Ordination: The great offering of ancestors and teachers

This calling to be ordained – to give myself completely to the dharma – has been present for thirty-two years, or, maybe, it has always been so. Long ago in India, I stood outside a small room in the jungle, listening to the chanting of those taking the vows of sannyasa, monkhood in the yogic tradition. I cried, knowing that I could not take vows of celibacy. [And if I had, I never would be married to the kind and gentle seeker of the truth – Brad, my life companion and friend and husband.]

Due to the love and grace of Hoka Chris Fortin, I was given permission to sew an okesa, Buddha’s robe. She said, “I see your shining priest heart.” So began a year of the joyful, but arduous path of sewing an okesa, a rakusu, and a bowing mat. Each stitch taking refuge in the Buddha. The robe itself became the Buddha, the offering of myself to the dharma. It was literally a year of blood, sweat, and tears: doing a long row of stitching, only to discover that I had sewed the wrong side of a panel to the border, having to remove the stitches, and sew the row all over again.

When I contemplated being a priest, I had one fear: that I would think I had become someone special.  Humility is the essence of priesthood, along with seeing the Buddha in everyone, and a desire to serve all beings. I just didn’t – and don’t – want to take myself too seriously, while taking the vows themselves very seriously.

The day before the ordination, several friends helped me and Mary Ann shave our heads. I had an overwhelming sense of disorientation and a kind of confusion. I didn’t know who I was. Deep in my heart, I knew that I didn’t really know anything.  Such a gift: beginner’s mind – immeasurably deep and profound, as the ordination ceremony says. The fear that I would take myself too seriously lessened.

The night before the ordination, I had a remarkable dream. I was a passenger in a Ford Explorer. We were on a road, stopped at a river. The river looked deep and flowing. I knew we had to proceed through the river, but I was scared. I knew that I had to trust the driver. 

During the ordination ceremony, I was in a state of deep concentration and inward focus. It felt like a powerful form of zazen. I felt still and quiet. It was a backward step, an inner deep return to myself. During the entire ceremony, I was never aware of the large number of people attending. I saw and heard only what was right in front of me.

I saw Chris’s radiant smile as we bowed to each other, and she offered me my name, a sitting robe, a rakusu, a bowing mat, and finally the okesa. Every time I received a gift, our fingers intertwined as she released it to me. So tender and beautiful!

Apparently I kept sitting down on my robe, and every time I stood up, it would pull apart. Three times I stood up and turned to Arobin, who tucked it back in again. The third time, Jeff Bickner whispered to me, “Don’t sit on your robe.” To credit the robe itself, I remained quiet and still as my robe was put back on. [Norman had spoken to me a few years ago about wearing the robe with the quiet dignity of a buddha.]  I was embarrassed, though, and I am sure my face was flushed. But this is good! So much for taking myself too seriously! Hard to do, when your robe keeps falling off!

The language of the ordination ceremony is a great promise of freedom from karmic bonds. It is a promise of liberation and enlightenment. We vow to live a life of enlightenment. I think, “What if this is true? What if I am really freed from my karmic formations?” Now, a few days later, I think it is not that the seeds of karma are exterminated; it is that we can see them through a new lens. My relationship to them could change. May it be so!

More than this, I vow to act and speak from the ground of the precepts. I vow to have love for others and service to others, as my only desire.

Gratitude to the ancestors and lineage of teachers, handing the dharma to me this day.

This is really the essence of what I wish to say: thank you.

Can we wake up (or not)?

We Zen practitioners use the words “wake up” as if we actually understand what waking up is. One can even buy coffee cups and tee shirts with the words, “Wake Up!”

The historical Buddha said, “When one person [italics added] opens up reality and returns to the source, all space in the ten directions disappears.” Pre-Mahayana literature describes this as an act of awakening that happens to a practitioner after rigorous practice over many lifetimes. [I won’t discuss here the confusing paradox that there is no-self to wake up!]

With the Lotus Sutra, and its emphasis by Dogen, awakening is a liberative function of all time and space.  Thousands of bodhisattvas emerge from the earth, and the Buddha has an inconceivably long life span.  Quoting from Dan Leighton’s wonderful book, Visions of Awakening Space and Time, “But Dogen’s own version of this utterance [the words of the Buddha] expresses a deeper appreciation for the vitality of the spatial environment and for the actual spiritual potency and capacity of the world to manifest awakening.” [I like to visualize Kogen in the fields of Green Gulch Farm!]

Important to note, I think, is that Mr. Leighton does not say here the capacity for one person to wake up. And this gets to my question: can one person wake up?  According to the Soto Zen view, as I understand it, there is no final state of enlightenment, as in one moment you are deluded, and then you wake up and are enlightened. “Practice enlightenment,” as described by Dogen, is ongoing, continuous practice.  In fact, great teacher Norman Fischer said in a talk recently that for Dogen,

Awakening was a kind of metaphysical reality, not a mere psychological achievement. Awakening existed in its fullness, always, and everywhere. It was not something produced by a little person’s little activity. ~ from Introduction to the Precepts

Ouch! “A little person’s little activity.”  I do love this idea of a metaphysical reality. But I don’t want to limit myself, to say that I, personally, cannot wake up or experience waking up.  I don’t know what to call them exactly, but I have had glimpses of a kind of non-dual reality, and always in the context of nature. At risk of sounding like some hippie-dippie person, I recently had an experience of the unity of all things.  I was walking kinhin outdoors and came across a radiant, golden poppy. For a moment, I did feel that I was actually that flower…until my mind kicked in and obscured and negated the whole experience.

Again quoting Leighton, “According to Dogen, there is clear and beneficial mutuality in the inter-relationship between the practitioner and the environment.” So that seems to validate my experience.  But do I need Dogen – or any teacher – to validate real experiences of spaciousness and love and the unity with all things?  No, I hope not!

The best language might be to change the verb tenses.  Instead of the past tense of “she woke up,” you could use the present participle, “she is awaking.” Instead of “enlightenment,” use the sense of “enlightening.”

However it is talked about, I have faith in the mystery that is always available to all of us and to have faith in my own experience.

Buddha's sorrowful and joyful rainbow body

Last week-end I attended the Rohatsu retreat held by Chris Fortin and Bruce Fortin.

In some traditions, the pilgrimage is as important as the sacred site, or, in this case, the shared intention to sit together at the important time of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

For me, the trip to St Dorothy’s Rest, the retreat site outside Occidental, was upsetting and even scary.  I left at 2:15 pm, allowing almost three hours to drive up through San Francisco and up highway 101. On 19^th street, in San Francisco, I saw a somewhat demolished motorcycle and worried about the driver, who was no longer present on the street.  I hit snail traffic at San Rafael.  I get claustrophobic in this kind of traffic, so I decided to exit at Lucas Valley Road and drive up the coast.  It began to rain and get dark. 

On the climb up Lucas Valley road, I pulled over so that a car – the driver was in a big hurry – could pass me.  A few minutes up the road I could see that he had side-swiped a car, and both cars both were limping off of the road.  I had no map, and I have refused to get a smarty-pants phone, so I didn’t know the way to Occidental.  I periodically made wrong turns and had to call Brad for instructions.  I reached Occidental in the dark.  The redwoods were dark and rainy.  I got lost on the way up to St. Dorothy’s and found myself on a one lane road, high in the redwoods, with no side rails. I arrived in tears.

Usually people talk about the difficulties of meeting oneself “on the cushion.”  I have now reached the point in my practice where zazen is actually restful.  Often the “bliss and repose” that Dogen described. The retreat itself was very quiet – practicing alone and together.

I meet the longing and sadness and anxiety in my life off the cushion. When I listened to various people at the retreat share their own grief and physical pain, I thought that this suffering has to be the fabric of our lives, and there will never be some mystical, end-point enlightenment.

At the moment, I am sewing a black okesa.  I hold it in my hands and wonder, “What is this?”  It seems dark and beautiful and sacred, but somehow “other.”  At the retreat I had a vision of the actual Buddha’s robe: it is made of shimmering, translucent fibers of silver and gold and pinks and blues.  It is the robe made of the beautiful and sorrowful and ever-changing patterns of human existence.  It is my skin and the skin of others.  It is actually “wearing the Tathagatha’s teaching,” as we say in the Robe Chant.

On the way home, I decided again to drive down the coast, but this time it was a low light, golden winter day in California.  I stopped at a seafood restaurant at Tomales Bay that had once been a kind of shack, but had now become upscaled.  A woman at a table next to me said, “If I drink one more Napa Chardonnay, I’ll scream.” I felt sick at heart.  On the way home, there was bumper to bumper traffic approaching the Golden Bridge.  It seemed early in the day to be so slow.  People had slowed to watch a man, who was perched on the rail of the bridge, while police were “talking him down.”

I can’t actually ordain with the robe I had imagined.  But I think I will go to Britex to find this fabric and make my own, special robe: Buddha’s rainbow body: car accidents and ice cold rain and getting lost and peaceful zazen and suicides.  And love.

All is Lost - Robert Redford

What do you believe?  Is there a divine rescue, or is all lost?

Okay - if you plan on seeing this movie, don't read any further, unless you want to know the ending.

This movie's only actor is Robert Redford, who is sailing a small sailboat somewhere in the Indian Ocean.  This is how he loses everything:

• A steel cargo container, floating in the ocean, rams a whole in the side of his boat
• Redford manages to patch the hole.
• Finally he finds the radio (and we have been wondering why he has taken so long), but he can only get vague crackles
• There is  a huge storm, and the mast is broken.
• Water is a few inches deep in the boat, but overnight it is filling rapidly
• He inflates and boards the life raft
• The boat sinks. 
• His potable water is contaminated
• The one fish he could catch was snatched away by a shark.
• Two ships pass him by and dont see the flares.
• He is near death, but sees a boat
• He makes a fire, but soon the whole raft is aflame
• He falls into the water, falling peacefully deeper and deeper.
• All is indeed lost.
• But not really! A light shines down, he swims upward, and we see an arm pulling him up.

So it is clear to me that this is an allegory of a man approaching death and dying. [Redford at age 77 surely must be thinking of these matter.]

I liked the image of him peacefully passing away.  I was really angry at the ending!

Not that I wouldn't wish the imaginary best for the character he is playing, but it is too deus ex machina.

One could respond that this is Redford's vision of the ultimate: a benevolent arm pulling one up to the light.

I think a lot of people have this image or love this image.  My own opinion is that it ruins the truth of what we actually know: that when you die, you lose everything.

There is part of me, however, that wishes I could believe in the divine rescue.  I just don't.  Ever since I was a child I have thought that one should not believe something because it is a beautiful story.

Maybe buddhist practice is here, right now, losing everything.  

Death in the Family

For me, the end of a life is always announced with a phone call:

“Hi John.”

“Amelie was killed.”

Just a few words to open shock, disbelief, sobbing.  Amelie, my niece, was only 24 years old.  She was riding her bike South of Market at 7:07 am, riding to make an early morning meeting at her work, Voce Communications.  A big rig passed her on the left, and then cut to make a right turn.  Amelie crashed into the truck and was run over by its rear wheels. I saw a photo of her mangled, blue bike on the Internet.

I rushed down to my sister Jessie’s home in Redwood City. We embraced, sobbing. “My baby is gone.  My baby is gone,” she repeated.  What to say?  What to do but sit with this giant grief.

Until these moments, I had never really believed in “life after death.”  It’s not that I disbelieved it either.  I just didn’t know. But I said to my sister – and now believe – that she is very much present with us, between us.  I could actually feel her. Jessie said, “Yes, I am closer to Amelie than I have ever been.”

What I want to say is this: joy and grief and love exist at the same time.

Amelie’s brother, Charlie, aged 21, wandered in and out of the rooms, crying, confused. Jessie would disappear and then re-emerge, saying, “This can’t be true.  I don’t believe this.”

Over the next few days, Jessie’s friends arrived, a few at a time, bringing food: lasagna, cheese, cookies, fruit.  I think I would go to bed and not get up again, but Jessie needed this flood of love and support.  I told her of “Indra’s net,” the celestial net in which the nodes are stars, are beings, and that we are all interconnected.  And that the net would hold her and would not let her fall.

What I want to say is: Joy and grief and love exist at the same time.

There were decisions that one thought one would never have to make. Immediately. Cremation?  Open casket and then cremation?  Going to Amelie’s apartment to find clothes she could wear – to cover everything but her face. Scattering of ashes? Where?  Phone calls, phone calls, phone calls.

Brad, my husband, was the anchor to all the plans, gently suggesting to Jessie that her ex-husband, Amelie’s father, Denis, might want to see the body.  He was arriving from Strasbourg.  Amelie’s sister, Rose, needed to be located.  She was traveling somewhere in Spain with her cell off.  Every grieving and confused and overwhelmed family needs someone like Brad to guide them, love them, hold them.

It was decided that there would be a viewing of her body at the funeral home before cremation.  How odd when the body is dead.  The person is gone, but, still, the body is there.  So sad – her beautiful eyes, her perfect mouth with the bright red lipstick she always wore.  Her hands utterly cold and hard – with nail polish, carefully applied by someone we didn’t know.

I grieved for those who grieved.  Her young friends came up to the casket. Some stood at a distance, some kneeled, some sobbed.  I wondered if this was the first time they had seen a dead body, had realized that death is indeed possible, even for them.

I could hear, across the folding screen, laughter.  Jessie’s laughter!  Others laughing as they shared Amelie stories.  She was a wild and loving and crazy young woman. People would go back and forth: to spend a few moments with Amelie, and then to go to the adjoining room to drink wine and share stories.  Brad and I remained with her body.  I wanted to keep vigil in some way.  I wanted to stay with her.

Later, above her casket, in the subdued golden light, there was a slide show of her life.  People were laughing, because she was a very funny person.  She loved to make faces in front of a camera.  Amelie lay motionless below her life.

Her ashes were spread in the waters just beyond the Golden Gate bridge.  We threw flower petals to follow her ashes. The fog was such that we were in a gray, cold place to say good-bye, and then as we entered Sausalito, blue sky and then radiance of sun on water.

What I want to say is this: joy and grief and love exist at the same time in this very fragile and precarious life.

Phony Guru

I saw a documentary called Kumari, made by a second generation Hindu living in Los Angeles.   I think his name was Dave, or Jim, or something like that.  He was raised as an all-American boy, and his film documented his real life experiment of adopting the guise of an enlightened Hindu yogi.   At age 26 he went to India to study hatha yoga and observe the wandering yogis.  When he returned, he decided to grow his hair and wear the orange robes and beads of an Indian sannyasi.  He adopted the accent of a Hindu speaking English.

 

He then took two women friends who taught hatha yoga, and he set up a store front shop as an enlightened yogi in a Los Angeles suburb.  Slowly, more and more people, young and old, came to study with him.  He would sit cross-legged across from a disciple and listen deeply and empathetically to the disciple’s problems.  He and his yoga associates set up “intensives” where disciples would send “blue light” to each other. He even lead them in chanting his name, “Kumari jaya jaya.”

 

There were many testimonials by disciples of how Kumari had changed their lives, and how they saw their “inner light.”  At the end of the film Jim – or whatever his name – has an “unveiling” of his true identity.  About one half of his disciples left in shock, but the other half laughed and embraced him, saying it was a good joke.

 

Based on my life experiences with spiritual gurus and teachers, this film was really disturbing and creepy.

 

So,the documentary  is humiliating – that we could be so easily duped.  On the other hand, it shows that we essentially need each other.  In our daily, work-based lives, we do not communicate deeply, at the level we would call “spiritual.”  This documentary suggests that even if the teacher is a phony, the premise of two people meeting deeply is authentic.  The problem, of course, is that the “spiritual teacher” often ends up exploiting his followers – most especially, taking sexual advantage of the adoring female followers.

 

The more relationships I have with teachers, the more mysterious and confusing this has become.

 

 

 

Proust and Zazen

My husband, Brad, and I have been reading Proust’s The Search aloud for three years.  We drive to a beautiful spot and read about ten pages (which actually takes awhile).  Saturday, parked high above the Golden Gate Bridge, we have just finished volume three, The Guermantes Way. The main characters in this volume are the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, who are aristocrats in Parisian society of the late 1800’s.

 

Proust is known as one of the greatest Western novelists, and, indeed, he has great descriptive power.  He can write ten pages on the beauty of a Hawthorne bush.  But, he can also be really, really tedious, especially when he describes a Parisian salon or dinner party, as he does here, at the home of the Guermantes.  Near the end of volume there is a long dialogue – forty or so pages – between the Guemantes about their aristocratic and noble families.  An excerpt:

 

In the past we were Ducs d’Aumale, a duchy that has passed as regularly to the House of France as Joinville and Chevreuse have to the House of Albert.  For instance, my sister-in-law’s son bears the title of Prince d’Agriente…

 

These descriptions became so boring and oppressive that I wanted to skip them.  But Proust always has a “method to his madness.” Near the end of this long dialogue, an old friend, Swann, is ushered in by the footman.  The Guermantes are on the way to a dinner and ball. Their discussion about their aristocratic heritage continues as they are about to enter their carriage. When the Duchess blithely asks Swann if he will accompany them to Venice, Swann says he cannot go because he is terminally ill.  The duchesse dismisses this as impossible.  She is poised with one foot inside her carriage when Swann asserts that he is, in fact, going to die within three months.  She hesitates. 

 

Will she stop, turn to her friend, and speak earnestly of his illness, or continue to enter her carriage, denying any possibility of her friend’s death?  She enters her carriage.  She is completely caught in the habit energy of her life.  She can speak for hours on the most trivial of subjects, but she cannot pause for her friend.  She gets into her carriage, missing any opportunity for meeting the actual truth of her life – that she and everyone she loves will one day die.

 

And the genius of Proust is that this applies to us all.  I often feel the rushing of my mind and life energy.  I often feel as if I have an appointment, but this is absurd, since I am retired and rarely have appointments.  I am especially aware of this crazy energy when I sit zazen. It can be very difficult to be quiet, to step out of the river of my rushing habit energy. 

 

But sometimes I can sit straight, and my mind is still, and this feels like the most important thing I can do for myself and for those I love.