Rice and veg

 

I grew some things and chopped them up. I steamed them enough to call them blanched, and steeped them in rice vinegar and honey.  

It's not like I can't or don't buy groceries, but occasional water-bath canning gives one the cheery sound of lids popping, and a sense of life going ahead.

Pop. Pop. Six or seven times, then go look at the moon.

This is preparation for a winter in the hermitary. 

Pickled veg is famously what Asian hermits have with their rice (when they have rice), especially in winter. Stonehouse recalled having gone through a hundred crocks of pickles, more or less, at his hermitage.

Stonehouse  had a hermitage, whereas I merely have a hermitary, that is, in my case, a she-cave attached to a comfortable home. Sincerity comes in bursts of a few seconds; I feel I would make a terrible Zen leader. 

That's all right. We are bubbles on the stream. When I see three seconds of sincerity, I jump on -- free ride! 

In the morning, rice and veg.

-- shonin 

 

Forty-some years I've
Lived in the mountains,
Ignorant of the world's
Rise and fall.
Warmed at night by a stove
Full of pine needles;
Satisfied at noon by a bowl
Of wild plants;
Sitting on rocks
Watching clouds and empty thoughts;
Patching my robe in sunlight;
Practicing silence
Till someone asks
Why Bodhidharma came east,
And I hang out my wash

-- Shiwu (Stonehouse) tr. Red Pine

One's own deep peace

What's new? fourfold: 

1) reading, writing, watching events unfold, speaking, remembering are full of gaps, like data is dropping out in increments of about 1/10 second. I'm re-typing words in every sentence. 

2) sleeping all the time -- naps throughout the day, often right in the middle of reading or watching whatever 

3) alimentary system seems poorly, with many trips to the potty, not always making it, lots of clothing changes and doing of laundry accordingly. I'm not embarrassed; a body is a body and does not come with guarantees; however I wish I was still good at pants legs and sleeves and not getting into things inside out and backwards repeatedly under duress. 😅

4) I used to feel a flash of anger when interrupted while coding. The sharp intake of breath and pained facial expression I produced were quite alarming to the interruptor, so I generally made an effort to apologize and explain. This has spread into interrupted reading, writing, speaking, or even zoning out. I'm stressing every time I see a hand raised to let me know I need to switch on my hearing device and pay attention. It's exhausting both for me and those who have to communicate with me. I'm realizing that to shift my attention causes actual distress, which I experience as pressure behind the eyes and a short-duration dull ache in the prefrontal lobes.

Not much in the way of sharp pains, though, so there's that. No idea whether all this is CLL related or just normal demented aging.

I sit in the veranda with the Bear folk and watch for bats swooping in the gathering twilight, a good life. 

People do not realize how much they do not need; I have tried to impart this insight with varying success for 50+ years and often felt frustrated over this, but now just sitting out back seems to be its own right thing, a completion. 

Sometimes it's enough just to be responsible for one's own deep peace. 

-- shonin

 

 

You see the true realm of human life in the peaceful breeze and in quiet waves. You realize the original nature of the mind in plain tastes and quiet talk. 

-- Caigentan by Hong Zicheng tr. Robert Aitken with Daniel W. Y. Kwok

 

No problem

 

 
People who are unwell may find that their options appear to be limited. Waking with a dry mouth and eyes and a hammering heart, they wonder if they are going to be able to get up this morning; then they find (this time) that they can do it. They get up and go do a few chores, then find themselves short of breath and the hammer heart has not gone away, which is a little new. They go back to bed and sleep at midday, then awaken to find there is a cup of tea left for them on the side table by a concerned family member. It's not quite hot; that was an unexpectedly long nap.

Perhaps they struggle up again, re-heat the tea, and, spilling a little (Oh, hot!), wander out back to sit in the sun, going over what chores remain that could be done somehow. "I might move that little ash tree that came up in the lawn, find it a better home. I wonder where the shovel for that is."

Planning a task is not failure to be in the moment. Those who go out shopping must sequence their activities: "bag, check. List, check. Keys, check. Phone, check. Okay, leave a cup of tea for the old-timer and say I'm going out. Oh, she's out cold. Well, she'll figure it out. I'll just tiptoe away."

All these activities are miracles of right now. Planning and listing are the sort of thing those new to zen may feel they must struggle against, but not so. The past vanishes into memory and the future is merely ideation, but these memories and ideas are indubitably part of the present moment.

The trick is to be all of you all the time, because you are all of the universe, with its air and warmth and tea passing through "you," along with the sound of jays out back for the old-timer and the changing colors of the stop light for the shopper. If what you are doing is what you are doing, inhabit all of it, like a star shining into all parts of its stellar system and on into the great beyond.

-- shonin

Katagiri says: 

Taking care of right now is coping with an emergency case. So when a moment comes, whatever happens, just face your life as it really is, giving away any ideas of good or bad, and try your best to carry out what you have to do. You can do this; you can face your life with a calm mind and burn the flame of your life in whatever you do. This is Buddha’s practice. That’s why teachers always tell you to practice, devote yourself to doing something, and forget yourself. When you forget yourself and put your wholehearted effort into facing every moment, you can do something, and simultaneously you can rest in the continuous flow of life energy. Then you really enjoy your life. 

Suzuki adds:

Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of "form is form, and emptiness emptiness." When Buddha comes, you will welcome him; when the devil comes, you will welcome him. The famous Chinese Zen master Ummon, said, "Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha." When he was ill, someone asked him, "How are you?" And he answered, "Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha." That is the life of "form is form and emptiness is emptiness." There is no problem. One year of life is good.

Nap time

 

 

I have been reading Zen poets.
Cold Mountain resents his limp,
his former married life,

his former neighbors,
and envies, I suspect,
the beauty of youth.

He's at his best
lying on moss, letting
icy creek water

clean his ears, or so
he says. I'll trust him
on that; it's not like I have

no resentments of my own!
Stonehouse is enamored
of his little clay stove

which he feeds leaves
while he sits close, listening
to gibbons down the mountain,

howling. Does he ever invite
them to tea? I'll trust that
he does, and lets them

sit warm with him in the long
winter. Great Fool is
my favorite; when not tacking

calligraphy to his walls
by his lone oil lamp, he
sets out briskly in rain

to ask housewives for
a little rice, and visit
children who bounce balls

and count. I lean back
in my squeaky chair
and sip a bit of yard

tea, this one mostly cats'
ear and stinky bob herbs.
Gee, if I could write poems

like these three, what would
that be like? Dogen said
don't write poems at all,

as narrative is a trap.
Please note: Dogen wrote
hundreds. One more

sip, and it's nap time for me.

-- shonin

Samsara/entropy

She spreads a scrap of drape
chalks a white line to follow
wonders at the collision
of Buddha with Euclid

 

Here be fallacies and contradictions; but let us muddle on.

 

For about a year, I have been too out of it to sew, not to mention my eyes are not what they have been. But my health has unexpectedly improved in the last month or so.

 

I needed an envelope for a new rakusu, so I've revisited a neglected practice. The first stitches were horrible, but perseverance uncovers muscle memory. 

I intend the stitches to follow the more or less straight line of chalk. The thread wanders, sometimes above, sometimes below, the line as conceived. 

 

Even if to my eye the stitching were to go straight, a hand lens would disabuse me of that notion. 

 

At first I was aggravated by my lack of skill, but the gap between skill and sufficiency can never be fully closed, and you have to know when to punt. I've become tolerant of deviation.

A Euclidean object exists at most as a pattern (concept) across a substrate of neurons in our brains. 

 

Its expression into physical form is approximate (map vs. territory). For example, there are no true spheres in nature.

 

If you look at the surface of a bubble closely enough (under, say, an electron microscope), you find it is a polygon or polyhedron, or not even that, because the atoms found at the vertices are in flux.

 

There is no there there.

 

Buddha chose "anatta" as the core of his teaching. He was telling the Brahmins their concept of the everlasting soul is only a concept. 

An axle/wheel said to have gone "out of true" was called, in Buddha's culture, dukkha: when the deviation from the concept reaches the point of inconvenience to the task.

 

Skill may create a functional wheel, but not a perfect one. We know and can live with that. The skilled wheelwright creates a wheel that is within tolerance; no more is asked by the wise.

 

Insistence that our experience match our imaginings will give rise to dissatisfaction. 

This is what is meant by samsara. We are "running around in circles," chasing our delusions, which consist in expecting that idealism will bring us this supposed happiness: that there will not be entropy.

 

-- shonin 

Unless you consult particulars you cannot even know or see. 

--William Blake, Annotations to Reynolds.

 

Ceremony

 

We tuck roots in soil, not

knowing if we will see harvest

with wearing the robe,

it is the same.

 

Ceremoniously offering and accepting tea, 
teacher and student face each other 
across the small table. 

Who knew? ... when we were neighbors 
in the woods some fifty years ago, 
this moment would come?

-- shonin

The luminous moon drifts by so lightly,

The sutra hall lies silent without a sound.

Bits of moonlight pierce the cracks between the bamboo,

Its round refulgence perches in the intersecting pine branches.
The dew dampens the nests filled with noisy swallows,

The wind combs the grasses filled with croaking frogs.

I sit with the master after the ceremony is over

As, face to face, we straighten out our robes.

-- Shiyan, in Daughters of Emptiness tr./ed. Beata Grant

A meditation on the Hsin Hsin Ming

(Better left unsaid, aye?
but I was always one to poke at stuff, yeesh.)

My way now lacks boredom.
It helps to have a veranda.
Our daughter left us hers,
so there you go: grief and ease,

A horrible fact, but one eats,
one sleeps. Things are not
apart, so when we judge we miss.
For? Against? A rock sits

where it is put, so teaches wisdom
without bothering to be wise.
As knowledge has no anchor,
sitting like a rock is available.

Hands can hold as much as we need,
sometimes more than we need,
so our reaching for more smacks of
not understanding reality.

Even trying to grasp this doggerel's
implications as I write shows me
there is no approaching a horizon;
Fatigue is what ends any endeavor.

If I suspend an effort, there is
effort in suspension; If I strive
there is rest in going. Sitting still
in knowing this neither goes nor stays.

My friend has spoken for years
of the circle of discourse
as if it were a sack he wished to escape;
whereas I like a goldfish circle, smiling;

both will end the same. We have both
said so, then sat together, each
contented in the mistaken thought
we have said it better. The not

saying more was the actual prize,
if there were one. Lack a thought about
any entity, and the entity remains
as like a fact as it ever will.

Lack a sight, or hearing, or any sensation
of any event, and it will be
all it needed to be, just as it is.
Most Zen, I'm told, sits at the bottom

of breath, like the moment
after dying. It is then a receding
horizon seems close. Even that
is illusory, but self examination

right then might yield insight. That's nice,
but chuck the insight aside for now,
and, without "holding" the breath,
undo doing without even un-"doing."

It's like not reaching for a beach pebble,
and the pebble is in hand, or like
not looking it over, and knowing its color.
No: beachless until we must inhale,

a taste of endless moment ending life.
"Thusness" cannot be divided into "is"
and "is not," other than as mistaken intellectual
exercise, and saying so is also mistaken.

We do live to eat, though, so take up
the knife without thinking "knife"
and cut the vegetable without thinking "vegetable."
Move through, then eat, then come to rest.

Same with washing the bowl, same with
the bending trees beyond the rain-streaked
window. It's privilege to reach for such
silence while having use of knife and window,

but an animal is neither rich nor poor. We
are already where we are, so must begin here.
Here has only memory for a past and anticipation
for a future, and only while we breathe.

Set the bowl on its shelf and the knife
in its place. So thoughts arose? That's not failure,
even if it was greed for life. Those are
bubbles, like bubbles in the sink.

Let them dissipate on their own.
What's left is still what is: hands drying
on a towel, perhaps. Trees continuing
to bend in autumnal storm.

Sitting is the same as eating or doing dishes.
It's a tree bending, letting old leaves go.
It's hands drying, fingers uncurling
on their own, resting on thighs.

On the power line outside, swaying slightly,
a crow preens, looks about, chuckles,
relieves itself, launches into rain —
taking no account of horizons —

does it even know it was ever an egg?
Does it consider what may happen in winter,
stretched on snow, losing form?
It is all of itself in the now, and is all things. 

-- shonin 

A comment on Hongzhi's Zuochan zhen

The thing about Buddhas (there are many, 
perhaps as many as grains of sand)
is that their being Buddhas is not an identity
(other than for convenience, as we are lazy)

but that they do something (without going
anywhere much, when it is what they do)
and that something is hard to speak of
(not that it's a secret or obscure, but because

nouns slide us far from where verbs are going).
Example (ha ha): while observing a growing
blade of grass, a Buddha observes growing,
letting "blade" and "grass" remain provisional,

unless of course it is time to mow (should a Buddha
chance to live in a neighborhood
with a Home Owners' Association,
in which case there is no help for it). But letting

grasses grow, birds fly, and fishes swim
a Buddha settles a bit deeper into the lawn chair
in shade, and sips glorious tea, without even
thinking not to think "glorious tea," in which case

the grass greens greenly in full sun, the bird
pounces mercilessly upon the fish, the fish
gratefully remembers how kind was its river,
and the Home Owners' Association deeply bows.

--shonin 

The bee moves on

Somewhere out back
the seven-year-old cherry
takes up its found duty
teaching evanescence

 

I sometimes don't make it out to the hut for two or three days at a time, especially in rain or snow. I've reached the age of more or less permanently camping in the easy chair, medications at hand, scarf wrapping neck, wall-gazing like Bodhidharma but with perhaps less intent, my sitting interlaced with napping, like Daughter's very old dog who lives with us still.

Son or Beloved bring me teas and nibblets. This perks me up, and seems to do them some good as well.

The thought experiments I've been sporadically attending to are: Occam's Razor and entropy.

Occam's idea, not completely original to him but close enough, is that there is no call to multiply entities needlessly. That is, if you fell off the cliff due to your own carelessness, you need not also attribute the fall to interference in your short life by a demon. 

Applying Occam will tend to lead one toward a monistic materialism devoid of teleology, which many physical scientists hold either explicitly or implicitly, for reasons. "Literary criticism is a branch of biology ( --I.A. Richards)."

Core Buddhism as it has come down to us does not have a lot of new ideas: 

1. there is suffering,
2. some suffering is self-inflicted,
3. stop that,
4. here's how.

It stands up well under Occam. 

Buddhism has acquired a lot of cultural accretions, some of which go back to the first generation or soon after. Many -- if not most -- of them may not stand up well under Occam.

Entropy can be thought of in lay terms as "everything runs down." 

To assemble what we may call a state or object, we must find and supply additional energy to the amount originally embodied in it to maintain it as such; otherwise it becomes other stuff. 

A car becomes not a car if it is set up on blocks and its wheels taken away. Leave it there long enough and it becomes an unwieldy and rather forlorn flowerpot.

Combine the razor and entropy when looking at the Four Truths and we get a pretty easily tested life engine that strikes me as having some ontological staying power.

Buddha's charioteer brought him to see the Four Sights, the first three of which were signs of entropy: old age, illness and death. The fourth was asceticism, a somewhat extreme response to the first three, which appealed to the young man and led to his years of practicing some rather severe yogas, as if punishing himself for being subject to entropy. 

After a rather simple meal offered to him, that is, some energy input to maintain his state as a living being, he decided against punishment and proclaimed a Middle Way: live without either seeking too great a buffer against entropy or too little. Entropy just is.

The bee checks out the cherry blossoms for at most a few days. The petals fall. The bee moves on. 

 -- shonin

The best way is not difficult

It only excludes picking and choosing.
-- Xinxin Ming tr. Pajin

Nothing need stop us

Slow moving illness
provides time to review
things done, not done:
release them all

Sitting in the new hut, Manzoku-an, or Hermitary of Quite Enough, she is running out of needs.

Buddha's great discovery was re-discovered millennia later. It's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As dharmas (things or beings) 

are not, or do not have ... 

... states ... 

... but are bundles of energy arriving and departing ... 

... they are ephemeral. 

All are equal, all equally evanescent. Resting from concern or anguish over that which is as it is, nothing need stop us from enjoying ourselves, as we might an evening of fireflies.

-- shonin


Whether I sit or I lie,
My spirit roams with the origin of things.
Singing alone or rhyming alone,
My joy runs to the edge of the sky.
-- Songs of National Preceptor Wongam (1226–1292) tr. Whitfield, Park