Doing Jail Time

If any of you ever ask me, "where were you on Thursday night?" I would say, in a half joking voice, "in jail." But it's no joke and the jail is the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center, where children younger than 17 are held after arrest for possible felonies and misdemeanors. I go in once a week for two hours as a volunteer for what is a listening ministry. This is where the orderly Mary Jeanne comes up against the chaos of juvenile life, mostly from the most impoverished and dangerous places and situations in Chicago. These children learn they are in jail because they have made choices. And I am there because I also made a choice.

I had been teaching a course at DePaul University that we call a community-based service learning course, for which students need to do 25 hours of service with a community organization. After several years sending students out for service, I began to sense a slight oddity in my teaching this course--I did not myself do any direct service in community organizations. So I began thinking (note the word 'thinking') about what kinds of service opportunity I might like--tutoring immigrants for the citizenship test or others for literacy, since both situations would fit my hope to open up opportunity for others. Fate did me a turn, however, and I ended up walking into jail one day to work with kids of an age I had wished to avoid my entire life. I met Fr. Dave Kelly from the Precious Blood Center for Reconciliation at a presentation inviting volunteers to work with incarcerated youth, mostly from the south side. I did not refuse the invitation. At first I could work only with the boys, but after a few years I also began talking as well with the girls.

This is an odd ministry in many ways: I usually have no idea if I have any effect on the kids. As many volunteers experience, they might see a kid for a couple weeks and feel a connection developing and then the kid disappears back to their lives. We see how much is not in our control--or not in anyone's control--even though it should be. But these are lessons we can learn in any situation new to us, especially in those places and with people unfamiliar to us. These times and places bring us to the edge of our practice, remind us of the need for our practice, send us screaming back to our practice. And this is not because we want just to bury ourselves again in the quiet peacefulness we might find there, but because our practice needs to be there at those edges of life, edges of growth, edges that help erode our small ego's desire to hold on, to be in control.

So my challenge to you is this: find a service opportunity. Just anything will do at first-as long as it will take you even one small, seemingly insignificant step out of your routine, your usual round of activities. In your decision to do Zen practice, you have already taken a step out of the routine our society expects. So now take your practice to the streets, as it were. No one is too busy to find a service opportunity, for example, perhaps only one two-hour period here and another in say 3 months. Some will be ready to check something out and commit to one time a week for so many weeks. And guess what I found in the 12/26 Sun-Times: web sites for volunteer opportunities. So you have no excuse! The Sun-Times has the full list, but just try these: Chicago Cares, Volunteer Match, Idealist, Chicago Volunteer, Nonprofit job board, Youth Outreach Services. If you live outside Chicago, google for voluteering in your community. So get out there, give yourself to the moment, and be grateful if it feels good; in any case your practice will never be the same again.

Mary Jeanne Larrabee

Right Livelihood and paying people what’s right

When I was a boy and asked my coal miner father one time too many for money, he got me a job as a "myrtle plugger." I sat all day in a field of ground cover with a special tool and "plugged" one plant at a time from the ground into a "flat" -- a large wooden box. Each plant took up a four-square-inch space. I saw immediately that I could fit between 50 and 60 plants into the box. Upon filling a flat I was to take it to the Yard Boss who was to "count" it and give me a fresh one to fill. I was to be paid five cents per flat. This was child labor, and it was in the early 1960s in Pennsylvania.

When I took up my first flat, the Yard Boss reached into the box and used his hand to squeeze my plants together to one side. They now filled 40 percent of the flat. He smiled, winked, grunted, and handed it back to me.

This was wage theft, and although I was only 10 years old, I knew it. I quit that "job" at the end of my first week. My father simply said, "Now you know what a union is for."

I was too young to understand what my father meant, but I was developed enough to see that the yard boss did not see me as human in some important way. He regarded me as the "other" -- as a tool like any other tool, to be used as needed for as long I held up to his purpose.

Many years later I heard a talk given during my priest training in which Yasutani Roshi, a well-known Japanese Zen Master, said these words: "The fundamental problem for all humanity is that you believe that you are there and I am here." This sums up how Buddhism casts a critical eye on the behavior of people -- especially in commercial enterprises.

As long as we regard each other not as humans but as the "other," we will suffer profound abuses in the workplace. Employers will steal their workers' wages, either overtly or covertly. And all the while they will deny both to themselves and others that this is the case. After all, they are only employees. I -- or we -- happen to be management, and as such are responsible for the survival and the thriving of the organization. Except that the workers are the organization and a theft against them is one against the group -- and me too.

I'm sure that the Yard Boss was being stolen from in some way by his betters back in that myrtle field. He could not have invented the workplace abuse of a child all on his own. I'll bet it went all the way to the top. After all, what happens at the top flows directly to the bottom in organizations. If "the other" is how we see individuals, we will guarantee they will see us this way also.

So from a Buddhist perspective it is not quite enough to say that we each are our brother's keeper. We need to feel instead that we actually are our brother. And from this, fair treatment flows naturally. There is then what we Buddhists call Right Livelihood -- mutually productive work, with everyone being treated fairly, everyone being treated Right.

Sevan Sensei

Originally published on The Rag Blog.

The Theory, Practice, and Experimentation of Zen

Imagine this scenario. A student enters the dokusan room, bows, and sits. The teacher challenges him to explain mu. The student knows intellectually that the teacher is just trying to point him in the right direction, but he can't hear the instruction. It's as if the teacher has something to say but the student can't hear it because he's not even in the room to receive the message. He's in another room, someplace that won't really help...the correct room has a door with a lock only the student can open, but the one thing the teacher can't do is give him the key to open the door. The student has the key already -- he's figured that much out -- and he knows where the door is, and even where the lock is, but he just can't get the key turning in the lock. He's done some experimentation, he understands the theory, but he's having trouble putting it into practice.

These three concepts, experimentation, theory, and practice, form one of the "triangle relationships" that software engineers love to play with. The most famous triangle relationship is between budget, quality, and time, and implies that you can have any two of these at the expense of the third (...you can have your project built on time and within budget but it's not going to be built very well...or, you can have a high quality product but it's either going to be expensive or time-consuming to build). Another famous triangle is between speed, size, and complexity. The experiment/theory/practice triangle is all about problem-solving. It implies that for any sufficiently complicated problem, you can skimp on one of these but you'll end up having to spend more time and energy doing the other two in order to become proficient at solving the problem at hand. For example, you can skip learning the methods and techniques for a particular domain (its "practice") but you're going to end up spending a lot of time experimenting and researching its theory - in effect, inventing the practice as you go along. This effect plagues the software world, partly because it is such a new field that its practices are still being invented, but mainly because developers never get enough time to learn and internalize new practices before they have to use them to build something. This also happens sometimes in upper-level college courses, where time for practicing methods is sacrificed in order to crunch more theory into less class time...the result is that students end up doing copious amounts of self-directed experimentation just to get the homework done.

At one point I was pretty certain that the "practice" of Zen is...well, what we do in the zendo: sitting and meditating. Theory, of course, comes from the sutras and the teishos we attend, as well as discussions in the dokusan room. But what about experimentation? It comes from what we do in the outside world, right? We experiment when we observe the paramitas in the wild or try to follow them ourselves, when we strive to notice important connections in daily life, when we try meditating on the train or while we do daily tasks... right?

Well...no, not quite....

Vimalakirti, in the wonderful sutra that bears his name, demonstrates to us that the model I outlined a paragraph ago is upside down: practice -- real, true, honest practice -- is done in the real world, not in the zendo. Our practice is our implementation of the paramitas in day to day life, out in the wider world. It's our engagement with that world that leads us to important realizations...if we don't engage with the world, we can't have meaningful connections in the first place, so our insights won't turn into realizations. And yes, our practice is also "our practice": the act of managing our mind through meditative techniques. But it's only when it's done "in the wild" that these actions become practice -- when we do them in the Zen Center, we're really just experimenting with the practices. Yes: the work we do in the zendo is experimentation.

The Zen Center is our laboratory. It is a safe place to put theory into practice and test the results. Our robes have more in common with lab coats than they do with the fine raiment that a priest would traditionally wear. We study theory and we practice in the Zen Center too, but experiment is (or should be) our primary focus at the Zen Center. Without it we are dooming ourselves to hours upon hours of studying sutras and practicing without the benefit of safety nets -- like a sailor who decides to become a trapeze artist by reading a bunch of books and taking directly to the high wire. Sure, both professions use ropes, but our sailor is foolish if he thinks he can draw solely on past experience to tell him how to use the trapeze ropes properly. And also, by confusing the role of the zendo and the role of worldly experience, we end up deferring real practice, waiting for what our minds are doing in the zendo to "stabilize" or "mature" (hint: it never will -- experimentation is like that...it's ever-changing, always shifting, never finished). The zendo isn't where we "practice" our practice, its where we experiment with how practice works...the real world is the proper place to put those lessons to work.

The ramification of this viewpoint is that it encourages us to try new things when we're sitting. If you find yourself "stuck" on a koan, or unable to follow your typical pattern for calming the mind, or you can't seem to find the energy to keep going, remind yourself that this brown robe you're wearing is a lab coat and this mat you're sitting on is a lab bench, and thus it's just fine to branch out and try something new. Remind yourself that trying new things is why you're there in the first place.

By the same token, this viewpoint also encourages us to not forget the theory. Teisho really isn't optional, nor are the sutras: we need to digest the theoretical information surrounding Zen, too. Just like the imbalances that occur in software engineering when one of the three sides of a triangle is ignored, our practice can suffer if we don't pay enough attention to the theory of Zen. It should be obvious by now that solely concentrating on the theory is just as imbalanced as ignoring it altogether: we need all three (experimentation in the zendo, practice in real life, and theory from the teachings) in order to have a solid Zen practice.

Gregg Cooke

Note from the Editor

Hello! I want to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Hugh, and I am the new editor of the Quarterly. You may not know me, because I live in Canada, so I am not around the Center as much as I would like.

I also want to reflect briefly on the function of the Quarterly. In some respects, it seems a bit at odds with the kinds of things that we normally do at the Zen Center. Most of our practice at the Center is involved in cultivating non-discursive mind. The articles in the Quarterly, on the other hand, are productions of discursive mind; they are more like talking than like sitting quietly.

Also, when talking happens at the Center, it is often done by people who are specially authorized: Sensei, in particular, but at various times also monitors, cooks, housekeepers, and so forth. Again, the Quarterly is a bit different, since it is an opportunity for any member of the Sangha to have a say.

Hopefully, these ways in which the Quarterly is different from what we usually do, give it some potential to be useful in its own way. I mean, in particular, that writing for the Quarterly needn't sound like a teisho or like a koan demonstration. Writing in the Quarterly should probably seem pretty ordinary -- much like a conversation with other Sangha members after an evening sitting.

Above, I mentioned the distinction between discursive and non-discursive mind. Of course, that kind of distinction is not really solid. Fundamentally, our mind is neither discursive nor non-discursive. It would be impossible to throw away language and speech, even if we decided that that would be a good idea. That being the case, it seems that it could be valuable to provide an opportunity for people to share aspects of their thoughts related to practice.

That, then, is the perspective I have on what the Quarterly is here for, but I'm also open to other approaches. In the end, the Quarterly is a manifestation of Sangha, "its wisdom, example, and never-failing help". Please consider how we can encourage the Quarterly to develop in a beneficial way. If you have suggestions (an article you would like to write, an article you would like someone else to write, some other kind of thing which you would like to see in the Quarterly, a change of format which you think would help), please get in touch. My email address is hugh@math.unb.ca

Hugh Thomas