April 16 2013:
In human history we have never experienced today before,and we cannot repeat it. This is it. It's an unprecedented and unrepeatable day that we are living, and to fully understand it, to fully appreciate it, is the first step in Zen.
p 30 "Endless Vow" Tanahashi @ Chayat. Introduction by Eido Shimano.
I sat at Rinzai-ji at 5 15 a.m.
I sat with two of Joshu Sasaki's Oshos on my first morning. The chanting was impressive but I could not follow along. I wonder if I will keep up in a month's time. My legs get numb as well.
I met with both Oshos, Seijin and Eshin, to discuss my stay. Seijin mentions Clarity and Compassion to me on my way out the door. I'd not been brilliant, let's say.
I want to study. I went to McDonalds which was on my way to a drug store. It had wi-fi. I found that Eshin is a long standing leader in Vancouver. I had him mixed up with Esshu Martin, the one who wrote against his former teacher Sasaki Rosi on the internet.
The preface to "Buddhist Thought in India" mentions that
on the suppositions of Indian Yoga a philosophical system can be built which is a valid, cogent and coherent as those based on modern science
but
no Oxford or Cambridge professor would demean himself by paying the slightest attention to his colleagurs of ancient India
(p 9 Conze).
Conze mentions that an
extrmely intelligent journalist was generally applauded for publishing a widely read book.devoted to the thesis that there is nothing to the wisdom of the East.
I stop from further reading because I wanted only to consider the statement "there is nothing to the wisdom of the East" which Conze says
reiterates the vulgar prejudices of those who, from mere tribal sluggishness, are convinced that 'Western, i.e. Judeao-Christian and scientific modes of thinking are the unfailing standards of all truth
(10).
In Conze's day it was the power of the newspaper that made 'nothing to the wisdom of the East' a prevalent reponse by the West to Buddhism et al, now it is the internet which has power to put across slander as prevailing truth.
Everyday is a good day, Ummon? When I was with Eshin and Seijin, just the three of us in the zendo, I had no non official sitters to follow and learn zen etiquette. Also, back to my own issues, my left knee is hurting.
Talking to the two Oshos at breakfast I mention Conze and his quote about nothing to the East etc., and Seijin replies there's nothing to the wisdom of the West. Of course I misunderstood him and said it was like a see saw; but I can see now he meant something else entirely.
I'm concerned with free time but struggling with how to be free of everything is what zen is concerned with.
Seijin may have been looking over my shoulder. He tells me I am on my own schedule at Gentei-an, cleaning the house and library.
I'm still considering nothing to the East to the internet attacks on Sasaki. I remember he would talk about sex, how men and women had different parts each the other desired. Men want what women have and so forth.
I don't know. This morning I think about what I'm doing, or supposed to be doing. All the while I'm old enough just to welcome death. I could, for example, go home and watch TV while my wife scolds me about not being an actor. Or I could just stay here and try to teach again. This morning it seemed helpless but I imagine, given time, I could chant or help with the leadsership positions.
I don't think much can be done. There's an overreaching pattern and it looks bad to anpyone who sees what is being said about Sasaki Roshi. He's not having sex but with underage or unwilling partners. One sees the black robed religious figures. One follows what one is told to do. So the woman who had sex with Roshi was up against someone who abused his position of authority. But this is Zen. Sasaki often said Zen is not the way of Saints, although perhaps it should be. I was not shocked when I was asked to have sex with Roshi's wife in order to "learn about women." I knew where he was coming from. I recall reading Eric Kandel said about young men having sex with servants to keep them from homosexuality (not that there's anything wrong with that as Seinfeld says. )
My mother sat with Sasaki and I was acting and traveling about. Gay men would tell me that their preference for the same sex in love was a secret they kept from their parents. I asked my mother about homosexuality and she was upset. Since then Sasaki would talk aboit homosexuality in teishos. It was amusing. Anyway I had learned plenty enough about women and simply declined Sasaki's offer. We did have issues later that made me leave. I really can't recall what he was saying that made me so angry at him that I ripped up a flower in front of him in zanzen. I would call someone a liar, albeit a troubled one, who would say or imply the sex with Sasaki was forced. I think there are issues Sasaki is immature about. What he said about homosexuality was him at his worst: overbearing and bigoted.
I see him as a young ardent priest, established in Japan but in a bit of hot water, coming to America with no academic sophistication. In some ways this kept his points radical and embraving, but he was also swayed by and at odds with a culture that he remembers as bombing his own, and seeing with young eyes how the American military invaders had Japanese women by their side.
At a restaurant to connect to the internet, the voices around me are overwhelming. Eshin gave advice about the sense of hearing, or any sense, rather than counting. I try to let my hearing follow the sounds.
In a new place are new sounds. I'm in the top floor of Gentei-an now. Wind is persistent today. Children play in a school across the alley from here. Thoughts and plans rise and fall in my mind.
A little dharma in the middle of the day. I'd gone to the office to ask if there was water, because the filtered water comtainer was empty, to be had. Eshin came from out the office and said he didn't know, being new. Then I quoted Soen Nakagawa:
hidden in this bowl of tea is a secret/ more secret than all of atomic science
Eshin said at once "So find it." Like "nothing to the wisdom of the West" by Seijun, this comes fast and points to absolute reality. Despite the woes I empathize with surrounding Sasaki's behavior and the hurt he caused, these Oshos show me the truth in Zen.
It's an hour away from sitting and I'm reading about acting so that I can go home and be a movie star for my wife to brag about. Ha ha.
It grows late, it seems, but it's only half an hour since evening sitting closed. I met with one of the other residents here and was told how to connect to the internet. Even later I am here up the street on a rented computer, because the nook was not working well. I'm just settling into whatever this is or shall be. Don't know why the situation with Sasaki floods my mind, it may be my window looks out across a roof to the roof of Rinzai ji, Sasaki's temple.
I do hear innuendos and half truths. A woman has died and other people write about her, quote her poems.
Oh, it's time to listen, listen to sound
That's here and there, there and here, just hear
The voices growing families confound
My philosophical ideas, I fear,
They've kept us prisoner too long, although
Surrender seemed unthinkable, I find
In sitting still with others I can grow
Away from what I know to what the mind
Encompasses, awaking one with one.
As soon as saying this I know it's phoney,
It's just a lot of words, all said and done
So many times it's all the same baloney.
I find again if I can live apart
It's better, let religion be, for art.
I realize I've gotten boxed into writing again. This is a crucial stage for me, stage as actor's platform, as human development, and as the "body of fate" from Yeats and Vision - the objective reality of now.
This day has been harsh. The talk by Eshin was for Sunday. It didn't talk about koans, but sounded very new age with talk of positive and negative. These are good terms for sitting, but I think it is too psychological for my taste.
At lunch after the sitting there was a lunch, I got angry. I sense coming back here was important and now I can move on. I realize I could not do what Eshin or Senjin do, they have wide arms to deal with a lot of people. I got upset over Susan wanting to come and take over things at lunch, doing so without gentleness or decorum. Groups do this all the time, like they are starved for new people and want to get what they can from them with some kind of attitude they have no need to show or say who they are. Are they ghosts like in Homer at the shores of Lethe, seeking the life of others? It is a perfect time to demonstrate realization and yet it seemed I was among bureaucrats. The famous, to me anyway, scene in Yeats is when the poet is with bankers and he sees fighters on the street. This lunch was the bankers, chatty and blase, while the life of the world was a fire of great and lucid urgency. Senjin is a bit of puzzle. Either Punch in Punch and Judy, like each blunt hit on someone's head enlightens them; or he is very perceptive and struggles with the opposite of perception, personality. He did, playing dad, remind me of my dad, playing dad. If this comparison holds, then it would be best were he to stop trying to make up for the differennce he has among those with less ken. Yeats says repentance...
God I love Winesburg Ohio. I also e mailed Palolo today, about working there. When I heard Eshin's teisho I was surprised because it was not about a text of koans, but the ideas stay with me. Breath by breath. I am trying to keep my distance now because if new students come, I should not be around. I am sure the people on Sunday would be confused by my lunacy.
I realize I demolished my own concern with lineage to Japan, so what is going on with poor Eido, or with Sasaki, or Aitken and his break with Sanbo Kyodan - are not important. Certainly of no concern to me, who is only here to help lovely Meryle and her folks even is her hope of me being a movie star is not going to be (fill in later: easy? possible?)
I've considered this Sasaki matter for over a week, however long I've been here. It's April 27 now. Another good day. I read accounts that said there was impotence along with accounts of sex and of a marriage being broken up. I had my own experiences as I have said and at the end I took this flower he had next to him and tore it up. I did not go along with what he was trying to make me do, and this had to do with marrying someone or something, something in a teisho about a woman seeing the child within. Poetic images in his mind in my opinion. I find that now that Eido Roshi has been distanced from Myoshin ji, if you read that account, they say they have nothing to do with him. So isn't it interesting they are going after Sasaki? Women were not mindless here, the word is enamoured. In America to find someone like Sasaki to talk to got one very close to profound experiences. There is nothing like Zen in the kind of fundamental Church religion in America which, to think of a passage by Sherwood Anderson, is a religion without the grandeur and depth anymore but one dwindled down to morale formulae. People may go after Sasaki for money now, but later on it leads to more witch hunts against groups like gays and "Philistines" who get in the way of greed. I think maybe greed rather than lust is the topic here. People want to go after the Japan bank. There are several stories in Winesburg Ohio that touch on this topic. The main one is Hands which is the story of a school teacher who used his hands to express himself, touching kids, and when one dull witted school boy got enamoured of the teacher then he got hurt and babbled a lot of lies and this drove the teacher out of town and into obscurity.