The view from my front porch

Hatsuboku Landscape has been a favorite since Alan Watts included it in The Way of Zen — a book I found excrutiatingly dull to read, but great fun to carry around my junior year of high scool. I have been permanently befuddled by the topic of Zen ever since. It was with immense satisfaction that I found this far more detailed image on the 'net several years ago, which allowed me to see, for the first time, the slanting splash strokes of a fishing village (not a Zen temple?!) by Sesshu at the base of the mountain. It must be said that, for somebody who was all about a special transmission beyond words, Alan Watts could spew the most amazing amounts of verbiage.

I (yes, I!)^† coined the viral neologism logorrhea several years ago because I'd gotten seriously depressed about never understanding books about Buddhism^‡, despite a cornucopiastic cauldron of bulemic upchuck that accompanied my struggles to express what I'd learned, if only to my self. It wore my friends out very quickly, but the flow etched me to the bone before ever I saw any moon in my own skull bucket. It turned out I like art better than narrative. These days I don't understand art either, but I admire it greatly; while language has turned out to be the great linear narrative fallacy, an illusion, dream, map of maps, and a bit of foxy fun.

What's cancer, compared to that? Not much, I say. Not much.

^†"Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan." — Anon.

^‡D. T. Suzuki's translation (into English!) of The Lankavatara Sutra was one I read cover to cover in 1975, in Washington, D.C., in a sleeping bag on a bare parquet floor in a one-room efficiency on Massachussetts Ave. I was supposed to be working. Perhaps I was. The book is incomprehensible.

Things I've Finally Learned

i. Nirvana
There's an old Chinese scroll which depicts a couple of Buddhists jumping off a cliff^a, apparently convinced that self-annihilation and Nirvana are one and the same.

Folks who should know better get hung up on that all the time, but Nirvana and nihilism are nothing alike. The Buddha smiles and holds up a couple of fingers, right? It's an enigmatic smile, like the Mona Lisa's. The gesture means, hold that thought.

The Buddha's point is, yes, the words mean exactly what they seem to say. Yes, self-annihilation and Nirvana are identical. But... Your question is not properly framed. If I jump off a cliff and kill myself, I have not attained Nirvana, and even more woefully, I have not attained self-annihilation. My suffering continues unabated. But the Buddha has attained self-annihilation. The Buddha has attained Nirvana. The Buddha smiles.

Technically, this is a koan, a logical paradox that can, if meditated upon for however long it takes, bring the seeker to the threshold of that same enigmatic smile. Of course, such a realization must be abetted, it must be confirmed by the Buddha. Pretensions can't be turned loose in the world, or they will result in a great deal of embarassment.

There's another criticism that gets thrown at the Buddha, which is that Buddhism seems to be entirely self-absorbed, passive and lacking a social conscience or any desire to solve the great problems of the world such as poverty, war, disease, hunger, ignorance and dissatisfaction. Not so. The Buddha is something of an inkblot, a Rohrschach, on this account, receiving your disquiet about social issues in a vast sea, not of complacency, but of compassion. Let's solve your problem first, and then the world's.

^aRather a hair-raising image which I first saw in a Japanese art history class at the University of Iowa, 1970. I can't find it on the web, but the painting is notorious. It was a faded vertical wall scroll, and showed two young bodhisattvas or arhats in mid-plunge down the face of a high cliff. No bungie cords. I'm not sure what the purpose of the painting was, but Japan has long had a penchant for religious satire. Buddhist monks are often represented in sumi-e as frogs, while their Shinto critics are monkeys.

ii. Koan
My favorite koan is the one about the two monks.

The younger monk is sitting in meditation. The older monk is puzzled and asks the younger what he's trying to accomplish by sitting in zazen (i.e., meditating).

"I am meditating like this in order to become a Buddha."

The older monk picks up a brick and begins rubbing it against a rock, probably one of those old "growing" rocks in Zen gardens, tracking a minor havoc through the carefully raked sand.

The younger, applying the timeworn principle of monkish dialectic, asks the elder what he thinks he's doing. "I'm polishing this brick in order to make a mirror."

The thunderbolt should have struck by now. If not, "How can polishing a brick make a mirror?"

And the rejoinder, "How can sitting in zazen make a Buddha?"

True to formula, the younger monk instantly became a mirror.

(Gotcha!)

Well, ok. So, D. T. Suzuki somewhat maladroitly called this moment The Great Renunciation, but it's also called satori and it's described as "mingling eyebrows with all the Buddhas," not face to face or nose to nose, but as though wearing a mask, from the inside, slipping on a domino and an altogether other point of view. The eyebrows mingle, the eyes are alike, the same.

It doesn't last long. The moment slips away, the world returns...

Satori is slippery in these psychological times, because anyone who sits quietly in meditation will experience something like it sooner or later. The anime Tenchi Muyo illustrates it like an interior snap of light inside the meditator's skull, a moment so commonplace every Japanese schoolkid recognizes it instantly.

Zen is nothing special. Suffice to say, that as far as bull goes, it arrives tenfold.

iii. Rant
This was all brought on by an extraordinarily irritating program on EWTN, the ultraconservative Catholic channel, Wednesday evening last. The "expert" they brought on to dismiss discuss Buddhism was not a Buddhist, but Anthony Clark, a Catholic polemicist and assistant professor of Asian history at the University of Alabama who praised my cross-cultural hero Thomas Merton with the faintest of damnations. Rather than letting Clark get away with ever so gently kicking the electric fan into Merton's bathwater^b, let me tie this nihilism stuff and my favorite koan, back to Christianity.

Remember Buddha's seeming lack of social concern? I mentioned it just a little bit ago.

When you bring a social conscience to Buddhism and demand to see a little action, especially if you're a Christian, you get the Christian answer: "Go, sell all you have, follow Me."

God delegates.

Be a perfectly reflecting MIRROR to all sorrow, spend everything you have and everything you are on what you see and what you hold, like a mirror, within yourself. Hang on that self-abnegating cross, embrace that descent into hellish judgment from your fellow human beings. Do good works, lose yourself in action (and Imitation), and you're not a dumb, dunderheaded, unconnected BRICK any more. That's Christian — heck, that's Mother Theresa!

And that's Buddhism.

^bWhy is December 10, 1968 different from all other Tenths of December? Because, like Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton encountered an improperly grounded fan.

iv. Disclaimer
A friend of mine gave me a poster many years ago which I have to remember whenever I spout Buddhism (because she got very tired of it). It's a quote from G. K. Chesterton, "Satan fell through force of gravity." Indeed, the dilettante's path is beset on all sides with banana peels.

Koan

When I was in college, I used to talk about Zen to everyone I knew. They started avoiding me. Maybe as a kind of retribution, the universe in front of my eyes (and ears) gradually filled up with Jesus Freaks, who felt inclined to talk to me about salvation. I couldn't avoid them.

Finally, as I was slouching at my usual 2-chair table in the Commons (ISU Memorial Union, but don't bother looking for my usual table, everything has changed) swilling coffee and smoking my Winston, a rather unattractive young girl stopped and asked if she could sit down and talk.

Fine, said I. Feel free, provided you don't talk about religion.

The conversation fluttered around the weather and other obvious inconsequentials, and then she ran out of trivialities and began to shake. Her lip quivered. She got up and fled, crying. I hate this story.

When Wisdom dances, the truly wise don't wait around for the last veil to drop off.

The 23rd Day of Lent, 2007

I've been re-reading Thomas Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite, the core experience from which I coined the word logorrhea several decades ago — you need not believe me, but it's true.

Merton is the grand old puppet master whose repertory of the Fathers of the Church includes an amusing caricature of D. T. Suzuki, by far the most approachable image we have of the old boy. I confess, though, I can't read Merton for very long before an inexplicable black rage rises up behind my eyes and I feel required, no, impelled to hurl his book against the nearest wall. Like Ayn Rand, whose every book I've burned, a few minutes with Merton asymptotically approaches Eternity.

Kurt Gödel explained this to my satisfaction in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach some years ago: Systems of thought lie atop each other like immiscible fluids, precisely because they are inconsistent with themselves. Merton's Christianity is fundamentally not like D. T. Suzuki's Buddhism. D. T. Suzuki's Buddhism is not like anything but itself. Dominicans and Jesuits take Truth where they find it. Leave it to a Trappist monk, bound by implacable vows to Silence, to transmute the consolations of philosophy into clanging alchemy.

For his part, Suzuki is a fabulous old exile from a small pond, a peregrine frog at large. I'm not sure of his dates, although he survived well into Showa. He attempted to present Zen to the West. Strange concept, that, as though Zen had some western aspect congruent with pre-beatnik sensibility, leaving aside Akira Kurosawa's take on samurai westerns! No, Suzuki is incomprehensible. I should know, I've flogged my eyeballs with his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra, and struggled to find meaning in his Studies of the same work. No, Suzuki, transporting Buddhism to the West, requires Western coolies to pull his riksha into the Atomic Age: Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Thomas Merton, among others.

Aside from muddying a few oddly still waters, like a giant goldfish whirling at the bottom of long-settled pools, I'm not sure Suzuki accomplished much. But he cracked open doors no one knew were doors, and so these days we have Dalai Lamas and Thich Nhat Hans gallivanting about, and Ecology and Darwinism and DNA where previously all we heard was D. T. Suzuki's odd neologism, "suchness," which, as any Logical Positivist will happily reveal to you, means absolutely nothing at all.

I confessed all my own ordinary sins last Saturday, part of my rite of passage into Catholicism. Today I confess my amphibian participation in a few extraordinary ones. Om, Sweet Om, my friends. Kawazu tobikomu.