What is Zen practice?

 I don't hold with embarrassing people or dogs (you can't embarrass a cat) so I have modified this quote from a blog, and present it without attribution:

"For me, Zen practice includes not just zazen (sitting meditation) but all of the other aspects of Buddhist practice such as chanting, prostrations, sutra study, and the like."

It's not that I disagree with the above forms of practice; I just don't think all that describes the fullness of Zen. That's because I take Zen as a form of Buddhism, a religion with an ethical code, not a personal practice.

This reminds me of something I overheard once after a sit.  The guy who said this was a regular in the sangha I practiced in then.  Talking to another Zenner, who had just spent a week at Zen Mountain in New York state, he said "Don't you just wish you could go there for three months and really practice?"   I thought, He doesn't get what practice really is.  The real practice is waking up to your life. To fully live your own life compassionately is the whole thing.

This guy was married with kids, and owned a business. Like many entrepreneurs, he was charismatic and had the I Can Do That mentality that sometimes leads people to take on more than any reasonable human can do. I'd heard him talk about the impossibility of finding 20 minutes to meditate in the morning.  And it can be hard. The very act of persisting until you make that time, that is enlightening. Confronting the conditioning that says you have to be striving and useful every minute. Realizing that you don't have to hold the universe together every minute of the day. This endeavor can help us see ourselves more compassionately.

There are guidelines for life as practice in the Noble Eightfold Path, which is more than a few tips. That path, put forth by the Buddha, includes our behavior in this world of dew. It tells us how to avoid harming ourselves and others every moment.  Right speech alone can be the work of a lifetime, as it includes right listening and also, at times, keeping your thoughts to yourself.  Which I did that day.

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
~~~~~~~
Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

The Eightfold Path

Following the Eight-fold Path?  Whoa, come on, not all that ethical shit. I like my [fill in your favorite intoxicant here].

A personal note: This morning I woke up hoping to not suffer like I did yesterday from the fire of high summer, which was occupying my center with a red energy of frustration, anger, confusion, and overwhelm. You can always find reasons for sensations like this, they're there in your life, and it's a challenge not to do that, just ride it out.

Some small exploration of the web led me by accident to this statement:

[Few Americans] (36%) identify Buddhism as the religion that aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering.

And this set me up straight with something like curiosity.  Yes, that is the promise of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the basic philosophy of all Buddhism.  You can easily find formal statements of them on the web, but I think of them like this:

1. Loss, pain, sickness, aging, death are inherent in human life, and they hurt. (Suffering, dissatisfaction.)
2. What makes them hurt so much is that we don't accept their inevitability, we strive to overcome our pain in a thousand ways. (Illusion, desire)
3. We don't have to be like this. It is possible to accept reality, and to reduce the power of our desires and aversions, and just enjoy life. (nirvana)
4. The way to do this is to practice meditation, cultivate wisdom, and refrain from harming in every aspect of our lives. (The Eightfold Path)  And this is a narrow way.

Now, wait.  Isn't this practice all about me feeling better just by meditating?  Or wearing a mala around my wrist? Cultivating mindfulness while I cook and eat wonderful food? Not feeling so much pain? Being calm and happy? Definitely that!

Ah, afraid not. That begins to sound more like everything American culture teaches us to desire - the (failed) promises of psychotherapy and shopping and plastic surgery and exercise and great vacations and brain plasticity, i.e. centered on personal happiness.  (Although maybe we could work with the plasticity idea, which is the evidence that we can train our minds.)

No, the Buddha says you have to behave a certain way to be happy. And that is not a self-serving way, au contraire, not a way of pleasure and gratification.  Following right speech, right action, and right livelihood are going to keep you pretty busy with various kinds of self-restraint.  It is not just about sitting froggily, though you know I advocate that. Meditation is the first thing to do, I think, the thing that can teach us how to slow down and be aware of what you're doing so you can try to live ethically.

Me, when I'm like this, right speech is a great challenge.  It often consists of keeping my mouth shut.  Time to meditate now.  And I will post the lovely cooling picture I took two days ago in the Park of Roses.  This is especially for Kit.
 

Happy End of Day

[image: End of Day glass]
I certainly prefer birth over death, beginnings over endings. A baby is fresh and new, a delight of potential and surprise. Old age, sickness, and death are so sobering. Yet, many Buddhists work with that. I believe it was Issan, a Buddhist abbott, who started the first hospice, when the AIDs epidemic hit California, and no one knew what to do. Buddhists find hospice work fulfilling, as do many people once they have served as caregivers for a spouse or parent. Facing death, we are more sincere, we are leveled.

In my church, memorial services often glide over the hard part and emphasize the joys of the person's life, before he got so sick, that is. It is a celebration. Yet I remember one service in which people spoke about the dead woman, Lisa, her eternal youthfulness, and at last one man got up and said, "She did not remain herself to the end. That was the tragedy." I knew that, too. I had visited her in her locked dementia ward. She had been dressed well, and sat on an absorbent pad on the bed, smiling, pretending to know us. She was not herself anymore. I appreciated that man's honesty. He loved her.

As I understand it, it was encountering the realities of end-of-life that led the Buddha to leave his home and search for some consolation. It took him a while, years of traveling from one esteemed teacher to another, learning what they had to teach, meditating, doing all sorts of rigorous spiritual practices. What he came up with was - Life is hard. Very unsatisfactory, say. Because in every single birth, death is implicit. All living things mature and die. Our problem, the Buddha said, is our endless thirst. Our craving to not have life be the way it is.

You sure know about this when you end up like me, limited by a mortal illness our medical system tries hard to defeat. Beyond "lifestyle" treatments, kidney failure can be addressed only by dialysis and transplant. Both are crude, painful, elaborate and expensive treatments, but dialysis is worse, and is usually low yield in terms of restoring health. So we thirst for that magical transplant.

I had to stop there the other day and examine that. This is one reason we meditate, to go deeper with ourselves, until we face the strength of our cravings and our unrealistic delusions. Transplant is not in fact so magic as all that; the real story with Cinderella is that you might marry the Prince, but you will still have to sweep up the ashes of life, metaphorically speaking. Our lives don't stop at the beautiful waltz of the beginning.

Going deeper with myself these days I realize how I crave healing, how I want to believe there is - or will soon be - a treatment that will give me back my life - the energy of middle age. Or at least, more years with more good days. I have an alternate craving: to forget the whole thing and just accept quietly dying; that is a choice a kidney patient can make.

Lousy alternatives. Realizing this yesterday, I went about doing my laundry yelling fervently, "Don't want!" That assertion was one of the first things my grandson learned to say, and as a toddler he could say it ferociously. "Don't want!" Of course, Don't Want is as much a craving as Want.

I came back from a Memorial Service the other day with an index card on which I had written,

There is no happy ending
to an individual life.
So, what is going to console us?

Zen says the answer is to sink deep into that truth. Accept it. I guess that is the Right Understanding piece of the way of life the Buddha recommended as our consolation, what is called The Noble Eightfold Path. Ah, so, I hear my sister-in-law say. It comes down to that after all. Where is the consolation of right livelihood, of not taking what is not yours, of kind speech? This hardly seems appealing compared to a party, or a transplant.

The image I put up today is End of Day glass. If you click on that phrase, it will take you to a site that describes this accidental art, which makes beauty is made out of the leftover scraps. That seems a very nice idea to me. Consoling, in fact.