Everyday Life: The Question of Zen

I often think that because I am quite remote up here in northern Michigan from others who practice, and am intensely stubborn, I learn so slowly that I will be dead before I understand very much.

But “Who dies?” is a koan I posed for myself several years ago. To know the self, of course, is hopefully to forget the self. The especially banal wine of illusion is to hold on tightly to all the resonances of what we see in the mirror, inside and out. In our practice the self is not pushed away, it drifts away. When you are a poet there is a residual fear that if you lose the self you will lose your art. Gradually, however, (for me it took fifteen years!) you discover that what you thought was the self had little to do with your own true nature. Or your art, for that matter.

When I learned this I began to understand that the period of zazen that lays the foundation of the day is meant to grow until it swallows both the day and night. Time viewed as periods of practice and nonpractice is as fanciful a duality as the notion that Zen is Oriental. The kapok in the zafu beneath your ass is without nationality. The Bodhidharma and Dogen saw each other across an ocean river that is without sex, color, time or form. What is between Arcturus and Aldebaran?

I was wondering the other day about this body that wakes up to a cold rain from an instructive dream, takes its coffee out to the granary to sit on a red cushion. The body sees the totems of consolation hanging around the room: animal skins, a heron wing, malformed antlers, crow and peregrine feathers, a Sioux-painted coyote skull, a grizzly turd, a sea-lion's caudal bone, a wild-turkey foot, favored stones, a brass Bureau of Indian Affairs body tag from Wyoming Territory, a bear claw, a prehistoric grizzly tooth. These are familiar, beloved objects of earth, but the day is not familiar because it is a new one. The bird that passes across the window is a reminder of the shortness of life, but it is mostly a bird flying past the window.

“The days are stacked against what we think we are,” I wrote in a poem. The point here, albeit blunt, is that when you forget what you are, you truly “see” the day. The man who howls in anger on the phone, because he has been crossed, an hour later is a comic figure dog-paddling in a sump of pride. He isn't conscious enough at the moment to realize that there is evil afloat in the land, within and without. This condition can be called “self-sunken.” A little later, when he takes a walk on the shores of the lake, he does himself a favor by becoming nothing. He forgets being “right” or “wrong” which enables him to watch time herself flickering across the water. This is a delightful illusion.

The hardest thing for me to accept was that my life was what it was every day. This seemed to negate notions of grandeur necessary for an interest in survival. The turnaround came when an interviewer asked me about the discipline that I use to be productive. It occurred to me at that moment that discipline was what you are every day, how conscious you are willing to be. In the Tao te Ching (in the splendid new Stephen Mitchell translation) it says “Act without doing; work without effort.” So you write to express your true nature, part of which is an aesthetic sense that reflects the intricacies of life rather than the short-circuits devised by the ego. Assuming the technique of the art has been learned, it can then arrive out of silence rather than by the self-administered cattle prod to the temples that is post-modernism.

After this body eats a tad too much for lunch it returns to the granary, stokes the fire, and takes a nap with its beloved dog who, at eleven, is in the winter of her life. A distinct lump of sorrow forms which, on being observed, reminds the body of the Protestant hymn, “Fly, Fly Away,” and we are returned to the fragility of birds. The sense of transience is then embraced. When the dead sister reappears in dreams she is always a bird.

On waking with a start, because it is the dog's nature to bark on occasion at nothing in particular, the work is resumed. There has been an exhausting effort in recent years through the form of poetry and novels to understand native cultures. The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much that you have perceived and assumed was reality. At first this is disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart. I find that I have to spend a great deal of time alone in the natural world to be of use to anyone else. Above my desk there is a wonderfully comic reproduction of Hokusai's blind men leading each other across a stream.

Whatever I have learned I owe largely to others. It was back in 1967 that I met Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love, then Gary Snyder, though in both cases I had read the work. But in these formative stages of practice the sangha is especially important. George Quasha introduced me to the work of Trungpa—Cutting through Spiritual Materialism is an improbably vital book. Shortly thereafter I met Bob Watkins, a true Zen man, who had studied with Suzuki Roshi and Kobun Chino Sensei. The work of Lucien Stryk has been critical to me though I have never met him. Then, through Dan Gerber, I met Kobun himself, who has revived me a number of times. Through all of this I had the steadying companionship of Dan Gerber who is presently my teacher. Without this succession (or modest lineage!) I'd be dead as a doornail since I have been a man, at times, of intemperate habits. I'm still amazed how the world, with my cooperation, can knock me off Achala's log back into the fire. There is something here of the child who, upon waking, thinks he can fly, even though he failed badly the day before.

There is an urge to keep everything secret. But this is what Protestants call the sin of pride, also greed. They have another notion relevant here, that of the “stumbling block” wherein the mature in the faith behave in such a way as to impede the neophyte. There is, sadly, a lot of this among Buddhists, the spiritual materialism that infers that I have lived in this town a long time and you are only a newcomer. This is like shouting at a child that he is only three years old. It is also the kind of terrifying bullshit that has permanently enfeebled Christianity. Disregarding an afterlife, he who would be first will be last.

We should sit after the fashion of Dogen or Suzuki Roshi: as a river within its banks, the night sky in the heavens, the earth turning easily with her burden. We must practice like John Muir's bears: “Bears are made of the same dust as we and breathe the same winds and drink the same waters, his life not long, not short, knows no beginning, no ending, to him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accident of time, and his years, markless, boundless, equal eternity.”

This is all peculiar but quite unremarkable. It is night now and the snow is falling. I go outside and my warm slippers melt a track for a few moments. To the east there is a break in the clouds and I feel attended to by the stars and the blackness above the clouds, the endless blessed night that cushions us.

1990