A Rock in the River

I’ve been sitting for extended periods every morning this week. Nothing too demanding, I’m actually on my own at the beach for a few days to work and grab a last chance at relaxation before the school year starts, but I sit down after breakfast and practice zazen and kinhin until lunch.

So what have I achieved? Unfortunately, no special insights. I’ve spent more time fighting drowsiness and back pains than grappling with emotional problems.

Am I getting anywhere? As a friend recently asked me, “where does this [meditation] lead?”

I don’t know, but I take comfort and encouragement in these words of John Daido Loori Roshi,

“The spiritual maturation resulting from this kind of practice [zazen] is as subtle as it is profound. It shapes our spiritual character the way a river shapes the rocks it encounters on its journey to the sea. The resulting form has as much to do with the rock as with the action of the water, and the changes that take place are gradual and almost invisible.”

[Preface, "The Art of Just Sitting", J.D. Loori ed.]

I think I can accept this. While I’m sure that I could justify meditation more easily if I knew it would make me a more humble, compassionate, generous, empathetic, happier and serene person, not knowing is a good alternative.

The rock sits and the river flows over it. That’s my practice.

Bringing a human Buddha to life

Who sits on my cushion, the confused individual reaching out for a spot of clarity, confidence, and serenity in his life, or the bundle of mental habits/neuroses that chased me to the cushion in the first place? Both, of course. I take a clear breath, hear a bird chirping in the trees, and then, unbidden, expectation, desire, and aversion all leap in to pilot my thoughts. Is this the path to Awakening? Am I doing this right? What would it be like to be free of these poisons?

My teachers and sangha friends are pretty quiet on these topics. Just keep sitting, they say. But what makes them confident that this road is the right one? Clearly, someone must have traveled it already, must have said, “follow me”, and persuaded his or her followers that this path is a good one. What was his or her life like after Awakening?

There are numerous stories of monks leading awakened lives in caves or forests. These do not interest me. If I have to move to a cave or forest, this path is of no use to me, so I was surprised to learn that Siddhatta Gotama, the Buddha, the Awakened One, didn’t spend his life in this way. After he awoke, he spent the rest of his life traveling from city to city, seeking and attracting followers, and speaking, sometimes debating, with whomever he met. He traveled the road of meditation and awakening and then came back to show others the way. Those who studied with him had the example of a living Buddha right in front of them. I have no doubt that they studied him, the way he looked, the way he spoke, and the way he acted, just as much as they studied his teachings.

Sadly, the Buddha lived and died over 2,000 years ago. All we know about him today are an unsystematic assortment of story fragments that, we are told, were originally preserved through an oral tradition (or, more likely, multiple traditions) and then eventually converted into written texts in Pali. These texts, the so-called Pali Canon, are considered the most authentic record of the Buddha’s life and teaching. Of course, given the large displacements (spatial, temporal, lingual, and cultural) that occurred between the Buddha’s lifetime and the writing of the Pali Canon, one must read the Pali account with a substantial grain of salt. But perhaps skepticism is unwarranted? Maybe what matters more is not the historical accuracy of the Pali Canon, but the reverence in which it has been held? If people have been able to use the signposts saying “this way to awakening” that are contained in this ancient record, maybe that’s good enough for me?

The next section summarizes three different sources I have examined regarding the life of the Buddha. Of these, I particularly recommend Buddha for general readers and The Life and Death of Siddhattha Gotama for Buddhist practitioners.

1. The Biography of the Buddha by Dr. K.D.P. Wickremesinghe
2. Buddha by Karen Armstrong
3. The Life and Death of Siddhattha Gotama, a series of eight talks by Stephen Batchelor

Stubborn Twig

Immigrant stories fascinate me. Three of my four grandparents entered the USA from eastern Europe around the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries and the parameters of the immigrant experience were strongly transmitted to me by my parents. I also tried out the immigrant experience for myself, moving to Israel in the early 80’s. Since I never discussed immigration (or much of anything else) with my grandparents, I don’t know how my time as an immigrant compared to theirs, but while they were able to stick it out in a “strange country” through two World Wars and a depression, I came back “home” after just two years.

Stubborn Twig traces the stories of several generations of a Japanese immigrant family, the Yasuis. The first Yasuis entered Oregon about the same time that my grandfather opened a tailor’s shop in Duluth. But unlike my forebears, who looked (but certainly didn’t sound) like their neighbors, the first Yasuis were instantly recognizable in lily-white, racially segregated, Oregon, and while they encountered a few friends, they were mostly confronted by wave after wave of bigoted Japanese haters who would try to drive them away. Fortunately, and truly amazingly, the early Yasuis found a way to see America’s promise. Sometimes they had to this from the inside of a prison cell, and the elder Yasuis often had to reminded the younger ones (and probably themselves) that “the land of the free” might not be that day’s reality, or the next’s, but that some day it would come true.

The brilliance of this book bubbles up in several ways. Author/historian, Lauren Kessler, draws a nice balance between the larger cultural-historical forces at work and the personal characteristics of individuals in the Yasui family. Despite the hardships that they faced, the Yasuis were human beings and Kessler never loses sight of this. Kessler also uses a novel, but clever, device to organize the story by generation, rather than by events or dates. Therefore, we learn almost the full story of Masuo Yasui and his imprisonment during World War II. Then, in a later section, we reencounter the war years a second time through the eyes of his children (and, in a still later section, we see how the grandchildren come to terms with their family’s story). This pattern serves the story well because it makes it clear how each generation of Yasuis differed from the ones that came before and the ones that followed.

I began reading Stubborn Twig last March when I found myself on the Oregon coast without a book. The local library had several copies on its shelf for the statewide Oregon Reads program and I was able to complete the first section before returning to Portland. I immediately put a copy on hold at my local library, but I’m glad to say, the book has been so popular, that I was forced to wait four long months before a copy came back into my hands. Fortunately, the story is told so vividly, it was easy to take it up right where I had left off.

I can only hope that everyone in Oregon will read this book. It is so easy to fall victim to lies and prejudice. On p. 212 (paperback edition) Kessler states, “a national opinion poll in 1946 revealed that almost 90 percent of Americans believed that nikkei had spied for the Japanese government during the war.” And then I think of the lies, and damn lies, that we spread today about foreigners, immigrants, our neighbors, and even ourselves.

The Zookeeper’s Wife

I first learned about this book from a radio interview with the author, Diane Ackerman, on Science Friday (January 18, 2008). The book’s central conceit, that Nazi ideas about racial and genetic purity somehow led to special treatment for the Warsaw Zoo during the Nazi occupation, and that this, in turn, facilitated the creation of an escape route for Polish Jews fleeing the Holocaust, was irresistible. Also irresistible were the accounts of how Zoo animals regularly took up residence in the Zookeepers’ home.

The book itself largely delivers on these plot points, although the central premise, linking Nazi ideology, the Zoo’s preservation and its eventual use as a hiding place for escapees, seems overblown. The Zoo stopped functioning as a zoo shortly after the start of the occupation. Also, I couldn’t help feeling that the zookeeper and his wife would have found a way to assist escaping Jews by any means necessary.

The book opens in 1935 with a description of the animals’ morning calls driving the zookeeper’s wife from her bed. However, the relative calm of this lively morning is replaced a few pages later by the story of World War II. Nearly all of the book is devoted to the period between 1939 and 1945, and almost nothing is said about the post-war years or what it was like to live under communism. Given this focus, there is the expected, yet still revealing, description of Nazi brutality and one gets a fair idea of what it was like to live under siege, occupation, and then frenzied withdrawal. I couldn’t help but wonder, do the inhabitants of modern war zones, experience life the same way as the Poles did in World War II?

On the other hand, for all its detail, the story of the war, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and its ultimate destruction, and the final Warsaw uprising, were all well-known to me and I could have skipped this book, save for one thing: the unusual characters inhabiting its pages. Although the book has its tedious sections (and these are accentuated by the author’s penchant for padding the text with lists of all types), Ackerman assembles a fair number of compelling stories, some based on humans, some based on animals (the bunny and the cat turn out to be more interesting than the zebras), and some that combine the two in interesting and unexpected ways.

Chemistry alert. For those of you who would like to bleach your hair (perhaps you need to look more Aryan?), do not use “pure hydrogen peroxide”. 100% peroxide is an explosive and I’ve never seen any solution that was concentrated beyond 30%. I can only guess that the book’s reference to “pure” peroxide means undiluted household peroxide with is already quite dilute.

How to (not) Think, Say, or Do the Worst Thing

Daniel Wegner’s review article (Science, 325, 48-50, 3 July 2009) of “ironic behavior”, thinking-saying-doing-feeling exactly the opposite of what we intend, sheds light on a host of mental and behavioral problems.

To begin with, why do I drive my bike directly into a fallen tree branch when I have already decided to go around the branch? Why do cheering baseball fans make it harder for me to avoid swinging at a wild pitch? Why do I kick a soccer ball directly into the goalie’s outstretched arms when the entire net is available? These are all “ironic” behaviors and Wegner describes a multitude of situations where ironic behavior appears.

As I understand it, the current theory of ironic behavior postulates two competing mental processes. When we are instructed “don’t do/think/say/feel X”, we begin a conscious mental process of distraction, looking for something “not X” to do/think/say/feel. At the same time, we also initiate an unconscious “monitor” process that begins looking for potential mistakes. This monitor checks to make sure we aren’t doing/thinking/saying X and it keeps the idea of X alive in our subconscious rather than letting it dissipate. Normally these two processes work well together, but things can go wrong, and since the monitor keeps the notion of X alive, X is ready to pop out whenever a suitable trigger arises.

A nice example of this, and the simplicity of ironic triggers (of which there are many), is shown in Figure 3, which shows the tracings a handheld pendulum makes on a piece of paper in four experimental scenarios. The scenarios are generated by telling the person with the pendulum to “hold it steady” or “keep it from swinging up and down”, and their ability to follow each of these instructions is tested first, without competing distractions, and second, by asking them to count backwards from 1000 by threes. The images graphically demonstrate our inability to follow instructions when overloaded with a second, unrelated task.

So how can we avoid ironic behavior and thoughts? One way “we can stop thinking of things” is to make “time to devote to the project [of not X] and become absorbed in our self-distractions”. In other words, we have to give the conscious project of distraction, of following instructions, a chance. Multi-tasking is not helpful. Another helpful approach may be to relax. Striving for tight control of our thoughts, etc., may keep the unwanted thought alive to a greater extent than simply accepting an unwanted thought’s existence whenever it appears. Does this sound like vipassana?

Institutional Zen & Me

Blogs are meant to be confessional, right? So here goes: the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, these guys are my heroes. I want to be like them.

OK, not all that stunning as confessions go. But I did start meditating as a result. And I’m also reading an endless string of books about Buddhism. So where has this taken me?

First, I should say that I hardly knew where to start. The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan Buddhist, but Tibetan deities aren’t for me so that ruled out a Tibetan practice. Thich Nhat Hanh practices a Vietnamese version of Zen. He has written an enormous amount (several books sit on my shelf) and there are plenty of affiliated meditation groups in my town so I gave a couple of them a chance, but something didn’t quite mesh. I needed something else, but what?

The Lost Art of Walking

Everyone knows that when you walk down the street something occasionally sticks to your shoe. But most people don’t stop to think that something always sticks to the bottom of one’s shoe. It might only be a few million atoms of dirt, or pavement, but it’s there just the same. Not only that, the accumulation of gunk on your sole is actually a two-way process because, with every step, a few million atoms of shoe undoubtedly transfer themselves to the sidewalk.

Given another 100 pages, its quite possible that Geoffrey Nicholson would have included material like this in The Lost Art of Walking. His mind works in unusual ways. Every page crisscrosses the subject of walking, always striding along purposefully, but rarely towards a goal that the reader can anticipate. And therein lies the book’s charm. I have just finished the book, but I already have trouble remembering what it was about. The subtitle, “The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of PedestrianIsm,” is not wrong, but it hardly tells you what’s there. Here are some bits I especially enjoyed:

“Well, it turns out the Sumatran orangutans are extremely bipedal. They may not walk on the ground, but they constantly stand on two legs and walk along tree branches, using their arms for balance and for gathering food. The conclusion is that we didn’t come down from the trees and gradually adapt to walking on 2 feet, but that bipedalism was already part of the repertoire. Knuckle walking, therefore, wasn’t an intermediate stage but a later development, necessitated in chimpanzees and gorillas because they’re anatomically unable to straighten their legs.” (p. 10). Interesting. I’ll file that under the “science of walking”.

“When I find myself in a new place I explore it on foot. It’s the way I get to know that place. Maybe it’s a way of marking territory, of beating the bounds. Setting foot in a street makes it yours in a way that driving down it never does.” (p. 12) I had the same thought the other day quite independently of reading it in the book. My main mode of transport around Portland is bicycle, but I drive and walk a lot too. Anyway, coasting down the street, parked cars on each side, it occurred to me that even a bicycle goes too fast and is too exposed to be a useful means of transport for taking in one’s surroundings. We evolved as walkers and runners, not as motorists or cyclists. I suspect some crafty neuroscientist will someday show a resonance between the optimal speed at which our brains absorb new information and the speed at which walking brings new vistas into view.

The book contains an utterly delightful lexicon on walking. I keep turning the Italian phrase darsela a gambe (to make with the legs) (p. 23) over and over in my mind. I hope it sounds as musical as I think it does.

Nicholson quotes many people throughout the book, including the “fine London walker” William Blake. For example, “I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man’s” (p. 92) celebrates one of the great joys of walking: extreme spontaneous flexibility. We can stop, turn on our heel, and head straight back the way we came. We can strike off at new and surprising angles. We can crisscross a street a dozen times to greet friends and look in shop windows. Anyone who has ever jaywalked knows how emotionally satisfying a personally created shortcut can be. Automobiles, and even bicycles, are usually enslaved by another man’s System. Walkers rarely are.

Speaking of systems, Nicholson describes a number of rules for constructing walks. Here’s one set that I found particularly appealing, “I came to a decision. I would make six transits of Oxford Street, there and back, from Tottenham Court Road tube station at the east end of the street to Marble Arch at the west, and back again. I would spread them out over the course of the day. I would see how the street and my walking changed.” (p. 106) what a fantastic way to spend a day! I’m already picking out some streets in Portland. I think I’ll start on the Summer Solstice. Maximum daylight.

Among the many sources that Nicholson quotes are New Age web sites extolling the spiritual virtues of walking. (p. 175-176). The stock New Age phraseology is uncomfortably gooey just as one expects so I’ll simply quote Nicholson, “I know that mocking the jejune philosophizing of New Agers is like dynamiting New Agers in a barrel, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.” I find this amusing, but I also confess to having some mixed emotions too.

Appropriately, Nicholson saves his very best bits for the very end. Near the end of the book, we get to take a walk with Nicholson’s dad, ignore a No Trespassing sign, stride onto private property and meet up with the unhappy landowner. The stage is set for all kinds of outcomes, but the actual resolution is completely unexpected and poignant. A walk that is good to remember. I would find the book again at the library just to reread this chapter.

Pause, Relax, Open, Trust …

A couple of months ago I downloaded all of the Buddhist Geeks‘ podcasts and began walking my way through them (yeah, I listen while I walk my very lovable, but old and creaky, Lab around the block each night).

One episode that has really connected was Episode 56: Insight Dialogue: Extending Meditation into Mutuality with Gregory Kramer. Meditating isn’t a social activity by any means (even though it helps to do it with a group) and Kramer makes a number of interesting points about Buddhism and interpersonal relationships.

However, the thing that really caught my attention was when Kramer said Insight Dialog was based on 6 steps and he was going to list them. My immediate thought was “oh no!” I can’t remember 6 of anything these days, especially while walking the dog, so I waited expectantly for the Geeks to cut him off (note to listeners: the BG podcasts run about 15 minutes and the Geeks rarely encourage guests to go into technical details, which is too bad).

Somehow, this time, the Geeks missed their chance, and Kramer launched into a short lecture/explanation of the 6 steps. They are:

1. Pause
2. Relax
3. Open
4. Trust emergence
5. Listen deeply
6. Speak the truth

Terrific! I saw immediately how they made sense for better communication. I could also see how steps 1-4 would fit into my personal meditation practice. Lost in thought? Pause that thought, relax, and open to the experience of breathing by trusting the physical sensation that emerges. I have started using “pause-relax-…” interchangably with “release-relax-return”, a useful sequence taught by a local Zen monk.

Fever Pitch

A couple of years ago I fell in love with Barca (més que un club!). It’s hard to say why exactly. Maybe it was because they had these great stars, Ronaldinho, Zambrotta, Deco, Messi, Iniesta, Xavi (ok, gotta stop here because I love the entire team!). I’m sure that it helped that the local coffee shop was showing the games on Saturdays and Sundays and that the team was having a great season. And, it didn’t hurt that a book I had just read, How Soccer Explains the World, brilliantly explained why any person, whether or not they spoke Spanish or cared all that much about soccer, should support Barca. Everything simply came together. My daughter even bought me a Barca shirt last Xmas (‘07) which I could wear on game days.

I should have been a very happy man, but nothing good ever seems to last. Barca’s ‘07-’08 season was a major disappointment. Then, just as the team began turning things around this past fall, the coffee shop stopped showing the games. So I have been stuck with reading game scores on the internet. No futbol action for me.

Frustrated and desperate, I did the unthinkable: I ordered cable. It will get installed in another two weeks so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the team will keep its winning streak alive after I start tuning in. Of course, this means I’m going to pay a lot of money to watch the games at home by myself (soccer needs to be shared), but did I have a choice? Of course not.

If I was ever looking for some justification for my inexplicably expensive behavior, I could have found all that I needed on just about any page of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s rapturously romping memoir of soccer fan lunacy. I had bought the book last month for my daughter, partly because it had been recommended to me by a British fan at the coffee house (Brian – you were right. Thanks!), but ostensibly to help her with her 12th grade history paper on soccer, Barcelona, and the Spanish Civil War. Of course, I was going to read the book first if I got the chance, and I did. Hornby’s pain is the reader’s gain and it grows from page to page. Here are three of my favorite bits from the book:

from “No Apology Necessary” Arsenal v. Everton, 24.2.88, “Absurdly, I haven’t yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that the best team does not necessarily win.”

from “Home Début” Arsenal v. Stoke City, 14.9.68, “It wasn’t the size of the crowd that impressed me most, however, or the way that adults were allowed to shout the word “WANKER!” as loudly as they wanted without attracting any attention. What impressed me most was just how much most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in the way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire afternoon. Withing minutes of the kick-off there was real anger; as the game went on, the anger turned into outrage, and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent discontent.”

from “Hillsborough” Arsenal v. Newcastle, 15.4.89, “If it is possible to attend and enjoy a football match sixteen days after nearly a hundred people died at one – and it is possible, I did it, despite my new post-Hillsborough realism – then perhaps it is a little easier to understand the culture and circumstances that allowed these deaths to happen. Nothing ever matters, apart from football.”

There are other bits that do a much better (and much funnier) job of explaining the undeniably insane nature of Hornby’s attachment to the sport, but these three summarize soccer in nearly-syllogistic terms: soccer is enjoyable, soccer fans do not “enjoy” themselves at games, yet they are driven to watch.

I have a co-worker who has grown up rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles. She told me that she was so upset that she couldn’t make herself watch the second half of the NFC title game last week (the Eagles had fallen far behind the Arizona Cardinals, but would take the lead in the second half, only to blow the game in the final minutes). She’s going to love this book.

Free-Range Chickens

OK, Xmas is coming, so what can I get Dad? According to my older daughter, the answer was a copy of Simon Rich’s latest collection of comic sketches, Free-Range Chickens. Did she do the right thing?

Yes. Yes, yes, oh yes.

Rich’s comedy is uneven and probably too many of the pieces deal with being a young or adolescent boy, but guess what? Middle-aged guys still get huge (and knowing) laughs out of the musings of Simon Rich’s heroes. Like the sullen uncertain teen-agers who populate nearly half of the book, I wanted, tried, and failed, to be the confident, cool dude capable of getting along masterfully with the opposite sex. And since nothing has changed except the reflection in the mirror, what can I do but laugh?

That said, the funniest parts of the book concerned situations of a less personal, more speculative variety:

• the uncertain student-teacher relationship in oriental medicine (can two people use “chi” in a complete sentence without either one laughing?)
• the most important qualitifications for presidential bodyguards (how tall are you? how wide? how thick?)
• and the rather obvious question that never seems to get asked about people who keep running marathon races into their dotage: are they cursed?