the ENDLESS JOURNEY of KŌDŌ KYŌHAN 廣道映範 AUBREY LEBLANC (1985-2023)

What follows are the memorial remarks made at Stone Nest Dojo on 10 December 2023 by Richard Collins, Abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple, on the death of Aubrey LeBlanc.

Endless Journey

When the great Zen master Sengai (1750-1837) was asked by a parishioner for a blessing for his new baby, the old monk said, “May you die, may your children die, may your grandchildren die.”

I asked my daughter, when she was ten years old, what she thought of that blessing. She said, “Of course. Old people should die first.”

Yes, that is the natural order of things. Old people should die first. Parents should die before their children. Old monks should die before their students, too. So when a young member of the sangha dies, it offends the natural order.

This zazen is dedicated to the memory of Aubrey LeBlanc, who died suddenly last week at the age of 38. 

I first got to know Aubrey some nine years ago, when I ordained her as a bodhisattva. She had been practicing at the temple on Camp Street for a while before that, but I was living in California at the time so I didn’t see her much on a day-to-day basis. 

I arrived at the sesshin on a hot and humid July day in New Orleans. Robert, who was at the beginning of his long decline, had secluded himself in his room, where he stayed throughout the sesshin. He informed me, on very short notice, that I would be leading the sesshin and conducting the ordination ceremony. I was to brush the calligraphy on the rakusus and give the six new bodhisattvas their dharma names. Two of them were my students, but I knew very little about the others, including Aubrey, except that she kept to herself and seemed quite reserved.

During dokusan I attempted to get to know her a little better. Our conversation was brief but revealing. She was wary and guarded. You could tell she had had reason in the past to be distrustful. Still, I saw great potential in her, which is why I settled on the name KYŌHAN for her: “Shining Example.” She told me later that her self-esteem was so low at that time that she thought this dharma name had really missed the mark. “I could never be anyone’s shining example,” she said. But the name was not meant to be descriptive; it was aspirational, an encouragement, a conjuration, even; a hope; and, as it turned out, a prophecy since she did become an inspiration for others in their recovery from various addictions.

After that, she practiced at the temple on and mostly off over the next five or six years until she realized that Zen practice might really be integral to her path, just as important as her yoga practice, if not more so. This was due in part to her participation in Recovery Dharma. 

She was very helpful as the sangha navigated the dharma gates of COVID and moved from the original Camp Street location to the dojo on Napoleon Avenue. 

Her practice became strong in those couple of  years, strong enough that I entrusted her to take the lead in introducing newcomers to the basics of the practice: posture, breathing, and attitude of mind. Her posture was exemplary, thanks in part to her yoga practice, and she soon mastered the various roles of Zen ceremony. And she always had searching questions during mondo that were helpful for others. Especially endearing to newcomers were her candor and sincerity in describing the arc of her practice and its influence on her recovery. 

Her practice indeed seemed strong enough that I thought she might be ready to wear the kesa and kolomo and continue to be for others the Shining Example that she had become.

When she expressed doubts about being ready to make the commitment to monastic ordination, I said to her, “Life is short. What are you waiting for?”

Her smile was glowing the day of her ordination, January 9, 2022, as I passed the monk’s kesa, rakusu, and kechimyaku over the incense and into her hands. And her grin when I gave her the monastic name: KŌDŌ. It was a tribute to Kodo Sawaki, Homeless Kodo, a similar name but not synonymous, with different kanji and a different meaning. His name means Ancestral Gate, while hers means Endless Journey.

Her monastic name was descriptive. Aubrey was an avid traveler, always setting off to Asia or South America, Thailand or Peru. These were not just physical journeys, they were spiritual journeys too. In spite of the early traumas of her life, she took these journeys on her own, a young woman traveling solo. She was fearless in that way. No, not fearless. She had an army of fears that haunted her. That was what was so admirable. She tried to face them down.

I didn’t see much of her in the final year of her life. She had drifted away from the temple and the practice, as people often do. After news of her death, I scrolled through the striking photos of her recent long trip to India and Nepal, which she had posted on Facebook. She seemed to have found a connection there; she seemed happy.

We can choose to use our bodhisattva name in daily life, and Aubrey chose to use her story to help others who had experiences similar to hers, to be a Shining Example. But the monastic name is not used until after death. Now Aubrey owns her monastic name. As we speak, her ashes are on the way to India, where she seemed to have found a connection — she always did feel an affinity with Kali, the goddess of Eros and Thanatos, the eternal cycle of Destruction and Rebirth. So her monastic name, KŌDŌ, or Endless Journey, takes on special significance now.

Gassho, Aubrey. 

Gassho, KŌDŌ KYŌHAN.

A GLIMPSE OF IT

Zen poetry comes in many forms. There are the essential ancient wisdom poems by masters, like the Shodoka, the Shinjinmei, and the Hokyo Zanmai. There are koan poems and poems that comment on koans. There are poetry contests, like the one described in the Platform Sutra. There are satori poems and death poems. There are philosophical waka and lightbulb haiku. What they all have in common is that they give “a glimpse of it.”

Early on in my Zen practice I published a series of poems that became the Bodhidharma’s Eyelids, in the magazine Exquisite Corpse (Cybercorpse 10 and 11). These I called “zazen poems” or “practice poems,” beginner’s-mind poems that did not aspire to wisdom or pretend to some unearned or ill-understood “awakening,” but simply poems that attempted to describe my own interior experience during or in consequence of zazen, the core experience when it comes to Zen. This kind of poem is experiential, often confessional, usually modest, often surreal, depending on the unique “glimpse” of the practitioner.

Not all Zen poems are Zen poems. Several poems of Wallace Stevens, for example, such as “The Man on the Dump,” which I have written about elsewhere, are more effective in conveying key Zen moments than many more self-consciously Zen attempts which may lack the true zenki (dynamic perception of the entirety of our being-in-the-world). Each successful Zen poem possessing zenki marks a passing through one of the endless dharma gates. Put more simply, it offers a “glimpse.”

I am glad to share here such a beginner’s-mind poem, “A Glimpse of It,” by Lana Matthews Sain.

A GLIMPSE OF IT

When at last, after long loathing, you cradle

into your palms the scraps left

of yourself, the few slivers 

you did not trade, and yield

your pride to the rind of Earth —

the rocks, the weeds, the algae-ed lake

behind the trees; when you submerge 

your ear into its hum and stop filtering

its song or googling how it should sound,

it’s like those first few cranks of the pedals,

or maybe the first flight of a bird — the balance, 

the momentum, the release. How the sun blinks

and bends the leaves toward me 

in late afternoon and saves me a seat

on the front row of chipped and weather-eaten 

concrete steps where lizards skitter

through the tiniest cracks, crack 

through me, lizards become me. 

At the altar of this crinkling flesh I bow

to the backs of my own hands. Relax. 

I spend thirty minutes, still,

in the shallow sea of soft Tennessee

humidity, allow a nervous fly to buzz

above my eye. Go inside 

and spend thirty minutes more, buzzing 

with my old vacuum: thirty minutes scraping 

the floor, thirty minutes collecting dust,

connecting the perfect attachment 

and watching the corners exhale

debris. Thirty minutes and everything 

is swept clean. Thirty minutes of nowhere 

else I’d rather be.

This poem could well have been about zazen, but as Lana points out in the statement below, the origin of the poem actually predates her zazen practice:

“Interestingly enough, I wrote this long before I ever attended zazen or had any structure around a 30-minute sitting, but finding myself exhausted in my own self-loathing and grief, one day I just surrendered myself, literally, to the earth and lay down on it in an almost meditative state fully aware of the present for around a half hour or so, and that's what the ‘glimpse’ was, followed by a feeling of everything being just fine right where I was. Of course, practicing zazen regularly, the shift is more prevalent in each day/each circumstance.”

Lana Matthews Sain is a recent graduate of Sewanee’s School of Letters MFA program, and a regular practitioner at Stone Nest Dojo in Sewanee.

— Richard Collins

Lana Matthews Sain, University of the South, Sewanee

Oppenheimer the Hungry ghost

“The Supreme Lord [Krishna/Vishnu] said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist.”

– Bhagavad Gita 11:32

While there are no overt references to Buddhism in Oppenheimer, the underlying themes that connect to central Buddhist concepts are everywhere throughout the film. 

First, as background, the film sketches the evolution of theoretical physics which has increasingly provided scientific parallels if not explanations for Buddhist accounts of phenomenological ontology (simply put, of our experience of being). Then, in the film’s foreground we are presented with its most memorable line — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — that, while translated from the Sanskrit of a Hindu sacred text, resonates with Buddhist themes when used as a touchstone for Oppenheimer’s personal moral and spiritual (and to some extent his political) dilemma. 

These thematic threads are reflected in the formal and structural elements of the film. Much has been said about its parallel plot structure: the use of color for the first-person narrative pertaining to the Oppenheimer security-clearance hearing versus the use of black-and-white for the third-person narrative pertaining to the Strauss confirmation hearing. But Oppenheimer’s personal qualms shown in claustrophobic closeups (like a series of overblown Chuck Close portraits) are seen against the big picture of quantum physics (kaleidoscopic micro- and macrocosms); and these form the double helix of the film’s thematic DNA.

The appearances of and allusions to Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg usher us into the unpredictable world of quantum mechanics. (I confess my ignorance of both theoretical physics and Sanskrit, so any insights I might stumble upon here are tempered by their relativity and my uncertainty.) For the benefit of those of us who lack sufficient mathematics or physics background to comprehend their mysteries, the film reminds us of how our culture has been influenced by the implications of first Einstein’s and then Heisenberg’s theories. Nolan shows us Oppenheimer’s prized copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land; then has the scientist linger in front of Picasso’s Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms; then shows him listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, each work by an artistic innovator in touch with the advances of science and its implications. These allusions might be helpful for all of us who are flummoxed by blackboard equations but may be familiar with Western landmarks of Modernism in the arts. 

We might not be as familiar with the ancient Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita, which is where Oppenheimer finds both a philosophical context for his role as a scientist-warrior and, in his reading at least, condemnation for his actions in that role. He could also have found solace and expiation for his personal “sin” had he been more of a believer in the religious dimension of that sacred text.

When the theories of relativity and uncertainty first made headlines, the layperson’s concerns were phenomenological questions of psychology and epistemology, questioning our sense of ourselves in the world and how we know what we know. Quantum mechanics, in philosophical terms, took us into more unfamiliar territory of ontology, thrusting upon us existential questions about the nature of being and how we are like or unlike all other physical entities. 

Trying to put quantum mechanics in a nutshell for his future wife, Kitty, over a cocktail, Oppenheimer asks (rhetorically) why we don’t pass through each other if on the molecular level we are temporary forms floating in a sea of nothingness? His explanation is reminiscent of Mahayana Buddhist concepts of form and nothingness (shiki and ku) outlined in the Heart Sutra and inherited from the Hindu philosophical tradition of the five skandhas (aggregations), which determine how we know we exist in the world. The issue is not unlike the existential question raised in Barbie — to move from the sublime to the ridiculous — when Barbie disrupts the Barbie dance party by blurting out whether any of her fellow Barbies has thought of dying (gasp, sound of needle scratching pink 45 record, silence).

Meanwhile, the poor player Oppenheimer struts and frets his three hours upon the stage, his personal tragedy playing out as variations on a theme provided by the much-discussed line from the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (This focus on the individual is the heart of the film, abandoning the horror of the death of so many Japanese civilians to mere off-camera mentions or his own hallucinatory but not-very-horrifying visions, a “sanitizing” for which the film has been justly criticized.)

Other objections have been raised by right-wing Hindus because Oppenheimer is made to read the line while copulating with his communist consort Jean Tatlock (a much more accomplished woman in life than the film portrays her, another reason to fault the film’s focus, which I won’t go into here). The objection to the sexualization of the spiritual text seems disingenuous considering the centrality of tantric eroticism in Hindu religious texts, traditions, and temples. Pavan K. Varma, in Firstpost, for example, makes the case that such objections have their origin not in Hinduism at all but in the colonial legacy of Victorian prudishness left behind by the British who felt revulsion for Hinduism’s sacred eroticism. 

Kama (sensual or erotic enlightenment), of course, as we have all been aware since we were curious adolescents discovering the Kama Sutra, is one of the four pillars of an enlightened life in Hindu tradition, along with Artha (material enlightenment), Dharma (enlightened conduct, following one’s individual path in relation to the cosmos), and Moksha (spiritual enlightenment, culminating in release from the round of samsara). 

Nolan’s decision to have Oppenheimer quote the sacred text during the sexual act is thus an absolutely crucial artistic decision, since the scene embodies the karmic intersection between creation and destruction, eros and thanatos, sex and death. Removing it, as these misguided Hindu zealots have demanded, would gut this core theme of the film. 

Oppenheimer’s quotation is actually a paraphrase of what Krishna (as Vishnu’s avatar) tells the warrior Arjuna during a pause in the battle between good and evil. The original line has also been translated as “The Supreme Lord [Krishna/Vishnu] said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist.” 

The film’s version of the quotation, reducing Time to Death, is more succinct and powerful but distorts the meaning. By taking the blame on himself, Oppenheimer usurps the role of the gods, refusing to see himself as their pawn. Instead, he could or should have seen himself in the role of Arjuna, whom the gods are absolving of his personal (karmic) guilt. Oppenheimer, however, takes on the burden of what is the gods’ responsibility, a burden he is not required nor equipped to bear, in spite of his arrogance and ego. Oppenheimer uses the quotation of the Gita not to excuse but to accuse himself.

Vishnu is not normally a destroyer but rather a balancer, one who restores order, although sometimes he must do this through violence and war. Indeed, the context of the quotation is that Krishna/Vishnu is trying to relieve the common soldier (Arjuna) of his guilt and moral qualms by asserting that one lone player has little effect in the big picture, a drop in an ocean of karma. 

In classical Western mythology, Time is the father of Death. Kronos (or Saturn) both creates and destroys, bringing forth children and then devouring them. (Or, in Milton’s perverse religious allegory, Death is the incestuous offspring of Satan and Sin.) That Oppenheimer utters the famous line while having sex with Jean Tatlock illustrates the karmic relationship between sex (creation) and death (destruction), which concludes with her eventual death by suicide. That Oppenheimer is haunted by causing this single death is paralleled by causing the death of tens of thousands or even by seeing himself as the destroyer of the world. 

In religious terms, then, Oppenheimer’s moral qualms point to an inflated ego, his inability to cede responsibility to the gods, or in Buddhist terms to practice nonattachment. He ignores the context of the Gita quotation, in which Krishna/Vishnu is attempting to absolve the warrior Arjuna of his personal culpability in the death of his enemies, since it is the gods who decide who lives and who dies, not the warrior (or scientist) himself. 

Nor can Oppenheimer embrace the nonduality espoused in the Gita (and Buddhism) by Krishna’s assertion that there is (in ontological terms, and perhaps in theoretical physics, as well) neither slayer nor slain. Contrary to common misconceptions, Karma is impersonal. Karma is often misinterpreted in a way that holds individuals responsible for specific actions which put into motion great consequences. But Krishna disabuses Arjuna of this notion, or rather refines it, by letting him know that as long as he acts according to his duty (dharma) he need not be worried about karma because there are more forces at work in war than the actions of one individual. To think otherwise is hubris. 

Viewing actual footage of his postwar interviews, you can see Oppenheimer trying to parse exactly what his duty (dharma) was as a scientist, and trying to convince himself that it was not up to him and other scientists to decide how to use their destructive discoveries for military and political ends (that was the dharma of generals and politicians). Yet he never seems to be entirely convinced, as evinced in his halting, stumbling, Hamlet-like soliloquies, trying to come up with the right words for a right philosophical take on his role. He is troubled by this idea of dharma as duty and responsibility, even as it seems to absolve him of the worst of his guilt. One’s dharma when confronted with a battle with evil (in this case Nazism) demanded a decision either to engage or not to engage. But his hubris forces him to take on more guilt than he needs to, so that “he” has become Death, when actually it is the powers beyond him (not just the military and political deciders, but the gods themselves, karma itself, time itself) that are responsible for the destruction of HIroshima and Nagasaki and, in future, perhaps the world. In any case, Time will ultimately destroy everything.

But Oppenheimer was not a Hindu; he happened to be a Jew who did not believe in the immortality of the soul. As a Humanist he believed in the sacredness of life and in human agency, which is why he was haunted by his role as “destroyer.” For him, the Bhagavad Gita was not a sacred text as such but a very personal philosophical guide to his life as a scientific “warrior.” Neither Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor accomplished Stoic (like his Sanskrit tutor Ryder), Oppenheimer remains a haunted figure. In the end, Oppenheimer inhabits not the realms of devas or humans (two of the six realms of samsara), but that of a self-condemned emaciated hungry ghost whose thirst for forgiveness can never be sated. This is the vivid portrait the film has painted.

— Richard Collins

REFERENCES

Arnold, Edwin, translator. The Song Celestial or Bhagavad-Gita (1900). London: RKP, 1948. https://merton.bellarmine.edu

Berridge, George. “‘Now I Am Become Death’: The Delicate, Destructive Words of Oppenheimer.” 27 July 2023.  https://artreview.com

Khorana, Alok A. “How Robert Oppenheimer Was Influenced by the Bhagavad Gita.” 10 July 2023. https://lithub.com

Ryder, Arthur W., translator. The Bhagavad-Gita. Chicago: The U of Chicago Press, 1929.

https://shreevatsa.net/ryder/1929-gita/Ryder-BG.pdf

James Temperton. “‘Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ The Story of Oppenheimer’s Infamous Quote.” 21 July 2023. https://www.wired.com

Varma, Parvan K. “Why Oppenheimer controversy Is a misplaced outrage over Bhagavad Gita.” 27 July 2023. https://www.firstpost.com

Does barbie have buddha nature?

Having at last succumbed to the barrage of Barbenheimer mania, I can now share my thoughts on the two films from a Zen perspective. (For now, though, I’ll restrict my remarks to Barbie.)

My first reaction to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was that it was the story of the Buddha. Like Siddhartha, she begins life (if we can call it that) in a charmed and sheltered palace, pink and plastic and perfect. Like the Republican ideal of childhood, there should be no taint of the unpleasant world of grownups, no unpleasantness, no dissatisfaction, no suffering, no aging, no death, and above all no mention of social inequality, bathrooms, gender confusion, or sex. It is only when these dark thoughts intrude upon Barbie’s consciousness that she sets off on her journey to “enlightenment.”

Like the prince Siddhartha, however, once she witnesses dukkha (imperfection) in the form of suffering, age, and death, she can’t be kept in the prison of her pink palace. She must make the journey to the underworld (i.e., the “real” world), and meet a teaching prophet (Weird Barbie) and confront even the gods (or at least their simulacra in the form of the corporate board of Mattel). Once she has confronted the twin demons of Capitalist Consumerism and the Patriarchy, she can rejoin the world, “enlightened” now, as a “real” human being. Cue the final frame of the Oxherding Pictures, where the un-Barbie-like chubby Buddha Hotei returns to the marketplace to perform as a bodhisattva, saving other beings like himself. Or, perhaps just as aptly, cue the Pinocchio/Pygmalion theme of the toy/statue coming to life. 

These themes were so obvious to me that I didn’t for a second think my interpretation was either original or outlandish. I searched “Barbie Buddha” online and came up with a number of references, including an interview with Margot Robbie who stated that Greta Gerwig was thinking in the archetypal terms of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (“or is it a hundred, anyway….” Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling, still channeling a dim and deferential Ken, says “either way, that’s a lot of faces!”) Robbie says it out loud: Barbie’s journey is “the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment.”

Now that we know the answer to whether Barbie has Buddha nature, we should ask the more pressing and as yet unexplored question of whether Barbie’s dog Tanner (discontinued for pooping choking hazards, as his brief cameo in the film shows) has Buddha nature as well?

— Richard Collins

Sam Grindrod (from Pinterest)

Integrity

A talk given at Stone Nest Dojo by Richard Collins, 28 May 2023

An integer is a positive natural number or a negative

number, with no fractional part, and includes zero.

One thing that we see in the Zen masters whom we read about from long ago is that they had integrity.

This doesn’t mean that they were perfect, or morally upright, certainly not confined by some rigid ethical code. On the contrary. It means that they were wholly themselves, authentic, vivid, unique, unpredictable, possibly eccentric. 

The root of the word integrity is integer, from the Latin, which means “intact,” whole, undivided, entire, and in that sense perhaps even “pure.” An integrated society is an intact society, a society not split up or torn apart by internal divisions. Integral wheat or grain is whole wheat, whole grain, wholesome. And a person of integrity is one who commands respect for being uniquely who they are. 

Think about the people you admire. Isn’t this true of every one of them? I think this is true of anyone we really admire. They are a whole person, well-rounded. They may not be perfect, indeed they are often exquisitely imperfect, but they are authentic. They are comfortable in their own skin, we say. They are able to act spontaneously in the moment from a certain center or core, whatever that core might be. And that core is rarely a belief; it is more likely to be a lack of any dogmatic belief and a realistic openness to possibility.

Sometimes sitting in zazen we can feel conflicted, torn apart by our thoughts and feelings, our urges and our hesitations. Even more so in everyday life. Being drawn-and-quartered is how I envision it, like the medieval torture that tied each of your limbs to a horse and had them go off in different directions, to dismember you limb from limb.

We are constantly torn in different directions by whatever has been drummed into our conscience by parents, church, education, society, whose gifts to us are their prejudices and myopia. We are also torn apart by our own fears, desires, ambitions, regrets — what we should not have done, what we should be doing, what we hope to do, and so on. And when this happens we are not whole anymore, we lose our integrity. 

That’s why it’s very important to reconnect with your self here in the present during zazen. Not the self that’s been drummed into you or the one that appears on your driver’s license or your permanent record, but the one that has infinite potential. The no-self. Like the enso that represents emptiness but also represents wholeness, people with integrity can take in the moment and do what needs to be done. Not because they have some default dogma or code to fall back on, but because they have a certain openness, an emptiness — no preconceptions. They are empty, not full of themselves.

We too can become this open, this whole, this integrated with ourselves — if we take in and accept and embrace all of our current situation, whatever that might be, without distorting it with our hopes and fears. Not so that we can admire ourselves of course, but so that we can do what needs to be done. Not just for ourselves, but for others, for all existences really, in our modest way.

仙厓義梵 Sengai Gibon (1750-1837), “Eat this and have a cup of tea”

DECIDE!

A talk given at the sesshin, 13 May 2023, New Orleans Zen Temple, by Richard Reishin Collins, Abbot

Sometimes we have to be a sangha of one.

We hear all the time about the Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. These can be very abstract terms, however, so I always encourage you to nail those down to concrete, recognizable examples in your life, anchoring these abstractions in your experience. For example: Buddha is the posture; Dharma is breathing; Sangha, attitude of mind.

We can find buddhas everywhere, all around us, if we just pay attention. It doesn’t have to be something on an altar, something holy, spiritual or special. It just has to be ineffably itself — tathata.

Dharma we find everywhere as well. In the patterns of our experience, we can learn the form and the formlessness of reality. This is especially true in what presents us with cases we can’t figure out. We call these koans when they appear in the literature, but the great koans are not to be found in books but in our own lives. These are what teach us — directly and deeply — about the nature of reality.

And sangha, which is less a congregation of people than an attitude of mind, the practice of mushotoku, with no intention of receiving any personal profit or gain. Sangha is an endlessly expanding community of mushotoku mind, so that even if you are doing zazen by yourself, you’re practicing with others. Even when you are doing zazen with others, you’re practicing by yourself. 

Sometimes you don’t get to choose whether to practice in community with others or by yourself as a hermit. I am speaking of my own experience — because I’ve become a sangha of one for a while in the mountains of Tennessee.

It feels very comfortable for me, this weekend, to come back and sit with you here in the temple in New Orleans, very natural, a refuge. A refuge from a refuge.

But our sangha has always expanded and contracted over the years. In the old temple on Camp Street we had 16,000 square feet to expand into, and yet the ebb and flow was no different than it is now. Sometimes there would be up to twenty or so for a sesshin and yet sometimes there would be no one at all. 

So a group of four or five sitting together feels abundant to me right now. But sometimes we have to be a sangha of one, like a stone dropped in a still pool. Like the Buddha at BodhGaya, in fact, where, as a sangha of one (we are told) he attained great awakening. 

The main thing is to not choose. As it says at the very beginning of the Shin Jin Mei, as soon as you begin to pick and choose, you’re a mile off the path.

Sometimes I think I might prefer to be practicing with more people. Then I relax and settle into appreciating the freedom that practicing by myself offers. The main thing is that I learn from this experience. I have learned this: a refuge can become a hindrance. A sangha can become a problem. Our problems can become a refuge — paradoxically, perversely — when they preoccupy us so much that we forget what’s important. Our neuroses become our safe place. Our problems come to define us and occlude our vision with a cloudy mirror. Then we tend to forget that we are the only problem; we ourselves are the only refuge. This is the vortex into which preferences lead us.

Be careful, though. Not to choose does not mean not to act! It doesn’t mean to do nothing. It doesn’t mean you can’t decide. In fact, when you don’t make preferences you can act spontaneously, you can make those decisions that are necessary, not the unnecessary ones, not the ones that you overthink, but the things that need to be done.

A long time ago, some twenty years or so, when Robert Livingston Roshi wanted to open a restaurant on the ground floor of Camp Street, I asked him if he really wanted to be faced with all the decisions that running a business like that entailed. He said, “I have no problem making decisions.” Now I think I know what he meant.

An even longer time ago, back in the ‘80s, I was a young professor when I interviewed the poet Molly Peacock. She said something that I have always remembered. She said, “One day I decided to be happy.” She pointed out that the word decision is related to the word incision. To be decisive is to cut something away. It is to be incisive. There is a precision to it. Decide is also related to every kind of -cide, from pesticide to homicide, even deicide (the killing of gods), and so on. A killing, a cutting down, a slaying.

We say that during zazen, with hishiryo consciousness we “throw down” or “cast off” body and mind – shin jin datsu raku. We cut to the chase. We slay the Buddha that we meet on the road to reveal the real Buddha within ourselves. This is what we do every time we decide to come to zazen. We cut away the inessential. As Michelangelo said, he cut away what was inessential in the stone to reveal the statue within. We cut away what is inessential in ourselves, to find our true self: the one that we have not yet thought of, as Kodo Sawaki said. The living Buddha in our hara. 

My wife Leigh and I moved to Romania in the early ‘90s. The first morning after we got up in our depressing cinder-block apartment, she went to the market to buy something to eat. As she stood at the counter, trying to decide what to ask for, the line of old ladies behind her started to scream at her. "Alegeți! Alegeți!” She didn’t know what that meant, but they were yelling at her to decide. “Decide! Decide!” Or literally, “Elect!” Select! Decide! Kill off your choices! Cut off your possibilities! Make up your mind!

In the Samurai tradition, of course, spontaneous decision-making is legendary. The Hagekure tells us that “one should make one’s decisions within the space of seven breaths.” This ability to focus with “an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit” is what allows the samurai “to break on through to the other side.” Hesitation in the martial arts is deadly. One deals with an attack spontaneously, automatically, naturally, not with a mind that “goes hither and thither.” A mind that is divided might soon result in a skull split open. You don’t think about it: you don’t worry about right or wrong. You go with your gut. Your hara.

When we practice on our own, though, we tend to overthink our practice. We think too much about the inessential. This activity is just waffling; it’s not deciding. We are not cutting the dross away, we are wallowing in it. We are trying to hold onto everything and to control it, weighing, picking and choosing, making preferences, all of which is very different from decisiveness. Someone who is decisive is not choosy, not picky, not bellyaching all the time about what is or is not appropriate.

As you have probably guessed, this kusen is more for me than for you, so that I can get back on track. But that’s our practice, that’s what a sangha is. We help each other. By helping each other we help ourselves. It doesn’t come down from on high from the Godo. The teaching goes both ways. We help each other to decide for ourselves.

Split Head Sculpture by Eric Kilby

SEWANEE ZEN OPENS APRIL 2, 2023

Sewanee Zen will open for the first time on April 2, 2023, with an Introduction to Zen Practice at the new Stone Nest Dojo at 3818 Sherwood Road in Sewanee, Tennessee.

The three-hour workshop will provide the basics of Zen practice: zazen (sitting concentration), kinhin (walking concentration), and dojo etiquette. Background on Zen Buddhism and bodhisattva practice-enlightenment will be discussed.

A regular schedule of zazen, with several sittings per week, as well as periodic zazenkai (half-day and daylong retreats) and sesshin (longer retreats) will be offered.

The introduction will be led by Richard Collins, Abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and Sewanee Zen, and assisted by Shawn Mitzel, monk, who leads our Blue Ridge, Georgia sitting group.

For information and registration, please contact us at nozentemple@gmail.com or 318-451-3418.

View from Stone Nest Dojo

Sentimental Compassion and Other Demons

So, today I want to talk about demons (or yokai, in Japanese). 

You might have heard me refer to the threshold to the dojo as the demon-tripper. This is a traditional way of describing the purpose of the raised piece of wood that separates the dojo from the rest of the temple. 

Of course, we are not referring to pesky little grimacing gremlin-like creatures who are so clumsy as to be tripped up by a symbolic boundary less than an inch high. 

These demons are not tangible; they are in your mind.

Muso Kokushi, who lived in Japan around 1300 (1275-1351), was an influential Rinzai master. His famous collection of mondo, called Dream Conversations or Dream Dialogues, has some helpful guidance about the pitfalls of Zen practice. 

For example, he talks about the inner “demons” or “devils” that are actually “mental phenomena and mental postures that obstruct the potential for understanding.” These are the demons we leave outside the dojo with our shoes and our cell phones.

These demons include the usual poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, not only indulging in them but also in fearing them. There are also the problems of hubris such as conceit and opinionated views, or pride in one’s knowledge of the sutras. Then we have issues associated with practice, such as addiction to meditation states, practicing for oneself instead of for others, doing zazen too little out of laziness, or doing zazen too much out of impatience for satori, idealizing teachers [some to the point of eating their excrement or drinking their urine, literally or figuratively], rejecting the teaching because of finding fault with teachers’ personal behavior. He also includes what he calls “sentimental compassion.”

Sometimes we experience these demons because we are not sincere in our practice, but sometimes they arise because we are too sincere, too eager, too pious. Muso goes on to say: “Anyone who wants to realize Buddhist enlightenment is obliged to examine his or her mind and heart for these devils.”

Many of these demons are familiar. But seeing them as demons in our own minds helps to animate them, gives them some agency and some personality — our personality. They are not some abstract noun like greed, or something outside ourselves that we ingest. They are already internal to us; not something we drink but something we think. Or feel.

Muso concentrates on those demons that are particular to religious practice because even advanced students can fall into these traps, or should I say, even advanced students can look in the mirror and see these demons in their reflection.

But I want to concentrate on Muso’s singling out of “sentimental compassion,” one of two limited forms of compassion, as opposed to the limitless kind which he calls“objectless compassion.” 

This reminds me of Katagiri’s distinction in the Lectures on Lay Ordination between “relative repentance” and “absolute repentance,” or “formless repentance in suchness.” It might be the most difficult concept to grasp in Katagiri’s remarks on taking the bodhisattva precepts. Relative repentance occurs when we seek forgiveness for a particular act from some person or some entity like the Buddha, while absolute or formless repentance in suchness is objectless. 

Absolute repentance is also subjectless. We have to ask: who is this “I” who asks forgiveness, or that “other” from whom forgiveness is supposed to be given? Absolute repentance includes all of our actual and potential transgressions (bonno are endless, I vow to drop them all), even though there is no one to blame and no one to give forgiveness. We are at one with our repentance, objectless and subjectless. Or seen another way, the repenting subject and the object of repentance merge into one.

Sentimental compassion is similar to relative repentance in that it is a limited sort of compassion, the sort that is directed toward living or sentient beings. Muso puts it even more precisely: “The compassion whose object is living beings as such is the compassion of one who thinks beings are real and their delusions are real, and who wishes to liberate these real beings from their real delusions. This is sentimental compassion, which is limited by feelings. It is still just emotion and desire, not real liberative compassion.” (He says this is the compassion of Hinayana Buddhism.)

The second form of compassion is an objective compassion that is based on the teachings of the Dharma, specifically the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, which sees all beings as conditional productions of causal relations (that is, of karma). But this merely sees beings and their sufferings as illusory instead of real: this second kind of compassion is “illusory compassion for illusory beings, using illusory means to liberate illusory beings from illusory delusions.” (This is Mahayana compassion, free of the “sticky emotions of sentimental compassion” but it is still not liberated compassion.)

We often see these two limited forms of compassion at work in the world. They are not evil, but they are incomplete. And when they are at work in us, they can become demons. There is, Muso says, some element of “contamination” in sentimental compassion, just as there is in Katagiri's relative repentance. By contamination, he means that there is a sense of purpose, a goal that is incompatible with mushotoku mind, free of intention.

How do we achieve “objectless compassion”? By entering the dojo, by leaving the demons behind. By stepping over the threshold that trips up the mental demons of “sentimental compassion” which sees suffering as real, as well as the “objective” compassion which sees suffering as illusory, allowing us to practice absolute, objectless compassion, just as we practice absolute, objectless repentance. By doing zazen without haste or reluctance — automatically, spontaneously, naturally —  without fearing or falling prey to the demons that wait for us on the other side of the threshold.

— Richard Collins