My friend Sister Petra is a Christian nun who also practices Zen Buddhism with our sangha. A few months ago she told me, “During the pandemic, I’ve been praying for everybody who’s sick, in body, mind, or spirit.”
I was moved by this, and it has continued to resonate with me. As I’m not a Christian, my view of prayer is probably different from Sister Petra’s (or maybe not), but I realised this prayer could easily be adapted into one that could be recited by anyone, of any faith or no faith.
So, most days now, using my mala, I chant, 108 times, May all who are sick, in body, mind, or spirit, be well.
Although Scotland is no longer in lockdown, I don’t intend to resume having in-person sangha meetings anytime soon. I think the lockdown has ended too soon, and some people have not yet been vaccinated, so I’m not about to have people sit together in meditation in an enclosed space.
Also, the online meetings have been going so well, I intend to continue having them even when we’re on the other side of the pandemic and in-person zazen resumes.
But…
I’ve been doing kinhin (walking meditation) by myself at a spot near the River Kelvin, in the park near the Kelvinside Allotments. Whether I do it depends on the weather, so I haven’t done it in a couple weeks, but I hope to be able to get back to it soon. If you’d like to join me for 40 minutes (or less, whatever you can do) of kinhin, masked and physically distanced, in the morning or evening, let me know and I’ll give you the details when I figure them out. And please let me know if you have any suggestions for other places in the city for outdoor meditation, walking or seated.
At last Sunday’s meeting, I gave a Dharma talk about free will, which I think is a myth, and so it’s a mistake to make too much of our locus of control, though having an external one makes more sense than having an internal one. A couple days later, this article appeared in The Guardian. It brought to mind Shakespeare’s tragedies, in which the inescapable fate that dooms the protagonist is not something written in the stars by gods, but by everything that makes the person who they are.
If our faults are not in our stars, but in ourselves — or, more accurately, our selves — then praise and blame are irrelevant, and the only sane response to anyone, however admirable or heinous their behaviour, is compassion. This doesn’t mean not restraining someone from causing harm, but it means restraining them for everyone’s good, not as punishment.
According to Lacan, the I which speaks and the I which is spoken of are not the same. The one observes and describes the other.
Zen practice reveals to us that we are not the I, the self, the aggregate of traits we describe and identify as “I” or “me.”
As we study the self, we may find we do not like, or even have much in common with, that self, the same way we experience some other people. Or we may like and relate to that self we are studying, the same way we experience some other people. But we are none of those people we can analyse and describe, including the self.
One of the most common practices in Buddhist meditation, including Zen, is to simply pay attention to your breath. When you realise you have been distracted by a thought, you label it “Thinking,” then return your attention to the breath.
It is a useful practice, but I question the accuracy of the label. Using the word “thinking” suggests you are in control, doing something, producing the distracting thoughts. But, as practice goes on, you will find the thoughts are there whether you are actively thinking or not, and trying to stop thinking and quiet the mind is just one more activity to be distracted by.
What if you let the thoughts be, just allow them to make their noise, like the background noise in a public place, a chatter you hear but do not pay attention to? You will find that the correct label is not “Thinking,” but rather, “Thoughts.” The thoughts just happen, and they are not your concern, and so you notice they have distracted you, and you return to the breath.
At last Sunday's sangha meeting, we discussed the first koan of The Gateless Gate. Koans are normally asked and answered in dokusan, private meetings between student and teacher, but the word actually means “public case,” and I thought it might be interesting to experiment with the type of discussion that was probably more similar to how koans were originally practiced. It went well, so we'll continue to do it.
This is Burns Night, and it should be noted that, though he likely never heard of Zen or Buddhism, he was one of the great Zen poets of the West:
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white – then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
As part of last Sunday's Dharma talk, I read Sam Hamill's poem The Orchid Flower. I corresponded with him for years, though we never met. He is among the people who have died whom I cannot bring myself to delete from my email contacts. When he died in 2018, I wrote this poem:
Elegy for Sam Hamill
Two days ago you breathed out
and didn’t breathe in again. You
were in your bed at home in Cascadia.
I’m on my couch at home in Glasgow,
reading a book of your poems, one of
the books you put in a package, took
to a post office and mailed to me.
I find you in the words, and I look for you
in the spaces between.
Many people go through life with one identity, based on an aggregate of subordinate identities, often a hybrid of job and family role. When we don't hold on to identities, when we let go of old things as we move on to new things (without clinging to the new), we can be amazed as we realise all the different people we have been.
Yakushi the Medicine Buddha by Enku, 17th Century
Mural by Smug, Glasgow
