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.

What is the essence of Zen?

Just now I was sitting at the kitchen table taking a break and reading - I hope I never have to live without a kitchen table and real paper books - and Tashi came up, which she is allowed to do when there's no food on the table. A boundary she likes to test, as she likes to come up when we're doing weekly meds and try to claim the box.

I was done reading and about to go downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer.  When I closed the book, Tashi strolled over and looked at me, and I thought, What does the little cat want? Sometimes something scares her and she needs a good cuddle, and comes over, looks in my eyes, then reaches up to put a paw on my shoulder.  I gather her in.  A few minutes on a shoulder - she's so soft, almost a ragdoll - and then I can settle her on my heart.  When my arms get tired or my back starts to hurt,                                                                     I persuade her down onto my lap.

So I waited to see what she did.  She walked over on her little cat feet and stretched down to put one foot on my thigh, then launched to the ground and off to whatever she had in mind.  I thought, Sometimes you're a mom, sometimes you're a ladder.  Whatever the little cat needs. Within reason.

It's the principle of serving. The Bodhissatva of Compassion is often depicted with many, many arms, and in each hand something useful.  A friend who is the active mother of two little ones recently named off the things she keeps handy:  tissues, cellphone, bandaid, juice box . . . on it goes.  Quan Yin in t-shirt and jeans.

Kanzeon - her name in my tradition - is the compassionate one who hears the cries of the world. In my everyday life it's more like being open to the whispers, receiving so you know what to offer the little cat or your daughter or yourself.  It's right there, I think.  Not that it's simple.

Once a friend and I were walking quietly after lunch through a park.  Jean Marie, who has a degree in horticulture, indicated a tall old pine I'd noticed was somewhat yellowed.  "That needs iron," she said.  She saw the condition and knew what the tree lacked.  It takes noticing.  Mere knowledge is easy to come by these days - I wouldn't be surprised you could snap a picture of the tree, send it to some site, and they'd tell you what kind of tree it is, and what it needs. Strolling quietly and noticing the tree - that takes practice.

Another Growth Opportunity

Here's what I got in my mailbox today from Tricycle Daily Dharma, which I usually appreciate:

We should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with. Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion? It is by dealing with such challenges that we grow and develop.
Judith Lief, from "Train Your Mind"

It made me feel better to send it to a friend who completely understands the irascible state of mind this kind of thing puts me in, so I thought I'd blog on it, too, and that might make me and someone else feel better yet.

Obviously, this quote is well-chosen the coming holiday, Thanksgiving, the day when 43.6 million Americans will travel to be with family; it's kind of a standing joke that these are people you would never have chosen as friends - in America there is a shocking disrespect for one's ancestors.  Most of these travel by car, driving the highways for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an average round-trip of almost 600 miles.  And actually, this is no longer my situation in life due to deaths and other circumstances; I go to a Thanksgiving dinner at the church, where I like most of the people.

But not all.  And one of them I just really don't like right now.  For quite a few years my dislike was not a problem.  I just avoided them (plural pronoun used as gender-free singular). But recently they shot a couple of arrows right into my tender spot.  They were not aiming at me, and this is usually true when someone hurts you - some people just carry their big egos on their shoulders like a 2x4 and once in a while it swings around and happens to strike you, like a Three Stooges cartoon.

But - the damn arrow still hits you.  I would like to pull it out.  Meanwhile, this is a person I don't want to talk it through with, because I don't want to be their friend. I want to go back to comfortably avoiding them.

So I will have this to practice with on Thursday, for they will probably be there at church.  Right action, Buddhists call it.  Being pleasant.  Not gossiping angrily behind someone's back.  Not sending  bolts of cold.  You know.  And that will just have to do.  I intend to put them in the "difficult person" or "enemy" slot in my lovingkindness meditation, but right now that slot is full with somebody else.  Such is life. And, since I am a creative person, my "beloved" category is full, too.

To close with a little more attitude that reflects on American history, here's Jon Stewart:

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

Your comments are always welcome.

update:  I had no trouble at all with negative feelings toward that person.  A stray negative thought, but not a problem.  Isn't that true for everything we worry about?  (Unless, of course, it turns out to be much worse.)

Following the pathless path

Jizo in the snow, photo by Tom Tucker

This morning I read Open Buddha's review of Footprints in the Snow, an autobiography I also like, and noted that Sheng Yen wrote a book on the Chan form of koan work.  My first response to this news was, I'd like to get that.  Next, I remembered that I have mostly lost interest in formal koan study, which was very good for me when done with Ama Samy, whose method is unique, and good for me in altogether a different way when I worked with Daniel Terragno, whose traditional method was guaranteed to arouse my striving and thus my frustration.  There's a book in that sentence.

Koan work appealed to that in me that longed for mystical, intuitive engagement with the truth.  In fact, the beginning of my work was in a dream after I got home from my first retreat with Ama Samy, one of whose books is titled after the koan, Why did Bodhidharma Come from the West?  I dreamed a deeply felt answer, woke up briefly to write it down that night, and the next day wrote to him about it.  This was in 1999.  He wrote back to me with another koan, "Who is that one?," and I carry that koan to this day, realizing more all the time that this one is compiled of a thousand thousand bits that shift constantly - the truth of no fixed limited self.

During the years that I worked with Ama Samy while on retreats, I also worked with the first book in the Japanese tradition, The Gateless Barrier.  I worked with three copies of it, in fact, by three teachers, studying each koan hard, thinking about nuances.  I embraced this study gladly, finding it much more fulfilling than the graduate studies in literary theory I had recently completed.

It made its way into Zen-flavored humor written by Sherlock, my cat, which I intended to collect as The Sound of One Paw until I got felled by one real-life koan after another.  I also read and reread John Tarrant's marvelous collection, Bring me the Rhinoceros.  In all this, each koan worked its way into my mind.  It's something Tom and I share in that intimate way of the long-married, casual references to something we both did and that we understand.

Well, this is a shorthand description of a few years of journey.  My interest in koans tapered off - I couldn't say when.  At the time, I felt like I was failing.  But now I notice that I carry all those koans, and they often pop up in response to some event.  My practice has become more flexible, is changing all the time.  I'm about to pick back up yin yoga, taking advantage of Lulu Bandha's online site, recommended by the best and most generous yoga teacher I've ever known, Kit Spahr.  I am again interested in poetry, writing my own, reading others'.  On retreat, I was very moved by the visible world, and took photographs, including a sequence of a sunrise and one of a sunset that I'd like to turn into mini-slideshows and publish.  And, well, going to the health club - I have never been attracted to exercise - is a way of recognizing the basic principle of cause and effect we call karma.  Practice is all over the place, if you think about it.

I suspect all serious practitioners think deeply at times of throwing over the householder's life and entering residence, spending more time on formal practices like meditation and calligraphy.  I don't, anymore.  I'm too bonded to Tom, my neighborhood, my home, my church.  Besides, I'd drive them crazy.

Playing trumpet in an empty stadium

Long ago I saw a photograph - maybe in the OSU Lantern - of a lone trumpeter practicing in empty Ohio stadium. I haven't found that picture online; it is probably somewhere in my stuff. But Geoff Carr's photo, above, is well worth looking at.

The visual metaphor intrigued me, and I wrote a short story that was the backstory, how that kid came to do that, and why. The story was titled "The Practice Room." I cared too much about it to run it through the rejection machine, so it is so far unpublished. The manuscript is somewhere in my boxes; maybe the photo is with it.

This blogging is so much like sending your song into empty space. I do not get comments, so I can assume nobody has looked at the blog except my best friend and my husband. Lost in the crowd. There are a million, or millions, of us blogging; it's the new Dear Diary.

You pick what blog to read by its theme, don't you? Someone promises to straighten you out, or dishes dirt on the people you envy. (A waiter just got a book out of that.)

The guy playing the trumpet alone in an empty stadium that can seat 50,000 people is just playing for himself. He doesn't care who hears him. This isn't about audience, but, I liked to think, about music. He was practicing. I loved that, as I love the trumpeter in the graveyard, far away beyond the hill, playing taps on Memorial Day. No iPod will ever capture the sound, no video the feel of those slow, lonely notes echoing over the peaceful dead and the temporarily alive.