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December 28, 2004 |
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By Norman Fischer | 12/28/2004 @ 17:50 pm
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December 28, 2004
It is raining again. Has been for a few days, after a week of bright weather. The hills are covered in mist, water falls continually from the sky. How can it rain so much? Doesn't it get tired of it? Too bad, my brother and his family are here and it means we spend a lot of time sitting around eating and talking which is not so bad after all. A fire in the woodstove. Up above the house, on the hill, looking down into the water below, dolphins swimming. They do not care whether it rains or not. Many small birds are walking around in the rain because I suppose it is more difficult for them to fly.
The amount of input, data, that comes into a person's life in a day, rain or shine, staggers me. Perception after perception, moment after moment, the unceasing flow of thoughts, feelings, visual or auditory objects, etc. Filtered and organized by our preconceptions, wishes, desires.
Maybe we are all living according to a metaphor or a set of connected metaphors. Buddhism is probably one such set of metaphors. Choose your metaphors well, because they condition the life you live. If your metaphors are bad ones, change them. This is easier to say than to do- lots of hours on the cushion, dharma talks, dokusan, is probably what it takes, or whatever other practice you do. And then to see beyond all the metaphors, knowing that they are metaphors: this is the best. Still, one gets caught up in metaphors. Like "me, " and "you," or "life" and "death." In writing poems I am always flying in the face of my var
ious metaphorical systems, trying to listen to something beyond them, that comes out in the lines, that never say what I mean, only what they mean, so as to liberate me. A necessity.
Writing this weblog is for me practicing with a new way to work with metaphor. It is all fictional of course. A convention. Possibly something is expressed that conveys meaning and does someone some good?
In the news is the horrendous tsunami that has taken, by today's count, over 50,000 lives in Asia. Imagine a wall of water suddenly appearing to wash your life away. Just like that. And here, now, the rain is falling, washing down the hillsides and into the sea.
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December 22, 2004 |
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By Norman Fischer | 12/22/2004 @ 6:53 am
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December 22, 2004
Muir Beach
These have been very bright days and Kathie, Aron, Noah (our sons) and I have been hiking. Noah is an artist so on the trail we often speak about art and life. It's not easy to be devoted to something like art (and practice is the same way) that doesn't necessarily provide an easy career path, and whose economic value to society is dicey at best. Still, if you have faith, and keep on with what you know is the right thing to do, things work out. You also have to be practical, kind, ethical, and willing to sacrifice. Noah thinks about having a family, and how much harder it would be to survive as an artist with family responsibilities. But even if you do have a family, there is always a way. Not an easy way possibly, but a way. As with practice, determination, energy and diligence are important.
Noah showed us the project he's been working on in the Hague, for the 125th anniversary of the Panorama Mesdak, a museum there that is an early example of installation art. The Panorama is a single immense circular painting, done on canvas, and hung 360 degrees around the walls of a circular building. It depicts a beach scene that can be seen at the Hague itself. The viewer enters the Panorama from below, and emerges into a small viewing area in the center of a large room, entirely covered by a man made indoor sand dune. So it looks like you are actually at the beach, seeing the boats, the people, the sea, the horizon in the distance. Noah's project is a video installation that will "update" the scene depicted in the painting. Using photographs, computer graphics, and animation, he shows the scene at it looks today, and as it might look hundreds of years from now, when, possibly, the Netherlands is underwater! The short video clip he showed us is very funny and clever (he begins by animating the scene of the present painting and ends with underwater spaceships and curious sharks), and if the Dutch government is smart enough to fund it, it will be something to have a look at in 2006, when the anniversary celebrations take place. Noah explained to us that the piece doesn't necessarily reflect his own ideas about art- it is rather his sense of what is required by the site and the culture. A wise flexibility, I think, to approach a project that way.
In Dharma seminar we have been talking about compassion, with loving kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, one of the Four Unlimited Abodes. Astonishingly, these are listed as concentration exercises, not practices of virtue, and one is to develop them in an unlimited way- shooting beams of wholesome emotion out into the world infinitely in all directions. Compassion has a warm fuzzy flavor as its usually understood, but if you actually look into it, its chief characteristic is sorrow and sadness at the plight of another, whose fate is also exactly one's own. So mostly we don't want to feel real compassion- naturally we either ignore someone's troubles, or we want to fix them immediately, so we don't have to feel so badly. Yet, though it is difficult, compassion is the gateway to self transcendence, for it is compassion that opens wide the doors of the enclosed self, our personal prison. As usual with spiritual practice, things are not so simple as they seem at first, and something difficult and seemingly obviously to be avoided turns out to be something precious and beautiful. Compassion. In Zen we say there's nothing but compassion. The sun right now shining through the window as I write these words: perfect compassion. Painful, powerful, bright, and warm.
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December 15, 2004 |
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By Norman Fischer | 12/15/2004 @ 5:31 am
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December 15, 2004
The Vissudhimagga (The Path of Purification), a fifth century Buddhist classic, says that the development of loving kindness for others requires first the development of lovingkindness toward one's self. It quotes a verse by the Buddha that goes:
I visited all quarters with my mind
Nor found I any dearer than myself
Self is likewise to every other dear
Who loves himself will never harm another
This from the sage who taught "no self" and the "empty nature of all phenomena!"
The Western mind can't see loving self as anything other than selfish- and we are supposed to be "selfless bodhisattvas." The Buddhist teachings on compassion are often taken this way- forget yourself, take care of others. But this isn't possible! Real love of others can only come from loving yourself well- not selfishly, but as the only possible pathway toward loving others. How else to love someone other than through appreciating one's own self as the vehicle of that loving? When you think about this with some clarity it makes perfect sense: to have strong self regard and loving care of the self not for the selfish sake of the self , which is just stupid (because "self" can't even ever be without other, selfishness is just ignorance) but because this is the only way to live together with others in kindness and beauty.
I am always impressed with the Buddha's good common sense and practical way of teaching. One begins to notice after a while how little sense one's conventional views actually make.
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December 14, 2004 |
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By Norman Fischer | 12/14/2004 @ 8:26 am
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December 14, 2004
Foggy day today at Muir Beach- but now the sun comes out while I am writing these words. Fog again. A lesson in weather? Anything that isn't a lesson?
No water today at Muir Beach because they are cleaning out the water system. But why should anyone expect that there would be water coming out of the tap whenever you want it? We depend on so much just to get through the day, we take it for granted.
Zeikke Tokudo ceremony for Andrea Jacoby, Bob Andrews, Bruce Hartsough, and Steve Gross at the all day sitting on Sunday, December 11. It was a sweet quiet ceremony, with a lot of visitors, many of whom had never seen the ceremony before. We have no impressive temple, no big Buddha statues. Just a big open room, light, our meditation cushions, and ourselves. But it seemed persuasive enough to our visitors I think. Anyway, no one to persuade, nothing to persuade about. The Dharma is clear enough, obvious to all who want to see it. The four ordainees each stood and said a few words after receiving precepts and rakesus, as far as I know this is something that has never before been done in the ceremony, though it is such an obvious thing to do. Their words- their honesty and sincerity- was the best part. Elizabeth Sawyer, Everyday Zen's All Day Sitting's first registrar, and a major supporter, friend, and all around guru, attended the ceremony with her husband Ken, a Zen priest. Elizabeth is an interfaith minister. We don't see them much now that they've begun their own group in Sonoma County.
Our son Noah arrives tonight from the Netherlands, where he is on an artist's Fullbright Scholarship. Very exciting. Eighth Chanukah candle tonight with him.
Spending the morning reading Vissuddhimagga preparing for tonight's seminar. Many pages on how to deal with the resentment that inevitably arises when you try to develop lovingkindness. "Recollect the saintliness of the Buddha." But that might not work! "Remember that we all own our own karma." That your hatred hurts you more than it hurts your enemy; and besides, his or her sins will reap their own results regardless of what you do. Once you see that you can love yourself and others equally (not others more than yourself!) then you've achieved "access concentration."
What would the world be like if it were commonplace to think that hatred and enmity were personal problems to be overcome by inner cultivation — that regardless of another person's terrible conduct one's reaction was always one's own responsibility?
Why not start work on that world right now?
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Rohatsu at Mar de Jade |
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By Norman Fischer | 12/10/2004 @ 7:03 am
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December 10, 2004
I am just back from Rohatsu at Mar de Jade. A refreshing sesshin. The mix of Mexican and American students makes it special, brings out a flavor of the Dharma that doesn't come up in the same way north of the border - possibly also the Dharma comes out differently because I am being translated, sentence by sentence, by Laura del Valle and so to save her stress I speak very simply and in short sentences. So the talks (of which there are twice as many as at home- we began in Mexico with Dharma talks at night as well as in the morning, because the Mexican students were inexperienced, and needed more instruction- but we have keep on with this tradition) seem very different. And too, the concerns the Mexican students bring are different, and are experienced differently: with more passion. There are family problems, money problems, lots of strong suffering, and I find myself more in touch with the simple message that is at the heart of Buddha's teaching: that suffering can be directly alleviated by the practice. I find the high beautiful religious abstractions of the Zen literature less meaningful in the Mexican setting. People need to hear very simply about peace, healing, and how meditation can help. This time in particular there were several Mexican students who'd really had it tough: problems of alcoholism and spousal abuse, marital infidelity, depression, despair and suicide, healing from brutal time spent in jail: some of the issues that arose. And it gave me a good deal of joy to realize (as those who work in prisons in the states, like Martha de Barros, and many others, realize) that the practice does on a very simple level reduce suffering and bring some relief. A lot of Kleenex was used in the dokusan room!
Also, about eight or nine completely different kinds of butterflies, white ones, black and red ones, yellow ones, orange ones. And the constant sound of the sea.
Getting back home to Marin I was scooped up by Kathie from the airport off to a choral concert at her school, Mill Valley Middle School. The young woman who teaches the kids how to sing was cheerful and enthusiastic, the student singers brilliant and sincere, the music inspired (lots of African music about freedom and oppression). I sat there in the auditorium weeping, my old age coming out, at the beauty of the music, and the beauty of the effort everyone was making, all the hard work and rehearsals and the sheer sincerity and hopefulness you could hear in every note.
Today at Muir Beach the sun is shining after a lot of rain and high winds. Checking emails, lots of disturbing stuff about the state of the world, and our national government, which seems truly out of touch with reality, or, to be operating on the basis of a different reality from the one that most ordinary sane people experience. What to do?
Lets sing more, keep on sitting, keep on talking to one another, sharing vision, information, and encouragement. Google Bill Mckibbon or get his books like "The End of Nature" to keep abreast of the environmental angle on all this. Met Bill last year in Seattle. He's a sound thinker, a great person, and a good writer.
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