6

Avian Zen

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder . . . I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.

Henry Thoreau (1817–1862)¹

I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.

Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi (1905–1971)²

Seeing begins when you forget the name of the thing you see.

Paul Valery (1871–1945)³

Birds capture our attention. Pivotal avian moments are embedded in the world of literature and in the lore of Zen Buddhism. What happens to us when we hear deeply and resonate with the call of a bird? The next pages sample centuries of evidence that a bird call can trigger openings into awakened states of consciousness. They present a plausible physiological explanation for this phenomenon. They also suggest why our hearing and seeing attentively in the outdoors is such an excellent meditative practice.

Bird Calls Trigger Awakenings of Consciousness

In his later years, Ikkyu Sojun (1394–1481) would become a legendary Rinzai master in Kyoto. While he was still a young monk of 26, Ikkyu went out one night alone in a rowboat on Lake Biwa. Out there in the dark, he wasn’t expecting a crow to fly overhead. Its “caw” suddenly triggered his deep awakening.⁴

So Sahn (1520–1604) was a Korean master who unified the Zen and sutra schools of Buddhism. When he was in his 20s, he was enlightened by the sound of a rooster calling.⁵

Unexpected events that catalyze a peak experience are not unique to Zen. [ZB: 452–457] Nor is their association with birds limited to earlier centuries in distant lands. The spiritual teacher Steve Gray (a.k.a. Adyashanti) recounted a contemporary experience of kensho-satori.⁶ It happened when he was 31, after he had practiced Zen for the previous 12 years. While he was preparing to meditate, a bird called outside his window. Immediately, “from my gut, I felt a question arise that I had never heard before: ‘Who hears this sound?’” Arising next was an extraordinary emotionless state, during which his former Self/other boundary dissolved. Now, “I was the bird and the sound and hearing of the sound, the cushion, the room, everything.” This was followed by a comprehensive insight: an original “emptiness, prior to the oneness, forever awake to itself.”

I recently had occasion to interview Adyashanti privately. Without disclosing the particular question I was interested in, I invite him to sit down and to simply return to the way it was that morning. He is composed as his words describe how this episode began.

He has just taken his seat, but has not yet begun to meditate. Indeed, he adds that he was not actually intending to meditate at that point. Suddenly, a bird calls outside the window. I ask him where this sound is coming from. His right arm reaches up and out into the air at an angle of 60 degrees, at the same time that he gazes up to the right toward his right hand.

I invite him to identify what kind of bird. At that instant, he did not recognize which species of bird it was. No word label was ever attached to this bird, neither then nor subsequently. He still does not know. However, that morning, this bird sound and the rest of his consciousness became instantly fused into one field somewhere in the space directly in front of him.

The Japanese Zen master Bassui (1327–1387) had posed a similar hearing question: “Who hears this sound?” It became the classic koan, “Who is hearing this sound?”⁷ When the late Robert Aitken-Roshi (1917–2010) recommended Bassui’s koan to me as a practice, he cautioned that hearing was the point, not mere listening.⁸ When one hears a sound, perception is an actual fact of experience; listening for something is only a preliminary step. Why would a distinction that emphasized actual hearing rather than listening become increasingly cogent? Because when researchers improved their neuroimaging studies during the next decade, they began to regard a subject’s effortful trying to “listen harder” as an example of the top-down approach to paying attention. Chapters 2 and 3 introduced this top-down concept. It is the kind of focused attentiveness that meditators engage in when they choose to activate their dorsal system of attention. Anatomically, top-down refers to this more voluntary executive system. Its functions are represented in the upper parietofrontal region of our cerebral cortex. We have seen that this system arises close to the somatic representations of our physical Self. [MS: 13–20] (see figure 2.2)

More about the Functional Anatomical Aspects of Hearing (Audition)

In contrast to this more deliberately influenced “northern” route, most other hearing functions happen choicelessly, effortlessly, automatically. These early steps in hearing (like those in vision) begin much lower down in the brain. They occur along the more “southern” pathways during the first milliseconds of perception. These kinds of essentially reflexive, habitual functions are now increasingly regarded as examples of bottom-up attentive processing. A brief survey of both the voluntary and involuntary networks of audition can help us understand why Aitken-Roshi himself practiced and recommended Bassui’s old koan.

What can we see? Only what lies in front of us. In contrast, we hear what happens all around us. This global auditory field encompasses 360 degrees. The deep roots of our hearing pathways evolved early, down in the primitive brain stem, eons before those later refinements that now serve us so well for vision.

The more primitive parts of our hearing system still process coarse subcortical, survival-type messages. They race up in a hotline from the colliculi, through the back of the thalamus and into the orbital part of the frontal cortex. [ZBR: 159–160] What about the course of our usual, more sophisticated, fine-grained auditory information? Once through the thalamus, it travels quickly on up to our primary auditory cortex in the temporal lobe (Brodmann area 41). Up here, these auditory impulses are first transformed into the neural codes for language. This occurs especially on the left side, in the nearby auditory association cortex (BA 42), chapter 3 reminded us that as these impulses begin to relay forward, their further processing enables them to be expressed in the form of word-thoughts.

In Aitken-Roshi’s experience, auditory stimuli were more effective sensory triggers than were visual stimuli. Various lines of evidence support this suggestion. Notice, for example, where our primary auditory cortex and our auditory association cortex are located (see figure 2.1). They lie very close to the specialized bottom-up attentive functions of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and to the multiple association functions of the adjacent superior temporal gyrus. This TPJ region engages in circuit breaker functions. They help us to disengage attention so that it can then be redirected to its next target. The next interactions become crucial because they then link our frontal lobe and temporal lobe functions. Each time an unexpected bird call startles us into reflexive attentive processing, these ramified networking alliances, led by the ventral attention system, serve many of our usual cortical needs for more refined decoding and pattern recognition functions.

What else happens the instant we hear an unexpected bird call or glimpse some relevant avian stimulus that captures our visual attention? First to react will be the even earlier, deeper receptivities. These are the signals that convey messages from the colliculi in our midbrain up to our thalamus. [ZB: 240–244] So, how can we further cultivate the sensitive awareness that has instant, effortless access to our deep, global processing functions? We can regularly practice both concentrative and openly receptive styles of meditation, doing so in ways that minimize our Self-centeredness. [MS: 20–30]

Sky-watching, cloud-watching, and bird-watching are excellent outdoor practices. They help train us instantly to detect, recognize, and shift toward any unexpected auditory or visual event. [MS: 54–60] Notice how often these receptive practices shift one’s attention primarily up and out. Here, up means toward events that might arise in elevations of space above one’s usual eye level and ordinary mental horizon. Out means “out there,” in the distance, toward distant events arising farther away from one’s physical body. Events in the history of Zen become more interpretable when viewed from this spatial perspective of functional anatomy.

Attentive readers may notice that ordinary language often links the upper domain of space to particular refinements of our psyche or our soma. With regard to cultivating wisdom, we’re encouraged to “wise-up.” When we wish to get into good physical condition, we’ll work hard in order to “shape-up.”

Early Zen Lore

Exacting teaching practices developed in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Chinese Ch’an masters were not only wary of troublesome words. They also expected their more awakened trainees to respond in certain ways. Some of their requirements might seem almost to have anticipated the neuroscientific distinctions sketched in earlier chapters. The patriarchs sought behavioral presentations, actions that were expressed in brisk body language. [ZB: 668–677] Why did they insist that their pupils manifest immediate physical responses? They wanted to observe the earliest clinical evidence of (what we today regard as) reflexive pathways. The masters were emphatically not interested in hearing discursive speech. Wordy conceptual explanations imply that multiple synaptic delays have occurred. Linguistic constructs, like other algorithms, keep branching out in the course of being further refined. Our language networks have widespread extensions. These reach down from the cortex to interact with subcortical regions bilaterally (see chapter 3, note 8, and chapter 8, note 7).

Indeed, the records indicate that the early Tang master Damei Fachang (752–839) once gave his monks the following explicit nonbranching advice: “Reverse your mind, and arrive at its root. Don’t pursue its branches!”⁹ Even on his deathbed, Master Damei still exemplified this deeply root-oriented Ch’an style of teaching students through direct experience. Just as he was about to draw his final breath, a squirrel suddenly chattered. Capitalizing on this last opportunity to instruct his monks, Damei exclaimed: “It’s just this thing! Not something else!” Was his parting advice some abstruse celestial concept? No. He simply pointed his monks’ attention to just this one ordinary sound. This natural stimulus had just entered the neural root of their auditory system. Just this. Direct experience.

A later Tang master incorporated avian examples into his auditory teaching methods. Jingqing Daofu (868–937) routinely posed simple hearing questions to test his monks.¹⁰ For example, he would ask, “What is that sound outside the gate?” An unenlightened monk once answered, “The sound of a quail.” Master Jingqing was not deaf. He had heard and recognized that bird call many times before. He was not probing for any such species label based on mere words. Indeed, he had previously warned his monks that their deluded thinking was turned “upside-down” if they voiced such discriminating language.

The bird outside the temple gate emits only bare sound energies. When such sound energies first reach the ear drum their earliest neural roots are still very far removed from branching out into word labels. The term quail can arise in networks only during the later milliseconds. Discriminating word labels are like an artificial band that ornithologists clamp around a bird’s leg. No aluminum band ever replaces the living reality of that actual bird. Nor can a finger capture the real moon by pointing at it.

Why does master Jingqing seem so refractory, so uninterested in an answer that would seem only reasonable to us? Though he probes his monks with simple direct questions, he still remains highly alert to every nuance of their next responses. His attitude is “Show me. Don’t tell me.” [SI: 217–218] He is capable of waiting years to be shown this behavioral evidence confirming that his monks had dissolved their old Self/other boundary. He knows that when they actually do become enlightened, their overt body language will manifest their awakening. Meanwhile, no spoken language satisfies him.

Passages in the Mahayana Surangama Sutra suggest that the Buddha also emphasized turning one’s stream of awareness successively farther back.¹¹ One wonders: Which vital functions shift when such a turning occurs way back down toward the deep root origins of one’s consciousness? [ZBR: 39–40] What happens when the lightning strike of prajna dissolves every psychic root of one’s Self into emptiness and—simultaneously—the brain awakens into that paradoxical fullness, the ineffable insight-wisdom of kensho-satori? [ZBR: 357–387] In this state of “suchness,” no Self-identity remains. Such a moment of oneness is not owned by any imperial Self. In this “thusness,” no agency of an ego exists that must thrust its own personal top-down modes of discriminating discourse into complex, branching networks.

Bassui was still a young monk when his consciousness was overturned by such a profound awakening. The auditory trigger for his first deep realization was the turbulent flow of a distant mountain stream. At dawn, after Bassui had meditated through the night, this simple natural sound suddenly penetrated his whole being. [ZBR: 39] At such an instant, when hearing turns far back toward its precognitive roots, all body-mind boundaries of one’s former Self vacate the scene. Every primal fear drops out of this non-dual state of perfection. All sense of time dissolves into an awesome impression of eternity (achronia). [ZBR: 380–381; SI: 183–196]

Avian Links to Achronia: The Writings of Stevenson and James

Before William James published his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, he was familiar with a European legend. In this story, the call of a bird suddenly prompts a monk to drop into this state of zero time.¹² In 1898, when James recounted this fable—about the call of a nightingale—he included many comments about it that Robert Louis Stevenson had already made in an earlier essay.¹³ Stevenson, a Scot who suffered from tuberculosis during his short life (1850–1894), had realized that this legend held deep existential implications. He understood that only an extraordinary state of consciousness could cause a monk to lose all sense of time for a very long period. Indeed, said Stevenson, the deep resonances of meaning within such a remarkable state would be so special that they would touch “very near the quick of life.”

As Stevenson begins this tale, we find the young monk walking in the woods far outside his monastery gate. Suddenly, he “hears a bird break into song. He hearkens for a trill or two . . .” Abruptly, he loses all sense of the passage of time. Later, his awareness of time returns. At this point, the monk finds himself standing back at that same familiar gate of his compound where his walk had begun. Yet now, none of the monks inside look familiar, nor do they recognize him. The sole exception is one brother monk, who now appears many decades older. When the weight of all this evidence finally sinks in, our monk then realizes what has happened: after he heard this bird call, he had lost all sense of conscious time for the past 50 years!

Of course, this is a very tall tale. We today will not be misled (nor were Stevenson and James) by a fable that grossly exaggerates the brief duration of a remarkable physiological phenomenon. To Stevenson, long familiar with metaphor, it seemed reasonable to stretch the yarn about this “time-devouring nightingale.” He did so simply to dramatize how such very special moments have qualities that quicken and lend spice to our private lives. Facing an early death, Stevenson had come to realize that the universal fabric of each human life could be woven out of two main strands: Always would we keep “seeking that bird”; rarely would we be graced by the reality of actually “hearing it.”

Indeed, this prolific author of A Child’s Garden of Verses and Treasure Island ventured to observe that it was poetry’s unique contribution to point us toward such moments of “true realism.” Is this an exaggeration? Or could it be close to the attributes that make some poetry so special? For example, in Japan, the old saying is, “Poetry and Zen are one” (shizen ichimi). Poetry, as Stevenson explains, can penetrate that secret place in our “warm phantasmagoric chamber of a brain where joy resides.” There, he said, poetic resonances might become amplified into “a voice far beyond singing.” In such recesses of memory reside capacities to remind us of “those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us.”

One can only speculate about the degree to which Stevenson may have become absorbed in the enchantment of some nightingale’s song. Later, William James so valued this same nightingale metaphor that he returned to it in his essay “What Makes a Life Significant?”¹⁴ He hinted, as had Stevenson earlier, at the way the deep levels of this story alluded to life’s eternal meaning, wherein all apparent conflicts might finally be peacefully reconciled.

Earlier avian tall tales from Asia can serve to remind meditators how to sit quietly during a long silent retreat. One legend about Ch’an Master Yongming Yanshou (904–975) is that he remained so immobile during a three-month retreat that a bird built its nest in the folds of his clothing!¹⁵

Other Literary References to a Bird Call’s Penetrating Impact

Poetic license was the province of another European author, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), a sometime contemporary of Paul Valéry. Rilke’s notebook described how a bird call once resonated in his own consciousness.¹⁶

[A] bird-call was there, both in the outside and in his inner being . . . [It did not break at the boundary of his body, but] formed of the two together an uninterrupted space in which, mysteriously protected, only one single spot of purest, deepest consciousness remained.”

When such an auditory stimulus does penetrate deeply and resonate within a person’s poetic sensibilities at an especially receptive moment, one can understand how it might travel pathways innocent of any word label for one particular species. In this regard, the Zen teacher Joko Beck once received the following report from a practitioner: “In sitting this morning, it was quiet and suddenly there was just the sound of a dove. [Yet] there wasn’t any dove, there wasn’t any me, there was just this.”¹⁷ Some of the uses of “just this” back in Tang Dynasty era are explored elsewhere.¹⁸ [SI: 11, 13, 199] Chapter 1 describes how this phrase was introduced into early Indian Buddhism.

The Benefits of Practice in the Outdoors

What counsel can be given to meditators who wish to practice more selflessly? One approach is to incorporate outdoor experiences seamlessly into your whole program of daily life practice. [MS: 54–60, 130–131] (See appendix A.) Random events arise unexpectedly in Nature. They can often capture your focal and global attention. [ZB: 644–667] You do not need to be a Thoreau, alighted upon by a sparrow, to feel anointed during the direct experience with a wild bird. Many birders bring an innate, elementary enthusiasm to the entire world of Nature. In 2007, Sam Keen, a literary birder, teamed up with a gifted watercolorist, Mary Woodin, to create a slender book, a gem of reflections entitled Sightings. Its pages describe and portray extraordinary unpredictable encounters with ordinary wild birds.¹⁹

What causes Keen’s perceptions to sharpen in the outdoors? In this fertile silence, he discovers the sights and sounds of the sacred. Some reverent events arise visually, in the radiant sunburst of a goldfinch. Other insights enter at twilight in the haunting flute-like song of the native American wood thrush. What makes this bird call so special? The wood thrush call “belongs to a family of experiences that usher us into a threshold where sound trails off into silence, time disappears into timelessness, and the known world is engulfed by the great mystery.” These ethereal qualities resemble those of the European thrush, its cousin, the nightingale in Stevenson’s story.

The writings by James, Stevenson, and Rilke suggest that their thoughts could resonate within this avian domain. Only after multiple visits to Japan would the present writer’s quest finally be rewarded by an actual glimpse of its furtive bush warbler. In the interim, although I had been repeatedly charmed by the liquid warble of this unseen uguisu, the mere sight of it had eluded me. This symbolized how Zen’s covert levels of existential meaning were unfolding just beyond the reach of this beginner.

In the outdoors, it was the flight of swallows that intrigued Master Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1769). Their effortless acrobatics served not only to elevate Hakuin’s gaze into the sky but also deepened his appreciation for being alive. The evidence is in his calligraphy.²⁰ The brush-play in one of his many ink paintings carries this universal message: “For everyone crossing the ocean of life and death, how enviable is the swallow’s flight.”

What other contemporary advice can be offered to meditators whose active monkey-minds keep leaping from one branching thought to the next? Robert Aitken-Roshi offers a practical suggestion in the following verse:²¹

When thoughts form an endless procession

I vow . . . to notice the spaces between them

And give the thrushes a chance [to be heard.]

Notice how these verses turn one’s attention back into those silent spaces wherein awareness resides with no-thoughts (mu-shin). A bird call sometimes actualizes its triggering potential when it penetrates such wordless depths.

In field and forest, where might such a fresh stimulus come from? from above? behind? either side? from afar? perhaps from underfoot? Surprises can arrive from anywhere when one is outdoors. Therefore, all perceptual systems become more alert, not only hearing and vision, when one bathes in the open atmosphere outdoors (see appendix A.)

In Summary

Wild birds symbolize the essence of natural, primal energy. Birds freely wing it in the open sky, seeming to burst the bonds of gravity that limit other earthlings. In their songs and instinctual behavior, birds help us to celebrate, in ways remote from words, the mysterious reality of the incomprehensible natural universe that we all inhabit. Thus, when Nanrei Kobori-Roshi once said to me, “Zen is closest to poetry,” he was voicing much the same truth about poetic reality to which Stevenson had referred.