What is (Zen)Buddhism?

My friend Markus had this to say about a recent blog I wrote.

 

the way you tell it, buddhism doesn’t even sound like a faith. If it’s not about an afterlife and a way to deal with impotence and fear, what makes it a religion? I think you leave something out. I am skeptical.

 

Which is a really good question, a lot of people say the same thing so it is a good subject to address in more than just a short reply. Let me start by saying that when I write “Buddhism” it is usually Zen Buddhism I’m talking about, but Buddhism is a broad umbrella covering many different things.

First, you need to know a very stripped down version of Buddhist history; about 2600 years ago the guy we call the Buddha (which just means “awakened”) undertook a personal quest to find an end to suffering in his life. He tried all sorts of methods and eventually discovered a path the we call Buddhism. Please note that I did not call it a faith or a religion, while difficult to pin down to an easy description the closest thing to what Buddhism “is” might be to call it a path, a method of interacting with the universe and not a system of “isms”, (but more on that later.)

The Buddhas teachings resonated with lots of folks and eventually it began to spread beyond the part of Northern India where it originated, as it traveled to each new area the indigenous people would take their already existing religion and mesh it with Buddhism to make their own version of Buddhism. Some Indian Hindus simply added the Buddha to the existing pantheon of Vedic gods as one of Shiva’s many reincarnations.  In Nepal and Tibet there was already a strong local faith known as Bon and Buddhism was combined into it to form what we call Tibetan buddhism. As it moved along the Silk Road into China it was mixed with Chinese Daoism to form what was known as Chan Buddhism (the Chinese actually stripped off much of the ritual stuff the Tibetans had added) and eventually to Japan to form what we call Zen Buddhism. Zen buddhism was the result of Japanese Buddhists trying to get back to the original form of Buddhism as they understood it from the earliest writings. It sort of the protestant reformation of Buddhism. A “getting back to basics” if you will.

Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia is one of the most colorful and dramatic forms of Buddhism and so it is the one most westerners are familiar with. The Beastie Boys and actor Richard Gere are practicing Tibetan Buddhists as is, obviously, the Dalai Lama. This type of attention would lead someone with only a passing knowledge of Buddhism to believe that is what Buddhism is, actually though, Tibetan buddhism is a tiny sect and their beliefs, based on the native pre-Buddhist animist faith, are often confused with all forms of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhists believe in reincarnation, in magical beings and multiple deities, it is not that they are wrong, it’s simply that they are only one flavor of Buddhism among many different ones. An old Buddhist saying goes “there are 84,000 doors to the Dharma (teaching)” meaning what works for one person as Buddhism may not work for someone else.

In Japan the two main sects of Zen buddhism (Rinzai and Soto) both sought to strip away all the mumbo-jumbo that had been added to Buddhism over the centuries. Their effort was not to discredit other forms of Buddhism, it was to get back to what they saw as the essential meat at the heart of Buddhism that had been obscured by the cultural trappings it had acquired as it traveled from India to Japan. Some of those trappings include a belief in Reincarnation, spirits, the afterlife, the buddha as a divine being, and anyone’s ability to definitively say if there was or was not a god. The school I follow, Soto Zen, even did away with the concept of enlightenment as some special state that happens once you do Buddhism thoroughly enough. Everything, they said, was enlightenment, we are just to deluded in our normal lives to see it!

In Zen Buddhism you are not asked to believe anything, in fact the Buddhas last words were supposedly “be a lamp to yourselves” meaning “test the theories I’ve presented for yourselves, don’t take my word for it”. Since no one can claim to know for a fact about an afterlife, or the existence of God these questions are put aside in Zen Buddhism in favor of more practical matters. In one famous zen story a young monk asks to see the head Abbot of a monastery, a very experienced and wise man. The monk asks the abbot all sorts of questions like “what is mans true nature, is the buddha nature in everyone, is there life after death”. Instead of giving pat answers, the abbot asked a question of his own, “did you already eat breakfast?”, this confused the monk who said, “yes I did.” to which the abbot replied “then go wash your bowl!”

What the Abbot was saying is “all those questions are not answerable by man, but in the meantime your food bowl is still dirty! Go clean your fucking bowl and leave the unanswerable questions for later!” Zen buddhism deals with the questions of “impotence and fear” by directing your attention to where it ought to be, in this moment! It is about the very real problem of people not dealing with reality! they spend their lives worried about the coulds, shoulds, and what-ifs , yet all the while they are missing this actual moment as it is occurring. This habit of ours to dwell in a fictional past or an unknowable future is so ingrained in us that we seldom ever notice it. Spending time and energy on those sorts of questions is like wasting time worrying about whether the wizard of Oz wears black shoes or brown ones, it doesn’t fucking matter and no one knows for sure anyway! What does matter is how you live your life right now, are you kind to others or a prick, do you do what needs to be done or put off the hard things in life til they bite you in the ass, in short, are you living life causing more or less suffering to yourself and others? It turns out that our suffering comes about because we cause it! The good news is that because we cause it, we can also end it.

What the Buddha realized was that the less we were in touch with this actual reality as it occurred outside of our thoughts of how it ought to be, the more we suffered. He also realized that nobody else, not your family, not a priest, not the Buddha could show you the Truth. You had to do it yourself! This is one reason why Buddhists don’t try to “convert” people or sell you buddhism as an end to your problems, one simply comes to Buddhism when (and if) they are ready to look deeper than simple answers and easy to hear platitudes. What the Buddha could do, however, was show you one method to use that might help you to begin to strip away the bullshit and see things as they really are. He called it the eightfold path,” path” because it is something you travel upon your whole life instead of hearing someone else’s idea of the truth once and stopping there.

Zen Buddhism promises you nothing, asks you to believe nothing you can’t test for yourself, it is simply the teaching some folks have found to be helpful to live a life with less suffering for themselves and others. A faith, by definition, asks you to believe something you can not prove, Zen Buddhism does not do this. A religion promises sure answers to questions no human can honestly know, Zen doesn’t do this. Zen doesn’t even tell you what this unfettered view of the truth looks or feels like because each person must explore that for themselves (and words are not up to the task of something like that.)  Buddhism is called a religion or a faith because that’s what we are used to calling things that people use to guide their lives, but Zen Buddhism isn’t really either one of those things. Buddhist writer Brad Warner once said that Buddhism is closer to an Art than a religion and I think that is the best description I’ve heard yet.

Freedom from comfort

I am left-handed, having been thus since I can remember it’s not unusual for me to do things with my left hand dominant that most folks do right-handed. So when I began learning about Buddhism and sitting Zazen I read about the hand position one is supposed to take when in meditation. It looks like this

and is known as a Mudra (and , embarrassingly this particular one is called the “cosmic mudra”. . .). The position of the fingers is a good way of keeping your mind in the moment, if you start to get to spacey and distracted your thumbs tend to drift apart and if you are too intense and focused you tend to squish our thumbs together. The pose is not arbitrary and I have found that it’s a good, unobtrusive way of keeping your arms in a comfortable position for some time while still being aware of where your mind is.  Anyway,  I had read about this and done it a few times and without thinking about it much. A couple of years into my sitting I was with a group of folks who were sitting together and one of them pointed out that my mudra was sort of, wrong. I was cupping my right hand in my left instead of the other way around as was traditional. “So what” I thought “I’m a lefty and this feels more natural, it’s not a big thing so whatever.” And for a couple more years I went on that way.

Some years later I was attending some “zazen for beginners”  type class and we were all sitting nicely facing the wall. A monk was walking around silently behind us, adjusting a persons shoulders here, correcting a posture there when she got to me she gently reached down and rearranged my hands so that my right hand was cupping my left instead of my typical lefty pose. I hadn’t thought about the fact that I was doing it backwards for years, but I did notice that instead of thinking “It doesn’t matter” I thought “hmmmm I better start doing it right.” And since that day I have.

Now bear in mind that I sit by myself 99% of the time so I’m not worried about being corrected, and I don’t feel that there is something intrinsically better about the right hand under the left position, but I realized that there was a freedom to be had in following this tradition, in doing something I was slightly uncomfortable doing. I keep the correct mudra position for the same reason I sit on a cushion on the floor instead of a chair even though a chair is more comfortable, I do it for the same reason I sit in meditation when my brain would much rather be looking at the internet or playing a video game.

I believe that most of us have a rather mistaken idea of what it means to have “freedom” and I don’t mean in the patriotic sense of the word. We believe freedom means the ability to do anything we want, to live without any sort of rules and to be comfortable all the time , but if we really look at the matter it soon becomes clear that kind of “freedom” is really less free (and more painful) than the alternative.  Children who are raised with no boundaries, with no discipline and who are never told “no” or corrected often report feeling unsafe and unloved as children for in later life. Why? as strange as it may seem, setting boundaries and establishing the rules of a society gives a child a sense of order, and a sense of their being important enough to be taught how to function in that society. Take their structure away and you seem to be telling a kid “I don’t care what you do, I’m too busy for you.”

Also we all want freedom from any restriction but until we decide to accept certain ones our desires go nowhere. Dainin Katigiri once used the example of wanting to be a doctor to demonstrate. We want to be doctors, that is our desire, to be free to be a doctor, but to achieve this we have to go to school where they have a LOT of rules we have to follow. If you try to go to medical school by not following the schools rules then you don’t get to be a doctor. They kick you out! You might desire to be a graduate with a medical degree but you are only free to be a janitor til you follow the universities rules! By the same token  if you want to sit with a large group of meditators for a long time then you have to follow the rules or you will disturb the other practitioners. You might want to stand up and sing “Pokerface” but your freedom to do that will harm the freedom of everyone else to meditate without hearing your melodious voice. Often these sort of restrictions were put in place for very practical reasons, in a zendo everyone turns the same direction when getting on or off their cushion, this isn’t because some monk got on a power-trip, it is to keep everyone from smashing their legs into each other when they sit down!

In our modern, western world we have a lot of things designed to make us comfortable. Things like air conditioners, cushy chairs, soft clothing, all free us from discomfort. However it only takes a cursory glance around to see how quickly this leads to people feeling entitled to be comfortable all the time. Kids gasp if they are asked to walk 2 blocks to school, people get into a $50,000 luxury car and feel adgitated when the seat heater takes 5 minutes to warm their ass, when my wife, Cara, used to work at a coffee shop I watched open mouthed when people would send drinks back because they ordered their latte to be at 140 degrees and “this one is clearly 145 degrees.” Sometimes I’m amazed that people get tattoos at all, a very small minority of customers do say things like “ugh, can’t you give me a pill so I don’t have to feel this!?”

Our freedom to live in comfort has, ironically trapped us in a world where we are only comfortable at a specific temperature, hearing specific music, wearing specific clothing, surrounded by people who feed our inflated sense of self in a specific way. We are prisoners of our comfortable world, we are imprisoned within our “freedom”. Wouldn’t true freedom mean that we were comfortable in many variable conditions? Shouldn’t true freedom mean that we can function and be happy even when everything was not catered specifically to our particular preferences? If you could be settled and calm when it is too hot or cold, when your are hungry or anxious or tired, if you could remain steady when everyone else was losing their composure, then that would be true freedom. Putting my hands in the correct posture means I can sit zazen peacefully even when conditions are not ideal.

A lot of corporations have gotten rich simply because we can’t stand to be inconvenienced or uncomfortable for even a moment. I believe that 90% of the people on antidepressants are being done more harm than good simply because we are fed the myth that we must be “happy” all the time and that to feel sadness or discomfort is an illness. Why do we  want money, fame, power, or all three? Because we believe that it will bring us freedom to do whatever we want, the sad part of this delusion is that if you take a look at anyone with an over abundance of those things they seem far more imprisoned by it than the rest of us. . .

Eyes on the (wrong) prize

In the world we have three basic choices of how we will interact with the reality. Under these larger umbrellas is a myriad  of variation, but at the core we all decide, consciously or not, to face the world as it really is via one of these attitudes.

1. we can accept the world as it is and attempt to align ourselves and our personal mythology (beliefs) to this state of “as it is”.  (Buddhism, Taoism, etc)

2. we can negate the world, perceiving it as an illusion or a place of punishment, our beliefs can be aligned to reject it totally and to see the “as it is” as something to be transcended by rejecting all the trapping of this  totally (Jainism, Hinduism, etc)

3. we can believe that the world is imperfect or impure but can be somehow corrected through our behavior, prayer, or attitude. In this view the “as it is” is faulty and requires rehabilitation through our efforts (Judeo/Christian, Islam)

I think its pretty clear that most of us in the western world were brought up in  the third worldview. Even if our families and friends are agnostic or atheistic it still remains that in the west we have a strong cultural tradition of “correcting” the world outside of ourselves. This attitude manifests itself in many ways besides our religious attitudes, our country was settled under the notion that the natural state of the Americas was wild and in need of taming, our forests were “wild uncontrolled places”. The native people of the Americas and Europe were considered ‘savages’ who could only be acceptable once they were “civilized”(often we “civilized” them to death). We don’t even accept ourselves as we are, we must be skinnier, prettier, richer, stronger, or in some way superior to the way we naturally occur in the world.  The very basis of our attitude, a belief that is so deeply ingrained in us that we almost never question it at all, is that things as-they-occur are just not good enough! Even those of us who are religious seldom pray for the willingness to accept the world as is, instead we pray for the change we desire to occur in ways that will satisfy us.

Joseph Campbell once said “This worldview expresses the notion that through certain kinds of activity, a change can be brought about. Through prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life. You affirm the world on condition that it follows your notion of what the world should be. This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her – it is not marriage.” (italics mine)

We believe that our happiness, our salvation, our very ability to live is dependent on how successfully we change the world to suit ourselves. We view anyone not actively involved in driving themselves crazy with all this activity as “lazy”, “complacent”, or even “cynical”. The very idea of putting ourselves in accord with the world is downright radical (and in some cases heretical)to most western minds. We demand that reality agree to straighten itself up and conform to our ideal.

The results of this attitude are all around us, we destroy enormous tracts of forest and habitat, we use antibiotics so profligately that we have bred super bugs like MRSA, we demand ever more highways and our cities sprawl outward like cancers, we assign anyone not in agreement with our world view a traitor or heretic, we punish instead of rehabilitating, we demand others do what we say instead of what we do .We go to war to challenge attitudes in other lands, we kill others and we kill ourselves.

We try to “fix” anything we come into contact with.

The word “fix” has several definitions and in this case two distinct definitions apply to this attitude. On the one hand the word ‘fix’ means to correct or repair and this is how we believe the proper way to interact with reality is. The other definition of “fix” is to nail something into place, to make it permanent, to make it solid, and this, not coincidentally, is the other problem with our western worldview. We try to take the dynamic and ever-changing world and freeze it into a simple black and white problem with a convenient black or white solution. The problem is that reality is bigger than our worldview. The other problem with our solution is that reality doesn’t give a shit what we think of it either.

There is, outside of all our notions, beliefs, and filters; a reality that simply happens. Stars are born and stars burn out, deer are killed by wolves and meteors wipe the life off entire planets in an instant, people fall in love and people fall off cliffs and none of it is good or evil, it simply is, it is reality and our ideals against that reality are as worthless as spitting to put out a forest fire. Even when we do manage to make a change it never, ever ends up the way we envisioned it. The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. We try to do what we believe is “good” and the result is that we cause more harm, more suffering, more delusion!

The good news is that we are here and we are here in a form that allows us to make a choice with how we interact with the world. Animals can only act like animals and their path is more or less fixed by genetics and the environment. Rocks and rivers pretty much simply exist. We are the only sentient beings on Earth who can take in this glorious parade and decide to do something with it. According to some ancient Buddhist stories, even the gods are too caught up in being blissed out to see things as they really are, only us regular folk can do that!

When you sit Zazen you take a moment to simply sit with the universe as it is. And yes I mean that you literally sit with the entire universe, it might be the only time that most of us take to sit still and be quiet for long enough to let that happen. So what does happen? Well, for myself it turns out that eventually, slowly, the noise begins to quiet down and a lot of notions that I used to think were very much a part of this thing I call ‘me’ drop off. One of the things that falls away is the notion that the world isn’t “right” and that I need to correct it. I began to accept that there was a lot of things that simply occurred and didn’t require me to interact with them at all. Things like being super opinionated or argumentative went away as I became comfortable with the fact that other people simply are going to believe what they are going to believe and that it isn’t my job (or even my right) to try to “fix” them or their ideas. I also noticed that lots and lots of nice things began to happen to me, small things, but still an unusual amount of shit started to go right in my world once I quit trying to tweak everything and everyone around me to meet my standards. Lastly, I discovered that what I thought I wanted the world to be like wasn’t half as cool as the world that just happened once I put my small little notions of  the world away.

It turns out that what we humans think the world ought to be like is small and stupid and petty compared to its real state just as it is!!! I mean this literally, the world is trying to give us all that we need and more if we would just get the fuck out-of-the-way with our stupid notions and let it!

I have a good friend in Alcoholics Anonymous and she once told me that when she first started going to meetings she was asked to write down 5 things she wanted out of her life with sobriety. She did and  was told that if she stayed on the path of sobriety that not only would those things come true, but that in time she would look back and they would seem small and silly compared to what her sobriety would have given her. Sure enough, all her 5 “wishes” came true, but she told me that her life was unimaginably more rich and wonderful than the things she desired on that list, once she got out of her own way the universe (or god, or karma, or fate, whatever)  was able to show her that her desires were really too small for all the awesome gifts that the world was trying to give her.

So it is with us all, I believe.  We may not all be alcoholics, but we are all addicted to our conditioning. To our faulty view that we need to fix this world before we can be happy. The trick is that when we fix ourselves first, happiness comes on its own.

less than ideal

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
-Carl Jung

 

The problem with idealism is that it seems to us like such a good and useful thing. We believe that to  hold “high ideals” equals that somehow we are being a better person and that the only alternative to being idealistic is to be passive or even nihilistic. We all feel that we can clearly see what is “wrong” with the world (and it usually turns out that what we think is “wrong” is that other people aren’t doing what we think they ought to be doing) and that it would be a simple thing to correct the wrong . . . if only things worked the way we feel they ought to. The problem quickly becomes obvious when we discover that everyone else has their own idealism and that it, shockingly, almost never seems to match our own at all.

I have a good many friends who are wonderful people, generous and kind and whose beliefs match my own and yet they are often shocked to find out that I can not join them in strongly speaking out for this or that cause. I fear that some of them take this the same way they take anyone who does not share their fervor, they may assume that I am passive, lazy, or ignorant. One of the common traits of idealism is the belief that if “they” only knew what “we” know then they could not help but to be outraged! And outrage seems to be the main product of idealism. I try to tell them that I do believe I am helping by first being as good of a person as I can be, but because I’m not shouting or engaging in some extreme rhetoric it looks like I’m just not concerned enough.

The plain fact is that an ideal is simply  a construct, a conceptual exercise in trying to force the world into a configuration that we find acceptable. On its own an ideal is a grand thing, in fact as long as we hold ourselves to our ideals we tend to create and do wonderful things, unfortunately the moment we project that ideal outward it turns from a motivator and noble goal into a poison. We are seldom satisfied to uphold our ideals personally, we wish to see them applied everywhere by everyone and so immediately suffering is the result. The idealistic vegetarian is angry that everyone isn’t a vegetarian, the idealistic conservative is angry that everyone isn’t conservative and they share the common ground of feeling uncomfortable in their own world as long as other folks exist who do not share their ideal.

We have only the best intentions, we genuinely feel that our way will lead to everyone being happier, and we truly think that the “other side” would agree if only they knew what we know. The common denominator in the former sentence is that all those things are feelings. Thoughts. Constructs of our minds, products of our conditioning, the electrical and chemical stew of our brains and we tend to believe that every secretion of that 4 pound lump of tissue is Reality. It isn’t. It might be our personal reality (small ‘r’) but the fact is that there is a true reality outside of our concepts and limited world view that is wholly independent of all the junk we feel makes our thoughts so very real. Real reality doesn’t care about our ideals and it doesn’t have a “side” to take.

Consider this, every nation believes it is the good guy. Not one government that has ever existed has thought of itself as the “evil” one. Even those groups which have participated in rape, murder, slavery, mass deception, tyranny, and pillage beyond our ability to even accept still thought of themselves as the ‘good guys”. The Nazis believed that they were saving their people by the disgusting slaughter of entire races of people who had done nothing to harm them, the French Revolutionaries thought they were protecting liberty and equality by executing tens of thousands who, they feared, didn’t agree with the new “freedom” of France. The confederacy asserted that it was protecting its heritage and way of life by keeping other human beings as slaves, while the Spanish missionaries thought they were saving the souls of poor unfortunate South Americans by torturing and murdering them by the hundreds. None of these people believed they were on the wrong side of history. They all had, in their own awful way, “high ideals”.

This then is the problem, as long as we can not see the reality, the truth, outside of our concepts, outside of our upbringing and conditioning, as long as we are all too fallibly human, then our ideals when applied to other people will end in some form of suffering. It feels good to be sure of our thoughts, its intoxicating to be sooooo right while “those people” are so clearly deluded and stupid. We define ourselves, we call ourselves a “tea-party-er” or an “anarchist” or a “Baptist” or a “buddhist” and then we take on all the acting that such a role entails. Eventually people get hurt when our role demands it, sometimes they get killed.

So what do we do? Am i suggesting that we sit back and just let bad things happen? Do we disavow all beliefs and ideals? Should we cynically ignore the outside world? To think so is simply a swing to the other extreme. There is not one choice or the other, this kind of dualistic thinking (your either for us or against us!) is just another false ideal. The solution, as it so often is, seems to be in the middle. The mushy, boring middle ground. The Middle path of applying our ideals wholly, firmly, and with great passion to ourselves. It requires that we first and foremost take that long difficult look into our own hearts and minds and to try to get a taste of the truth without all the filters we are carrying. It means that we examine our own beliefs all the way to the core. So, If I am a vegetarian because I believe that animals should be protected and treated kindly then am I also treating and protecting all the human animals I meet the same way? Am I as kind to the bus driver or to the cop, or my annoying uncle as I would like everyone to be to a cow or sheep or pet? If not then I am not living up to my ideal as a vegetarian for animal rights.

And on the other hand if I am a conservative christian am I living to the ideal of Jesus? Do I believe that all gods creatures deserve love and peace even those who are gay or choose to have an abortion? If I am a true conservative Christian then shouldn’t I apply that same restraint  I would like to see in others to myself? If I have hate for those who are different from me then I’m not really living up to my ideal as a conservative christian.

It is much harder to really and truly apply our ideals to ourselves, it is terribly, dangerously, easy to see how everyone else “ought” to be acting and yet we can seldom ever actually do it ourselves. The funny thing is that when we really and truly take that honest look at the world as it is, when we apply the best wishes we have for others to ourselves first, a strange thing happens. All those big problems, all those things outside that make us so uncomfortable in the world begin to take care of themselves. As if by magic the act of cleaning up our own messy backyards leads to everyone else doing the same. The final irony of an ideal is that we can’t force anyone to accept ours, and yet when we truly embody a noble ideal then  people are attracted to it without us having to hit them over the head with it.

It’s not as fun as reinforcing our sense of self and separateness, but if we honestly want our ideal to become a reality is has to start with each of us questioning the very thing we believe in so strongly.

I found it hard, its hard to find*

In his wonderful book, “What makes you Not a Buddhist“, the author (Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse) points out that much of what we take as true Buddhism is really just the dressing that various cultures have added to Buddhism. In short, things like being a vegetarian, believing in reincarnation, being pacifist or living in a monastery are all actually not a part of Buddhism. As the author points out there are only 4 things that are integral to buddhism and these are the realization;

1. All compounded things are impermanent.
2. All emotions are pain.
3. All things have no inherent existence.
4. Nirvana is beyond concepts.

I have talked about the first three on this blog at various times but I’ve never really dealt with 4. (Nirvana is beyond Concepts) til now. It might be one of the toughest things to accept because we really have trouble conceiving of a thing which we can’t conceive!  For example, thoughts are almost invariable accompanied by some form of concept. if we think of a person we may visualize their face, or the way they sound when they speak, their smell or even how their skin or hair feels. But when we try to conceive of “nothing” there is almost always “something” in our heads we are conceiving of as “nothing”. Perhaps we envision an empty vessel, a barren desert, the vastness of space but none of these things are actually nothing, they are symbols of nothingness.

Nirvana is like this, whatever you wish to call the state (enlightenment, awakening, as-it-is-ness, seeing reality, etc.) the fact is that it can not be described because the very act of conceptualizing it means you have lost it. In the sect of Zen Buddhism I follow it gets even more diffuse because we believe that so-called enlightenment is really just this very moment! No clouds, no angelic fanfare, no blinding flash of inspiration, just this very moment. It is no wonder that lots of folks get a little taste of Zen Buddhism and decide it isn’t for them, after all it is one of the few systems of belief out there which tells you right up front that there is no reward at the end of this path (of course the path itself is the reward, but no one wants that when they believe they get a shiny prize doing some other form of philosophy). So why bother?

For one thing, there are results of a sort, but they aren’t sought after, can’t be quantified, and don’t really change the world into the way you think you want it to be. The fact is that by the time you start to feel different you realize that lots of the things you started off desiring out of Zen aren’t even all that appealing to you anymore. Its like going on a 100 mile bike ride to get some ice cream, and by the time you arrive you feel so healthy and energetic you dont want ice cream anymore! Besides, its far more subtle than that, after sitting zazen for a few years you find that life is simply a little calmer, that you tend to stop feeling put upon by the world and instead you feel very much a part of it. It isn’t dramatic, but it is very comfortable.

Is that a big enough reward? It is once you are in it, but from the outside it probably doesn’t seem as cool as the idea of being all “enlightened” and, like, peaceful and shit. Most people seem to believe that the state of Nirvana is being sort of high all the time but never having to come down. In fact it would be safe to say that most folks want Nirvana to be just about anything other than what is going on in their lives right at this moment. Too bad, cause this is Nirvana right here.

You can not conceive of it because our conceptions are what is fucking it up in the first place. When they line says “Nirvana is beyond concepts” it doesn’t just mean that its cooler or more amazing than concepts, it literally means that it is beyond Concepts, as in further-down-the-road! Once you get past concepts, when we  cease ignoring the real world for the one we make up in our minds it turns out that Nirvana is all around. It’s not something else that is keeping us apart from reality, its us.

I should admit right now that I’ve never been there, and I’ve been doing this Buddhism thing for some time now. Heck, I may never ever get to that point and I am absolutely sure that I will never get to anything matching my fantasies about what Nirvana is. What is amazing is that even though I feel like I’m 10,000 miles away from seeing it, I have found that even the first baby steps I have taken have substantially improved my own life and , I honestly believe, the lives of everyone else.The cool thing about Nirvana is that you don’t need to understand it, conceive of it, or feel it, you can just be it a little at a time.

*the only reference to the band Nirvana in this blog.

Wisely Selfish

My dad and I were talking about kids one time long ago and he jokingly said  “You know, if a 2-year-old could kill you for a cookie, they would.” He was right, of course, but in my head I thought “Yea but then wouldn’t that toddler die of starvation later since his cookie provider was dead?” We were both right but the sad part was that it took me another 20 years to understand that I had been acting like that same toddler for most of my life.

Being selfish is not only perfectly normal and natural, it is actually hardwired into your genetic code. When a mommy bird sacrifices herself by luring a cat away from the nest that maternal instinct isn’t just touching and brave, it’s also the result of the base drive to protect her genetic legacy. There is almost nothing more basic to our nature than the desire to protect and provide for ourselves above others. Many religions and philosophies see this as a fundamental problem, something that must be overcome by what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

Of course anyone with even a passing knowledge of history and reality can tell you that time and again these admonitions fail and someone acts out of self-interest, even if this ends up causing lots of harm or even death to others. So we feel guilty when we act out of selfishness, but we still do it.

You can’t halt selfishness anymore than you could end jealousy or hornyness, it is simply one of the facts of being a human being. Those creeds which demand that we deny a basic human feature fail over and over because what 30 million years of evolution has wrought cannot be undone by a lifetime of guilt trips and threats. In fact,  you don’t even really have to end selfishness to substantially improve the world. The wiser course is to take those natural traits and to use them as a cautious person uses fire, carefully employed for a positive benefit.

To act in a wisely selfish way means to consider all our actions and their effects in an enlightened way. To think even a few hours down the road often changes things drastically. To act with care does not mean that we have to be martyrs or saints, it just means not taking actions that will ultimately harm ourselves later. In a real way there can be no more selfish action than to try to live in as kind  a way as possible, for this generally rewards us far more than a few short-term, but ultimately harmful actions do.

A simple example;  to steal from the local store so much that it goes out of business results in not only the store owner suffering, his other patrons too, but ultimately even the thief has nothing left to gain once the store is gone. Everyone has lost, even the thief supposedly acting in his own best interest . This is selfishness in ignorance, it is gaining a little something now and losing much more later.

Take instead the example of having a rich but annoying Great uncle, to sit and listen to his boring stories is a small sacrifice until he passes away and you find that he left you a giant inheritance. In this case the uncle gets an audience, and you (and your family) gain financially. A small sacrifice in the short-term for a larger gain later. Selfishness in wisdom.

I am aware that these are really simplistic examples, but the fact is that many of the stupid decisions we make are for a short-term payoff at the risk of great harm later in situations just as simple as my examples. I do it all the time and when I finally realize what a little wisdom would have done to improve an impulsive selfish urge  I want to kick myself. The fact is that even if you only want to see the world through purely selfish eyes you would be foolish not to act out of compassion for others. It isn’t hard to see, you only have to stop and look at what is occurring daily in our lives. Conflict and pettiness always result in more harm and suffering, over and over we marvel at how silly dramas and slights turn into bad blood and even violence. I don’t think its an exaggeration to suppose that many lives have been ruined over a thoughtless comment or look.

I have lived both kinds  lives for some time, before I got my head out of my ass in my mid thirties I went through most my life thoughtlessly selfish and time and again my shitty actions ended up with my having shitty results. You can’t make a pie with mud and think its going to taste like apples, but that’s exactly what I did. I was always amazed that I could never catch a break when all I had to do was look and see how I had failed to give anyone else the same courtesy and it should have been painfully clear why my life was so unhappy.

I got lucky when I had a near nervous breakdown. Something broke free in me and I realized that something fundamental with my world was not working .  Something in my life was out of sync with the rest of the world. It took me many years of meditation and effort at correcting my poor behaviors and attitudes to get the tiny bit of progress I have (believe me, I’m still a prick, just less than before) But almost immediately I began to find that all those breaks I had been missing started to head my way. It didn’t take long til it almost felt like magic the way that things fell into place in my life, it wasn’t magic, it was simply that I was no longer trying to  succeed by fucking other people over. It also didn’t take long to realize that if I really wanted to be selfish then I would have to be so wisely, If I wanted the world to behave the way I wanted then I had to start by fixing my own actions. If I wanted to be respected and safe and loved then I was going to have to start giving that out as well, why did it take me so long to see it?

I think it is because wise selfishness is learned, stupid selfishness is inborn in the basic lizard part of our brains. Basic selfishness is what makes a rat take a small crumb because its 3 inches closer than the bigger crumb, once we start to open our eyes, though, we can fianlly see the larger rewards that come with a little more effort and self-discipline.

Not One, Not Two

It’s impossible to start delving into Zen Buddhism without some preconceived notions about “what it is” before having learned or experienced anything for ourselves. This is generally how the world works, you hear about a good restaurant and that gives you the motivation to go try it out. Unlike a restaurant , however, most of the ideas that I had about Zen buddhism were way off base and after doing it for some years now i can feel confident in saying that everything I thought about it was wrong.

Which is ok, because the nice thing about Zen Buddhism is that eventually you find that you weren’t listing to the wrong answers, it’s that you were asking the wrong questions altogether!

Years ago a well-meaning customer gave me book to read that was by a 13th century samurai, the customer knew of my interest in Japanese history and zen and thought it might enjoy this book. The author mainly went on and on about how great it was to cut the heads off of other samurai and about how a good samurai doesn’t think, he just takes orders. Not exactly my cup of tea, but there was one passage I liked a lot, in a section about what samurai ought to think about religion the author wrote, “The Samurai should not study Buddhism, for the Buddha way teaches him to see things two ways when a samurai should only see things one way.” I always loved that bit, and im sure that it is true. If you want to be good at taking orders, slicing off heads for imagined slights, and extorting rice from the peasants then I suppose Buddhism probably would have made that harder.

At the end of the day there is nothing you can have heard about Zen, nothing you could read or talk about Zen that will give you any idea of it until you actually do Zen (which means sitting Zazen). You can read all about Oranges but until you taste one you really have no idea about what an Orange really feels like on your tongue. We don’t like the idea of this very much. We are smart, we know about going to the moon and curing diseases, we know about making energy from atoms and making 10,000 parts into a working automobile so why can’t we just know about Zen from books and others reporting?

It helps to stop thinking of Zen as something your brain does. It’s not a skill learned by reading the right books or reciting the right words any more than you can win a bike race by watching the tour de france on tv and reading cycling magazines. It also helps to understand that most, if not all of the really fundamental turning points in my Zen practice happened when something clicked in my Intuition, not my intellect. All of the sudden a lot of those wacky Koan stories and seemingly contradictory sayings in the Zen literature began to make some kind of sense on a gut level if not on a mental one (though im still pretty baffled by a lot of it) some things just seemed to begin sounding true. Not even true really, more like recognized.

Do you know that feeling when you are waiting for a friend in a busy place? An airport, a lunchtime cafe, somewhere with a crowd of people coming on going and you feel that tiny bit of apprehension as you scan each person looking for your friend, when suddenly there they are! At that moment you know that it is your friend, you don’t need to look at another person, you don’t doubt your eyes or  ask for their ID to confirm that it is your friend, you simply recognize this person you have known for years among all the unfamiliar faces going in and out. That is what it begins to feel like after a few years of Zazen.

You can’t take my word for it though, if you really want to know what Zen Buddhism is all about, try it and see what it tastes like.

Expectations=Disappointment

If you had to guess what do you think would be one of the most difficult aspects of being a Zen Buddhist?

Would it be sitting in meditation for long periods while your knees groaned and your mind ran around like a monkey? Or perhaps dealing with the realization that you can no longer hide behind your own bullshit? How about finding the motivation to continually rededicate yourself to a practice with the avowed goal of not having any goal at all?

Those are all challenges to be sure, but for me what has been harder than all of those things is the challenge of dealing with other people and their bizarre notions of what Buddhism is and does for you. Any time I lose my temper or become frustrated there seems to be someone to pop up and say “Huh, guess you’re not so zen after all!” or the person who acts aghast when I order a meal with meat on it “I thought you had to be vegetarian to be a buddhist!?”

Which is annoying a bit, but with the lack of information available to the general public and Zens difficulty to be described in a soundbite I understand these misconceptions. What seems extremely difficult to deal with, however, is the same sort of misinterpretation from other zen Buddhists! People who could and should know better , many with decades of practice under their belts and yet still labor under the most ridiculous notions and preconceived ideas, particularly about how others should act.

For example, the average non-zen person has a stereotype of a Buddhist as a peaceful, hippie type walking around and gently leading ants out of his way, never getting angry,  or ever having sexual or silly thoughts, and always deferring to others so as not to cause conflict.The sad part is that a shit-ton of Buddhists believe this garbage as well! Well its a load of shit and a real shame that so many folks get caught up in the idea of “acting buddhist” that they don’t bother to actually BE buddhist.

The problem is that we have all come to Zen with our own baggage and notions, our upbringing and cultural bias, in short we come pre-programmed with conditioning. We, all of us, have been indoctrinated with a set of filters by which we view the world and one of the first things we learn in Buddhism is that almost every single one fo these filters is not “true”. The very idea that we can take our minds and wrap them around reality is the very thing that we strive to undo in Zen, our way is to try to see and act in accord with reality as it really is, not how we think it is, want it to be, or fear it might be. We are so used to putting all the screens of social conditioning in front of reality though that’s its very difficult, even scary to try to live without them.

So you end up with so-called Zen Buddhists who feel that they have to act calm and peaceful and  “good” even when it’s actually inappropriate to do so.  These folks must live in perpetual fear of snapping in public where all their other fake acting friends will see and shake their heads “ah, he’s not very zen is he”.

The fact is that all the trapping of “being zen” originally occurred naturally as a result of the practice. You feel more peaceful because you aren’t filling you head with ridiculous notions (like “I have to act peaceful”) you may become a vegetarian because you become aware of the chain of events and suffering that eating meat entails, not because it’s the “Zen” thing to do this week. Being a Zen Buddhist means learning to act appropriately to a given situation as they arise, not with some pre-programmed ‘nice guy” routine, but as reality genuinely warrants. Sometimes being a Zen buddhist means you have to call someone a thief if they are being a thief, or punching someone in the nose to stop them from punching their girlfriend in the nose. if there is a nice way to do this then we try that way, but if it’s just not appropriate then we do what is appropriate.

We are not robots, no real Zen Buddhist is always Mr. Nice-guy (and he also isn’t Mr.Smug Dickhead on the other side of the coin) We swear, we have sex, we get frustrated and we deal with it all as naturally as we can with as few conditioned responses as we can. Ultimately its about being in synch with real reality not a prettied up pretend version of reality.Any Buddhist worth his time on the cushion has discovered that having expectations of others is one fo the best ways to remain in the shit-mud of delusion. Keep deciding how other people ought to act and you will, guaranteed, be disappointed time and time again.

Buddhism is not a faith, thank God!

In his expansive study of Mythology (which he wryly described as “other peoples religion”) author Joseph Campbell made an interesting observation. Namely that all past religions were in accord with the science of their day. The rules that governed the world of ancient peoples were not in conflict with the faith that these people practiced. To an ancient Egyptian the story of Horus in no way conflicted with the Egyptians ideas of how the Earth was formed, why certain events occurred throughout it and how the miraculous was made understandable. To an ancient Mayan the world really did require human sacrifice and the ritual games that were an integral part of their culture had cosmic significance. These people didn’t have to believe in their religion, they lived it! it was all around them, and it explained their world, their place in it, and their role in the society in which they existed. It would have been completely useless to try to make a Hellenic Greek believe the religion of the Zulus, it wouldn’t have agreed with the Greeks knowledge, his scientific understanding of his world.

Campbell went on to say that if your Myth, your religion, doesn’t agree with the science of your world, then it just isn’t working for you. You can not reconcile the story of a 4000 year old culture with that of ours today, and to try does a terrible disservice to both. No matter how fervently you believe, some part of us knows that the world took longer than 6 days to build or that a woman could not really be formed by a rib taken from a man, we may want to believe, but believing is not the same as knowing. If you want to see what happens to a world full of people know one thing scientifically and are told to believe another thing on faith just take a look at the world of religious violence we have today. It is the schism that comes when ones own mind is at war with itself, it is turned outward, toward everyone who wont help us to fool ourselves that what we really know isn’t what we really know, but at heart the problem is that Belief cannot overtake Knowledge. Faith is another world for believing the unbelievable.

Zen Buddhism is uniquely able to address the concerns that Joseph Campbell explains, and Western Zen Buddhism even more so. For me the first experience of this was when I realized that I didn’t have to reject any of the science that explains my world today at all to be a Buddhist. How pleasantly shocked I was the first time I read of a zen teacher telling a student that all the weird ghost stories ans supernatural stuff in the old zen stories was “just stories to prove a point” and not to be taken as facts. There has never been a point in my years of practice where I had to push away the facts before my eyes in order to swallow a “belief”.  We live in a world where seeing is believing, if you feel that this is a sad state of affairs or a great one is no matter, that’s simply the way it is now. We are given the choice to embrace the real world as it is now or to try to shoehorn ancient non-factual myths onto our lives today. We can see what happens with the latter, it isn’t pretty and it isn’t necessary.

At the same time there is in the Buddhist community a popular idea that as Buddhism has traveled “west”, that is to traditionally non-Buddhist countries, that it is in danger of losing its essential nature. In most of the Buddhist “press” there is repeated the idea that we western practitioners in dispensing with the rituals and accessories of traditional forms of Buddhism that we are turning it into a “self-help” exercise. Obviously though, there is the problem of “mistaking the cup for the tea in it”, that is, of falling in love with the chanting, incense, robes, and ritual and forgetting the essential core of real Buddhism. Most of the comments about western Buddhists failings are said and published by people with a vested (if subconscious) interest in preserving the older form of Buddhism, if you own a magazine that is full of ads for companies that sell statues and expensive retreats and some punk western Zen guy comes along and says “you don’t need any of that stuff” then as a seller or supporter of “that stuff” you get a little nervous. Understandable.  Fortunately Buddhism is a big (and rather tolerant) umbrella, there are, they say, 84,000 doors into the Dharma. Put another way, in Buddhism there is no one true way, only the way that is true for one (you).

In this sense western Buddhism should become a “self-help” exercise. Frankly that type of thing makes a lot more sense to the western world than reincarnated Lamas and transcendental floating do. The wonderful thing is that the essential character, the method that brings one into accord with the world carried on even as Buddhism traveled from one culture to the next.It is no mere coincidence that as Buddhism traveled away from India toward Japan that more and more it began to be pared down of its ritual elements til it was a solid core of stripped bare of all distraction. It was making that journey in time as well as distance and each culture was in the process itself of divesting the primitive science of their day for what they had newly come to realize. Today zen Buddhism is able to give me the spiritual contact with the world without asking me to ignore the facts in front of me. The fact that it has been able to do so throughout history (a history with remarkably less war and death than any other ‘religion’) while constantly being able to agree with the “science of our day” for over 3 millennia should give those concerned with whether western Buddhist are “doing it wrong” reason to relax and enjoy ever-changing and yet always essential nature of Buddhism.

So.

The old zen master Hakuin lived near a family with a teenage daughter. The daughter had a boyfriend her own age in the village and one day discovered that she had become pregnant by her young lover. Such a thing was scandalous to her family and would have ruined the boy’s family reputation as well (not to mention the fact her parents would forbid the boy to ever see her again) In her fear she told her mother and father that old Hakuin had been the one to get her pregnant.

The parents went to confront the zen master, yelling and angry they berated the old monk. “You filthy old pervert, you got our daughter pregnant!”

Hakuin did not respond with his own anger or try to cause the girl further grief, instead he only said “Is that so?”.

In time the baby was born and the parents again visited the monks hut, “Here, this is your fault, you raise this brat!” they scolded as they handed him the infant.He took the child as tenderly as a grandmother and said only “is that so?” to the angry parents of the young girl.

Haukin raised the child for a full year, the village had all heard the tale and looked with disgust on the old man. Occasionally someone would shake their finger at him or spit after he passed, the old mans response was only ever  “is that so?”. His reputation was ruined and he barely survived on the few who still donated to him, he begged enough milk to keep the baby healthy though.

Finally the girls conscience could bear her lies no more and she confessed to her parents. They were terribly sorry at their treatment of the old man and went right away to the old zen master. After being told of the girls confession and the dozens of bows and apologies they asked for the child back to give to its mother and her boyfriend to raise. Even after a year as the babes parent, Hakuin handed the child over without hesitation saying only “Is that so?”