Richard Collins, Abbot
Kusen: Sunday, 26 March 2026, New Orleans Zen Temple)
Since March I have been steadily writing my book about Robert’s life and legacy. It is largely now sketched out. Several chapters, though, have been hard to write, especially the late chapters, which deal with the dismantling of Camp Street and Robert’s death.
While writing about these difficult subjects, the phrase “the tyranny of things” occurred to me. Things have great power over us, or rather we allow things to have great power over us. When referring to the temple on Camp Street, it is not just the building but also its contents. And not just those things that are the repositories of our personal memory, but also the archives, letters, documents, receipts, and so on, things that tell the story of an era, a life.
The phrase “the tyranny of things” is not original with me. It is a universal phenomenon and has been articulated in many ways over the centuries, at least as long as people had stories to tell, memories to draw from, and things to possess that related to those memories, both pleasant and unpleasant.
A couple of essays with that title appeared as early as 1893 and 1917.[1] But of course, monks of all sorts, Daoist and Zen and Christian, have examined the idea long before that. Monks are home-leavers, mistrustful of possessions, things that tie them down to this world and its heavy burden of responsibilities.
For those of us who can’t cast off these responsibilities so easily, we continue to be entangled in the world of things. Trapped, like Monkey from the great Chinese folk novel, The Journey to the West. Sun Wukong, whose name means Monkey Awakened to Emptiness, isentombed in the side of a mountain before he is released to accompany the Buddhist monk Xuanzang on his trip to the Buddhaland to retrieve the Tripitaka, the three baskets of Mahayana teachings, including the Heart Sutra, with its essential message of emptiness.[2]
I am reminded of the opening of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer. The narrator declares: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” It is not just monks who feel the freedom of nothing left to lose.
When we come to zazen, we experience the nonattachment of not being enslaved by things. The rest of the time our possessions own us far more than we own them.
Robert began to detach from things long before he was detached from life itself. Until he discovered Zen, or Zen discovered him, when he was living on hedonistic Capri, he was awash in the world of samsara, living the high life in Europe. Thus the first half of his life was all about experiencing things, if not acquiring them; the second half was all about casting them off. But life itself, this mortal coil, is the last of those things to be cast off, and not easily. As he used to tell us, don’t worry about nirvana, you will reach it soon enough. Nirvana: the ultimate nonattachment.
The book I am writing, which I am calling a “biographical memoir,” is Robert’s biography but also my memoir of my time with him. It is called Great Abandonment. Robert’s life was a series of abandonments: being abandoned by others like his parents, and abandoning people and places, wives and children, places and things. My life has been similar in that way. So was the Buddha’s. So are all our lives, whether we know it or not.
And yet complete abandonment is impossible because we are all beset by the tyranny of things.
This week I am in the process of dealing with a situation that is similar to the closing years of Robert’s life. A relative is in memory care and I have been helping to dispose of their things, the physical objects of memory, the souvenirs, the detritus of a life lived for over eighty years.
This is a process that all of us and our things will undergo in some way or another. Whether we die suddenly, when others will have to dispose of our things. Or whether there is a slower and more painful process of detachment.
Zazen allows us to face this reality, even as we remain entangled in it.
On the drive here from Tennessee my wife read to me a book called Altered Traits,[3] an overview of the science of the effects of meditation. This morning she cited an experiment in which longtime Zen practitioners were proven to have a significantly increased endurance to pain.
Anyone who has sat in sesshin with the karma of their knees and back knows this. Anyone who sat with Robert and heard his kyosaku-like “Don’t move!” might think that he did not want to be disturbed by your fidgeting; but really he was saying, “Endure!” Learn how to endure the discomfort and learn from the endurance that the pain is just your reaction and interpretation of that discomfort.
But the scientists determined something of greater interest. This increased ability to endure pain was not just a result of the “altered state” during zazen, but it became an “altered trait” thanks to long-term practice.
This is what short-term practitioners do not appreciate. It takes time for the lessons of our bodies and minds to set in. Those who look for short-term results are also those who continue to experience discomfort as pain, responsibilities as impositions, and reality as a personal affront.
When we come to zazen, we climb into our coffins, where pain is just a thing of the living. When we leave zazen we climb out of our coffin, and we realize that living is the field of our practice. We return to our discomfort, our responsibilities, and our reality but with a new equanimity, where our awakening to emptiness allows us to see that poverty, the absence of things and the absence of hope, become the field of our freedom.
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[1] These two essays, by Elizabeth Morris and by Edward Sanford Martin, can be accessed online in Quotidiana: https://essays.quotidiana.org/.
[2] There are many translations, mostly abridged versions, of this classic, including those by Arthur Waley and Anthony C. Yu, but the best and most complete version is that by W. J. F, Jenner published by Foreign Language Press in Beijing.
[3] Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your MInd, Brain, and Body (New York: Avery, 2018).
