When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.

Rosanne Cash says she is not a Buddhist because she “kills ants and eats meat,” but what does she know? (Some of the most rigorous Buddhists I know eat meat from time to time.)

The most adventurous part of my adventure occurred before I ever got to the monastery, but I think that “bon voyage” must have helped, but the trip very nearly became the Zen Mountain Massacre. Fortunately, I was helped by a couple of bodhisattvas along the way and made it to the monastery in time to begin the retreat despite my GPS unit, usually very reliable, trying to take me down a road with a washed-out bridge. I had driven happily through the Adirondacks and down into the Catskills, avoiding the Northway (I-87), which would have been more direct. Around sundown I found myself in Lexington NY on a road that both the satellites and my new iPhone said would get me where I wanted to go. What neither of these smart devices knew was that floods last spring had washed out a bridge. The road ended in a barrier. As it turns out, Zen is all about barriers, but I’ll come to that later.I notices a car parked at the Lexington Municipal Building and pulled in to ask for directions. An very helpful woman who I think was probably either the mayor or the town clerk pulled out a map and sent me back onto a route that would get me down to Mt. Tremper. Of course I missed the turn in the dark. Time was now running short — I really needed to be at ZMM by 7:00 in order to begin the retreat with everyone else (the liturgy waits for no one) — so I pulled into a diner, where the waitress and a couple of patrons helped me with some local landmarks. I headed back down the road but missed the turn again and came back to the diner. This time the local bodhisattvas were very specific & I found my turn, where, weirdly, the GPS picked up again and started reading out the turns. (Master D?gen says that practicing Buddhas often don’t know they are Buddhas, but I can tell you that there are Buddhas in Lexington NY.) I made it with about fifteen minutes to spare and within half an hour found myself sitting with about a hundred other people — something I had never experienced, having done zazen by myself over the last couple of years.

This is where things get more difficult to describe. Despite being in my street clothes & despite having just driven for seven hours & having been completely lost — an experience that in the not so recent past would have tied me into six-dimensional knots — I was calm. I was even happy. After an hour of zazen (broken in the middle by five minutes of walking meditation) there was a service I understood very little of. In Zen Buddhism one stands for most parts of the service — doing honor to the Buddha & the sangha, yes, but also stretching one’s back. Bowing & doing repeated prostrations is also very good for the back, it turns out. After the service I was given a snack, since I had missed diner, and I went to bed — a dorm type room with four other men. It was 9:30. It took me a long tiome to go to sleep. I wasn’t really wound up, but the strangeness of finding myself in this place after so aggressively secular a life kept me suspended in a kind of amazement.

Around 5:00 the next morning the monk with the bells came around to wake everyone up. The bells are not particularly loud — not a great clanging — but they persist long enough to make sure everyone is awake. The schedule allows just enough time for everyone to cycle through the bathrooms and make it down to the dining hall for a quick cup of tea or coffee before morning zazen. Again, we sat for an hour & then there was morning liturgy. Who knew that Buddhists have hymnbooks? Made the liturgy & chanting much easier to follow. Then we had breakfast & then Caretaking practice, i.e., work. I vacuumed all the cushions in the zendo & dusted the woodwork; later, I would wash dishes and chop vegetables in the kitchen. Then came lunch & some instruction in other areas of practice. Dinner. Sitting. Liturgy. Sleep. Here’s the official schedule. On Sunday people from the local community bring their kids what one can only call Zen Sunday School in the dining hall and some of the parents join in the zazen & liturgy upstairs in the zendo.

And after lunch on Sunday I drove home — by a more direct route. The weather had been perfect on the way down — very lucky for January — and was even more beautiful for the drive home. In fact, it was so beautiful it made me laugh. Heading up into the Adirondacks at sunset, the whole sky to the west lit up in orange-gold-red with dramatic pulsing blue-black shadows and a shaft of yellow sunlight shooting straight up from the center of it all. “Ah, this must be that enlightenment they speak of,” I mused. Really, it was a cheesy New Age Zen movie sort of sky & it wasn’t through with me yet. Descending the Western slope of the mountains down toward the St. Lawrence Valley, I turned a corner and there was a huge — & I do mean really huge — full moon rising directly in front of me. I got home without the cosmos playing any more ironic jokes on me & dove right into getting ready for the semester to begin. I’ve only just now caught up enough to write this description.

I notice that I have stuck pretty exclusively to more or less objective description of the retreat at ZMM; as already noted, I find it very hard to talk about the spiritual side of the experience. Hell, a couple of years ago I would have scoffed at the very notion of the spiritual — the whole concept was so tainted for me by my early experience of fundamentalist Protestantism that I just completely dismissed that whole realm of consciousness, except occasionally when it arose in the secular context of poetry. I have been making notes about my reading & meditation & I am going to try to write something soon in this space that does not betray the very deep qualities of the experience, if I can.

Based on a story by Son Nam, the film looks at the lives of young men whose parents, landless peasants, barely eke out a living as share croppers on large tracts of rice land, using their buffaloes to cultivate the paddies. The buffalo is the most valuable thing that the peasants own & the death of an animal is a disastrous event — literally a matter of life & death — for a family. During the rainy season when the floods come even the poorest peasant must hire buffalo herders to take the animals to pasture. Kim, the hero of the story, is the son of such a poor family & he refuses to go to work as a laborer for a landowner, so he takes the family’s two buffaloes himself when the floods come, one of the animal dying of starvation during the journey. The death of the animal marks the beginning of the disintegration of Kim’s family & the rest of the film chronicles his life after he joins up with the Lap, the leader of the largest “gang” of herders.

The depiction of the life of these herders is remarkably like the wild west, with drinking, dope-smoking, fighting, murder, & rape. The one thing the herders have is a kind of freedom — they are not farm laborers working for someone else. The plot of the film works out Kim’s coming of age & his coming to a kind of understanding. Throughout everything, the buffalo stands as a symbol of mute persistence in the face of nearly impossible adversity. The critique of French colonial economics is subtle, but clearly present in the story. It is not an accident that a French patrol walks past without concern while Kim is burying the remains of the family’s buffalo. Throughout, the hardness of the peasant’s life is set against breathtaking beauty and the characters are presented sympathetically but without any hint of overwrought romanticism.

In looking around just now for commentary on the film, I discovered this post on the All In One Boat blog, which gives a fuller account of the story. The blog itself looks interesting as well, dealing with the environment, poetry, religion & all sorts of things I’m interested in — I’ll  certainly look in again from time to time. And here is the NY Times review of Buffalo Boy.

Ozu’s Late Spring is literary in this sense. Late Spring is about as far from the noise & movement of contemporary movies as it’s possible to get. From the middle of Ozu’s career & shot in black & white, the film consists mostly people talking to each other & key events happen away from the camera, while seemingly minor events are lingered over. Transitions are straight cuts, with the occasional use of a static shot of a building or landscape. These transitional frames feel very much like still photographs and sometimes invite a symbolic or metaphorical reading with their inclusion of lonely trees or clocks. Key dramatic moments are often implied rather than fully dramatized: one important plot turn takes place during the performance of a Noh drama when two characters merely look at each other and nod, with a third watching and “reading” this brief & conventional interaction.

For the contemporary Western viewer of Late Spring, the motivating problem of the story may be hard to grasp. (Assume that narratives have motivating problems or conflicts and that this is true across cultures (I think it is); nevertheless, conflict gets expressed in different ways in different cultures. And what is recognized as a particular sort of conflict in one culture might be seen is a very different light in another.) The twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives with and cares for her widowed father, a professor. Both the professor and his sister would like Noriko to get married, but Noriko, despite being attractive and apparently happy, resists.

And it’s not that Noriko doesn’t like men, or is shy. She flirts with her father’s assistant and might have married him except that he is already engaged. One even gets the impression he’s have broken his engagement to marry Noriko. She does not want to get married because she feels genuine filial piety, a concept foreign to the West but highly developed in many Asian / Confucian cultures. This is one of the things that made this film feel so psychologically strange to me. It took me a long time to figure out that Noriko really did want to stay home and care for her father & that she genuinely preferred this to getting married, which she well understood was the expected thing to do. Actually, staying home with her father and getting married were both “expected” of her in post-war Japan and therein lies the conflict of the drama. Noriko is caught between two equally compelling social responsibilities, one traditional and one modern.

Noriko’s wedding is not dramatized. She is shown in her bridal regalia leaving to get married, then her father and a woman friend — a divorcee we’ve met earlier, a friend of Noriko’s — are shown in their wedding clothes in a bar drinking sake. The implication of this final scene is that the father will marry this not quite respectable woman rather than the woman to whom he nodded during the Noh performance, ironically proving himself to be more modern than his younger daughter, who even in marriage continues to represent the traditional Japanese virtues of filial piety and self-sacrifice.

Of the various traditions, though, I have focused mostly on Zen. Of the various Buddhisms, Zen interests itself (more than the others) in literary & artistic matters. (In contrast, the early sutras of the Pali Canon have an outdoors, sunlit, brightly colored quality — a healthy-mindedness — that is also very attractive & that contrasts with Zen’s black & white brush strokes.)

Two main schools of Zen survive today from among the many that have flourished over the centuries since Bodhidharma traveled from the west bringing Buddhism to China in the 6th century. Both schools of Zen, the Soto & the Rinzai, make use of teaching stories called koans, but it is the dominant method in Rinzai, while it is treated more tangentially in the Soto school, which emphasizes “silent illumination.” (At least that is my understanding; experts should feel free to correct me.) In traditional Zen practice, koans are presented almost as law cases, with a brief statement, then the main narrative, then a commentary by one or more teachers, followed sometimes by a capping verse added by still another hand. Sometimes the cases are used by teachers to test students’ understanding; sometimes a student will use a particular case in meditation until it becomes clear — sometimes a matter of months or years! That’s the formal koan tradition & to be honest I don’t know all that much about it, but there is also what might be called an informal tradition of teaching stories that employs some of the same narratives and texts. Stories, I know something about.

That’s a long didactic run-up to mentioning two lovely little books from the Zen storytelling tradition, once ancient & one modern. The Sayings of Layman P’ang (translated by James Green) is a compilation of short conversations between the eponymous layman and various monks & masters. The Layman, who lived between 740 & 808 CE, gives new meaning to the word laconic:

At another time, the Layman asked Ma-tsu, “If you met someone who was a distinctly authentic person, how would you recognize him?” Ma-tsu directed his gaze downward. The Layman said, “Only you are able to play a tune on a stringless harp.” Ma-tsu looked up and the Layman bowed. Ma-tsu then returned to his room. The Layman followed him, saying, “Just now, I tried to trick you, but you made a fool out of me instead.”

The Buddhist tradition has other enlightened lay followers, most notably Vimalakirti, who loved during the Buddha’s time; the Vimalakirti Sutra is loquacious where P’ang’s sayings are hermetic. I prefer the Layman to the elaborations of Vimalakirti, but then I’ve always tended to respect silence — perhaps an odd trait for a poet & a fairly talkative one at that.

There is a blurb on the back of The Sayings of Layman P’ang from John Tarrant, an Australian Zen teacher & the author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros, a modern treatment of several traditional koans, along with some koan-like stories drawn from other traditions. Tarrant has a transparent and lucid prose style that does not get in the way of the stories he’s retelling and that serves the originals well without trying to displace or “improve” them. My favorite story in Tarrant’s book is based on a traditional koan, the title translated by Tarrant as “A Condolence Call,” is also known as “Daowu Won’t Say.” (Here is the formal version of the koan in John Daido Loori’s translation.) Tarrant takes this bare-bones bit of Zen scholasticism about Daowu & Jinyuan and turns it into a deeply human story about a student’s desire to understand & a teacher’s willingness to go to any length to help him. Tarrant adds some characterization & description in the manner of a modern storyteller and expands the narrative a bit; these modest changes, though, add up to something that does justice to the original story but is at the same time completely its own. Tarrant’s version is somehow more good-natured & humorous without in the least descending to parody. As both a teacher & a student, I find Tarrant’s version of this story deeply moving, profound without being freighted with “meaning.” That is, it is in the best Zen tradition, as I understand Zen.

[More koans.]

Found this at Tricycle Magazine. Check out the comment there from “Bill,” who, whatever kind of Buddhist he is, is severely irony-impaired. Bill hangs around the Tricycle blog as the resident scold & reminds me of the fundamentalist Christians among whom I grew up. Of course, I earn no merit from saying so, which probably makes me a worse Buddhist than him, but I came to Buddhism to get away from humorless absolutism & literalism.