Wild Fox Zen

President’s Day off and I’m getting a bit silly! Here’s a new rendition of an old country classic. See the words below for a Zen sing along.

Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be zennies
Don’t let ‘em fluff zafus and work them old koans
Make ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be zennies
They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love
Zennies ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold
And they’d rather give you a sutra then diamonds or gold
Nyo-e o’kesa and old faded robes and each night begins a new day
And if you don’t understand him and he don’t die young
He’ll probably just drop away
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be zennies
Don’t let ‘em fluff zafus and work them old koans
Make ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be zennies
They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love
Zennies like smokey old zendos and clear mountain mornin’s
Expensive green tea and Cohen and women of light
And them that don’t know him won’t like him
And them that do sometimes won’t know how to take him
He ain’t wrong he’s just different
but his pride won’t let him do things to make you think he’s right.

Here are a couple bald eagles about a week back on a cold and windy day. This pair has hung around all winter, staying quite close to their nest and seeming to hunt together. They pay no heed whatsoever to this old baldy and dog Bodhi.

Speaking of baldies, I met an old friend today for coffee. He’s a retired Episcopalian minister and did a decade in a Catholic monastery when he was just out of high school. We both always arrive exactly on time, remnants of our monastic training, albeit in different traditions. We get together several times a year and always have a good time yacking it up.  A server at one restaurant once came over and asked if we could keep it down a bit, something I think we’re both nonmonastically and unspiritually proud of.

This morning my friend asked how koan training was going. “Still getting your mind zapped by the unanswerable?” he asked.

There is, of course, a bit of a mind zap when first encountering a koan, but koans, I explained to him, aren’t unanswerable and trippy. Instead, koans are the most practical little devils I’ve run across.

For example, “A monk once asked Fayan, ‘How can I transcend two words, sound and color?’”

Well, maybe in this case it’s more of a mind stoppage than a mind zappage. “Huh? I don’t get it,” you might say, “how can ‘I’ who is completely sound and color, transcend what I am?”

My friend is not alone in his impression that koans are unanswerable. Steven Heine concludes his nice piece, “What Is on the Other Side? Delusion and Realization in Dogen’s ‘Genjokoan’” that appears in his new book, Dogen: Textual and Historical Studies (see the previous post here for more) by quoting Dogen’s comments to the sound and color koan, “…Now I ask the great assembly, what things do you call sounds and colors?  Where are sounds and colors now?”

Heine sees this as a “rhetorical question.”

Quite the contrary and quite barking up an eagleless tree, imv. I see Dogen here as inviting a strong and clear dharma presentation.

Fayan responded to the monk, saying, “…if you understand the point of this monk’s question, it is not difficult to transcend sound and color.”

If it were meant rhetorically, in the sense of being unanswerable, transcending would not be not difficult, no?

A koan like this, though, is particularly impenetrable if the deep structures of consciousness still cling to the old stories about birth and death, delusion and enlightenment, buddhas and ordinary people.

Our practice on and off the cushion, is to be a bullshit burning furnace (Daido’s phrase), digging into the marrow of this one great life, leaping through sounds and colors.

Here’s another part of Dogen’s commentary on this koan, all of which occurs, btw, in Dogen’s Extensive Record (the Kindle edition is now a shockingly low $11.92 so shop now!) number 52:

When we realize the way, we do not realize with something else, we realize only with sounds and colors.  When we are deluded, we are not deluded with something else, we are deluded only with sounds and colors.  A deluded person and an enlightened person at the same time use one boat, and each is not obstructed.

Ain’t that sweet?

A deep thanks to Koun for his wholehearted, uncompromising effort to express his impersonal heart here in the last two posts.

I enjoyed having Koun guest blogging and hope that he’ll offer more in the future – like any time.

Or maybe he’ll do his own blog. Clearly, Koun has an important perspective that is not usually heard or seen in the blogging world and although reading blogs is not training in authentic practice, at least bloggers can serve by sharing information about it.

There is quite a lot of mental practice and misinformation in this cyber realm, after all, so a little variety is nice too from time to time.

Speaking of variety and whether what we’re doing in the US is “Zen” or a misappropriation of the term (see No Zen in the West for more), I received the beautiful catalog from Tassajara Zen Mountain Center this past week. Tassajara’s San Francisco Zen Center is in it’s 5oth year so the question of whether Zen has successfully been transmitted seems fitting.

In the fall and winter, Tassajara offers a couple 90-day practice periods that I understand are still pretty rigorous – so more power to ‘em for all of that. I might even apply to participate as a little retirement gift to my impersonal person, sometime in the next decade.

In their more public season, early May – mid September, the oldest Zen monastery in the West offers fifty-three retreats.  Imagine staffing and managing (and grunting out) fifty-three retreats in just over three months. I’m tired just thinking about it!

Imagine that in 500 years, a rather tormented reincarnate of Steve Heine (click here for his 2012 Dogen book) discovers this catalog and seeks to discern through careful historical procedures if authentic practice had been transmitted to what was then known as the US in 2012. He might classify the retreats, give a couple examples, and then calculate the percentage of that type (11% are just too hard to classify even in the 26th Century) – in reverse order of frequency, of course, so the drama could build:

Food: “Breakaway Cooking with Tea,” “Dragon Greens: A Cooking and Gardening Summer Solstice Celebration,” 6%

Nature: “The Nature of Zen,” “Wildflowers and Birds of Tassajara,” 8%

Zen: “Dogen Zenji’s Mountains and Waters Sutra” (this is one of two study weeks, descriptions on p. 57, the last page), “Presenting Suzuki Roshi’s Teachings,” 9%

Art (usually the written kind, usually paired with Zen): “Words under Words,” “Brush Mind,” 11%

Psychology and Zen (usually an adult adjustment disorder): “The Well-Fed Woman,” “True Person Retreat: Discovering the Life You’re Meant to Live,” 17%

Body: “Zen Mind, Zen Yoga,” “Breath of Fire, Breath of Peace: Breathing Practice in Zen and Yoga,” “Healing with Qigong and Zen,” 38%

Now don’t you think Steve’s incarnate would think, “Wow, that’s kinda curious!”

“Why would a 21st Century Zen Monastery offer only 9% of its sessions on Zen? Maybe they didn’t think Zen had much to offer,” Steve might think.

But he wouldn’t stop there – Steve would keep thinking. “Why would a Zen monastery bury the teaching of Dogen on the last page? Maybe ‘Zen’ as a commodity in the last remnants of state capitalism, could only sell when fused with other things, especially other ‘Eastern’ body practices, but other stuff too, like how to be comfortable in your own skin. Hmmmm. Maybe the people who came to those retreats were just really desperate for some kind of relief. Or maybe they were so into denial about the ecological and economic crisis about to unfold that they were just looking for a good time to escape and had exhausted the puny online archives (having watched everything on Netflix twice) available in that early day, so they desperately distracted themselves on themselves.

“Or just maybe there was an error in translation! Maybe they had confused ‘True Dharma Eye’ (as in essential What is It?) with True Dharma ‘I’ (as in obsessed with the self).”

Your speculation welcome as well, fellow 26th Centurions!

In a recent email exchange with Dosho, I made an offhand comment about “authentic practice.” Dosho, very reasonably, then asked me to explain what I mean by that. I want to acknowledge that there are lots of practices which I consider “authentic,” and that authentic practice can take lots of different forms in lots of different contexts.  That said, my simple answer is that authentic practice has (at least) these two components:

1. Authentic practice is radically, emphatically impersonal.

This practice is not about me.  Of course, we arrive at spiritual practice because of something we want—answers to questions, or comfort, or (common in Zen) the means by which to become a particular kind of person, one we imagine must be wise or confident or compassionate. Those desires are natural and human, and they can serve as catalysts for positive action.  Whatever brings us to the practice, we can be grateful for it. But the depth of the practice doesn’t offer the kinds of rewards we seek at the start.

One of the most critical aspects of practice is the experience of giving up.  In a weeklong sesshin, it’s normal for participants—for some this happens in the first hour, though it seems to be most common (and most dramatic) about three days in—to waver in their commitment.  The posture is zazen, but the mind is on fire with the question, “Why on earth am I here?”  You think of the things you could be doing, and that shifts dramatically towards what you should be doing (“It was irresponsible of me to leave my family for so long—I should go home right away.” “I’ll never get that report in on time—what was I thinking?”).  They decide that the pain in their legs is too much, that they’re hurting themselves. They say, “I’m just not ready for this.”  Or whatever it is. And so a good number of people will just go home.  But many—even though they have all those same impulses and all those same concerns—stay.  They give up, but without moving from where they are.  After that moment of letting go, in my experience, zazen suddenly reveals itself in a very different way, and the aches and pains and fears and excuses tend to largely fall from view.  That moment of giving up is critical to this practice, but it is only possible when we hold ourselves to a standard that is not entirely comfortable, one which confronts us—and our stories about who we are, what we need, what we are capable of—directly.

It is a basic human impulse to “fix” what is uncomfortable—Zen training, in my experience, runs completely counter to that impulse. When we really commit to something (a teacher, perhaps, or a community, or even just a schedule), we don’t suddenly come to love all the things that were previously difficult or ill-fitting, but we do let go of the idea that we need to adapt that thing to make ourselves feel better.

Because I trained in Japanese monasteries and tend to do things in a way that seems formal or traditional, people often assume that I feel strongly about adhering strictly to traditional Soto Zen ceremonial forms.  But that’s not really the case.  My only real allegiance to traditional Soto forms, if I even have one, is that 99% of the time, when I see people adapting/rejecting/replacing them, it’s obvious that they’re doing so for their own comfort. The forms can fall away. They can be different forms. And they’re constantly changing anyway. But they offer us practitioners two things that are very difficult to manufacture on our own: (a) a strict and thorough template for action, which frees us from the potentially self-serving pitfalls of making things up; and (b) a kind of culture shock which forces us out of our comfort zones and begs the question—the very critical question—“What is this?”

If you are called upon to sing a song to a crowd of people, you can either refuse, or you can sing, offering your voice to those people and to the song itself.  All the stuff you might add to that—saying you’re not a good singer, or insisting that you don’t know the song, or singing meekly out of embarrassment—only serves to make that experience about you.  But it’s not about you.  So in Zen, you just stand up and sing.

I have heard it said that Zen practice is recognizing that something is impossible and just doing it anyway.  We don’t get to rehearse something until we get it right, nor do we get to offer excuses—we “get it right” by throwing ourselves into it completely.  “Standing in one’s position,” which I wrote about last week, is like this.  Vowing to save all beings is like this—if we hold up that vow to our own story of what we think we can and cannot do, we won’t even start (that, or we’ll drown in delusions of grandeur).  But if we just do it, whatever it is—with all the flailing, human energy we can bring to that work—then that offering is complete. Nothing is lacking.

2. Authentic practice is expressed physically, moment by moment; that is, it is not purely internal or mental.

Zen practice, put very simply, is the practice of giving everything, in every moment, in every action (A student of mine once offered this definition: “Realizing the whole moment, in every moment, knowing it’s going to change.” Also true, and a beautiful way of putting it.). I think most people readily agree that practice should carry beyond just sitting in zazen, but what does that really look like?

Often, I think people misinterpret “continuous practice” to mean that they should be thinking Zen-like thoughts all the time, or that they should be doing mental exercises to cultivate compassion, or that they should be “mindful.”  But if Zen is the practice of giving everything (I suppose there are many who would disagree with that simple definition)—if that’s the case—then when we walk, we give everything to walking.  We invest ourselves in it completely.  When we speak, we speak to the very best of our ability.  When we sit, we sit as well as we can.  In shikantaza we learn this very directly, to just sit as a complete activity, to be still actively, with every cell in our bodies.  It’s the total activity of sitting still.  But too often, when we try to bring zazen into the rest of the day, we imagine that what we’re bringing is a mindset, a kind of lens on the world.  But it’s simpler than that:  It’s the total activity of this moment.

I have known people (monk and lay) who express buddhadharma in the way they read a book, or in the way they step out of a car.  But just a few.  I have also known exalted Zen teachers (in Japan and around the world) who, for all their rank and training, still teach only with words. Those are too many to count.

To take it upon oneself to sit, stand, walk, lie down, dress, speak, listen, eat, breathe as a living expression of buddhadharma is a radically impersonal act, one which is probably born from an experience of impersonal training. This is not walking around like one’s image of a Zen person, putting on one’s roshi face and saying deep things all the time–it’s getting oneself out of the way so that when you walk, walking is your complete expression.

This action, whatever it is (answering the phone, washing the dishes, walking to the mailbox, bowing), is the climax of our lives—everything we have learned and experienced and thought up to now has been leading to this moment, and is expressing itself in this moment.  We only have this moment once, and in this moment, this action is all we have—the rest is just a story.  This action is our expression.  If we invest ourselves, then this action is the full expression of itself, of living practice. It is the selfless offering of all we can offer.  It is the realization of the moment.  It is the fulfillment of vow.

I believe this is something we can recognize in others, and in ourselves.  It is palpable. It does not look the same on any two individuals, but still, we can know it. For me, this kind of expression—which I forget and remember, forget and remember, countless times a day—is at the very center of the center of what it means to bring zazen into daily life, to do “continuous practice.”

(Thank you, Dosho, for the generous invitation to write about these things.)

Koun Franz

It’s a pleasure to introduce Koun Franz to you as a guest blogger. This is great fun for me because Koun is fine, young priest and in my crystal ball, I see him as an important emerging figure. He’s 100% shikantaza, Japan-Soto trained. This background gives him quite a different perspective, I think you’ll agree.

Koun was born in Helena, Montana, but has spent more than half of his adult life in Japan.  From 2006 to 2010, he served as resident priest of the Anchorage Zen Community (some of his talks can be found on their website).  Two years ago, Koun and his family moved back to Japan (Kumamoto), where he studies, trains, lectures, and does Buddhist-related translation work.

I encourage you to read this post through (and the upcoming offering on authentic practice) and mix it up with Koun by making a comment or asking a question.

Here’s Koun:

In his post of January 14 (“More on Koans and Who Gets to Comment”), Dosho wrote, “This mode of interpretation, btw, may be largely a Western invention as a Japanese-trained priest once told me. Kind of literary interpretation, I think he said, which he’d never heard in a dharma talk in Japan.” That priest is me. After some email back and forth, Dosho very generously suggested that I expand on a couple of our exchanges directly, as a guest blogger. I’m honored.

The conversation in question took a place a couple years ago in Alaska, when Dosho was visiting the Anchorage Zen Community. Specifically, we were discussing a style of dharma talk in which a classical Zen text (maybe Dogen, maybe a koan) is juxtaposed with something from Western literature, maybe a Stevens poem or a Dylan song. In my limited exposure to Western Zen teachers, I have bumped into this style of talking quite a few times, but in all the years in Japan, I have never heard anything even remotely similar.

For that matter, I have never even heard a Soto Zen teacher in Japan talk about a koan–as a koan, that is.  I cannot recall any teacher using the word “koan” to introduce a story.  But that doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the conversation.  I recently watched a lecture on koan literature by T. Griffith Foulk from the Dogen Conference held last year, and in it, he explains how new research is showing that Dogen is constantly referencing both known and obscure koans in his writing, to a degree far beyond what we previously knew.   In the talks I hear in Japan, the famous exchanges and awakenings do occasionally come up, but they are presented as illustrative stories, as a part of our history.   They are a launching pad for expression of the dharma, but then, what isn’t?

In Japanese Soto Zen, there are a few different categories of what we might generally call “dharma talks.” The following terms are defined differently according to region and individual, but the categories stand:

• Houwa (法話, literally “dharma talk”). Houwa are usually short talks given to laypeople on the occasion of a private ceremony, such as a wake. There might be a discussion of impermanence (and how death is like the changing of the seasons), but what’s being conveyed is more emotional than philosophical. (I have heard many priests, especially those in small towns, express their exhaustion at trying to come up with something new to say in houwa when the same people attend every single funeral. It’s a kind of performance, one that a priest might have to repeat every month or even every day.)
• Sekkyou (説教, “expounding on the teachings”). These talks are also directed towards laypeople, but the teacher is usually invited, and the event is often a larger annual ceremony (such as one marking the Buddha’s enlightenment). The tone is usually encouraging, and the message is a simple one. There is actually a testing process by which one can receive various ranks as a lecturer, and since the lecturer’s audience is almost always a new one, it’s possible to repeat and polish the same basic talk for years. (I have given quite a few of these talks in the last few years; I assume that people hope the novelty of a foreign lecturer will bring more people to the temple that day. The expectation is that I will explain how I—of all people—became a priest, and that I’ll tell interesting stories about feeling out of place in Japanese culture. I always disappoint by talking about Buddhism.)
• Houyaku (法益, “benefit of the dharma”). This is the kind of talk you might find at a genzo-e (Shobogenzo study group) or at a monastery. Houyaku tend to be very academic in nature, picking apart a text line by line while adding information about its historical context, its application in a monastic setting, and so on. Teachers who are “good at” houyaku must be very knowledgeable, but unlike the categories above, there is no expectation that a houyaku will be inspiring or polished or even engaging. It is a class, not a performance.
• Teisho (提唱, “a proposal”). It is rare to hear teisho in Japan, but this is the category that corresponds most closely to what people in the West call a “dharma talk.” In my experience, the context in which one is most likely to hear teisho is during sesshin, while people are actually sitting in zazen. An in-depth discussion of zazen and true moment-to-moment practice would be surprising in any of the above categories, but since teisho are so often delivered during periods of sitting, zazen is a favorite topic.

Skillful or not, interested or not, all priests who do temple work related to laypeople will deliver houwa, perhaps frequently. A particularly charismatic or respected or even just confident (oh—or foreign!) priest will probably receive some invitations, in the course of his career, to do sekkyou. Houyaku is the realm of those who are particularly well educated, or who have become specialists in one or more areas of the tradition. And teisho is the domain of a very limited few, usually just the officers of monasteries. The vast majority of the priests I know in Japan will never be in a position to deliver either houyaku or teisho, nor could they imagine themselves doing so. In a country with tens of thousands of Soto Zen priests, there are people to do those things.

But I suspect that in the US, the situation is perfectly reversed: teisho are offered almost constantly; houyaku are expected whenever there’s some kind of study group; sekkyou are for the occasional guest-speaking gig, for larger groups, and for outreach; and houwa are relatively rare. It’s not just that Western priests have to do it all (since there are so few around), but also that the audience’s expectations are completely different. (When the AZC first contacted me about serving as their resident priest, a teacher here congratulated me—jokingly—on my promotion to ikinari douchou, “instant head teacher of a monastery.” He suspected, from what he’d heard about Zen centers, that my job description would be closer to that than to the duties of an ordinary priest. And he was right.)

In 2006, when I was preparing to move to Anchorage, one of my teachers sat me down and offered this advice: “Always stand in your position.” What he meant, essentially, was to accept the role of being a priest, not to apologize for it. It’s easy to refuse to sit in the high seat, to laugh at the silliness of having everyone bow in your direction, to wink and say in a thousand little ways, “Don’t worry—I know we’re just playing. I’m just like you.” People practically beg you to do it. But my teacher’s stance was, and is, that deep down, people do not want the priest to be just like them. They want that person to have the strength to sit in the position of the Buddha, unflinchingly, and to speak and act from that place. Because who else will do that?

“Stand in your position” means to open your mouth and let it fill with the dharma, to put on the robe of the Buddha and to embody the lineage stretching back to the Buddha, with no excuses. It also means to accept the projections and transference of others—as father figure, as distrusted school principal, as saint, as charlatan—without stepping outside of your role to say, “No, no—I’m really this.” It is not about being stubborn or immoveable; it is a question of knowing one’s function and realizing that function wholeheartedly. It is a way of offering yourself to others.

In my whole life, no single phrase has permeated my consciousness in the way that “Stand in your position” has. It pokes me every day—not just in the role of Zen priest, but also as an educator, as a citizen, and recently as a father. It is incredibly difficult—in part because there are so many tempting excuses not to do it, but mostly because in order to stand in one’s position, you must first understand, even if only intuitively, what that position is. Even if you cannot fully know what to do, you have to do it anyway.

I bring this up because as I kick around the questions Dosho raised about commenting on koan literature, I keep coming back to this issue of position. Who gets to talk about what, and how? I don’t know who gets to talk about what. I’ve been thinking about it for days, and my perspective keeps shifting. In some cases, maybe it’s better to say nothing. Perhaps just the word “koan” can mislead listeners to believe that they are entering an entirely different kind of dialogue, one the speaker does not intend. Could it be that simple? I’m not sure about that.  But if we do open our mouths, if we do take that leap, if we stand in that position, then I am sure that part of that function is to speak with the full thunder and music of the Buddha’s own voice. We do this while not knowing, because not knowing is our fundamental condition. But we do it. We just do it. Because who else will?

This question has been up again for me lately because of a couple opposing currents that I’ve noticed in the culture and my work world, namely careful process monitoring vs. the results only work environment.

So here’s a quick bit about these and their relevance for Zen training.

I’ve long felt that the “Zen Master” title gets flung around way too wantonly in the West, btw, so let me confess that prejudice at the outset.

Malcolm Gladwell wrestles with the issue of mastery in his usual entertaining manner in Outliers: The Story of Success. His basic point being, it seems to me, that in order to achieve mastery, or at least success, we need to put in our time hacking away and then be lucky with how all the forces beyond our puny efforts are rolling out.

The Beatles and Bill Gates, for example, did their hours of practice (the hairy four guys in strip clubs in Berlin) and were really fortunate to have a bunch of societal circumstances ripening just when they were.

Malcolm and others note that what lots of folks who have achieved extraordinary accomplishments have in common is that they practiced a lot. Like at least 10,000 hours.

Applied to Zen, 10,000 hours would mean about 600 days in sesshin – if you don’t count sleep. Without sesshin, it would take longer, of course. If you sit for an hour a day, it would take about 27.39 years to log 10,000 hours. If you sit 15 minutes a day, that’d be 109.6 years. Individual cases would get rather complicated weighing both factors. I did the rough math for the first 13 years of my practice while Katagiri Roshi was alive and thanks to the power of rounding up and hind-sight estimating, came up with a rather large number that I won’t share. I’m just too humble.

Like for other things, I think that the 10,000 hours rule is probably a necessary but insufficient condition for mastery in Zen.

Granted, there are problems with the math like how to count hours of “practice,” for example, so I’ve included 18 hours a day in sesshin and the full period of zazen, not subtracting those days that we’re zoned out ninety-some percent of the time! Then too there’s how to count monastic training. And there’s a lot more to a Zen life than the time you log in sesshin or in daily formal practice. But for me the exercise puts mastery in some perspective.

One of the Zen teacher organizations asks the question to applicants about how many days of intensive retreat they’ve done and friend who’s a member of the membership committee thinks that the unspoken minimum is about 300 – a rather long way from the 10,000 hours, no matter how deep the samadhi.

Btw, another friend and member of the membership committee denies that there is any such unspoken number. Hmmm.

The counter-current has a recent expression in ROWE – results only work environment. See Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution by Ressler and Thompson for more. They work for Best Buy and write about how they’ve implemented this approach there. The basic deal is that it doesn’t matter how many hours you log, whether you show up for work or not, whether you log 10,000 hours, etc., it only matters if you achieve your goals.

They write about one guy who is a roadie for a rock band, traveling around the world, doing his techy thing for Best Buy at the same time. He apparently is really happy and a very dedicated worker.

Btw, I’ve sent an application to Lucinda Williams to see if she’ll accept me as a roadie and then I’ll be talking to my boss. Wish me luck.

Anyway … the rub with the results-only approach to Zen practice is the difficulty in identifying the results or at least agreeing on them, as recent posts and comments here indicate. For Soto Zen the process is the result. For koan Zen, there’s passing through the many koans. But both of these also seem like necessary but insufficient conditions.

Then there’s manifesting a tender broken hearted love in daily life, carrying the many beings across, etc., which are hard to measure but you might know them when you see them. This seems to be the orientation of traditional Soto Zen in leaving it up to the community to call someone “Roshi” (old teacher), when the community senses that the person is ready rather than the person him/herself or their teacher laying it on them.

So no conclusion so far.

Katagiri Roshi always denied being a “Zen Master” and didn’t like people to call him that. He said that being a Zen master was like being a master driver of the car. The moment when you say, “I am master of driving the car,” you are not paying attention to your driving and might cause an accident.

That seems like a good thing to keep in mind.

Thursday, March 1, 7pm – Sunday, March 4, 1pm, 2012, at the lovely Deep Spring Temple near Pittsburgh, PA. In this sesshin, we’ll commemorate the 22^nd year memorial of Katagiri Roshi’s death. In that spirit, the focus will be to review the Buddhadharma (what is the essential point?) and to renew our practice. Dosho will give the dharma talks and offer dokusan. Suggested donation: $150. Please contact kyoki@deepspringzen.org for more information or to register.

My last post seemed to rile some folks up, as did the Old Monkey Mind in a related effort to be clear and gentle, it seems to me. James Ford is a much nicer person than I, btw, much more developed too, and it shows in many ways including the genteel generosity of his words.

Despite our careful consideration – oh, how we suffer (wink, wink) – “some” Soto Zen teachers got rather huffy and puffy about owning a share of the koan literature and the right to definitive commentary. Koans in Zen circles seem like money, sex, and children in relationships – the hot buttons around which conflict springs. They are provocative little buggers, (the koans, that is, not the teachers, just to be clear) so it makes sense to me.

“They’re our teaching stories too,” said one dear friend and Soto teacher off blog while messaging on Facebook, no less, or our make-up phone call afterwards, I don’t remember which. And we’re probably going to need another make-up call after this post.

Well, fair enough, koans are stories for everybody and nobody that I know is saying differently. And that’s the point.

For koan Zen, they’re not only teaching stories. As James cuts the cat, there is koan study and koan introspection. In “study,” koans are stories to be interpreted, sometimes with deep feeling and subtle application of the practice suggestions embedded in the context of the koan. Good stuff. Great dharma talk material. No problem.

This mode of interpretation, btw, may be largely a Western invention as a Japanese-trained priest once told me. Kind of literary interpretation, I think he said, which he’d never heard in a dharma talk in Japan.

In koan introspection, face-to-face presentation of the koan point, the truth happening point, is the point. The face-to-face part is important, it seems to me, and the method of student-meeting-teacher, self-meeting-self, has developed because it so wonderfully suits and even draws out the insights or sets up the accidents and manifestations called for in the koan.

Now from the depths of your Pure Shikantaza you might well have seen through the koan but without the presentation of the koan in face-to-face meeting, who’s to know? Who’s to verify? Who’s kidding who?

After all, koans are essentially relational, as a student said to me recently. Very few are about somebody sitting alone and having the once-and-for-all “Eureka!” moment. The koans themselves are mostly set in the face-to-face context and so of course the koan point is best actualized in that same context – and then generalized to sitting, standing, walking, lying down.

So especially those of us who haven’t undergone that process, yes, please do exercise caution when commenting on koans by noting softly and humbly from time-to-time, showing tenderness and inadequacy, the true “don’t-know-mind,” that there might be a meaning and dimension to koan that we have not yet fathomed. Certainly true for me.

This caution (as I said, dear, in my last post if you read the dang thing before getting all defensive), is always a good idea for all of us, yes, including me. I am, after all, sitting here and talking to myself and I hardly know what I’m saying so don’t listen to me and think this is definitive in any way. I’m just a “this and that,” zig-zag, poorly trained, working-class white kid from the swamps of northern Minnesota, mostly self-educated, bumbling along making quite a mess of this life, trying to make sense of it all, hammering nails in empty space, despite the obvious futility of that endeavor.

So your thoughts are welcome.

Here’s the Bodhi dog asking “What is it?” in his 100% doggie way.

By the way, the talks from the Boundless Way Rohatsu 2011 are now up here (encouragement talks are listed first and then the talks by the teachers – Melissa Blacker gave the first teisho, David Rynick the second, Dosho the third, and we all chimed in on the fourth – probably our best collaboration to date imho).

The theme for the sesshin was Xuefeng’s “What is it?” (Blue Cliff 51 and Book of Serenity 50):

When Xuefeng was living in a hermitage, two monks came to pay their respects. When he saw them coming, Xuefeng thrust open the gate of his hermitage and jumped out, asking, “What is it?”

One of the monks also said, “What is it?” Xuefeng hung his head and went back inside.

The koan goes on to deal with the last word of Zen but that’s not what I’m interested in today so I’ll ignore that part for now.

I also got an email notice recently from a San Francisco Zen priest, Dairyu Michael Wenger, in part about his book, 49 Fingers. Check out his blog with a really nice “What is it?” painting here. Michael describes 49 Fingers as “…a collection of 49 American Koans, written in traditional case, commentary, verse format alongside 22 of my original brush works.”

“Case 47: What is it?” is a great scene that’s been kicked around a lot so you probably have seen it but in case you haven’t I copy it here:

When Seung Sahn (1927-2004) met Kalu Rinpoche, they were seated at a table. Seung Sahn pointed to an orange and said, “what is it?” Rinpoche did not respond. Sahn Sunim repeated, “What is it?” Rinpoche turned to his attendant and asked, “Don’t they have oranges in Korea?”

I heard this story some time ago, perhaps embellished, with the wild Korean monk picking up the orange and shoving it in the refined Tibetan master’s face, shouting repeatedly “What is it?” I bust my gut laughing at Kalu’s fresh presentation.

Michael’s refined version works too, of course.

I’d like to make just two unrefined points now. First, when it comes to “What is it?” who gets to say? And second, what “What is it?” isn’t.

Who gets to say? is a tough issue. Soto priests without koan training comment on koans regularly (including myself in my nefarious past). Koan Zen teachers without direct training in Dogen’s teachings speak definitively about Dogen. I’ve heard a well-known Vipassana teacher go on and on (and way off) about Mu.

And this isn’t limited to the dharma whirl. Nobel laureates famously develop a halo effect and have been known to talk about areas (like racial genetics) that are far from their specialty. And we are suspicious for good reason.

I’m of the school of thought that thinks that it’s best to be really careful when importing something from another tradition and imputing meaning based on our training and background to it – because we might well miss the point. Rumi, for example, coming from his Islamic/Sufi background, may well have had a depth of meaning, an angle on truth, that we modern Zennies cannot fathom.

So at least qualifying our comments are in order, “From my shikantaza training, here’s what I think this koan is about,” for example. For listeners, it’s best to assume that such qualification is always implicit.

Now that I’ve done some koan training, I confess to this hubris in my own past and from my current perspective would like to encourage my Soto non-koan trained friends to consider the possibility that there might well be something in a koan that they have not seen from their shikantaza perspective.

I suppose that goes for all of us all the time.

I recently saw a comment on another blog saying that Zen (“What is it?” in this case) is whatever each of us say that it is. That’s fine and dandy (and willy-nilly), of course, but it ignores the many practitioners in the past who really put their butts on the line to go beyond their own personal feelings about what Zen is and isn’t and just might have discovered something beyond relative pluralism.

In addition, and most importantly, by not engaging in the question (“What is it?”) with someone else with an open heart, we miss the opportunity to hear something like “Well, there’s a better answer.”

And then dig deeper into the issue at hand.

That’s the point, you see. It’s not about authority but about discovering the healing point of Zen, as Dogen put it.

Koan Zen is likewise incredibly practical. The usual drool about what Zen is and isn’t, is often just too mushy and spacey (in the guise of spaciousness) to bring home the bacon.

So although “What is it?” is a question that can be asked forever, there is also a clear and powerful response that can be actualized while walking the dog or chewing the fat. And although “I don’t know,” what Michael nicely calls “straightforward puzzlement” might close the gap, it might well not be clear or powerful or compassionate enough to bark up the right tree.

So when you hear, “What is it?” and think that you don’t know,  you might not be so sure about that.

Your thoughts welcome.