So we continue our little perusal of these fascinating figures in the history of religion: the Zen Masters. This time our attention shifts to Japan. Now to be very clear, we are not under the spell of a romanticized, idealized view of Zen Buddhism. It has had plenty of problems thru its history until this very day, and this could be said of Buddhism in general. About some of this we shall reflect on in the next posting. But here and now I simply want to enjoy the company of some remarkable people–folks who are as endearing as many of my favorite Desert Fathers. When I was visiting with the Chinese masters, I used Red Pine as my guide. Here I will use a lovely little work by Richard Bryan McDaniel, Zen Masters of Japan.

Let us begin by repeating a story that I already once related, a story that I consider one of the most important in all the history of religion. This is the account of the meeting of Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk who had arrived in China from India, with the Emperor of China. Recall that Buddhism had long before entered China and this Emperor himself was not only friendly to Buddhism but also a convert to it. But Bodhidharma’s Buddhism was very different to what the Emperor was used to and so he was very curious what this strange monk was about. Whether this account is mythic in nature or an actual historical incident is totally irrelevant for our purposes. The meaning of this story is what matters. So let us listen in to this encounter once more:

“The Emperor was a practicing Buddhist and proud of the many ways he had supported the tradition in his realm. When he learned that there was a visitor in his kingdom from the land where the Buddha had lived, he naturally invited Bodhidharma to come to the court. There, Wu described all he had done to promote Buddhism and asked, ‘What is your opinion? What merit have I accumulated as a result of these deeds?’ Bodhidharma’s reply was blunt and tactless: ‘No merit whatsoever.’ ‘Why not?’ the Emperor demanded. ‘Motives for such actions are always impure,’ Bodhidharma told him. ‘They are undertaken solely for the purpose of attaining future rebirth. They are like shadows cast by bodies, following those bodies but having no reality of their own.’ ‘Then what is true merit?’ the Emperor asked. ‘It is clear seeing, pure knowing, beyond discriminating intelligence. Its essence is emptiness. Such merit cannot be gained by worldly means.’ This was unlike any exposition of the Buddhist faith the Emperor had heard before, and, perhaps a little testily, he asked, ‘According to your understanding, then, what is the first principle of Buddhism?’ ‘Vast emptiness and not a thing that can be called holy,’ Bodhidharma responded at once. Wu spluttered: ‘What is that supposed to mean? And who are you who now stands before me?’ To which Bodhidharma replied: ‘I don’t know.’ Then he left the court.” (as presented by Richard Bryan McDaniel)

What a remarkable story! This story has a universal significance–it holds for all the great religions whether it be Christianity or Hinduism or Islam–you might say that it points to “A Tale of Two Views Within a Religion,” to borrow a phrase. In one story religion is a kind of transaction, you do something in order to gain something. There is this “I” that is constantly seeking “gain,” and so religion energizes this self-centered dynamism disguised by piety, worship, rituals and traditions, spirituality, doctrines, even benevolence–all of which is for the enhancement of this “I”–(Dostoyevsky’s Fr. Zosima pointed this out also in The Brothers Karamazov–in fact he pushed this to the extreme with unspeakable irony when he said that a person would even endure crucifixion as long as he got adulation for it, as long as there were people there to “applaud.”) The Zen Masters (and Desert Fathers) totally deconstruct this inner dynamism. Theirs is the “other” story of religion, one which seeks a piercing vision into the reality of the human condition and deconstructs the ground of all those dualisms that the “I” lives by: I like this; I don’t like that; here is the holy; there is the not-holy, you are you and I am I, two separate realities, etc., etc.

Now the history of Zen Buddhism oscillates between these two stories of religion as it travels through the centuries. Both in China and in Japan Zen Buddhism has its periods where it becomes lost in stagnation, superficiality, decadence and self-seeking; and it has its moments, and I use this word deliberately because these tend to be brief, when the intense light of Zen shines clearly and fully. We will hit a few of these moments in Japan.

Buddhism came to Japan from China. Chinese culture was looked upon as something to learn from and imitate, and so were the religious tendencies. At first there were three schools of Buddhism that came from China and flourished in Japan: the Tendai, the Shingon, and the Pure Land. The Tendai School is often considered the first wholly Chinese School of Buddhism, and it was primarily concerned with the teachings of the historic Buddha. McDaniel: “Although meditation was practiced in the Tendai tradition, the majority of Tendai adherents were satisfied with understanding it as the doctrinal system which was intellectually coherent and which was able to meet the devotional needs of the literate population.” So the focus of the Tendai was on Scripture, while the focus of the Shingon School was on ritual. McDaniel: “It was one of the so-called ‘esoteric’ schools of Buddhism, in which secret teachings, or ‘empowerments,’ were transmitted from teacher to student.” Shingon practice had elaborate rituals and mantra recitation. When this School reached Japan, initially it was very popular with the ruling class. Finally, there was the Pure Land Buddhism which became very popular among common people who found “philosophical Buddhism” too abstruse. Pure Land was utter simplicity–you simply recited this mantra and you would be “reborn” in a heaven-like afterlife. Also, you didn’t need to be a monk. It arrived in Japan in the 12^th Century; it was always popular among ordinary people; and today it is the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan. (And Zen Buddhism is practically dead or just a cultural artifact!!)

Now in China all these varieties of Buddhism competed for popularity, power and influence. Zen Buddhism somehow emerged among all these others–due to those great Patriarchs of Zen we previously mentioned– and at times even flourished. It seemed to survive the various persecutions that some Emperors engaged in when they determined that Budddhism was a “foreign” religion and the push was for a return to Taoism and Confucianism. Because Zen Buddhist monasteries pretty much stayed in far-off rural areas and the hermits lived in remote mountains, Zen Buddhism was often “off the radar” and left alone. There were some great Zen Masters, but there were also periods of decline and decay when, for one reason or another, the focus on enlightenment, on that “direct seeing” into one’s mind that Hui Neng and Lin Chi emphasized, all that seemed lost and Zen Buddhism became “infected” with the kinds of problems the other varieties of Buddhism exhibited: emphasis on ritual, on doctrine, on wealth and power and prestige, etc., etc. There is a lot of controversy about this history, and about all that I will touch on in the next posting. (Recall that what made Hui Neng’s Zen Buddhism so special and revolutionary was his emphasis on “sudden enlightenment,” the downplaying of intellectual prowess and intellectual efforts, the openness to all no matter their station in society or in life, and most startling of all, Hui Neng’s downplaying the necessity of having a teacher—after all he himself, the greatest Zen figure of all time, didn’t have one until after his awakening.)

Dogen. This is the first great Japanese Zen Master to look at. He is generally known as the “founder” and foundation of the Soto School of Zen Buddhism in Japan–throughout Japanese history there are then these two parallel tracks of Zen Buddhism, Soto and Rinzai. The peculiar thing is that both branches trace their lineage back to the same Chinese Zen Patriarchs, like the great Hui Neng , and the amazing Zen Master Lin Chi. Yet these two branches are very different in their approach to Zen and at times they were fierce rivals—D. T. Suzuki simply ignored Soto in his presentation of Zen and thought it was not “real” Zen. Yet today Soto is the only Zen Buddhism that has any life left in Japan and is the prevalent form of Zen in the Wes(though in some cases Westerners combine Soto and Rinzai traditions). In any case, back to the great Dogen.

Dogen lives about the same time that Romuald, Bruno Francis, and Bernard are doing their thing with monks and hermits in the West. He came from a noble family, received an excellent education as a youngster and was definitely slated for a life in the imperial court. But his parents died while he was still young, and this deeply affected him. By the time he was sixteen he had run away from that scene and became a monk at a Tendai monastery. Here he studied the Buddhist sutras, and since he was well-trained in Chinese he took to the study readily. However, his deepest questions and concerns were not assuaged by this approach. He traveled to other monasteries, and he was exposed to a kind of amalgam of Tendai and Shingon brands of Buddhism with a little bit of Zen that had filtered into Japan. It was here that Dogen sensed that his deepest quest was leading him beyond any study and ritual, and the path he was on was not going to lead to any kind of awakening. He had a sense that Zen had what he needed, and so he traveled to China to learn Zen Buddhism from its source.

So Dogen goes to China, and there he encounters various Zen Masters. Things are not quite as good as in the Tang period, the “golden age of Chinese Zen,” and due to various government persecutions and pressures Zen is in decline.   The lineage of Hui Neng and Lin Chi has split up into several schools and not all the branches are flourishing. Dogen finds himself with what was the Chinese beginnings of the Soto school. Now let’s take a moment and explain what’s going on. For Hui Neng and someone like Lin Chi, Zen Buddhism was all about this “direct pointing at the Mind.” Sometimes called your “original face,” sometimes called “the true person of no-rank,” sometimes called “the Buddha nature,” sometimes called “your original nature,” sometimes called, the Unborn or the Self, etc., etc.   This whole awakening, this wholly revolutionary way of seeing things, this piercing of reality into the true nature of things, was called by different names by different masters but it all amounts to the same thing and for Hui Neng everything was for the purpose of this awakening. Yes, meditation could play a role, but it was not essential in primitive Zen; anything and everything was an instrument in someone like Hui Neng’s hands. All of life, your whole situation, anything was a means to this awakening. Lay or monk didn’t matter. This is the purest Zen, but it is also a very intense way of living, and not many could keep up with the likes of Hui Neng and Lin Chi. So what happens is quite understandable, various Zen masters develop various ways of ameliorating the journey if you will, or at least making it more “well-defined.” Thus, the koan method develops. People are given the koan and this is the total content of their meditation. Their mind is given “something to do,” something to focus on—in a sense it becomes like the wall that Bodhidharma sat in front of for years. It is still a very intense practice, but you see it is a very well-defined path and that takes some of the stress out of it. Later on the koans get systemztized and people go from koan to koan as if solving one puzzle and getting a deeper one. The koan method usually implies a totally monastic life.   When a person has a breakthrough, an awakening, “kensho” as it is called, then he is able to give an answer to the Zen Master that shows he has broken through the wall of his rational, ego-centered, dualistic vision of things.

Another approach was completely different. Here the emphasis is on a kind of empty meditation, the key thing is precisely the meditation and not some content of the meditation. The student is taught a formless meditation, shikantaza, which literally means “just sitting.” So here sitting meditation or zazen is the central practice. Dogen eventually settled in a Chinese Zen (Chan)monastery that was following this path. He stayed there for several years and had his first awakening. When he returned to Japan he brought back this path, enhanced it, intensified it, made it THE practice of his Zen monasteries, and today this school, the Soto School, is the most popular Zen path both in Japan and in the West.

A story related by McDaniel: “Dogen found an elderly monk working in the heat of the day preparing food. The tenzo (monastery cook) was hatless in the sun and walked over tiles which must have burned, but he showed no sign of discomfort. Dogen asked the monk how old he was and the monk replied that he was approaching his seventieth year. ‘Are there no younger monks who could assist you?’ Dogen asked. ‘Others are not me,’ the tenzo answered. ‘These are my duties, how can someone else fulfill them?’ ‘But surely there’s no need to carry them out during the hottest part of the day,’ Dogen persisted. ‘If not now, when?’ the monk asked. ‘I can see that you are a man of the Way (Tao),’ Dogen said. ‘Please tell me, what is the true Way?’ ‘The universe has never concealed it,’ the cook said and turned back to his work. The conversation struck Dogen profoundly, and the memory of it would stay with him long after he returned to Japan.”

When Dogen got back to Japan, he found many Buddhist monasteries were filled with luxury compared to the Chinese Zen monasteries. He set up teaching in a remote, old, run-down temple and there he started attracting students. He was open to teaching lay people and monks. He also wrote extensively in Japanese–previous Buddhist writings were mostly in Chinese and so of limited accessibility. He wrote of philosophical/theological issues, explaining Buddhism in general and Zen in particular, and he also was propagating what he picked up in China which became the Soto School of Zen. Here he wrote very practical things like how to do zazen, what to eat, how to live as monks, etc. Here is an excellent summary of his teaching by Peter Levitt, a poet and Soto Zen teacher from British Columbia:

“The ability to leap beyond dualistic thinking during zazen is fundamental to Dogen Zen. It is due to the wholehearted, all-inclusive nature of the activity, but we should look at this carefully to be sure we discern his meaning. As taught by Dogen, meditation does not lead to enlightenment. [In that he is very much in tune with Hui Neng] In fact there is no distance of any kind between meditation and enlightenment. There is not even a separation between one’s aspiration to realize the self and that very realization.   According to Dogen, from the very first moment of establishing the meditation posture, no bridge is necessary; practice IS full realization, and full realization IS practice. As he says, ‘Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap.’ Dogen’s understanding is that at all moments we are whole, lacking nothing, despite how we feel at any given time. Therefore, zazen is not a practice that leads to realization. It is neither a means to an end in our usual goal-oriented manner of thinking nor a method for learning to concentrate; nor is it a technique designed to help us improve ourselves…. Dogen’s teaching is clear: zazen is…an intimate expression of the oneness of all life…. It is realization itself whether we are aware of it or not…. And so we do not sit in order to become enlightened; we sit as an expression of enlightenment. That is what buddhas do.”

Final Dogen quote: “Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all beings.”

The other great Japanese Zen Master to look at is Hakuin. Even though Hakuin lived centuries after Dogen, he can be considered as Dogen’s great rival. Hakuin is probably the most prominent figure in the Japanese Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism. And this is, like I said, very very different from Soto Zen!

Hakuin was born in 1686; his father was a samurai of limited means; his mother a devout practitioner of Nichirin Buddhism, an offshoot of Tendai. They lived in an impoverished region, and throughout his life Hakuin retained a great compassion for the poor people of Japan. Hakuin entered monastic life at the age of 15. He spent time at various temples, studying this and that. It was not until he met this particular teacher that challenged and pushed him to his own awakening. The odd thing to remember in all this is that for most of its history, Zen Buddhism both in China and in Japan was in a state of decline. This seems surprising, but it was especially true of the Rinzai tradition, the one in which Hakuin lived. Yes, there are the great moments and the great masters, figures who can take your breath away with their insight and awareness; but strangely enough this hardly lasts, and most of the time Zen is in decline. Here’s a few examples from McDaniel:

“Official support of the Rinzai tradition perhaps had more negative consequences than positive ones. Since Rinzai temples had become schools for the sons of the nobility and the warrior class, the government had an interest in how they were organized…. The government approved abbots and controlled the curriculum….schools became training grounds for students intending to enter the civil service, and they became a vehicle for promulgating government policies in remote districts. As they became centers of growing cultural importance, they lost something of their credibility as spiritual centers. Students with no religious interest at all were sent to them in order to acquire basic literacy skills. Other students were drawn by an interest in various arts that were becoming associated with Zen. Meanwhile, koan study deteriorated from being a powerful and challenging spiritual exercise to becoming a popular literary activity.”

“Shosan never bothered to have his awakening formally acknowledged, and he would always claim to be ‘self-enlightened without the aid of a teacher.’ The experience even led him to question the value of kensho. He was contemptuous of what he called kitai-zen, Zen practice undertaken in expectation of attaining some end, such as satori. The Rinzai emphasis on kensho, he argued, resulted in monks with very minor awakening experiences coming to believe they were fully enlightened individuals. Particularly significant to him was the fact that he seldom saw a notable change in the moral behavior of these monks. Their lifestyles, preoccupied as they were with physical comfort and ambitions to advance within the hierarchy, were evidence of how preoccupied they remained with self or ego.”

“Temples could be commercial establishments. Some acted as banks; others were publishing centers, where school texts, along with both Buddhist and Confucian documents from China, were made available in woodcut prints. The temples also carried out ritual activities for the benefit of the national government. In many temples, religious teaching became slack. Monks unable to earn them could purchase documents of enlightenment.”

So Hakuin arrives on this scene with that kind of monastic milieu, with Rinzai Zen in very bad shape. As a young monk he tours many temples trying to learn what he can of Buddhism and the Zen tradition. However, he is not interested in formulating ideas about all this; he has a deep, instinctive and intense desire for awakening, and he knows nothing else will satisfy him. Finally he meets this rare bird, a crusty old Rinzai master who was the real thing and who helps Hakkuin break through in Lin Chi fashion–by giving him one helluva time and knocking the psychological stuffings out of him! Hakuin spends some time with this master after his awakening; then he travels a bit more to deepen his awakening; then he finally returns to his hometown and takes up this abandoned, run-down temple. Here is McDaniel’s description: “It had neither roof nor floor boards. When it rained, Hakuin had to wear a rain hat and high getas (sandals with wooden slats on their soles) even indoors. The land and furnishings were mortgaged to local creditors. Undaunted, Hakuin set about rebuilding it, and subsequently this small rural temple became a center to which students from throughout Japan flocked for the next fifty years. Although Hakuin did not actively seek for disciples, his character was such that genuine aspirants were drawn to him…. Although the primary focus of his life’s work was on renewing the Rinzai School…Hakuin also retained a commitment to lay people, in particular the working classes. He took lay disciples and was sensitive to the challenges they faced…. Hakuin took upon himself the responsibility of affecting a complete reform of the Rinzai School. Central to that reform was ensuring that only individuals who had legitimately received inka be allowed to teach. It was essential that students work with genuinely awakened teachers, although Hakuin realized there were only a few available in Japan during his lifetime. He set high standards for both students and teachers. He had no illusions about the difficulties facing those who came to him…. Awakening was central to Hakuin’s Zen. One was not, in his opinion, a member of the Zen community until one had ‘seen into one’s true nature.’”

Here’s a very well-known story about Hakuin, which I long ago related and which corresponds so closely to a Desert Father story –totally amazing actually:

In the village in which Hakuin was building a Zen monastic life, there was a family who had a daughter who got pregnant. The parents demanded to know who the father was. At first she wouldn’t talk; they pressured her and wore her down, and she finally said, “The father is the monk, Hakuin.” All the villagers were outraged, and word spread all over that Hakuin had impregnated the girl and everyone feelings toward Hakuin changed for the worse. When the child was finally born, the parents and the villagers brought the baby to Hakuin and said, “This is your child. You look after it.” “Is that so?” Hakuin said. He accepted the baby and did not appear distressed at receiving it. His reputation was in tatters, but he looked after the child as best as he could. The baby was kept clean and warm, and Hakuin sang it to sleep at night. He lived like this for almost a year. Then one winter’s day, the girl happened to see Hakuin making his way through the snow, going from house to house, begging for food with the baby tied securely on his back. She felt ashamed at what she had done and confessed to her parents that it was not Hakuin at all who had fathered the child; rather it was a young man who worked at the market whom she had been seeing on the sly. Abashed, her parents rushed to Hakuin and apologized profusely. The child was not his; they would take the child off his hands and the girl would marry the real father. “Is that so?” is the only thing Hakuin said, and turned the child over to them.

So much for these two giants of Japanese Zen. There were of course many other outstanding figures through the centuries right into modern times, and each one made his own contribution to our appreciation of Zen. The figures who appeal to me the most are the ones who are unconventional, who are not “officially approved,” who don’t fit in, who are in fact “Zen fools.” Ryokan would certainly be one of these. Here’s a few others:

Shuho (later known as Daito Kokushi).

Here is a story about him: In the 14^th century, Japan had a very young emperor who was so interested in Zen that he abdicated his throne at the age of 22 to give his whole time to Buddhist study and practice. Here is McDaniel’s account of what happened: “The retired Emperor heard a rumor that a Zen master of exceptional ability had come to the city of Kyoto where, instead of establishing himself at one of the city’s temples, he had chosen to live among the derelicts and beggars residing under the Gojo Bridge. The emperor was intrigued by the tale and asked his informant if there were any way that he could identify which of the beggars was the Zen Master. All the informant could tell him was that it was rumored the master was particularly fond of honeydew melons.

The emperor disguised himself as a fruit peddler and pushed a cart laden with melons to the bridge. As the residents gathered around him, he held up a ripe melon and announced, ‘I will give this melon freely to anyone who can come up to me and claim it without using his feet.’ One of the beggars immediately challenged him, ‘Then give it to me without using your hands.’ It was as much the gleam in the eye of the beggar as his reply that told the emperor that he had found the Zen teacher he was seeking.”

One of Shuho students was Kanzan. He was an especially gifted Zen student, but after his awakening Kanzan retreated to a rural village in a distant mountain region where for the next eight years he worked as a farm laborer during the day and spent his evenings in meditation seated on a stone ledge that jutted from the edge of a high cliff. He lived in this manner until the Emperor summoned him to Kyoto to become an abbot. While abbot he lived as frugally and austerely as when he was in the mountains. Not many could withstand the rigors of his training, and there were frequent defections. But those who stayed became the basis of one of the strongest lines in Japanese Rinzai.

Bassui: From McDaniel: “At the age of 20 he entered Jifukuji where he sought instruction from a master named Oko. Under Oko’s instruction, he began a rigorous meditation practice. However, he still questioned the value of the many ritual activities carried out in the temple…. As a consequence, he resisted taking the precepts, choosing instead to practice as a layman. He did this for nine years before finally having his head shaved and becoming a monk. Even then, despite his official change of status, he remained uncomfortable with the trappings of monastic life and remained noncompliant in many regards. He refused to chant sutras or take part in rituals; he even decided not to wear the traditional robes of a monk. Eventually he even ceased to stay at the monastery…choosing to live in a nearby hermitage.”

Again from McDaniel: “Bassui had heard about a hermit named Takukei who lived in a small hut in the wilderness…. Intrigued by what he had been told, Bassui sought the hermit out. At their first meeting, Takukei was confounded by the young man’s appearance and remarked, ‘I can tell by your shaved head that you are a monk. Why then aren’t you wearing the robes of a monk?’ I became a monk to learn the Buddha way, not to wear special clothes,’ Bassui answered.

‘So do you study the koans of the old masters?’

‘Of what use to me are the koans of the old masters when I do not understand my own mind?’

‘What then is your practice?’

‘I seek to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings in order to help them overcoming their sufferings even if by doing so I should fall into the deepest hells.’

Tokukei was so impressed by this answer that he bowed to the youth.”

When Bassui was about 50 he emerged from his “hidden life” and began accepting students. Eventually he had over a thousand disciples!

Then finally there is the incomparable Ikkyu, the “anti-monk,” the no-monk, the ultimate fool, the outrageous one….but also one of the most profound…..

Ikkyu seems to have been an illegitimate son of the emperor, but his mother was kicked out of the court when she became pregnant and was banished. She raised her child in poverty, and this deeply influenced his formation. He acquired a life-long aversion to the upper classes and a sympathy for working people and for the tribulations of women in that culture. When Ikkyu was a child, his mother enrolled him as a student in a Rinzai Zen temple. Ikkyu was a very good student and he also received a good literary education but he was drawn to Buddhism. McDaniel: “Even as a youth, Ikkyu had a naturally reflective temperament. He was drawn to Buddhist practice, but he was also sensitive to the discrepancy he observed between the way monks lived in the temple and the principles of monastic life to which they paid lip service.”

With his thirst for enlightenment growing, Ikkyu sought out some real masters. He found one in Kaso Sodon, who at that time was living in a hermitage near a village. Kaso had a reputation as a very demanding Zen Master, and he gave Ikkyu the “full treatment.” It took several years, but Ikkyu had an especially deep awakening, but when Kaso wanted to give him the formal certificate of Dharma transmission, the credential that allowed him to become a teacher in his own right, Ikkyu threw it into the fire. McDaniel: “Ikkyu was leery of the formal customs associated with the established Zen tradition. He refused to give his own students certificates of inka since such documents could now be purchased from less scrupulous teachers and, to his mind, were no longer credible evidence of a practitioner’s level of attainment.”

After his enlightenment, Ikkyu stayed with Kaso until the latter’s death. He took care of Kaso’s physical needs as Kaso weakened with age and illness, but there was always tension between the two for Kaso was a firm adherent to Zen traditions and the monastic code, while Ikkyu preferred saki, dallied with prostitutes and showed no deference to distinguished visitors. Ikkyu was in his early 30s when Kaso died; he could have become a teacher and would have many disciples. Instead he adopted the life of a wandering monk, visiting wine shops and brothels as often as he did Zen Temples. Ikkyu was critical of the pretentions of monks who affected a sanctimonious lifestyle.

A story that McDaniel relates about Ikkyu begging for food: “He came to the house of a wealthy landowner who, although he professed to be a Buddhist, gave Ikkyu only a single small coin and that grudgingly. Ikkyu returned to his dwelling and put on the formal robes of a transmitted Zen Master; wearing these, he returned to the landowner’s house. The landowner eagerly invited Ikkyu in and ordered an elaborate meal prepared for his guest. When the meal was served, Ikkyu stood, took off his robes and placed them on the seat of honor. ‘This meal has obviously been prepared not for me but for my clothes,’ he remarked. Then he left the house.”

Another tale narrated by McDaniel: “Ikkyu was crossing Osaka Bay on a ferry when a warrior monk of the Yamabushi School approached him. Yamabushi combined Shingon and Tendai teachings with native Shintoism, its adherents were trained in martial arts and magic.

‘You’re a Zen monk, aren’t you?’ the warrior monk asked. Ikkyu admitted he was.

‘I’ve heard that your school produces great meditators, but what else can it do?’

‘I don’t know. What can you do?’

‘We’re trained to be warriors and magicians. We can perform miracles which terrify our enemies and amaze the people and, by doing so, we bring respect to the Buddha way. Can you do anything like that?’

‘Certainly there are miracles in the Zen tradition, but tell me what kind of miracles you can do.’

‘I can call up the Bodhisattva Fudo on this very boat.’ Fudo was a guardian bodhisattva usually portrayed bearing a sword and a rope and surrounded by a fiery halo.

‘That would be very impressive,’ Ikkyu admitted. ‘Please show me.’

The monk began a series of chants and prayers and then, indeed, the Bodhisattva appeared in the boat surrounded by his halo of flames. The other passengers fell to their knees in amazement.

‘Can the Zen monk match my skill?’ the Yamabushi asked.

‘Well, I’m capable of a miracle or two as well,’ Ikkyu said. ‘For example, I can make water with my own body.’ So saying, Ikkyu pulled out his penis and urinated on the flames surrounding the bodhisattva, putting them out.”

In his old age Ikkyu finally took on some students and even got enticed in rebuilding a precious temple; the memorial temple for the beloved Daito Kokushi. But even here he was most unconventional and had his girl friend Mori visit him often. Even when he was 80, the two could be heard in the evenings playing duets. She was a harpist and vocalist, and Ikkyu accompanied her on the flute.

We will have a respite from my historical journey through Zen Buddhism this time—just a few odd pieces that have come to my attention.

There are two “happy” documents to come out from the recent gathering of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (to be distinguished from the more conservative Missouri Synod). There’s probably a lot more good stuff going on there, but it’s these two that caught my attention. First of all there was a “declaration of unity” with the Roman Catholic Church. It admits that there still are some real issues that need addressing but a “basic unity” is there and is more a process that we all are involved in. (By the way, Pope Francis is going to Lund, Sweden in October to participate in a celebration of the Protestant Reformation.) I always thought a lot of the Protestant-Catholic disputes were just so much verbiage due to ill feelings on both sides, gross misunderstandings in all the words we “shouted” at each other, and definitely some decadence and arrogance on the Catholic side. When we calmly look at what we hold and believe in, then the differences do not go away but do seem to shrink.

The other Lutheran document was a simple one declaring the church’s support of the Palestinian people and condemning the Israeli practice of “apartheid” and the grabbing of their land. It is a courageous stand considering the powerful Israeli lobby in this country, but it is also in keeping with the sentiments of quite a few other religious groups. I am happy for all my Lutheran friends, but I do wish their church would get a bit more “mystical”!! (Not that mine is much better!)

Recently I again came across a well-known quote by Merton but one whose full ramifications are hardly explored. Here is the quote: “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves.” The fact is that we are trying to cross that abyss in all we do, try to do, in all our efforts and actions. This universal condition is explained in Catholic theology in terms of what is called “original sin.” But theology never gets to the nitty-gritty of what this really means in everyday life except in abstract words like “sin,” “greed,” “lust,” etc. And it readily loses the fact that religion itself shares in this problem. In other words religion itself can easily be part of the problem and not just part of the solution.

Now Buddhism, for one, has a more existential word: “suffering”–that which is that deep dissatisfaction in pursuit of this self that we feel is “graspable” in or through some experience out there; something that frees us from that spiritual vertigo of that abyss as deluded we imagine ourselves having crossed it. Modern life is so good at that. Visualize those racing greyhounds chasing a virtual rabbit, round and round they go, and never do they catch it. Such is a good picture of what is going on in all seeking of power and wealth and status and name and adulation and fame and possessions and yes of course the continual play of sex; you see this pursuit in endless shopping of something “ever new,” some gimmick to give a temporary relief from the anxiety of sensing that abyss within ourselves, of sensing that we are not really “ourselves” but some image. Here we can also find religion as this kind of “gimmick”–an infantile religion that keeps us in an infantile place.

Zen is really good at addressing this problem; and here I don’t mean just Zen Buddhism, but the heart of it all which is really Zen and which is at the heart of all true mysticism (this last statement I admit can be argued). All those good old Zen masters in China and Japan, all their words and gestures, everything they did and were, all this simply pointed at the “overcoming” of that abyss, at the full realization of selfhood, at the resolution of what seems like an unbridgeable duality. Now as I said all authentic religious mysticism deals with this also, but it’s not just religion that’s seeking an answer here. In the 1950s it became apparent that psychoanalysis was a secular version of an indepth analysis that dealt with this problem. At least this seemed the case with some great figures like Erich Fromm, who not only was open to religious language but also engaged in dialogue with Zen and religion through figures like D.T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton.

In 1957 Erich Fromm organized a conference around the topic of Zen and psychoanalysis. A number of practitioners came, such as Richard De Martino who was a psychoanalyst and a student of Zen and whom I found very illuminating, and of course D. T. Suzuki. Here is a summary of some things that Fromm had to say:

“At the beginning of the century, people coming to psycho­analysis were mainly those suffering from symptoms (i.e. paralyzed limbs, obsessional thoughts and actions). Now the majority of patients are those suffering from an “inner deadness”; they are generally unhappy with their lives wherein success has lost its satisfaction. This inner deadness manifests in the individual as an alienation from self, others and nature. Life poses the question – “how can we overcome the suffering, the imprisonment, the shame which the experience of separateness creates; how can we find union within ourselves, with our fellow man, with nature?” One is driven to solve this Koan – even in insanity an answer is given by striking out the reality outside of ourselves, living completely within the shell of ourselves and thus overcoming the fright of separateness, or alienation. The answers are only two: to find unity through regression to the pre-awareness state; or to be fully born, to develop one’s awareness, one’s reason, one’s capacity to live, to such a point that one transcends one’s own egocentric involvement, and arrives at a new harmony or oneness with the world. ….   Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism, and is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense), fully related to others and to nature affectively; to become what one potentially is; to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness; to be creative (of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it – so that the world ceases to be a strange world ‘over there’ and becomes MY world; to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to be and to experience oneself in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.   Most of what is in our consciousness is “false consciousness” and it is essentially society that fills us with these fictitious and unreal notions. This ‘social filter’ permits certain experiences to be filtered through to our awareness, while others are stopped and held in the unconscious, e.g. not allowing the awareness of a subtle or complex experience (seeing a rosebud in the early morning, a drop of dew on it, while the air is still chilly, the sun coming up, a bird singing)   because the social filter does not consider such a multi-sense experience as sufficiently ‘important’ or ‘eventful’ to be recognized.

Again, certain cultures do not form words or vocabulary to recognize perspectives of reality not seen as priority distinctions. Different cultures have varied logic processes, and the logic of a reality can only be perceived through one’s cultural social filter. The filter of one’s culture may not allow one to be aware of certain attitudes or inclinations taboo to the group. The reason behind the social filter is that any society, in order to survive, must mold the character of its members in such a way that they want to do what they have to do; their social function must become internalized and transformed into something they feel driven to do, rather than something they are obliged to do. Were the society to lose its coherence and firmness, many individuals would cease to act the way they are expected to, and society itself would be endangered. In all societies there are taboos, the violation of which results in ostracism. The individual, cravenly fearful of ostracism, cannot permit himself to be aware of thoughts or feelings inconsistent with his culture, and learns to repress them.

Consciousness represents ‘social’ man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the Cosmos; it represents the plant in man, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be naturized. By repressing reality through the distorting cultural social filter, we “see as through a glass darkly (I Corinthians 13:11). Again, via cerebration we see the experiences as being, if not distorted, unreal – e.g. I believe I see – but I only see words; I believe I feel, but I only think feelings. The cerebrated person is the alienated person, the person in the cave (Plato) who sees only shadows and mistakes them for immediate reality. This cerebrated alienation arises through the ambiguity of language. In using words, people think they are transmitting the full experience. The receiver thinks he sees the transmitted message, inasmuch as he employs his own personal meaning of the words – he thinks he feels it – yet for him, the receiver, there is no personal experience except that of his own memory and thought. When he thinks he grasps reality, it is only his brain-self that grasps it, while he, the whole man (eyes, hands, heart, belly) grasps nothing – in fact, he is not participating in the experience which he believes is his.”

(The extended quote above is from notes on the conference that I found on the internet. I believe these are summaries of Fromm’s talk.)

And here is a direct quote from Fromm during this conference:

““Well-being is the state of having arrived at the full development of reason: reason not in the sense of a merely intellectual judgment, but in that of grasping truth by “letting things be” (to use Heidegger’s term) as they are. Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense). Well-being means to be fully related to man and nature affectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists—and yet to experience myself at the same time as the separate entity I am, as the individual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists—to react and to respond as the real, total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world “over there” and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.”

Now psychotherapy has had a lot of criticism and many key critics and much of this is well-deserved, but in the hands of a specially gifted practitioner like Erich Fromm it becomes an acute tool to diagnose what ails us, not in theological language but in existential terms. Thomas Merton himself benefited from his encounter with Fromm and his kind of psychotherapy. Then there was also Merton’s famous exchange with the Iranian Sufi who was a psychotherapist, Reza Aratesh. Merton wrote a whole essay about his work, and that can be found in the collection Contemplation in a World of Action.

Recently I came upon this Zen story that pertains to one of the lesser-known Zen masters of China, Lung-t’an.

“A nun asked Lung-t’an as to what she should do in order to become a monk in the next life. The master asked, ‘How long have you been a nun?’ The nun said, ‘My question is whether there will be any day when I shall be a monk.’ ‘What are you now?’ asked the master. To this the nun answered, ‘In the present life I am a nun. How can anyone fail to know this?’ Lung-t’an fired back: ‘Who knows you?’”

A truly remarkable encounter! The nun boldly addresses her condition on a social/historical level, and the zen master takes to a wholly different level. You can hear the complaint in her voice about the inherent unfairness of her status as a woman–nuns are rated inferior to monks. She is quite right as far as that goes, and this is the historical predicament of all women in all the religious traditions. But she is a kind of proto-feminist and she raises her voice with this master. No passive “little flower” here! But the Zen master takes her to a completely other level of identity. She brings her problem, her pain, her anxiety, her disenchantment, her impatience, her sense of justice; and Zen simply uses all that for leverage to open up a whole new vista of who she is. Zen does NOT solve our “problems”; it uses them to open us up to an awakening to whom we really are. And from this will spring the needed creativity and resources that will allow us to deal with our problem.

(Recall St. Paul’s: There is no more male or female, no slave or free, no rich or poor, no Jew or Gentile….all these identity markers which were so important in Paul’s world are now radically relativized–slavery is NOT by the way justified as some folk seem to think by this kind of language–and a whole new identity reality is pointed at which Paul equates with “Christ.” That is the primary reality, and once you awake to that, then you can deal with all these other problems and divisions according to your new sense of identity.)

And to conclude I just want to share this image: a drawing by Japanese Zen Master Hakuin, 18^th Century. The title of this drawing is “Blind Men Crossing a Bridge.” An apt portrayal of the spiritual journey!!

Recently I have been reflecting on Zen (Chan in China). I want to continue in this vein here and next time, and then another posting where I hope to discuss some of the problems and controversies afflicting Zen. Now I would just like to ponder the giants of early Chan in China and Zen in Japan. These folks are among the most interesting and most important figures in human religious history.

Let’s start with the greatest of them all, Hui-neng, a giant among giants, the Master of all masters, and the Sixth and final Patriarch of Chan. His emergence is an incredible story in itself. Coming from a poor family in the south of China(638) and almost illiterate, he enters one of the early Chan monasteries, and there he is only a poor lay brother, as what we would call him today, who did nothing more than pound rice for the monastery kitchen. At a certain point he had heard someone chanting the Diamond Sutra and immediately it clicked with him–he immediately understood its real meaning, what it was pointing to, and his inner illumination broke open on his awareness. I won’t go into the longer story except to say that the Fifth Patriarch of Chan, who was the head of this monastery, eventually discovered the depths of this humble monk and recognized his true potential. He had Hui-neng come to him by night so that no one else would know. As he told Hui-neng, the other monks, the Master’s top students and disciples, would have a hard time accepting Hui-neng as a master considering his lowly status. But the Fifth Patriarch conferred on him the symbols of the transmission and sent him out to cultivate and deepen his already profound grasp of Chan. Hui-neng lived in the wilderness for over a decade, at times with ruffians and hunters, gently trying to persuade them from killing animals. Talk about the “hidden life!” Somehow he also learned to read and write. Eventually, like Jesus, he began his “public life” in South China.

Here is an important story about Hui-neng with a commentary by Merton:

One day Hui-neng was asked a leading question by a disciple: “Who has inherited the spirit of the Fifth Patriarch?” (i.e. who is patriarch now?)

Hui-neng replied: “One who understands Buddhism.”

The monk pressed his point: “Have you then inherited it?”

Hui-neng said: “No.”

“Why not?” asked the monk.

“Because I do not understand Buddhism.”

Merton: “The story is meant precisely to illustrate the fact that Hui-neng had inherited the role of Patriarch, or the charism of teaching the purest Zen. He was qualified to transmit the enlightenment of the Buddha himself to disciples. If he had laid claim to an authoritative teaching that made this enlightenment understandable to those who did not possess it, then he would have been teaching something else, that is to say a doctrine about enlightenment. He would be disseminating the message of his own understanding of Zen, and in that case he would not be awakening others to Zen in themselves, but imposing the imprint of his own understanding and teaching. Zen does not tolerate this kind of thing, since this would be incompatible with the true purpose of Zen: awakening a deep ontological awareness, a wisdom-intuition (Prajna) in the ground of the being of the one awakened.”

Hui-neng’s Chan is very sharply focused, and at some future time became formulated in this famous gatha:

“Special transmission outside the Scriptures.

No setting up of words and letters.

Point directly at man’s mind.

See self-nature and attain Buddahood.”

Commentary on the first line by John C. H. Wu:

“By a ‘special transmission outside the scriptures,’ is meant that the Dharma or Reality and Truth can only be ‘transmitted’ from mind to mind, that the scriptures are only a means of evoking or rousing our true insights, that besides the scriptures there are other means which may serve as an occasion to awake us to Reality, that this waking is a strictly personal experience…. All external things are but a reflection of our ‘Original Face,’ and all external teachings are but an echo of the true music of our self-nature. Let no one identify himself with his mere reflection or echo ; it is only by seeing one’s self-nature that he becomes actually what he is in essence.”

Hui-neng is not “against” scriptures; after all he learned how to read and he quoted from many sutras when he was teaching. What he is against is the notion that “reading, studying, or praying the scriptures” will lead to enlightenment. This kind of thing was prevalent in the Buddhism of his time and in popular Buddhism today. Hui-neng’s Chan moves intensely in another direction, which pooh-poohs the repetition of Scriptural language. All words, all language, are, in Merton’s term, only an “alarm clock”–and whatever words the Zen master uses, scriptural, koans, talks, everyday situations, etc., are only there to wake us up. Hui-neng’s Zen is not about “messages” in words that you then try to understand. (What this does to Christianity is very interesting, but we will tackle that in another posting.) And this now leads us to the second line.

Commentary by John C. H. Wu:

“This phrase has often been rendered as ‘no dependence on words and letters’(pu li wen tze). The word ‘li’ means to set up as a pattern. The idea is that, just as we must not cling to the letter of the Scriptures, so we should not expect others to be enslaved by our own words. A typical instance of this is where after he had spoken of the ‘true void of the self-nature,’ Hui-neng immediately warned his audience against clinging to the word ‘void.’ ‘Learned friends,’ he said, ‘when you hear me speaking of the void, please do not cling to the void. It is of first importance not to cling to the void. If you sit in meditation with a vacant mind, you will fall into a spiritless apathy.’ In fact, the true void is the same as infinite Reality. ‘The self-nature of man is so great that all things and laws are contained in it.’”

So again, the problem is not so much with words and language in itself, but in our relationship to words and what we make of them. The goal of goals is not simply to clarify or “spiritualize” our language–I have seen people who take up Zen take up a whole new language–they start speaking a “spiritual jargon,” dress differently, even trying to “look spiritual,” and people entering Christian monasteries tend to do the same thing–it’s not until much later that we discover what our real goal is and all this other stuff is, most of the time, harmless playing at spirituality. And our real goal, in Hui-neng’s terms and in the Zen that comes from him, is the actualization of our real self-nature in all our activity. And Hui-neng’s Zen accomplishes that by: “Pointing directly at the mind of man.”

Now here it is important to recognize that the word “mind” in this context does not refer to our thoughts, our rational ongoing thinking and willing, etc.–our usual use of this word. No, “mind” here is that deep ground of all this so-called thinking and willing. It is that which we cannot turn into “object” for our thinking because it is the very ground and foundation of our thoughts, feelings, vision, etc. And it is this which is the key to our self-nature and our enlightenment. This “mind” is never and can never be the object of our thinking, our analysis, our willing, etc.; we can never “find it” this way. It is not graspable in language or concept; yet it is always there at our fingertips, so to speak, in everything we do, feel, think, see, say, etc. It is by awakening to this “mind” that we recognize the essential nonduality of Reality and our being.

It is not at all clear how Hui-neng did this “pointing directly at the mind.” Monks did read scriptures and did meditate, and for Hui-neng this was ok but that could easily become a “numbing” instead of an “awakening.” So for him anything at all could serve this essential purpose of awakening: scriptures, meditation, work, everyday encounters, paradoxical language, even outlandish behavior. Mostly and amazingly he believed in “ordinary life” as the best “alarm clock.” All this gets very formalized in later Japanese Zen in the famous koans of the Rinzai school and that’s a whole story in itself. But for Hui-neng anything at all and everything could be an instrument in his hands to help a person “awaken”–primarily because what was important and significant was within the person–or rather THE person standing right there, not some message that Hui-neng was trying to communicate, not some teaching–he was really down on that. The awakening is to one’s own self, the true self that is complete and lacking in nothing. Any system or approach that places one’s goal, one’s “happiness,” one’s “perfection,” somewhere out there is hopelessly wrong–you will never “get there”–this is the essence of dualism. Here is Merton: “In the relation between Zen master and disciple, the most usually encountered ‘fact’ is the disciple’s frustration, his inability to get somewhere by the use of his own will and his own reasoning. Most sayings of the Zen masters deal with this situation, and try to convey to the disciple that he has a fundamentally misleading experience of himself and of his capacities.”

Someone asks Pai-chang: “Who is the Buddha?”

Pai-chang answers: “Who are you?”

Let us conclude Hui-neng’s story with some more comments by John C. H. Wu:

“When Hui-neng learned how Shen-hsiu taught his disciples to ‘keep the mind still to contemplate silence and quiet, and to keep up the sitting posture without lying down,’ he remarked that ‘to keep the mind still to contemplate silence and quiet is a disease rather than Zen,’ and that ‘to keep sitting for a long time only shackles the body with no profit to the mind.’ He composed a gatha:

‘When alive, one keeps sitting without lying down:

When dead, one lies down without sitting up.

In both cases, a set of stinking bones!

What has it to do with the great lesson of life?’

Not that he rejected categorically the practice of Zazen any more than he rejected the use of words and letters. But he was careful to remind his disciples of the one thing necessary to realize the ever-abiding mind and to see one’s self-nature to attain Buddahood. All other things must be subordinated to the supreme end of Satori or enlightenment…. Hui-neng was one of the most thoroughgoing teachers of non-attachment. To him it makes no difference whether you are a monk or a layman, but it makes a world of difference whether you are attached or non-attached in spirit to the externals.”

The above is interesting in that today Zen is almost totally associated with meditation, and so is also all of Buddhism to a large extent. In Hui-neng’s circle meditation was a practice but only an auxiliary practice if you will. For him meditation, like study, can become an obstacle like any other obstacles to this “direct pointing to the mind.” Koans, which are the central element of the Rinzai school of Zen today, are also still in the future here. But its “seed” is beginning to be seen here in the give and take of “monkish encounters” and the use of paradoxical language. And speaking of this language, there is to be great caution in how we understand Hui-neng’s use of certain terms–like “emptiness” and “void.” Here he is in complete harmony with the whole Mahayana tradition. Listen to Burton Watson, the great translator of Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts:

“This is the concept of shunyata–emptiness, or nondualism. Mahayana Buddhism in its writings manifests a profound distrust of words, insisting that the highest truth or reality can never be formulated or conveyed through verbal teachings, and Ch’an masters will be found repeatedly harping on this theme. When Mahayana texts designate the absolute, or highest truth, as emptiness, they mean that it is empty of any characteristics by which we might describe it. This is because it is a single, undifferentiated whole, and the moment we begin to applying terms to it, we create dualisms that immediately do violence to that unity. Hence even the term ‘emptiness’ itself must in the end be rejected, since it implies that there is something outside of emptiness that is not empty. If reality is a single, all-embracing oneness with nothing whatsoever outside it, then the entire phenomenal world as we know and perceive it, all time and all space, must be included within that unity. In the end, then, the absolute must be synonymous with the relative or phenomenal world; or, as the Heart Sutra puts it: ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.’”

And finally Wu: “When Hui-neng speaks in terms of ‘within’ and ‘without,’ he is referring only to the effects of the self-nature’s functioning. In itself, the self-nature is identical with the non-dual Real, which is beyond space and time and above all attributes that human language can offer. Human language is at home dealing with the things of the phenomenal world, the field of relativity where all things seem to go in endless pairs of opposites. For Hui-neng as for Shankara, the Non-dual is that ‘before whom all words recoil.’ Whenever a mystic tries to express himself, his words are like so many thirsty blinded lions running in all directions in search of a hidden spring of water. In this sense alone can we see eye-to-eye with Hui-neng when he asserts that there is no difference between the enlightened and the unenlightened, or between Bodhi and klesha, and that self-nature is neither good nor evil. In his answer to a special envoy of the Emperor, he expounds the non-duality of the real nature in these terms: ‘Light and darkness are two different things in the eyes of the ordinary people. But the wise and understanding ones possess a penetrating insight that there can be no duality in the self-nature. The non-dual nature is the real nature. The real nature does not decrease in the fool nor increase in the sage; it is unperturbed in the midst of trials, nor does it stay still in the depths of meditation and Samadhi, it is neither impermanent nor permanent; it neither comes nor goes; it is neither in the middle, nor in the interior, nor in the exterior; it is not born and does not die; both its essence and its manifestations are in the absolute state of suchness.’”

After Hui-neng’s death a number of his disciples establish various schools of Zen, emphasizing this or that aspect of Hui-neng’s teaching. But all Zen lineages today trace their origins to Hui-neng. To be continued…..

(Caution: there is a lot of hokey stuff about Hui-neng on the Internet. Even the Chinese government is into it–they have named a power plant after him. Also, they have his embalmed body up in some kind of shrine. Also, there is this horrid little movie about him in Chinese with horrid English subtitles on You Tube.) All this, of course, is the very antithesis of what Hui-neng stood for.)

The world of red dust. This is an expression found in ancient Chinese Zen and Taoist poetry (sometimes simply “dust”).  It is a vivid image and a sharp metaphor–have you ever driven down a dusty dirt road? Imagine now villages, towns, and cities with nothing but dirt roads. So it was everywhere at one time. For the Chinese Zen poets (and poets inspired by them) the “world of red dust” was the world of human agitation and deluded activity toward accumulation, possession, a manifestation of greed, a seeking of power, the give and take of commerce, the pretentions of government and officialdom, etc., etc. What an apt metaphor! But it also refers to something much deeper…there are many references to “dust” in the heart and the mind.

A couple of examples:

            “The mountains stand unmoving just the way they are

All day they let the clouds roll out and roll back in

            Even though red dust is countless layers deep

            Not a single speck reaches my thatched hut”

                                    Han-shan Te-ch’ing (translated by Red Pine)

And:

            “I carried books and a hoe in my youth

            When I lived with my older brothers

            Somehow I met their reproach

            I was even disdained by my wife

            So I left the world of red dust behind

            All I do now is wander and read

            Who’ll spare a dipper of water

            To save a poor fish in a rut”

                        Han-shan (the famous Cold Mountain, translated by Red Pine)

I am sitting at a campsite about 10,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada. All alone. The quiet is immense. Even more so than found entering an empty church or a true monastery. Oh yes, there are sounds–the wind blowing in the tall trees, the coyote at night, sometimes a bird…. But these sounds do not disturb the silence; in fact they only accentuate it, so you feel it sinking into you very deeply.

Merton quote: “No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence that is ‘heard’ when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say where there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.”

The wind in the trees says “Be Nobody.” Do not be afraid to be Nobody. That’s what the wind and the solitude say. Zhuangzi’s and Lin Chi’s (Rinzai’s) “true person of no rank”–no credentials, not even religious ones. Enter that nothingness where the fires go when they go out. The fire of your ego identity will go out too, with all its grasping at this or that identity. A scary invite. So misunderstood. Something in us pushes us to be “somebody,” to have all that stuff and all those people telling you who you are, that you are somebody. The world of red dust.

Las Vegas, Wall Street, the Pentagon, etc.–all these are merely externalizations of what we are inside, of the “dust” of our minds (or “hearts,” the hesychast would say). But there are deeper levels still.

Now I think of Ash Wednesday and our ritual: You are dust, and to dust you shall return. This is another and somewhat different use of “dust,” but it points in the same direction.

The Tibetan Buddhists express all this with different images. Some of them that are borrowed from their own native shamanistic Bon tradition are the demons, so prevalent in many of their festivals and rituals. The demons are all within one’s mind and heart, they are the devouring passions that eat people up with their unending demand for fulfillment. So, the seeking of liberation. The Christian Gospels touch on this in their own way also. Recall the various parables of Jesus and his sayings. Recall that vivid image of the man who is totally wrapped up in expanding his “barn” not realizing that he will soon die. And the Desert Fathers really read the Gospels in such an interpretative scheme.

It’s a very cool evening at 10,000 feet; the city below me is sweltering in heat. Interesting contrast! It’s so cold I am trying to build a fire to warm up. Full moon and wind. I am reminded of a Jack London short story, “To Build a Fire,” a story of a man who freezes to death in the Yukon as he is unable to build a fire. I read this story decades ago, in high school. Never have seen it since. Funny what things you remember at what points in your life. Mostly it is the red dust we carry within.

Why is it that all of us “good people” get so caught up in the red dust of religion? God is then no more than our own ego identity projected large, really large! The call to be Nobody is then totally incomprehensible; religion then becomes a way of enhancing the self, immunizing the self, instead of deconstructing the self. The Upanishads make it a Divine Calling. You are THAT! The Divine Reality does not make a big deal about being God! The Divine Reality is the “Ultimate Person of No Rank,” the Ultimate Nobody, abiding and hiding within all that is, or nothing would be. And the New Testament invites you to recognize yourself as a “child of God.” What if that’s the same call? I am beginning to agree more and more with Abhishiktananda, that without the interpretative schemes we find in Asia, Christianity has only a faint grasp of the “gift of God” and all that implies. Christianity itself partakes of the world of red dust — the delusions and confusions of human beings. Certainly this is not the “orthodox” view!

Merton’s “true self,” Lin Chi’s “the true person of no rank,” the Upanishad’s “You are THAT,” even the New Testament’s “child of God” language, all these point to something that is impossible to point to. That’s why all this language is mostly paradoxical, symbolic, and indirect.  Perhaps they all do not refer to the same thing, but what they do refer to has this common characteristic that it is not something that you can “grasp” and make it a possession or something that your ego can hold before itself. Who you truly are is therefore this Nobody which defies all categorizations–not something you can look at in the mirror and admire and measure and enhance, etc. All this is in the world of red dust. Who you really are is so limpid, so clear, so pure, so lucid, so luminous, that not a speck of dust can find a place to land. True religion is NOT “cleaning up all the dust”—that’s the shallow view of religion whether Buddhist or Christianity or anything else. Rather it is a realization, a waking up, to what is Real….

Consider one of the most significant, most profound and most fascinating encounters in the history of world religions which occurred when Bodhidharma met the Emperor of China. Recall that Bodhidharma was the Indian Buddhist monk who had inherited the mantle of transmission of that which was later called Chan or Zen, and he came to China for some reason to “spread this Gospel.” (Recall that Buddhism had already been in China for several centuries, but not the Chan kind. Let me now relate this story in the words and translation of John C. H. Wu:

“Bodhidharma arrived in south China in 527, and was immediately invited by Emperor Wu of Liang to his capital, Nanking. In his audience with the emperor, a devout Buddhist, the latter is reported to have asked, ‘Since I came to the throne, I have built countless temples, copied countless sutras, and given supplies to countless monks. Is there any merit in all this?’ ‘There is no merit at all,’ was the unexpected reply of the Indian guest. ‘Why is there no merit?’ the emperor asked. ‘All these,’ said Bodhidharma, ‘are only the little deeds of men and gods, a leaking source of rewards, which follow them as the shadow follows the body. Although the shadow may appear to exist, it is not real.’ ‘What then is true merit?’ ‘True merit consists in the subtle comprehension of pure wisdom, whose substance is silent and void. But this kind of merit cannot be pursued according to the ways of the world.’ The emperor further asked, ‘What is the first principle of the sacred doctrine?’ ‘Vast emptiness with nothing sacred in it!’ was the answer. Finally the emperor asked, ‘Who is it that stands before me?’ ‘I don’t know!’ said Bodhidharma, and took his leave.”

The Emperor is a devout Buddhist who is caught up in the “red dust” of his own religion. There is this self that accomplishes these pious acts and then waits for its reward; and of course the real reward is that all these acts come back and “congratulate” the doer and confirm the self in its illusory existence. People in monastic life do this all the time, and it is a waste of their monastic life. The trouble, of course, is not with the acts themselves but the mind of the doer. The Emperor, without realizing it, exhibits a typical dualistic vision. Can you see the comparable dynamic in Christianity? Well, the next statement by Bodhidharma will inevitably seem to most Christians as nihilistic and totally incompatible with Christianity: Vast emptiness with nothing sacred in it. But this is precisely the language of Chan for nondualism in all its deepest forms.

Much more about this later…..

This is the title of a marvelous book by Bill Porter (Red Pine). The subtitle tells you what it’s all about: a pilgrimage to China. Much more than that it is a personal account of a pilgrimage to the places where Chinese Zen got established and grew into the powerful tradition that later influenced Japan so much and through which we in the West have learned about Zen and Buddhism. Buddhism began in India (and that has its own interesting history), but it’s not until Buddhism gets into China and meets Taoism that Zen emerges.

I had commented on an earlier book by Red Pine, the one where he began to search for hermits in China. This was long after the Cultural Revolution which had done so much damage to all the old monasteries, temples and hermitages; and it was after the new government eased up on its anti-religious ideology. In fact now it sees the monastic movement as a valuable cultural and historical artifact, and the monks seem to be getting some government support in rebuilding the temples and monasteries.

So a number of years before this current pilgrimage, Red Pine had gone into China in search of living hermits and the hermit tradition–Road to Heaven. This was a really ground-breaking kind of work because even as many were aware of a great hermit tradition in China, most people, including many Chinese, were thinking that this was a thing of the past. Red Pine’s book was an eye-opener, and apparently it was quite popular when it was translated into Chinese. The Chinese were happy to rediscover this tradition as being alive in their very midst. This book also inspired a documentary film maker to go into China and record some of these hermits and the movie is readily available: “Amongst White Clouds.” Well, on this particiular pilgrimage Red Pine is focused on visiting the key sites associated with the 6 great patriarchs of Chan Buddhism (Zen) and the development of Zen in China. The book is very informative about this period of Zen, but all the Chinese names and place-names can get very confusing if you are not familiar with the terrain. More importantly for a western Christian monk is the pattern of life that these monks engage in–all the similarities and all the differences, and there is much to learn there. Then, finally, there are all the personal vignettes that Red Pine narrates, both from the immediate present of the pilgrimage and from his own past. Sometimes they are funny; sometimes very poignant, moving and illuminating. All in all a superb book.

So, first of all, there are various points that Red Pine makes about the origins of Zen–some of them well-known, some not so well-known. We all have heard the story of the very beginnings of Zen: after the Buddha’s enlightenment and when followers had gathered around him, one day he got the whole group together, and there were hundreds of them, and they were all waiting for instruction from him, a talk, as he was their teacher now. But this time all he did was hold up a flower before them. Most of them just looked puzzled, not knowing what this was all about. All stared dumbly or bewildered–except Kashyapa. He only smiled, but it was a smile that showed total understanding. The Buddha said that Kashyapa had understood the teaching, and he gave him his own robe and bowl as a sign of transmission. It was a wordless transmission, and it is this transmission that later Zen masters look on as the beginning of Zen. Zen was not and could not ever be put into words.

But we have to remember that this was India, and the Indians have a penchant and a talent and a habit of elaborating things! Witness the enormity of the Hindu Vedic literature, and the Indian epics make the western Iliad and Odyssey seem like short stories! So Buddhism in India, over the course of several centuries, developed quite an extensive literature and teaching doctrine and methodologies and various schools. Inevitably Buddhism expanded into other neighboring areas and that included China–this was actually even before Buddhism came into Tibet.   In Tibet, the elaborate Indian Buddhism became even more elaborate as it incorporated a lot of the native, shamanistic Bon religion of the Tibetans. In China something different happened.

The Chinese had their own native religion: Taoism. This had its roots in the archaic shamanistic religion of prehistoric China, and it too had its variant developments. One was a kind of pop Taoism which included a lot of magic and paranormal practices and manifestations; and there seems to be a wholly different Taoism in the masterpieces of such figures as Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi. There the emphasis is in this mysterious Tao, in a harmony that transcends all human calculations and conceptualizations. There was also in China the quasi-religion of Confucianism, which was generally the ideal of the ruling class and for much of the populace. When Buddhism came to China, it was pretty much accepted or seemed to most as a variant of Taoism and allowed to co-exist. This first Buddhism in China was not Zen. In Red Pine’s words: “The Buddhists…were into works: ascetic practices, meditation aimed at suppressing the passions, shamanistic incantations, and magic.” When the Indian monk Bodhidharma arrived in China around 475 CE, his Buddhism was a totally different creature. We have no idea how the line of development traveled from Kashyapa to Bodhidharma, which spanned several centuries, but the fact is that Bodhidharma was something very different from the usual Buddhism–and that included India of course. Now there is a dispute among scholars of Buddhism whether Bodhidharma bought a fully realized Zen to China or that in fact he was influenced by the Taoism he found and so Zen emerged as a result. Red Pine is in the minority when he believes that Taoism had nothing to do with the beginnings of Zen in China, and I find his argument convincing, but who knows!?

Nobody rolled out the red carpet for Bodhidharma in China when he arrived. He moved north to an already established Buddhist monastery, the now-famous Shaolin monastery. Today this place is mostly a tourist trap. It is famous for its Kung Fu adherents, and over a million tourists visit this place every year–imagine thousands coming to a monastery on a daily basis. But there is very little spiritual seeking here, but the government loves this place for the tourist money it brings and supports it. Unfortunately and perhaps inevitably, the recent abbot of Shaolin was involved in some kind of scandal a few years ago, and I am not sure how that turned out. The only reason Red Pine wanted to visit here was something that the general public does not pay any attention to: a small cave high up a mountain above Shaolin. This is where Bodhidharma meditated for over 9 years facing a wall. That was his only practice. From that small seed emerged that great and beautiful flower of Zen.

So Bodhidharma was the First Patriarch of Zen. This was no easy or simple thing. Bodhidharma developed plenty of enemies: other Buddhist monks, some Taoists and Confucians, and plenty of government officials. Here is Red Pine: “Zen was crazy, if not dangerous, for it called into question the understanding of those who considered themselves the purveyors of the means to liberation. It was said that when Bodhidharma died in 536, it was the result of the sixth attempt on his life–all by poison. Assassinations were common, even in religious circles.” Bodhidharma seemed like a threat, at least to some, in that he minimized acts of piety and learning and hierarchies. When the Emperor asked him how much merit the Emperor had accrued in building many Buddhist temples, Bodhidharma told him, “None!” He taught that every person was a buddha; that the only way to liberation was to look into one’s mind; you are only one thought away from Buddhahood, and meditation was “the gate.”

Now we come to the Second Patriarch of Zen, Hui-k’o. Here is Red Pine again: “Hui-k’o…was born in 487…his parents were Taoists, but he studied the Confucian classics in his youth with a view to becoming a government official. And he seemed destined to become one until his parents died and he lost heart in a worldly career and turned to Buddhism. In 519, at the age of thirty-two, he became a monk and studied with Master Pao-ching at Hsiangshan Temple near Loyang. The kind of Buddhism practiced in North China at that time was not Zen but a mixture of Hinayana and early Mahayana practices aimed at eliminating the passions. [my interjection: this kind of thing took place also in Christian monasticism with a wrong-headed application of Desert Fathers and also various Orthodox ascetic writers. That’s why Merton was so intrigued by Zen, because it is so much more liberating to simply see what is really going on in your mind when your passions are roused.] What Hui-k’o first studied was what later Zen masters would call Dead Tree Zen, as opposed to Living Zen…. After eight years with Pao-ching, Hui-k’o decided to look elsewhere for instruction. He didn’t have to look far. The sacred mountain of Sungshan was a two-day walk southeast of Loyang, and at Sungshan’s Shaolin Temple Hui-k’o heard about this Indian monk named Bodhidharma. The most popular version of what happened next has…Hui-k’o hiking up the trail behind the temple to a cave where Bodhidharma was meditating and asking the First Patriarch for instruction. When Bodhidharma paid no attention to his visitor, Hui-k’o continued to stand outside the cave and wait. He stood there for several days. Even when it started snowing, he continued to stand there. Finally, in an act of desperation, Hui-k’o cut off his left forearm and put it before Bodhidharma as an offering. This got Bodhidharma’s attention, and he asked the Chinese monk what he wanted. Hui-k’o said he couldn’t still his mind, and he asked for Bodhidharma’s help. When Bodhidharma asked him to show him this mind he couldn’t still, Hui-k’o said he had tried everything but he couldn’t get hold of it. Bodhidharma said if that was true, then he had already stilled his mind. Hui-k’o suddenly realized the true nature of mind and became Bodhidharma’s disciple. Hui-k’o stayed with Bodhidharma for six years. Finally, in 534, the Indian Zen master gave Hui-k’o his robe and bowl as symbols of authority to teach in his place, and the two monks parted company.”

Now whether this story is literally true or a sort of parable is not important. What it points to is a certain kind of determination and commitment that Zen calls for. This is no New Age meditation workshop/ retreat kind of thing–it calls for “all of you,” not just some aspect of you–in a way this reminds us of the call of the Gospel. In any case, Hui-k’o began teaching this new thing called Zen (Chan) and he attracted many disciples. He “aroused the anger of other monks who found the Zen teaching of Bodhidharma anathema, if not absurd. How could we all be buddhas? And how could Enlightenment be less than a thought away, since everyone knew it took a lifetime to achieve? They were also annoyed to see their students flocking to hear another teacher whose teaching they themselves didn’t understand and couldn’t compete with.” It appears that Hui-k’o was physically attacked on one occasion at least, and then due to civil unrest and a real persecution of all Buddhists in the north, Hui­­­-k’o fled to the south.”

Red Pine again: “When Hui-k’o led his disciples to Ssukungshan to escape the religious persecution in North China, there were no temples on the mountain. But Ssukungchan had a reputation as a good place to hide out, which is why he chose it. In fact that was how it got its name, which was an odd one. Ssu-k’ung meant ‘Minister of Works.’ It was the title of an official who hid there around the time of Confucius, and the mountain had been called Ssukungshan ever since. It was also one of Li Pai’s favorite haunts. In 758, shortly before he reportedly tried to embrace the moon in the Yangtze and drowned, China’s Poetry Immortal wrote a poem entitled ‘Thinking of My Hideout on Ssukungshan.’ There were lots of places to hide, and Hui-k’o and his disciples disappeared into the mountain. It was not until Pen-ching (667-761) settled there that a monastery was built. Pen-ching was a dharma heir of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen. When Emperor Hsuan-tsung heard about him, he invited the monk to lecture at court in 743 and was so impressed that he elevated Pen-ching to the status of National Master and bestowed on him enough funds to build the biggest monastic complex in China. That was the origin of Wuhsiang Temple, which nowadays wasn’t even a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of its T’ang-dynasty incarnation, when records say seven thousand monks lived there. No one knows how long Hui-k’o stayed on the mountain before he headed back north. He didn’t leave any records. But just behind the present shrine hall, there was a stone platform where he lectured. And further up the trail, there was a large gourd-shaped boulder where he was said to have transmitted his robe and bowl to Seng-ts’an, making him Zen’s Third Patriarch.”

Red Pine: “As with his teacher and his teacher’s teacher, Seng-ts’an left few traces…. Seng-ts’an followed Hui-k’o in his wanderings across North China, until the religious persecution of 574-580 sent them fleeing south. During the brief period that it lasted, monasteries throughout North China were destroyed, and five million Buddhists and Taoists had to return to lay life–but not in the South.”

That kind of number shows you how religious that culture tended to be and how popular monastic life was. In any case the persecutions and civil unrest came to an end under the Sui Dynasty, and Hui-k’o transmitted the patriarchship to Seng-ts’an and headed back North where he died. Seng-ts’an stayed in the South and it was here , at a monastic center and pilgrimage place called Tienchushan, that he met the future Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin (He Who Trusts the Way), who when they first met was only 12 years old but already inquiring into the nature of his mind. It is with Tao-hsin that Zen makes an important shift in its mode of presence among the people. First of all, Zen changed the practice and meaning of Buddhism in China; then, Chinese culture changed the style of Zen within China. Here is Red Pine: “Until the advent of Zen, the Chinese considered Buddhism a religion for the spiritual elite. Attaining nirvana was hard, really hard. And those magic powers that practitioners acquired along the way didn’t just fall from the sky. Buddhism’s inner sanctum was not for everyone; it was for the few, the proud, the ascetic. Even the first Zen patriarchs were presented in that light: tough as nails, able to look at a rock wall for nine years, or to stand in the snow for days and cut off their own arm. That was what Buddhist masters did; not your average monk…. Then Zen went south. No more rock walls, no more amputations. Beginning with Seng-ts’an, attaining the Way was presented as something within anyone’s reach. Of course, the teaching of not choosing, of nonduality, of nondiscrimination, the teaching that one’s very mind was all a person needed to be a buddha, the teaching that the only difference between a deluded person and a buddha was the delusions of the deluded person, this had been taught by Bodhidharma and Hui-k’o. And someone must have understood their message–both had other disciples. But the teaching of Zen didn’t make much of an impact until it traveled south, until Seng-ts’an passed it on to Tao-hsin.”

Tao-hsin then made a radical change in the lifestyle of Zen monks; in effect he was the St. Benedict of Chinese Zen. Here is Red Pine again: “When people think about Zen, they usually think of it in external terms: nonsensical talk, spontaneous behavior, or minimalist art forms. But that would be to look at it from the outside. If you look at it from the inside, from your mind, Zen is just a way of living. And that way of living is far easier to realize in a communal setting with the support of others than it is alone. Seclusion has its place, especially once a person has practiced in a community, but it was its communal approach to spiritual cultivation that was the strength of Zen. That was why it overwhelmed all other Buddhist sects in China, both in terms of numbers and in terms of influence. Its success was Darwinian. It produced a better-trained monk and more of them…. Zen was life-driven. It’s motto was ‘No work, no food.’ Zen monasteries in China are slowly getting back to this approach….”

This was literally a monastic revolution in the Buddhist world and elsewhere. Nothing like this developed in any extensive way in India or in the other Buddhist countries of Asia. Work was not considered a spiritual practice for monks; renunciants were to live by begging. With Tao­-hsin that radically changed. Red Pine again: “Up until then, Zen masters such as Bodhidharma, Hui-k’o, and Seng-ts’an wandered from place to place and occasionally gave lectures on the Dharma. But whenever they settled in one place for long, they either lived in hermitages with a handful of students or they stayed in monasteries at the pleasure of others. Tao-hsin changed this. He created the first self-supporting monastery where life revolved around meditation and manual work…. By the time he died there were more than 500 monks living at his monastery.”

So at this time, in the great T’ang Dynasty, Zen Buddhism explodes across China, and the other schools of Buddhism recede in numbers and importance. It is mostly communal monasticism and there is this revolutionary element of “working for your livelihood.” The hermit tradition was always strong in China, and it can be found in the Zen tradition quite a lot, but that is not the foundation of Zen. Solitude of this kind is usually seen as something temporary, as appropriate at some points in your spiritual development but not as a lifetime thing except for some very rare birds. Even with the Taoist hermits, and that’s where the hermit tradition was the strongest and most prevalent, in Taoism, there was still an appreciation for a certain fluidity where people could move in and out of solitude easily. Very often the Emperor called some Taoist hermit to civil service, and this was seen as quite normal and honorable to do. Today both kinds of monasticism are being revived–but with all kinds of complications. (By the way, I wish Catholic monasticism showed the same kind of fluidity with regard to hermits and communal monks. We keep insisting that one has to be one thing or another but not both! Lots of reasons for that, but we won’t go into that here.)

Tao-hsin next transmitted the patriarchship to Hung-jen. Here also Tso-hsin was an innovator: he stayed with Hung-jen for a number of years until he died. Usually, before this, the other patriarchs would depart from the master who had transmitted the bowl and robe to them–the new patriarch would strike out on his own. Not here; not this time. Hung-jen became the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, and he established quite a reputation for himself in time. When Hung-jen died there were over a thousand monks at the monastery that he had established. Hung-jen carried on Tao-hsin’s teaching both in spiritual matters and in practical, material matters. They built monasteries up and down China but always selecting sites that were far from cities and good for farming. Red Pine: “It was the selection of such sites that made communal practices possible, and it was communal practice that enabled practitioners to extend their spiritual awareness beyond the meditation hall to their daily lives. This was what Tao-hsin and Hung-jen taught their disciples, teaching them to practice everywhere, regardless of what they were doing. Tao-hsin explained it as ‘guarding the one.’ Hung-jen called it ‘guarding the mind.’ They told their disciples to be mindful in all that they did or said or thought to the point where the distinctions between doing and saying and thinking disappeared.”

Red Pine again: “It is hard to overestimate the impact Hung-jen had on Zen. His disciples founded both its Northern and its Southern schools and lectured before emperors and court officials. They were the first harvest of the Zen grove, and they were responsible for spreading Zen throughout China…. Hung-jen’s stature and the communal practice he fostered attracted people from all over the country. What attracted them wasn’t an ideology or a set of ascetic practices or something magical or mysterious. What attracted people was simply a way of life.”

But it may be that Hung-jen’s greatest contribution to Zen was the finding of the Sixth and last Patriarch of Chan Buddhism: Hui-neng. It is an amazing story how Hui-neng goes from being a peasant monk who worked in a huge monastery pounding rice — what we would call a laybrother in Catholic monasticism–how he went from that to becoming the Sixth and greatest Zen Patriarch is a story that never ceases to amaze. This is a story that does not get extensively treated in this book because it deserves a whole treatment in itself. Suffice it to say that Hui-neng is not only one of the giants of Zen but also the real foundation of Japanese Rinzai Zen, and one of the greatest spiritual figures in world history–and for me he is more interesting than Milarepa in many ways. Merton wrote about him; he was one of his favorites, and if you want to get a handle on what Zen is about you will need to confront Hui-neng yourself. We will deal with Hui-neng in another posting at another time.

Well, we have gone long enough on this topic, but we have only scratched the surface of the riches of this book. I focused on the historical material, but the book is full of personal anecdotes and encounters with Zen masters and nuns and laypeople and hermits. There are some very interesting observations about modern China and also the rebirth of Buddhism and Taoism in the new China. And also some very touching self-revelation by Red Pine about his own past. It was a trip worth taking, and I am glad he took us along.

Not too long ago I was sitting in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, patiently waiting my turn. The waiting room was small, and it was dominated by this huge aquarium, a very large fishbowl as it were. It was beautifully laid out with all kinds of colored gravel, fascinating rocks and plants, and of course an amazingly varied assortment of eye-grabbing fish. It was very peaceful watching them swim around this huge tank. But I also began to see something else here. The fish were in their own world and I was in my own world. The fish were seemingly aware of a boundary to their world–every once in a while a fish would bump up against the glass wall of the aquarium. Was I aware of the “boundary line” of my world?

What is more striking is that the fish seemed hardly aware of anything outside their world, what was beyond that “wall” they would hit once in a while. If you wiggled your fingers in front of the glass, you would elicit a slight reaction from some of them. But the comings and goings in the room seemed not to affect them at all–contrast that with a dog or cat in the room. So they exist in “another world” from us–the dog or cat are “more” part of our world. Now what I am getting at is this parable of the fish bowl. We all live in a kind of fish bowl with boundaries that we are hardly aware of; and at the same time most of us have no inkling of any other possibilities beyond that fish bowl life of ours. A few of us catch a glimmer here or there and perhaps we might want to tell our fellow fish-bowl inhabitants, but it is almost useless and truly futile. To know what is really beyond that boundary wall of our fish bowl we would need to radically experience a different kind of life.

Now this fish bowl thing comes in every aspect and level of our life. There is the political fish bowl; the economic fish bowl; the cultural fish bowl; even the physical fish bowl; and, yes, there is also the religious fish bowl. It is important to realize at this point that there is not necessarily anything wrong with this. Nor am I talking about our individual, personal kind of limitations. No, I am referring to structures whether they be the “given” of our environment or the “created” by our various cultures. These structures may very well be beautiful and/or well-made–that’s not the point of what I am saying. In a sense that’s irrelevant–whether the plants and rocks are arranged in a nice way or a horrible way, at some point some of us begin to wonder what’s beyond that “glass wall.” So what I am getting at is simply to recognize that you and I are living in a very real fish bowl.

Let’s consider the physical fish bowl first. I am sitting on a mountain in the Sierra Nevada. What a view in all directions from 10,000 feet up. What a beautiful world we live in. I can see for miles and miles; and at night, on a moonless night, the whole sky is lit up with countless stars that are light years away, hundreds of light years, thousands, millions, even billions. It is truly mind-boggling how vast this universe is; totally unimaginable the scope of the space between galaxies. That fuzzy patch in the sky is the Andromeda Galaxy, over 3 million light years away–that’s light traveling at 186,000 miles a second would need 3 million years to reach earth. So when you see that fuzzy patch of light you are looking at light that left that galaxy 3 million years ago!! Such enormity is almost beyond imagining, and yet, and yet, it is still a fish bowl…. An incredibly huge fish bowl, but still a fish bowl. What lies “beyond” this awe-inspiring vista? Like good Platonists we might meditate on the beauty before us and intuit that there is something “beyond” that and which is the foundation for it all. In a sense, when we ponder this beauty in the right state of mind we are responding to those “fingers wiggling” outside the fishbowl. There is a world “beyond.” But this “beyond” is not beyond like the galaxies…it is of an order that is something totally other. Of course we might also just exploit everything around us, the fishbowl as “resource,” and thrash about our fishbowl and be totally ignorant of it all. That is the more common thing.

Ok, there are all these other fishbowls that we inhabit: the economic, the political, the cultural…. It is amazing how we absolutize the boundaries around the worlds we inhabit…and so other possibilities become almost impossible. But I am not going to waste any time on these fishbowls but go on to something much more interesting to me: the religious fishbowl. This one is a tough one for all of us to deal with. Whatever religious structures we are part of and committed to, well, these do seem to be absolute and “final,” “all-defining.” No matter which tradition we are part of it is in fact a very real fishbowl: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem…. And like I said before there’s nothing negative implied in saying this. That is simply reality and very normal: we are the pretty fish swimming around among our beautiful plants and rocks that makeup our tradition. It is the world in which we truly live and grow. However, some of us begin to sense a world “outside” our fishbowl; something there is that is “beyond” everything we know or claim to be true or experience as real. This is very difficult because we are so committed to our religious concepts, formulations, rituals, etc. This was certainly true of Merton; he wanted to learn from other traditions, especially Buddhism, because he sensed a whole spiritual world outside the formulations of his own tradition; but he did not really want to “tinker” with the key formulations of Christian spirituality. The person who went way beyond all that was Abhishiktananda. In a very real sense he seemed to do what is really impossible: live in two fishbowls at the same time! By the end of his life he was ready to reinterpret a lot of fundamental Christian formulations in the light of his new experience. He could no longer just swim along within the usual rocks and plants no matter how pretty they seemed.

But let’s be very clear about this: you are always in some fishbowl and it is a delusion to think that you “break free” by dropping your traditional symbols or changing your traditional formulations willy-nilly (as too many liberal Christians seem to believe). Each and every religious tradition is its own fishbowl but its adherents will hardly acknowledge such a state. Each and every religious tradition tries to give an all-encompassing explanation of reality in the terms available to it in its fishbowl. My own tradition, Catholicism, is really good at this and does not hesitate to claim a kind of universality that explains it all as it were. From this standpoint all the other traditions are respected and accepted as partial or incomplete “goods.” In other words all the other traditions are really part of the Catholic fishbowl, only in this incomplete manner. If you think this is peculiar to Catholicism, you would be wrong. I read a talk by the Dalai Lama in which he praised all the other religious traditions and especially Christianity and asked his Tibetan Buddhists to respect all these traditions, and he said they all contained something good and important and were perhaps the best way for a particular person to follow; but at the end of it all he could not acknowledge that there was anything other ultimately than Buddhist enlightenment at the end of the road as it were, and that eventually this is what everyone finally gets to. Now that sounded very much like the Catholic view but coming from another place. So each and every tradition represents itself as a “final answer” to what human beings seek, but that answer is always in terms of what is within that fishbowl. This is nothing negative; it is simply the inevitable nature of human knowledge and discourse and vision. There is no such thing as “leaving the fishbowl.” But some of us may at some point “bump against that glass wall,” or sense some fingers wiggling out there, and begin to wonder about some “beyond” that is truly beyond our fishbowl. At a certain point we may begin to talk to others about what we sense of this “beyond,” and here we might find ourselves as outcasts, as strangers and aliens, even considered as mad. There is a Desert Father story about this:

“Abba Anthony said, ‘A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”

To begin to be aware of your fishbowl is to risk seeming “out of it”–because to acknowledge the fishbowl nature of your position is to acknowledge that there are these limitations, and then the big question arises naturally, what is beyond these limitations? After all the fishbowl is what defines reality for most. Here is another example, a real historical example, of the difficulty one encounters when one “bumps up against the glass wall of a fishbowl.”

Early in 1941 a Jewish gravedigger was going from village to village in Eastern Poland trying to tell Jewish people that they were in great danger, that he had seen with his own eyes the Nazis gassing people in these mobile units with carbon monoxide–this was just before the big death camps opened up. This man was racing ahead of the death squads trying to warn everyone. When he got to Warsaw and talked to the Jewish leadership, they thought he was ridiculous or even mad. No one would listen to him until it was too late. It was just inconceivable that something so terrible could happen to them, who were so well ensconced in this social matrix. So, besides being an incredible historical example, it is a kind of allegory for the fishbowl effect that I have been speaking about. The Jewish leaders had a deep comfort zone within that cultural fishbowl they were in and no word could penetrate that glass wall. In a sense it was a psychological fishbowl more than anything else, and they were just too comfortable within this fishbowl. So this is a negative example, showing the possible negative repercussions of bumping up against that wall. But never mind all that. For most of us most of the time it’s simply just swimming along in our fishbowl serenely until one day we may quite peacefully get an inkling of something “beyond” all our words and formulations, a real glimmer, and we might be able to give some hint of that to our fellow fish, or maybe not…no matter. Let us listen to the gentle words of Li Pai, one of China’s greatest poets who lived almost two thousand years ago:

            You ask why I stay in the mountains

            I smile without speaking, my heart content

            Peach blossoms in the stream float into the distance

            There’s another realm beyond the world of man.

Quiet words, small hints, but who is listening?

Well, there’s a lot of candidates for this prognostication! One of these items below is what I am really pointing to–the others are an extra bonus!

 So, is it…..

Killer asteroids? Hey, they are out there…they have hit us real bad in the deep past and who is to say what the future holds…. And the really important thing is that if we spot one of these big guys, there is nothing really that we can do about it.

So, is it…

Drought? Some folks in the southwest and in California are saying that the drought is over. Wrong, folks! So far we have had only Intro to Drought, next comes Drought 101, and then comes Advanced Drought. A bit of wet weather during the past few months can fool you. During a long-range drought there will be a blip occasionally of wet weather even as the trend moves toward an ever-drier condition. So….the snowpack is only so-so in the Sierras–even with this supposedly mega El Nino; Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great reservoirs of water for Vegas, Phoenix, LA, etc., both are at historically low points even this Spring. Edward Abbey cursed the Glen Canyon Dam when it was built, creating Lake Powell and covering over a canyon that rivaled the Grand Canyon for wildness and beauty. Well, the curse is working…the water is going down so fast that there are predictions you will be able to hike the canyon in 10 years. The long term view is ominous.

Is it….

Climate change? It’s happening folks; things are warming up, no doubt about it. Global political leaders are either faking it or are self-deluded that what they are offering is substantial and will stop this warming. In any case it is not even clear that this warming is not just human-made but may also be a cyclical thing with the sun and the atmosphere. If that is the case we are really cooked.

Is it…

Elections?  Ugggghhhh! Don’t think that voting the “right way” will save us! As Rosa Luxumberg said about a century ago: If elections could change things, THEY would make them illegal.  Ok, so you believe you have this choice between the abysmally, godawfully bad and the less bad. So you vote for the less bad and breathe a sigh of relief. You think you have stopped a catastrophe. But here’s the sad truth: the really really bad is still coming–you have not closed the door; in fact you have put out the welcome mat! And here we come to my prime candidate for what I refer to in the title of this piece. The fact is that we are suffering from a very deep and pervasive incoherence and dysfunctionality as a culture and a people. Sounds kind of abstract and not very exciting, but it is this kind of thing that brings down empires and whole civilizations. The rot, the disease starts deep inside the culture within our very fundamental communication, our language. Words begin to be used in a very deceptive way. The novel 1984 gives a small illustration of this. We begin to live in a culture of lies and deception and even self-deception. We not only lie to each other; we lie to ourselves. And here we are not just referring to the traditional untruth but more to a deceptive use of language where we don’t really mean and act on what we say. We live in a make-believe, a pretense, an incoherence in the meaning of our communication. This leads to certain spiritual death, and then to a very real moral confusion where we can no longer tell what is the right thing to do. The end result is social and cultural collapse.

It is interesting that people as diverse as James Joyce and Gandhi stressed the importance of language in the moral life of a people. Merton picked up on this and noted the intoxication with violence and self-deception that the media and the political leaders of his time exuded. Clarity in language and truthfulness are the building blocks of a healthy morality and a robust spirituality. But as I have said, we are moving in the opposite direction and I would like to illustrate this with some concrete examples of a manifestation of this problem. We will begin with a rather bland, seemingly innocuous example of political “shape-shifting”:

“ President Obama took office promising to usher in an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability in the federal government. Back in 2009, when he said federal agencies “should take affirmative steps to make information public,” he promised that the administration would make openness a centerpiece of its agenda. But as the curtain closes on Obama’s second term, many of his lofty promises remain unfulfilled. For example, despite signing the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which was supposed to usher in a new era of protections for officials who speak out against waste and fraud, the Obama White House has brought more cases against whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. In other areas — such as a plan to improve the Freedom of Information Act, or a proposal to shine a light on federal spending — the administration hasn’t only fallen short, but sometimes undermined reforms that would make the ways of Washington more open to public scrutiny. Consider the short-lived office of the “ethics czar,” a position President Obama created to crack down on government corruption and malfeasance. It was a good idea, but one that didn’t last long — the position has been vacant since 2011.” (quoted from an article by Elizabeth Hempowicz of the Project on Government Oversight)

A lot of people pay no attention to this rather arcane, Washington-insider kind of stuff, but it is a symptom of a much larger problem. We are so used to “Washington promises” not being fulfilled that we think nothing of it. Not thinking of the far larger implications of this kind of deception and pretending. Here’s a more serious example:

There’s a lot of politically liberal people who decry gun-violence in this country, and the prevalence of guns all over our society. Ok. But you will hardly hear anything from these same folk about the problem that the good ole’ USA is the number one weapons dealer in the world, selling all kinds of weapons to all kinds of people–as long as they “promote our interests.” This was done not only under right-wing presidents but very much under Clinton and Obama also. If we facilitate violence all over the globe, we shouldn’t be surprised if that violence comes home to roost!

President Obama, the “progressive” president, called dropping the bomb on Hiroshima evil and he has forced a cutback on a nuclear program in Iran; yet he is updating and upgrading our own nuclear arsenal.   Wish we could ask Dan Berrigan what he thought of that. And here’s the thing: these “liberal,” “progressive” folk do offer us a bit of economic candy, they put a lot of sugar in the toxic brew that is our economic system, so most people just swallow this and are really afraid of radical change. Insecurity of sorts. But what happens is that we become tolerant of more and more outrageous pretense and deception.   Like this “war on terror.” The drone killings. Etc. As long as we get our little piece of the American pie, what do we care about what happens elsewhere. If we bomb a hospital, the President says, Oops! Sorry about that. But no accountability; just as with the banksters and the people who lied us into a war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. But we are awash in a sea of lies, a mirage of self-righteousness, a fantasy of American exceptionalism, the home of Special Ops and Special Forces. Think of this last example: the President authorized the sale of arms to Vietnam.   He opens a door to Cuba, hooray, and then opens a door to death and destruction in SE Asia. Why not? Our excuse is basically that of the corner drug dealer: hey, if we don’t sell it to them, someone else will. Here’s a more succinct and artistic presentation of the problem:

But lest you think that our problem is primarily political and economic, I would like to remind you that our churches are totally implicated in the lies and deception. Of course they do not protest at the deceptions of the government or the economy—did not hear a peep of protest as we invaded Iraq. The churches seem to be there only to “hold the hands” of the faithful and help them enter the next world. If that were the only problem, I could even excuse them. But the situation is much more serious. Some of them are active pushers of this drug of deception. Make it look like it’s one thing that they are about when it’s really something quite different that they are doing. Consider this story from the New York Daily News:

“Not leaving it to divine chance, the state Catholic Conference has turned in recent years to some of Albany’s most well-connected and influential lobby firms to help block a bill that would make it easier for child sex abuse victims to seek justice. The Catholic Conference, headed by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, has used Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker, Patricia Lynch & Associates, Hank Sheinkopf, and Mark Behan Communications to lobby against the Child Victims Act as well as for or against other measures.

All told, the conference spent more than $2.1 million on lobbying from 2007 through the end of 2015, state records show. That does not include the conference’s own internal lobbying team. Filings show the lobbyists were retained, in part, to work on issues associated with ‘statute of limitations’ and ‘timelines for commencing certain civil actions related to sex offenses.’ Other issues included parochial school funding and investment tax credits.  ‘They are willing to spend limitless money in order to basically keep bad guys from being accountable for their actions,’ said Melanie Blow, chief operations officer of the Stop Abuse Campaign. ‘I think they’re doing it because they don’t want to have to pay out settlements.’

“Timothy Cardinal Dolan heads the state’s Catholic Conference, which in recent years hired major lobby firms to block legislation designed to help child abuse victims seek justice. Added Kathryn Robb, an advocate and survivor: ‘If they need to spend that much money on lobbying, clearly, then, they have some pretty big secrets to hide.’ While a far cry from the millions in lobbying top special interests spend in Albany each year, advocates for child sex abuse survivors say the $2.1 million spent likely represents a worthwhile investment to the Catholic Conference if it can continue to block legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations on child sex abuse civil cases and open a one-year window to bring lawsuits for victims who can no longer sue under current law.”

So the Church is very fond of “talking the talk” with regard for care for the victims of clerical sex abuse; but it hardly can be said to “walking the walk.” For all the talk of addressing the problem and even solving it, actually the Church in a lot of places has spent enormous resources blocking accountability and making it more difficult for victims to get justice. Of course it not only seeks monetary protections but it cherishes its image above all else. Recently the Pope got some headlines because he supposedly expanded Canon Law in order to facilitate the firing of bishops who have hidden priest abusers. But as some organizations have pointed out this is a smokescreen because a real tribunal that was to be formed to examine such cases, specifically sex abuse cases, will not be formed; and furthermore the actual fact is that the Pope could have fired many bishops and cardinals in the recent past, but very very few have been touched in any way–and even if they are “fired” there is no talk of criminal prosecution for these guys. The fact is that neither Church nor State have acted to hold the bigwigs of the Church accountable. Here’s a piece of the story from Truthdig and the Washington Post:

“The Catholic Church has been struggling to remedy internal proceedings ever since it was revealed in 2002 that bishops across the nation shielded pedophile priests from consequences. Last year, Pope Francis looked to hold bishops accountable when he announced the creation of a tribunal with authority to dismiss bishops who played a role in covering up abuse. But now the pope has apparently changed his mind. The pontiff announced Saturday that he was abandoning the tribunal proposal and instead would clarify existing laws regarding the removal of bishops. According to Nicole Winfield’s report in The Washington Post:

‘The new procedures sought to answer long-standing demands by survivors of abuse that the Vatican hold bishops accountable for botching abuse cases. Victims have long accused bishops of covering up for pedophiles, moving rapists from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police — and suffering no consequences. But the new law was immediately criticized by survivors of abuse as essentially window dressing since there were already ways to investigate and dismiss bishops for wrongdoing — they were just rarely used against bishops who failed to protect their flocks from pedophiles.’ Winfield goes on to explain that the changes to the law mean very little. In fact, the only thing worth noting about the pope’s changes is that they make ‘no mention of the original proposal for the tribunal, which would have treated negligence as a crime and prosecuted it as such.’ “

Even the so-called progressive National Catholic Reporter missed this ecclesial sleight-of-hand. Now the Pope seems like a decent fellow overall, but the sad fact is that he is nevertheless also caught up in this web of deception and self-deception where the cost of speaking truly and clearly and then ACTING so is actually very high. Thus I would like to conclude with some examples of those who moved in the other direction, who showed that “wholeness of spirit” alluded to by that Desert Father who said “I am the same inside as I am outside.” In other words, you get what you see. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, too many of our political, economic and religious leaders are like magicians–they are doing one thing with one hand and something quite else with the other. Watch them carefully; the old adage holds: the “hand is quicker than the eye.” And their language is replete with deception, even in cases where explicit deception is not intended.

But like I said, there are counter-examples, and the first one is Gandhi. Here is a famous story to illustrate the point: A mother brings her young son to Gandhi’s ashram and asks Gandhi to tell her son not to eat sugar because it was bad for him. Gandhi agreed to talk to the boy but tells the mother to bring him back in a week or so. She is puzzled but does as told. When she returns, Gandhi takes her son and spends some time talking to him about how bad sugar is for him and not to eat it. After the talk the mother thanks him, but then she asks him why couldn’t he have just said that last week. Gandhi answered, “Last week I was eating sugar myself.”

Another example: recently in the news there was a story of a Unitarian minister, a chaplain in the military, who was stationed in Afghanistan. Every day he would see the drones flying on the way to kill someone and all the so-called “collateral damage.” He got sick of it. He quit; resigned his commission in protest. Never mind the political leaders, religious leaders have been almost totally silent on anything that we do militarily…except for a few like Dan Berrigan and this Unitarian minister. Of course the cost is pretty high for speaking out and few are willing to pay that cost.

Speaking of that, it just came in on the news that Muhammed Ali has died. What a remarkable figure and a counter-example of what I am talking about. On the one hand he was a clown and a comedian who had a lot of fun; on the other he was possibly the greatest athlete of the last half century. But more than all that this young Black had an extraordinary purity of heart that was hardly understandable in the circles in which he moved or in any church circles for that matter. In the early ‘60s, when he was entering his athletic prime, he started hanging out with Malcolm X and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammed Ali, and that scared a lot of white folks who wanted to hero-worship the heavyweight champion. He alienated a lot of people when he joined the Black Muslim movement, a weird sect of Islam here in the U.S. among a small group of Black people. As Ali matured and grew in vision, just like Malcolm, he entered the mainstream of Islam and by 1975 had actually become a Sufi. Hardly anyone in the sports media or the mainstream media understood what he was about.

At the very height of his athletic prowess when he was world champion, Ali spoke out against the Vietnam war with vigor and refused to register for the draft. This was even before Martin Luther King turned against the war. Here’s a quote from Ali:

““I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand: either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my Constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end I am confident that justice will come my way for the truth must eventually prevail.”

And another quote:

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” (Both quotes as found on Rawstory)

After such words Ali found himself vilified by the white media, lost most of his fans and supporters, held in contempt by white and black politicians, and even criticized by certain Black leaders. He was stripped of his title, forbidden to engage in any boxing activities, and made a pariah in the public forum. From many estimates he lost the best of his athletic life to inactivity, lost millions of dollars in earnings, and had to endure the hatred of many. It was not until 7 or 8 years later when the country itself woke up to the horror of Vietnam and at least a small majority of the country came out of the propagandized fog, that more people began to see Ali as a true prophet. Slowly his stature grew until he became globally a beloved figure.

So there are a few people out there fighting the system of lies today. Next month Chris Hedges and a throng of “truth-seekers” will be giving witness at the Democratic Convention . Here is Hedges in his own words(as found on Truthdig):

“On July 25, opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Cheri Honkala, leader of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, who was denied a permit to march by city authorities, will rally with thousands of protesters outside City Hall. Defying the police, they will march up Broad Street to the convention.

“We will recapture our democracy in the streets of cities such as Philadelphia, not in convention halls such as the aptly named Wells Fargo Center, where the Democratic Party elites intend to celebrate the results of the rigged primary elections and the continuity of corporate power.

“Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, other activists and I will march with Honkala. It is not as if we have a choice. No one invited us into the center or to the lavish corporate-sponsored receptions. No one anointed us to be Clinton superdelegates—a privilege that went to corporate lobbyists, rich people and party hacks. No one in the Democratic establishment gives a damn what we think.

The convention is not our party. It is their party. It costs a lot of money to attend. Donate $ 100,000 and you become an “empire” donor, with perks such as “VIP credentials for all convention proceedings,” along with tickets to lavish corporate and Party receptions, photo ops with politicians at the convention podium, four rooms at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel and a suite at a Yankees game, where a “special guest” will be present. Short of $100,000? You can become a “gold” donor for $50,000, a “silver” donor for $25,000 or a “bronze” donor for $10,000.

“We have the best democracy money can buy. The Wells Fargo Center and the fancy hotels in Philadelphia will be swarming with corporate representatives and lobbyists from Comcast, Xerox, Google and dozens of other companies that manage our political theater.

Honkala, who was once homeless—she lived for a while out of cars, in abandoned houses and under bridges—and who was the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in 2012, has long defied the elites on behalf of the marginalized and the poor. She led a protest at the 2000 Republican National Convention, (after being denied a permit for that as well), which saw 30,000 people shut down Philadelphia’s center over issues such as racial discrimination, police violence and poverty. She has fought for the homeless, the unemployed and the underemployed for three decades, through acts of civil disobedience —marches, the construction of tent cities and homeless encampments, and sit-ins—that often ended in arrests. She has been arrested more than 200 times.

She will be on the south side of Philadelphia’s City Hall at 3 p.m. on July 25, with or without a permit. And thousands for whom the Democratic Party is another face of the corporate enemy will be there with her……

“The loss of faith in the political system and neoliberal ideology is widespread. The corporate elites are pouring $5 billion into the carnival of presidential electoral politics in a desperate bid to keep us mesmerized and controlled. Democracy is endlessly invoked on the airwaves to legitimize the corporate and political forces that have destroyed it. Congress has an approval rating of 11 percent. Half of qualified voters are not registered to vote, and half of registered voters do not go to the polls. A little more than half of 25 percent—no more than 15 percent—of the electorate determines who becomes president. And this is the way the elites want it.

In our system of inverted totalitarianism, the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin pointed out, the object is to demobilize the citizenry, to render it apathetic, to convince the citizen that all political activity that does not take place within the narrow boundaries defined by the corporate state is futile. This is a message hammered into public consciousness by the corporate media, which serve as highly paid courtiers to the corporate elites. It is championed by the two parties that offer up fear of the other as their primary political platform.”

I will pray for Hedges and his companions, and I hope they do their thing in a Gandhian spirit and not get lured into a violent response. As it is the national media will portray them as rabble-rousers, etc. I think their efforts will be futile–but necessary. As for myself I want to head for the hills and live in a cave–something really really bad is coming. But Mother Nature and the Truth will prevail.

The word “mysticism” is not very much in favor in our society and culture. For too many this word merely points to various bizarre manifestations or simply just the paranormal, whatever that be. Even at its best, “mysticism” seems to refer only to some special experiences of some small elect group within a religious tradition…the “elite” of that tradition. As I have often lamented in my postings, at least within Christianity mysticism hardly seems to matter to the average church goer. What we badly need is a very basic, down-to-earth language about mysticism (kind of ironical in that regard) and an understanding of it that opens people up to the depths within themselves wherever/whoever they be. And finally we need to challenge our superficial religious culture and consciousness of a watered-down Christianity that is more about making people feel “comfy” within the aches and pains of modern life than about opening us to the depths within our hearts.

In some ways it is useful and important to talk about mysticism in universal terms; but that can also be misleading. In the concrete experience of people mysticism comes in so many different “flavors” and “styles” that it is bewildering to see any deep down unity of that experience. It’s only when you abstract from the varied experiences that you begin to see certain universal traits and common notions, but then you have only the conceptualizations of mysticism, not the reality itself. There are numerous philosophical issues that these last few sentences hint at but we won’t be getting into that. Suffice it to say that no one can/should claim that it’s obvious that all mysticism is “one” and the “same.” How do you get John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi and Eckhart and the great hesychasts of Russia and Mt. Athos under the same umbrella? And then there’s a short statement by Merton somewhere which is not picked up by most commentators that mysticism in our time will be quite different from classical mysticism. All this is only for Christian mysticism; how about then such figures as Ramana Maharshi, Milarepa, Hui-Neng, Ryokan, Rumi, al-Hallaj, etc., etc.? Or consider the personal/relational mysticism of bhakti yoga or most Christian piety concerning Jesus and compare that with the Buddhism of Nagarjuna or the advaita of Sankara. Only a superficial view of these people would claim that all these folks are about the same thing.

Given all that, it is still extremely important to get some universal handle for this topic; or to put it better, to find something in our hearts that is universal and seeks fulfillment and expression in the mystical language available to it, which in some sense also shapes that fulfillment. Consider the following quote from Abhishiktananda:

“In the heart of every human being there is something–a drive?–which is already there when he is born and will haunt him unremittingly until his last breath. It is a mystery which encompasses him on every side, but one which none of his faculties can ever attain to or, still less, lay hold of. It cannot be located in anything that can be seen, heard, touched or known in this world. There is no sign for it…. It is a bursting asunder at the very heart of being, something utterly unbearable. But nevertheless this is the price of finding the treasure that is without name or form or sign. It is the unique splendor of the Self–but no one is left in its presence to exclaim. ‘How beautiful it is.’”

In every work of art there is a “more” than just what the artist intended to be there. You may have a sense for that “more” even beyond the sensitivity of the artist. He/she does not necessarily have the resources to exhaust the meaning of what they have created. By analogy, the language of the mystic is not necessarily exhaustive of the meanings of his/her experience. That’s why it is advantageous and beneficial to read the mystical language of a different tradition than your own–you might have a sense of something there that will help you understand your own tradition so much deeper. The “more” in your own tradition may become manifest only with a different vantage point. This is not the same thing as a cheap syncretism.

The word “mystic” comes from the Greek word “mystikos.” Perhaps here lies a problem. The root meaning of this word refers to things that are “secret,” hidden, not manifest. The word “mystery” comes from the same roots. Originally the word “mystikos” applied most readily to matters and persons in the Mystery Religions of Hellenistic culture and the ancient Near East. One had to undergo a certain initiation in order to be a “mystikos.” This makes one a member of a secret group of elites who have this secret knowledge of the “other world.” So this is an unfortunate association. Nothing to do with real mysticism except that the latter does involve us in something hidden but in a very paradoxical way–or in a very Zen way if you will. In real mysticism what is most hidden is what is most manifest; and what is most manifest is what is most hidden.

Namaste. The traditional greeting between people in India; superficially akin to people in present-day USA saying “Hi,” “How are you,” “Hello,” “Good to see you,” etc., etc., and then the all important handshake.   In “Namaste” the hands are held palms together as in western prayer in front of you, and this parallels the western handshake. Actually to say that there is a superficial resemblance between the two is in fact a gross overstatement. There is actually very little in common between such greetings. To extract the deep down meaning from “Namaste” you need to explore the meaning of such a statement as: “God in me greets God in you.” Here we are very far from the western handshake!

The handshake, the western greeting, partakes of a very different sense of relationality to the “other.” It speaks, whether people realize it or not, of an economic relationship, the world of commerce and bargaining, a contractual relationship: I will be nice to you if you are nice to me. The western greeting and handshake is a kind of agreement; the handshake is an outgrowth and an extension of a contractual agreement–you can count on the other party for something, at the very least for a kind of mutuality that is the basis of all contracts, and we often hear it said, “His handshake is good enough for me,” or “You can tell a lot about a person from their handshake.” So we encounter the “other,” acknowledge his presence and in greeting we enter into an unspoken agreement to be mutually civil and to share and exchange whatever it is that we are about. And all this is most often left unsaid and even unthought, but believe me it is at the basis of all these greetings whether we realize it or not.   Now “Namaste” is in a completely different world. Here we are no longer encountering “the other” with greetings that have economic underpinnings. This is human relationality grounded in something quite different. For one thing, the very notion of “the other” begins to recede and the underlying unity or “oneness” is pronounced and becomes manifest. This is not a unity that is due to some contractual agreement, but it is a unity that is a fundamentally spiritual and metaphysical reality. And, yes, all this is quite there even when the “Namaste” is said with little thought.

Now you may be wondering what does this have to do with our discussion of mysticism? Well, lots! Just maybe the very notion of mysticism is impossible to understand within a culture that sees all human relationships through the lens of economic underpinnings. Within that kind of setting mysticism seems only bizarre. Maybe it is only when we are within the world of “Namaste” can we begin to sense the real meaning of mysticism.

In the western mentality (and actually in a lot of the East too, but mostly in the West) there’s this mindset: mysticism? Ok, how do I get started? What’s step 1? Step 2? Step 3?….give me a plan…a recipe…maybe a shortcut…let’s do it…hey, maybe there’s a how-to video on You Tube….ok, ok, now I am exaggerating, but you get the idea. Authentic mysticism does not unfold like that at all. It’s a long, long journey–with no beginning and no end, at least not in any sense that our little rational minds can grasp. Decades ago the Beatles had this lovely song about a “long and winding road”–that’s your life you know. You are THAT road, that trail through the wilderness, wherever you are, whoever you are.

(with thanks to the PCT hiker who took this photo)

There is only a kind of awakening to it, but you are on that road whether you realize it or not. Authentic mysticism unfolds like that–in the very heart of whatever life you have. With whatever aches and pains there may be, with whatever bliss there may be, with whatever turns there may be.   There is NO map, no guide, no how-to manual to YOUR life, your “long trail,”–the mysticism that IS you is your real life. Maps, plans, programs, guides, all these exist only for the abstract journey or as some sort of exemplar but be cautious even with the classic and great “maps” of various holy people.

There is this superb Hasidic story: Rabbi Zusya, a true holy man, used to say: When I die and come before God, God will not upbraid me by saying, “Zusya, why are you not yet Moses?” No, God will upbraid me by saying, “Zusya, why are you not yet Zusya?”

The Divine Reality is manifest in all things and in all people; but in each it manifests itself in this unrepeatable way and so it goes to infinity. The Divine Reality unfolds in your heart and in your life and manifests itself there in a way that it does NOWHERE else in the whole cosmos. In the Old Testament the Divine Reality is called a “jealous God,” and you can begin to see the true meaning of this term when you see the Divine as being “jealous” when you seek out its manifestations somewhere else than your own heart and your own being, which is “on fire” as the Burning Bush (and as the Desert Father Abba Joseph said, “Why not become totally fire?”). In the depths of your being you know the Divine Reality by a Name that no one else knows, and it is this that is the essence of your uniqueness. It is this Name which is hidden in the depths of God and in which you find your own self and the Self of God as One Reality. Once you awaken within the Divine Presence in your own unique life, you can truly say Namaste to all in the deepest sense.

Having said all of the above, there is still a very real place for a “clearing of the cobwebs” of consciousness, for a setting in order the disorderly passions, for training the mind in certain ways. The path of renunciation and asceticism has its rightful claims on us if we are truly “into” mysticism. However, there is an interesting problem and a common mistake here.   And this may be a peculiar problem within the Christian spiritual and mystical traditions. Too often certain key notions from the Gospels are used as grounding renunciation and asceticism: “taking up your cross,” “following the way of the cross,” “giving up your life in order to save it,” “following Jesus with your whole being,” etc., etc. These are extremely important moments and sayings from the Gospels and they have much more to do with one’s whole life, your whole orientation in life, than with some practice that may or may not be difficult and/or arduous. Let’s be very clear: the language of the Cross, Jesus on the Cross, has very little to do with ascetical practices and nothing to do with creating pain for oneself by some practice. It has everything to do with the real cost of discipleship in that path which plunges one into the Mystery of the Divine Reality whom Jesus called “Abba,” “Father.” The two should not be confused like they have been at times in the tradition. The rationale for asceticism has to do with “clearing the cobwebs of consciousness”; the Cross has to do with the most fundamental direction of one’s whole being.

And in conclusion I would like to end with a beautiful quote from a great holy man of the Kasmir Saivism tradition, Lakshman Joo:

“God is realized by everybody. He is perceived by everybody. God is realized by ignorant people. God is realized by those who have nothing to do with God. They have also realized God. And those who are only engrossed in household activities, those women carrying water from the river, who know nothing else, they have also realized God. So, drstah: he is realized, from all sides he is realized, let Him elevate us.”