The spring breeze is our every breath

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

Zen Master Ikkyu, 1394-1481

Many years, we here in Minnesota are still being swallowed up by winter clouds. This year, not so much. All around, the trees are budding. The lingering snow and ice is melting. And the air is filling with the songs of returning birds.

The same might be said of how people experience awakening, enlightenment. Most of the time, it seems to be some thing distant, buried under the snow of our sufferings and attachments. However, it need not be that way. Even in the worst winter storm, there is a spring breeze waiting to be discovered.

Ikkyu stands exactly where he is in this poem. There's not much desire for something to be radically different, just description and acceptance of what is. And also weariness. A weariness that isn't what it seems to be.

The spring breeze that isn't in the relative moment is fully alive in Ikkyu's heart/mind. In the poem, it breathes a love into everything that is, just as it is. And in doing so, he moves beyond being owned by that relative reality.

That weariness isn't of a man who's been beaten down by the world. As I see it, it's of a man who has grown tired of riding the emotional tides of life's endless changes.

Whatever comes, he's ready to embrace it.

I must remember that the budding trees will someday be rotting logs. I also must remember that the rotting logs contain budding trees.

The spring breeze is our every breath.

Zen Failure; Zen Success?

There's a slightly provocative post over at No Zen in the West I'd like to draw your attention to. For our purposes here, I want to examine one section of it, which goes like this:

A distinguished Buddhist scholar told me that the burden of Zen teachers he knows is the need to act/be “enlightened”. How heavy! “I’m a Zen teacher, great! Now I have to somehow embody the premise that this way of life and practice makes people better, enlightens people.”

David Chadwick, after decades in Zen circles, hasn’t noticed that Zen practice works, which means that Zen teachers and Zen students everywhere could be off of the hook. If it’s not making us better than other people, it’s not because we’re not doing it right!

The late Rev. John King said that he loved so much going into our San Quentin Sangha because in prison – perhaps only there – “you don’t have to pretend that your life is working”. You don’t have to pretend to be a success, because it’s clear that everyone’s life is a failure. So you can just relax.

I’m feeling something like that about David’s observation. Great! Zen doesn’t work. I don’t need to pretend it does, or convince anyone else it does. I can just do it for the love of doing it, if I happen to love doing it, and forget that any good might come of it in the least. Forget the idea that I’ve gotten any better from it.

Of course, you might recognize that "success" and "failure" are part of the Eight Worldly Winds that Buddha spoke about frequently in various forms. And if you know anything about them, you know that they're always blowing about, shifting and changing like our own breath does.

So, any talk about whether Zen practice "works" or not is coming out of those winds, and as such, doesn't have any ground to stand on. What's considered a success today, is tomorrow's failure. Something gained today is lost tomorrow and regained the next day. Yesterday, I was called a "good Zen student." Tomorrow, maybe I irritate everyone and suddenly am now considered "a bad Zen student." And so it goes.

However, this leaves us in a predicament, I think. Because all of our regular ways for assessing what's happening basically fall flat when it comes to the spiritual life.

Is everyone's life in San Quentin "a failure"? Based upon conventional view standards, I suppose you could say "yes." Yet, that's only one way to see it.

Go a little deeper, though, and you might notice that not only is talk about working and not working, success and failure lacking ground, but it also is all about comparison. And I don't know about you, but when I'm trapped in comparing myself with others, it tends to be a walk down the royal road of hell.

Somehow, if you're really going to do Zen practice, or are really intent on liberation, you have to stop defining whatever it is that you are doing (or not doing) with variations on the Eight Worldly Wind theme. In other words, coming to a place where you can let all the noise of life blow around you and even within you - without choosing to identify yourself with any one or a handful of aspects of it - is pretty key.

Just relaxing - without the need to label "success" or "failure," for example - that's one possibility. Another might be to function with the understanding that all labeling is provisional, just a skillful means for working with the causes and conditions of the moment.

Everyone's Folly: The Eight Worldly Winds

Jeanne over at the Dalai Grandma recently received a short teaching from the Dalai Lama about the Eight Worldly Winds. In her post today she writes the following:

Oddly, the Dalai Lama's subject is called, as in my title above, "The Eight Worldly Concerns," though to my mind there are four concerns, each of which encapsulates wishing not to get its opposite. But when it comes to understanding the human mind, I bow to him. Here they are, more interesting stones that mark the Buddha way:

* wanting to be praised and not wanting to be criticized,
* wanting happiness and not wanting suffering,
* wanting gain and not wanting loss, and
* wanting fame and approval and not wanting rejection and disgrace.

"We all experience these, don't we?" he writes. "Even animals probably have them in some slight measure." Sheba reminds me that dogs' desire for approval is itself a disgrace. Her own ambition is small and appropriate: she wants to be up on the kitchen table while we are eating.

Who among us can claim to be totally immune from these pairs of opposites? If any of you raised your hand, I sentence you to twenty hours of zazen, followed by a long look in the mirror at yourself!

A lot can, and has been said about the Eight. What I'd like to add this morning is this: the very thing you fear might actually be exactly what's needed.

For example, being a political animal whose views are rarely mainstream, I have had to learn how to handle ample amounts of rejection, criticism, and yes, even some lost connections with people. However, what's interesting about it is that seeing the world as I have had provided me with an almost endless opportunity to live with the impermanence of views and reputation. One minute, I'm a good friend. The next I'm some crazy guy who isn't supporting "the cause." Then, sometime later, what I stood for is considered right and all is forgiven. Or I was completely wrong, but all is forgotten.

Fifteen years ago, when I was a young adult who refused to own a car and who bicycled most of the year, the vast majority of people thought I was either ridiculous, rebellious, quaint, or kind of foolish. Now, a lot of people think these practices are cool and hip. What I'm doing is still the same, but the winds have changed.

In her post, Jeanne brings up the NY Times list of 20 fiction writers under 40 "worth watching," then speaks about all those thousands of others out there who want to be on that list. When I was younger, a part of me wanted to be on such lists for poetry. Or for essay writing. Maybe even a novel or two. But the idea of being a famous anything does nothing for me now. I want to be published, sure, but it's really more about providing something that benefits others in some way or another that motivates me now.

When you look at the struggles most of have with these Eight "winds," so much of it is tied to believing that whatever we are experiencing is both permanent and representative of who we are. Am I that crazy biker or a cool and hip cat? Neither, really. So wanting one, and not wanting the other, is kind of foolish, don't you think?