Spring Notes

Spring brings the return of grounds caretaking days as noted on the calendar. These are a great chance to spend an hour or two after Sunday sitting to help rake, plant, weed or do anything else that needs doing in the Center’s gardens. You don’t need to be an expert—just bring some work clothes. Ask Laurel Ross if you have any questions.

In May, the Center will hold the annual sangha meeting and election. As is true every year, two Trustee positions expire: Laurel Ross has served for two consecutive terms and is not eligible for election to the Board for a year; Fran Spellman is eligible for reelection. Information will be emailed soon on how members can download a ballot. (Ballots will also be available at the Center.) Please take the time to vote.

Vesak and Jukai are also in May. Rakusus are available to anyone who has been a member for at least a year and has gone through a formal student ceremony with Sensei. The rakusu ceremony happens at Jukai and they must be sewn, so please inquire soon if interested. For Vesak, we will have fun and games and a great potluck as always.

The Cedar Rapids Zen Center and the Milwaukee Zen Center are collaborating to offer a joint sesshin for sanghas around the Midwest at Hokyoji in southern Minnesota from August 20-27, 2005. Teachers will include Sevan Sensei, Genymo Smith of Prairie Zen Center, Rosen Yoshida of Missouri Zen Center, Dokai Georgeson of Hoyoji, Tonen O’Connor of Milwaukee Zen Center and Zuiko Redding of Cedar Rapids Zen Center. Each will give dharma talks and do daily practice with sesshin participants. Further details will be available late in the spring. CZC members should feel free to apply—please speak to Sensei first.

Coming to the Path

As we go along now, starting with this summer, there will occasionally be talks given in place of teisho called "Coming to the Path" talks. These talks will be given in the Buddha Hall after the usual Sunday sitting and chanting. Each talk will be given by individual Sangha members asked by Sensei to do so, with the talk being centered on how the speaker came to practice Zen, along with the problems and insights encountered along the way. These talks have been given for years at the Rochester Zen Center and have proved to be inspirational to both the Sangha and the speaker alike. The talks will close with a short Q & A period.

20,000 Ways Not To Play The Han

by Zoe Kaufman

All of the names have been changed to protect those who wish to remain anonymous.

One day, just before an evening sitting, Sensei marches up to me and says, “From now on you are the Han Player. Simon will show you how.” Sensei turns around and marches away “But, Sensei,” I call out to his retreating figure, “I don’t want to play the Han.” It’s true I want to know HOW to play the Han, but I do not want to actually PLAY the Han. Not for a real sitting. I’m shy. And I hate performing. Besides, sitting is already hard enough. But it’s too late. Sensei is gone.

“Well,” I console myself, “how hard can it be? It’s just a hammer and a block of wood.” After all, I’m not altogether unmusical. At times in my life I have mastered Bach partitas, Chopin preludes and Beethoven sonatas. I have learned to cantillate ancient Hebrew according to Rabbinic trope. I guess I can hit a piece of wood with a stick.

After the sitting Simon explains the Han ‘riff’: One loud strike, two soft. Then, one loud, one soft; one loud, one soft. Repeat several times. End with two soft, one loud. “Piece of cake,” I say, immediately forgetting everything Simon has just told me. Was it loud soft soft or loud loud soft? “No,” says Simon, who patiently explains the riff again. “Play as loud as you can. Make the soft an echo. Then pause.” How long is the pause? “Count all the states between Mexico and New England,” says Simon.

Count all the states? I don’t even know the states next to MY state. “Does it have to be states?” I ask.

I try it again. Simon is kind enough not to overtly humiliate me, but my louds are not loud and my softs are not soft. Perplexed, I look at the mallet. “Hold the mallet loosely,” says Simon. “Hold it farther down the handle.”

I try again. Now the louds are soft and the softs are inaudible. “Practice!” says Simon.

At home, my husband is bewildered by the sounds of hammering coming from the kitchen chopping board. But practice is useless. A chopping board and a hammer are not after all the same as a Han. There is something about a Han.

One day I arrive at the Center and am astounded to learn that I am playing the Han for TONIGHT’S SITTING. “Me?” I ask Simon in true bewilderment. I say I’m not ready. Simon is sympathetic but there’s no way out. I run through the other chores of the Han player: I check the house. I make sure no one is arriving late and that the front door is locked. I turn off the phones. I arrive in the Zendo, stand at the Han and wait for the signal from the monitor.

“Loud soft soft” I remind myself. I strike the Han. That was too soft. I strike again. Too loud. I strike again. Not enough pause. “Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois. And Kentucky,” I add. No, that’s too far south. I decide to forget about counting states.

I am now officially the Han player every time I come to an evening sitting, which is at least once, sometimes twice a week. Months go by. I have played the Han perhaps 50 times, and every time I have found a different way to play it wrong. The complexity of the thing is baffling. The variations in its sound are endless and there is no discernible way to control it.

I am assigned to play the Han for a six day sesshin. In sesshin the Han is played several times a day, so by the third morning the mallet feels more friendly in my hand. I strike the Han. That’s IT. At last, mastery!

But during kinhin, Winston, the monitor, draws me aside and whispers, “You are playing the Han TOO LOUD.” I am shocked. Did Winston not hear my confident, round, and resonant Han strokes in the morning sitting? I am bewildered. I resolve to play the Han more softly.

I finish sesshin, and resume my normal duties playing the Han for evening sittings. Each time I play the Han I renew my resolve. My softs will be exquisite and almost inaudible. My pauses will luxuriate, my rhythm will be smooth and even. And my louds will not be loud! But the Han is my foe. It stares at me with its smooth, simple surface as I continue to find new, incorrect ways to play it. One night Simon takes me aside. “Zoe,” he says, “You are playing the Han too softly.” What?!!? “Hit it hard!”he says. “Louds should be loud. Softs should be soft.”

Loud louds, I say. Soft softs.

I go back to playing loudly but now my softs are wildly unpredictable. Some are soft, it’s true, but some are medium and some are loud. I am horrified at my incapacity. A year has gone by and I can’t hit a piece of wood with a hammer correctly three times in a row. I would like to walk away from it, but I’ve been in Zen long enough to know there’s no way out. This Playing Of The Han is my existential predicament. I am the Han Player. I have to play the Han.

More months go by and I am again standing at the Han. “This time I’m gonna do it right!” I resolve. I strike the Han. Once, twice, three times. Loud, soft soft. “Wow, that’s it!” My louds are loud and my softs are soft. I am exultant.

After the sitting, Winston, who is in attendance, takes me aside. “Zoe, you are playing the Han too loud,” he says. “Play it SOFTLY.” “GRRRR,” I say to myself.

Now fear grips me every time I face the Han. There are a limitless number of ways to play this thing wrong, I realize, as I confront it again. It is the first day of another long sesshin. I play the first loud. Too soft. I play the two softs. Too loud. And uneven. And too fast.

The next time I am at the Han I jump when the mallet is suddenly snatched from my hand. I whirl around and see Sensei standing with the mallet in his hand and a gleam in his eye. I take my seat and listen carefully.

Loud soft soft, says the Han. Loud soft. Loud soft. Soft soft loud. “Oh,” I say. Because no one plays the Han louder than Sensei. Wham. Echo. Gorgeous. Very, very loud. Very loud. I resolve to ignore Winston and play like Sensei at the very next opportunity.

Soon enough I am at the Han again. "Play like Sensei," I say to myself. I hit the Han. LOUD, soft soft. Zen IN ACTION. Wham. Echo. Gorgeous!!

After the sitting Sensei takes me aside. “Zoe,” he says. “You are playing the Han too loud.” Now my head is spinning and I am speechless. I am about to argue with him, but instead I remain silent. I recognize this spinning feeling, this utter bewilderment, and I know simply that I do not know and that I will never understand.

I continue to play the Han. More weeks go by, and months. I wonder why in the world Sensei chose ME to be the Han player. I play the Han both too loud and too soft. My playing is both sluggish and too fast; my repetitions both too many and not enough, my pauses both too short and too long. I hold the mallet too tight and too loose, too high up on the handle and too low. When I finish playing I walk to my seat both too slowly and too fast, and too loudly. (And, I forget to turn the phone off as well as on.) I decide I have flunked out at this very, very complex thing, this piece of wood and a stick. I am sure I am the worst Han player since the Patriarch crossed the China sea.

Every once in a while Winston takes me aside and tells me to play softer. Simon tells me to play louder. We now have a new Chant Leader, who tells me to lengthen my pauses. He then demonstrates by playing very short pauses.

And so time passes.

One day when I arrive at the Zendo, Sensei says to me, “I’ll play the Han today.” He takes the mallet and plays the Han. On this day, I hear. This is how Sensei plays the Han: First he plays the Han. Then he stops. Then he sits down.

It’s true there are an infinite number of wrong ways to play the Han. But now that I have heard, I know: there IS one right way to play the Han. This is how you do it:

First play the Han. Then when you are done, stop. Then, sit down.

How complicated can it be?

The Tension is Normal

by Sevan Sensei

Doubt: (O.E.D.) Uncertainty as to the truth or the reality of something, or as to the wisdom of a course of action; occasion or room for uncertainty; be undecided in opinion or belief.

I had studied all the right chess openings. I was confident. I had the twelve common openings down and I could follow almost all of these through the first ten moves or so. This had taken all summer. My marriage was questionable, my job a mess, but I could play chess now. At least through the opening. After that? What, me worry? I would think of something!

The tournament begins. My opponent hits his clock, thus starting mine, and the pressure’s on. I open with pawn to king 4, a classic; he does the same, also classic. I move up my next pawn with confidence, within range of his. OH NO!! It can’t be!! I’ve moved up the wrong pawn!! He will simply take it and proceed to wipe the board! Move after move I will shrink into a defeated and cornered insurgency, my king finally waving the white flag; and then over coffee, as we review the game ( a tradition here at the USCF club), he will explain in a fatherly way how that move was my blunder, as if I didn’t know. My heart sinks. All that memorization gone to waste. A summer burned looking at a chess set, and now for what -- so that I could be laughed off the board after three moves?

But he didn’t take the pawn. He didn’t make any other move either. He sat there. He sat there and stared at that move for a very long time. I watched his clock (we each having 30 min. on our respective clocks to complete all our moves -- one can easily lose by running out of time). Five minutes went by. Ten. I had a long conversation with him without saying a word (no talking allowed once the clocks start). “You idiot --Take the pawn!! This was just a mistake. I moved the wrong piece. A chess Freudian slip. I said to myself not to move that pawn out and then I went right ahead and did it! I’m the idiot!! . . .” At fifteen minutes, I realized that he was stumped. He thought I had a plan which I did not have. Maybe I would win on time (his clock running down). Wow!

And then he took the pawn, and he used no more than three more minutes of his allotted time for the rest of the moves he needed to crush me. Over coffee near the vending machines, as I started to set up the chess board so we could do the normal post mortem, he stopped me, saying we didn’t need to do that. He leaned into me across the snack table and said only one thing about the game, one piece of advice from a 50 year old chess veteran to a young man just starting out. And that one thing changed my life. He said this: “The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.”

This is great chess advice. It really is. Chess is all about living with, and even seeking to increase, the tension on the board. And so it is with many things, things far more important than chess. Take, for example, our work on the mat. The tension we refer to here is simply the most visible form of our natural doubt. We shouldn’t differentiate between “small doubt” and “Great Doubt” so quickly. While it is true that one is wrapped around the conduct and preservation of the Self as we have come to accept that entity, still and all, Great Doubt has as its root the psychological and fundamental doubts about this Self too. Who among us has not gotten into the world of Zen practice partly motivated by our doubts about our day-to-day selves, and how we have come to conduct ourselves in the world? Many, if not most, of us come to Zen with only the most vague grip on Great Doubt -- the large questions loom indeed, but they are occluded by the lesser ones.

We start out with something like, “Will I win this chess game?” (Read, get married, get a promotion, get over my anxieties, etc.) But after following the breath a while, (Read, SLOW DOWN!!) and after hanging around the better chess players, (Read, interacting with senior students of Zen, including the Teacher) we allow that the win/lose level doubt may have a deeper sister doubt, and this may be something like, “What am I, win or lose?”

After enough sesshin and sittings pass, after enough slowing and clearing and interacting with real practitioners, after we quiet, our unshaped fundamental doubt arises. At this level, words will not do, and even “Great Doubt” falls short. Instead of losing at chess, or at home, or on the job, we discover the chasm of the loss of ALL. And this fundamental questioning allows for absolutely zero assumptions. Here we enter the land of no labels, no definitions, no assumptions. Everything is unsafe.

And our instinct is to run away. We twist and turn to re-establish Self. We will take any Self we can find, and this may be the cause of those truly deep and abiding makyo found later in sesshin. Many of can attest to the “bouncing” action of going deep into the practice, only to hit a wall of doubt that is so impregnable that we are repelled back to our sets of assumptions. And this process may happen so many times that it becomes all but habit, and acquires a vague familiarity about it. Again and again we hit our wall of doubt, and again and again we flee back to the “known.”

But what of my chess opponent’s advice? Can we simply accept the tension of doubt as part of the spiritual quest? The landscape of spiritual inquiry is indeed simply made out of doubt, so we should expect to truck in tension all the way down. Fear, worry, anxiety -- all symptoms of doubt both great and small -- litter the inner landscape of the quest like so many rocks and boulders. So why not train ourselves to accept these conditions? Why not council ourselves to be ready for the tension, to accept it, and to even use it?

“Use your doubt to shape your actions” does not mean allowing doubt to rule one as a king does a subject. It means that we need to pick up those very rocks and boulders of the anxiety field and throw them at the wall of doubt before us. How does one actually do such a thing? Concentrate. Question. Examine. Get curious. Doubt and tension can quickly be converted, as it were, into inquiry itself. They are made of the same stuff, but only look different. Once one is truly engaged in deep inquiry, one discovers that the lack of definition and solidness of assumption becomes the very vehicle of practice, and that it is not to be feared or escaped, but sought.

“The secret is using your doubt to shape your actions. Learn to live with the tension. The tension is normal, and release of tension is only momentary.” Indeed.