, historical lineage, beginning with the Buddha, is religious fiction. It is a religious myth.  [Although I don't need scholars to tell me that; it seems obvious]

The myth of lineage – not limited at all to Soto Zen – legitimizes and verifies internal structure and hierarchy.  It is a kind of governance and control of who has the power within the organization.  This control does serve the important function of creating coherence and continuity of practice. 

In its most powerful and beneficial aspects, myth of lineage reveres all those who have preserved and brought to us the tradition and practice of Soto Zen.  It honors and remembers all the practitioners that have caused our practice to be what it is today.  Without them, there would be no cohesive practice.  It is the flow of life. 

It is a flow of awakening and buddha-nature, and that is why I felt joy to receive the women's lineage papers from Norman and Chris.

On the other hand, I think we have to see through this.  We need to remember that it is myth. I don’t  believe that we should reify lineage or worship it.  Particular placeholders in the lineage may have existed or not.  And there are the myriad of unknown male and female practitioners who have practiced and influenced our practice who appear on no lineage chart.

This morning I read these words of Dogen:

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others.  The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and is not merely arising now.

To me, this says it all.  Lineage is a beautiful and necessary metaphor, but it is empty of intrinsic reality.

Waking up to Soto Zen Hierarchy

It’s as if I woke up from a dream, or some self-imposed amnesia. It’s not that I didn’t know that Soto Zen is a hierarchy, and patriarchal until just recently. [My friend and teacher Norman Fischer has been instrumental in introducing the women's lineage papers.  A noteworthy achievement.]

Clearly the ordained and lay entrusted have the only real status.  It is not a status based on actually living the dharma – although many do - but on an ordination that may have happened years ago, or upon acting as shuso for two months.  When I first came to Zen, it was clear there was a kind of elite club: the priests. A kind of caste system. At Zen Center, I am told this enactment of hierarchy is very precise – down to where the zafu is placed for certain services.

What triggered my awakening to this after all these years of my being willing to ignore this every entrenched tradition within Soto Zen?

I was given a list of how people should line up to receive the new women’s lineage documents.  And there it was: a literal expression of rank.  Priests and lay entrusted first and everyone else. One priest – a dear friend – told me that the ordained hold responsibility for our practice.  Although this responsibility is taken seriously in most cases, there are many who through questionable ethical behavior, or simple lack of involvement with a sangha, do not hold the practice for me. 

Another dear friend told me that it is simply a tradition of honoring the elders and their longevity of practice.  I would agree that it is valuable to do so, but the problem is that there are many people who have practiced just as long, or longer.  And there are people who are not ordained and who have devoted themselves to service in our sangha for years and years.  These people will never receive this kind of honor and attendant privilege.

It’s as if I woke up, and I was shocked.  How could I have given so much time, have given so much of myself?  I am very egalitarian, and I do not believe there should be a special class of people.  Everyone has his or her own role, based on the causes and conditions of her life.  There are mothers; there are those doing socially engaged Buddhism; those sitting at the bedside of the dying.   

So how do I hold this with integrity?  By being so active in my Zen community am I being complicit with a value system that is not my own? Is this an actual moral question, or can I continue giving and receiving love?  And ignoring.

The Prodigal Son: Christian and Buddhist versions

I am reading the Lotus Sutra in preparation for Chris Fortin’s discussion of this text in the Everyday Zen dharma seminars.  I just finished the chapter, “Belief and Understanding,” which is really the parable of the prodigal son…called the “impoverished son” in this text. 

In the Buddhist version, like the Christian, the son leaves home for many years and falls into a destitute state – a state in which he finds himself despicable and the lowest of the low.  In the Buddhist version, the father is also wealthy, although in this version, the father is king-like, sitting on a throne of pearls.

According to the Buddhist story, the father knows he is going to die eventually and sends for his son, so that he will have someone to inherit his vast wealth.  But he knows his son would not believe he is the son of a wealthy king, so he asks the messengers to say, “This wealthy man would like you to work for him.”  And also knowing that the son would feel unworthy, says to the messengers, “You can tell him that he can shovel excrement.”

The son in the Buddhist parable does return, but he refuses to see the king, because he considers himself to be filthy.  So the king – wishing to approach his son - puts on dirty clothes, puts excrement on his body, and goes to his son saying, “Let us work together shoveling excrement.”  After many years, the man gains the trust and love of his son.  The father then reveals his identity, but he still knows that the son cannot accept that he is the son of a king, so he puts his son in charge of the treasury, dispursing  great sums of money.  Only after several years of doing this work, can the son really believe that he is the son of a king.

In the Christian version, the son wants to return home, but fears the wrath of his father.  When he is returning home, his father sees him far down the road.  The father runs down the road, throws his arms around him, and forgives him.  He is overjoyed to have him home at last.

So here is what is so interesting to me:  In the Christian version, the father – God – is the antecedent to forgiveness and wholeness.  In Buddhism, buddha-nature is the antecedent.  That is, according to Buddhism, we are already pure and great.   We are buddha-nature.   Only because of our fear and suffering and low sense of ourselves do we feel unworthy to step up to our greatness.  In the Christian version, especially the evangelical version (as explained to me to my once evangelical husband), we are sinners and will always be sinners, but it is through God’s love and his incarnation into a suffering Jesus, do we find redemption.

I would guess that the Buddhist parable was heard on the “silk road” in the time of Jesus.  The story was then changed and told both through a Jewish perspective and through Christ’s message.

The parables seem very different, but somehow the same.  In one story the greatness is outside of ourselves in the form of God.  In the other story, our own true nature is already great.  But in both stories, we find peace and love and belonging.

living freely as an unmoored boat

           Great is the matter of birth and death
           Life slips quickly by
           To waste time is a great shame
           Time waits for no one.

These are the classic words written on the han, the wooden board that is hit with a mallet, to call people to meditation in the Zen tradition.

These words are meant to wake us up to the great matter, to the investigation of what it means to be human.  What it means to live a life of value.

I do not need to hear these words!!  I am actually very aware that I am going to die!  I would say I am obsessed with the passage of time, and this obsession has produced a kind of dread.  This is not how I want to live my life, feeling in bondage to the passing of time.  I know that my deep commitment to the spiritual life in part comes from the knowledge of the passing of time, but the constant reminder of my mortality is more depressive than up-lifting.

Often one hears a dharma teacher quote this verse from Mary Oliver’s poem A Summer’s Day:

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Doing, doing, doing is the disease of our modern culture.  “To be is to do” is the mantra subconsciously repeated by all of us who have been taught to strive for achievement.  Personal fulfillment is defined in terms of accomplishments that will give legitimacy to our lives.

Ironically, Zen Buddhist teachings suggest that we should be happy with our lives as they are.  To enjoy this moment as it is.  And yet, I see the persons I love most within this tradition working and working and working.  Travelling and giving talks and publishing.  One might argue, “But this is how he enjoys the moment.” But I do wonder about the need and value of a simpler life.  Isn’t something being sacrificed in all this busy-ness?

What if I decide – right now – to do nothing?  I am retired, so this should be easy.   Being alive, being joyful, being thankful should be enough.  I do not feel that I actually need to repay the incomprehensible generosity of having been given a beautiful life.

I am now studying the Taoteching.  I especially like the commentary by Chuang-tzu on verse 34.

Those who are skilled toil, and those who are clever worry.  Meanwhile, those who do not possess such abilities seek nothing and yet eat their fill. They drift through life like unmoored boats.

What a wonderful image: living freely as an unmoored boat.