Of Gateless Gates and Walls

Something there is that does not love a wall.

– Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

When we enter the dojo, we step over a raised threshold. We often tell people that this is to keep the demons out. But our demons of course are not so easily tripped up. And in any case, they rarely try to enter so boldly. They usually come in as stowaways in the baggage we bring into the dojo with us.

But this leads me to think about the purpose and meaning of gates and walls. 

Gates in Japan are used as boundaries and borders and barriers as well as entryways. They are meant as much to keep people out as to let people in. They are borderlands where black and white becomes gray. Dawn and dusk, these twilight zones, are much more dangerous than the witching hour of midnight or the “demon of noontide” when you know what you’re dealing with.

Perhaps we in America think about gates and barriers in the same way, like Robert Frost’s prickly neighbor who claims, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But as Frost speculates in response: “Something there is that does not love a wall.”

In Zen practice we spend a lot of time staring at the wall. Like Daruma, who spent nine years at Shaolin before his eyelids came off and his arms and legs atrophied. During a short sesshin like this one of just a couple of days, we spend nine hours facing the wall. And by that time, it’s true: Something there is that does not love a wall. And maybe that something is you.

In our ceremonies, we hear the word for the kanji for GATE very often, perhaps without recognizing it or knowing what it means. When we chant HOMON during the Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva, we are saying Dharma (HO) Gates (MON) are endless; we vow to penetrate them all. 

In popular culture, Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (the Rasho Gate) has become a synonym for conflicting multiple first-person accounts and the dubious conclusions that might be drawn from them. We all perceive things differently, according to our vantage point, our fears and desires, and the interpretations that arise from these. They are nothing less than conflicting versions of reality that each of us clings to in our isolation. In Kurosawa’s film we see this acted out by characters who have witnessed a crime, as they tell their stories while trapped by a rainstorm under the Rasho Mon. (It’s worth reading the several short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that went into the adaptation of Kurosawa’s film.)  

Also, when we chant the Eko, the lineage, during the ceremony, we hear Somon Kodo Daiosho. Kodo Sawaki’s monastic name, SOMON, means Ancestral Gate. He was both a barrier to keep out the lackadaisical demons who allowed zazen to fall into disuse, as well as a reformer who brought back the ancestral practice wherever he went. An ancestral gate that is also a barrier.

The Rinzai tradition of course uses the collection of koans called The Gateless Gate, the MUMONKAN, the forty-eight koans collected by Wumen or Mumon Ekai. It is used as a sort of curriculum, students being assigned a koan which they must “pass” before going on to the next. In Soto Zen, however, zazen itself is our koan, the wall that we face is our gateless gate. And our life is the curriculum that provides the assignments we must study without ever hoping to pass. Indeed, life provides us with abundant koans. We only have to see them. Dharma gates are endless. Nor will we ever “graduate.”

Bodhisattva ordination, like we have today, is a kind of boundary, or gate, that we pass through. A matriculation, we might say, into a kindergarten for beginner’s mind. Certainly not a graduation. 

The Dharma names we receive are not diplomas. But they can be lifetime koans.

Dharma names can be descriptive or prescriptive, an encouragement or a warning, but they are always a koan. My bodhisattva name, Reishin, for example, means Profound Mind, which seems simple enough, but of course SHIN means both Heart and Mind, so to get beyond the surface (the wall) of Profound Mind, I had to mature enough to penetrate the surface meaning (the barrier) of Profound MInd to discover (by entering the gate of) Profound Heart/Mind, just like Sharishi (Shariputra), who was clever enough intellectually but needed to be educated by Avalokiteshvara about Compassionate Wisdom. 

Similarly my monastic name, Taisen, is the same as Deshimaru’s bodhisattva name, but whereas his name means Great Sage, mine (my teacher Robert said) means Great Abandonment. This could be taken in many ways, and it remains my inexhaustible koan to this day. But just because it cannot be solved doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide me with insights and guidance. The better the koan, the more unsolvable it is, and yet the more it reveals.

So you see, these gates are everywhere and they are endless. These barriers might seem to keep the neighbors (the demons) out, and they may seem to be intended to trip us up. But they are the very mechanism of our enlightenment. These barriers to wisdom are endless, and yet it is our practice to penetrate them without a gate. Each satori dissolves a wall, and if you are lucky, you realize that the wall itself is satori.

I have mentioned more than once my fondness for the koan about the ox that climbs through a window. (It’s number 38 in the Mumonkan.) Its horns and legs, and its whole body can get through, but it can’t get its tail through. A window is also a gate — and can be a barrier even if there appears to be no barrier. It depends perhaps on how many demons (bonno) you are smuggling through.

My point, I suppose, is: you don’t need a gate to get to the other side.

— Richard Collins

The cast and director of Rashomon. (Note the Zen monk, the only one clawing at the wall.)

The Frozen Money Bag

Et le monde, loin d'être un obstacle, est la voie 

par laquelle s’actualise son satori.

– Taisen Deshimaru

This weekend in Tennessee, I was obsessing about the financial situation of the temple (part of the abbot’s job description). After watching a particularly spectacular sunset from a bluff on the Cumberland Plateau, I decided to do a little bibliodiviination, or bibliomancy — you know, the ancient practice of asking a question and letting a book open up to a page at random to give you the answer.

When I got back to my desk, I picked up Taisen Deshimaru’s L’Autre Rive: Textes fondamentaux du Zen. (The Other Shore: Fundamental Zen Texts.) What would Deshimaru have to say, I wondered, about our dilemma? Maybe he could offer the sangha some sage advice about money problems from the other shore. 

So I sat down in my corner, stuck in my thumb and pulled out a plum. On pages 96 and 97, in the middle of a commentary on the Hannya Shingyo, Deshimaru tells this story:

Un soir, un homme se rendit à l'église et fit une prière: “Mon Dieu, je vous en prie, faites que je trouve de l’argent!” Sur le chemin du retour, il vit briller à la lumière d’un réverbère une grosse bourse et exulta: “Une bourse pleine d’argent! J’ai trouvé une bourse pleine d’argent!” 

Il voulut la ramasser, mais le chemin était gelé et la bourse prise dans les glaces. 

“Il faut que je trouve une pierre pour briser la glace,” pensa-t-il. Mais quelqu’un arrivait derrière lui, et la bourse risquait de lui échapper. “Je vais plutôt uriner dessus, pensa-t-il, et la glace fondra.”

Ce qu’il fit aussitôt. Il saisit la bourse, la tira, tira encore, mais elle ne venait pas. Il ressentit par contre une grande douleur. Son regard était tourné vers le ciel, mais il n'aperçut ni ciel ni étoiles. Il réalisa alors qu’il venait de faire un rêve et que la douleur provenait des ses testicules, qu’il serrait encore. Seul le lit mouillé était bien réel. 

One evening a man went to church and prayed: “God, I beg of you, please help me come into some money!” On the way home, he saw on the ground, shining in the light of a street lamp, a fat money bag, and he rejoiced: “A bag full of money! Praise the Lord! I’ve found a bag full of money!”

He bent down to pick it up, but the bag was frozen in the ice on the path.

"I just need to find a stone to break the ice," he thought. But then he heard someone coming up behind him, and the treasure seemed in danger of being lost. I'll piss on it instead, he thought, that will melt the ice!

Which he lost no time in proceeding to do. Then he seized the bulging bag and pulled it, and pulled again. But it was stuck and he was suddenly in a lot of pain. He looked up at the sky but he could see neither sky nor stars. Then he realized that it was all a dream and that the pain was in his testicles, which he was still savagely tugging. Only the wet bed was real.

Bibliodivination is hardly ever so on point. 

We can hope and pray all we want, but this kind of desire only causes suffering and a certain amount of humiliation. Our imagination creates a mirage that is an unreal projection of what we think we want, what we think we need. We can tug all we want at the hallucination, the object of our desire, but that won’t magically bring it out of our fantasy into reality, it will only cause us pain because we think what we want is outside ourselves but it is really only the chimera of desire. So in the end we act on our delusion and unwittingly punish ourselves for not being able to control our circumstances.

Like children, we think we can piss on a cold and obstinate world that tempts us but won’t let us have what we want. Or we think we can outwit those who sneak up behind us to steal what we have not yet got. But it is all an illusion, a dream. The only reality is the damage we have done to ourselves in believing in the illusion, in acting on our delusion. Only the wet bed is real.

Deshimaru goes on to discuss the phrase tendo muso, which has to do with various illusions: “le rêve, les chimères, les mirages, les hallucinations.” The Hannya Shingyo, he says, distinguishes between four types of illusion.

The first error of perception is in relation to mujo (impermanence) and consists in believing in unchanging entities, and the perenniality of existence. This is an error, he says. Tout change sans cesse. All existences are bound for extinction. Nothing is static. Everything evolves and is transformed. 

The second error has to do with happiness. This lure resides in our faith in the attractions of this world: love affairs, friendship, the joy we find in our work, vacations, and other entertainments and distractions. Fugitive joys, ephemeral happiness. This phenomenal world can give us only a pale reflection of true happiness, that which we can only find in the absolute dimension, beyond the pleasures of this world. (Sesshin, though, he says, lets us glimpse this journey in the world of that other dimension, the world of plenitude.)

The third error is the attachment of the ego…. and so on.

But here ends the message from the Other Shore on pages 96 and 97. 

In the following pages, however, Deshimaru goes on to say that during zazen thought arises from ku, emptiness, the absolute. But in daily life thought arises from shiki, phenomena, the relative. The ego produces ignorance, and ignorance is the source of illusions. And everything is an illusion because our ignorance is endless. Illusions are born of desire, which give birth to all the sickness and suffering of body and spirit. 

All this is enough to remind me of what I already know. That for all the joys and satisfactions of the phenomenal world — and they are many, and they include the joys and satisfactions of the responsibilities of running a dojo and being a Zen teacher — they are not the point. The point, in the end, is the practice; it is zazen itself where we encounter the plenitude of ku.

Constantly being preoccupied with daily affairs — even the affairs of the temple — can blind us to the true purpose of the practice. In the story of the dream I wondered at first why the man could not see the sky or the stars when he looked up. But now it is clear to me. Such an obsession can cause us to be unable to see either the sky (ku) or the stars (shiki). It is like pissing on the three treasures. It is like tugging at one’s testicles in a dream. 

—Richard Collins

The Cosmos Doesn't Care

This morning at 3 am I opened an email with a mondo question about a movie called either Do or Let Die (which I couldn’t find online, and might have been confused with Live and Let Die) or A Time to Die (a 1991 film with ex-porn star Traci Lords). I assume, though, that the movie in question is actually the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die.

The question went something like this:

“After watching the movie, it occurred to me yet again that all literature illustrates that all life is conditioned and impermanent and that human suffering is caused by our denial of this truth. 

“We deny it because we love, which is desire, and don’t want to suffer the loss of what we love. Because of this desire, because of love, we perpetuate all suffering. Should we not love? Can we not love? Are we doomed to love? 

“Can that love make us cause the suffering and death of the delusional perpetrators of suffering as a solution?

“Can we stop the cycle of violence and suffering?

“What should a practitioner do when faced with the loss of country, friends, neighbors, and loved ones under these circumstances? 

“What is the correct action?”

I’ll begin by saying I grew up on James Bond movies and books. It would not be too much to say that they had a very formative influence on me and my view of the world, for better or worse. I think No Time to Die may be the best.

The film begins as Death comes stalking over an icy terrain in the form of a killer wearing a mask from the Japanese Noh stage. Warped by his personal suffering, the villain behind the mask is bent on Karmic Revenge. He is the archetypal teenage shooter. Because his bad complexion has scarred him, he wants to mow down all the guys, like Bond, who get the girls. And the girls too. In other words, he is out to destroy the whole world. He is the face of the poison Anger, in spite of the serene mask he wears.

Meanwhile, Bond is chilling in Jamaica, fishing and living the life in retirement, detached from involvement with world affairs. Until he is recruited to return to active duty to stop the villain who threatens to destroy the world. We should know, however, that it is useless to stop Death or Karma. Only for so long can even Bond put off Death — or the End of the World.

Here at the outset Bond embodies the Buddhist dilemma in a nutshell. Do I try to achieve nirvana for myself in this life through nonattachment, purifying my practice, like the arhats and lohans of old, by dwelling in ku? Or do I enter the fray of shiki, of samsara, of the shit, and try to help all beings through engagement in the affairs of this world, trying to transform the suffering of others? The Peace of Buddha, or the Determination of Daruma?

Yes — and yes. 

But we must first learn to think of the challenge in this way: Life is a game that we can’t win; we can only put off losing. As the ending of Oedipus Rex tells us, “Now as we watch and await the final hour, count no one happy till they die, free of suffering at last.” Bond has put off losing to Death through numerous books and films, until now.

We can’t choose not to die. We can’t say, “I have no time for that. This is no time for me to die.” What we can do is to choose to act honorably, or not, as long as we live. We can choose to act as wisely as possible, or not. We can put all our training and expertise to work to “stop the cycle of violence and suffering,” but we have to know in advance that this is ultimately impossible.

The question in the email implies that there is a way out of suffering in this life and that we, as practitioners, should be able to avoid suffering, if not for ourselves then for others. If only we could find “the correct action.” 

One assumption seems to be that we might avoid suffering by not loving (which seems to be confused with desire, but desire is only one form of love, the love of attachment and clinging). And early James Bond movies certainly gave the impression that the way to nonattachment was by becoming a cold-hearted spy in the house of love (to borrow the title of an Anais Nin novel). 

The question about suffering seems to refer to the Four Noble Truths. But what does the Heart Sutra say about the Four Noble Truths? It says that these are Four Noble Illusions. Go back to Mushotoku Mind, Chapter Ten, which I entitled “The Four Noble Truths That Are Not.” There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no path to lead from suffering. In ku there are none of these; there is only mushotoku, the attainment of no attainment.

Suffering, in other words, is caused not by love but by being attached to shiki, to an outcome, an attainment, desire, passion. And as we know, passion means suffering.

Like so many other people, I have been suffering recently because of the actions of a few people in a courtroom, dressed in black robes like priests, who have decided that we no longer have certain rights. When the questioner asks about “losing a country,” that’s what comes to mind for me. Not as a physical refugee, although that is terrible, but by losing the idea of a country, which is after all what a country is, at least that’s what this country is. Not founded on land or borders or blood, and not on some divine right, nor on race, but on a noble idea of freedom and equality: the great experiment. But like Bond, we are only able to enjoy a brief respite from fighting the injustices before reentering the fray because there is always someone in a white mask or a black robe who wants to take revenge on the world.

But to return to the question: “Should we not love? Can we not love? Are we doomed to love?”

The beautiful thing about this Bond movie is that it shows that Bond is human. He is not immortal. “Just a boring family man,” said one disappointed and cynical viewer. Bond is no Superman. He has no pretensions of becoming a buddha. “Too stupid to become Buddha,” wrote Dogen in a poem that Deshimaru quotes, “I only desire to become a true bodhisattva / And help all beings cross to the other shore.” Isn’t that better than becoming Buddha? Perhaps all bodhisattvas are just boring family men and women — because their heroism is pointless — or perhaps better to say “winless” — since we are all engaged in a losing struggle with the inevitability of suffering.

As my Tai Chi instructor always said, “Just begin by relaxing into the recognition that you have already lost.”

Are we doomed to love? Let’s hope so. Love isn’t our doom; it is our salvation. Or rather: it is both our doom and our salvation. That doesn’t mean it makes us immortal, though. Immortals don’t love.

Perhaps it is true that “all literature illustrates that our lives are conditional and impermanent,” but it does not follow that it is “our denial of this fact that causes suffering.” Suffering causes suffering. Life causes suffering. There is no way out of suffering. There are only ways to deal with suffering or, as the sutra says, to “transform” suffering.

Literature makes distinctions between different genres, which are really our different reactions to the reality of our lives. Tragedy weeps over life’s impermanence. Comedy laughs at our impermanence. Tragicomedy tries to show that our lives are a mixture of laughter and tears, and sometimes a spasm of the two combined.

No Time to Die gets the tragicomic cocktail just about right — for an action movie. (The real genre of the action movie, the spy movie, is of course romance, but there are different flavors of romance.) The slippery Bond is finally cornered, and being human, he is proved to be no superman but mortal after all (even boring family Superman had a mortal weakness, love or nostalgia for his home planet in the form of Kryptonite). Bond accepts that mortality and his fate. He acts honorably, which is all we can do. That’s a tragic motif, of course, but the redemption is worth it, as in the tragedy of Christ whose sacrifice is comic in the end because it redeems not only his own suffering but that of the rest of the world forever and ever amen. It’s the supreme Christian myth, isn’t it. A divine comedy disguised as a human tragedy.

The question in the email seems to want to avoid the inevitability of failure, of suffering, of death. As though “as practitioners” we can suss out some “correct action” that will cheat suffering, cheat death. As practitioners, which means “as humans,” we can only do what we can do. Little as it is. 

We sometimes think our practice is about improving ourselves, improving our actions, improving the world — even though I have tried over and over again to discourage this way of thinking about our practice. Our practice, as passed down to us through Kodo Sawaki and Taisen Deshimaru and Robert Livingston, is to align ourselves with the cosmos, and the cosmos is pretty clear that it doesn’t care. That is not to say that we should not care about our actions, but we should not trick ourselves into believing that there is a right and wrong answer, a right and a wrong action on a cosmic level. On the contrary. This is why we must take responsibility for our human actions so that we can create the meaning that is not inherent in the universe by discovering how to act with compassion within its carelessness. 

If that means dying for love, like Bond, so be it. We should all be so lucky.

But let me end by letting Deshimaru have the last word. Here’s what he says in Chapter Ten of Mushotoku Mind about how to deal with suffering:

“In the end it is enough to forget yourself, to forget your ego, and all the sufferings in the world disappear of their own accord. You must begin by sitting peacefully, legs crossed and head straight, and let the whole painful story of humanity flow into your consciousness, without intervening, without being frightened and trying to flee. Just as the Buddha did.”

After zazen, you can go back to saving the world.

— Richard Collins

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die (2021).

Grasshopper Transcendence

What words, what notes can net what one feels in those too-brief blissful moments? Grasshopper transcendence, [William Carlos] Williams called it, as he caught their translucent wings whirring up into the light before the roar of those milling crowds forced their entry like some thief.

– Paul Mariani, “Snow Moon over Singer Island”

I once ran into David Carradine in a gas station in Southern California. This was in the early 1970s, long before his role in Kill Bill, when he was still best known for his role in the television series, Kung Fu, in which he was called Caine, or Grasshopper.

But this doesn’t have anything to do with that Grasshopper. Nor with the cocktail supposedly invented by Philip Guichet, owner of Tujague’s, in 1918. If that’s what you’re looking for, you can stop reading now.

Many people when they come to Zen practice or any sort of so-called “spiritual” practice are looking for transcendence. As in Transcendental Meditation, or even the Transcendentalism of the early American Romantics, who first imported the “wisdom of the East,” in which the small self approaches some sort of communion with the Great Self or Atman. But we don’t offer that either.

I have told this story before, but back in 2002 or so, when I was answering correspondence for Robert, someone asked, “Have you ever experienced an alternate state during zazen?” Robert answered, “Our everyday state is our alternate state; in zazen we experience our natural state.”

And yet there is a kind of quickening that we experience in zazen sometimes. Sometimes it’s called satori, awakening. Or as Kodo Sawaki called satori: “a thief entering an empty house.”

I always liked the anecdote about the young monk going up the mountain to a retreat when he met another monk coming down the mountain from the same retreat. He asked the monk coming down if he had experienced satori and if so what was it like? The one coming down simply dropped his bag. “What will you do now with your experience?” asked the young monk. The other picked up his bag and continued down the mountain.

This is Zen transcendence. 

In the last few days I came across a phrase in Paul Mariani’s biography of Wallace Stevens in which he compares the big transcendence that Stevens longed for in his poetry with the “slight transcendence” that William Carlos Williams achieved in his poetry. (Stevens meanwhile traded the bravado of his aesthetic dandyism for a secret deathbed conversion to Catholicism.) Mariani calls Williams’s version a “grasshopper transcendence.” Up into the air to catch the light, then back down to earth again. One monk goes up the mountain; another comes down. But they are the same monk.

This is a nice phrase, grasshopper transcendence, and I’m going to steal it because it reminds me of Caine, fresh from his training at Shaolin Mountain, where Bodhidharma himself sat with the mystery, before coming to the American West. Little Grasshopper, that quickening leap that we sometimes feel with satori. 

But we always come back down to earth. This is what we experience over and over again in zazen. We can call it a leap of faith, or an epiphany, or simply a glimpse into our natural state when we feel alive, alive to our life, to nature, to our environment, to our situation, to our own imagination even. But alive.

And now I’m going to think about going to Tujague’s in the French Quarter for a cold, refreshing Grasshopper.

Kyosaku! 

— Richard Collins

The Grasshopper. Invented by Philip Guichet at Tujague's, New Orleans, 1918.

Fathers and Fathers

It’s Father’s Day. Maybe a good time to consider the lineage and some of the implications of patriarchy, fatherhood, responsibility.

There is the koan that asks: what is your original face before your parents were born? Some people will take this as an invitation to think about an essential spirit or soul, like Wordsworth in his poem about “intimations of immortality'', where he says that the child before birth comes “not in entire forgetfulness” but somewhat ready-made and “trailing clouds of glory” before he or she is incarnated.

But this is not what we mean at all. This would assume that we have already been formed, that we bring our spiritual as well as our biological baggage with us (and not just in the form of karma or DNA), that there is some self that is transcendent and essential, unchanging and substantial, that has always been and always will be. 

But everything changes. What manifests in this life is temporary, form out of emptiness, emptiness into form. And because it is temporary it is more sacred than the eternal.

I’m thinking more of the real aspects of this idea of fatherhood. All of us have our own father experiences, unique. Some of us will bristle at the idea of fathers, having had not such a good experience. Some of us will lack that experience altogether, or have a very indifferent experience of physically or emotionally absent fathers. Some of us have not been very good fathers, it’s true. But our unique experience is, in a sense, our inheritance, our lineage, if you like. This is what we have to deal with, just as the kechimyaku serves as the family tree for those of us who have been ordained and taken the precepts. That’s the lineage of our own karma. It has nothing to do with transcendent souls, which is just a pretty platonic idea, much less with rewards and retributions, which is just a sophomoric notion of karma. And it has nothing to do with biological fatherhood, which is just an accident.

The choices we make with (or as) emotional fathers, spiritual fathers, that’s what counts. I am reminded of the story about Hakuin, the great Rinzai master. He was accused by a young girl of fathering her child. Sounds like one of those scandals we hear of in churches all the time. He didn’t deny it. He accepted the responsibility, even though he lost his reputation. He raised the child as though it were his own. A year or so later the mother admitted that she had lied and the biological father was a fishmonger. And while Hakuin loved the child as his own, he let it go without attachment. This is what true fatherhood is. Whether it is a spiritual father or a biological father or an emotional father or an adoptive father. Accepting responsibility. Without self-aggrandizement. Without attachment.

My own father was very different from me. Not that we didn’t get along. We just didn’t have anything in common, except the accident of genes. I had several surrogate fathers instead, all three of them (perhaps not surprisingly) teachers. Father figures, we call them, in a very strange turn of phrase. 

The first was my history teacher in high school, Walter Bodlander (1920-2019). One day when I fell asleep in his class (I was that kind of student) he sent me outside and told me to hop around the building on one foot. I said the hell with this and went home. But we remained friends for the rest of his life until he died a few years ago, at 99. He very generously hosted the reception for my first marriage in his house in the Hollywood Hills. Over the years we met up in Oregon, London, Los Angeles, always as though no time at all had passed. During all those years I never realized what a remarkable man he was. Born the same year as my father, Walter was a German Jew who joined Army intelligence during the war, something I did not know until, at the age of 95, he received the French Legion of Honor for his role in the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris. But isn’t this how we treat our fathers, not recognizing their worth until it is too late?

My dissertation advisor in graduate school, Professor Robert Peters (1924-2014), served a similar role. Bob was an accomplished scholar and critic who became a powerful poet and performance artist. He could be a ruthless critic, but he was always generous with me, more generous than I deserved. It was the death of Bob’s son that prompted his first book, Songs for a Son, and shocked him into embracing his own true identity as a gay man, giving him insight into his true self, giving him his authentic voice. It was perhaps not coincidental that the dead son happened to have been named Richard and would have been about my age if he had not died as a child.

The third and final father figure, of course, was Robert Livingston Roshi (1933-2021). As with my own father, Robert and I did not communicate that much, you might be surprised to hear. Over the course of twenty years, we had surprisingly few profound conversations. We were not friends. Our connection was not emotional or intellectual, as it was with Walter Bodlander and Bob Peters, much less biological as it was with my father. There is no one word to express the foundation of our relationship, except perhaps the mind-to-mind transmission of shiho. There was a total acceptance of each other, from the very beginning, unconditional acceptance. (This is not to say that there weren’t moments of falling asleep in class and punishments imposed and ignored, even authority rejected; but just as with Walter Bodlander, even though I never hopped around the building at Robert’s whim, I always returned to the dojo.) I hesitate to call it love, which is a very pale term for a vivid mystery that fits into no category. But I suppose that is what in a sense it was. Love. Like that love-without-attachment of Hakuin and his son.

What, then, was my original face before these father figures were born?

Of course I have to say “I don’t know.” None of us knows who we were before we were, before our fathers (and mothers) made us who we have become. Just as we don’t know what our eventual face will be when our great-grandchildren have forgotten us, and we have passed back into ku, emptiness, the heavens, sky.

— Richard Collins

仙厓義梵 Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)

After the Death of Illusion

No death is so sad or final as the death of an illusion.

— Arthur Koestler

This is Arthur Koestler writing in the 1930s. A devoted Communist, Koestler was lamenting his disillusionment caused by the Nazi-Soviet Pact early in the Second World War. Like many intellectuals during the ‘30s, Koestler saw Communism as the path to a better future for mankind, and so the actions of Stalin were a great disappointment, a great betrayal of the ideals they had committed themselves to. 

The context is important. But I think there is a more general truth to be had about the death of illusion if we see this in terms of dharma gates. The death of an illusion is the penetration of a dharma gate. Remember: one of the four great vows of the bodhisattva is: “Dharma gates are endless; I vow to penetrate them all.” 

A dharma gate is, essentially, a disillusionment. The death of an illusion. Each dharma gate that we penetrate opens onto a new reality, one that shatters the previous reality. Or, if you like, a new illusion that shatters the previous illusion. However useful that reality was for a time, we enter the new reality with newly opened eyes.

Think of your own disillusionments in life, those personal moments when you realized that your concept of reality was altered in some concrete situation, a betrayal, an infidelity, the fall of a hero or heroine, the disappointment in some ideal, the reversal of some principle or condition that you held inviolate, unquestioned, unchangeable, real. 

This is bound to happen whenever we place our faith and trust in anything and expect it to endure. Because nothing endures. Not even profound statements like “No death is so sad or final as the death of an illusion.” 

Such truths are themselves illusions. The more declarative, the more assertive, the more certain they are, the more likely they are to fall apart upon examination. It is part of our Zen practice to examine the truth of such statements, to acknowledge the opening of dharma gates. But it is also our practice to examine the limits to those truths, and not to allow ourselves to settle into dogma. As the Heart Sutra says, “There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no way to end suffering, no path to lead from suffering.” In short, no Four Noble Truths, only Four Noble Illusions. 

On first hearing it, we might find Koestler’s pronouncement to be solid, profound, unimpeachable. Just as early Buddhists found the pronouncements of the five skanda as being the foundations of our reality and just as they found the Four Noble Truths to be sources of comfort and edification. But upon further consideration, we should realize in what ways such pronouncements, for all their wisdom, are wrong. Or, as Avalokiteshvara tells Shariputra, they are empty. 

Yes, perhaps for an idealist like the committed Communist Koestler, the death of an ideological certitude (the illusion that communism would save the world) seems to be “sad and final.” And for Koestler, no doubt, it was. 

The question is: Is the death of an illusion really the saddest and most final? When you stopped believing in Santa Claus, was it such a horrible moment? Or did a new clarity arise?

I would say that the death of a pet is more “sad and final” than the death of Koestler’s belief in the communist panacea. And what about the death of loved ones, or acquaintances, or even “nobodies”, like the millions who died at the hands of Stalin; do they not count as more “sad and final” than the death of Koestler’s worship of a political system? Seen in this way, his disillusionment is laughable, his sadness a wallowing in self-pity. 

In a way, the truth of Koestler’s statement remains, though. When a loved one dies, what is more “sad and final” than their physical death is the death of our illusion that they would last forever, that we had all the time in the world to be with them, to look forward to. 

Perhaps we should call Dharma Gates, Illusion Gates. Illusion after illusion. For isn’t this the same thing as saying, truth after truth?

In Zen practice, we vow that Dharma gates are endless. When we come upon some sagacious saying, like Koestler’s, we might find it to be pithy and profound. We should acknowledge what it can teach us, but we should also examine the limits of its truth. We must also examine its untruth, its illusion. Thus we must, as the Heart Sutra says, go beyond, beyond, altogether beyond, to the other shore. To the death of illusion.

Richard Collins

15 May 2022

Leandro Erlich, Window with Ladder — Too Late for Help.(2008)

Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans Museum of Art

No-Self Portraiture

In zazen we are all nude models for ourselves.

Concentrate! Stretch the backbone. Head presses the sky. When we say “concentrate,” this has nothing to do with thinking. It is not like studying for an exam. It is more like making a fist, except that it is effortless. It is more like a yawn or a sneeze or laughter: whole-hearted, spontaneous, yet silent and invisible. Mind is concentrated in the body like tea in hot water, infused.

Last night I was reading Notes of a Nude Model. The author talks about the amateurs, those models who don’t last, the ones who are self-conscious, who have an inflated sense of themselves, modesty or shame or pride. Or the lazy ones who think sitting for an artist is just sitting and relaxing on the dais and collecting a check. No, real models work up a sweat by just sitting, just like bodhisattvas in the dojo. 

During zazen, like modeling, although we just sit, we never relax into our posture. In shikantaza we constantly stretch the backbone, head pressing the sky. Like an artist’s model, we hold the pose like a pro. We don’t fidget; we are not here to make ourselves comfortable, to self-soothe, to suck our thumbs. 

We are here to concentrate. To strip ourselves naked and to observe the beauties and blemishes, unmoving and unmoved, without pride or prejudice. Zazen is neither analysis nor appreciation. It is observation but without a mirror and without an artist to reflect or interpret us. We are a mirror of ourselves, our own artists, our own interpreters, like empty plaster casts on a balcony aware of the world around us.

Reading Notes of a Nude Model I was reminded of when I lived in London and sat for an artist friend of mine in his freezing studio in Hackney back in 1980-81. The cold never affected me until I tried to move. After a couple of hours of “just sitting,” I recall how on the bus ride home to Victoria I would feel emptied out but exhilarated too. I would catch a glimpse of myself in the reflections of the windows with the London cityscape in the background and hardly recognize that person, my so-called self: who was that “self” anyway? 

Twenty years later, when I began to come to the dojo and strip myself naked morning after morning, I would recognize that feeling of being emptied out after zazen. It was as though I was sitting for my portrait, except that it was a no-self portrait. In zazen we are all nude models for ourselves. We sit like pros, emptied out and sweating. 

— Richard Collins

ZEN PROGRESS

Everyone seems to be interested in their “progress” in Zen practice. Whether we have been practicing for two weeks or twenty years, we sometimes wonder whether we’ve made any progress. This occurs to us even when we know that there is no such thing as progress in Zen practice. The only progress is realizing that progress is illusory.

Unlike in the martial arts, we don’t have a system of grades and rewards in Zen. We don’t have different colored belts to indicate where one is in their practice, to mark their achievements. No competitions to build up or confirm our confidence, or to tear it down. Of course some people insist on seeing ordination as a mark of distinction, like graduation from high school or college — it’s more like graduation from kindergarten. 

It’s a familiar pattern: strong practice until ordination, then a slacking off, while they savor the view from the height of their little dunghill. This is a mistake. Bodhisattva ordination, monastic ordination, the shuso ceremony, even shiho, these are all aspirational; they are not graduations into some higher rank, some exalted realm of the enlightened. One only takes on at each stage the added responsibilities of continued practice with a greater realization of one’s incapacity. 

There is only one belt in which to wrap yourself in Zen, and that is the black belt of your own Death. Congratulations! Until then, though, we are all works “in progress.”

In Buddhism, however, death is symbolized by white (the color of all colors) instead of black (the color of no color). The white belt in martial arts dojos is the color of the beginner.

So we go back to the cushion each time as a beginner, always to confront the same question: what to do now in this moment, how to live life here and now. The progress of yesterday is past, the achievements of yesterday have expired. Yes, we have made some improvements, we have perhaps dropped some delusions. But just as with the dharma gates that we penetrate (there is always another and then another to open), delusions are endless: we vow to drop them all. 

Perhaps we have dropped the illusion of ambition — either because we have achieved our goal or failed to achieve it — but we have not dropped the delusion of hope. We have dropped the illusion of insecurity, only to replace it with the delusion of security. We exchange regrets for new fears, desires for new disillusionments, and so on. 

Is this progress? Maybe. But we still go back to the same unanswerable question: how to meet this moment here and now.

Do we make progress? Robert used to speak of the “wisdom” that arises from Zen practice, a spontaneous, natural, automatic, and unconscious alignment with the cosmos, the order of things, the Dao, the Way. What sort of wisdom do we achieve? Can we call it progress? 

From time to time in our practice we realize that something in our lives has changed, changed for the better — i.e., it has “progressed” — but this realization usually happens only after the fact. Satori can be —and usually is — very subtle, more like an evolution than a revelation. We look back on a difficult time like an expanse of water that we have somehow walked across and wonder: how did I get through that?

But we must not expect to be rewarded even for our unconscious miracles.

When the Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma about what merit he had achieved, Bodhidharma answered: “No merit. Vast emptiness.” When we can look upon our progress and say, sincerely, “no merit, vast emptiness,” then maybe we have made some Zen progress.

— Richard Collins

Gary Larson