Peace Cranes

Just thought I'd share this one. Perhaps the story is familiar to some of you.

Sadako Sasaki (January 7, 1943 - October 25, 1955) was a Japanese girl who was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, near her home by Misasa Bridge in Hiroshima, Japan. Sadako is remembered through the story of attempting to fold a thousand origami cranes before her death, a wish which was memorialized in popular culture.

Sadako’s story has become famous all over the world as a little one who wished for, prayed for, peace. There is a legend in Japan that if one folds one thousand paper cranes, a crane will grant one wish. Sadako wished to be healed from her leukemia and for peace on earth. She viewed the 644 cranes she did fold as messengers.

"I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world," she said.

Maha Council - Meet Some Asian Buddhist Statistics

Over at the blog Dhamma Musings, Shravasti Dhammika writes today on the decline in Buddhist affiliation amongst younger folks in Singapore. What's interesting to me is that some of the reasons I, and others, have suggested as to why younger folks North America and Europe aren't coming into Buddhism at the same levels as their older counterparts appear to be at play in parts of Asia:

Sorry to say statistics from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan show a similar trend. Buddhism is failing to speak to young, well-educated, modern people. A visit to a good number of temples and Buddhist societies will show the reasons for this trend; commercialized spirituality, absence of Dhamma education, lack of social engagement, poor leadership, etc. The almost complete absence of networking between Buddhists also doesn’t help either. ‘You do your thing. I’ll do mine’ is the norm for Buddhist groups, temples and organizations.

I made a comment on David Chapman's blog related to the Maha Council conference that fits in here. In part, the comment went as follows:

I currently am the board president of a Zen sangha in the Midwest, and am also amongst the Gen X practitioner crowd, for whatever that’s worth. My experience as part of the leadership here is that for the most part, each sangha is on it’s own. We had a teacher scandal several years back. Got help from some teachers of other sanghas, but the lion’s share of debate, discussion, policing, and moralizing was internal. It was a much smaller version of what happened with Trungpa, Baker, Shimano, Genpo, Maezumi, etc.

My point in mentioning this is that I don’t think there’s ever been a strong collective effort to do much of anything in Western Buddhism. We don’t have a large-scale ethics body to appeal to when teachers abuse power. We don’t make collective public statements about anything, political, social, or otherwise. In fact the “we” has always – in my view anyway – been largely about individual groups that are loosely associated with each other, partly in religious name only, and partly through some form of teacher lineage.

Furthermore, when I think about some of the major natural disasters in North America in recent years, I'm hard pressed to come up with any significant Buddhist-driven aid and/or support effort. At least amongst Certainly, individual Buddhists have helped, and certainly individual sanghas have done things like given money to the Red Cross and whatnot. However, the kinds of efforts that regularly come from, for example, teams of Christian churches working in tandem to raise money, bring in supplies, and help people rebuild houses and other structures just isn't easily found amongst convert Buddhist communities.

Why bring that up? Well, because we don't seem to be to good with being part of a larger community. And this plays out internally, where groups of individuals sanghas can exist within 50 miles of each other, and yet rarely, if ever, collaborate on major projects and endeavors. And it exists externally, where a given sangha might be located within a particular community, but has membership that primarily is from outside of that community, and also doesn't do a whole lot of connecting with others in that community, regardless of their affiliation.

Now, from what I have seen, organized religion in general is tottering on the edge of oblivion. It might be a slow death, but it is possible that holding this stuff together may be like practicing on a sinking ship. However, at the same time, there are plenty of people longing to be a part of more vibrant communities, ones that acknowledge and even aid in uncovering the deepest, richest parts of our lives. So, there's kind of a push-pull going on between individualism and community, one that seems to offer the best of each side (while condemning the worst of the opposite side), but which fails to bring any fruitful reconciliation.

I don't know where any of this is going to go in the future. It does seem though that those statistics from Asian nations about Buddhists are linked, in some way, to the some of the struggles sanghas are having here in North America and other parts of the "West." And certainly, whatever the goals of the Maha Council (and other meetings like it), there's a desire to address said struggles.

Homeless Zen Retreat

I don't have too much to say about this post, other than it's so much more inspiring than a lot of the stuff I have read over the past week.

When I went on my first 9-day retreat, I felt claustrophobic. There was no place to run and nothing to do but sit with my thoughts. What came up was sometimes poignant and sometimes scary. I spent many hours marveling at the tenderness of my own heart. But I also had to face my lifelong habit of wriggling away from anything that required true commitment. I was so afraid that I would wither away if I stayed in one place or dedicated myself to one thing. But only through going on retreat—and subsequent meditation practice—did I begin to dismantle those fears, and gradually build an organization in which I, and hundreds of homeless youth, could experience a true sense of belonging.

But as I learned last month, dreaming of going on retreat and actually going on retreat are worlds apart. Taking twelve homeless youth to a Zen-Buddhist monastery for 3 days was an experience that I could not prepare for. And while I had designed the experience for them, I too had to open myself to learning along the way. As it turned out, one of the first lessons appeared even before we left the city.

The post goes on to detail the experience. I loved how the retreat leaders and monastics at the retreat center seemed to balance holding the container of a retreat with the basic needs of teenagers who have lived quite unstable lives.

Amidst wranglings over the intentions of Buddhist teachers at some conference, or endless dissections of the behavior of a Congressman named Weiner, writings like this are a reminder to me to stay focused, and let whatever seems like a distraction roll off my back.

Giving homeless youth the gift of a Zen retreat is the kind of engaged practice that makes my heart happy to hear. May we do more of it. May it become commonplace.

So "Drunk With Media," Who Are You?

Over at the online Zen community Treeleaf, I found an interesting discussion, that began as a question about self-hatred, and opened up into several other topics. As someone who has a strong interest in education models, ad who has taught both children and adults, I found the following comments blogworthy:

Zen Teacher Jundo Cohen wrote:

Hmmm. I have had teachers in America tell me that, over the last many years, there is such a tendency to tell every child that "he/she is a winner", that everyone in the contest must get "some prize", that "all children are special" ... that it has backfired a bit. These kids, entering school and then the workplace, then insist that they should get rewarded and be treated as a "special winner" without particularly earning it or exerting themselves.

This is something happening in Japan too, as the kids have been a bit more spoiled these last few generations, and there has been more equalitarianism in the society.

Dosho, an American member of Treeleaf responded:

My oldest is just finishing kindergarten and I haven't seen much of that "everyone's a winner" mentality. His school tries to emphasize each kid's strengths and how they compliment those of the other kids. His class seems to work very well together and his teacher told us he will often cheer on other kids having trouble with some activity. He is scheduled to start t-ball in the summer and they have already indicated everyone gets a trophy, so we'll see how he reacts to that. However, when it comes to sports he participates though doesn't really ever seem that concerned about mastery. He just likes being around other kids, whatever they happen to be doing.

And later on Taigu, the other teacher at Treeleaf, said this:

The world has changed, education can't catch up.
Most of the kids I teach are clueless about themselves and the world, drunk with media , games and computers and very negative. And yet, still an amazing light shines through. Japanese education is not better than Western education. We are in a global hazy zone. My job is to tell these kids that the world is not going to end and that there is a place for beauty, love and peace. My job is also to teach them that work has a profound meaning.

Taigu's comments are particularly of interest to me. When I saw the line "drunk with media," the whole conversation expanded beyond education for me. I started thinking about how prevalent media is in many of our lives, and how "drunk" with various forms of it a hell of a lot of us are.

I used to read a lot of social and political comments. Would scour up to a dozen indy media sites daily, trying to keep up with what the alternative voices to the mainstream were saying about the events of the day. Some of it is brilliant stuff. A lot of it is a rushed attempt to have something noteworthy to say about a particular hot issue. And some of it is just plain noise and nastiness. Actually, you don't have to look very hard to find that plain noise and nastiness, and frankly, going down such rabbit holes is quite addictive.

When I first started Facebook, I had similar drunk experience around collecting "friends," offering comments, and reading people's "stuff." Noise is what much of Facebook is about. A lot of people seem to use it for goofing off, smarting off, and just plain getting off in some form or another. None of this is right or wrong really, but if you spend too much time there, you're life becomes saturated with that kind of energy.

Even blogging has this kind of push-pull. I am still quite curious about blogs, and find myself looking for new voices to follow on a regular basis. However, I have had to recognize the same addictive qualities to the noise and nastiness that I experienced with social/political media. It's so easy to get sucked into a good drama and/or head bashing of despised figure or idea X, and once that happens, who are you?

That's what really came from Taigu's "drunk with media" comment for me. Who are you, when you are drunk with media? Do you know? Can you know?

Even though the internet and other tech devices have spread the ability to drink media far and wide, this isn't a new problem. Upper crust English folks were drunk with the memoirs of other upper crust English folks back in the early 19th century, just to give one example. And it certainly goes back long before that.

Going back to the comments above, the point Jundo Cohen makes about the "everyone's a winner" mentality, which has been an undercurrent of American childhood in recent decades, is another piece of this story. Specifically, by artificially propping up the "self-esteem" of children, adults who do so are failing to allow kids to learn "Who they are?" But you know, the same adults who so readily rely on such methods probably don't know themselves well at all either. Because from what I have experienced and witnessed with adults who are more in tune with their "deeper selves" - (oye, language is failing me here) - these adults are much more likely to interact with children as they are, and aid those same kids in seeing who they are, beyond their trophies, test scores, Facebook pages, video game prowess, etc.

These kids of discussions often devolve into sound byte simplicity statements. I don't want to go there. As much as the AA model of total abstinence works for some alcoholics, the reality is that most of us are not out of control drunks. We don't need to abstain from everything that might cause suffering if abused, and go off to live in the woods somewhere.

What we need to do is to keep the question "Who are you?" close. To learn to recognize our drunkenness in all it's various forms, and shift our actions accordingly.

Really, any spiritual practice worth it's weight is about re-educating yourself about the world, using the world itself - as it is, not as you imagine it to be.

When the Buddha spoke of renunciation, I believe more than anything, he was imploring us to renounce our views of the world, all the ways we think things are that we cling to, as if they were the whole truth.

Samsara as Dharma Gate

Our head teacher at the Zen Center, Byakuren Ragir, is starting to get into the blogging thing now. She's got three posts up this month, including this one, which contains the following passage:

When Roshi Reb Anderson was at Clouds, the sound byte that stuck in my mind was “You can’t beat samsara”. Then my husband heard that and amended it by saying “You can’t trump samsara.” What does that mean? It is very similar to the first noble truth that human life contains within it; dissatisfaction, anxiety and suffering. No matter how “good” our spiritual life is, we are not divorced from the swirling ups and downs of samsaric life.

How can you truly find peace amidst the vicissitudes of human life? We need to have some deep visceral connection with that which is beyond up and down.

The 8 worldly winds are the vicissitudes that constitute the human world. They are:
Pleasure Pain
Gain Loss
Success Failure
Praise Criticism

How can we practice when the 8 worldly winds have us caught and gripped? Sometimes, I feel, I can’t even sit down to do zazen. My practice at these pressurized points in life, often has to do with Buddhist Prayer, the chanting or saying over and over of certain phrases. Trying to interrupt my habituated energy and compulsive thinking with more wholesome, dharmic thoughts.

This immediately brought to mind the wild fox koan, which I have written about sometime in the past. The myriad of causes and conditions that make up each moment are something that we can't escape, as long as we are here in this body/mind.

But what's funny is that it's possible to take the comment from Reb Anderson in a different way as well.

"You can't beat samsara," instead of meaning you can't escape it or avoid it, could also mean "This is the best training ground you could possibly have for awakening." Do you get it?

I think it's a generally habitual human pattern to think of our sufferings, miseries, and anxieties solely in terms of being hindrances. And yet, when looked at only slightly differently, these same things can become the very medicine that we need to take.

Foxglove, a fairly common garden flower, has a long history of medicinal use, addressing a wide variety of ailments, from serious heart conditions to asthma. It also has a long history of poisoning, as people who were either unfamiliar with the power of the plant, or overzealous in their application of it, overdosed on Foxglove remedies. In other words, the line between medicine and poison is often hard to discern.

This is also the case with our lives. Those "pressurized points" Byakuren speaks of are packed with great liberation potential. And yet, all too easily, that potential becomes a poison to us, as we sway between avoidance and overindulgence.

Too much Foxglove might kill you. However, just the right amount of Foxglove, at the right time, could save your life.

I wouldn't recommend experimenting with Foxglove, but I would recommend experimenting with the sufferings in your life. Can you work with them in such a way as to find the gate of liberation contained within?

I think this is a major part of our practice. Maybe all of it really.

Relational Yoga, Relational Zen

We are studying the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in teacher training right now. As much as I have enjoyed studying poses, anatomy, adjustments, and the rest, the Sutras are the kind of juicy stuff that gets me going. In great part, I think, because I have never felt considered the physical practices apart from the spiritual teachings.

Patanjali reminds me a little bit of the famous Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma. Both are almost larger than life figures. And both might have been credited with writings and discoveries that they, themselves, didn't actually make. In fact, so much of their actual lives remains a mystery, which probably only has added to the great esteem with which people have held them with in the centuries since their passing.

I was struck yesterday upon reading more closely the following:

“In daily life we see people around who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some may be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate toward those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our minds will be very tranquil.”

- Yoga Sutra 1.33, Translation by TKV Desikachar

This passage zeros in on the relational quality of yoga. And just as is the case with Buddhist teachings on our relationships with others, there is a strong emphasis on equanimity here - the kind most of us struggle to locate in our everyday lives.

Given my own predisposition to serving in the world, and to doing what I can to help right injustices, what I find so wonderful about a teaching like this is that it's a reminder that the most powerful place one can come from is built on a foundation of joy and equanimity.

In Buddhism, a similar teaching is found in the four divine abodes, where lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity are the foundations from which all that is good in life springs forth.

For me, the biggest challenge is to remain "undisturbed" by the errors of others, especially when those errors are greatly destructive, oppressive, and highly productive of misery. And yet, "undisturbed" doesn't mean untouched, or unfeeling. It's really a quality of not being flipped over by, troubled by, or excessively excited by something, all of which make it very difficult to have clear perceptions and to do intelligent, beneficial action.


*painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

"Westerner" on a Spiritual Pilgrimage

I stumbled upon this story on the Yoga International magazine website. What's fascinating is how, if you strip off the first part of the following quote, you might think: Is this another Eat, Pray, Love privilege-fest being quoted here? But it isn't. Not for the most part anyway. Although it's true that anyone able to fly half way around the world to do a "spiritual pilgrimage" has some level of privilege.

I grew up in the Midwest with native Chinese parents. Although they hung paintings of Kuan Yin in the living room, they weren’t spiritual types. They didn’t assemble altars with plastic light-up Buddhas, burn incense, or chant. Instead, they planted fruit trees in our yard, baked lasagna, and ballroom danced. Once, when I was a girl, I asked my mother about the Buddha. When she told me that he was a wealthy Indian prince who gave up everything he had, I decided that he couldn’t be trusted.

In my late 30s, I began to attend a Tibetan meditation center in Seattle. Soon, my sitting practice deepened. I chanted the Heart Sutra and I learned that the Buddha was indeed someone I could trust. But impatience hindered my budding practice. No sooner would I fold my legs into lotus pose and relax than I’d begin to fidget or drift off to sleep. When I did manage to stay awake, my mind would chatter away about the dental bill, the beastly project at work, and the benefits of espresso versus chai. Buddhism just didn’t seem to fit in with my American lifestyle. I was too busy and too occupied with modern distractions.

I told myself that all I needed was a journey to the motherland and click, my meditation practice would activate. What I needed was to go where people practiced Buddhism for real, lived it, and not because it was some trendy lifestyle promoted by celebrities or the spiritually correct.

This is quite an interesting mix, isn't it? A middle class Chinese-American woman finding in mid-life, of all things, Tibetan Buddhism, and then taking a trip to Tibet to "jump start" her practice.

It gets better.

The monk asks me where I am from. My guide translates between Tibetan and Mandarin.

"America," I reply.

The monks look puzzled. "America?" They lean in and glance at each other. "How can that be? She looks Chinese."

In all my travels in China, I’d never encountered this reaction. If anything, my response—that I was Chinese American—usually explained why my familiar accent was hitched to my odd grammar.

"My parents were born in China," I explain. Surely they’d heard this story before. But the monks stare at me, their faces riveted to mine. "But they moved to America. I was born there," I finish.

I might as well have said that I was born on Venus. "But she looks Chinese," they say again. They discuss this perplexing matter. I look at Zhuo Ma. She shrugs.

"Westerners have blonde hair and large bones," one monk insists to Zhuo Ma. "Her parents must look very
Chinese."

You gotta love how all these assumptions hit the fan here. The author's assumptions about what might constitute "real" instead of "trendy," as well as her views related to what the trip might do for her Buddhist practice. The monk's assumptions about who the author is and where she's from, as well as what they believed all "Westerners" look like.

If I had quoted only the second and third paragraph above from Ms. Tai's article, would have pictured a Chinese-American Buddhist practitioner who grew up in the U.S. Midwest?

Somehow, I bet not.