A Single Thread.net

What Identity Does the Mind Dwell On?

By Yao Xiang Shakya

There are preliminaries or what might be called the first rounds of being alive where we learn different identities about who we are.  Birth brings us into the world in ignorance where we begin to construct many false, temporary, changeable identities that we grasp and attach to thinking each one is real. As we might imagine it begins with gender, as in it’s a boy!— it’s a girl! But is this gender who we really are? Thereafter we are labeled many other names—healthy, good, sleepy, fussy, colicky, small, big, strong, sweet, pretty, cute….the list is endless. Over time the list of labels are put together to form a personality with traits which we begin to believe are true and real. We take on the personality as an identity and become somebody with a name and a particular form.

There is no doubt this happens….but is it your true identity? There is no doubt that the name and form with traits acts a certain way in the world….but it is a temporary, changeable and therefore false identity. Yet, we seem to get attached to our false identity as though it were true and real….as though it was everlasting and permanent and unchanging.

We know when something is false by the very nature of it being temporary and changeable. It rises, appears and then vanishes which makes it unstable and unreliable. It is apparent and not true very much like the character in the film Truman. The main character thought he was in a real world, as a real person, with a real life until he found out he wasn’t. It is the same for us. We think we are in a real world, as a real person, with a real life. We believe I am a doctor, lawyer, teacher, mother, father, daughter, male, female, educated, uneducated, black, white….and on and on the list goes. These labels are roles and functions in the apparent world….not your true identity.

All false identities begin with I am and we fill in the blank with all the myriad possibilities from gender, to age, to beauty, to occupation, to relationship and so on. It is natural to do so. In fact, the community in which you live fosters the construction of a false identity by asking…. who are you…. over and over again…name, age, social security number, gender, race, sexual orientation, marital status, occupation, nationality, education….these labels (names) are functions in the temporary world and will never be complete or completed because they are changing. They come and go, are unstable, are measured differently depending upon the one who is measuring.

A step on the spiritual path is to realize for yourself that these labels (names) are not your true nature.

Do you think you are these functions?

There is no doubt that these functions are taken quite seriously to the point it determines worth and value and status for one’s life. But taking something seriously and declaring value and worth does not make something true.  As an example, many if not most cultures say men, being of the male gender makes one  more valuable than women, being of the female gender. We can take each function and do a similar measurement….youth more valuable than age, beauty more valuable than plainness, one occupation more valuable than another, blood relationships more valuable than unrelated relationships and legal relationships more valuable than non-legal.  And to be honest even in a spiritual community this question arises in terms of lineage, master, practice and such. In fact, in any community measurement seems to float up in some form or another based on the functions, based on the persona or role of a living being. We want to know your name and the form and shape of your life in order to peg you as someone, somebody who might be important to us or not. In other words, we divide the apparent, temporary world along the lines of name and form.

This phenomenon is coming from ignorance. When either you or the other believe that the filled in blank is true in the sense of your true identity you place a variable value on the answer and on the person responding. You do it in regards to yourself as well as others.

When you believe these false, temporary, changeable identities you suffer and so do others.

The external, apparent temporary world is appealing, insistent, alluring and seductive because it offers us a chance for the winds to blow (1) pleasure and pain, (2) gain and loss, (3) status and disgrace, and 4) praise and censure our way. Of course we are gamblers by nature because we think we will be able to roll the die and get pleasure, gains, status and praise which will offset pain, loss, disgrace and censure to such a greater degree that we will find happiness. Time and time again we throw the die, spin the wheel and bet on one side over the other. When it doesn’t come up as we hoped, we suffer. And this happens time and time again. But we keep gambling….some of us until we die. This process is also ignorance…. we believe we know how to win and control the world based on what we know and control. The more we know, the more we control the better the odds.

When we know the world is rigged we recognize the winds blow both pleasure and pain and we begin to see where we are and have an opportunity to stop gambling. We sober up. We begin to investigate and study what is really going on here. We see no matter what we do, we can’t quite hit the mark.

Most of us know this by experience. It’s pretty easy to see it. Take any experience in life and examine it. If we identify with the name and form of the experience, we are dependent on an unstable, temporary and unreliable world. And in this place we think we can get the results we want….results that will bring lasting happiness.

Here is a concrete example. Let’s say there is a person whose main aim in life is to belong, belong to what, god only knows. But they have an inner yearning to belong…to fit in….which they feel will mean they are in the right place, feeling good. They may find a place that feels right, giving a sense of feeling good and they join up. It could be with a partner, having a family, an organization, a job….and for some period of time they may indeed feel as though they belong, and they may feel right. But when things change or don’t go the way they need for them to feel as though they belong….or….fit in….they are in danger of losing the sense of feeling right and good and things go south. In fact they risk depression, despair and brokenness.

I once knew a woman in her 80’s who came to see me in despair, depression….she was broken because she had lost her place in the world….her husband had died and her daughter moved away….and without them she didn’t belong and didn’t fit in. Her age, although she did not think so at the time, was a blessing….because at her age it was difficult for her to conjure up and imagine finding another husband or adopting a daughter. Left bereft she had to face the suffering of the worldly winds, face her false identification as a wife and mother and look elsewhere for who she really was. As one might guess, it was one hell of a battle for her.

All of this whirling in suffering comes when we carry our self forward, the ME-somebody in some false identity which we ignorantly believe is the be-all and end-all that will bring contentment and happiness. Falling in love or starting a new project often is full of promise and we think this time, this lover, this program will bring satisfaction and peace. But what happens is we experience the attachment of hope for a better love, a better body, and a better job….putting aside the truth that the blush of the blossom falls and weeds pop up no matter how much you are attached and no matter how much you dislike something.

As long as we identify ourselves as separate from the Divine, as free wheelers who can do anything, who wield the knowledge of good and evil as the way to the Divine we will suffer the blossoms falling and the weeds popping up. Just about everything rankles us when we are in this condition.

The story of Adam & Eve is all about misidentification as being somebody separate from God and separate from each other. Prior to this false identification they were with God; not separate from God or each other.  In Zen the same principle holds true. We misidentify as being somebody or a know-it-all body which may take on the name and form in an attempt to make it stable and solid.

The with of Zen may be experienced as Buddha nature or emptiness or as Ayya Khema states, being nobody, going nowhere. In each of these realizations no matter what label is used it is not the free-wheeling ego that is with God….the ego is the one that goes after the false identities over and over again.

We experience the realization of our true identity when we no longer rely on the false ones.

The ego identity is a function of the mind. It helps you go to the market, to the bank, dress yourself, tie your shoes, speak a language….and it also gets you in trouble with greed, hate and delusion. When the ego grabs a false identity it is akin to Adam & Eve eating the knowledge of good and evil. The ego is up to being a bad apple or polishing the apple to look good.

Now you may not agree, which of course is not a problem; because whether we agree or not, our true nature continues with or without our agreement. And it continually tries to make us aware of itself.

Each of us is called, pulled, bonked on the head to see our true nature, but as we know not all of us listen, turn and follow it. This condition is important to consider. And we can start on two levels to find out for ourselves. The first level is to examine our aim in life.

What is your aim in life?

This requires time and honesty.

Many have been conditioned to go after the good life. If this is you, then you might want to go to the second level and see if you are actually living out the life with the knowledge of good & evil as your guide or if you are living out your life with the eyes of Buddha, God or Clarity (poor, empty)….eyes where there is neither attachment or aversion, eyes not looking for something for the me.

The second level is to examine pleasure and/or pain. Anytime you experience pleasure contemplate what the mind is dwelling on. And secondly, anytime you experience pain contemplate what the mind is dwelling on.  And who is it that is dwelling on the pleasure, who is it that is dwelling on the pain?

In order to know who we are, we must know our aim and we must know the root of our pain and pleasure.

To summarize what are some steps to take….

Do you think you are the functions of life? Study and examine this in your own life.

What is your aim in life? Study and examine this in your own life.

When you experience pleasure or pain what do you do? What is the mind dwelling on? And who is that is doing the dwelling?

May the merit of this practice benefit all beings.

Go with God.

Go with non-attachment.

This is enough.

Die in place.

Steady as you go.

Seek no glory.

Welcome the throng of others.

Remember what you know.

YXS

Part II

WHAT IS ZEN BUDDHISM?
PART II – SAMSARA AND NIRVANA
by Ming Zhen Shakya

The aim of any meditation technique is to transcend ego-consciousness, that is, to go from ego-awareness to the state in which the ego doesn’t exist. This is a tall order, one that specifies a division of experience.

On one side we have Nirvana – unconditional loves, permanent values – the Real world, our heaven. No egos and no judgments, just God in all His Persons – and peace, joy,truth and freedom – and the Eternal moment. We enter Nirvana through the act of meditation.

On the other side we have ego-awareness or Samsara as we call it… this is the Buddhist equivalent of hell… it is theworld of illusion – appearances, judgments, opinions,conditional loves and values… the world that measures distance and history by Greenwich Mean Time.

Samsara is the hellish world of time and space and the shifting shapes which energy assumes, the fluctuating world which is apprehended by the senses and presided over by the judgmental ego. This is the world that the Buddha described as being “bitter and painful.”

Why do we call Samsara hell? Let’s take a look at the world of the ego. Suppose I see a woman who’s wearing a yellow sweater. I would be making a Nirvanic utterance if I said simply, “I see a woman wearing a yellow sweater.” I would be making a Samsaric utterance if I said, “I see a woman wearing a hideous yellow sweater.” By my contemptuous, judgmental statement, by my egotistical usurpation of the exalted rank”Arbiter of Fashion” I have placed myself in the hell of Samsara because I now must stand trial for every garment I wear. I must commit much of my time and energy, and my financial resources, to looking good because I dare not ever be caught wearing anything hideous. Nobody will love me for dressing well; but if I make afashion blunder then all those whom I have criticized will gleefully get their revenge.

In all our egotistical judgments – about clothes or art, or our instantaneous opinions about other people’s guilt or innocence, or their sincerity or duplicity – about anything at all – we place ourselves at hellish risk.

Jesus said it best. “Judge not and ye shall not be judged.”

In Samsara we believe that a man who drives a Cadillac is a better man than a man who drives a Ford because a Cadillac is a better car than a Ford. Right? And the man who wears a Rolex spends his time better than a man who wears a Timex… Isn’tthat how it goes? In Samsara we believe that the quality of a possession magically adheres to the possessor. People who have expensive junk are much happier than people who have cheap junk.How painful it is to learn that this belief is false… that this illusion defines deceit itself.

Thorstein Veblen, the great economist, wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it he compares sterling silver flatware to stainless steel flatware. Now, if you eat eggs or tomatoes – or many other foods – with sterling,you’ll get this vile-tasting chemical reaction. You don’t get this reaction with stainless steel. So stainless steel in many ways is superior to sterling. But be honest: a great hostess would sooner commit hara kiri with a butter knife than lay out anything but sterling.

In his famous Allegory of the Cave, Plato likens people who live in the everyday world of ego-conscious existence, that is to say, Samsara, to people who have been chained since birth inside a Cave. They sit there facing the rear wall of the cave and their heads are so restrained that they cannot look around. Immediately behind them is a stage upon which marionette figures are moving; and behind this stage is a large fire. The fire casts the marionettes’ shadows on the rear wall. And these moving shadows, then, are all that the chained people see. They regard them as real. But this isn’t Reality, it’s Maya …Illusion…Samsara. Shadows of the shadow world… the world of the ego.

Transcendent Reality, or Nirvana, is what is seen in the brilliant sunlight outside the cave. There truth can be seen in its pure Ideal Forms. But few people ever try to free themselves from their chains to go out into the light. People always get into their dreary ruts and don’t want to trust anything outside their own little niches.

Plato ended his allegory by saying that if a person ever got out of the cave and then in a mad desire to help his fellow man returned to tell them about that beautiful real world outside,they’d call him crazy and if he didn’t shut up, they’d kill him.

WHAT IS ZEN BUDDHISM?
PART I – CHRISTIANITY AND ZEN
by Ming Zhen Shakya

In recent years Christians have shown increasing interest in Buddhism, an interest, I think, which doesn’t arise so much from academic or neighborly curiosity, nor from any dissatisfaction with Christianity, but instead stems from a desire to return to older forms of Christian worship…forms that included the various methods of meditation that are still followed in Buddhism.

Buddhism’s history is such that, having been founded in a preliterate time and place, it was spread by word of mouth and never found itself constrained or codified by any federalizing forces. Buddhism was all over the place and out of control before anybody committed its teachings to print. The genie was out of the bottle, so to speak; and nobody has ever been able to get it back. The upside of this freewheeling diversity is that Buddhism rarely has had to contend with the problems of organizational politics. A great deal was added to Buddhism… but nothing – no technique, no method – has ever been uniformly repressed. A universally intertwining Church and State has never been an issue in Buddhism as it has been in Christianity.

If we can imagine the U.S. Congress running our religious life, we can imagine what the early Christians had to face… There were civil authorities and religious authorities in a sort of bicameral legislative and executive body. Kings and Popes, Dukes and Archbishops, and a variety of lesser nobles and priests. In those days, before Chrysler Motors, Southwest Airlines and Amtrak, a person could very easily be born, live and die all within a radius of 50 miles. Aside from the county sheriff, the only authority-figure the average man ever knew was his parish priest. Priests had to wear many hats. They were lawmen, judges, family  counselors, little league coaches, doctors, psychologists, teachers, supervisors of church administration and building maintenance, and on top of all this they were required to write letters and sermons, to hear confessions, and to perform rituals. Nobody in his right mind would envy the lot of a l4th century parish priest.

Christians had access to the methodologies of all the saints – their recipes for achieving exalted states of union with God; and many parishioners put those meditation techniques to use and became mystics, persons who could communicate directly with God.

Mystics are spiritual anarchists. You can’t tell someone who has a direct-communication link to God what you think the divine word means or the divine will intends. A mystic can figure that out for himself. He prefers to tell you. The last thing a priest needed was a few mystics in his congregation challenging his authority. He had enough to do without having to coddle these troublesome elitists. So cloisters were created, lovely places where mystics could go and contemplate God in private. There would be a nice high wall around the cloister. But more than likely that wall wasn’t there to keep people out, it was there to keep the mystics in…

At any rate, meditation, that means by which we come to directly experience of God, was deemphasized and common prayer was put in its place. The emphasis was placed on fellowship, not solitude. This was quite a change. Cathedrals, you’ll recall, were not designed to accommodate congregations. There were no pews for ordinary folks.

And so Christianity’s great body of meditational lore was hidden away. Nobody counted on the stress of 20th Century life or on the separation of church and state that would allow Christians to explore the secret Paths to God.

Those meditation techniques have been available to Buddhists for two and a half millennia. And nobody has ever had to convert to Buddhism in order use them. Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, doesn’t succeed according to the number of people it can claim as Buddhist. In fact, if the truth be known, Zen Buddhism has little or no group dynamic.

Zen is the mystical branch of Mahayana Buddhism. As the Sufis stand to Islam, as the Cabalists stand to Judaism, as the Yogis stand to Hinduism and the Contemplatives to Christianity, so does Zen stand to Buddhism. And as such it is singularly non-congregational.

For example, I’m considered the pastor of a thriving Buddhist congregation here in Clark County. Of course, a pastor is by definition a kind of shepherd – but Zen is a highly individualistic religious discipline, and shepherding Zen Buddhists is rather like trying to herd cats, as the saying goes. If you can get a congregation of cats to move when and where you want, it’s because you’ve laid down the scent of Fancy Feast and not because of anything you’ve said. I’m also reminded of Benito Mussolini’s answer when someone asked him if it was difficult to govern the Italians. El Duce sighed wearily and said, “Difficult? No. Useless!”

And so it is with Zen. There’s an unwritten law that says Zen done in a group is not Zen at all. It is of course both possible and desirable to preach the Buddhist Dharma to large gatherings of people. The more the merrier. But not Zen. True Zen is done alone. Let’s consider the word’s definition.

Zen is a sanskrit word which means meditation. I’ll digress to tell you that in China the word is written C-H-A-N and is pronounced Jen which is more or less how it’s pronounced in India. The sanskrit is written D-H-Y-A-N …duh yen. Now, whenever we have a heavily voiced D followed by the glide Y, we pronounce that d-y combination as a J. For example, when we say, “Did you go?” Did you becomes dija.  Dija go? Or, ed-u-cate, becomes ejucate. It’s a natural speech change. So, dh-yen becomes Jen and then Zen.

The English cognate is dwell.

When our mind truly dwells or meditates upon something we’re practicing Zen. Of course this doesn’t mean that we’re merely pondering a subject, musing or mulling it over. Meditation which involves thought is a structured, orderly discipline. The meditator concentrates upon his subject, mentally circling it, and that concentration leads him into total absorption. Platonic dialectics is one form of this rigorous meditation technique; the Zen koan is another.

In the Republic, for example, Plato demonstrates this advanced Zen technique when he has Socrates engage in a dialogue on the subject of Justice. The Buddha, in the Surangama Sutra, uses the same technique when he inquires into the nature of the Mind. What is mind? What is justice? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Structured inquiry is an ancient meditation form.

But the important thing here is not acquiring knowledge about mind or justice or clapping hands. These topics are merely an excuse, if you will, to enter those higher levels of consciousness: concentration, meditation, and, if we’re lucky, the euphoric ecstasy of divine union, a state which we call samadhi. Entering the Nirvanic precincts, the sacred state of samadhi, experiencing that incomparable bliss, is the goal of any spiritual practice. And obviously this isn’t the kind of goal the serious practitioner would even want to attempt in a public environment. Prayer and meditation  are personal and private endeavors. Every Zen Buddhist knows this as well as every Christian. ln Matthew Chapter 6, verse 6, Jesus says, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

When you succeed in meditation, it shows. You change! You radiate joy: You are rewarded openly!

Fellowship can be valuable. Human nature is such that people often need the feeling of security that comes with belonging to a group. And so we find many Zen organizations whose members regularly meet in order to sit on their cushions and then to enjoy a cup of tea and some spirited conversation afterwards. There’s nothing harmful about fellowship but it isn’t Zen – it’s fellowship, it’s a social endeavor. Jesus didn’t say that you shouldn’t go to the Temple. He said that when you want to communicate with God, don’t make a public spectacle of your piety. Talk to God in private.

The great problem with group Zen arises from the kind of meditation technique that is usually employed by groups, the technique called mind-blanking. As an advanced technique, it is dazzling. But it is not and should never be attempted by anyone who has not already experienced Samadhi and a few other exalted states of consciousness. Yet, because the instructions are so simple, everyone feels competent to try them. All you need do is sit down and stop thinking. Every time a thought arises in your mind you erase it. The aim is to attain a thought-free mind. Each thought is likened unto a speck of dirt that soils the mind and so you are obliged to polish it off immediately.

Unfortunately, this friction can have serious consequences. The next time you find yourself sitting around with nothing better to do, try making your mind blank by thinking about nothing. No thoughts. The normal person can’t remain thought-free for more than a few seconds at best. He would give up quickly, unless, of course, he attached soteriological significance to this activity. If he perceived it as a means to gain spiritual salvation then he’d be deadly earnest in his attempt – or if he was responding to peer pressure, that religious fervor which inspires mass-hysteria and mass-hypnosis. In either case a person might really try to hammer his brain into submission.

This mental self-flagellation then becomes a strange kind of sadomasochism. The most that can be accomplished by this activity is the state which we call Quietism – a stuporous blandness, a wretched, numb and passive state in which life’s blessings and hardships are accepted without consideration. This is not reasoned equanimity. It is not tranquility. It is mere vegetative dullness.

Back in the 7th Century, Hui Neng,  Zen Buddhism’s 6th and last Patriarch who founded the order I was admitted to in China, once approached   a young monk who was always sitting on his cushion trying to meditate in this manner. “Why do you spend so much time sitting like this?” he asked the monk. “Because I want to become a Buddha,” the monk replied. The 6th Patriarch shook his head, “My son, you can make a mirror polishing a brick sooner than you can make a Buddha sitting on a cushion.”

But usually the person who attempts this technique fails miserably and then, frustrated and disappointed, he abandons Zen, deciding that it’s useless and a bit too bizarre.

What is necessary in Zen or in any other religious discipline is clarity of thought. Life can be cruel and confusing especially when we discover that we’re largely responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. We need to understand our predicament. Escaping from life to sit on cushion and obliterate our minds is hardly the answer to anything.

In part two we discuss how a Zen practitioner develops the necessary clarity of thought to transcend ego-consciousness – the state in which the ego doesn’t exist.

The Good Fortune of the Contemplative Path

By  Yao Xiang Shakya

Many might well question, as some often do, the solitary life….a life that directs itself towards the heights of Nirvana….in a singular way….towards the emptiness of not needing anything in particular. Many seem to worry that this Way is not the Way to know much more than loneliness and misery of wanting the company of others.

A solitary, contemplative path of an inner insistence towards knowing often begins in some unsettled place coming from the recognition that the material world is disappointing as well as disenchanting. This recognition is a good fortune, if one is able to withstand the constant but fading pull to try once again to fill the inner yearning with something tangible, concrete….material.

If one defers the need to go after some thing, one has a chance to enter deliverance.

Deliverance comes with a stop gap. A temporary, sometimes makeshift ability to reel in yet another of an umpteen attempt to find satisfaction in things that are of the nature to decay, fall apart and disappear. It is a precarious place. Deliverance often feels as though the material world is on the other end of a tug of war where the material world will be declared the winner. But this feeling is a ruse.

But….it may become a haunting ruse….in the myriad shape of a distraction…promulgated by the propaganda of the conventional world….to get involved and do something.

The effort to flee the grips of this propaganda one must study and relinquish any form of pride and hate. In this case, pride may take the form of worry, wanting regard, concern for a reputation, fear of loss….just to list a few. And since hate is a familiar pal to greed it stokes up dislike, fretting, fear and loss.

When we are prideful we tend to defend our position with decrees: this is how I am…. I am the type to….I can’t stand the way things are going. We want to alter the world….have things my way rather than relinquish the ego-lord that is spearheading this attack on anyone or anything that dares to challenge it.

The ego-lord has to be forgotten as a conventional character who can never make the climb to the summit. It is to be studied….forgotten….deemed incapable….surrendered.

The first surrender is to realize the ego-lord is not capable and never will be capable of liberation. Liberation requires leaving the world of the ego-lord for a higher transcendent ground of being. For the being of Shi Ke’s harmony.

We must want to accept that the material world will be forever dissatisfying, disappointing and disenchanting. We get a chance to accept everytime we experience the changing nature of the material world….but we miss the opportunity when we keep trying to get Samsara out of some thing that will never give it….it’s when we realize in our experience that trying to get blood out of a stone is a delusion.

In Zen it is often expressed in two words: Leaping Clear. But many times we don’t know what this means. What is in need of the clear leap? In the Genjokoan it speaks of Leaping Clear of the Many and the One….again this may be fuzzy as to what the many and the one are….it is referring to the clear leap from the ego-lord (one) and the material world (the many) the stuff the ego-lord gets attached to and deems valuable.  Together, the many and the one form the delusional world.

We already know there are good days and bad days….we already know the unreliability of the material world. But when the ego-lord is in charge, untamed….still fighting….it keeps trying to get blood out of a stone. It does not leap clear. It keeps arranging and rearranging the many things in the world to get liberated, to find paradise, to be at peace, to find happiness….to live a simple life….but not the higher ground of being explained in Ming Zhen’s On Samsara.

Ming Zhen on Samsara

ON SHI KE’S TWO MINDS IN HARMONY

We don’t know precisely when Shi Ke drew it. The day, unfixed by coordinates, ambles somewhere across the Tenth Century’s calendric grid. But it must have been a sunny day for such history as we have informs us that the Master, preparing to execute his composition’s major strokes, picked up a handful of dried grass, squeezed the clump into a brush, and lapped the bristles round the ink tray until they were soft enough to yield to rice-paper demands.

If we look carefully we can hear the monk snoozing in soft cadence to the tiger’s steady purr. “Two Minds In Harmony”, Shi Ke called the work. What was he trying to tell us when he furiously scribed into existence this mellowed, dozing pair?

What else do we see? On gross examination the two figures are conformed to suggest the “on guard” position of the martial artist’s hands: the right hand is contracted into a fist and the left hand is laid securely upon it. Together they are furled and held before the chest.

The configuration is an ancient diagram of polarity: Yin/Yang. Shakti/Shiva. Power and the Law Power Obeys. The fist is power, emotion – movement away from. The overlaying hand is law, intelligence – the internal governance of reason, a hand position which reminds the martial artist that his mind must always control his use of force.

What happens to this Yin/Yang hand-configuration when the man who is poised for combat becomes the man who reposes in meditation? As the function is reversed, so is the hand position: the clasped hands are simply inverted, rotated l80 degrees, and gently relaxed, the left hand going from suppression to support and the right hand from fist to cup – a spiritual begging bowl. Indeed, the meditator assumes a passive posture and in a conscious act of supplication surrenders to the Buddha within himself.

But the Yin/Yang configuration suggested here is neither that of combat nor of meditation since both activities require an alert awareness; and the monk and tiger, in this Yin and Yang embrace, drowse as a unit in blissful oblivion. Again, what is Shi Ke trying to tell us?

We know that in our everyday lives of chopping wood and carrying water we must balance emotion and reason, the interests of eros and logos. We know that we cannot have an harmonious performance if we entertain one member of a duet to the exclusion or disadvantage of the other.

The harmony of tiger and monk has not been achieved, let us quickly add, by the victory of some vaunted superior human nature over an equally mis-termed inferior animal nature. Dogs can be more loyal than men; cats more affectionate than women. We should all improve from the company of wolves.

Neither can we suppose that the drawing conveys the idea of sexual hegemony: male sovereignty over some vassal female state, Creative over Receptive. Science has taken us beyond supposing that “seminal”; conveys the fact of “seed”, that the male supplies a pret-a-porter zygote needful only of a convenient female’s nutritional depository. The Yin and Yang concept admits to no such facile interpretation. Were this an intended meaning, Hexagram 12 (Heaven over Earth) would be a desirable one; it is not. It indicates No Progress… Disjunction… Obstruction. And the left or “sinister” hand would be represented as the female force. It is not. The right hand is the fist.

It is a matter of artistic license to term certain qualities feminine. But feminine is not female. In order for any human being to be complete the qualities so described must be equally present and harmoniously blended with those qualities designated as masculine.

But this message, however valid, is mere commonplace, too jejune and trivial in its limits… hardly enough to engage a master and surely insufficient to inspire him. What, then, is Shi Ke so determined that we see?

Where are the dynamics of intellect and passion? Isn’t the slumber an expression of peace, and the peace an implication of harmony?

Isn’t he illustrating the Seventh Day… The Day of Rest… The culmination of effort… the stasis of sleep?

Shi Ke has depicted the transcendence of opposites: the passing beyond prejudicial judgments of good and evil, of male and female, of eros and logos, of need and satiation, of conflict and repose; and, most especially, of ego and other. There is no more Yin and Yang. The distinctions are obliterated. Sleep has emptied the Circle. Shi Ke has taken us into the Nirvanic Void.

This is the effortless state of simply Being… a freezing of the pulse, a stoppage of the Turning Wheel, an end to the alternations of struggle and repose. Sunyata. Perfect entropy. The heat death of Samsara.

On Saving Others by Yao Xiang Shakya

All one can do is hope to endure the pain that comes with creation. Mary Kinzie

We cannot escape the material world in watery attempts to save another. The same is true when we ourselves might want another to save us. This murky bath of wishful salvation often in the guise of niceness, of fixing, or defending ourselves or another is off the mark and is no match for the relentless suffering of desire that is at the root of all our misery.

It is spiritual materialism in the form of a bandaid which arises in the guise of being nice….being a nice person….or wanting someone to be nice to us….

Salvation and being nice have nothing to do with one another. Being nice is a worldly convention salvation requires a leaping clear.

In order to stick with the work of spiritual salvation, we must know this or we will be duped by those who see themselves as nice….or our own internal wish to be saved by a nice person….or thinking being nice is salvation. 

Being nice, being a nice person, wishing for others to be nice to us clouds and weakens our endurance to face the pain that comes with the creation of what it takes to be a spiritual aspirant. It is a mistake of the novice or one who thinks he is a spiritual seeker but who has gone off in the wrong direction.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with any particular religion, dogma or doctrine.

When we make this mistake we do not yet know a basic requirement of a spiritual path; we do not know what is real and unreal. If we want a spiritual life, when we seek the higher aim with conviction, we seek the real. But often we stumble at this very first requirement. We do not know what is real and unreal and often mistake the unreal for the real.

Once we fall for the unreal it leads to defensiveness. We defend the unreal with pride and anger.  

This unreal place is difficult because we tend to respond to what we think is real even when it is not. Our devotion to it strengthens around our pride, a sense of self-satisfaction of seeing the unreal as real. It’s the classic tale of mistaking a rope for a snake and responding to it as a snake. This is known as hell for we have forsaken heaven for something unreal. We have wandered off the narrow path in reaction for the sake of something unreal. 

The unreal will never sate or satisfy our thirst for God.

The first step for a spiritual aspirant is to begin to look for the real and unreal, even a little discrimination is helpful….because the seeker can cultivate it.

ON FA SHI’S “I’VE COME TO SEE THE PIGEONS RIDE”
by Ming Zhen Shakya

I had never heard the entire poem. I had heard only the opening line which Fa Shi (Gisho Senderovich) had recited in the course of conversation. “Ah, yes,” she had said, “it’s just as I first wrote, `I’ve come to see the pigeons ride a crested wave of air, to fish for ocean memories…'”

I forgot the conversation but I did not forget that line. It came to mind frequently, always as an incantation that conjured up images of forgotten summers at the Jersey seashore: sea birds – sunlight glinting off their flapping wings – a handful of confetti tossed into the air: hungry birds, hovering over the surf, then dipping – the beach a smorgasbord of tiny shellfish.

The images were so pleasant that the mere remembrance of the line could improve my disposition. I was sufficiently moved to attempt a city-dweller’s haiku.

Fa Shi’s surfing pigeons
Devour worrisome crabs
On sun-drenched sidewalks.

It wasn’t much – too bad I can’t say that it suffered in translation – but it did have that virtue of mediocrity: it was sincere. Someone gave her a copy of my little salute and she graciously thanked me. I was feeling rather pleased with myself until a month later when I got a copy of the entire poem. “What a great fool she must have thought me,” I announced after I got over the impact of the piece. Her poem was an agonized prayer whispered in extremis. It was definitely not intended to be a pretty little mnemonic for childhood pleasantries.

Of course, like those of all fine artwork, its lines are deceptively simple. Surely, we think, a stroke here, a dash there, and it was finished. Fa Shi cannot comment upon the creative struggle: she has no recollection of writing it. She can only explain that she composed the poem while sitting on a Southern California beach. “I was verging on suicide,” she says simply and without poetic license, “I had been falling through space for a long time and then the ground obliged me by coming up to meet me.” She adds, smiling, “It was quite a collision.”

It would have had to be. Gisho Senderovich sets high standards for calamity. She is a Jew, born in Poland in the Thirties, a survivor of the Holocaust.

The “free fall” and the depression about which she now so casually speaks was, this time, occasioned by the self-persecution of hopeless love. The man whom she had worshipped (not too strong a word to describe her obsession) had suddenly, and with stark cruelty, terminated their relationship. Confused, grieving, she began walking around Los Angeles and found her way to the beach at Santa Monica. Whatever hold she still had on reality, she let go of at the beach. She gave away all her money, and then as if to lost her identity, too, she threw away her purse. For three days she sat on the cold sand; then someone called the police who came and put her in a hospital’s psychiatric ward. A week later, coherent – but not much more than that – she was released into her daughter’s custody.

Fa Shi remembers little of the hospital and those days on the beach. She remembers only the lines she composed and that it was Passover and the moon was full.

I’ve come to see the pigeons ride
A crested wave of air
To fish for ocean memories
That are no longer there
To beg pardon of the setting sun
That it must go down to rise
And ask the moon ascending
If it will shine for me tonight
And hesitant, though willingly,
I too await the tide
That, inexorable, washes in
No matter where I hide.

The theme of this exquisite poem is resurrection and the redemption which resurrection implies. Though the words are taken from a universally understood religious vocabulary, they are particularly meaningful to Mahayana Zen Buddhists. Of all Buddhists, we are most devoted to Amitabha, He of the Infinite Solar Light, and to his divine, lunar emanation, the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, whose name is variously translated as the “Savior Who Is Seen Within” or the “Savior who looks down from above.”

What is there about the moon that so attracts us, especially when our defenses are down? Why, when torment separates us from our rational selves, do we come finally to appeal to the moon for help? What racial memory, what code-transmitted message of salvation speaks to us when our distress is so extreme? Why, poor moonstruck lunatics, do we turn to that one face which countenances us when all other faces have turned away?

To understand Fa Shi’s poem, we must first consider the origins of our moon-dependence. Surely it was in times as ancient as our phylum that the moon began to fix its awesome hold upon our psyches.

To recapture a little of the essence of this attachment we need only imagine ourselves living – cut off from all things modern – in some remote agricultural community.

During nights and dark winters the moon would be our principal source of light, often our only source. Out of doors, without the moon we would be immobile.

We would number our days and mark our seasons by a lunar calendar and we would even take a lunar cue for planting seeds.

We would see that it was by lunar command that the tides ebbed and flowed and that women menstruated and were fertile according to the same directive. We would count from the time of conception until the time of birth exactly ten lunar cycles, one for every finger on our prayer-pressed hands. We would labor hard by day, but in the evening, by moonlight, we would know the kind time, the time when, with family reunited, we could rest, eat, drink and love. It was the moon that presided over the best hours of our lives; and we would know we owed it more than veneration.

April is the cruelest month, if, of course, you have survived March. And March is only bearable to those who were not among February’s winterkills.

By the autumnal equinox, we would harvest crops and stockpile fuel, praying that both would last us not only through the winter but far enough into the spring to sustain us through the reaping of our first planting. But which of us would have laid-in enough? By the vernal equinox, we would all be trembling with hunger and uncertainty. This is when the passion begins. Around the northern hemisphere, there is no day so holy as Passover.

Fasting is a spiritual exercise. All religions recommend it especially to those who crave the sights and sounds of divine fantasy. (On or about the fifth day of fast, the human body produces a substance similar to lysergic acid.) And so, with so many starved into spirituality, we observe Lent (Spring’s “lengthening” of days). As long as we have nothing to eat, we might as well fast.

The priests would guide us. They would remind us of our sins and we would offer our hunger in atonement for them. But we would fear, with dreadful anxiety, that if this sacrifice were not enough, the Moon, sickened by our iniquities, would wane and die and enter Nirvana, leaving us to suffer forever in nocturnal darkness. The Rites of Spring are sacrificial rites.

Two weeks later the moon would indeed die, and for three terrible days and nights there would be no moon. But then, our Bodhisattva would hear our cries and, foregoing the pleasures of celestial paradise, would return to help us. Just as the full moon always rises at sunset, the new moon always rises at dawn; and so, on the third dawn, the morning yet dedicated by many to the Goddess of the Dawn, Eastra, our Lord would appear to us anew. (Also Sprach Zarathustra!)

Zen’s connection to Judaism and Christianity is not mere coincidence. Proselytizing Persians brought the salvation cult of Mithras (Maitreya) to China. This is why there is still debate about Bodhidharma’s nationality. Was he an Iranian or an Aryan from India? Aryan, Iran, and even Erin, are all cognates – the Chinese ideogram signifies their common meaning, “noble”. There in the land where Zen was born, the lunar, salvific attributes of Mithras were assimilated to the Guan Yin androgyne, Avalokitesvara, even as Ahura Mazda, the Solar figure, fused with the Buddha of the West, Amitabha. (Recall the many silver, “argent-moon” statues of Avalokitesvara and the golden images of haloed Amitabha.)

There are but three places for the heart: heaven, hell, and purgatory: Nirvana, Samsara, and the slough that separates the two. At critical times in our lives these places meet. We usually locate them through the coordinates of grief.

So, Gisho Senderovich (she was not yet Fa Shi) found herself at the beach where ancient elements converged. There, on the sand, by the sea’s edge, in the chilling ocean air, she brought her passion’s burnt offering: Earth, wind, water, and samsaric hellfire for the ego’s immolation. It was the time for great reckoning.

Gisho had been guilty of the worst sin that a mature person can commit: idolatry. She had failed to detach herself from the things of this world. She had not turned her ego-mirror around to let it reflect the Buddha Self in whose image it had been made. Instead, in the way of adolescents, she continued to look outward at things and people in order to give herself definition and purpose. She had not yet learned that we may need and worship nothing but our Buddha Self. “I am the Lord, thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me!” Indeed.

She had bankrupted her spiritual resources. She had emptied her vaults to squander adoration upon another human ego. And so, sitting amidst the converging elements, she watched the pigeons and contemplated the sun which had not yet set and the moon which had not yet risen.

The persons of her poem are none less than the Holy Trinity; God or Godhead – represented poetically as the setting sun, Amitabha, the Buddha of the West; the redeeming Savior or Bodhisattva, divine offspring, represented by the moon; and the Holy Spirit, the expression of divine love that is breathed into each of us, which is represented here, as it is universally, as a sacred bird – dove, phoenix, quetzal, among others.

Ego-dead, Gisho submits to judgment. She explains, “I’ve come to see the pigeons ride a crested wave of air..” The image is lovely. The Holy Spirit is borne upon a crown of spume-filled wind.

“To fish for ocean memories that are no longer there.” The lines tantalize us. Who is fishing? She or the birds? Both, for they are one in the same. She has lost everything. Not even in the depths of her unconscious `ocean’ is there a minnow’s worth of sustenance. “To beg pardon of the setting sun that it must go down to rise.” Here is the great mystery of the human condition. How we regret our need for divine sacrifice, that vital death and transfiguration without which there can be no salvation.

“And ask the moon ascending if it will shine for me tonight.” This is the poet’s crisis. She begs God to intercede and send the Savior.

Will the Moon rise for her? Will He illuminate her darkness? There can be only one outcome. The Bodhisattva of Compassion will hear her cry and He will come. He will look down upon her and she will find in his face the comforting assurance of the ancient covenant. The tide will flood, a baptismal cleansing. With understandable anxiety she awaits completion of the sacrament. She need not fear. Such is the mercy of our Lord that even if she were to hide, she could not escape His mercy.

The conclusion is always “inexorable.” Those who have been delivered know this to a certainty. (Recall Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, “I hid from Him, and under running laughter… I sped… From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.” Huysmans, too, in his introduction to A Rebours – that disturbing `yellow book’ that Wilde places in Lord Harry’s hands in Dorian Gray – confirms the same ineluctable conclusion. “… while certifying that the will is intact, we must nevertheless allow that the Saviour has much to do in the matter, that he harasses the sinner, tracks him down, shadows him, to use a forcible phrase of the police.” Huysmans, famous and successful after publication of his masterwork on decadence, left Parisian society to enter a Trappist monastery.)

To those who are bereft of resource or habitat there remains the primordial medicine: the healing solace of nature.

Can man be born again? Can his deadened body be filled with life again and can his spirit be redeemed? Of course. It was not long after this remarkable seaside communion that Gisho Senderovich, splendidly tranquil, became Fa Shi, a Buddhist renunciate.

The pigeons were doves of peace.

Gisho Senderovich’s poetry is published under her American name, Gloria King.