The Buddha and the Bard

My So-Called Life

2010-03-26T15:57:00.000-07:00

In one of my earliest posts I called Shakespeare a kill joy. He's always bursting our bubbles. This balloon-popping, gap-toothed-grinning death's head of a theater -- Shakespeare's theater -- stands up to that big bully of Life and says, "oh yeah? you and what army??" Shakespeare's theater calls Life out, meets it 'round back, and just when Life has lifted its chin as high and puffed its chest out as big as chest-puffing and chin-lifting can go, the playwright pulls out his pin and POP... there go all of Life's hollow pretenses, hallowed though they may be.
As I've said before, that's Shakespearean melancholy. His droopiest, whiniest characters -- Jaques in As You Like It, King Richard in Richard II and of course, everybody's favorite gloomy gus, Mr. Hamlet -- all find themselves wielding the needle that pricks our dreams.
But fools like Feste in Twelfth Night also seem pretty handy with a needle. Indeed, Shakespeare's melancholics and his fools seem pretty clearly to be two sides of the same rusty old coin.Where we're wont to see beauty and power and health, the melancholic sees with graveyard eyes. He sees only putrefaction, impotence and decay. The melancholic sucks the wind out of our sails and the life out of Life.
The fool, in contrast, seems to give us back our life. In one fell swoop he cures us, liberating us from the grandiose delusions that deafen us to the humming, thrumming world all around us. He liberates us from our so-called Life and places us, instead, squarely and rightly back in the midst of life itself.

In his darker moments, the fool's "physic" -- as Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have called it -- doesn't pop like a pin so much as purge like a knife.... Yes indeed, the Elizabethans loved their clyster pipes (i.e. enemas) and their letting of blood. And so, the cure in Shakespeare's plays is not infrequently worse than the disease. Here we need only remember the abuse received by a scapegoat like Malvolio in Twelfth Night: "an affectioned ass… so  crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him." Surely Malvolio, so full of himself, needs to have his bubble burst. But... hm. It's not a pretty sight. (Not to mention where this unpretty sight can lead.... Think Shylock, Antonio and that wing man, Gratiano: the wise-cracking anti-Semite who declares in Act 1 of The Merchant of Venice, "Let me play the fool!" Foolery in Shakespeare's Venice cuts pretty damn deep indeed.)
At his best, however, Shakespeare's fool is not a barber but an acupuncturist, deft and lithe with his needle, popping us back into balance.
- Which takes me back to the subject of my last post: the Countess Olivia at the beginning of Twelfth Night. "Good madonna, why mournest thou?" asks Feste, her late father's court jester. Olivia's sorrow makes no sense: her brother is now in heaven. Pop! Life shouldn't be wasted on the living!
It's moments like these that remind me of Zen Master Dogen's poem, written more than 700 years ago: "The Acupuncture Needle of Zazen [seated meditation]."

The water is so clear you can see down to the bottom,

As fish swim by, just as fish do:

The sky is now boundless, penetrating the heavens,

As birds fly off, just as birds do.

Zazen, just like Shakespeare's theater, and just like the art of the Fool, is nothing less, nothing more than the acupuncturist's needle. It weighs almost nothing, but against its pressure the insubstantiality of a deluded Life gives way.
And then, there we are. Doing just what we're doing, living just as we live. No muss, no fuss. No lies, no bullshit. The birds fly off, just as they do.

Take Away the Fool

2010-03-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

Zen Buddhism is famous for chiding us about language. Famously we're enjoined not to mistake the finger for the moon. Like our pointing digit, language is supposed merely to be useful, not to be a destination or distraction in its own right. Words, in other words, are a means and not an end. They direct our gaze to what really matters: i.e. to the full and luminous truth of awakening.
Lots and lots of Zennies who have spent lots and lots of tushy-time will bring up this thing about fingers and moons. They'll quote the verse associated with Bodhidharma (the sage who brought Buddhism from India to China):

A special transmission outside the scriptures, 

Not founded upon words and letters; 

By pointing directly to mind

It [i.e. Zen] lets one see into nature and attain Buddhahood.

They'll remind us that Zen is "beyond" conceptual thought, that its truth is "outside" of scripture, independent of words and letters.
The implication with this line of argument is that language is somehow extrinsic to the dharma. Words are something other than what really matters. The finger is not the moon; the word is not the truth; the container is not the contained.
Dagnabbit, argh, harumph and god's teeth! I'll try not to get too steamed up here -- but this is where my testy English professoriness tends to get the better of my equanimous tolerant Zenniness. This line of reasoning is just flat out wrong. It's heresy, in fact. Why would words be any different than any other thing at all? Are daffodils outside of the dharma? Are hydrogen atoms? Are dribbles of horse piss or a Zen master's fart or a gem-encrusted statue of the buddha?
Isn't the whole point of this whole wacky non-dual Buddhist thing that we must think outside of the categories of inside and outside themselves? (But wait! How can we think "outside" of "inside/outside" without invoking the very dualism we're trying to discard?) (Exactly. We can't "discard" it. Where would we toss it, after all? Are we going to put it in a great big steel container and ship it off to China? Mental garbage no less than physical garbage: these are things we've got to live with, make our peace with, after all.)
So, yes, sure, why not: the finger is not the same thing as the moon. But it's also not not the moon. If language is like a finger that points to the moon, then language is also like a puddle or a dewdrop or a mirror: the moon appears entirely within it, full and complete and round.
That's why a Zen master like Chao-Chou Ts'ung-Shen (the 8th century teacher I mentioned in my last post) could be known for his "lip zen": he used language not simply to point towards enlightenment, but to embody it then and there, in his verbal exchanges with his students. His words lasso the moon, as George Bailey might say, so that we can touch it, live it, gobble it up.
The technical term for this moony Zen language is "koan." In the most traditional sense, koans are little dialogues and stories recorded from the early days of Zen; exchanges that revealed and conveyed insight -- where the cobwebby veil of delusion was stripped back, if only for a heartbeat. Over the centuries these recorded exchanges became objects of study and meditation themselves -- almost like the ways in which a Catholic might study the lives of the saints, or meditate upon Christ's passion. As contemporary Zen master Eido Shimano tells us: "A koan is simply the time and place where Truth is manifest. From the fundamental point of view, there is no time or place where Truth is not revealed: every place, every day, every event, every thought, every deed, and every person is a koan. In that sense, koans are neither obscure nor enigmatic."
In this sense, too, koans are not limited to Zen. Shakespeare (for instance) has his koan moments in abundance.
I'm thinking here, especially, of Shakespeare's fools. I may be the first to call it such, but I'm hardly the first to notice the "lip zen" of characters like Feste in Twelfth Night. Every encounter they have is an opportunity for humor, and every humorous exchange is an opportunity for truth. Like a master grill cook with the fried egg and flapjack, they flip our own words up and over and back again. If we're lucky, they flip them back to us sunny-side up: showing us the life-giving truth that was there all along.
Take Feste for instance. In Act 1 of Twelfth Night we don't know much but we do know that love doesn't stand a chance in the land of Illyria. Count Orsino is hopelessly infatuated with a woman he barely knows; for her part, the Countess Olivia is hopelessly locked in a sorrow that knows no end: in the past twelve months, she's lost first her father, then her brother, and has now closed up her house in mourning. To make matters worse, her late father's fool, Feste -- who is perhaps the only leavening touch in what has become a palace of death -- is nowhere to be found. When we catch up with both Feste and Olivia in the first Act, the former is in the doghouse -- the latter is in despair. (Check out Ben Kingsley's glorious, sad-eyed Feste here.)

Olivia: Take the fool away.

Feste: Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the lady....

Olivia: Sir, I bade them take away you.

Feste: Misprision in the highest degree!... Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.

Olivia: Can you do it?

Feste: Dexterously, good madonna....

Olivia: Make your proof.

Feste: Good madonna, why mournest thou?

Olivia: Good fool, for my brother's death.

Feste: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.

- The sound of one hand clapping? Well, maybe not. But the rim shot is pretty darn close to enlightenment, if you ask me.

The Bridge

2010-03-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Although there's still some academic squabbling over these numbers, nonetheless most scholars agree that William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and 4 other poems on topics ranging from rape to wild boars. That's a lot of blank verse and fare-thee-well's. 884,647 words in the Shakespeare canon -- give or take. Which means that we see quite a lot of some of his favorite words. His most-played list tends to include words that do double or even triple duty: nouns that also work as verbs; words with multiple and even conflicting meanings; terms that can be both incredibly concrete and deeply, metaphysically abstract. For instance, the word "will" can be both a verb ("I will"), a common noun ("free will") and even a proper name (uh, "Will Shakespeare"). It can be prim and proper, or bawdy and irreverent: it's an equal opportunity obscenity for the Elizabethans, slang for both penis and vagina. The word appears more than 5000 times in Shakespeare's writing. Or, take an adjective like "fair" -- which can mean both "pale" and "beautiful." "Fair" appears upwards of 800 times. A term like "blood" -- rich in metaphysical, religious and political meanings, but also just that red stuff in our veins -- appears almost 700 times.

In all of that mass of language, however, Shakespeare only uses the word "bridge" 16 times. "Bridge" doesn't mean a lot to him; it's not a particularly resonant term -- not particularly abstract or profound. A bridge for Shakespeare pretty much is just exactly what the Oxford English Dictionary tells us it is: "A structure forming or carrying a road over a river, a ravine, etc., or affording passage between two points at a height above the ground." Shakespeare only uses the word in a more figurative sense twice. First of all, he uses it to refer to the bridge of the nose. The context is whores and syphilis. He's talking about what gets flattened in the later stages of the disease, when tubercular eruptions eat holes into the sides of your face and your nose falls off. Yeah!

The other time he uses the word figuratively is in the context of a proverb: "What need the bridge much broader than the flood?" - I.e. whatever suits the purpose at hand, is good enough. You don't need an elaborate cantilevered structure to cross a drainage ditch.

Very practical advice. Shakespeare's pretty straightforward about bridges.

Myself, I'm less so. I've been obsessed for years now with figuring out the way to bridge the seeming gulf between my two worlds... My ivory tower, my black cushion... Buddha and Bard. I keep looking for the bridge. I keep wanting to cross over, to move between these two distinct and distant continents.

And then again, I obsess over bridges within the context of my Buddhism itself. Within the Mahayana tradition -- the Northern Buddhism of East Asia (as opposed to Theravada Buddhism) -- to be a Buddhist is to seek awakening for the sake of all beings. We awaken ourselves in order to liberate all others. In Zen, this aspiration takes form as the stupifyingly impossible, absolutely crazy-making and utterly gorgeous Four Bodhisattva Vows:

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.

The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.

- Yeah. Okay. Now I've just vowed, finite being that I am, to undertake the infinite. Beautiful! Mad! Impossible! The focus is, at any rate, on guiding those numberless beings across the all-extending gulf of samsara, of birth and death, rebirth and suffering (what Kerouac called "the wheel of the quivering meat conception.") I've vowed to usher all beings through all time and space over to the other shore. Nirvana or bust. As the Heart Sutra puts it: gat-e gat-e parasamgat-e bodhi svaha! "Gone gone beyond, gone completely beyond, completely across, enlightenment, oh yeah!"

This bodhisattva business: it's a tall order. Perhaps understandably, I keep looking for the bridge.... for the way across.

The thing is: the suffering of samsara consists in nothing other than this belief that there's a here and a there.

There aren't two shores. There aren't two separate continents. There's actually no gulf that needs bridging at all. The opposite of here isn't there but the realization that, wherever you go, there you are.

But here's another way to tackle the issue:

There's a famous story involving my favorite Zen master, the 9th century Ts'ung-shen of Chao-Chou county -- known as Chao-Chou for short (his Japanese name is Joshu).

A monk asked Chao-Chou, "For a long time I've heard of the stone bridge of Chao-Chou, but now that I've come here I just see a simple log bridge."

Chao-Chou said, "You just see the log bridge; you don't see the stone bridge."

The monk said, "What is the stone bridge?"

Chao-Chou said, "It lets asses cross, it lets horses cross."

Chao-Chou was known for his "lip zen": for his ability to turn beings toward enlightenment with a mere turn of phrase. This story is no different. There really is, and was, a famous stone bridge in Chao-Chou county. It's the world's oldest open spandrel stone segmental arch bridge, and was already considered an engineering wonder in Chao-Chou Ts'ung-shen's day. It crosses the Jiao River; you can cross it even today. But the sly monk who's come to visit the master is not just talking about actual bridges, actual rivers. He's come to Chao-Chou county to cross over from samsara, and instead of a golden buddha he's found a plain and ordinary man.

In essence the monk is asking: What's the big whup? This supposedly incredible bridge is just a log. This supposedly incredible lip-zen master is just some flatulent and wizened old baldy (Chao-Chou was 80 before he started teaching.)

Big deal.

What does Chao-Chou tell him? "You just see the log bridge; you don't see the stone bridge." The monk is looking so hard for the other side -- for the ultimate, the absolute, the miraculous -- that he doesn't see the way in which the simple functioning of what's right in front of him is all the miracle he needs. "What is the stone bridge?" "It lets asses cross, it lets horses cross."

When it comes to enlightenment, our own selves, our own lives right in front of us are the only bridge we'll ever need.

"What need the bridge much broader than the flood?"

Accident Prone

2009-12-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

As long as I can remember I've been accident prone. Have only recently started wondering why. To some extent, it must be plain, garden-variety mindlessness. Laziness. No effort being made to match my body to my thoughts. I think too quickly, don't watch where my limbs are; I think at the expense of doing. There's a kind of pigheadedness here about the primacy of, well, the head. A kind of failure to take note or care of the world outside. A kind of imperiousness about myself, a kind of solipsism, even: as if the world of matter and form -- beginning with my own material form -- should accommodate with perfect, seamless ease my ideas about it.

Thing is, according to a Buddhist perspective, there is no real distinction between the world of thought and the world of things. Buddhist psychology talks about six senses: the usual five, plus the mind. In contrast, Western psychology segregates and subordinates these functions. Going back at least as far as Aristotle, the West has tended to imagine the brain as distinct from the body's sense organs. Instead of being a sense organ, the brain is a kind of processing plant, where input from the body is churned into memory, language, ideas.
Note the hierarchy here: first come the five senses, then the brain which processes the raw materials into nicely hemmed and finished thought. In turn, that three-pound mass of gray jelly, the brain, is itself subordinated to something we call the mind. Again since Greek philosophers like Aristotle, we've understood the mind as the true seat of thought, and as utterly distinct from the body altogether. In Aristotle's view, the brain is best understood as the mind's stomach -- or better yet, its meat grinder: fleshy input from the body's senses is pulverized, masticated, homogenized. The mind then comes along with the equivalent of sausage casings -- categories, concepts, words, images -- and bingo, we have the sausage links of experience. The tasty building blocks of a human life: language, ideas, reality-as-we-understand-it.
Sometimes -- especially for so-called Christian neo-platonists like St. Augustine -- we Western types have identified this immaterial mind with something we call our soul or spirit. Sometimes -- especially for Christian reformers like the guy behind the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther -- we've insisted on a vast distinction between mind and spirit. From a wide enough angle, this huge difference (big enough for monarchies to tumble, "heretics" to be burned, civilians to be slaughtered) makes little difference: whether we think about the organ of thought as the brain or the mind; whether we align the mind with the spirit, or sever the two absolutely -- regardless, at stake is a fundamentally dualist world view that envisions a world of stuff out there and a world of thought (which cognizes, organizes and manipulates that stuff) in here.
Outer and inner. Matter and thought. The world and me. We cut our life in two and then spend our life trying to figure out how to heal it back into one. If we could just harmonize these two halves then maybe we'd know what to do in those dark, windy, rainy nights on the Oregon Coast. Maybe we'd know how to move forward.

Within a Buddhist framework, however, this dualist outlook is the very definition of delusion. "To carry yourself forward and experience the myriad things" writes the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen, "is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening." At its core, dualism envisions the self as static and the world as moving. The notion seems comforting at first: all that whirling messiness is "outside" somewhere, undergoing change and death and bad hair days. "Me" on the other hand: I'm timeless, eternal and perfectly coiffed.

But I'm also eternally in prison, trapped on that worldly whirligig that, quite literally, has nothing to do with me. The world is my merry-go-round -- and I can't get off. This is the Buddhist definition of samsara, by the way: existence as the endless unsatisfying cycle of birth and death, rebirth and death again. As long as self is "in here" and world is "out there" we just keep going round and round in circles.

Samsara to the Buddhists. "Elsinore" to Hamlet.

Heart-Mind

2009-12-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

The Oregon Coast. December 2003. I'm staying with our three dogs at the wonderful Yachats Inn, where the older, unrenovated kitchenettes can be rented without breaking the bank, including the nominal pet deposit, and where every rental comes with an unlimited supply of firewood so that you can cozy up, with an ocean view, fire blazing and dogs curled at your feet. I can't remember now why I was on the Coast by myself. Ezra isn't in this memory. But somehow, there I was, and what I remember very clearly was the spectacular clearness of this one night. The wind was whipping in from the ocean, the air was wet -- not quite rain, not yet. I still had long hair then, and it was lashing my face. The dogs were running ahead of me, little blinker lights on their collars to keep them in my sights, and it was very dark. I could just make out the bodies of Tucker, the shepherd, and Sasha, the black lab: dark bulks of gray against the fainter gray of the hedgerow. A slight luminescence to the scene from the salt air and the full moon. Stella -- the sharpei-lab mix: stockier, smaller, and vastly more stubborn than the other dogs -- was just a bouncing pinprick of red light, running in the distance.

I was crying: full-throated, dragged-up-from-the-gut sobs in the wind. And half-laughing from the wacky, wuthering Charlotte Brontë-ness of the moment. My ninth year as a Shakespeare professor was well underway. I had tenure, a happy marriage, a nice home, a well-received first book, a prestigious teaching award, respect from colleagues and students, love from friends and family. I had, at this point, two years of meditation practice under my belt, and before that, more than a decade of psychotherapy. At this point, or so it seemed, not a lot unfolded in my heart on unfamiliar terms. I knew that particular terrain pretty damn well. But I was also just recovering from a major depression, my soul scotch-taped together with the unending kindnesses of Ezra, the routines of teaching, the rough-nosed solidities of dog ownership and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors provided by the fine folks at Forest Laboratories.

And I was back in a familiar place:

What the hell was I doing with my life?

The straw that broke my dromedary's spine that Fall of 2003, elevating me to wuthering heights of sorrow on the Oregon Coast, was just one more academic, administrative squabble like a score of others before and since. The details and players are not so important any more -- although at the time, my heart felt broken, utterly shredded. It felt like I'd lost both a dear friendship and a significant colleague. It felt like I'd lost a chance to do the kind of extraordinary collaborative work at my university that I'd always dreamed of doing. I'd lost, or so it felt, the opportunity to create something of vast meaning and beauty. Pretty melodramatic, but I'd be the first to admit that I'm quite the drama queen -- even now (especially now?) for all of my Zenniness. The worst of this melodramatic mess was that I couldn't even blame the various individuals involved for my disappointments. Everyone had, more or less, done his or her best. Everyone had acted in completely good faith. But nonetheless, things had gone completely awry -- leaving everyone, literally everyone, unhappy. The problems were systemic, institutional, administrative, academic.... You name it, the problems loomed large and seemed utterly beyond the scope of personal agency and ordinary human will. Things just sucked, everyone knew it, and the inevitable bad results inevitably unfolded.

My husband could relate to the experience. Ezra, is a bookman and a poet. Words are his life and his livelihood: these days he owns a booksearch business, a beautiful old bookmobile named Gertie, and carries an online inventory of books. In the old days, however, Ezra carried his words in a different way: he was a letter carrier, and for years he was absolutely in love with the US Post Office. The privilege of entering people's lives, of carrying their news and their dreams and their promises and their debts, the sense of movement and freedom, alongside the truths of stability and home… He loved it. But the blue beast kept breaking his heart. Mismanagement, petty bureaucracy, institutional injustices, potentially actionable discriminations -- again and again the institution left him disappointed and disillusioned, and one day he just left the USPS and didn't return.

In Fall of 2003, the university was my blue beast. Or to change the metaphor and the scale completely: it was as if the massy bulk of the university had somehow shrunk -- was continuing to shrink before my eyes -- and yet there I still was, trying to jam all of my being into an increasingly tiny, well-trod and endlessly re-worked patch of academic life.

In truth, in the wake of that one last disappointment with institutional inertia, I was simply meeting, squarely and fully, my own heart-mind in all its achey breaky, slick and sticky, hyphenated, self-divided glory.

It was as if there were two Lisa's -- heart-Lisa and mind-Lisa; yearning-Lisa and thinking-Lisa -- and yet I knew that they should be, could only be, one-and-the-same Lisa. And, by gum, this intellectual life for which I was so impeccably well-trained and eminently well-suited, was going to have to expand broadly enough to encompass both heart and mind. This vocation of mine (my job, profession and mortgage-paying time suck) would have to become my vocation (religion, spiritual calling and touched-by-angels-affirmation). However, the more I tried to pry open my head to let the rest of me flood in, the more the life of the mind seemed to clamp itself down: the further it closed itself off to those ventricular longings of the heart.

I don't think that everyone feels this heart-mind division in the same way that I do. Not everyone falls in love with the intellect, or goes to college and simply forgets to leave like I -- hapless university denizen -- did. And thank god for that! But I wouldn't be writing this blog if I thought that I were alone in this matter. I feel pretty fundamentally certain that this heart-mind split actually defines us human types. I'm pretty damn near sure that we all find ourselves torn between the world of practicality on the one hand, and the murkier promptings of the heart on the other. On the one side, we form ideas and act on impulses that more or less direct themselves toward living better and longer with more of the universe's goodies in our bag. On the other side, though, we're living more or less in the dark, pricked along pathways we have no choice but to clarify, step by step.

We're like Hakuin Zenji's blind pilgrims, piecing our way across the chasm.

Practicality nips at our heels: gotta keep going, gotta move on, can't stay here, for freak sake...

But the murkiest of faith pulls us forward, attached to that long silken cord hooked through our sternum, nailed straight through the pericardium and anchored in the oxygen-rich muscle beyond.

* * * * * * * * * *

One month after the deluge on the coast, on January 9, 2004, I walked through the door of the Eugene Zendo and met my teacher.
The problem is: don't ever look to Zen Buddhism for answers to anything. As I keep saying: it's just going to give you a hell of a lot more questions.

Black Cushion, Ivory Tower

2009-12-04T14:58:00.000-08:00

Precious Mirrors

2009-11-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

In Shakespeare's day, the Venetians held the monopoly on good mirrors. That island city-state, home of the world's first ghetto (think Shylock) and innovations in banking and merchant venturing (think Antonio), was also home to those brilliant glassmakers who, ensconced on the island of Murano, perfected a way to fuse mercury onto the back of their particularly fine glass. The result was an almost distortion-free reflective surface. It may be such precious mirrors that Hamlet has in mind when he declaims upon theater's true goal: "The purpose of playing," he tells us, "is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his [its] form and pressure [imprint]." Hamlet hopes that his own theater will do just that: hold the mirror up to nature. The nasty bit of business he has orchestrated -- the "play within the play" he stages before Claudius -- aims to catch the king's conscience by offering an accurate reflection of the truth.

I'll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;

I'll tent [probe] him to the quick: if he but blench [blink],

I know my course.

But how true is Hamlet's mirror? As many have noted, the play performed for Claudius does tell the story of a murder -- but it is the story of a nephew murdering his uncle.... It's a story that reflects Hamlet's own situation, in fact. Although we later learn that Claudius' conscience has, indeed, been tented to the quick, the mirror's power may have less to do with some idealized objective clarity than with its all-too-human distortions. To hold the mirror up to nature, in other words, is before all else to put oneself on display. Hamlet's mirror reflects, first and foremost, Hamlet... But in doing so, it can't help but reflect his rival, Claudius, as well.

For the 9th-century Chinese founder of my lineage, Tozan Ryokai (in Chinese: Dongshan Liangjie), the mind of Zen is something like Hamlet's theater: it is a precious mirror that reflects the whole wide world. As Tozan writes in his Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi: "Facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each other. You are not it, but in truth it is you."

These days Tozan's words -- like Hamlet's theater -- have become my koan.

I am not it, but in truth it is me.

Just what, precisely, is the relationship between me and my reflection?

I recently lost a bunch of weight: the "happiness" weight I gained when I met my husband, Ezra, who has the appetite of a linebacker and the metabolism of a fruit fly. Ezra can put it away without putting it on. It turns out, however, that I can achieve only the former. Fortunately, connubial bliss doesn't require quite as many cheese fries as you might suppose.

So, I dropped some weight, and now I find myself drawn to my reflection in two ways... First, I look at pictures from my cheese fries period. Is that me? I don't remember that round face, those earth mama arms (what my friend Sara calls "gnocchi arms": the biceps of a good potato-dumpling maker). Is smiling, ample gnocchi woman me?

And then, on the other hand, I'm drawn to my image in the mirror, or to the number that winks back at me each morning from the face of my healthometer. I keep measuring myself against this new reflection. Is this me? Is this finally, or once again, who I am?

You are not it, but in truth it is you. This is what is so tricky about body image. This is why weight loss is a $50 billion industry in North America. Everything in my heart screams that Tozan got the last half of the saying wrong. I am not it, and in truth it is NOT me, goddammit! Much as I either court it or fear it, I actually want little to do with my reflection. I want to believe instead in the reality and permanence of my self -- and consequently in the unreality and impermanence of my reflection. I want to think that I am me... eternally, essentially, independently and immaculately. Moreover, because of this supposed immaculate self-possession -- because I am me, forever and a day, regardless of circumstance -- because of that solid-as-a-rock self-possession: I get to pick and choose how I appear in the world. I get to sort through my reflections -- holding on to the pictures I like, discarding the images I don't like. I get to edit the photo album of my self -- and please don't blame me if I photoshop the pictures I really hate. Ah, look at that one: that's the real me. Not gnocchi woman -- not Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles woman -- not triple-chin falling asleep on the train woman -- but that suitable-for-framing 5x7 over there: that idealized, perfectly coiffed, elegantly backlit, cheese-fries-free woman. That's me. The others... not so much.

But here's the rub: I don't get to be ME apart from all the myriad ways that I appear. That really good picture of me on Ezra's motorcycle... that's only possible because of all those horrible bad-hair-day mug shots. This world in which I think I'm free to pick and choose, and play around, and photoshop my self: this world is not apart from me, but is instead appearing before me just precisely as my image... as my self. I am not it but in truth it is me. Constant and continual feedback between me and the world: I keep putting my foot down in front of me, and the world keeps rising up beneath it, with precisely the right amount of pressure, guaranteed and perfectly calibrated to keep me standing up and moving forward. I am not the world: it is a constant source of mysterious guidance and feedback, it is a path continually unfolding in front of me. But nonetheless, the world is me, it is nothing more and nothing less than me. The world is me insofar as I am its appearance in a unique, infinitely particular Lisa-Myobun-Freinkel shape. I am the world as me.

Thankfully, tho', the world comes in other packages as well.

Facing the Wall

2009-11-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

My friend Gensei calls zazen, the central practice of Zen Buddhism, "a vast field of no leverage." To my ear, Gensei's phrase is very beautiful and sounds vaguely, expansively Chinese, like the traditional names of what are, to my tongue, very ordinary tasting teas. "Iron Goddess of Mercy," "Osthmanthus Silver Needle," "Silver Bud Melon Frost" and, my favorite, "Maiden's Ecstasy": for me, these are all just high-priced names for that everyday poetry in a cup. Mind you, I'm not averse to being educated, and am even willing to drop ten bucks, as I did not so long ago, at a high-end "tea salon" in San Francisco for a cup of something that tasted a whole lot like Bigelow's enduring favorite, Constant Comment. I'm a tea novice, knowing just enough to avoid putting milk in my earl grey (it clashes with the bergamot), and am plenty happy with my crushed and crumbled leaves and my loosely woven filter paper tea bags. I know almost nothing of the beauty of those tight little buds unfurling and releasing themselves in the bowl or pot.

As it turns out, the same guy who invented zazen also (or so the story goes) discovered tea. According to legend Bodhidharma -- the fifth- or sixth-century Indian sage who brought Zen Buddhism to China -- discovered the enlivening properties of the white-flowered evergreen bush, the camellia sinensis, while meditating. One version of the story goes that he was dozing off and began chewing some twigs from a nearby bush. Instant awakening.

Of course, the Zen version of the story is more bloody. Amputations are, of course, involved. According to this version of the story, infuriated at himself for falling asleep during meditation, Bodhidharma ripped off his eyelids and threw the little skin flaps to the ground. Where each eyelid fell, a white-flowered bush arose. Yummers. Tea arises from (and as) our intention to wake up.

Now, zazen is just Japanese for "seated meditation." Za -- 坐 -- means "sit" or "seat." I believe that it gets used in compounds for the names of theaters -- sort of like the English suffix "plex" (multiplex, octoplex). I know that it gets used in the compound word for suppository (zazai - literally: seat medicine). Zen 禅 is just the Japanese transliteration of the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word for meditation: dhyana. Despite its exotic Japanese name, then, za-zen is nothing special. It's just meditation that you do on your keister, as opposed to walking, standing, prostrating, etc.

In addition, at least in my lineage of Zen (the Soto school), this keister-meditation is traditionally performed facing a blank wall. Eyelidless or not, Bodhidharma sat on his hairy, blue-eyed barbarian ass, facing a wall (it is said) for nine long years. His form of seated meditation was called "wall-gazing" as early as the 7th century. Bodhidharma is said to have retreated to a cave near Shaolin monastery in northern China, to have turned himself around, turned himself away from the world of push-me and pull-you, of manipulations and formulations and expectations.... -- And he is said to have sat in motionless silence for nine years...

(More amputations for the Zennies, by the way: Japanese Bodhidharma dolls have no arms or legs -- like those fun Weeble dolls of my childhood, but without the wobble. Why? Because after nine years of facing a wall, some nerve damage is bound to set in... Bodhidharma's limbs, it is said, simply faded away.)

It's tempting these days to ask how long and fruitlessly I've been facing my own damn wall. Torn and hovering and motionless. Up against that wall. Divided between my heart and my mind, between my spiritual practice and my academic profession... between my monkette's life on the black cushion and my entrails-deep entanglement in this ivory-towered world. So I ask again: how long have I been facing this wall?

But the question misses the point. Bodhidharma's wall is not some obstacle or impasse. Nor is it a protective barrier, like a cloister or a hermitage or a Walden Pond, behind which we retreat from this life and world of ours.

The wall of zazen is instead nothing less and nothing more... it is just precisely this life and world of ours in their entirety. It is a field so vast that it contains everything -- and hence, allows no place, no elsewhere, that we can push against; no cranny where we can tuck in our feet or our fingers and leverage ourselves up and out against.

The wall is everything. It's us. It's everywhere.

It's so close, I can't help but face it... which is why I, nonetheless, keep closing my eyes.

Ambition

2009-11-03T15:22:00.000-08:00

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other... - Macbeth

I've been trying to get my mind around ambition. Hamlet claims not to have it; Macbeth can't seem to act without it. In Shakespeare, ambition seems straightforward enough; it's "advancement" (as Hamlet calls it) -- or rather, its the craving for advancement... the desire to get ahead, as we would say. "Thou wouldst be great," Lady Macbeth purrs, filling her mouth with the most delicious fricatives in all of English poetry. "Art not without ambition, but without the illness that should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily. Wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win." If ambition is the desire to be great, it's a desire attended by illness. It's a desire that makes us sick.
Macbeth's problem, then, is that he's not quite sick enough.
Elsewhere Shakespeare suggests that there's quite simply something crazy about ambition -- at least about political ambition (and, in the end, I'm not sure that there's any other kind.) As we get to know the future Richard III, for instance, Shakespeare makes us wonder just exactly why anyone would want to be king. Richard's body is twisted, we learn -- literally deformed -- and so, as Richard himself tells us, he can't look for pleasure in love: "I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap... oh, miserable thought!" But, given that the kingdom is currently at peace, Richard can't look for pleasure in war either. "I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown," he concludes in soliloquy. "and whiles I live, t'account this world but hell."
This is the crazy part. Normal desires have objects; you lust after a particular woman, you crave vengeance or blood as you smite down your enemies. But Richard -- the monster who would be king -- has no real object. His heaven isn't the crown itself, but the dreaming upon the crown. His pleasure is not power, but the pursuit of power. What Richard takes refuge in is ambition itself: not power or greatness in themselves, but the illness that attends them. The desire that turns the crank on our great and greasy human engine. The desire for desire itself.
So that's what I keep stumbling over -- that's the dark face I keep staring at, waiting for the features to resolve themselves into something familiar and mundane. I have my own ambitions to reckon with, after all...
Seven years ago, when I first started to sit zazen, I felt the trapdoor in my lower abdomen swing open with a little click. One by one specific dreams fell away, fell through into empty space. I didn't need to be this, do that, create this, be honored for that. I didn't need to do anything. I was perfectly cushioned in the spacious and empty nothing-doing beneath that little trapdoor. Everything was dripping off me. The grease paint was shedding off me in sheets, like rain. I remember thinking, wow -- maybe this is a spiritual awakening! maybe this is what all those saints went through! maybe I'm up and on my way now!
Not surprisingly, the trapdoor clanged shut a little while after that. Specific ambitions had fallen, forever, away... but the illness was... is... still there, and I'm sick of it.
I've gotten it through my head that a genuine zen practitioner has no ambition... no "gaining mind" as Zennies call it. No striving after achievement or gain... no action that seeks its reward or purpose outside of itself... no tit for tat, no bargaining, no negotiating with life... no doing this in order to achieve that... no vaulting over the here and now in the name of some future something....
No gaining mind is just an extension of the bodhisattva vows of Mahayana Buddhism. My teacher tells a little story about these vows: If enlightenment is like crossing the river to the other side, when that little dinghy arrives to ferry you over, as a bodhisattva you look around you and say: you climb aboard first, you go first. And in truth you say those words so that others will learn to say them, too. You first, you climb aboard first... And pretty soon -- well, okay, after millions upon millions of kalpas -- everyone that exists now and has ever existed will be saying, you first -- you cross over before I do. And at that point -- this side is the other side.
Ambition has nowhere left to leap.

The Snooze Button

2009-10-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

   I do not know
   Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do'
   Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
     To do't.     -- Hamlet

When I was 18 and writing my first bona fide college papers and just starting to study things like words and religions and ideas seriously -- I remember being absolutely absorbed with a single question:
If God created everything, how can there be anywhere that He is not?

Now, granted, I was a bit of spiritual geek. In high school, when the other kids were sneaking out with their boyfriends and smoking dope and filter cigarettes and listening to rock and roll... I was... well, I was sneaking out with my boyfriend and smoking dope et cetera... but just a wee little bit. Mostly what I was doing: praying to my personal lord and savior, Jesus. Other kids were worried about their parents finding the hash; I was worried about my parents finding the little gold crucifix I tucked under my blouse. Remember -- this was in the long long ago, pre-digitized days... VHS was still an exciting technology... video games meant Pong... maybe (if you were really cool) Asteroids at the local arcade. Forget about cell phones, of course. Forget about personal computers or personal listening devices (I didn't own my first Walkman until GRADUATE school). So instead of entering a white ear-budded full-color massively multiplayer pixilated alternate reality like today's wayward youth -- I went way way wayward by being a suburban Jewish girl in love with J.C.

Christianity was my alternate reality. Massively multiplayer indeed.

So, here I was, first year in college, reading Augustine's Confessions for the first time -- and finding thirst-quenching spiritual guidance for the first time ever. It wasn't so much that Augie answered my questions; it was that he asked the questions I had even begun to frame. He asked about evil, about suffering and death -- about how to make peace with loss. He asked about asking itself. He wondered how it was even possible to pray: to call out to God as if there were any place that God hadn't already completely filled -- or as if there were any place big enough to contain Him. "How could God, the God who made both heaven and earth, come into me? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain thee?" Reading Augustine I started to think -- seriously -- about humility and about grace.

But I also started to think about procrastination. By the time I was reading Augustine, my love affair with evangelical Christianity was over.... and now I wanted to become a Catholic. I had the fantasies, I had the conviction. Catholicism had all the pretty churches, the music, the smoke, the smocks, the history. I wanted to be Augie, St. Francis, Dorothy Day and Flannery O'Connor combined. But since conversion would have been one Big Fucking Deal, I just couldn't bring myself to it... and I couldn't even bring myself to pray about it. Conversion in the broadest sense -- dedicating one's life to God, forsaking one's family and picking up that Cross -- I just couldn't do it. I was good at accessorizing (I've always been good at accessorizing); I was great at stocking up on the accoutrements of faith. I bought a breviary. A rosary. Lit candles. Snuck into communion line (contrary to popular belief: it tastes neither like matzah nor chicken). Got the ashes on my forehead. I stocked up.

And I didn't convert.

But here, too, Augie was my guide. Book 8 of the Confessions begins with Augustine recounting the day of his conversion and marveling at his own procrastination. Why did it take him so long? He compares himself to someone snug in bed, someone deliciously paralyzed by the warmth and the weight of the bedclothes -- by the comforting heaviness of the flesh itself.... He knows that it's time to wake up... and yet he can't help but continue to hit that big ol' cosmic snooze button. "At every turn, You showed me that Your words are true, and I, convinced by the truth, had nothing to reply but the slow and sleepy words: 'Soon, soon. Just a little longer!'"

Here's what seven years of meditating has helped me to investigate: that strange knife-edge pivot point between sleeping and waking... between our narcoleptic same old bullshit, and our converted lives of grace and faith.... between forming an intention to leap forward, and actually leaping forward. How is it possible that we spring, suddenly, from stasis ... from inertia... into action? How do we move into movement, since that first move itself is movement? It's like one of Zeno's paradoxes: how is it possible for the arrow to be in flight when at any given instant, any snapshot moment, it's completely still? How will it ever hit its mark when it must always pass through the midpoint between here and the distance remaining?

After recognizing that conversion is itself an act of will, Augustine asks the question like this: how do we will an act of will? And his answer is that we don't. None of any of this would be possible without God's will. The point of Book 8 of the Confessions is that conversion only takes place through the infinite mercy of God.

Sheisse. This is bad news for the proactive among us.

It's also bad news for the melancholic. Like Hamlet. Like me.

Why does Hamlet have bad dreams?

2009-10-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a bit lately about Shakespearean nightmares. There are quite a few of them -- and here I'm not talking about the variety to which audiences are subjected, like Joseph Fiennes' terrible comb-over in Michael Radford's recent film version of Merchant.... No, I mean the soul-pressing, hair-raising, teeth-chattering mare that sits heavy on your chest and pours scorpions into your mind, banishing any hope of sleep. When Shakespearean characters sleep badly, more often than not, the dream is something of a visitation... a palpable manifestation of guilt -- like the ghosts of victims past, who visit Richard III on the eve of his "kingdom for a horse" battle... "O coward conscience," cries Richard Crookback when he wakes up, doubled over in fear and oppressed with remorse. "How dost thou afflict me!" Similar afflictions plague the Macbeths; indeed, it is precisely sleep itself -- a good, sound, self-satisfied sleep -- that Mr. Macbeth murders when he murders the sleeping king.
   Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
   Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,
   Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care…
   Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
   Chief nourisher in life's feast….
By and large, bad Shakespearean dreams exist as something like a fistula of the soul: a suppurating passageway between inside and outside... from which our darkest, inmost yuckiness oozes outward... and into which the scathing light of day gnashes and burrows.
More than anything else, the bad dream in Shakespeare gives the lie to our easy divisions between self and other, inside and outside.
Which brings us back to Hamlet. Hamlet is the guy who finds his princedom, his castle and his country to be a "prison" -- but feels that he could live like a king inside his head. "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he tells us. Or, to be more precise: that's what he tells his frenemies, R&G. He refutes their refutation that Denmark is a prison -- "We think not so," they offer primly. R&G think that Denmark is pretty darn swell (it helps that they're being love-bombed by the current king and queen.) Why then, it's not a prison for you, says Hammie. "For there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison." Hamlet's the world's first -- and worst -- cognitive behavioral therapist. Think happy thoughts and you'll feel better! Think bad thoughts, and you'll feel like shit.
How's that working for you, Mr. Prince of Danes?
Indeed, people tend to read Hamlet as the ultimate solipsist. The ultimate egghead for whom nothing is so real as his own thoughts.
I tend to think that, au contraire, Hamlet's problem is that his thoughts aren't quite real enough. They're too vulnerable to this seepage from the outside world; there are too many fistulae, too many ports of entry for the outside world to invade the inner sanctum of the mind... What makes Denmark a prison to Hamlet is that you can't escape it. Duh. Denmark's a prison because you can't get out -- not even by retreating into the inward space of your own thoughts. The night's mare rides you even harder all the way hidden inside there.
So, if freedom doesn't come from our thoughts... what then?
In my last post, I was thinking about Dogen Zenji's instructions for zazen -- for seated meditation: "Learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward."
What makes the inwardness of zen buddhism so utterly radical -- so thoroughly, un-nightmarishly liberatory -- is that it doesn't set itself up in opposition to outwardness. It's an inside that isn't opposed to any outside. This "backward step" isn't a retreat from the world; it isn't an escape from prison, but instead a plunge inside. It's a jumping off into the world... fully exposed... ventages wide open... without any safety googles, parachutes, kevlar, landing pads, rubber bumpers, you name it....

In a Nutshell

2009-10-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.... were it not that I have bad dreams. - Hamlet

I've been stuck in my head of late, and that's a dark and twisted place to be, as Hamlet himself can tell us.

It's Act 2. "Denmark is a prison," says our Prince Charming. "It must be a prison for your mind" say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. "Your ambition makes it one." Oh gawd! says our Prince Charming. Ambitious? You think I want power? You think this is about politics? You think I want to be king? I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space. I don't need a stinking throne to make me happy.

All of which kind of begs the question: just what do you need? Why the hell does Hamlet have bad dreams?

And then there's me. Long time, no blog. Instead of writing, I've been turning things over in my own nutshell head -- where everything just seems to get more and more complicated, less and less say-able. Lots of tangled vines and dark cobwebs. "Learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward": that's the advice at the center of my tradition. That's the description of zazen -- of sitting meditation -- offered by Dogen Zenji, the 13th-century founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan. Turn inward, Dogen seems to be saying, and clear your mind. Cut the vines down, brush the cobwebs away. But, in fact, the more I sit still and simply inhabit this nutty shell of mine, the more I realize that there's no "away" to which I can sweep these cobwebs. There's no magic machete with which I can cut down these vines. The more I sit still, bounded in my nutshell, stepping backward into the source of light itself -- rather than peering outward, into a world other than myself -- the more I realize that this nutty shell of mine includes the whole wide world. Learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward... Actually Dogen is quoting the 8th-century Zen poem, Shitou Xiqian's "Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage":

I've built a grass hut where there's nothing of value.

After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.

When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.

Now it's been lived in - covered by weeds….

Who would proudly arrange seats, trying to entice guests?
Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.

The vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from.

(trans. Taigen Dan Leighton)

This hermitage that is the self, this little grass hut: no sooner have we built it, than fresh weeds appear. The whole thing starts to flake away... rank weeds possess it merely. From one standpoint (Hamlet's standpoint, perhaps), this task of building a life is hopeless. The minute we build something up, it starts to fall down. The minute we know who we are, have gotten a life and sorted it out, that very life has collapsed upon itself. We're back to the drawing board... or worse.

Indeed, in the words of Jaques, our old sinkhole buddy, the melancholic from As You Like It: "From hour to hour we ripe and ripe -- and then from hour to hour we rot and rot -- and thereby hangs a tale." We ripen on the path to rotting. In fact, to ripen is to rot. As our culinary-minded and oenophilic friends might tell us, rotting is nothing more than late stage ripening. Gastronomy, like life itself in this respect, is just the finely controlled art of dying. After all, what do you think it means to enjoy your beef well-aged and your wine well-oaked? Things taste better with entropy, pure and simple. We ripe and ripe, and rot and rot. So, from one perspective, what's the point of it all? - At the beginning of the play, that's what Hamlet's asking himself. His dad is dead... his smiling, smarmy, fist-bumping uncle is sleeping with his apparently over-sexed and oblivious mom... he's thirty and broke and still in college... and to top it off, he lives in Denmark, where a favorite salty snack is skaerpekoed: a leg of sheep hung outdoors to dry for about a month, then moved into the basement for another two or three. Yum. What's a disenfranchised royal prince to do? What's the point, after all, of being anybody, of doing anything, of even making a go with this human life of ours? The minute the grass-roofed hut is built, weeds overtake it.

But from another point of view -- Shitou's point of view, I think -- the grass hut is nothing other than weeds. It's literally made from weeds -- from the grasses that never cease to grow. How can it be "overtaken" by anything? Grass and weed, weed and grass: one building material, one hut, one world. "Though the hut is small," Shitou writes, "it includes the whole world." It's nothing but the world.
From this perspective, there's absolutely no separation between nut and shell, between shell and world. We worry that we'll lose ground. We worry about aging, worry about loss and sickness and death. About H1N1 and zombie apocalypses. But just what exactly can we lose? - So, what am I worried about?

How I Learned to Meditate

2009-08-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

I've been talking about melancholy for these past few posts -- thinking about that world-flaying impulse of a character like Hamlet: the impulse to peel back the tawdry skin of the universe and reveal the hard clean lines of underlying bone. This is Hamlet in the graveyard, with Yorick's skull in hand... It's also -- to cite a slightly more contemporary melancholy moment -- the red pill in Morpheus' palm. It's Neo, reaching for the truth, knowing that the impulse will strip away his world, for better or for worse.

Oy. Melancholics don't make particularly good roommates or boyfriends or dinner guests. I'd rather hang out with Yorick in his heyday then stroll among the tombstones with Denmark's prince. But these melancholics are on to something -- which is why, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, they make great tragic heroes.
What they're on to: bodhicitta. It's what Buddhists call the arising of awakening mind. "Bodhi" means enlightenment or awakening; "citta" is thought or mind. Bodhicitta is the mind determined to wake itself up. In a word, all Buddhist practice is designed to cultivate that determination.
When a friend of mine became a Zen monk a few months ago, I first encountered -- and was much moved by -- a passage about bodhicitta from the ordination service:

When bodhisattvas in the round of birth and death
First give rise to the thought of awakening,
Their earnest quest for bodhi
Is strong and immovable.
The merit of that single thought
Is deep, vast, and without limit.
Were the Tathagata [i.e. the Buddha] to explain it in words
He could not exhaust it to the end of time.

What strikes me now -- given how full and complex a human life is and how much at any moment we utterly have to lose -- is just how unlikely it is that the determination to awaken should ever arise.
How impossible it seems that a baby's neck will ever be able to support the heavy bulk of its head. How impossible a perfect tulip is: gorgeous, unattainably rich bulb of color, supported by such a narrow stalk. Bodhicitta is the same way: how impossible it seems that this "strong and immovable" quest for bodhi should be carried on the thin stalk of our lives.
Take my own circuitous path to Buddhist practice. I wanted to learn to meditate in my early twenties. Didn't know why -- but wanted it -- and believed that the knowledge I craved was esoteric, difficult, impossible to achieve. In college I devoured centuries of work by Christian mystics. Was most impressed by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing who taught me silently to repeat the name "God" or the word "Love" as I sat stock still. Was this meditation? Prayer? I didn't know -- and didn't follow the experiment very far.
A few years later, a friend gave me a book called Christian Zen and described himself as "a buddhist with a small 'b.'" He showed me how to sit on a round black cushion. Explained that I could sit with my eyes half-open -- or could use a flame as a meditation object. The idea of open-eyed meditation seemed counter-intuitive to me. The sense that I needed a special object -- that funny black cushion -- was both enticing and mystifying. When my friend later went on a two-week meditation retreat in the California desert, I was enthralled. He returned with stories of sand, sun, emptiness. Meditation was somewhere very very far away -- as distant as a Bible story. How could you ever learn it??
And I felt all this, while living for six years within walking distance of the Berkeley Zen Center. I was a brief train ride away from the San Francisco Zen Center. I patronized Zen businesses, literally nourished by their Buddhist practice: I bought pastries at Tassajara Bakery (fell in love with the "bear claw" there: that wonder of white flour and almond paste) and ate gourmet vegetarian meals at Greens Restaurant. Zen practitioners fed me confections and tofu for a good six years! But I never connected the dots from bear claw to broccoli rabe to my friend John's black cushion. Instead: I took a five-week meditation course at the Berkeley Psychic Institute where I learned to visualize my aura and to drop a golden chain from my second chakra down to the center of the earth.
In the end, I learned how to meditate by somehow realizing that there wasn't any trick to it at all. I went to a retreat center affiliated with the nuns of Mount Angel Abbey and did nothing special for two days. I read books on prayer and contemplation and meditation from their library. I ate simple meals in silence in their empty cafeteria. I napped on a sagging mattress in my little room. I kneeled on the prayer bench by the side of my bed. I visited the dark and peaceful chapel in the middle of the night. I climbed a walnut tree and sat in the branches. I climbed down and kneeled at its base. My hands felt very odd and large and warm; it felt suddenly like I was holding a watermelon in my open palms. It somehow felt like I was biting down on Styrofoam, like there was a weird gap between my upper and lower teeth. I wasn't sure where my body was and thought that I might be having some kind of weird little migraine or seizure. But I also wasn't very worried. I didn't learn anything special, didn't do anything special.
And that seems to be the moment that Buddhist practice became, suddenly, possible. The quest for bodhi had found something to rest itself upon.

Alas, Poor Teacup!

2009-08-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

These days I've been thinking a fair amount about melancholy. That imbalance of the humors (too much black bile, or is it not enough serotinin?) that sucks the juice from this most tasty world, leaving us an hourglass that is always half empty... at best... Melancholia. Perhaps not the most auspicious way to begin a brand new blog -- down in the tarry pits of black despair -- but, as I wrote in my first post, I'm not advanced enough to begin with the Fool; I need to take my cues instead from his darker brother, the Melancholic.
Fortunately, I've been noticing that Shakespeare gives all of his best lines to the melancholics.

The fools, on the other hand, get the best laughs…. if not the last word.
Think about Yorick in Hamlet. We all can picture this moment, right? It's Act V. The graveyard scene. Our favorite overgrown adolescent, the original black bile boy himself, Hamlet jr., has returned from sea. He's faced the perfidy of his former school chums -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or is it Rosenstern and Guildencrantz? -- as well as his own mortality. He has, in other words, sent R & G to their deaths -- substituting them for himself in his own death warrant. No impetuous sword through a tapestry this time: Hamlet has now finally demonstrated his ability to kill with vengeance and forethought. Now, he stands before a naked grave, skull cradled in palm like a teacup Chihuahua.... Black Bile Boy declares:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.

See, here's the thing: death is always going to trump everything. It's always got the winning hand. Laugh at that, milady and milord! All your frump and finery, all your pretenses, all your banalities, all your bluster ultimately blisters away.

Death wears the ultimate coat of motley, the ultimate uniform of the licensed fool. It alone can mock the mocker.
But Death is also the seam that joins the Melancholic to the Fool -- the tragic hero to the comic butt. For Death, in Shakespeare's world, is what allows us to hear the universe in stereo. Every brilliant sound receives its dark, resounding echo -- every shining vision gains its glowering shadow. For every Lear there's a Fool; for every Hamlet there's a Yorick; for every Jaques there's a Touchstone (As You Like It); for every Malvolio there's a Feste (Twelfth Night).
...All of which reminds me of a not-very-funny Buddhist joke.
- Question: What's the difference between a Buddhist and a Nihilist?
- Answer: Nothing!

Death, the Antic

2009-08-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

People often think Buddhism is bleak. It's a religion, after all, founded upon the universal truth of suffering -- upon the fundamental fact of a shifting, impermanent and hence unsatisfying world. Dukkha (pronounced DOO-ka) is the Sanskrit word for such things. Dukkha literally means uneasiness, discomfort, dissatisfaction. The Buddha achieved enlightenment about 2500 years ago, and the very first words he preached were: "there is dukkha." Life is dookie. Bleak, bleak, bleak.
In contrast, here in 21st-century America, religion is supposed to be uplifting. "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets and lite Christian rock. Sweetness, buttercups and angels. Hand-waving, foot-stomping tears of joy. I love that stuff, myself. I'm an equal-opportunity spiritual seeker: born and Bat Mitzvah'd Jewish; born again in my late teens as a Pentacostal; drawn to Catholicism in my twenties, wanting to ordain as a Carmelite nun; apathetic and vaguely secular for a good fifteen years; Buddhist since 2002. I love -- indeed, I crave -- the sweet, charismatic stuff. The holy highs and the righteous lows. Yum! God is my favorite Scooby Snack -- and I'm not even being sarcastic here. I mean it. The Holy Spirit really is delish.
Not so much in Shakespeare's England. We moderns have forgotten what it was like to worship in the face of all but universal plague, pestilence, war, vermin, venereal disease… Where empires were literally built upon the import of spice and fragrance -- ambergris, nutmeg, cloves: anything strong enough to mask the stench and taste of corruption in a world without refrigeration, sanitation, antisepsis.
We moderns have forgotten the central importance of death in our own tradition. We think Eastern religions are bleak, but have all but forgotten the graveyard religiosity of Shakespeare's world. We've nearly forgotten, for instance, the Danse Macabre or "dance of death": those woodcuts and paintings and pageants of the late medieval and early modern world… spectacles designed to remind us that death unites us all, from lowliest milkmaid to highest queen.
The image above, for instance, comes from Hans Holbein the Younger's 1538 Dance of Death. (Holbein was Henry VIII's court artist… so he probably knew a thing or two about the death of queens….) Here Holbein depicts a Fool who scoffs at death: the Fool is about to whack Mr. G. Reaper with the early modern version of a whoopee cushion. This "fool's bauble" -- a mock staff of office -- has an inflated pig's bladder tied to one end. But I'm not the first to notice that Death has his own whoopee cushion: Death's bagpipes have an inflated bladder of their own.
Question: What is it about Fools and Death and bags of air??
Thankfully, Shakespeare answers this question when the ousted King Richard (in the history play Richard II) contemplates what it means to fall from grace:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives: some sleeping killed;
All murdered: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humored thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Here the crown of kingship is imagined as the very court of King Death: a court where the monarch is also the jester, the "antic" or Fool who scoffs at pomp and pretense. And so King Death, the Mighty Fool, allows us to think -- for a little while -- that we're in charge. With our bad-ass selves we imagine that we are Kings of the World… when in reality we're only flying high on a doomed Titanic. We think we're kings -- but Death is the real king. And Death, madcap ruffian that he is, plans to give us all only a little, a very tiny little, breathing space: only enough rope with which to hang ourselves.
And so... we imagine that our flesh is indestructible, unassailable brass; we imagine that we will live and reign forever. We puff ourselves up with self-importance and fantasies of invulnerability… until at last that Antic-Monarch-Fool Death, comes along with a little pin … and bursts our bubble. Death whops us with his whoopee cushion, and we plotz right over. Our deflated bladder of selfhood whizzes into the void.
When it comes to bleakness, Shakespeare may just have Buddha beat.

Shakespeare, the Kill Joy

2009-08-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

Here's one thing that makes Shakespeare so freaking good:
Think of the way our hearts are ripped out of our ribcages by four simple beats of iambic: thy lips are warm. What slays us is not just that Juliet is awake and Romeo is dead, but that this -- the play's final kiss -- is a kiss that undoes itself. Here's how it goes: I awaken to my life, and find you in your death. I cannot live without you -- and so I kiss you to say my goodbye… I kiss your poison-stained lips to find my death as well.
It's a great theatrical emblem, right? When we first met Romeo, he was a puppy dog in love, luxuriating in the dark, delicious idleness of unrequited love for Rosalind. Pining away, his love expressed itself in over-the-top, adolescent antitheses: "Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!" To want, and not to have is to feel both giddy with desire, and heavy with pain; love, Romeo tells us, is both death and life: "A choking gall and a preserving sweet." It's at once the poison and its remedy.
Now we finally know what this duplicity of love really looks like: namely, it's a kiss that brings you back to life (what Juliet calls a "restorative") by leading you to death.
That kiss, in itself, would be good theater. But Shakespeare's smarter than that: thy lips are warm! Juliet already expects to find her death upon Romeo's lips; love, sex, desire are already death from an Elizabethan perspective. The very slang, in early modern English, for sexual climax is "to die" (like we moderns might say "to come"). (Hm… that's interesting, no? In our progress- and product-obsessed modern world, sex is all about getting somewhere. Arrival. I'm coming! It's no longer about leaving all of this behind….) (But I digress…)
So… Juliet expects to find her death on Romeo's lips -- but Shakespeare's smarter than that. Instead of Juliet finding her own death, she finds the lingering traces of Romeo's life. Omigod. Thy lips are warm! She realizes viscerally, literally, in the depths of her cellular knowledge what all of this bleeding tragedy of love has been about. This has all simply, stupidly been a mistake. Juliet's not in the land of high meaning, of tragic flaws and great matters of state; she is instead in the farcical low lands of comedy -- where the revolving doors of mistaken identities and missed cues lead to laughs and sexual tension…. Only here, the lovers' near misses have finally duped them; the fickle gods of theater have subbed out their happy ending for a double suicide.
In other words: what a fucking waste.
And this is what the greatest love story in English drama looks like.
No wonder the melancholics like Jaques piss us off. They watch us puff ourselves up with high ideals and beautiful thoughts… and then insert the pin.

Jaques, the Egg-Sucking Weasel

2009-08-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

The 22 major trump cards of the classic Tarot deck begin with a card numbered zero: The Fool. With his little yappy dog at his heels, his nose turned up to clear skies, and his toes on the brink of disaster, the Fool (I've been told) walks a world of endless open doors and infinite horizons. He may be completely ridiculous (get a load of those yellow hose, f'rinstance) but that doesn't change the fact that he’s fearless.
As it turns out, I’m not advanced enough to begin with the Fool. I’ll have to begin with Jaques, the egg-sucking weasel.
Jaques is the guy who speaks the most famous lines that Shakespeare ever wrote. No, not "To thine own self be true" -- that was Polonius in Hamlet, but, as I said, I’m not ready yet to begin with fools.
I’m thinking of those other famous lines: "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…." from As You Like It. Jaques is a bit of a fool, too, of course. His name -- probably pronounced "jakes" -- was also Elizabethan slang for privy (duh, it’s the "john"), and for centuries his "moralizing" (as he calls it) has convinced readers and playgoers alike that, like his namesake, he too is full of crap.
But Jaques himself is quite clear on the subject: he isn't a fool, but wishes he could be one. Unlike the true idiots of the courtly world who strive vainly for power and wealth, Jaques is only "ambitious for a motley coat": for the livery of tomfoolery. "I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom I please." Jaques wants to have the same kind of license as do court jesters -- those stand-up comics of the early modern world. He wants to satirize each and every body, to blow -- into each and every bogus corner of the scurvy world -- a truth so strong it could strip paint. But he does not want to pay a price for such liberal ventage of spleen. "Give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world," he declares… then backpedals, slightly: "If they will patiently receive my medicine." Sure thing, doc. People typically just love being scorched skinless by withering satire. Dr. Shitter to the rescue!
Poor Jaques. He’ll never wear motley. His idea of fooling just isn't funny at all. Jaques thinks he’s telling the world The Capital-T Truth -- but he’s really just sucking it dry. At one point in the play he begs a companion to keep singing. The friend demurs: it will only make you melancholy… All the better, cries Jaques. Keep it comin' -- the more the moodier! "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs!" To suck the life out of life: this is what Jaques positively lives for.
Jaques, the egg-sucking weasel. Extracting the nourishment and leaving behind the dry shell. This is the best image I've ever heard for that world-destroying frame of mind the Elizabethans called "melancholy." The melancholic sees the world with graveyard eyes, presaging death in the rosy cheeks of life and knowing that the air itself -- this brave, overhanging firmament -- is really nothing more than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
And the thing is: the melancholic is absolutely right -- which is why we can’t stand him. The world is dying, with every breath it takes. All of our plump and delicious realities are, already, on the way to becoming drained and meaningless husks.
We live in a world of impermanence -- a world of vanities. In oh so many ways, we’re living our lives just walking on eggshells.
And the only question is: what are we going to do about it?
For the past 20 years, I've been trying to answer this question through William Shakespeare. I am a Shakespeare prof; using the Bard as my Ouija board to spell out the solutions to all of life's problems: this is what I do.
About seven years ago, however, I also became a Buddhist. These days, I don’t just sit in an ivory tower. I also sit on a round, black cushion.
And from where I sit, Shakespeare’s answers and the Buddha’s look pretty much the same.