On Queensland Zen Centre

Take the Benleagh train to
Moorooka and follow these flowers.

I had the honor and privilege of practicing zen at Queensland Zen Centre on 18 March 2018.  The usual schedule was slightly altered due to the Guiding Teacher's illness.  Their website, linked above, should be taken as a model for zen center websites.  I should have paid more attention to it myself.

Their practice that Sunday morning was just as they describe on the website, except Zen Master Senshin did not participate: "Our practice periods begin with three prostration bows and a period of chanting meditation.  We chant traditional Buddhist sutras and chanting books are provided.  After chanting, periods of sitting meditation - following the breath, in stillness and silence - alternate with walking meditation.  In addition, individual interviews with our teacher, Zen Master Senshin, are held as part of our Sunday morning practice. We close with the Four Great Vows and three prostration bows, and then there is time for refreshments, questions and discussion.   Instruction in each of the practice forms is offered throughout the session."

I included a visit to a zen center on this trip because zen practice is an important part of my life.  If I am not able to become comfortable practicing zen in Australia I won't live there.  I did not think it would be a problem, but enlightenment is not what you think.

I was greeted warmly at the door by the same person with whom I had been corresponding over email, one of the senior training teachers.   It was a warm morning, my skin was sticky from a very brief walk from the train station.  After putting away my bag and turning off my phone I was offered water and pleasant instruction in the information quoted above.  It is so refreshing to see a zen center keep their website tidy.

I have to "tilt the bell" a bit with my practice because of arthritic knees.  They hold up fine for walking and sitting on western furniture.  Zen practice often includes deep prostrations and floor-sitting which can cause my knees to hurt.  The way that I cope with the pain often causes me to interfere with the pace of the group.  For this reason, when sitting with a group at a new center, I make a point to request to sit in a chair and permission to substitute deep, standing bows for full prostrations.

They didn't give me time to request these accommodations, they suggested them.  They have their attention on the right things.  This was deeply comforting.

The lineage of the teacher is a bit unusual for my experience.  I sit with two traditions.  One is Soto Zen, and my line of teachers goes directly back to Dogen, who founded it about fourteen-hundred years ago.  I have one "generation" of American teachers between myself and Dainin Katagiri, who was Japanese, trained in Japan, and has a Japanese lineage all the way back to Dogen.

The other tradition I sit with is Theravada, and loosely so, tracing back to an Australian who trained in a Thai lineage.  My sangha is urban, young, and led by an ex-punk covered in tattoos out of the hippest parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

I took the precepts in the former lineage.  I sit sesshin, a formal silent continuous practice period of several days, with the former lineage.  I suppose I look to it as my religious authority.  I sit regularly with the latter lineage, they are local, and the talks have been very valuable to my understanding.

There's a Korean influence on practice at Queensland Zen Centre, or it's probably more correct to say there's a Japanese influence on Korean practice here.  It's hard for me to say from my perspective, which is almost exclusively in the American adaptative tradition of the Japanese style of zen.  They chant in Korean, and instead of chanting, they really sing, and in beautiful evocative Korean scales and melodies.

I was familiar with the sutras we chanted, just the English or Japanese versions, and some of the briefer chants were in English as well.  Chanting is a fascinating practice and "understanding" the language contains a lot of ultimately fruitless attention to the illusory separately-existing individually-identifiable self which is all the problem to begin with!  I loved this Korean chanting.  Here's an example from YouTube:



This is a challenge for a newcomer, I have neither seen phonetic Korean before nor have I heard the gorgeous melodies.  Sincere practice means "seeing" the chant with my ears and following along every moment, diving as directly into now as one can.  Staying silent would be far too attentive to the illusional self that is experiencing all of the awkwardness.

Chanting along anyway feels awkward, but the practice is profound.  I would never have another chance to be brand-new to this style of chanting again.  I was very grateful to have this chance with a sangha that was both tolerant and did not hesitate to offer instruction when appropriate.

It was most comforting that the senior training teachers would speak up and correct errors in practice at the time they became worthy of it.  Instruction was direct, brief, helpful and delivered with kindness.  I gave them a few chances to exercise their skills myself.

One of the most charming aspects of their practice is they do walking meditation outside.  The center is in a residential neighborhood, in a former private residence.  It has a backyard.  They conduct walking meditation at a moderately fast pace, and they wind right out the front door and on to the beautiful patch of earth in the area.  Birds are singing in the trees, geckos are croaking on the porch.

This also provides an additional challenge to this newcomer.  I wore hiking boots to the center, not expecting to have to put them back on during that morning's practice.  I usually put them on in a sitting position using both hands and a shoehorn.

I did what I could, but I had to get out of line to do it, which was a hassle I didn't need.  Taking them off again was just as problematic.  Lesson learned: bring sandals to Australian zen.

They sit facing in, which tempts my mind to wander in a way that facing the wall, as we do in Soto  practice, does not.  Counter to what one might assume, sitting facing inward causes me to close my eyes, which is a bad idea in meditation.  I don't usually face this particular challenge, so it was interesting to see what my mind did with it.

After the practice period, we sat for about an hour on the back porch and chatted with snacks.  Two very kind members of the sangha offered to drive me back to the part of Brisbane I was staying in.  They also showed me their beautiful home briefly, I was touched by their casual kindness and generous offer of time and attention.

I was more than comfortable with this little taste of zen practice, I was intrigued and a bit invigorated intellectually.  What do these teachers have to teach me?

I bought a copy of the Guiding Teacher's book, Essence of Mind, by Zen Master Senshin, and read it on the plane back to the US.  It is quite good.  She's done palliative care, which is a particularly interesting direct connection between us.

I didn't meet her in person.  I met her sangha and felt something of her that morning as she was elsewhere in the building caring for her illness.  Subtle movements and the occasional cough let me know she was there.

Reality is a bit more clear after my visit to Queensland Zen Centre.

Gassho.

On pre-trip jitters

In twenty hours I will be en route to Brisbane.  My bags are packed except for those few things I will be using between now and the time I leave, like my toothbrush and razor.

As I have written before, this is the first time I have travelled solo.  I have travelled alone before.  I have travelled to visit people alone.  I have travelled alone to meet someone for more travel together after that.  I have never traveled solo, just for myself. 

I just received an e-mail from a friend who travels solo quite often.  I was pleased to get it;

"Solo travel is the best!  Do your own thing on your own schedule. Plus, as a couple or group, you are insulated from other people.  By yourself you are much more likely to meet people."

I had not thought about that.  I realize I have had a covert belief that an experience like travel is always best by being shared with someone.  I realize I accepted this as true for me as if my mind was made up on purpose about this issue long ago.  Really?  When did I do that? 

Life is about getting free of unexamined beliefs.  The trick is seeing them.  I confuse unexamined beliefs with reality.  I think I am seeing reality, but I am really just seeing my thoughts.  I have never really asked myself if I wanted to travel alone.  I told myself that would be a waste, I would regret it, and I killed the idea before it had a chance at life.

This is a good place to point at something in the First Precept of Buddhism.  I killed this idea of travelling solo against the advice of the first precept.  This teaching points to many things, but one thing it points to is a warning that if you so fully object to something that you want to kill it, be that a person, a relationship, or an idea, then you have already lost direct contact with reality.  One does not want to kill anything before one has a concept of it, that is, one must have an idea about something, something that separates it from the things around it, in order to kill it.  Pre-concept.  Precept.

I respond when I notice that I have been caught by a concept by taking a breath, checking my posture, and opening my eyes as if I have never seen any of this before.  I may find solo travel the most meaningful thing I have ever done in my life.  I may find solo travel disappointing for the reasons I have accepted as true all these years.  I am about to find out.

Eyes open, soft focus.  How's your breathing?  How's your posture?  Once I answer those questions for myself, other answers soon follow.

On simplicity

I went to a business writing class today at work given by Exec|Comm, a group which helps firms with business writing.  I did not want to go, my boss asked me to go.  I thought I was in trouble for the sometimes angry e-mails I send when I think people don’t read or listen to what I wrote before.  I was not sent for personal reasons.  I was a member of a group who were all asked to take the class.

I think I am a very good writer.  I enjoy reading my own work.  I often spend time when I edit my work just reading what I have written for the pleasure of doing so.  I will realize later that I have read far beyond the section I was editing.  I have to go back and start again with more focus.

At my last sesshin, one of the teachers told me that he likes “to start simple and then go simpler.”  He was talking about zen practice.  This is a good notion to apply to writing.

I enjoy English.  I like big words, complex construction, and layered dependent clauses.  Much like some runners may like the challenge of a hard or long course, I enjoy writing in complex and flowing language.  I like to write in a way that closely describes the unique message I want to convey but also draws upon the beauty of English I often find in complex grammar and long words.  That is fun for me, but I learned today that this complex writing can exhaust my readers.

I am ashamed and sad to say that some of my best writing is tiring to read, but it is.  I want to change that.  In this post I am using the lessons from the class today.

The Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale, a simple method for scoring how complex a sample of writing might be for people at different reading skill levels, was the most useful thing I learned today.  It is part of Microsoft Word.  One gets a score like the one on the left below after a spell-check if you have the right options chosen in your Word set-up.  In short, the scale will punish long sentences and complex words with a higher grade.  The score is the grade level required to read the writing.

I learned from my zen practice that simplicity is not the same as dumb.  Making writing simple is not the same as making writing dumb.  The teacher today said that Einstein’s work on special relativity receives a Flesch-Kincaid score of five.  That means a fifth grade level of education is needed to read it.  That made me think.

It is hard to write simply.  It takes a long time.

This post has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade level score of about 5.  I brought a sample of my writing to class today that I thought was simple and clear.  It had a Flesch-Kincaid Grade level score of 13.

Simple is hard.

On farting during kinhin

Kinhin is a Japanese word American zen folk use for walking meditation.  Kinhin is usually done with a group of people, pragmatically as a way to move the body without arousing the mind too far out of the contemplative repose of sitting meditation, called zazen.  As a practical matter, periods of kinhin are interspersed with periods of zazen to form long periods of continuous meditation practice.

Traditions vary slightly, but generally it is done at a very slow pace, one short step with every breath, in a circular manner around the meditation hall for ten or fifteen minutes.  Then, one sits back down on the cushion for another session of zazen.  If you need to exit the meditation hall, kinhin is the right time to do it.  We have a protocol for how to leave, and how to return afterwards, that keeps everyone organized with a minimum of attention from others.

In kinhin, one notices that the torso is more stiff and easier to balance when one's lungs are full of air, so one generally takes a slow deliberate step at the top of the inhale and exhales through the transfer of weight from one leg to the other, balancing on both legs at the bottom of the exhale, then finishing the step at the top of the next inhale.

To the uninformed observer, it looks like a bunch of extremely depressed, and perhaps sleepy, people aimlessly wandering around in a state of existential crisis, staring only at the ground in front of them, hands clasped together in position for anticipated bouts of anxious hand-wringing.  People look very sad, and maybe worried, but really probably too sad to be worried.  Or maybe they're just really tired and are doing their best to stay awake by forcing themselves to walk around.

As an aside, all of that's probably true, but I'll get to that in a minute.

For me, on the inside, kinhin is when I'm checking-out women's butts and seeing what the weather is like outside.  Then, I notice I'm doing that, bring my attention back to my breath and posture, and concentrate on not falling over, which is easy to do when you're walking, really, really slow.  A moment later I'm noticing how so and so cuts his toenails and wondering why the people who built this floor couldn't hammer nails in a straight line.  Such is meditation: it's organizing monkeys who are herding cats, all day every day.

It's very quiet in the zendo during kinhin, so if you should rip off even a very quiet fart it echoes through the hall like a dropped metal tray, everyone knows immediately who is responsible, most acutely whomever has been sitting to your left, since they are directly behind you in the kinhin line.  Sometimes, once the echo of fartitude has subsided, you hear someone stifling a giggle, often the person who has been sitting to your right, because they're just in front of you.

The truth is, these moments are gifts to the people around you, along with every other "mistake" made in the rituals of group zen practice.  Every clanked bell, every turn the wrong way, every dropped chopstick during silent meals is met with a sigh of relief by everyone in the room except the person who did it:  Oh, thank God that wasn't me.

But, when you're the gift-giver it's an odd place to be.  Formally, it's part of life, and zen practice is all about attention to life, so there's no cause for shame or any kind of attention to whatever it is.  It is what it is.  Follow your next breath and move on from the fart heard 'round the world.

Right.  That's why I'm staring at a wall for six hours a day, because I have that kind of an emotional center.

So, what did this enlightened zen master decide to try?  Holding them in.  Boy, that was pleasant.  I had not been eating much during this sesshin, which made oryoki simpler and gave me more time to figure out how to tie my bowls, but it also has the effect of making me a little gassy, because we don't drink during meals and that causes many stified burps in my post-surgical stomach, which puts gas into my intestines, which has to eventually find it's way out the only way it can.

It didn't work, of course, so all that it did was rob me of the knowledge of when the explosion of gaseous waste would announce it's entry into the formless emptiness.  Barrrappp!  Oh great, they all hate me now, this is depressing, zen practice is so boring, I wish I could disappear....

See?  We really all are as miserable as we look when we are holding to self-centered views.

Who farted?  Who asks?

On outrage and heartbreak

Since the 45th President of the United States took office I have been in an almost constant state of outrage about the conduct of the US government.  In fact, I'm not sure "almost' is appropriate.  Every day it is something new, there's no time to process yesterday's outrage, today's outrage from this administration and their congressional enablers simply displaces yesterday's incident from my attention.  There's never time to come to terms with any of it.

Outrage is not really an emotion.  Fear is an emotion, sadness is an emotion, joy is an emotion.  These things are directly experienced.  Outrage requires thinking.  Fear is felt in my chest, sadness in my throat, joy in my belly.  These are direct experiences I'm sure I've been having since before I could speak or think in words.

Outrage requires the violation of a norm or a principal; some rule has to be broken.  One can be sad or angry because they didn't receive a phone call from a loved one on some random day.  Not receiving a call on your birthday, or on some anniversary, or when you've experienced some tragic loss, sparks outrage.  The rhetorical calling card of outrage is "how could they.....?"

Outrage is also a defense, a way to obscure from one's view a deeper, more painful emotion.  If one stays in outrage, one stays confused.  To take the phone call example, the last time I was outraged someone didn't make a call, underneath my outrage was much more painful information about the state of the relationship in question.  The fact that I did not receive this call was an important signal, something I needed to know, but I didn't see that until my outrage had time to settle.

There's been no time for my outrage about the 45th President to settle.  Until this sesshin.

This sesshin last weekend my first since Obama was President.

Sesshin practice requires silence, and part of the silence required is a temporary cessation of contact with any news media.  My phone gets powered down, there's no TV, no newspapers, and no radio from start until finish.  That might not have been enough by itself, but since I was spending about 16 hours a day in some form of meditation my mind quickly settled and revealed to me what all this outrage about the conduct of my government was obscuring from my view.

I am heartbroken.  I am utterly, completely and devastatingly heartbroken over what has happened to my country.  I grew up with Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and witnessing the advent of Medicare, civil rights legislation and moon-shots.  When I was young the US was a beacon of hope for all the world's people, not just our citizens.  We had a lot of problems, many things needed fixing, but the overall arc of American progress was towards compassion, wisdom and generosity for all of humanity.

Now the United States government is a risk to world security.  Now it's a place that the less fortunate fear.  As incredibly impossible to me as it sounds, I am truly considering permanent immigration to an English-speaking democracy with a national health system.  What I discovered this weekend is that what is motivating me isn't outrage.  I'm not rage-quitting the US because I am disappointed my candidate didn't win in 2016.  It's much deeper than that.  I am so, so heartbroken.

I haven't lost faith in the American people.  The people in this country are the same wise, compassionate and generous people who have made me so proud over my lifetime to count myself among them.  Three million more of those people voted for the person who did not take office in 2016.

I have lost faith in what our system of government has become.  I truly fear these wise, compassionate and generous people I have been so proud to live among my entire life have lost control of their government.  The people in this country want things they can't get their government to even attempt to act upon.  They want DACA immigrants protected, they want sensible gun legislation, they want everyone to have health care and make enough money to live on.  This government can't deliver any of that.

So, I'm heartbroken.  I fear the American experiment is over after a two-hundred and fifty year run.  It will take some time to dismantle, but the process is underway.  Like my friends who have been dealing with the pain of divorce, I fear that I am going to have to leave.  Not because I wanted this, not because this is what I had planned, but because I honestly fear my differences are irreconcilable.

I was wondering about this because I generally don't take huge, life-altering decisions out of anger.  I have been unable to talk myself out of my desire to live somewhere else in the same way that I'm always able to talk myself out of rage-quitting a job or withdrawing from a personal relationship in anger.

This is the value of zen practice for me.  Sitting and staring at a wall without the exposure to today's outrage from the government cleared the smoke.

I'm still not sure I'm going to do it.  I have a lot of information to gather first and it's going to take some time to do that.  I don't know what the right thing is.

I do know the answer will come.

On staring at the wall

I am in Minneapolis, home to my home zendo, Dharma Field Zen Center in the somewhat bougie neighborhood of Edina in Southwest Minneapolis, near Lake Harriet if you know the area.  How a boy from Texas who now lives in Manhattan ended up in a zen center in Minneapolis (a place I have never lived or worked) is a topic for another post.

I often tell people when they ask what brought me to zen practice that no one sits and stares at a wall for six hours a day because things are going well in their life.  When we gather in the zendo this evening each of us will have a different tale of woe that brought us here, some are pretty glamorous, some are tragic, most are variations on the theme of life not making sense at some point and not knowing where else to turn.

To save you from hours of staring at a wall, let me tell you the secret.  There is no secret.  Life will never make sense, it can't.  The philosophies we construct to flail against the mystery may make sense inside their own context and offer the balm of temporary salvation, but at some point they all will walk into the same trap.  The best one can do is learn to live in a world that doesn't make sense.

Buddhism is the religion that offers you nothing...and delivers!

I cracked myself up this morning when I was in my apartment in Manhattan packing for this trip.  I stopped and thought, what does one need to bring to sesshin? (Sesshin is another Japanese term we borrow, one helpful translation is "collecting the mind."  In general it refers to this variety of zen meditation retreats).

Nothing!  Once it starts, concerns about the body, dress and clothing drop away.  In these short sesshins I do not bathe aside from washing my hands and caring for my teeth.  I will be wearing the same clothes when I finish the almost 48 hours of continuous silent zen practice.

That's the point.  Everything about sesshin is organized to make it possible for a group of people to spend all day with the meditative mind.  We rehearse and practice highly ritualized ways of moving about the zendo, eating, working, and resting.  This kind of intense practice is exhausting, so I'll be asleep before my head hits the pillow at night, and will sleep soundly until someone rings a bell to get everyone up at some ass-early o'clock in the dark of morning. 

So, essentially I stay in meditation for almost 48 hours straight.  I do not wear a watch, and none are in view during sesshin.  The zen center has clocks of course, but they cover them with a cloth during sesshin.  We organize ourselves time-wise through signals created by someone pounding a block of wood (which generally means "get up") or ringing a bell (which generally means "sit down").

"Oryoki" is the Japanese term we borrow for eating meditation, it is complicated and I mess it up every time, but it does allow for 30 people to be fed and clean up after themselves in a quick, quiet, and efficient manner with barely any need for communicating with others. 

Everything from preparing one's eating utensils and bowls for receiving food, to eating itself, to cleaning up everything afterwards happens in a tightly defined and practiced ritualized sequence. Even though we are all silent we all know what to expect of everyone else at every single step. 

There's a video on the bottom right of this page if you want to see how its done (and perhaps if you find that you need to lull yourself to sleep and this post hasn't done the trick).

Oryoki is really just a more complex version of kinhin, walking meditation, and the basic point is it allows everyone to eat and not arouse the operative mind, that endless judgy chatter of "do this, don't do that, like that person, hate that idiot" which most people confuse for reality as they go through the day.  Trying to get it right, that is to do everything in the right order and as fast as everyone else, makes me anxious as hell, but that's my work to do.  I can work with that and not bother anyone else.  That's the wisdom of the way this works.

I had been considering the fact as this sesshin approached that I was in a pretty good place in my life, unlike most of the other times I've prepared for sesshin.  Things are okay, I'm pretty comfortable with how things don't make sense at the moment.  I wondered if that would affect the quality of my practice.  Would I slack off a bit?

Then I got off the plane, read a email, and immediately started crying.  Well, all that aside, at least I don't have to worry about coming to this practice empty-handed emotionally.

If you've never been in some kind of silent practice with a group of people let me tell you some things that might surprise you.  Keep in mind that I only visit this zen center for sesshin so I don't know, as in REALLY don't know, the people I practice with aside from the teachers and a couple of others, none of whom I know all that well.

Yet, in the 48 hours that we're together in the same room all day I will grow to intensely despise some of them and develop crushes (or bromances in the case of men) on some of the others.  Now, there genuinely is a way that one really gets to know another person by sitting next to them in silence for hours that is unlike other forms of intimacy, that's real.  Im talking about something else.

There's also the process that unfolds as your mind works to make sense of your relationships with these other people without the benefit of conversation or even looking them in the eye (we avoid direct eye contact during silent practice).  It hilarious to watch your mind do this as long as you don't take it seriously, which I don't.

At the end, we break silence and stand around to chat for a few minutes (some people do just get the hell out of there, my teacher runs home to order a pizza delivery, for example), I can't tell you how many times my intense infatuation or hatred has been pierced forever by a single phrase uttered by this person I've spent the last two days constructing ideas about.  This is perhaps one of the most valuable things I learn about myself here.  My mind is funny, it's a mixture of wise insight and truly ridiculous extrapolations.  I can't always tell which is which.

But, I do find out who can sit still, and that's a quality I like in others regardless of their other charms, quirks, or rough edges.

I can sit still.  It tooks years of training, and still requires effort, but I can do it.  I like that about myself.  Sesshin is a chance to show it off.