one thing well

It would seem that my recent posts are getting shorter and shorter. Maybe I’m distilling some collected wisdom down to its essence. I don’t know. In any case, here’s another quote I found stashed away in one of my document folders. I suppose it can apply to any creative endeavor, or just plain life:

“Do your best at each and everything.  That is the key to success.  Learn one thing well and you will learn how to understand the ten thousand things.  Ten thousand things are one; this is the secret place of understanding you must find.  Then everything is mysterious and wonderful.”

-Archery Master Awa Kenzo

empty-handed zen

Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed — that is human.
When you are born, where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.
The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.
Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
Then what is the one pure and clear thing?

I’m not sure who wrote this, but I reread it from time to time. That one pure and clear thing, not dependent on birth and death, is what I have been searching for all my life. Can we find this pure and clear thing in the midst of our daily lives? That is the real challenge.

monday zen

Imagine this situation: The alarm goes off at 4:30 am. It’s still pitch black outside, and cold. You’re under three layers of blankets, warm in your cocoon. You should get up and go to the gym, that’s why you set your alarm, but today it’s Monday and that means it’s just too difficult. Why not just stay in bed awhile? Sound familiar? This is our daily dilemma. Not just whether or not to go to the gym, but whether to abide in inertia, or keep going. A Zen teaching I read years ago said that we should get out of bed in the morning as if our bed is on fire, and go to sleep at night as if it’s our final rest. The underlying message is that whatever we do, we do it fully and mindfully. To continue: So you manage to get out bed (at 6:00 am) but then you are presented with the fact that you have to perform about fifty small tasks just to get out the door in order to arrive at work on time. Then your car doesn’t start and while you are fiddling with some engine cables under the hood, you step in a pile of dog shit. Now you really wish you hadn’t gotten up that day. But what can you do? Just live and breathe right into that moment with dog shit on your shoe and keep going. Dainin Katagiri Roshi, in his book Returning to Silence, says, “In everyday life there is no excuse. One day you like your life, the next morning you don’t. Finally, all you have to do is just live. This is pretty hard and very painful because from day to day, you have to do something in this situation where you feel as though you cannot move an inch at all. You have to get up in the morning when you have to get up, wash your face when it’s time to wash your face, have breakfast even though you don’t like it, go to work and take care of your life…Nevertheless, right in the middle of this situation we have to be refreshed constantly.  In sickness, in despair, in hard work, in easy work, whatever it is, happy or not happy, you must be constantly refreshed. To be refreshed is to digest your life completely. This is Zen teaching.” So I ask you: Can you be refreshed with dog shit on your shoe, late for work with a car that won’t start? If you can, you see the Dharma clearly and are close to Buddhahood.

day four – one thing

Multigrain pancakes for breakfast, then a 20-mile bike ride. Bright, sunny day. My Soen Roshi diet is pretty much out the window. I was going to attend a sitting group this morning, but I realize I have a greater affinity for solitary meditation. I’m more of a Bodhidharma kind of guy. I checked out a copy of the Mirror of Zen by Korean Zen Master So Sahn. I started reading it, and page one stopped me in my tracks:

“There is only one thing, from the very beginning, infinitely bright and mysterious by nature. It was never born, and it never dies. It cannot be described or given a name. What is this “one thing”?

Like Joshu’s “Mu!”, this question is like a hot ball of iron in my gut that I can’t get rid of.

day two

Rice porridge this morning with milk and honey, using a recipe from the Three Bowls cookbook I mentioned a few posts ago. In his advice to the Zen cook, or tenzo, Master Dogen says we should prepare the rice today for tomorrow’s gruel. In his journal Soen Roshi, commenting on the preparation of his monastery for winter, says, “Everything that needs to be attended to is done, yet no trace of effort is apparent.” These thoughts express the Zen spirt perfectly. When you do something, burn yourself up so there’s nothing left. After breakfast, I started to cheat a little. I had one cup of coffee because my PG Tips wasn’t cutting it and I was in such a foul mood. I could sense that I was giving off angry vibes. For someone who has caffeine every day, it’s startling to see your true nature without the drug. I swam 30 lengths on my lunch break today. So far, so good. Hoping to resist the temptation to stop after work and buy beer. Am I breaking the Fifth Precept if I have three beers tonight while sitting on the couch watching baseball? Does that count as “misuse of alcohol?” Friday night, Red Sox/Rangers at 7:05 pm: for me this is what Mara, or temptation, looks like.

day one

For mid-morning meal, two cups of PG Tips tea, one bowl of rice cereal with milk. So far, so good. No coffee cravings yet. I think when you’re dieting, coffee can be the root of all evil. It stirs up the passions and makes those hungry ghosts come out.

For lunch, and my last big meal of the day, a green salad with various beans and vegetables, and one cup of vegetarian hot and sour soup. I’m unable to swim today due to work constraints, but I will take a brief walk on my lunch break. Right now it’s 11:47 am, so if I don’t take another meal until tomorrow, I’ll be following those early Buddhist precepts I spoke of. I’m guessing I’ll need an apple before then, however. It’s strange…even though I have just eaten, I find myself already thinking about my next meal. There must be a fear of starvation reflex that gets activated when you diet. I’ll be doing my four miles tonight, and I may have some nuts or a glass of milk before bed.

I think I’m going to call this my Soen Roshi diet. More thoughts on food from the master, again from his journal: “Although it is austere, my diet is nourishing. While I eat only one meal a day, it is filled with delicious tastes, and I am extremely grateful to nature for this bounty. It consists of nine types of food: black beans, green beans, azuki beans, white beans, soy beans, sesame seeds, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, and brown rice. While chewing these things one after the other, I mix buckwheat powder with water. I also eat radishes, carrots, greens, fruits, seaweed, and pine leaves – whatever is available. I don’t use fire; I eat everything raw. Recently I have stopped using salt, unless it occurs naturally, as in seaweed. I take all things as they come in nature.” (Sounds a little like my friend Henry D. Thoreau with his bean patch. )

non-working lunch

I just came back from a “working lunch” where we listened to a speaker as we ate. This is a pretty common practice in business, where we eat but we can’t really pay attention to the meal that is nourishing us. The food was free and the speaker was engaging, but something was missing. During events like these, because our attention is split between eating and listening, we can’t bring mindfulness to either. I would like to institute a policy at my workplace where we eat in silence, much like the formal meals given at Buddhist monasteries called oryoki, then once we have given proper attention to our nourishment, we can shift our full attention to other matters. And yet, can you imagine the reaction if I suggested this? It goes against the cult of multitasking that we’ve all had to adopt. Somehow we’ve come to believe that if you can’t do two or three things well, and all at once, that there must be something wrong with you. But what really ends up happening is that we don’t do any of these mutiple tasks well, and because our attention was somewhere else, we weren’t present for any of them. So that time has slipped away, and we’ve spent it unskillfully. I say we all eat in silence, really take the time to taste, appreciate and enjoy our food, and then we can talk all we want. That way, we don’t lose time, or our lunch.

renewal

Lately I seem to be more of an aggregator of information than a creator of original content. But like a good book that you thrust into a friend’s hands with a “must read this” plea, I feel like sharing these bits of wisdom that I come across in the hopes that you might glean some spark or insight from them. As for my own vows, it looks like another time for renewal. Like Soen Roshi, I too have been consuming the metaphorical demon rice cakes. Even though I have been swimming 30 lengths in the pool on my lunch hour, I still can’t seem to turn the corner on my exercise regimen. I am trying to use the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei as my inspiration for my nascent running program (four miles every day no matter what) but that hasn’t gotten off the ground yet. I’m doing about three days a week worth of running and walking. I know my mood improves when I exercise, so I have to do it, come rain, shine, or darkness. My diet at first glance appears good, but too may late-night Red Sox games have done damage to my willpower. Today I’m buying a cookbook called Three Bowls: Vegetarian Recipes from an American Zen Buddhist Monastery by Seppo Ed Farrey and Nancy O’Hara that I hope will help my diet. In the Buddha’s time, it was common for monks to eat only one meal per day, and to eat nothing after noon. Extreme, yes. And not very conducive to a householder’s life. But I’ve got to find some way to make my vows stick.

demon rice cakes

More thoughts on food from Soen Roshi’s journal, dated Autumn, 1931:

“On October 3, I made a vow to live on one meal a day, following the teachings of early Buddhist scriptures. This has resulted in a new-day clarity and expansiveness in my life…Since making that vow, I have been experiencing the joy of practicing it. One evening I hear a Zen teacher tell in his lecture about eating forty-nine sweet rice cakes at a time when he was young. I am appalled. But on the way back, I stop at a bakery and buy one of those cakes. It is like the initial gunshot breaking the silence. It creates explosive desire. One calls for another, and another. I become so angry, even while devouring this unhealthy food, that I feel like a demon.”

nabokov’s sandwiches

Perhaps due to my own dietary struggles, I’ve always been fascinated by what others eat, especially creative or spiritually advanced people. Maybe I believe that there is a direct correlation between someone’s spiritual or creative achievements and what they eat. Either the food produced the state of mind, or the state of mind in a sense dictated the diet. In either case, I love the little details. Take this, again from Eido Tai Shimano Roshi’s introduction to the book Endless Vow: The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa, “Even at Ryutaku-ji, Monk Soen went his own way…His strict diet, which he had devised for himself while living in his hut on Mount Dai Bosatsu, made it difficult for him to take his meals with the other monks. He ate no cooked food. When traveling by train or boat, he took no meals in restaurants and bought no prepared food; he would pick up banana peels and apple cores others had thrown away, wash them, and save them for his meals.” This was the diet of one of the towering figures in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to the West. Or I’ve heard the story of a Korean Zen master, who, when on an isolated retreat in the forest, ate nothing but boiled pine needles, so much so that his skin turned a peculiar shade of green. When Vladimir Nabokov was living in Cambridge, MA during the 40’s and cataloging butterflies at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Biology, he used to pack a “flask of milk and a few sandwiches” for his lunch. First, I love the phrase “flask of milk”, but I have always wondered what was in those sandwiches. I’d like to find out and make my lunch out of that same, bright stuff.