Sunday, October 01, 2006

Autumn Notes

International Day of Peace

The International Day of Peace, September 21, was commemorated with a special ceremony in the Buddha Hall. Sensei selected three letters from soldiers and sailors in World War II and Vietnam to be read as part of the ceremony. One of them was from Corporal Harry Towne to his mother. Corporal Towne was wounded four days after the American flag was raised on Iwo Jima’s Mount Surabachi. He was one of 28,000 US casualties of the battle, March 19, 1945. He wrote to re-assure this mother that he would soon "be in almost as good shape as before now that they have these new artificial limbs. Yes, Mother, I have lost my right leg, but it isn’t worrying me a bit. I shall receive a pension for the rest of my life and with the new artificial limb, you can hardly tell anything is wrong."

After the letters were read Sthaman led the Sangha in the following prayer:

I will keep in mind
the horrors of war.

I will not be fooled
by talk of glory.

I will see the victims.
I will see the suffering.
I will see the way.
I will see myself walk the way.

May all creatures find peace.

The International Day of Peace was created by United Nations resolution in 1981. Our Center is one of 1900 organizations in 190 countries that has signed the "Peace Pledge" agreeing to help raise awareness of this day and its goals. Our ceremony on September 21 was one of the 2500 events that day that took place across 179 countries in honor of this pledge. More information can be found here.

The letters were selected from a collection entitled "Letters of the Century", edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler. Copies are available in the ZC library.

More Pierogies, Please

Cynthia Stone recently proposed the idea of a Sangha recipe book, and has volunteered to assemble it. Recipes can be given or e-mailed to Cynthia or to Kasia at the Center.

Summer Reading, Some Are Not

There's a very cool secret button that lives at the bottom of our blog. It's called a Site Meter. If you'd clicked on it September 25, you'd have seen something pretty amazing. The July issue of the blog has had 491 visits since it was posted, averaging six visits a day and a total of about 1,076 page views. (The Bulletin Board has also been doing well, and thanks are in order to Jeff Berger for first locating this tool and incorporating it into the BB.)

We're impressed. We think this means that we are gradually being weaned off of paper and onto the web, allowing us to — for instance — "publish" Kasia's luscious photos of our garden in full and glorious color as well as share those photos with the Sangha. It allows us to expand our reach and enrich our content graphically in ways only the most costly full color magazines can even dream of. There is a PDF version available for printing text (no graphics) of this issue, for those who still crave paper or have difficulty reading things on a screen, but for the most part, we think the blog has increased readership and interest. And that beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick any day. We are, as always, interested in hearing your opinions, comments or gripes.

Sit well,
J&J

Bodhisattva on the Dashboard… or What I really learned about Zen practice in Viet Nam

by Barth Wright

Kristin and I study monkeys, and Viet Nam is host to some of the most endangered of the bunch. Many of them eat primarily leaves and are truly extraordinary looking. If you google “douc langur” you’ll see what I mean. Given our distance from the CZC I thought that along with being scientifically valuable, a trip to Viet Nam – ideally a Buddhist country – would help me gain greater focus and insight, and I think this may turn out to be the case, but not in the way I expected.

For some initial background, upon returning from our first trip to Viet Nam I sat down to write an article for the CZC newsletter. Wanting to make it as uplifting as possible, I began to put together a tale concerning the little Kwan Yin figures that one often sees in cabs in and around Hanoi. I wanted to share with the Sangha the way in which the bodhisattvic ideal permeates the country, even though on the surface it appears to be just as delusional as any other place. After revisiting this draft, and after two more trips to Hanoi and outlying provinces, I think I have a clearer view of what was really gained from visiting and developing friendships in Viet Nam.

What I’ve come to realize is the fact that these little figures act much like the Jesus on the dashboard of cars in the United States. They are good luck charms. Much like rubbing the belly of a Hotai, these figures are thought to provide protection and prosperity. While they may do this to some degree, they became emblematic of what Buddhism is in Buddhist countries and what it has the potential to be in the West. Buddhism to many of the young scientists that we know is “what your parents do”. To many of these young people the temples are stagnant. They are places where the older generation goes to ask forgiveness and gain entry to paradise when they pass on.

I must add that I did not meet any monks and only went to one temple in an outlying province. I saw monks at the few vegetarian restaurants and though compelled to ask them about their practice, my greater desire to hide my beliefs from my young colleagues kept me from interacting with them. I am sure there are monks and masters in Viet Nam with great insight, but I’m sure there are others that have fallen into the same trap that many Theravadan monks in Thailand and Sri Lanka have fallen into. They are carried along by a deeply engrained cultural tradition and, finding themselves supported by the local populous, “hang out” with no real desire for enlightenment.

So what is it about these trips that has helped my practice? First, I see the opportunity that Zen has in the West. There is no cultural precedent that we must follow, save some of the helpful cultural forms that we bring from Japan, China, and Korea, and from both the Soto and Rinzai sects. In fact, as Harada Roshi, Yasutani Roshi and Kapleau Roshi realized, these forms can be mixed to the greater benefit of the practitioner, particularly in the West where no prior forms existed. I have also come to realize that, at least for me, hiding my practice is an enormous detriment. Admittedly, there are times when a person should not wear their religion on their sleeve, but there are also times when rather than running from our beliefs we must reveal them. It is easier to hide one’s practice as a lay practitioner. The ordained carry certain symbols of their practice everywhere, and I envy this in many ways. I have also learned how amazingly helpful it is to be around like-minded people. True Zen practitioners, even true Buddhist practitioners, are few and far between, not only in the West, but everywhere throughout the world. To be able to talk openly about the way we view the world with other people that view the world the same way cannot be underestimated. I remember Sevan Sensei speaking of a time when Kapleau Roshi broke into tears reflecting on the opportunity to be around like-minded people.

So will I take these lessons to heart? I sure hope so. I’m still working and when I sit, I sit with all of you at the CZC. This one still gets me on the mat…

“This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land,
And this very body, the body of Buddha”

With nine prostrations to all of you,
Barth

The Clause

This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,
this wedge of want my mind calls self,
this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,
keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state
from which ambiguity would be banished, uncertainty expunged;

this implement my mind and self imagine they might make together,
which would have everything accessible to it,
all our doings and undoings all at once before it,
so it would have at last the right to bless, or blame,
for without everything before you, all at once, how bless, how blame?

this capacity imagination, self and mind conceive might be the "soul,"
which would be able to regard such matters as creation and
destruction,
origin and extinction, of species, peoples, even families, even mine,
of equal consequence, and might finally solve the quandary
of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;

these layers, these divisions, these meanings or the lack thereof,
these fissures and abysses beside which I stumble, over which I reel:
is the place, the space, they constitute,
which I never satisfactorily experience but from which the fear
I might be torn away appalls me, me, or what might most be me?

Even mine, I say, as if I might ever believe such a thing;
bless and blame, I say, as though I could ever not.
This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,
this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,
is this where I'm meant to end, exactly where I started out?

-by C.K. Williams from The Singing.
© Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Permission to reprint has been requested.

Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain

by Jody Wilson

Consciousness is a slippery slope, especially when you’re wired into a heart monitor, wearing an oxygen mask, dealing with a drain inserted in your pleural cavity and arguing with your husband about using the on demand intravenous morphine drip.

“I’m fine,” I insist inanely, hoping to be heard through the oxygen mask. Translation: “I am terrified that if I use the morphine and go to sleep, I will die. I will die in a drugged stupor, unconscious, without realization. I will die a bad death, without courage or hope. Please don’t let me die that way.”

“You’ve got to get some rest,” Bob replies with the same steely eyed reasonability he’s been facing me down with for hours. Translation: “You will not die today. Let go with trust. There’s no need to struggle now. You need to sleep so you can live. Please live.”

My sons aren’t constrained to treat me as an equal or take me seriously and if they can hear the subtext, they choose to ignore it. They jam my headphones on my head, crank up “Abbey Road” and take turns hitting the morphine button every 15 minutes. It’s fun to turn Mom on.

It’s less than 24 hours after undergoing a partial left lung lobectomy. The inferior lobe contained a malignant tumor the size of a tangerine. A couple of dodgy looking lymph nodes in the media steinum were also excised and the surgeon was “pretty sure” he got them all. The diagnosis is non-small cell lung cancer, 3-A on the scale of cancer nightmares. The worst is four. The five year survival rate is 15% — eight out of ten people will die of the disease within five years. But, if I am one of the statistical two that survive, the odds of my dying of any type of cancer come back in line with the general population or 200 in 100,000. On July 8, 2000, I am counting down day one with, I hope, about 1,815 to go.

I will say right now that I am culpable. I smoked my first cigarette when I was 15 and my last two months before I was diagnosed. I quit nine times, once for 18 months. And I knew I was a first-class risk; in 1980 I had a super fast growing malignant tumor removed from under my left arm. I am responsible for my own actions, not the tobacco companies, and I suffer the consequences. Karma is, inexorably, karma. All of our actions cause suffering, some more than others. Why do people repeatedly act against their own self-interests? How can you/I/he/she/they drink/smoke/drug/eat/sleep/shop/fill in the blank to excess when all the evidence — especially the evidence of our direct experience — informs us that our behavior is harming ourselves and others? All my ancient twisted karma, stemming from greed, anger and ignorance, arising from body, speech and mind, I now fully repent. No one escapes.

I was not practicing Zen when I was diagnosed. I was, however, an experienced practitioner of the Zen of Reading All the Books about Zen and, I modestly admit, a pretty adept spiritual materialist. I began this practice at 12, just a year after Dharma Bums was published. At 24 I read Be Here Now, and later that decade The Three Pillars of Zen and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. At 30 I discovered Alan Watts. At 40, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

By 2000, I had visited Milarepa’s cave in Tibet, acquired a leaf from the cutting of “the” Bodhi tree at Wat Pho in Bangkok, and had spent the night at Lumbini. I’d attended a workshop at the Toronto Zen Centre, and had returned to that Centre to sit at other times. But the vibes weren’t welcoming and the energy at the Toronto Zen Centre in 1992 was unsettling. I didn’t stay. I had taken teachings from the Dalai Lama; hugged strangers at Unity churches; chanted at the Vedantist Society; “OM-ed” with a number of celebrity lamas and mamas; danced ecstatically at New Moon rituals, attended New Age “healings” and had otherwise been stumbling down the road to Inner Peace for some time. At 53, spiritual seeking had become my life and although I thought I was working hard to find a “place to worship” as I described it, I’ve come to understand that the “seeking” was the main obstacle to finding. But there’s nothing like the diagnosis of a potentially terminal illness to focus the mind. I didn’t know it, but the seeking was pretty much over and the hard work had not yet begun.

On the third morning after surgery, the sun rose in my east facing hospital room. A nurse was with me, silently and patiently untangling the web of cords, tubes and wires from all the various drips, monitors and drains that ensnared me. As the light in the room deepened, every idea I had about religion, every fierce wish for total faith in a personal God, every cherished idea concerning the nature of things and all of my closely reasoned analysis of existence and being, dissolved. An Ojibwe saying quoted by Joko Beck — “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky” — rose like the sun in my newly minted mind. I spoke these words out loud. The nurse turned to me and smiled. “I thought you were asleep,” he said gently. “Not anymore.” He held my hand while I wept. His presence was witness, his silence a balm. The experience was completely full completely empty. I was discharged the next day, 48 hours before anyone had expected, borne by a great wind across an empty sky.

It’s well documented that people with cancer or other serious illnesses who cultivate and maintain a positive attitude live longer and have a better quality of life than those who don’t. This point-of-view is pervasive at every level of the experience. All hospital personnel from the head of surgery to the parking lot attendant encourage it. Support groups provide step-by-step instructions on how to achieve it. Family members and friends insist on it.

Emotions and thoughts are chemical. Negative thoughts weaken us. Positive thoughts and feelings strengthen and heal us. The goal is to “stop every negative thought and action in your environment whether you think it, say it, or are in the field of someone else who says or does something and replace it with a positive thought,” according to one source. “Positive affirmations can shrink tumors,” claims another. “You are the commander of YOUR body! Take charge and command your cells to be healthy. You do not have to accept and enable what's happening to them. You may command the cells in your body that are here to serve your Soul!”

Hallelujah! I could think my way out of this! I longed to believe that I was essentially in control and had ultimate power over the events that were coming downstream, including the very real possibility of a horrible death from a wasting disease. It would be a dream come true to force this nightmare into something I could manage and control. I wanted to wring it dry of every hint of uncertainty, ambivalence and ambiguity. Who doesn’t yearn for a future that is solid all the way through. Like baloney, no matter where you cut, it is the same, a completely consistent and predictable physical, emotional and mental package. No surprises.

But the Great Matter had whupped me upside the head good and proper. I now knew, without a doubt, that I was not enthroned, solitary and omnipotent, at the center of the universe. We may be the “captains of our fates and the masters of our souls” only under the most limited conditions — pink or blue, whole or skim, Coke or Pepsi. The notion that we have the power to command our cells to heal as if they were a pack of bad dogs is the seductive danger of New Age spirituality. It tempts us with a fantasy of unparalleled personal power, encourages us to use that power for our own self-interest, and ultimately affirms our unalienable right to get our own way. It’s true, isn’t it? What we call “positive” thinking is always in accord with our ego preferences — an abundance of wealth, health and happiness — while “negative” thinking always describes our aversions — financial insecurity, ill health and (the ultimate aversion) — death. That we can know what is ultimately good and ultimately bad and drive our lives towards the good and away from the bad is essentially ego inflation, a fantasy of God-like power. Besides, who really knows what’s good, what’s bad?

In ancient China, there was a poor farmer whose only valuable possession was a horse. One day, the horse ran away. A neighbor rushed over to commiserate. “That’s terrible! What a tragedy, a real misfortune.” The farmer answered, “Who knows what’s good, what’s bad?” The next day, the horse returned, leading a herd of wild horses into his corral. The neighbor hurried over to compliment the farmer on this unexpected windfall and his stunning good luck. “You’re a rich man now! What a great thing for you and your family!” The farmer answered, “Who knows what’s good, what’s bad?” The next day, the farmer’s only son, attempting to tame one of the wild horses, was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbor ran to comfort the farmer. “A disaster, certainly. Who will help you bring in the crops? Terrible!” The farmer answered, “Who knows what’s good, what’s bad?” The next day, the army marched through the village, conscripting all able bodied youths, but the farmer’s son was not taken because he had a broken leg. So the neighbor . . . well, you know the rest.

People with serious illnesses can become prisoners of positivism, captives of the either/or good/bad positive/negative mind state. I knew I didn’t want either/or. I hadn’t for some time. Now I was finding both/and to be unsatisfactory . What I was discovering was that the imperative is not to be positive, the imperative is to be present.

I was optimistic about the outcome, including — not in spite of — the very real possibility that I would die from this disease within five years. And while it is preferable and pleasant for us and the people around us for to be positive in these circumstances, in the end both Pollyanna and Scrooge are crippled equally.

My optimism was coming from a different place, a knowing that, regardless of my own particular and personal outcome, everything was, is now and will essentially be okay. A few years later under different circumstances, Sensei told me that Roshi Kapleau often said: “Don’t worry. You can’t fall out of the universe.” That is a near perfect expression of the knowing that I experienced. The optimism that sprung from this energy is what enabled me to be present for this experience, not from “positive” thinking.

When I took my first Jukai, I wrote this poem:

Bad thought. Good thought.
Just thought. No thought.
Ah!

But that was later. In the six months between diagnosis and the post surgery, post chemotherapy, post radiation benchmark CT scan, my job, as everyone kept reminding me, was to “beat this thing.”

The language of cancer (or any serious illness) is the language of war. We attack cancer and conquer it. We are urged to be strong in the fight against cancer. We are told that early detection is the best defense. There are cancer battle plans, aggressive strategies to kill cancer and an entire library of books with variations on the title, Fight Cancer and Win. An individual’s experience with the disease is often described as a “last stand” or “a desperate struggle.” Certain foods and supplements are described as “cancer-fighting” and nutrition, exercise and alternative therapies are “weapons.” There are victims and survivors. Survivors are courageous and brave. Some, like Lance Armstrong, are heroes. Some, like Dana Reeves, are martyrs.

The military vocabulary drove me nuts. I am a dove politically, non-violent socially and non-aggressive by design and desire. But I’m not a pacifist. Even now, as a practicing Buddhist, I will fight to defend others. Under certain circumstances — like this one — I will also fight to defend myself. But how do you fight your own cells? What was there to fight? Maybe the cancer cells that survived the surgeon’s knife (another weapon) were forming a fifth column in my body. Was I harboring the enemy? Or was I the enemy? Who fights? Who lives? Who dies? Now I see these questions as the seeds of koan practice. Then I was angry, disturbed and completely flummoxed (which, now that I think about it, was also my initial response to formal koan practice!)

My resistance ran so deep, that I did something completely out of character. I dropped the struggle and shut up. I nodded and smiled. I learned to tune out the clichés and listen to my own heart and mind. When I did, I understood one simple fact. The ground is falling away under our feet — ALL of our feet, ALL of the ground, ALL of the time. This was the only thing I was sure of as I embarked on a 28 day cycle of radiation therapy and one course (two cycles, administered through six infusions) of a chemotherapy blend of Taxol and carboplatin or TaxolCarbo.

Taxol is, basically, a natural botanical, an extract from the bark of the Pacific yew tree (Taxus brevifolia). The problem with using natural Taxol as an anti-cancer treatment is that it is unconscionable environmentally and off the charts in terms of cost: it takes between three and ten 100-year-old trees to treat just one patient. But luckily the needles and twigs of the European yew tree (Taxus Baccata) were found to contain a close relative to Taxol. As the trees quickly replenish the needles, harvesting large quantities has little effect on the population of yew trees. A semi-synthetic version of Taxol, Paclitaxel, was introduced in 1995. Still wildly expensive, of course, but sustainable and relatively practical.

An infusion of a semi-synthetic botanical, like a rare medicinal tea, perhaps, or a complex herbal cocktail, that doesn’t sound so bad, right? In fact, I was feeling pretty good about it, despite the short list of side effects — hair loss, loss of appetite, nausea, painful bones and muscles, numbness and tingling of limbs were the manageable minimum to expect. More serious things like internal bleeding, respiratory and/or gastrointestinal problems, mouth sores, fever and bone marrow depression were distinct possibilities.

The most fearsome item on this list of horrors is hair loss. Trust me. No woman who has ever faced chemotherapy will tell you otherwise. Remember the classic Jack Benny routine? Benny is held up at gunpoint. The robber says, “Your money or your life.” Long and delicious pause. The robber repeats his demand. Benny says, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“Your hair or your life,” says the oncologist, metaphorically. And one hesitates! The idea that I would lose my hair — which, frankly, I never liked anyway, it being always thin and limp and full of cowlicks — opened a floodgate. My tantrum was worthy of any two year old. There was nothing to say. I was inconsolable, my feelings of despair beyond words of comfort or reason. The next day, my husband shaved his head.

This singular act of compassion and loving kindness was and is the most marvelous thing anyone has ever done for me in this life, helping me immeasurably through what was to come. I began to catch a glimpse of what it might mean to simply hold up a flower, to simply see it, to simply smile. To be, fully and entirely, beyond words.

There are essential differences between pain and suffering. Pain is unavoidable — suffering is optional. Pain is what happens. Suffering is the story we tell ourselves about what’s happening. Or has happened. Or might happen. Pain is physical. Suffering is mental. In the chemotherapy room of the Strauss Oncology Center at Weiss Hospital the already thin wall separating physical pain from mental suffering is permeable to the point of transparency. And a mighty cheerful place it was, too.

Forbearance is an old virtue that has a bad rap. Often linked with patience, forbearance is a level or two deeper. Patience is something one exercises while in line at the supermarket or in traffic. Forbearance is more like a willingness to absorb pain with as much good humor, courtesy and self-lessness as one can muster. In fact, one of its dictionary definitions is “long-suffering.” The practice of forbearance is what made the experience of willingly poisoning oneself at regular intervals bearable. Even enjoyable. Without exception, every single person I encountered was cheerful, helpful, hopeful, open hearted and brave. It was a privilege to be there. I learned how to basically sit for hours in the presence of others on the same journey, uncomfortably pinioned to an intravenous drip, experiencing the benefits of stillness one moment and the resistance to it the next, breathing through it all, trying not to watch the clock and struggling to be with what is. I often flash on this experience in the few moments after a formal round of sitting in the zendo when we all rise for kinhin.

While chemotherapy had a group energy, radiation was a solitary experience. Perhaps because of that and because it meant a daily trip to the hospital, the worst of the two. It was here that I think I first faced the First Noble Truth. “Suffering, or unsatisfactoriness, is a condition of existence.” Not just my existence. It is neutral. If we take it personally, we’re doomed.

In January, 2001, I became a Buddhist. It happened during a regular appointment with the oncologist following the “benchmark” CT scan:
“There is a mass on your left lung. It’s probably scar tissue, completely consistent with your experience.”
“What?!”
“There is a mass on your left lung. We’re pretty sure it’s scar tissue.”
Pretty sure?! What does that mean?”
“Scar tissue looks like a mass on these scans.”
“My tumor looked like a mass on the scan.”
“Right.”
“RIGHT???!!!!”
“Right.”
“How do we know it’s not a tumor?”
“We compare scans. If the mass is larger next time, it’s probably a tumor. If it’s the same it’s probably scar tissue.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding. The mass could be either a tumor or scar tissue. We’re pretty sure it’s probably scar tissue.”
“When will we be certain?”
“Never.”

Picnic Pictures

The Sangha had its annual picnic in September, hosted this year by Cynthia. Here are some pictures from the event, contributed by Kasia. The bocce set was nowhere to be found this year, but we're hoping it resurfaces for 2007.