“practice the way as though saving your head from fire” [dogen zenji]
Tuesday 8 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
At the end of June, California began its annual burning; and, as happens every ten or twenty years, the national forest surrounding the Beautiful Trench began to burn as well. [Here Wordpress ate my original post.]
Mandarin was among those evacuated during a sudden fiery surge in 1999; this summer, her ex is one of a score of residents who have chosen to remain and fight the blaze. He and a dozen or so hand-picked others follow an exciting schedule of digging firebreaks, installing sprinkler systems, clearing brush, running up and down mountain ridges to report on smoke plumes, and just generally working their (male and female) nuts off from 5 am until 9 pm every day. Of course this isn’t actually all that different from the normal summer work schedule, except that usually minor California celebrities like Tracy Chapman and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jerry Brown are lounging around in the warm plunge and/or munching on the infamously amazing bread. But the minor celebrities have all been nicely ushered forth into their relatively flame-free existences, as the fire has effectively canceled the guest season (resulting in a serious loss of revenue for the monastery).
I happen to know first-hand that the bread is amazing because I spent a few weeks in the Trench myself, first as Mandarin’s guest for a month in 2003 (in a little redwood cabin like the one above) and then the Monk’s for a fortnight in 2004. Both times I was reasonably ill-mannered, miserable and snappish, though I also peeled and chopped about a thousand pounds of yellow onions; ate many cookies and almond-butter sandwiches; and overall failed to observe the work-period rules. Nevertheless, as thready and tenuous as my connection may be, I’m so grateful for the students who remain and work to save their home. It hurts to imagine the last of the priests leave-taking and closing the gate behind them as they chant, not knowing whether they will return to smouldering temple and molten Buddha. Fortunately, the bunch on firewatch right now are imminently tough, sturdy, cheerful, and best of all practical. If any human effort can keep any particular place safe, these beings will surely manage to protect this one, anyway for now.
These events develop far away from my suburban summer mind-ground, which is addled and refractory, stubborn and arbitrary and scattered. I start my days with various wild spurts of chore-energy and melt around midday into torpor coupled with self-recrimination ranging from mild to mildly furious. During the great purge of objects I came across many Zen artifacts and relics, some of which request that decisions be made as to their disposal. Will I keep my robes? They are musty from hanging in the closet, still creased from sitting, and the collars of the white jubons are sweat-yellowed despite dedicated applications of Oxy-Clean. Will I wear them to Mandarin’s ordination in August? Will I wear the rakusu? I dream every other night about the teacher who gave it to me, as I have for years, as my dreams are peopled again and again with the Modernists, the Monk, the Physicist (and last night—just to inject a little nonliterary reality—I was Rachel from Friends, and Ross was urging me to hook up with Phoebe. But I’m straight! I kept objecting, though by the end of the dream I’d begun to wonder). The book I wrote under Herself’s name should be out now; I should try to find a copy. And then there’s an unexpected temple literally two blocks from the house—why do I not go? Why does even the thought of having someone gently correct my posture leave me feeling like I’m about to be hosed down with flame retardant? See, this paragraph too reflects my divisive and divided thoughts, writing mirroring the scrambled mind—just as a teacher can tell your mental state from the way you invite the bell.
I’d rather be human than Buddhist, I huffily commented once, on Mandarin’s old blog. Now, like the rash words of “The Man without a Country,” my wrong speech has cursed me. I left practice because I was going to be a poet? That’s like, I don’t know, an actor leaving his hit TV series because he’s going to make it big in motion pictures. What am I, the David Duchovny of Zen?!
Trust me to somehow make this ALL ABOUT ME (can you tell I’m premenstrual) when in fact I was going to try to reproduce for you a dharma talk once given by the tanto from the Trench—a sweet, beautiful, unflinchingly flame-laced lecture on the Four Noble Truths—or, as Kosho called them, “the Two Nasty Truths and the Two Noble Truths.” Kosho is a beautiful man himself, an ordained queer Episcopalian priest who not infrequently held dokusan at a San Francisco gay bar, and who once allowed an enraged Young Monk to punch him (”What did he say?” “He said, ‘Ow!’ “). It would have been (or will be, once I’m fortified by sleep and can stand to dig out my notes from the barbed-wire notebook in which they lurk) exceedingly relevant to the recent bloghood thread on self-improvement and saving the world (or more accurately, I suspect, saving the world’s thin crust of biological life).
Well, sufficient unto the day is the failure thereof.
Lifted from Mandarin, the words of Keizan Jokin, honored one:
Any excesses lead to a disturbed mind. Anything that puts a strain on body and mind becomes a source of illness. So don’t practice zazen where there is danger of fire, flood, strong winds, and robbery. Keep away from areas near the seashore, bars, and red light districts, homes of widows and young virgins, and theaters. Avoid living near kings, ministers, and high authority or near gossips and seekers after fame and profit.
Temple rituals and buildings have their worth. But if you are concentrating on zazen, avoid them. Don’t get attached to sermons and instructions because they will tend to scatter and disturb your mind. Don’t take pleasure in attracting crowds or gathering disciples. Shun a variety of practices and studies.
From some damn dumb old Zen story or another which Herself used to quote: The student wails, “But what do I do about the world?” and of course the teacher says, “What is the world?” You know.
And finally, from poet and former student Jane Hirshfield, who survived the Beautiful Trench fire in 1977: some new writing, which she offered to the recently displaced students.
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OPENING THE HANDS BETWEEN HERE AND HERE
On the dark road, only the weight of the rope.
Yet the horse is there.
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May all beings be nonflammable.
2 cookies in the jar
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Do, please, when you have time, send on the Two Nasty Truths and the Two Noble Truths. Caveating myself as someone who knows from Buddhism mostly by way of wikipedia and Mark Epstein books, I had this realization today that I have been brutal on my own little Buddhist strawman: all these truths about where suffering comes from and then how not to suffer, isn’t the trying to avoid suffering yet another opening to suffering? Or maybe it’s just that I recognize my own brain’s proneness to excesses being such that I can’t tell basic aesceticism (not, says wikipedia, to be confused with aestheticism!) from anhedonia. I recognize the things made sweeter by their transience, don’t know if I would be able to marvel so at the complete human being bundled into three feet and thirty some pounds if it weren’t for the trail of outgrown baby shoes and older brother shoes leading off into infinity, and I happily pay the suffering, the loss, for the present joy, I take intimacy with jealousy and vulnerability and relish it….I suppose the Buddhist I am not is a Buddhism of my own construction, and I do have monastic fantasies, and yet I am still working out how I really feel about suffering.
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Editor: Here I at last deleted the comment response that began to grow blobular and devouring, and I move it to the main blogbody since the green light is flickering gamely.
Or…blogular?