July, 2009

Are you tired? Listless? Is life getting you down?

Are the girls running away from you when you try to pick them up?

Are the boys ignoring the handkerchiefs you drop?

Need money? Power? Fame? A nice car?

Then come to Hill Street Center tomorrow morning at 10 AM (details are on the link over to your left <<<) for ZAZEN WITH BRAD™!!!

Zazen with Brad™ is the answer to all your problems!

You will be happy forever! You'll get more high quality ass than you can possibly handle! You'll get a good job with higher pay! Every cake you bake will turn out more tasty than your neighbor's! You'll have massive abs! A tighter, curvier butt! Cuter eyelashes! Your tennis game will improve dramatically! Your ukelele will always be perfectly in tune! Your dog will never poop where he's not supposed to again! You'll see God!

...or not. How the fuck should I know?

But I do know this is the last class at Hill Street Center I'll be attending for the next 2 months. I'll probably skeedaddle right after for the World Guitar Show down the street. But who knows? You may be able to actually speak to Brad Warner himself!

Imagine two full hours at a house by the beach with Zen Master Brad Warner Roshi and just four or five other people (or however many show up). What will happen as you delve deeply into your Self with the help of one of the great Zen masters of our time, allowing you to experience realizations usually requiring years of sitting meditation? How much will your life change with this type of deep and intimate help from a true master? How deep will you go? How deep will Brad go? How much awakening will you experience? How will you feel about your Self after you awaken with Brad?

Direct and extended face-to-face time with an awakened master is an exciting and rare opportunity. Those lucky enough to receive this type of personal attention can experience years, even decades, of progress in just a few days, shedding illusions that have held them back, experiencing deep realizations about their true nature, increasing their wisdom and compassion, and increasing their ability to serve others, making their cocks three inches longer and their nipples so high and hard they can put a man's eye out!

How can you afford to miss out on such an opportunity???

Answer: YOU CAN'T!

While perusing blogs this morning, I came across the following comments from Brad Warner at Hardcore Zen:

"In spite of all the foregoing cautionary material, I still believe zazen can be a very good thing for survivors of traumatic experiences. Maybe even the best thing. It can put you directly in contact with the source of the trauma itself. By slowly and carefully removing the psychological barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself from these memories you can finally become aware that the memories themselves are just thoughts in your head. No matter what the content of your thoughts are, they are all just thoughts. This is easy to say but very difficult to truly understand because we’ve been taught since birth to believe in our own thoughts."

Now, I agree with Brad that zazen can be a "good thing" for trauma survivors, but there is something in his comments that needs to be addressed. Specifically, where is the body?

I have noticed that some male Buddhist teachers and students don't talk all that much about the body. In fact, some seem to ignore it all together. Buddhism is reduced to working with thoughts, being rid of thoughts, moving beyond thoughts. But what about the body? How can anyone address trauma without also focusing on the real impact such trauma has on the body?

When you speak of rape survivors, abuse survivors, survivors of war - the body is just as important a point of focus as the mind. Maybe even more so in some cases. Saying that memories of violence lodged inside of someone are "just thoughts" is horribly dismissive, and creates a barrier to healing and awakening for those who believe such ideas. I'm not interested in slamming Brad here, because Brad's words are fairly common in parts of the Buddhist world, both in convert communities and traditional Asian communities. And although I'm reluctant to make gender generalizations, and for the most part believe the way gender plays out is as along a continuum, in the case of addressing the body and dharma, I've seen more women teachers and students doing so than men.

Some of this disparity may be due to cultural conditioning. Men being taught that how they think is more important that what they look like. Although at least in the U.S., there is an awful lot of emphasis on the superficial, physical looks of everyone, so it's maybe a bit more complicated than that.

When I reflect on some of the older teachings I can recall concerning the body, what I remember is the body in the negative. The body as a source of affliction, of transient pleasure, of causes of suffering.(Forgive my lack of specific citations; I'm going to work from impressions today.) These impressions make me wonder if there has been a bit of dualism playing out throughout the history of Buddhism. And maybe some of us are continuing this today by emphasizing the mind over all else.

Here are some lines from Dogen's Fukanzazengi:

"At the site of your regular sitting, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it. Sit either in the full-lotus or half-lotus position. In the full-lotus position, you first place your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. In the half-lotus, you simply press your left foot against your right thigh. You should have your robes and belt loosely bound and arranged in order. Then place your right hand on your left leg and your left palm (facing upwards) on your right palm, thumb-tips touching. Thus sit upright in correct bodily posture, neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward nor backward. Be sure your ears are on a plane with your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. Place your tongue against the front roof of your mouth, with teeth and lips both shut. Your eyes should always remain open, and you should breathe gently through your nose.

Once you have adjusted your posture, take a deep breath, inhale and exhale, rock your body right and left and settle into a steady, immobile sitting position. Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen."

Notice how much emphasis Dogen places on the body, where to place limbs, what to do with the body in zazen. Body posture, body movement or non-movement is part of the path to enlightenment. See, some men get it :)

Going back to trauma, in my own experience, returning to those places in the body where physical pain is lodged again and again - that is the path toward freedom. In fact, even after my thinking has cleared, and distorted patterns have broken up, there has still been physical manifestations of things that happened long ago. I can sit in zazen and breath into those places. I can do yoga poses to help shift the energy blockages, and strengthen my body in a healthy way. Or I can get a massage, or take herbal medicines, among other things, to address the physical issues. But the main point I'm trying to get at is that we have to stop splitting the body from the mind. And I'm especially speaking to all the men out there who were taught, either directly or indirectly, that the body is secondary, or a source only of pleasure and pain, or just a troublesome place in need of control by the mind.

This splitting is killing us, and it's creating a lot of bad dharma teaching!

And we all should continue to dig into the history of Buddhist teachings with a critical eye to places where the body is overly de-emphasized, or treated in a way that places it far below the mind in terms of value or importance. I'm grateful to some of the feminist Buddhist scholars out there, such as Rita Gross and Jan Willis, who have dug into some of these issues in recent years. And to men like Jon Kabit-Zinn, who do focus on the body as an integral part of practice.

Maybe you know of others, or simply disagree with me. I'd enjoy hearing what others think about all this.

BTW: The dog in the photo is barking at you! Do you know why? Be wary of easy answers.

Sawaki Roshi:

A shower
in the middle of a fight
about irrigation.

After a long drought, they fight over water for the rice fields. In the middle of the fight, a shower hits them. Since the fight about irrigation depends on the condition of dry weather, if it rains, there's no problem. There will be no difference between a beautiful and an ugly woman when they become eighty years old. The original self is empty and clear.

Uchiyama Roshi: Because the fight about irrigation depends on the condition of dry weather, if it rains, there's no problem. Let's see: there is the possibility that if I go out now, I will have a car accident that will finish me off. If I were rundown by a car and knocked out, my thoughts, "I want this, I want that," my frustrated anger. "Oh....that fool!" or my longing for a certain woman would all be resolved quite spontaneously, like a shower in the middle of a fight about irrigation. As long as we are alive, we will have problems which are based on the assumption that we will continue to live. But it is also important to look at these problems with the assumption that in the next moment, we will be in a coffin. Then we can live in a more leisurely fashion, knowing that we don't have to get stuck in our own opinions, gritting our teeth and furrowing our brows. In a word, zazen is to look back on this world as if you were already in your grave.

Sawaki Roshi: Imagine thinking of your life after your death. You see it didn't matter.

.
Funny how, in the course of going to school, the printed word takes on a kind of elevated credibility. Because students pass tests and get ahead based on how much of what they read is absorbed, a habit seems to assert itself: If it is written or printed, it must be true or important. Or at least it takes on a forceful character in the mind. And if your advancements in life depend on written truths ... well, you can sort of see why the habit might grow up: If something is written and therefore important, then if I know what is written, I too am important.

All tables have four legs.
My dog has four legs.
My dog is a table.

Smart or stupid ... same habit. The tentative nature of what is known is rarely taught in a world of A's and B's. It is enough to know what I know and to find agreement among those who agree with me ... or even disagreement: That too elevates what I know and, by extension, who I am.

The fly in the ointment is that dog shit stinks whether it adheres to the shoes of a smart person or a dumb one. No perfume of smarts or stupidity can alter that fact. Life's lessons cannot be written, so the only real option is to revise our own habits, including the habit of imagining what is important or true.

Oh well ... others have pointed it out better than I ever could:

Swami Vivekananda said, "The mind (he meant intellect) is a good servant and a poor master."

The Zen teacher Rinzai said, "Grasp and use but never name."

But I guess you have to step in a lot of dog shit before you get their drift in any useful way. And that, when you think about it, really does elevate dog shit to the realm of wisdom. One man's 'serious' is another man's 'frivolous,' but either way, dog shit stinks.

There is suffering.
There is a cause of suffering.
There is an end to suffering.
There is a way to end suffering.
.

I'm sitting out in a little park near my apartment. Across from me, water pours from statue made by the sculptor Paul Manship (1886-1966), who grew up in St. Paul, and later became famous during the Art Deco period.

A woman appears to be taking photos of the statue, while cars pass behind her. The sun is beginning to slowly set to my right, while another woman appears in the park, walking her dog. Squirrels climb up a pair of large oak trees, maybe seventy or eighty years old. They begin to hiss at each other, as some leaves fall to the ground. The woman finishes her photos and stops to talk with the woman walking her dog.

I'm sitting here typing.

A tiny slice of the present moment, although even as I write it, it's already gone.

Life feels so transient when you pay attention like this. Nothing really is holding still, waiting for you to write about it, see it, do anything with it at all. It's just happening all together - so much so that even the stones lodged in the riverbed and the roots of the oldest, most stable tree aren't what they were before, just a moment ago. Not exactly.

A bee hovers around a tall, yellow flower beside me. The name of the plant escapes me, but it's very distinct, with large, long, and narrow leaves more than a foot in length and half a foot in width. The bee pauses, then dances off to another flower. I am watching, then stop to write. Watching, then stop to write.

Cars pass behind me, in front of me, to the side. What do the people in them see? Do they see much of anything of their lives, or are they just trying to get to some future which may or may not exist?

A woman raises her voice into a cell phone. What does she see as she is walking? What else can come in when we fill our lives up with noise and technology and pasts and futures?

Surely, the dog on the leash and the woman I just turned to smile at - they're taking in more of what is actually here, right now?

Maybe.

And maybe I'm just creating artificial divides like those with all the gadgets stuck in their ears.

Water pours from the statue: sun setting, wind picking up out of the east.