"A scheme is not a vision..."

Well, I'm finally back sort of kind of ...that is at the moment I have an ability to write a blog at home, which was absent for about a week after I got back, much to my extreme frustration.

Yes, yes, yes, the frustration was transcended, as well as my frustration at my frustration.

Some guy once realized enlightenment when he stubbed his toe.

Do you get that one?

It hurt when he stubbed his toe.

I was going to write about many things over the past few days, but now there's no time.  The title though refers to one post I may write about how the Catholic Church sees ex-Catholics - I cannot believe it. (Heh heh.)


Have a relatively pain-free day.

Mother's Day

It's a good day to focus on the Mothers out there.

Bows to all of you. 

There are no words to acknowledge your difficulties.

Interference

Kyle at the Reformed Buddhist has a post  on the horrors going on the world which are almost completely airbrushed out of US media by broadcasting fluff and gossip.  I commented that there was once a great radio engineer (who had the occasional bizarre right-wing view, e.g., opposition to the metric system) who called such media  fluff and gossip a "interference."  In communication systems and radio engineering, we call interference as "unwanted received signals" or often, when the interference is unintentional, as "noise."

Funny thing is, our brains do that to ourselves or at least my  brain has a tendency to do that.  By "that" I mean  make "interference."  Habit and diversion - these were, in the West, noted by Blaise Pascal as forms of "interference." Regarding diversion Pascal wrote (in French of course!)

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

and

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

and

The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.

Regarding habit Pascal wrote:

What are our natural principles but principles of custom? In children they are those which they have received from the habits of their fathers, as hunting in animals. A different custom will cause different natural principles. This is seen in experience; and if there are some natural principles ineradicable by custom, there are also some customs opposed to nature, ineradicable by nature or by a second custom. This depends on disposition.

I agree with Kyle's point that the misery of the world very far surpasses our ability to even know about it, especially with the media with which we have been so fortunate to be able to have.  But we do this in 100 tiny ways to ourselves.  Sometimes, it's out of necessity. Other times, it's out of blissful ignorance. Sometimes marriage vows are read as:

I, ____, take you, ____, to be my (husband/wife). I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life. I, ____, take you, ____, for my lawful (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

Imagine if these vows were more descriptive, at least statistically.  Perhaps in addition to this, if  there was a sentence reading such as "I understand that, if you live to the age of 55, that  between the ages of 55 and 64 there is a 10% chance of you  dieing by any cause whatsoever, including a 3.2% chance of death due to a major cardiovascular disease, and a 3.7% chance of death due to a malignant neoplasm" the reality behind these flowery marriage vows might sink in - like those warning labels on cigarette boxes.   On second thought, no that probably wouldn't work - people would just ignore that too, just like people ignore those warning labels cigarette boxes. Habit and diversion again, are pretty powerful ways to get one's self to avoid seeing how one is and what needs to be done.

But my point, I hope, is obvious: Whenever you meet someone, you're meeting someone who's going to die.  Any time you meet someone, you meet someone who either has just been born and is just finding out about the world in which he lives, or has been survived enough to have hopes and dreams and aspirations, or who has had them and may have lost them, or was, by luck of the draw, rendered too insentient to ever have had them, but is still sentient enough to be alive and present on this planet at the same time you are. And  you are meeting someone who will have been able to have an obituary written about them.

To put it in a more Zen context, as Case 7 of the Hekiganroku points out: 

A monk asked Hōgen, "I, Echō, ask you, Master. What is Buddha?" Hōgen said, "You are Echō."

Now, what is the list of things I've got to do today?  Or more to the point, what do I have to remember to do today that goes against my ingrained habits, desires for diversion, and actually helps folk here?

 

持久 (じきゅう) : More on Genpo Merzel: Sympathy and Criticism and Caveat Emptor

Once, when my son was younger, he took Tai Kwon Do lessons at the local martial arts school, and once we had a birthday party for him there.   Or perhaps it was the opening of their new dojo; I don't know which.  At any rate, at some point the instructors asked me to break a board - me, who knew jack about such things.

Within a few minutes of trying I had broken a board 1 inch think. It was pine. I'm glad it wasn't oak.

On the larger piece of the broken board I later painted 持久 - pronounced in Japanese "jikyuu" - which means "persistence" or "endurance."   It's there to remind me to be persistent and to endure.

And everyone around me knows I have to keep persisting and enduring.

I bring that up by way of explaining more my sentiments regarding Genpo Merzel.  I think it's too trite - way- to trite, to go into unmitigated condemnation of the man, though you can be sure he had it coming.  There's more to see here than that in us. 

"Genpo Roshi" had built himself into a brand, following all the bromides of current American capitalism in decline: It doesn't matter what the brand is trying to sell; the brand's the thing.  You can see that on his Twitter account, or by going to Google images and searching him.  To some extent we can't help but "brand" ourselves one way or the other, but like that Magritte painting of a pipe with "This is not a pipe" in French written under it, the brand is not the person or thing.  

Anybody and his brother can be trained to hold a Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) meeting and pretend to be a Guy Who Knows His Stuff.  Anybody and his brother can get a photographer to propagate a "look" that one wants to be known by; Charlie Manson did it.

It takes 持久と仕事 - persistence and work - to actually live a life authentically, oddly enough. It's not enough to boast to people how you don't care about what people think because umm... you care deeply about all sentient beings. Walking the walk is the hard part.

Genpo Merzel is us: He's fallen seven times.  We're all falling seven hundred times.  He wasn't my teacher; we wouldn't have had each other in a teacher student relationship, and he's deeply hurt many people and completely trashed his own brand all by himself, without any help from his blogosphere critics or Brad Warner or anyone.  I still think what many of his critics wrote was true: "Big Mind" was and is a load of horse hockey.  But to think that your Zen practice or other Buddhist or "spiritual" practices - or lack thereof - insures you against the type of crap Genpo stepped into is also horse hockey.

Work and persist to be what you can and should. Caveat emptor.

That's all.

It's been a couple of very busy days... AND YES, IT WAS PRACTICE!

I have had an especially busy return to work after my vacation, with an even busier home life at the same time.  So I found it strangely comforting - and helpful - to read the criticism of Brad Warner by that guy Muho from Antaji.   While I don't want to really get into the spat of Warner versus Muho, I did make a comment on Warner's blog post to the effect that 切磋琢磨 (せっさたくま） - being polished by others -  is important.   It is sooo true. 

On the other hand,  I also generally agree with Nathan's response, which says we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that everything we do we can't label practice if we haven't been, you know, practicing.

However, I do have to disagree with both Nathan and Muho a bit. As for Muho, I think he's off the mark when he says:

If you live with a family or work with others, that is also practice, but if those that you live and work with do not share the perspective that the whole day is practice, it will be very difficult to uphold your practice during the 24 hours of the day.

And with Nathan's response:

However, the way Muho's statement seems off to me is in its assumptions about the external environment people live in, and how that might affect practice and insight. 

 The reason I disagree with both  of them has to do with the past few days I've had: absurd business and stress corresponding to various getting back to the routine. In such a time the only sane response is practice, mindfulness, compassion, graciousness and humility.   There simply has not been time for anything else.  And yes, others karma does inter-relate and affect my experience. I'm not dead.

Has my practice been perfect? Definitely it has been pitiful.  But there is no alternative but to keep trying.

It's a bit like the enso I did here (right below this post). Does it compare well with any great master's enso? No, it's garbage by comparision.  But it's a sincere effort on my part, and if you think it's trivial to do it, I invite you to try to do it.  To do the practice sometimes you have to do the practice where you find yourself, with the level of skill and ability you have at the time. 

 It also reflects the environment in which I created the enso; so it is with the other beings around us.  Muho might say, "Oh, it's difficult to work with people who are not consciously praticing," but to me that sounds almost patronizing; he's not living the life where one is stuck in THIS bag of skin.

I have more polishing to do. Others will polish me. They might not have the advantage of being declared Buddhists, but this is the life in which we are together.  It's time to get through the day.

Things I'd like to do more of in the New Year

I suck at New Year's resolutions.  I never make them, and have no intention of keeping them.  I wish I could find an appropriate Humphrey Bogart quote here...at any rate, I don't have one.  Furthermore,  I think New Year's resolutions are made to be broken. I think the idea that one snaps one's fingers and whoosh! - an entire new persona develops is absolute nonsense.  Nobody stops being who they are because the earth passes through a designated point in the universe.  Nobody ever got anywhere because of volition or lack of it, except insofar as what can be achieved  in the present, in this very moment now, whenever that is, which is of course fleetingly small.

With all of that said, though there are things that I'd like to do more of in the future. Among them:

• I'd like to be more gracious and humble in what I do, as I noted the profound effect I saw what this did to myself and those in the audience when we attended the Leonard Cohen concert.

• I'd also like to be able to share the uniqueness of the present moment better with those around me.  I don't think I explain this well enough to people.

• I'd like to show more appreciation to my family members; to truly create a better sense of harmony in our lives.  That's not always easy.

• I would like to do more extended periods of zazen.    It's very important.   I might have a chance to do this in the summer.  Hopefully I can arrange to attend a sesshin.  

•  I'd like to work more on translating Buddhist work from (at least) Japanese to English, and help my wife with the translation of Laiguo's Seven Gates of Zen, if she has the time.

• I'd like to do more 書道.   It's very important to do this.  It's important for me for several reasons, among them, it's good mindfulness practice, and it helps me to train portions of my brain that I hadn't trained before.  It's important to keep learning stuff as we get older.    It's also useful to develop crafts and practices not entirely in the domain of one's training.

•  I'd like to get to reading all the material I've saved and printed out for myself.   There's great research I could have my team be doing, real forefront stuff,  I could even get it funded I believe.  But I need the time and space  to do it, and making the time and space - a theme running through this post, actually - is what I need to do.

•  I'd like to learn how to really swim.  I'll probably take a few lessons on this. 

• Finally, I hope to accompany my family in a performance at the Chinese New Year festival.  I've got to practice for this!

Children and Others Who Are Reflections of Ourselves

Nathan at Dangerous Harvests brings up the "Buddhist indoctrination of children" question.  As a father of a child, as a father who as a child was indoctrinated religiously in ways that I would agree with Dawkins are pretty atavistic,  and as someone who practices himself and understands that "family practice" is more than just dumping a kid off to some kind of Sunday school, I might have an opinion on this.

Then again, my opinion on this might just be my mind's reaction to seeing someone else's self  and their foibles reflected through their writing, and my mind's desire to "have its way" with that.

I say this last bit because it was triggered in my mind at reading the following sentence:

So, whatever I will say is coming from a somewhat outsider position, and I'd encourage parents who are Buddhist practitioners to chime in on this issue. 

Now, I'm in a pretty good mood today, actually, for whatever reason.  And perhaps it was my good mood that led me to the reaction to write this down now: I never liked the phrase "chime in" as a metaphor for "respond."   I mean, to whom is it intended to chime in, a bell?


And so, yeah, pet peeve...but that peeve's in my mind...that's just the way Nathan writes...I...wouldn't write that way...but I'm sure my writing gets under some folks skin...

And that's kind of my point/theme:  This thing I wanted to fix exists in my mind.  I'm sure Nathan doesn't give a hoot about my linguistic pet peeves and foibles, and why the hell should he, anyway? It's his expression of his writing, and it's my  pet peeve and I'll be peeved if I want to.  Or not.

So there's my little mind reacting to all kinds of stuff here...but...I don't think, now that my kid's 9 years old, that I'm responding to any unresolved childhood issues of my own.

In fact - it may be the rather peculiar nature of my particular sangha that informs my viewpoint here- but I think the whole issue here that Nathan brings up here is really ...um...irrelevant,...with all due respect.


Why do I say this?

Because your practice should be demonstrably practiced at all times, with all people.  Most of the time, in my sangha, it would be inappropriate to have brought my son to a zazenkai when he was younger: the sangha meeting for zazenkai  usually consisted of no more than 4 people.  There was no one to care for my son, save my wife, who was happy to have me "get out of the house" provided that I returned soon enough for whatever she was doing.    But - my practice has been getting less horrible over the years, but still - the  practice on the cushion should also be practice off the cushion, and like going from zazen to chanting, one would should have gone from zazenkai to making lunch or whatever.

It's not that I didn't teach my child about Buddhism, bringing him to temples and all that. I did. Sometimes he likes it; sometimes he doesn't.  But it's just that it's completely unrealistic to "train" a kid in a religion, when the notions of religion in his mind put Christianity, Islam and Judaism in that equivalence class. And my son knows - knew for a while - well enough not to believe anything just because someone demanded that they believe it.  If I am to be a responsible parent, who raises a kid that can actually help people, it's going to be necessary to raise a kid who can think for himself.  Oddly enough, or not, my son seems predisposed to want to do that.

My son at the age of 9 understands now that Buddhism is different from other religions.  While I might want him to become a Buddhist, if only to spare himself and others suffering, that's still a want and an attachment of mine.  It's in my mind.  Better for me to practice my own Buddhism than to try to create thought structures in others minds by sheer indoctrination.  I mean, does that work  so well for adults with properly functioning brains? No? So why in the long run do you think that'll work with a kid; did it work out for you so well?

Better for me to deepen my own practice.

It's like swimming: the better I swim, the better my son wants to swim.  Provided, of course, that I actually swim when my son is around me sometimes.  And he continues to want to swim himself, regardless of how well I get at it.  But so far it seems to be the case.

It's exactly like swimming.

Or, if you don't like that analogy, consider the recent re-make of  The Karate Kid with Jackie Chan: his role is a stereotype (like Uma Thurman's in Kill Bill somewhat) : it is the role of the highly trained and skilled practitioner dwelling unannounced as such amongst ordinary people,  living in a seemingly far more humble station than his training should admit. 

That's where you're supposed to be as a parent, because it provides you an easy entree to be able to teach your child, your boss, your spouse, anyone. Like the Jackie Chan Han character, it's not that you don't act without super force when needed.  But there's no need to bludgeon what shouldn't be bludgeoned.   You can demonstrate it by washing a fork.  By getting your kid to clean up after himself consistently without shouting at him.

True demonstration and teaching of Buddhism.