Ten Good Reasons to Practice Zen: #2

Reason #2: You get to relax.

This morning I came across this, by the artist, Wendy MacNaughton.........

And it suggested to me a way to view individual human development.

1.  We start out babbling, me, me, me, want food, want comfort.  We formulate longer-term desires to achieve, to get things, to matter.

2.  If we're lucky, we gradually learn to take in the outside world.  We begin to meditate and hear the demands of the self, and acknowledge the reality of other people, to not push ourselves forward so much.  We get some freedom from the cravings of the small self.

3.  We live long enough that life keeps knocking us with the fact of death and we figure out that we are one small golden blip on the great black river, and all those words don't matter so much after all.

So there.  You get to relax your ambitions.  That's reason #2.

Seeing the Light

[video:  Maru sees the light.]

Understanding that we are fragile and our lives can be snatched from us any moment is a staple of Buddhist thought. Gaining that understanding is thought to be key to awakening; some monks meditate in cemetaries or worse, charnal grounds. (The link leads to an interesting Wikipedia article, but you probably don't want to know.)

During some Zen retreats a beautiful text may be intoned by a voice from the dark outside the zendo, encouraging us to to understand that the great matter is the fragility of our lives, and we should not waste one minute of our precious time on retreat.  Along this line, here's this from an article about one of the great Teachers who brought Zen to the West, and was known for a sense of humor.

Maezumi Roshi's style was warm, dynamic and direct. He lettered a sign on the zendo reading, "If you want to clarify the Great Matter of life and death you are welcome. Otherwise, better get out!"

 So I would have said I grasped this intellectually - but Zen is never satisfied with that.  Mind is only a piece of heart-mind.  And yesterday I got a body blow that took me deeper with it.

As you know if you follow this blog, we've been to four funerals in about three months - three friends, and Tom's father.  Two of these friends were way younger than me, and their deaths shocked a lot of people.

Another couple we know has had a string of frightening events.  In April the man had his first heart attack; last month the woman took a fall that fractured her pelvis, and means she is in chronic pain and has to use a walker; yesterday we learned that the man had fainted and hit his head, and is hospitalized. Why he fainted is still being investigated.  These are older (than me) people, entering their eighties but vigorous and engaged in life, who had already had to abandon a planned trip.

The woman leads the collage group I am in, and the way we work together in silence has led to a sense of intimacy in the group.  Maybe that was why the news hit me so hard.

The way it hit me was that my body feels soft, and it is as if I can see by x-ray vision my small bones and their significant deterioration. It's that sensation, and that enhanced perception of my fragility that has me reeling.  As much as I've been reminded of my age, as near as I've been to dying, first from cancer, then from kidney failure, I didn't feel it until now.  Or if I did, I'd forgotten.  Our bodies really are soft, our skin a very thin defense; we are constantly invaded by germs and viruses and cancer cells that would like to use us as a host. I knew that, but I didn't feel it.

So I find myself remembering that chant.  Here is one version. 

Let us be respectfully reminded:
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, and with it our only chance;
each of us must strive to awaken.
Be aware! Do not squander your life.

Living in Bali

In June, 2000 I did a thought exercise I read about somewhere:

The designer Milton Glaser assigned his students at the School of Visual Arts: design a perfect day for yourself five years from now.

I set myself down to do this in one nonstop session, the way I was keeping my journal in those days. The exercise caught my imagination as I wrote, and I am surprised, looking back, how it creates a whole community, an ideal civic order of cooperation and neighborliness. It was a life of no work and harmony on a sort of fantasy island, as I then thought of Bali - as a culture where the arts are sacred and pervade life. In that design, we lived in a sort of gated community where nothing evil could enter.

My fantasy began with a house with glass walls - such as I now live in. It sat in a small community of close neighbors - which I now live in. We are not on a beach, it's true, but on a woods, next best thing - our own little woods. What we "own" goes steeply down to the ravine.

We have come a long, long way since then, but it has not been an island paradise. Life has been punctuated with illness and deaths. Yet, as the poet Robert Frost said, "Earth's the right place for love." This life is what we have, complete with all that.

The photo I chose today marks one instructive event that took place two or three years ago. My grandson Otto was visiting, and Tom was gone. It was a pleasant summer day, warm and with no wind, and Otto and I were at the dining room table playing a board game, maybe "Life" (I'm not making that up) when we heard an odd sound I identified as a loud swooshing. My peripheral vision caught something happening to my right: a huge bouquet of leaves falling past the window to our right. We blinked, stood up and went to the window. The back yard was covered with green leaves springing out from a branch. A branch of the maple had broken off and fallen.

I remember that I just kept on saying, "Oh my God." Utterly astonished. It is interesting to think that it didn't seem to rattle Otto at all - maybe when you're seven years old, a whole lot of things are inexplicable and surprising. But he obediently went with me to inspect the back yard. The branch had not scraped a window or poked through a porch screen. Nothing was harmed. We circled the house, had to go across the street to see just where the branch had broken off, high in the tree.

There are moments when our conception of a safe, secure reality is torn apart, and we see the true nature of life - how a branch can tear off when there is no wind, no apparent disease in the tree. There are reasons somewhere, maybe in the unseen world, the 90% that scientists say our senses do not detect. Maybe the buddhas whose spirits are thought to be everywhere gathered to push that branch down just to break me out of my complacency and give me an amazing dharma lesson. But it is also true that organic life is complex, and birth always leads to death. And death is not necessarily announced. Again and again, it cuts through our belief that we have things in order.