Don't Tread on Me

With respect,

When I returned from Vietnam, recovering from a bullet to my head, my Aunt said to me that my injury brought the war home to her. Yesterday I learned that the morning after the election a swastika was scrawled on the kitchen door of my son's restaurant in Georgetown, Tx. This made the catastrophe of Donald Trump's presidential win very real.  It brought it home to me. In the news of late many stories of racism and hate crimes seem to have increased.  It's as though a group of people (who always existed, but in the dark) now felt emboldened to take themselves into the light of day. I believe our now president-elect's campaign and post-campaign rhetoric has given tacit approval to such people.  He has fanned the flames and now we burn as he distances himself from the hate groups who so rabidly supported him.

Funny thing about hate, it spreads and it hurts. The Buddha argued that the antidote to hate is love. As a Zen priest I ought to practice loving my enemies.  I try.  Yet, we also vow not to kill and to me that vow also includes saving lives and preventing injury. So, a dilemma: to defend or not to defend.  The sort of hate being more and more openly expressed and the fear driving it is so similar to that in pre-WWII Germany that its actually scary and helps us resolve the dilemma. This is a hate that, left unchecked, will grow to include registering those we are afraid of: Muslims, Gays, Liberals, Intellectuals.  If you are a student of history you will recognize this tactic.

In Germany the Final Solution was facilitated both by fear and the fact that registration of undesirables had already been in place.  It was no problem to locate and round them all up. They were put behind walls away from sight as they were systematically murdered.  And we want to build a wall.  We want to vilify the press.  We insert false news stories and people begin to distrust the news outlets.  A propagandic tactic also used in Germany. Are we there yet?

We are headed in that direction.

Confronting hate with love is a good thing, yet those loved must be willing to receive it.  Often instead, the loved hater builds a wall around himself, creates mythic stories to make his hate OK and, at the same time, accuse their opponents of weakness at best, and of being co-conspirators at worst.  For me, the danger here is that many of us, like the Jews in Germany, believe good people would surely not harm us.  Fear and carefully crafted messages of hate will make good people chose to do bad things and one day, then, those good people come knocking on our door and they aren't bringing cookies.

I refuse to answer the door and welcome those who might hate me, and do me harm, entry. No, I will not. What I will do is address the hate directly, as in messages like this, and at the same time prepare for the worst.  What does that mean? Meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, and over here meet Mr. Taurus, oh, and let's not forget Mr. Colt. All of these fellows are near the door and are willing and able to put you away if you come to through the door with a deadly threat. All the while, I will chant the Heart Sutra for you as they are doing it.

Some say that isn't very Buddhist.  I really wonder where they get that idea.  Monks have for millennia defended themselves with deadly force. Even Tibet had an Army under the command of the Dalai Lama. Monks train with bow, sword, knife, cane, and other Martial Arts weapons.  I train with  9 mm and .380 semi-automatic handguns, as well as a M-4 Tactical Carbine. The Zen of it is this: defending life is based in the precepts and more, an obligation of everyone wishing to live in an open society.

So, hate-mongers, I welcome you to try to take away my life and those of others around me. I will first offer you my love, but failing in that, I will prevent you from harming me or others. Don't tread on me.

In this Moment

With respect,

There is a famous line in Master Dogen's Genjo Koan that goes like this:"firewood does not become ash, firewood is firewood, ash is ash." Sounds so simple, but then some of the greatest teachings in the world are simple statement, but they are not simple, they are deeply profound observations. Years ago in my mountain refuge I would make a fire in the firebox of my wood cookstove. Every once in awhile I would need to put more wood in the box. It was obvious the wood was becoming ash. Master Dogen says that isn't so. Why would he challenge the obvious process of fire?

I believe the answer is in our everyday lives. With each breath we draw we draw it in a moment, hopefully of awareness. Drawing that breath is, itself, our life. It is a Dharma moment with its own existence. Likewise as we release our breath, that too, is its own Dharma moment. One is not becoming the other. Each exist in themselves and only in that moment. As Dogen says, ret each have "their own Dharma reality."

If we live our lives with the constant thought of what comes next, the moment we are actually existing in fails to arise and we do not appreciate it. You might say we are sleep-walking because we are not paying attention as we are moving about. Dogen asks us to pay attention. This breath is solely this breath. Forget the next or the last: in each we die and are born again.

Questions, Part Two

With respect,

Looking at your computer screen, what do you see? We might say, "a blog note."  Or we might say, "my screen." But whatever you say, it will only be a thought.  A concept socially developed and agreed upon, but what is it before we have named it?   A "blog note" is just what we call what we are seeing. I am asking us to look through the concept.

In our everyday life we rarely pay attention to the "true nature," the "original nature," of what we are looking. Earlier this evening I sat out under the stars with a sky map open on my iPhone. I saw stars and checked their names.  I would be a far cry from the truth of the matter if I thought the names were the stars. The stars are not their names.  Nor are they "stars."  Stars is what they are called, that is all.  But as I sat there and looked at them as they were, something else emerged.

In such silence truth emerges: we are infinitesimal creatures on a very tiny planet in a tiny galaxy amid a universe of others. We might come to the conclusion that what we think does not matter, nor does what we do in the greater scheme of things.  Is that so?

Everyday life is close, not distant.  We are living creatures amid other living creatures: the grand scale of the universe is not our realm, the everyday actions of each of us is our domain.

I asked in Part One, how to keep our original mind in everyday life.  The answer is simpleL pay attention. Mindfully paying attention to ourselves within interaction is key to living a "Zen" life. If you think this is easy, try it for an hour.

Listen

Good Morning Everyone,

Yes, it's true, another day dawns on us. My question to myself is this: In light of my vow "Beings are numberless, I vow to free them," what can I do today to fulfill this vow?

First, its an impossible vow on the surface. If beings are numberless, how can I possibly free them. Second, how can I free anyone? Third, what does it mean to "free" a being?

"Free" was in the past written as "Save," but I suspect that word had too close an association with Christianity's use of the term. To "free" has specific meanings in Zen. Zen Buddhism believes that we are prisoners of our mind, a mind that keeps us from viewing the Absolute and wants us, in a sense, to remain in the relative view of life. We practice to free ourselves so that we might abide in the Absolute, which is to say, a non-dualistic view of the universe where all is one.

The Relative Truth is that we are all separate beings. We may be interconnected and interdependent, but we are separate from each other and all other things. The Absolute Truth in Buddhism is that we are not separate; we are completely one with everything else. In this realization, there is no "me" separate from "you." Or no "me" separate from, say, "God." Buddhists argue that our task is to free ourselves from the bonds of the relative and live in the truth of the Absolute. 

When we realize the "Absolute" those boundaries that divide us fall away and when they do and we are all "one," One itself dissolves and there is just "thusness." We are then "beyond the other shore, having never left." 

Like a koan, we must move away from the words as the words are traps that bind us to the relative. The power of this vow is in the resolution of the apparent contradiction. When we try to enter non-duality we must fail because we are attempting to enter through the relative which keeps us stuck. 

So? How, then to honor this vow today? 

Listen.

That Place

 Gassho,

There's an old koan about a student practicing meditation. The student comes to the Master and asks how to escape the heat and cold. The Master simply says "Go to that place where there is neither hot nor cold."

What is that place, I ask? Notice I don't ask "where" is that place. Why?

Simple. That place is everywhere and nowhere. It is not a place. Hot and cold, like comments on social media, are perceived and interpreted by mind. This comment is good, this comment is bad. This one hurts me, that one makes me feel good. In themselves they are neither good nor bad. Just so hot and cold.

So what is that place? Ask the duck floating on the pond.

As it is

Good Afternoon All,

I was re-reading my friend Brad Warner's "Don't Be A Jerk" this morning. Its a fine book, I recommend it, especially the piece on the Genjo Koan. Many of us Zen teachers believe this to be one of, if not the most important fascicles of the Shobogenzo. I know I reference it often. In effect its about realizing life. Not particularly understanding life, but rather, realizing life in this very moment.

The life I realize is conditional: what's this? What's this? What's this?

Each moment having its own reality, to paraphrase Master Dogen, 'Ash has its own dharma reality; firewood its own dharma reality. Firewood does not become ash. Ash is ash, firewood is firewood.'

When I look back at my life I am no longer awake. When I look forward in my life, I am dreaming. When I look at my fingers dancing along this MacBook I am looking directly at all there is. Nothing complicated, just this.

These days our lives seem to be filling up with comments on what happened or what's going to happen and our mind takes into a dream. Let's forget the dream and just feel our fingers on the keyboard or the feel of a brush in hand or the smell of bread baking in the oven or the touch of a loved one.

When all there is is that, when mind and body fall away, we cannot touch our true nature as there is no we and no nature to touch; just this.

Refresh Yourself

With respect,


I wrote this short note to a friend in need and thought you each might find it helpful.


"...I know you will. Your efforts are not unnoticed. My own journey has been fraught with anger and even hate coupled often with tremendous hurt. It is so difficult to see the suffering in those that wish to harm us in such moments, let alone feel compassion for them. Yet, it is that responsive set of feelings that tell us our individual work is not yet done. Sometimes I think our outward focus relieves us of the felt need to look inward. What we in the Zen world call "serene reflection meditation" has been helpful to me. Its much like the the practice the Hebrew ancients called hitbodedut done in silence out under the stars, a practice I often do, especially on those nights without a moon. Too often I think we get caught up in the day's events and fail to let things fall away in the night so that we are truly refreshed in the morning."



Gassho