Let's heat up some water

 Stonehouse says:

The whole Buddhist Canon 
is worthless old paper 
seventeen hundred tangled vines
who can see through the mess
one thought is still too many (tr. Red Pine)

Finally it rains, and I sit staring out the kitchen window past the sunflowers and sunchokes to the chopped and dropped Deer Garden, tomatoes and corn (not much of either) gathered, hoses and shades put away, listening idly to the rain barrels filling. Having done the things, I'm caught between the Zoom zendo and the neighborhood walk, a fly in amber, a slow brain complemented by slow moment. There's not enough motivation in this moment to move tea things around on the table and convince myself I'm doing. A crow on top of the neighbor's ash tree seems to agree, hardly bothering to swivel its wet head and inspect its retinas for signs of an approaching hawk. Do soaked crows shrug?

We've been talking a lot around here about "entangling vines," those tendrils of the world reaching out to curl round our ankles and demand of us the tribute of at least aversion if not attachment. If we are to have no preferences, why not let the hawk have us? Why struggle to live? Or, perhaps less momentously, why get up, dress, come to the hut, make tea, wake the Mac mini, say the Robe Verse, put on the rakusu, log in, and begin Morning Service?

Well, if it seems to us like Right Action, we pull ourselves together and do it.

The morning after Philip Kapleau and Professor Phillips arrived at Ryutakuji Monastery they were given a tour of the place by Abbot Soen Nakagawa. Both Americans had been heavily influenced by tales of ancient Chinese masters who’d destroyed sacred texts, and even images of the Buddha, in order to free themselves from attachment to anything. They were thus surprised and disturbed to find themselves being led into a ceremonial hall, where the Roshi invited them to pay respects to a statue of the temple’s founder, Hakuin Zenji, by bowing and offering incense.

On seeing Nakagawa bow before the image, Phillips couldn’t contain himself, and burst out: “The old Chinese masters burned or spit on Buddha statues! Why do you bow down before them?”

“If you want to spit, you spit,” replied the Roshi. “I prefer to bow.”

-- One Bird One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories, Sean Murphy

That sure is a lot of rain. Maybe I'm done pushing around the tea things. Let's heat up some water!

-- shonin

Much the same

There's a groundswell of faith activity around the world which was perhaps not expected, given historical attitudes toward people with disabilities and/or shut-ins.

Here is the Zoom studio/zendo of Manzoku-an, the converted tool shed.

 

It consists of a decade-old Mac mini on ethernet cable, with monitor, external cam, mic and speakers, facing a zero-gravity chair and bench serving as a table, with tea and a book (doubles as mousepad). Across the 9X13' room there's an old telephone table serving as an altar, with Shakyamuni and Kannon and their accessories. Kannon was two dollars at the local thrift.

I serve as doshi for two online groups, and sit with two others, all in this space. It doesn't take much. Get up, take two steps into camera view, do the rightward shuffle, bow, make offering, bow again, rotate two steps back, bow, remain in gassho (two hands together) while the online kokyo/doan chants and rings bells, bow three times with the online sangha, walk back, sit. Kinhin (walking meditation) is ten steps toward the other end of the hut, turn, ten steps back, in my case often with a walking stick, until the bell rings. People who don't have huts like mine do all this in their bedrooms; some do what they can from hospital beds. 

Covid sparked this kind of innovation worldwide. Now even many sanghas that returned to in-person sitting (or never stopped) have an unobtrusive laptop on a table in the corner of the zendo or Buddha hall, with offsite attenders participating in the only way (in many cases) they can. When visiting their websites, if you have a yen to sit in meditation with them but can't show up in person, check for a live video link. You'll be very much welcome. 

A fellow Soto priest in one of my groups lives in Ukraine. He hosts online zazen from his apartment, and sometimes, out of necessity, hosts from a bomb shelter, on his smartphone.

Much the same is occurring in churches and other religious assemblies. I'm also a member of a Friends Meeting and a link is provided to remote attendance at a number of their events. Our Yearly Meeting took place in Olympia, WA this year and I appreciated being able to be a fly on the wall during plenary sessions.

I, and there are others in like case, have compromised immunity and must steeply reduce in-person contact beyond my household (who make efforts on my behalf, such as masking at the grocery store).

It sounds lonely, but in good weather (we're currently socked in by wildfire smoke) my friends come to see me (I'm no longer allowed to drive) and we walk out back to sit, socially distanced, in the breezeway. I pour them tea, they tell me their triumphs and tribulations, the birds sing, the bumblebees check out the sunflowers.

I'm wondering about prisons. I know some prisoners in some places, certainly some in house arrest, have Internet. I have been following a former RN who got into trouble, who vlogged his circumstances while shut in (he's out now and walking the Pacific Crest Trail). And some prisoners have meditation groups. My teacher has worked with such a group in a women's prison, and a member of my Friends Meeting also works with prisoners. But none of these, I think, are allowed online. I'm interested in finding out more -- search engines haven't been much help as of yet.

In the Shushogi there is a passage on how to behave toward other humans (and presumably all beings). It begins: "There are four kinds of wisdom that benefit living beings: giving, kind speech, beneficial deeds, and cooperation." None of this requires ableism or even freedom of movement.

"Do not disdain even a small offering; its giving will surely bear fruit."

"Kind speech means, when meeting living beings, to think kindly of them and offer them affectionate words."

"Beneficial deeds are one, universally benefiting self and others."

"Cooperation" means not to differentiate; to make no distinction between self and others."

Even in a Zoom room, or with a blog, or on social media (with the caveat that the techno-purveyors of most of these means do not have your best interests at heart), it is possible to do all these, and with considerable geographical reach. Throughout history, writers of letters or epistles have offered expressions of ministry or healing at a distance. Today, friends and associates console or advise one another via texting, messaging, blogging, vlogging and microblogging. Sitting in zazen together online is much the same.

-- shonin

 

  

There is no one who is not the iron ox

 

There is no one who is not already the iron ox, but we hide it from ourselves, to endless trouble. There is another way to live, and with practice we can unfold it to ourselves and grow it, like corn and beans, like apples, like rice.

Buddha is said to have been asked by King Bimbasara to differentiate his followers from the followers of other teachers and assigned the design to Ananda, with the instructions to make it like a rice field. The idea is that those wearing Buddha's robe nourish the whole world with the dharma, as farmers nourish the world with rice.

You can of course be a helper without calling it Buddhism or wearing a robe; Buddhists are a relatively small subset of the world's helpers. I was drawn in by the similarities of the Four Sights and Four Noble Truths to the human struggle with biotic entropy. Thinking about that happens to be my hobby. 

But anyone who notices that the world tends toward chaos and suffering and resolves to do anything about it is what I mean by a helper; and these are to be encouraged, I think, in any way possible.

This is not a matter of scale. Jesus talked about the woman who brought, like, two cents, to the temple. A gift need not even be intended as kind to be a gift; children playfully put mud in Buddha's begging bowl and he reverently handed it off to be used in maintaining his hut. 

Dogen, in the Shushogi, mentions someone giving a blade of grass. The Shushogi is a pastiche of things Dogen wrote, some of it taken out of context, but it's functional, and is the official statement of faith and practice for the Soto School of Zen Buddhism. The whole passage with the blade of grass is all about generosity:

There are four kinds of wisdom that benefit living beings: giving, kind speech, beneficial deeds, and cooperation.

That is, giving (donating), giving kind speech, giving beneficial deeds, and giving cooperation.

Here's the rest of the passage:

These are the practices of the vow of the bodhisattva. “Giving” means not to covet. In principle, although nothing is truly one’s own, this does not prevent us from giving. Do not disdain even a small offering; its giving will surely bear fruit. Therefore, we should give even a line or a verse of the dharma, sowing good seeds for this life and other lives. We should give even a penny or a single blade of grass of resources, establishing good roots for this world and other worlds. The dharma is a resource, and resources are the dharma. Without coveting reward or thanks from others, we simply share our strength with them. Providing ferries and building bridges are also the perfection of giving. Earning a living and producing goods are fundamentally nothing other than giving.
    "Kind speech” means, when meeting living beings, to think kindly of them and offer them affectionate words. To speak with a feeling of tenderness toward living beings, as if they were one’s own infant, is what is meant by kind speech. We should praise the virtuous and pity the virtueless. Kind speech is fundamental to mollifying one’s enemies and fostering harmony among one’s friends. Hearing kind speech to one’s face brightens one’s countenance and pleases one’s heart. Hearing kind speech indirectly leaves a deep impression. We should realize that kind speech has the power to move the heavens.
    "Beneficial deeds” means to devise good ways of benefiting living beings, whether noble or humble. Those who encountered the trapped tortoise and the injured bird simply performed beneficial deeds for them, without seeking their reward or thanks. The foolish believe that their own interests will suffer if they put the benefits of others first. This is not the case. Beneficial deeds are one, universally benefiting self and others.
    “Cooperation” means not to differentiate; to make no distinction between self and others. It is, for example, like the human Tathagata who was the same as other human beings. There is a way of understanding such that we identify others with ourselves and then identify ourselves with others. At such times self and other are without boundaries. The ocean does not reject any water; this is cooperation. It is because of this that water collects and becomes an ocean.

Might we not all consider devising ways of cooperating in kindly communication and beneficial action? There is a world of hurt; what's to stop us from making it a world of healing?

-- shonin 

 

No hindrance

Gardens occupy the mind/bodies of gardeners. The vegetable gardener benefits from the garden not by receiving vegetables alone, but also by having a relationship to the natural realm; by exercise, fresh air, quietude, focus. And the world benefits from the gardener's renewed equanimity as well as, perhaps, some of the food. 
 

Monastery gardens focus on food but also on medicinal plants and plants for craft, ranging from bamboo to indigo, as well. Asian monasteries are often located in or near forests to which they have access for making anything from furniture to roof-beams.

Hermits often don't have as many resources as monasteries, unless they reside near one with which they have an arrangement, or near a kindly disposed settlement, perhaps. Most hermits are agile enough, until near their end, to be their own gardener, herb-gatherer, wood-cutter, carpenter, glazier, cook, tilesetter, candle-maker, or whatever needs arise. Their resources are, within reasonable limits, whatever or whomever they can reach. I reach for many things, in season, right here on this 1/5 acre lot. There are dandelions, cat's-ear, spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, blackberrry, Oregon grape, calendulas, marigolds, nipplewort, deadnettle, plantain, self-heal, thistles, herb-Robert, camellias, cascara (use with caution), ash, Douglas fir, and cedar right at hand, and a short walk along the street provides, with permission, rose petals and hips, birch foliage, hawthorn, bigleaf maple, assorted pines, deodar, crabapples, pie cherries, broadleaf plantain, chickweed, chicory, and on and on. Some are for topical agents, some for medicine or tea, some for walking sticks or to prop up peas or beans.

Concerning the peas or beans, we do have the usual variety of vegs and fruits, and the family also collects a bag of vegetables each week in summer from the Youth Garden CSA. These they use during the week, and then the day before the next batch arrives, I raid the leftovers for things to add to my own stash of vegetables for chopping and pickling.

It's a small, satisfactory, labor-intensive and meditative practice. I'm more in-the-zone at the cutting board than anywhere else. Enough diced root and leafy veg to fill the rice steamer is enough to fill several half pint jars with pickles, or combine two batches to fill several pint jars.

I mostly don't use quart jars for this any more, because I go through the contents too slowly. I still have a number of half gallon jars from my more manic canning days, and these I'm using to keep bulk dried sundries on hand.

 

 

The idea, then, for much of the year, is to steam a handful or two of (soaked) black beans, pinto beans, chickpeas, split peas, lentils, or rice or tofu or pasta, open a small jar of pickles to throw in at the last minute, serve into a bowl, sit down, be thankful, and eat.

Stonehouse noticed his food routine made up the bulk of his practice.

Lunch in my mountain kitchen
there’s a shimmering springwater sauce 
a well-cooked stew of preserved bamboo
a fragrant pot of hard-grain rice
blue-cap mushrooms fried in oil
purple-bud ginger vinaigrette
none of them heavenly dishes
but why should I cater to gods
(tr. Red Pine)

Life is short. If you have salt, reach for the salt. If you don't have salt right now, reach for the dried kale flakes you've made. There's always something, until there really truly isn't. And "really truly isn't" comes to us all in its own time. As it will do so whether we have salt or don't, there's no need to rush around or fret. This is called "no hindrance."

-- shonin

  

  

The nothing zazen is good for

Chitting potatoes

Rev. Dainei, my Dharma brother, chose the following quote as the footer for a recent email:

It is necessary for us to keep the constant way. Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. If you become too busy and too excited, your mind becomes rough and ragged. This is not good. If possible, try to be always calm and joyful and keep yourself from excitement. Usually we become busier and busier, day by day, year by year, especially in our modern world. If we revisit old, familiar places after a long time, we are astonished by the changes. It cannot be helped. But if we become interested in some excitement, or in our own change, we will become completely involved in our busy life, and we will be lost. But if your mind is calm and constant, you can keep yourself away from the noisy world even though you are in the midst of it. In the midst of noise and change, your mind will be quiet and stable. -- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (emphasis added)

 The more time I spend with Zen, the less I know about it. Maybe you have had this experience as well. I'm going through a phase of making it to a fair number of sits, thanks to teleconferencing. Sometimes we chant, have dedications and bows, and so on. I'm grateful for these opportunities, as they do seem to help with centering.

I come most alive in the in between times, cutting chard and lifting a few potatoes, then sitting at the hut's "kitchen" table with cleaver and chopping block. I cut up potatoes, garlic scapes and chard stems, with some dried chili pepper, and steam them for fifteen minutes or so, meanwhile chopping greens (chard leaves, dandelions, a cabbage leaf maybe, some clover buds and self-heal) to put into the steamer in the last minute. I drain these and stir in some olive oil, soy sauce, chili powder and sesame seeds, briefly offer the bowl at the altar, and dig in. Have with water or "yard tea" -- currently dock, ash leaves, fennel, herb Robert, self-heal and camellia leaves -- and, after a while, go check some chitting potatoes and water the garden beds and young trees from the rain barrels.

This routine requires very little if any thought, and also very little if any thought suppression. There's no aim here to "become enlightened."

Strangely enough, what has sold me on the effortlessness of "concentration on our daily routine" is that I'm in the early stages of cognitive decline. Memories and words are getting harder to access. Since I don't have many responsibilities nowadays, there's little cause to be stressed about it. Loss becomes not so much "oh, I lost that" and something more like "this is what there is right now" -- which is of course the entire universe.

My youngest, who lives with us (he's 42) also goes out and "just gardens." He remembers to stop by the strawberry bed on his way back to the house. He finds me resting in my chair and holds up a ripe strawberry. I open my mouth and he pops it in, like a starling feeding its chick. This is the nothing zazen is good for.

--shonin

 

A shorter "eight great realizations"

One can find enough to do for a lifetime in a few short phrases: be undesiring, be content, be tranquil, be practicing, be mindful, be meditative, be discerning, be steadfast.

It doesn't take much from us to do these things, but there is a consistency of "effort" called for. We might call it be present, be present, be present.

If we think it is easy to practice because we have a beautiful building, that is a mistake. Actually it may be quite difficult to practice with a strong spirit in this kind of setting- where we have a handsome Buddha and offer beautiful flowers to decorate our Buddha hall. We Zen Buddhists have a saying that with a blade of grass we create a golden Buddha which is sixteen feet high. That is our spirit, so we need to practice respect for things.

I don't mean that we should accumulate many leaves or grasses to make a big statue, but until we can see a big Buddha in a small leaf, we need to make much more effort. How much effort I don't know. Some people may find it quite easy, but for someone like me great effort is needed. Although seeing a large golden Buddha in a large golden Buddha is easier, when you see a large Buddha in a blade of grass, your joy will be something special. So we need to practice respect with great effort. -- Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So.

-- shonin 

But live

 As shonin approaches 77, she takes stock of her intellect and finds it ... gummy. The most one can hope for is that this is a peaks-and troughs experience, and she's going through a trough. But she knows, by interior inquiry more than from doctors, who tend to wave her off with talk of sleep apnea, that she's not getting enough brain food by day as well as night. She spends some time with her cannula, whiffing concentrated oxygen, and watches earnest videos by younger and brighter folks as the days wear on.

When there is some energy, she walks, cooks, gardens, gathers herbs and forbs for tea, plays at being doshi (altar officiant) for a tiny sangha. During the last peak, she read aloud some poems to YouTube.

It's a long, slow spring with April frosts, confusing for plants that have seen temps as high as 80F already. But she, and they, persist.

After all, what is there for the living to do, but live? 

-- shonin

Reverse takuhatsu

 

"Entering the village with bliss-bestowing hands"

 For Buddhists (and anyone like-minded): if you have been going for walks, and you live where pindapata/takuhatsu is not a thing, and you pass something like a Little Free Pantry along your route, carry a little appropriate something with you, bow to the pantry, put in the something, bow again, and be on your way. 

Don't think about what just happened. Just admire the shadows of trees on the sidewalks and the singing birds. Everything is the same as everything else in the realm of giving and receiving.

 -- shonin  

Rapid niche depletion

Putting this here to remember that it was said, because it's a fairly succinct statement of our continuing problem in 2026, which is rapid niche depletion by our species. Fascism, which while we are attempting with little success to contain it, prevents our addressing said destruction, which meanwhile goes on apace even when not accelerated by the fascists.

 -- shonin 

If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite. 

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. 

-- Gregory Bateson, "Form, Substance and Difference," Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture (1970), reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (1972)

An appropriate response

From the Blue Cliff Record

Case 14: Yunmen’s “Appropriate Response”

A monk asked Yunmen, “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”

Yunmen said, “An appropriate response.”

Shunryu Suzuki says: "Buddha's teaching (as attained by Buddhas) in its pure and formless form, is not expressible by word or idea. Hence, the contribution of each sect to Buddhism is to give system to the scriptures, to set up the true words of the Tathagata ... in a consistent way so that people may understand and follow Buddha's way of life." (Wind Bell corrected text)

That is, that which is real is beyond words, but words can point to the real --provisionally.

Words have no meanings of their own, but are assigned meanings in our minds. The slipperyness of word meaning can be demonstrated by examining the almost universal misunderstanding in English that the prostate is to be referred to as the "prostrate," a verb or adjective supposed to indicate "lying down."

The reason we understand someone who refers to the prostate as the "prostrate" is they use it in either an implied or complete sentence, usually within a context. In language the context is a paragraph, in the world the context may consist of prior conversations or locations. Someone saying, at the front desk of the doctor's office, "I'm here about my prostrate," is likely to be understood and not even corrected by the receptionist.

Language is actually algebra, in which something is conveyed by means of an operator and operands.

Just as a=b is an equation, so is "that stick is a hoe handle." In the real world, "hoe handle" is an abstract concept, but the stick really is a thing, and it's useful to know that the speaker sees it as material shaped by human agency toward a desired end, thus having added value by means of the applied concept. A concept is, for purposes of the material universe, an illusion, but in the case of a hoe it is a useful one. 

In order to convey information, which is made up of a mixture of ideas about things and ideas about ideas about things, we must constantly embed the ideas in formulae, in which the operator ties together two operands, a symbolic representation of a subject and an object, in either a metaphorical equivalency -- assertion -- or denial of equivalency -- refutation. 

In other words, we rely on metaphor to get anything said, trusting in the transitivity of equivalency, a tool used both by those hoping to formulate and communicate a truth and those hoping to deceive.

Information is news of difference (Bateson). To form an argument for purposes of convincing someone that we bring them information requires three implied or actual sentences: 

a = b, b=c, ∴ a=c (assertion), 

or 

a = b, b≠c, ∴ a≠c (refutation). 

The three sentences of the argument form the structure of a complete paragraph. This is solving a system with equations (in disguise).

It's very, very difficult for two humans in conversation to solve systems with equations on the fly, especially if one of them is using chicanery in the construction and conveying of some of the information in order to achieve an end at variance with the end that would benefit them both. Often each is trying to do this to the other.

Where there is plenty of greed, anger and ignorance, there is much politicking and commerce, hence advertising, scamming and so on. These are all about broken promises and failure to honor contracts, and are made possible by appeals to greedy illusiveness by means of malevolently employed enthymemes: incomplete or incorrect paragraphs and incomplete or incorrect sentences, many of which are carefully nurtured fallacies. 

Dukkha is Buddha's word for the not-quite-rightness of the world as he has found it; much if not nearly everything about human behavior seems off to him, like a cart wheel set off center on the axle, causing the cart to go down the road jolting itself apart even in the absence of potholes ... "dukkha, dukkha." We all are of the nature to become ill, to become old, and to die. Accepting that this is so, and helping one another home, so to speak, is wisdom -- a centered wheel and a smoother ride for all. But the world's common sense is non-acceptance: ignorance, greed, and anger that our illusory, greedy expectations have not been met.

Buddha offers a remedy for our vulnerability to fallacy and its consequences, from disappointment all the way up to life-threatening danger. He noticed, immediately upon seeing the morning star, that the remedy would be difficult to explain, because even honest use of language involves imprecision: no one has the exact same set of meanings of signifiers. 

And those who do not mean well are apt to capitalize on the apparent similarity between inadvertently imprecise honest speech or actions and purposefully imprecise (dishonest) speech or actions.

Yet he persisted. The risk, to him, was worth the gamble.

This is why Buddha speaks of "expedient means" (upaya). Even his most direct verbal teachings made use of language; even at their most formal they were all expedient means toward the ending of suffering, yet inevitably open to interpretation, leading to perceived contradictions over time; the more so as agreed-upon meanings of words drifted.

When we talk about Dharma, just as we talk about anything, our talk does not approach the reality of dharmas (phenomena), or, in the case of Dharma, what we might call our secondary reality -- of ideas. 

And yet we trust in Dharma (the set of available truths about dharmas -- Thusness) to hone our behaviors toward the lessening of suffering -- ours and that of others.

There is some truth in truth, enough so that we if we intend be on its side against injuring, lying, stealing, misuse of pleasures, and misuse of resources, a way forward can be found.

Buddhists speak of the paramitas. Theravada traditionally lists ten; Mahayana  six. But it seems clear, as commentators have noted, that the two lists are just two ways of covering the same ground. The main thing is to provide, as best we can -- toward whatever is before us -- an appropriate response.

 -- shonin