No heat or cold?

I just found my way once again to a fine discussion of a classic koan by Barry Magid.  That's him to the left.  Doesn't he look nice?

The koan is called "Tozan's No Heat or Cold."  How I know I've read this before is that my browser shows I've been here.  I still don't get it.  I mean, I still find myself thinking at times, Let me out of here!  I haven't mastered umm....what have I not mastered?  Well, sometimes I can't find my center.  Sometimes I'm stuck with bad loud music or  paranoid people or weird convoluted bureaucracies and I begin to make me feel overwhelmed.  I don't like it.  I want out of this too-bright mental state.

I won't use a specific example drawn from my long day today, on the off chance that someone who made me feel like that would read this and recognize themselves.

And now it's time for me to head into my bedtime routine and let this sit overnight.
~~~~~~~~~
It's morning, and I reread the case, and I got it again.  Here's a quote from it that I put in my journal:

Where is this Oneness that everybody's always talking about, anyway? And Tozan tells him it right here, right in the midst of the heat and the cold - not somewhere else, not in some "higher" state he's got to reach. To be completely, unself-consciously cold, cold without any thought of escape or how well I'm handling being cold or anything, just [shivering] COLD - right there is no separation, no self. 

It always seems to be the same answer, just be here. Today I am in a much cooler place.  A day to do laundry.  To throw myself 100% into doing the laundry.  I can do that.

The Whole World is Medicine

Our house in spring, star magnolia in bloom

I'll start with the story.  I was in the Internet Cafe (TV room) at Manor Care, where Tom's father is now resident, fixing myself a cup of coffee.  The little refrigerator was empty, but there were packets of that creamer mysteriously made from corn syrup.  Well, it was still sort of cream, and would soften the gastric hit of the coffee.  As I tore open the package, looking at it for collage possibilities, I thought of Yunmen's koan, which I learned as, "The whole world is medicine. What is the illness?"  (There is a different version by John Tarrant here.)

Students of Zen just finished that thought, I imagine.  It is a famous statement that is considered a koan.  The one everybody knows is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  (I know the answer to that one. :)  [by the way, smileys are addictive, especially useful in texting, which is economical]) 

later -
This morning's NY Times has an article on the discovery of the microbe that gave us streptomyacin, how a lowly lab assistant was finally given credit.  I loved this quote, though, from his journals: the microbes were found in "leaf compost, straw compost and stable manure" on a farm near their lab. I said, "The whole world is medicine."  Tom told me then that his BP medicine is based on snake venom, which kills you by reducing your BP to zero.

But that's not the deepest point of the koan, which goes like this:
Unmen said, "The whole world is medicine.  What is the illness?"
My response is, the illness is not perceiving the world. The illness is living in and grasping at your delusions.

And here's my example.  Tom and I are respectivily 63 and 69 years old, but sort of older, really; he has  post-polio syndrome, and I am, you all know, a sort of musculo-skeletal wreck, and on meds for kidney transplant, BP, arrythmia.....the usual.  Body wearing out, sooner than some people's.

His parents are 90 and 93.  His father is in nursing care, went there two months ago septic with untreated infections and long ago mentally disabled by stroke.  His mother is now living with brother Dave and his wife, but constantly trying to go back to her house.  She is bent with arthritis and can barely walk with a cane, but wants to drive.  Tom and his siblings and grandson are trying to straighten out a really horrible mess of their estate, much of which has disappeared into the hands of scam artists while they clung to their idea of staying in their own "home," the house they bought fifty years ago and have not maintained.

What is the illness?  Clinging to the delusion of never growing "old."  Clinging to the delusion that she can be independent all her life, it's only a matter of refusing to see reality.  In there was her own susceptibility to flattery, which she would never admit to, which has led her to meet strangers who call her on the phone and ask her to meet them in a parking lot and give them money.  And by the way, your home is not that house you live in; it's the world.  And your body, and you don't get to keep that.

As for us - we don't want to ever put my daughter in this position.  We spent this morning talking with a Realtor about what we can expect to realize on this house.  We are not going to move into a condo either; it's straight to retirement home for us, because realistically, we love our house, but we want to relax and enjoy whatever time we have left.  Realistically, that might be a year or ten years or a day. 

The Realtor wore flip-flops.  You have to love that.

Case 1: "What's the use?"

[Case 1 in Grandmother's Koans]

The Case
One afternoon, Grandmother and a friend sat on the patio under a shade tree having a cool, refreshing drink and discussing the recalcitrant idiosyncrasies of their husbands. They calculated that between the two of them they had been married some seventy years, though not always to the same men.

Contemplating their vast lifetime store of experience, the friend said, "You can't do a thing with them."

"What's the use?" Grandmother said.

The friend sighed and remained silent. Both women nodded.

Grandmother's Poem
All things change they say.
But some things are just more of the same.
So why bother?

Commentary
A historical note: The "patio" mentioned in the Case is a predecessor of the modern deck. Usually made of brick, stone, or concrete, it provided an outdoor haven when built near a large tree, whose cooling shade was welcome in the days before air-conditioning. Obviously, Grandmother and her unnamed friend are Women Of a Certain Age, given their many years of married life - the only life available to women in ancient times. Another key to their advanced age and wisdom is the fact that they are sitting down in the middle of the day instead of working their asses off. Perhaps they are "housewives," or are retired, or are working women enjoying the classic Friday "long lunch."

The Poem. It has been noted that the Poem does not rhyme or scan, follows no classical form, and has no imagery. Why, therefore, is it called a poem? What is a poem? Thinking deeply on that is an entirely useless past-time, and thus highly to be commended.

A curious fact about the central statement, "What's the use?" is that it takes the grammatical form of a question - but is never answered. It would be a great mistake to answer it in any meeting of Tea Ladies, and would be considered a breach of etiquette. Why is it never answered? No use asking.

The statement can be defined as a rhetorical question, but should not be set aside as trivial for that reason. Work this non-question with all your might, day and night. At every turn ask yourself, "What's the use?" When prompted to speak, stop and ask; when about to take action, stop and ask. When the alarm clock goes off, silence it and, turning over, ask, "What's the use?" Do this until you have become a mass of stopping and doing nothing, until everywhere you turn, you see that there's no use. People don't change, we never get anywhere, you will put every pound back on. By the time you fix anything, two other things will have gone wrong.

Then you will shout to the universe, "Why bother!" and the very heavens will crack open for you, and you will enter a fresh, new life. All delusions fallen away, you will understand the pleasures of a use-less life, and may now enjoy refreshing beverages with your friends, and may enter into advanced contemplation of buying a chaise lounge. But where would you put it?

Hanging in your Dilemma

A little while ago I decided to read through The Gateless Barrier - a basic collection of Zen stories and talks. I had pieced around in it the first time, and worked some of the koans with teachers, but Robert Aitken suggests you then read it right through, because his comments build on one another. And I was supposed to be off my feet this week, healing an arthritic flareup.

The last koan I expected to get interested in was "Kyogen's Man up a Tree." I never did like that koan. The basic idea is, You are hanging from a tree by your mouth. You can't reach a branch with your hands or feet. Someone comes by and asks you to tell him about Zen. You have a dilemma: if you speak, you fall and die. If you don't, you are abandoning your responsibility to others. What do you do?

Since I am a language person, I am sometimes struck by a certain word. And my experience is that Zen masters take care to be accurate. I have three translations of this collection, and Aitken is the only one who introduces the word dilemma. I recognized that prefix, di (two, as in dualism) and thought, There's a clue in this, so I looked it up.

In a dilemma, you have two choices, and neither one is good. That applied to the little puzzle. Then Aitken helped me out by telling us straightforwardly that what we have to truly hang there in that dilemma, be with it all the way. This is not so natural, is it? Can't you picture yourself writhing around, trying to make your way down the branch, kicking out, making throaty protests (without letting go the clamp on the branch that is definitely hard on the TMJs)? That is in fact what we do with our dilemmas. Sometimes it's not obvious; we may feel we are in despair over some event, a chronic illness or a lost love, but are in fact trekking from one healer to another or one bar to another, trying to find someone who can get us out of our fix. And there are always lots of people who think they can. They are even more deluded than the weary seeker, and they end up burnt out.

The first time I encountered the idea of giving over to your unhappiness or depression was in Parker Palmer's little book, Let Your Life Speak. There he recounted his own long clinical depression, and how he sank into a virtually immobile state, and slowly came to realize that he had a spiritual problem called despair, that his life was telling him, What you're doing is not working for you. He had been refusing to listen. He published this article before the recent vogue in confessional memoirs; it was a courageous act, and he has survived the stigma of mental illness to be an admired teacher and speaker.

What you do with a koan is just carry it, and I wasn't inspired enough by this one to get caught up in figuring it out. But I knew the koan was working on me this morning when I woke up to the thought, I've got to get more facts about kidney transplant. I've been on a waiting list for a year, grateful every single day that I haven't declined to the point of needing dialysis again. It's no picnic. Neither is transplant. Both carry all sorts of medical risks and uncertainty. But I hadn't been really hanging with the decision, but in the land of hope - hoping my kidneys would keep holding on until something else killed me, that I would never have to answer that phone call Yes or No (you have one hour to respond). In other words, I was really avoiding my dilemma with the mental tricks that we are best at. Maybe I'll never have to decide. (Maybe I'll win the lottery.) We are lucky when something or someone nudges us out of a delusion like that. Life is much easier when we open our eyes.