Zen Buddhism – Roaming the Mind

March 16, 2015January 4, 2018

Revoking the Myth of 1492 and Reclaiming Turtle Island

You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.

Spoken by a Crow elder to Gary Snyder.

Joseph Campbell, whose resonant interpretations of world mythology left such a mark upon the arts and spiritual imagination of the previous century, once offered four functions for any culture’s mythological system. “Mythology,” in this case, does not mean “outdated” or “pre-scientific,” but rather it means the interface of stories about the nature of existence that any culture must utilize to navigate through an ultimately unknowable cosmos. These stories we use to orient ourselves fall into four categories, or “functions,” according to Campbell:

1. The Mystical Function, expressing our awe of the universe; 2. The Cosmological Function, explaining the shape of the universe; 3. The Sociological Function, supporting and validating a certain social order, and 4. The Pedagogical Function, giving direction for living one’s life within the overarching meaning provided by a mythological system.

Apparently, this works by the trickle down effect. Authentic mystical visions of the highest attainable truths are given symbolic form and then stepped down, systematized, and eventually harmonized into the daily life of a society. This was the idea behind Plato’s Republic as well as the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, in whose cathedrals we can see an entire cosmovision realized in stone.

Yet, as we know, myth can not only point to eternal truths but also be a system of control imposed upon a population. Folk sometimes imagine the sociological function has to do with “socializing” at church or the temple, but it doesn’t. Not at all. It’s the aspect of mythic systems that supports and validates the social order — and like the tradition of sati, where a Hindu widow would throw herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre and burn to death, it can actually be a fairly nasty piece of work. Continue reading “Revoking the Myth of 1492 and Reclaiming Turtle Island”

September 18, 2014September 7, 2018

Reflections on A Dawn Cloud

I showed up at Koko An Zendo while still a teenager. Having done my preliminary research, I marched into my first dokusan with Robert Aitken and announced my intention to take up the path of Zen. He had regarded me and said, “Well, there is this koan called Mu…” Shortly thereafter, I moved into that little temple in Hawai’i and embraced the deep sense of inner vocation I felt upon chanting the vows and taking my seat for meditation.

I was a rough piece of work. Unruly, my peace of mind shattered by my life on the streets, without inner direction except a fierce conviction that the Buddha Way was mine own. I don’t know what Aitken Roshi saw when he accepted me as a student – he was an intensely private being. Yet I recently came across a passage in a little booklet he published in 1960 which seemed to reach out of across the decades to clarify his mind for me:

Sometimes a juvenile delinquent is brought to the temple by despairing parents in hopes the monks can make a man of him. In the one case of this kind I know about the boy had a difficult time in adjusting to temple life. He made one entire sesshin a complete washout for everyone by going into giggling fits in the zendo. However, I found him at the same temple when I visited there six years later. He had become a monk and was acting as the personal attendant of the roshi. So far as I could tell, the temple life had indeed straightened him out.

Had Aitken Roshi recalled that “juvenile delinquent” as I had audibly and visibly battled with my inner demons through my second sesshin, wreaking similar havoc on the atmosphere of the zendo? Had that long ago encounter shored up his determination to keep a loose cannon like me rolling around the temple until I could batten myself down? I suspect so. Continue reading “Reflections on A Dawn Cloud”

August 12, 2013September 7, 2018

Alas! My Blade Is Broken!

Among Zen Buddhists, there is a tradition of composing a final work of art or poetry upon one’s death bed.

As a teenager, freshly embarked upon my Zen training in a Buddhist temple in Hawai’i, I came across this poem that has stuck like a koan in my memory ever since:

All my life I have prepared for this moment,
Sharpening my blade.

Now, my time has come.
And I draw it forth.

Alas! My blade is broken!

“This is not good news,” I had thought, appalled. How could someone train for decades and find, at one’s moment of greatest need, all the effort to be worthless?

Over time, I have come to savor this final communiqué from an anonymous monk in the recesses of a medieval Japanese monastery. The Heart Sutra teaches us that all things are essentially empty, including all the layers of the self that lead us to the delusion of a permanent, solid ego. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and like clouds in an empty sky, we coalesce and dissolve as well.

This realization is the great liberation transmitted by the Buddha. Our blades are, indeed, broken. Good thing, too.

Yet, the anguished lament of this monk echoes still in the marrow of my bones:

Alas! My blade is broken!