Independent Buddhist Sitting Groups: A Wave of the Future?

For awhile now, I've been interested in the ways sangha is manifesting or not manifesting in the 21st century. In addition to the varieties of online activities which may or may not be "sanghas" (or Buddhist communities), I've noticed a number of bloggers living in areas where there isn't much in the way of established Buddhism starting their own sanghas. Last month, Kyle over at Reformed Buddhist started up a Zen group in his Virgina hometown. And this morning, I ran across this post from Jordan, who is stationed over in Okinawa, Japan, and trying to start a group as well. I've seen others doing similar things, including members of my own home sangha, who have started up sitting groups on the side.

It's an interesting experiment, isn't it? There's a great democratic spirit in all this, and clearly an intention to fill a gap being called to be filled.

I also wonder about leadership issues, training in working with group dynamics, messages being given about Buddha's teachings. Things can get messy fast if you don't have some grounded people around helping to navigate everything.

What do you think about these groups popping up? Is this a sign of the future of practice? A temporary stepping stone to something else? A road to trouble?

Engaging Your Environments Fully

More rain today here in Minnesota. It's been twenty degrees colder than normal all week, and wet, very wet. The stuff of gloomy thoughts and haunted blog posts, like the one I wrote yesterday.

I remember being about twenty and telling people "the weather doesn't impact me at all." I was the guy who rode a bicycle in -20 degree weather and who did two mile hikes on one hundred degree days without eating. Of course, there was burned skin and dehydration, but I didn't see it as a problem. I just trucked on, not considering how much the environment shaped my life.

With more life behind me, and more experience, it's obvious to me now that if you don't engage with how both the planet and the human-made environment are impacting your life, it will simply be another thing controlling you.

Do we talk about this much in Buddhist practice? I'm not sure. Some people write beautiful spiritual poetry about nature. Others examine the stress that comes from driving, living far away from your workplace, etc. Still others are involved in various environmental projects and activist work, from community gardening to Buddhist-inspired ecology work like the Ecodharma Centre.

Yet, so much of what I see is caught in a binary manifestation - either it's mostly about an "external" focus or an "internal" focus.

How do we bring the two together? This seems to be the pivot question I've lived with for most of my life.

If you don't engage with how both the planet and the human-made environment are impacting your life, it will simply be another thing controlling you. I was on the bus this morning and I saw a woman trying to cross the street in the crosswalk in front of the bus. She was clearly anxious and in a hurry, and as she passed the large, wide front bus window, I noticed a ball of tension rising within me. Looking at her struggling, I felt a resistance, a not wanting to "deal" with her appearance in my life. And it hit me - that this was the confused compassion mixed with control I often respond to the human-filled environment with.

I felt whatever she was experiencing trying to enter me, and I both wanted to heal it, and banish it at the same time. Neither of these are working with total acceptance of the present, the basis for the bodhisattva work of non-violent intervention.

Back to the weather - living in a place like Minnesota, filled with temperature and precipitation extremes, it's really easy to get hung up on the weather. In the winter, it's too cold, too snowy, to bitterly windy. In the summer, it's too hot, too humid, too stormy. In the spring, it's too wet and the temperatures fluctuate too much. In the fall, it's too dry and the temperatures also fluctuate too much.

All that talk is letting one's self be controlled by the natural environment.

What would it look like to engage fully with both the human made environments we live in and also the natural environments, the two of which always overlap in some way or another?

Some of you may have noticed the lines from Shitou's "Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage" in yesterday's post. I've been slowly reading a book of Suzuki Roshi's talks about Shitou's other great dharma poem, Sandokai, and interestingly, lines from the other poem keep appearing to me during my days. These lines in particular seem to apply to the question above as instructions:

"Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.
The vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers, be familiar with their instruction,
Bind grasses to build a hut, and don't give up."

We have move beyond seeing "ancestral teachers" as only old Zen folks. Shitou, himself, lived a lot of his life in intimacy with the planet as it was. The ancestral trees, grasses, medicine plants, waters, mountains - these were as much his teachers as any human, if not more. At the same time, familial and cultural human ancestors probably played a large role in his life, and another reason why it took only two poems to cement his place amongst the great Buddhist teachers. He didn't need a lot of words because he had taken everything in, and wasn't controlled by it, but could engage with it fully.

Things are probably more complicated for a lot of us living now, but at the same time, there are these lines from the Sandokai:

"In the light there is darkness, but don't take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light, but don't see it as light."

Even though we "moderns" have "more to deal with" in a certain way, it's really not all that different than those living their challenges in the past. Not the same, but not all that different. So we don't have the luxury to just copy what the various ancestors did, just as new generations of trees, for example, aren't able to replicate their ancestors' ways of growing and being. However, like the trees, we aren't cut off from that past, nor the environments around us today.

So, as it's raining outside, I'm offering this to you, and also considering my own life's ingredients. Let's work together for a more complete expression of practice, and more complete lives in the process.

Ghosts of Empire

Walking to the bus stop this morning, I noticed the effort people put forth in cities to contain the growing environment. The streets, sidewalks, alleys, trees circled by grates and other holding devices - all of this to keep things in place which won't stay do so. "When it was completed, fresh weeds appear. Now it's been lived in covered by weeds." Anyone ever heard these lines before? This is like all our building efforts; projects that are destined to decay and be covered over.

Over a hundred and fifty years ago, American artist Thomas Cole painted a series of paintings charting the rise and fall of Empire. I remember first discovering them during a traveling show of 19th century American landscapes several years ago, and being in awe of the grandness of the images. Now, though, they feel like ghosts taunting us "modern Americans," living as we do in a crumbling empire.

I remember grade school discussions of what the world might look like after nuclear war. What would last? Rats. Cockroaches. Twisted up trees perhaps. It's hard to have a real sense of what nuclear bombs can do when you are nine years old, but you're mind is open to possibilities in a way adult minds' rarely are. So, things get strange, very strange. Elephants with rat heads flying through black smoke.

Today, I suppose children are more worried about terrorists destroying their homes than a nuclear war, although the latter is still a lingering possibility. There is an endless array of future specters to haunt us when those of the past don't spook us enough. I've heard people use various Buddhist terms to describe this day and age, but more and more, the Hungry Ghost Realm seems most appropriate.

"Who would proudly arrange seats, trying to entice guests?" I would. My guess is you would too. Stripping the garden of weeds so others are impressed. Withholding something that needs to be said another in order to avoid discomfort. Researching every last detail of a political issue so I can be right no matter what someone else says. Standing up against injustice by putting those who are injust down. I see all of this as "arranging seats" to entice others to "my side" of life. And this is the mode we're taking too often collectively as well, attached so deeply to what we think this life must be, now and in the future.

Are You Calling Me a Radical?

For a good week now, I've been haunted lines from a song. It just kept arising, in various situations that seemed completely unlinked. This morning, I was thinking that the song was from a band a friend of mine loves, but then it appeared again - five minutes ago - on the soundtrack in the coffee shop I am in. I knew it was time to do some research.

Supertramp's "The Logical Song" was a hit single in 1979, when I was 3 years old. It's a song about the experienced freedom of childhood, and how growing up, "getting educated," and getting evaluated by others creates some major identity confusion.

What's interesting is that there have been a few posts lately dealing with some of this. Robyn from My Fair Isle speaks of homeschooling, unschooling, and her children struggling to enjoy a program at a Waldorf school. From the bits I've read of Robyn's ideas about learning, there's a deep desire to provide something for her children that runs counter to the kind of education the Supertramp song speaks of, and which most of us experienced. Having spent years teaching, and exploring learning theories and experimenting in my classrooms, I completely agree with Robyn that the standard models of education for either children or adults fail us in many ways.

On a different, but related note, The Zennist posted recently about leaving childhood ideas of the world behind and taking responsibility for our lives in adulthood. At one point, he brings up the perennial topic of guru or spiritual teacher exploitation, suggesting that attachment and enacting views of the world we developed as children probably play a role in being involved in these kinds of relationships later in life. The "I wasn't "saved" by mom or dad, so I'll seek out a savior figure spiritually" kind of thing.

Going back to the song, the entire thing hinges on not knowing one's self. The chorus of the song is of a man desperately seeking identity:

At night, when all the world's asleep,
the questions run so deep
for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
but please tell me who I am.

My guess is that all of us have been here, even if we never say it out loud to others. Wanting confirmation that you "are someone" to "somebody," we take what others say about us as true, or seek out more opinions when what we hear doesn't sound so good.

If my Zen training has done anything, it's taught me to turn within and let all that chatter go. Not at all any easy task, and in many ways, it's felt like another form of unschooling, breaking a trained pattern of acting in the world, seeking confirmation or rebuke, and then acting based on that response. Sometimes, I have wanted to fit in, so I'd go along with that which stifles the living precepts and suffocates my life. Other times, I wanted to be seen as the "radical," and so I trotted out my views in situations where they weren't called for.

Behind all that, though, seems to be this deeper search for identity. Who am I? What am I supposed to be doing here on this earth? What is my deepest intention now?

All of this has been up for me a lot lately, as I've navigated career issues, a fairly new romantic relationship, a leadership role in my sangha, and everyday life. I feel very blessed in many ways, and in other ways, somewhat stifled still. However, the gift of dharma teachings that remind me again and again not to place my faith in the transient things of life, while also caring deeply for those same transient things, are invaluable.

A Swing and Miss of Manjushri's Sword

We had another barn-burner of a staff meeting at work last Friday. Just to give you an idea of the tone, at one point, while discussing yet another major change to our classes and workload, I turned to one of the directors, pointed directly at her face, and said "What have you sacrificed?"

It was a tense moment brought on by a long-standing frustration with this particular director, whose department in the school has increased over the past two years while the rest of us have had to reshuffle our decks, take pay cuts, and generally feel demoralized. The director got defensive. I said she was always trying to "push" projects through. She called me a "negative person." I said "look around, everyone here is burned out." Then a hallelujah chorus broke out from the other teachers on staff, who seemed to have been waiting for that particular elephant to be driven out from under the table.

However, I misspoke in the beginning, to ramped up to ask the correct pointed question. It should have been "What has your department sacrificed?" But instead, I made it personal, which is what we do most of the time when were frustrated and not thinking too clearly.

Genkaku has an interesting posttoday that points to why I felt so frustrated with what was happening.

He writes:

Nobody likes a bullshitter, but what occurred to me this morning was that getting my tail in a twist was a bit of an overreaction ... a long-standing habit based on the harm I have experienced at the hands of an over-active intellect, i.e. an over-active imagination.

When each person is confronted with the bullshit in their lives -- the disconnect between talking the talk and walking the walk -- when, in fact, there is not much other than bullshit to work with, then working with bullshit is simply the name of the game. It is a way of encouragement and effort, a flash of lightning that may, in fact, help to put the saddle on the horse. The fault does not lie with the bullshit itself but with the unwillingness or inability to investigate and make whole what is for the moment disconnected

I can see now how I was reacting not only to the director's continued stonewalling about the whole picture of the organization, but also to the sloppiness of the question that shot out of my mouth in such a ramped up manner. I wanted to be Manjushri in that moment, because the situation was crying out for such action, but the cut of my sword missed, and more suffering was the result.

Do I feel bad about all this? Not really. Mostly, I find it interesting how often it takes a messy series of exchanges in order to bring anything buried to the surface. We'd all been going along, trying to try, when the reality was there was so little morale and so much burnout that all the collective effort to be cooperative was killing us. I'm pretty sure that not saying such things as "we have little energy or morale left" is a product of the "do good at all expense" culture I find so pervasive amongst non-profit types. It's making me take a step back and consider what it would mean to have a healthy, balanced organization that serves others because they seem so rare to me. I've experienced short periods of collective balance in non-profits and other service groups, but it never lasts.

And I think Genkaku's lines about bullshit are an important pointer here because it does always seem to come back to talking the talk, but not walking the walk, doesn't it?

* For more images linked to the one above, go here.

Cat Zen: Revisited

A few Buddhist bloggers have done retrospective postings of popular old posts and people seemed to enjoy it. Obviously, it gives the writer a break, while offering newer readers a chance to see something they didn't see the first time. (I often wonder if anyone ever digs through the archives of this blog, or any blog, beyond a few weeks back. I've done it on a few blogs, and found it delightful, but it's a rare practice even for me.)

Anyway, I'm going to take up the theme of "On this day one year ago," and offer you the post I wrote May 9th, 2009. Happy Mother's Day!



This is a photo I took of my mother's cat, Baby Jesus. Now, just where exactly the name came from, I'm still not sure. My mother isn't Christian, nor does she really have a lot of interest in Jesus, as far as I know. She told me the name just came to her, and really, maybe that's just how it was - things seem to come to us when we pay attention closely.

Now, Baby Jesus, also known as "the resurrected animal," has in some ways outgrown the baby. He's a big cat, probably weighing in at close to twenty pounds. He's very much a dominant presence in the house in a way a kitten can never be. He lounges effortlessly, leaps often, and attends to laps like an expert physician attends to surgery.

I have long thought that cats are good roles models for us muddling, sometimes meddling humans. Having lived with cats most of my life, and having experienced the cats of many friends and family over the years, I really think that, for the most part, cats are good at expressing and living out their catness.

Even though there are as many different personalities as there are cats in the world, there seems to be a directness and clarity that cats naturally have, and which people spend often entire lifetimes trying to cultivate. Emotions are expressed easily; actions are done without tons of calculating and over-analyzing. And anyone who has ever lived with a cat, or spent any significant time with one, knows that cats can focus their attention on something (a mouse, a bird, a fluttering dust bunny) and keep it there for a very long time, often without moving. They seem to have object-based meditation down pat, even if there is an end goal in mind (catch the moving object, eat the moving object, etc.)

Cats also have had their role in zen literature, most famously perhaps in the koan of Nanchuan's Cat. Here's the case, along with Mumon's comment and poem.

"Nanchuan saw the monks of the eastern and western halls fighting over a cat. Seizing the cat, he told the monks: 'If you can say a word of zen, you will save the cat.' No one answered. Nanchuan cut the cat in two. That evening Zhaozho returned to the monastery and Nanchuan told him what had happened. Zhaozho removed his sandals, paced them on his head, and walked out. Nanchuan said, "If you had been there, you would have saved the cat."

Mumon's comment: Why did Zhaozho put his sandals on his head? If you can answer this question, you will understand exactly that Nanchuan's action was not in vain. If not, danger!

Mumon's poem:

Had Zhaozho been there
He would have taken charge.
Zhaozho snatches the sword
And Nanchuan begs for his life.

There is so much that could be talked about in this. And so many landmines I could step on in talking about any of it.

But one thing I have always found so intriguing is this business of silence on the part of the monks in response to Nanchuan's request for a word of zen. You can imagine that these guys might have spent hours or maybe even days arguing with each other about this cat, each side certain that they had the right answer to the issue at hand. And what issue was that? Some say it was an argument over whether the cat had buddhanature. But maybe it was something more mundane, like whether the cat should be in the monastery, or who's turn was it to clean up after the cat. Discussions of buddhanature or the ultimate nature of things are fairly rare, even in a place like a zen monastery. But discussions about cat shit, if a cat lives nearby, are fairly common. Hard to escape those everyday details, but very easy to get hung up on your view of those everyday details.

So, you can imagine these guys fighting with each other in some puffed up way over this cat. And Nanchuan stepping in, seizing the cat, and startling all of them silent.

At this moment, all certainty goes out the window for the monks. Just a moment before, they were divided just as so much of our lives get divided by our black and white biased minds. Yet, in this silence there's an opportunity, and Nanchuan isn't going to let that opportunity go. He speaks his words of zen to the monks, but then they stay stuck in silence, unable to join the conversation, the expression of life.

Even though speaking itself places a divide across the world by naming and separating, as Katagiri Roshi said "You have to say something."

Or do something. Maybe be a little bit like Baby Jesus, but not too much, not copying him. Baby Jesus jumped into a box, as you can see. How about you?

Stumble Upon Sangha?

Have spent the past hour or so setting up a new account at Stumble Upon, which is a social networking site that lets you link to anything you want on the internet. It seems like a cool way for us bloggers to get more traffic, discover new websites and blogs, and maybe even meet new people.

You can check out my profile here. I have linked to a few of my fellow Buddhist blogger posts, and plan to do so more in the future. Maybe a few of you will join me?

Anyway, enjoy!

p.s. You can read more about the Buddha image above here.