Suzuki-roshi, somewhat different interpretations, but it's all OK

I finally re-read Barbara's post on Suzuki-roshi & dragons, and added a comment, as you can see there.  To be honest, I'm not entirely satisfied that I captured what I wanted to say in the comment, which I'll get to in a bit, but I wanted to go somewhere else first.

Suzuki-roshi is/was another one of those guys about whom Stuart Lachs has written a "corrective" on saying, basically, a) he was really really human, despite what the posthumously written intro to his most widely known book would imply, and b) he therefore made what we'd refer to as "mistakes" if we were talking about any other Tom, Dick or Harry.  I won't bother to go find Lachs' piece on Suzuki-roshi, just because as a guy who's been involved with such cultural things for a while now, none of it is surprising - while the Japanese Zen school has sent outstanding teachers and exponents to the West, they've also at times sent exponents of their "B Team," which is kind of a common practice at certain international companies - they send the exponents of the A Team when they really want to expand, and they send exponents of the B Team when they want to move a potential (or actual) problem to the "Somebody Else's Problem Field," to use a term from Douglas Adams. But in this context, let me just say a lot of us can learn a lot from the B Team.

I remember getting that book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" long ago, and when I first picked it up, it was frankly incomprehensible to me, and later on it made a heck of a lot of sense, since I guess I was somewhere that needed the relative sanity expressed there.  Later on, when I started reading Dogen (yeah, I have read Dogen), I realized that some of Suzuki-roshi's extrapolations on bits in Dogen, quite frankly, weren't obvious in the plaintext meaning of Dogen.  But then again, it being Zen and all that, Suzuki's narrative is not all that different, ultimately, than my interpretation.

Back to Barbara's post.  Barbara's relating a story about a guy who was so enamored of dragons that he got to meet a real dragon, and was shot through with stark terror on the encounter. She notes that Dogen commented, "I beseech you, noble friends in learning through experience, do not become so accustomed to images that you are dismayed by the real dragon."  Her explanation that we shouldn't mistake outward forms and images for the "real thing"  is pretty good, and my comment is sort of OK, but I think I'm not going far enough in my comment.  To actually give up one's attachments - to realize that one has  the power to get all beings to transcend suffering is to realize that the "dragon" of our True Nature has unfathomably infinite power compared to the "worm" of our attachment driven little mind that I don't think you can cross that threshold without a bit of fear and trepidation.  It's scary to be able to give up everything, including the desire for enlightenment itself,  just as it is to consider that death means "giving it all up."  So, the idea of the serene Buddha, the images of the thousand armed Regarder of the World's Cries,  so calm and all that, isn't the being that actually has the power to give it all up.  The moon beats the finger pointing to it like a gong.  And it's easy to get dismayed that this bag of decaying flesh, home to more microbes than there are homo sapiens on the planet,  is actually an expression of that True Nature. 

And, it's why folks like Warner constantly rail against "Big Mind," but that's kind of a digression. 

At such a point, when one encounters this fear, there's actually something that can be done, which I'll get to later, but for now, Douglas Adams' advice is pretty good: Don't Panic.

Not Both. Including/excluding Dogen, Hakuin, Sutras, Emptiness, Zazen

Many people come to Buddhist practice for many reasons. Some who come to Buddhist practice stay with the religious background of their cultural heritage.   Some, such as myself, take up some official affiliation with Buddhism as a religion - in my case,  jukai or shòu jiè  (受戒).   To those of us who have received the precepts, Buddhist practice as a religious practice might be considered as pursuing the Great Matter a bit more deeply than those who aren't near a stream, let alone those who haven't entered It.

The immediate ancestral temple of my practice is Ryobo Zen An  (両忘禅庵 ), which means "Forget Both Zen Cottage."  "Forget Both" indicates a concept of the practice of non-duality in all one's affairs.  It is a good place for the mind to be when the mind is trying to be mindful. Hakuin, the reviver of Rinzai practice in Japan was a guy who sat a lot of zazen each day; often for 2 hours or more when not in sesshin, when of course there was substantially more zazen.  But Hakuin emphasizes in his writings that the practice is in fact to be done all the time. It needs to permeate every nook and cranny and interstice of one's existence, it needs to be dissolved into the marrow of the bones. "It's got be in the blood," as my EE 102  professor said about his AC circuits  and systems teachings.

So with all  of the foregoing said, I do think there is a bit of over-emphasis on meditation practices in some of conversations in the Buddhist blogosphere.   (I'm ignoring the pop-Buddhist celebrity Buddhist stuff today here as well, but obviously you can contextualize that in terms of what I'm writing in this post as well.)  I find it interesting that I have some agreement with one Sulak Sivarkasa, who until today, I was not aware that he was an "engaged Buddhist."

In 1953, I went to London to study. In our family background, which was middle-class and upper-class, being educated in Britain meant that you were educated properly, and that could help you get ahead. England was the place to be. While I was in England, I joined the Buddhist Society. Mr. Christmas Humphreys, founder of the Society, was a very great man.
But I did not agree with his approach. His view was that a Buddhist must concentrate on meditation, even when they are part of the society. He said that Christian men are wrong because they got involved in society and politics and lost their spirituality. To be Buddhist, he argued, you must concentrate on meditation. I felt that he was fundamentally wrong. Meditation is a good thing, but it does not mean only looking inwards. I realized that many Buddhists were from middle-class backgrounds. They didn't realize the suffering of the majority of our people. They didn't even question their own lifestyles. I think that is escapism, not Buddhism.

Of course, then he goes into social action, and if your place in the world is there, practice.  But that's not what this post is primarily discussing, but rather the practice in the whole shebang of your life. All of it.  So when Brad Warner says: 

One of the comments under the last piece [in Warner's blog] referred obliquely to Nishijima's "very personal and particular interpretation of Dogen." I have to assume he means Nishijima's ideas about the fourfold logical structure of Shobogenzo. This way of reading Dogen isn't simply a personal bias, but the result of decades of working with the text.

Nishijima has written a very detailed explanation of this way of reading Shobogenzo, which is available as a free download at:

Understanding Shobogenzo

I'm glad he pointed me in that direction, but I must still dissent a bit.  I actually do read Dogen kind of the way Nishijima does (though for some reason the results of Dogen's teachings seem even now somewhat less "active" than that bald devil Hakuin.)  But when Nishijima says the following, and remember,  Nishijima is writing linearly here, not in the way of Dogen:

Here I would offer some advice. In order to study Master Dogen’s Buddhism, I think that it is very important to rely on his teachings completely. We must be very exact in our study. If we only immerse ourselves half-way, accepting some of his teachings, and criticizing others, it will become impossible to gain a full understanding of the complete philosophical system which he expounds.

Dogen is useful, and a historically great teacher and yes, even philosopher, but there's no point as I see necessarily being an apologist for Dogen if being an apologist for your practice  is not skillful towards your practice.  There is no point in swimming every day if it is not useful for your practice.  While I personally think Hakuin has been a more profound and influential teacher in my life, and my teachers' lives, I cannot find it useful to be an apologist for everything Hakuin did. Nor, for that my matter, my teachers.  And I don't expect them to be apologists for me.  Naturally, of course Dogen sangha people will admire their founding teacher, and I admire Hakuin.  But there's a limit, I think; even Warner would admit that. Similarly, I find it absurd to condemn someone because of their inexhaustible and beginingless greed, anger, and delusion, especially when the results of that might in fact be one's own greed, anger and delusion.  And that, by the way, I'm sure is a sentiment that is some kind of similar sentiment that must animate Genjo Marinello's thoughts about Eido Shimano.  But that's another story.  But regarding the condemnation, I also don't mean this post to say to others, "See you got it wrong! It's really like this!!!"  Yet still I can't resist the link that says, you know, I don't want this post, or any other  to sound like this;  I suppose that is my beginingless greed, anger, and delusion popping up.  (And for the record,  it seems the Zennist fails to grasp emptiness, based on my take-away from that post. There. I said it.)

I have had a few years doing this blogging, and it has taken a while to find a "voice" for this blog, and I think it's kind of true for writing in general.  This weblog is, or should be, about Buddhist practice in real life, which includes, but is not solely about meditation, sutra study,  current events, Buddhist celebrities, but inevitably should come back to being about Buddhist practice, which takes place, hopefully, everywhere, and is densely permeating the whole universe. 

I hope my practice blogging helps.

Commentary on commentary on the Eido Shimano controversy

I, like so many others, have been following the reverberations of the Eido Shimano affair in the blogosphere.

I've been reading, inter alia, Barbara's Buddhism blog on About.com.  As you can see, I made comments on that post, to the effect of 1) Genjo Marinello's obviously been quite conflicted over this, and 2) there's a whole host of other things that happened here, and some of these are quite important.

Barbara's response to myself is somewhat telling:

BTW, I found Genjo Marinello’s dharma talk audio archive — the links work better in iTunes — and listened to the first teisho, on “Neither Mind Nor Buddha.” I thought it was a pretty good teisho on shunyata that also addressed the issue of why teachers screw up. However, what was missing was an admission of the severity of Eido Shimano’s “transgressions,” and there was no acknowledgment of the suffering he caused. I’ve talked to people with first-hand knowledge of the situation who said the young women were genuinely damaged. The sensei made it sound as if Eido Shimano had just stumbled over some quibbling technicality.

 First a bit of a qubbile: Genjo Marinello should at least be referenced as at least "Osho," although he has obtained inka.

Secondly, I mentioned two dharma podcasts from Cho Bo Ji, and to be honest the point of the dharma talk was the subject of the dharma talk, not a place where Cho Bo Ji would explain or ask forgiveness of Eido Shimano's transgressions and ethical lapses.

My point was that this was evidently so present in what Genjo Osho was doing that it evidently crept into his dharma talks!

Then, below an at-least-at-one-time monk Chana writes that a) there are difficulties in American Zen, and b) the Soto sect is in trouble, and c) it has to do with a metastasis of Zen from its original foundations.  Chana illustrates an example from Bankei, who (he says) taught that life provided its own koans and that's why Hui Neng could get enlightened in two shakes of a lamb's tail.  

Now I'd like to first comment on Chana's comment before I get to Barbara, since my comments on Barbara's comments are corollary to my comments on Chana's comment. Chana is partially correct and partially wrong: the emphasis in American Zen on seated meditation alone, is hardly what the masters taught.  That said, I would submit, having read both Bankei and Hakuin that Hakuin wins on points here:  Bankei's Zen is a lazy man's Zen compared to Hakuin's Zen which must be pursued.  Hui Neng might have been enlightened in the time it takes for lightening to flash, but if his life wasn't primed for it it would never have happened.  That is the experience of my life, and so many others.  Finally, Hakuin was a very strong emphasizer of making sure this practice, even as koan practice, carries over into every day life, is practiced moment by moment.

Now to Barbara: her reply misses Chana's point entirely.  Even Dogen I would submit would emphasize mindfulness in the midst of activity.  The stuff on a cushion is only one small part of the whole enchilada. 

And that's  why there's been ethical lapses in the first place! Duh!

No birth no death nothing is defiled nothing is pure...

Well, John Tierney's quotable today.

At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

“Nothing is unstable,” Frank Wilczek, a physicist and Nobel laureate from MIT, finally said to a general murmur of agreement of his colleagues on stage, John Barrow of Cambridge University in England, Paul Davies of Arizona State and George Ellis of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Given a chance, nature will make nothingness boil with activity...

But that insight, which is unlikely to put theologians out of business, is getting ahead of a story that starts with the Greeks, who were so uncomfortable with the Big Zero that they didn’t have it in their number system. Along the way, as Dr. Barrow told us in a breezy history review, Nothing got replaced by something called the Vacuum, which the physicist James Clerk Maxwell defined as what was left when you took everything else away.

And that proved to be quite a bit ­– the laws of physics, for example. Where do they come from? For them to guide the universe into existence out of pure old-fashioned nothingness, Dr. Davies pointed out, would require them to have “a transcendent existence.” Nobody claimed to know what that would mean.

But quantum weirdness has made the Nothing known as the vacuum even more substantial. According to the uncertainty principle, empty space is boiling with so-called virtual particles zipping in and out of existence on borrowed energy, and measurements of a small quantum suction called the Casimir effect, have validated the idea.

The problem for modern physics and cosmology is that there is both too much and too little of this vacuum energy. Sometimes it is all cosmologists talk about. Today it is known as dark energy and seems to be gently boosting the expansion of the universe, even though otherwise unassailable theoretical calculations suggest that the dark energy should be overwhelmingly greater.

Well, let's cue up the theologians and such, or at least go into details of the Dharmakaya...but first...

Dr. Wilczek compared modern physicists to a fish, who has suddenly realized that he is surrounded by water and that if he could understand what the water is, what it is made of, he could make better sense of the world.

I don't quote Dogen often on this blog, but this seems more than apt:

Now when dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, "What you see as a palace is running water," the dragons and fish will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, "Mountains flow." Nevertheless, there maybe some dragons and fish who understand that the columns and pillars of palaces and pavilions are flowing water. You should reflect and consider the meaning of this. If you do not learn to be free from your superficial views, you will not be free from the body and mind of an ordinary person. Then you will not understand the land of Buddha ancestors, or even the land or the palace of ordinary people. Now human beings well know as water what is in the ocean and what is in the river, but they do not know what dragons and fish see as water and use as water. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. You who study with Buddhas should not be limited to human views when you are studying water. You should study how you view the water used by Buddha ancestors. You should study whether there is water or no water in the house of Buddha ancestors.