via Analyzing Feelings of Regret – NYTimes.com.

I brought him home & zipped him inside an old canvas dogbed cover with stylized paw prints printed on it, then went down by the river to dig a grave near where the old bluetick hound Maude and the little French Bulldog Weezer are buried. Digging on our property is difficult — you have to choose between a place full of stones & a place criss-crossed with thick tree roots. The place I chose was full of roots, but after about an hour I had a hole three feet deep & big enough to hold Angel’s body. I lowered him in & shoveled the dirt on top of him, tamped it down & put a big flat stone on top. I gathered up my tools and put them in the wheelbarrow, then paused to wipe sweat from my face. Looking up, I watched a bald eagle fly directly overhead. I like to think the eagle came to escort the dog’s spirit away into the vast emptiness that gives birth to all the myriad things of the world.

Poetry on the Brain: A Bittersweet Symphony.

The story is set in a near-future dystopia in which prison communities run by a corporation  have been developed in which citizens spend half their time living as prisoners and the other half as “prisoner-civilians” in the gated community that surrounds the prison. For the residents, once you sign up it’s a lifetime commitment. One month as a prisoner, one month as a civilian tending the prison & surrounding town — for the rest of your life. As in Oryx & Crake, life outside the confines of the corporate community has degenerated into a nasty amalgam of poverty, criminality, and disease. People go into the Conciliance (for so the town is called) program because it offers them security, though at the cost of their freedom. Instead, they are given a simulacrum of freedom.

Predictably, for some characters the simulacrum proves insufficiently stimulating & it is from that dissatisfaction that Atwood fashions her plot, which revolves around unapproved sexual desire. But the characters, particularly Max, are cartoons. (Ah, it just occurred to me writing that last sentence, this would have made a good graphic novella.) In an interesting twist, one of the characters whose sex drive seems to be trying to compensate for her loss of freedom, has the job of euthanizing prisoners who cannot be reformed. It is a job she takes seriously & performs responsibly, feeling no conscious remorse. No sense of guilt or complicity clouds her idealism in performing this task & the scene in which we see her at work is deeply creepy, certainly the strongest in the story. Would that the sex scenes rose to this level. Perhaps if this story gets developed into something more, that will happen. The final scene of the story certainly suggests kinky possibilities.

In Belinda Attaway Yamakawa’s translation, the roshi writes gracefully. With  genuine humility & insight, he describes the period immediately following the war, when much of Japan lay in ruins physically & even more so morally. Morinaga had been a high school student when the war began & when things got desperate for Japan he was drafted to train as a kamikaze pilot, though the war ended before he was called upon to fly a suicide mission. The early chapters of Novice to Master describe his profound disillusionment on discovering that the war he had believed just was a war of imperial aggression. He movingly describes his & his friends’ descent into nihilism & despair & how, upon graduating he had no prospects, no family, & no desire at all to go to university, even if he could have afforded it.In an act half cynical & half driven by his ferocious need to get a grip on the meaning of his life, the young Soko Morinaga decides to become a Buddhist monk. The third chapter of the memoir begins, “so it was, through these mysterious causes and conditions, but I was led to knock at the gates of the Zen temples. I still feel very grateful that, after calling at two or three temples, I was brought to Daishuin in Kyoto, where I still reside, to train under Zuigan Goto Roshi.” The roshi asks the disheveled young man why he has come to the monastery. “In reply,” Morinaga writes, “I rambled on for about an hour and a half, covering the particulars of my situation up to and including my present state. . . . When I had finished my exposition, he spoke, ‘this think you now, I can see that you’ve reached a point where there is nothing you can believe in. But there is no such thing as practice without believing in your teacher. Can you believe in me?’”

Of course at that point he can believe in anything but, he is also desperate — both physically and spiritually. He tells the teacher that, yes, he can believe in him even while telling himself that he doesn’t believe in anything — if he could believe in anything, he wouldn’t be here, what he? The old man accepts him as a student even knowing, as he must have known, the shallowness of the boy’s belief:

‘Follow me’, directed the roshi, and he assigned me my first task: to clean the garden. together with this 70-year-old master, I went out to the garden and started sweeping with a bamboo broom. . . . The human being( or, my own mind, I should say) is really quite mean. Here I was, inside my heart denouncing this “old fool” and balking at the very idea of trusting so easily; yet, at the same time I wanted this old man to notice me, and so I took up that broom and swept with a vengeance. Quite soon I had amassed a mountain of dead leaves. Eager to show off my diligence, I asked, “Roshi, where should I throw this trash?” the words were barely out of my mouth when he thundered back at me, “There is no trash!”

The novice is told to go get an old charcoal sack from the shed and to put the leads in it: they will be used to start fires in the bathhouse. Even the small stones that have been swept up with the leads have a use: the old man shows the boy how to place them under the eaves where the rain disturbs the ground. This is his first lesson and as the author points out it would have been nice if he had immediately had some sort of revelation, if not enlightenment. Of course this does not happen and he only slowly comes to appreciate the honesty and sincerity of his teacher’s practice. after a couple of years with Zuigan Goto Roshi, it is decided that he is ready to go to a larger training monastery. The episode describing the process by which a novice entered a Japanese Rinzai monastery in the late 1940s reveals a great deal about the culture of the Zen in postwar Japan and also a great deal about the character of Soko Morinaga.

Zen monasteries in China & Japan have for centuries put up barriers to entrance. Otherwise, in hard times they would have been filled to the rafters with monks whose devotion to practice was less sincere than their devotion to their bellies. And send as practiced in China and Japan was and to some extent remains physically very rigorous. The Rinzai sect in which Morinaga practiced is particularly macho in this regard, but even Soto monasteries are not interested in you unless you are serious:

Inside the main gate of Eiheiji, the temple founded by Master D?gen in 1244 . . . are two wooden plaques inscribed with Chinese characters to inform all who seek entry that “Only those concerned with the question of life and death need enter here” and “Those not completely concerned with this question have no reason to enter this gate.”²

Early in Zen practice one will be told that the three qualities necessary for the student are great doubt, great determination, and great faith . The early part of Morinaga’s memoir powerfully describes the nature of great doubt — doubt in one’s fitness for practice, doubt in the practice itself, doubt that there is such a thing as enlightenment. (How presumptuous, after all, to imagine that one might aspire to such a sublime spiritual state!) Without a hint of spiritual pride, Moriniga then goes on to describe his determination, which, as his subtitle humorously hints, often feels to him more like stupidity than determination or courage.

Perhaps it speaks to my lack of long or deep practice, but the second half of Novice to Master, which deals more with faith, seems somewhat less energetic to me. The tone throughout is unfailingly gentle, somehow combining self-deprecation and great spiritual authority. The book offers the personal interest of the memoir genre, with its insider’s view of a very rigorous practice, and a view of the world shaped by the author’s genuine commitment to a form of non-duality that has real existential depth.

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In any event, Mathiessen’s book of Zen journals has several passages of very clear exposition of Zen principles, but much of this — as one would expect from a journal — emerges from very fine-grained and small scale descriptions of the writer’s interactions with his teachers and — especially in the third section of the book — his travels around Japan visiting various Soto temples. This final part contains some of the best “Zen writing” but also tends to get lost in paragraphs of landscape painting and descriptions of peripheral Soto places & personalities. My own preference is for Mathiessen’s historical anecdotes, as opposed to his contemporary accounts. For instance, in Chapter 11, visiting the Engaku-ji Temple in Kamakura, he relates the story of the 13th century nun Chiyono, who attained enlightenment while hauling water. Apparently, she had been studying a long time without experiencing kensho, but one evening her wooden bucket gave way & she “understood the great matter,” to paraphrase Master Dogen. To commemorate the event, she wrote a poem:

In this way and that I tried to save the old pail
Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break
Until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water!

In the Soto journals from Japan that conclude the book there is extensive discussion of the 13th century master D?gen Zengi, including detailed descriptions of the places he lived & taught. At their best these passages combine exquisite description of place with insightful exegesis of religious teachings:

Kosho-Horin-ji, a lovely white-walled monastery across the river from Byodo-in . . . sits on a hillside just north of the bend where the Uji River flows down out of the mountains. The majestic location doubtless inspired the Sansuikyo, or Mountains and Rivers Sutra, which celebrates the manifestation of the Buddha-body in the mountains, rivers, and great earth, an ancient synonym for all things, fleeting and eternal, that are included in the emptiness, the void, the One. “I have come to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” This pharase, from an early Chinese collection (Zenrin) used in k?an study and often cited in Shobogenzo [D?gen's master-work], precipitated the enlightenment experience of Yamada-roshi quoted earlier (176).

The Mountains and Rivers Sutra is a fearsomly difficult piece of mysticiam by D?gen  and these few sentences provide not only a reasonably summary, but an opening by which a student (such as myself) can enter the text. Matthiessen knows his Zen. These are the parts of the book I found most satisfying — it seems to me that most other readers, whether they are students of Zen or not, would feel the same way. The places in the book in which Matthiessen explicates a particular religious point & ties it to a particular place or person engage the reader in a way that the passages of travelogue — sometimes, alas, in prose purpler than necessary — fail to do.

Nine-Headed Dragon River is also of interest as a document in the history of religions. This is particularly true of the first section, in which Matthiessen is introduced to Renzai Zen practice & participates in the founding of the first Zen Monastery in the US, in the Catskill Mountains of upstate NY. The monastery, Dai Bosatsu, is still there, though recently its Japanese leader of four decades, Eido Roshi, was forced into retirement as a result of a sex scandal. An American woman is now the abbot & head of the Zen Studies Society. Matthiessen paints a fascinating picture of Eido, who even in the early days seems to have been a deeply troubled figure & a terrible choice to head the first Zen monastery in the US. The the account here of the founding of Dai Bosatsu opens a window on the first generation of American Zen, imported to the US by Japanese teachers after World War II. [Note: A good deal of what Matthiessen discusses about the early days of Zen is easier to follow if you have a copy of James Ishmael Ford's Zen Master Who? handy. Ford's book is a little superficial & would benefit from some lineage charts, but it covers the necessary territory for those interested in the personalities that drove the early history of American Zen.] In any case, the fact that an American is now the abbot of Dai Bosatsu marks a kind of tipping point in the history of Zen in the US; American Zen is pretty much all American now, two or three generations after it began, depending on how you count generations.

Those early days are fascinating to a Zen newbie like me — there was a lot more drinking & smoking in first-generation American Zen than one might have thought — it is quite abstemious, if not puritan, these days. A couple of those Japanese masters had problems with alcohol & not everyone kept the precept against adultery. I have an odd reaction to these facts. As someone who has at times led a fairly irregular life, I understand the pull of desire & the power of addictions; at the same time, I would prefer it if those who dispense moral instruction (which is a part of Buddhism, after all) were themselves example of the sort of behavior they exhort in others. But then again, at least one of those imperfect roshis  (Taizan Maezumi) was in the eyes of many a fully realized master. Many geniuses — artistic, spiritual, scientific — have led irregular lived, left pain in their wakes, & not fully exemplified in their private lives the values & perspectives they advance in their work. It’s a conundrum, perhaps a koan.