Relationships

Perhaps the primary experience at TAS is the teacher-student relationship. We always a have wide variety of students, but amongst them are always a group of kids who have very shaky relationships with adults. This lack of trust can lead to great harm.
One way that it can be is this: a kid without supervision eventually finds herself largely in the company of other kids not properly checked in with. Kid culture and kid judgment become normative and self-reinforcing. Adults don't interrupt this process, and it carries deep into adolescence.
Compared to the daily support and warmth our students receive, ordinary high school is a big waste of time for these kids. It becomes a thicket of failure, frustration, and reaction.

Early childhood is a period of perfect vulnerability, which is how the most essential foundation of trust is lain there. I wonder how much five years at TAS with a lot of support from the family can alter a deeply troubled start. I think quite a lot.

I am not a great supporter of diagnosis in general, but as a convention it can a reasonably good initial framework for experiencing a very confusing person. As such, Attachment Theory is smart place to start. It is relatively simple, it has explanatory power, and is very descriptive.

Going back to what we may introduce as something of a teaching matrix (adapted from John Daido Loori's work at ZMM), one of the key elements is the relationship with the teacher, who is an advocate, mentor, academic advisor, and to some students, a parent figure. It would be highly instructive to look more closely at the role of this person in the lives of the students who best fit an troubled attachment framework.

This raises another important issue: why is meditation practice alone usually so inadequate for troubled westerners? One would think that of all the troubles that Asian culture might have, orientation to place, family, and clan would be among the least. As those teachers came over to the West they found people quite open to what they had to say, but there was a gap. In a famous story, the Dalai Lama was asked by a young American what can one do about feelings of self-hatred....The great teacher was totally perplexed and had to consult with his translator for quite some time. It was a foriegn concept, yet a primary experience of his audience.

My guess is that early life attachment syndromes are at the heart of this difference, and that Western psychotherapy has largely evolved in response to the tremendous dislocation and disorientation that came along with industrialization in the late-nineteenth century. Buddhism is very adaptable, and it techniques a marvelous adjuct or even primary practice. But it is not enough.

The Poetry Friday First Pitch

Arthur Waley and James Legge are translators who never seem to become dated. They stay close to the source material and thus become a valuable point of reference for subsequent translators and poets. Yet their poems and passages are well-written English. Two of my favorite books are Legge's nearly interlinear translations of Confucious and Mencius. Beautiful books, with deep footnotes and delicious, block style characters for the original language. Waley's "Translations from the Chinese", which can still be had in large format hardback for under ten dollars in big city used book stores is, for me, a perfect starting point for Chinese Poetry. This book looks very good as well.

Here is a lovely poem by Chi K'ang, who was born just as the Han Dynasty, the Asian equivalent of Rome, collapsed:

I will cast out Wisdom and reject Learning.
My thoughts shall wander in the Great Void.
Always repenting of wrongs done
Will never bring my heart to rest.
I cast my hook in a single stream;
But my joy is as if I possessed a Kingdom.
I loose my hair and go singing;
This is the purport of my song:
"My thoughts shall wander in the Great Void."

- Taoist Song

A very reasonable response to political and military anarchy, wouldn't you say?

Poetry Friday

No art is more closely associated with Zen than poetry. Why? A poem can be executed more quickly, and with more irony between the levels of concretion and abstraction than music, painting, or theater. It seems that long ago, Chinese practitioners realized this fully.
Poetry doesn't seem to be of great importance in Indian Buddhism, but as its ideas filtered into China, and missionaries began to recognize a few points of correspondence between Buddhism and the indigenous Taoism, the Chinese language became a natural medium for brief, vivid snapshots of life. Nature, in particular, took on a centrality that it never had in India.

One can, and some do, derive a strong environmental ethos out of this tradition. The arts are most prominent, however. At TAS we intend to develop the arts much more powerfully over the next few years.

Two things prepared me for an interest in Zen. One was the very large number of artists and musicians I loved who practiced Zen, John Cage most importantly among them. The biggest influence was Chinese poetry. Arthur Waley and Kenneth Rexroth's translation completely blew me away. My interest in China began there.

So let's have Friday's be a poetry day. There is so much, that I will certainly run out of Fridays before we run out of great poems. But let's begin today...

Wang Wei is one of the four giants of Tang Dynasty poetry (618-907 c.e.), a Buddhist, and the founder of one of the most influential styles of landscape painting.

Mourning Meng Hao-Jeng (transl. David Hinton)

My dear friend nowhere in sight,
this Han river keeps flowing east.

Now, If I look for old masters here
I find empty rivers and mountains.

Wednesday

We had a visit from Naropa University yesterday. In other news, sedate March weather has slowed us all down a bit. Maple syruping continues over at Tintinhull Farm. And the second term- torqued and patchy from snow days and holy days- stumbles to a close on Friday.

Some thoughts....

Are there any easy answers? It may be just a human characteristic to both desire and mistrust quick solutions to enduring problems, but the American version seems especially polarized. And this polarization is easily illustrated by looking at some current meditation perspectives.

There are a multitude of techniques, some basic, like following the breath, repeating a mantra, doing a body scan, or visualizing a peaceful scene. There are highly advanced ones, of which I know nothing at all, that are associated with Tibetan and various tantric practices. There are also rather technological ones, that use different triggers for brain wave states, as well as certain drugs that either activate or suppress certain circuits in the brain.

Here is an excerpt from an Amazon reader's review of The Eight Gates of Zen, by John Daido Loori:

Instead of self reliance and self empowerment through one's own realization, books like these present practice as some sort of"rocket science" that we must study and burden ourselves with for our entire life. This book makes practice into such an uptight and burdensome endeavor. And you know...life is just too short and precious to waste it on the hamster wheel of practice and achievement. I'm not going to buy into this notion that life and practice are some sort of cross I must bear. Thank you very much, but I'll leave that to the Catholics. What a shame that people actually take this book and it's "training matrix" to be Zen. This book is just a complication. It is a hopeless attempt to concretize the spiritual journey which is, in fact, deeply personal, unique and beautifully undefinable and mysterious. Like art or falling in love, the systems that try to encapsulate the spiritual journey are completely and utterly besides the point.

This reader makes a fair point that practice should not be a burden and zen should not be a "system". Perhaps systematizing Zen practice is a peculiarly American thing to do. Perhaps the "burden" is just a hangover from the protestant work ethic. On the other hand, the reader has a very diffuse notion of what Zen is and seems to be concerned that whatever he or she does, so long as it is self-reflective, be labeled "zen".

On the low commitment end of the spectrum are mindfulness practices, on the high end, is some sort of life-long monastic experience. The low end does not require much in the way of a relationship with a teacher; as one proceeds along the spectrum, the teacher-student relationship becomes more and more substantial. Tradition and lineage imply a central importance of that relationship. Obviously, a technological approach to mindfulness requires little direct teacher input at all.

Upon reflection of my own practices, I am surprised by how complex they actually are. I sit meditation, either by tracking my breath or by visualizing the various techniques of Zen Sword that I study in Shim Gum Do. I do a few simple attention and mindfulness exercises throughout the day. Then there is grad school (in psychology) and short term cognitive therapy (for some other things). I am taking a class in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, so I might eventually teach some of the techniques to my students. It is hardly a summer camp schedule of one activity after another; rather it all flows quite seemlessly. But it is quite a lot of self-observation. It has coherence, which I greatly appreciate but could also easily slip into indulgence and solipsism. This is why I think a vigorous, external discipline is important for self-development: an external frame of reference continually challenges one's assumptions in a way that simply picking and choosing techniques will not. That external frame of reference is tradition, institutions, and teachers.

Interestingly, I received a package in the mail that announces:

Meditate like a Zen Monk at the Push of a Button.

It comes with an introductory CD, a discount on the whole course, and a money back guarantee.
Such a heady mix of neurological research, ancient tradition, and American Entrepreneurialism. It is kind of exciting. Maybe I can cure these headaches and the TMJ. Maybe I will get a glimpse of a mind-state that I have never seen before.

Or, maybe I will just have another arrow in the quiver. We will see.

Hello Monday!

Sometimes the frequent yammering about “mindfulness” and meditation leave me feeling like I used to when a favorite underground band suddenly got noticed. The worry would be that the quality of the experience would be brutalized by the endless rounds of larger venues and the pressure to match expectations set by the record label. Not long after, a musician finds most of her time taken up by very unmusical concerns. Boredom, ennui, and an anxious rootlessness creep up like gangrene. Soon, the patient is dead.

Every philosophical and religious paradigm must eventually leave the hot house of innovators and dedicated evangelizers and meet the marketplace. The “marketplace”, the bustle and endless distraction of the world outside of the meditation hall, is a very important metaphor in Zen. There, the rubber hits the road. Compromise, worry, the needs of others, the quotidian duties that come with food, shelter, and safety can do a real number on a would-be monastic.

The rubber is now hitting the road. Mindfulness has hit the big time.

I recommend reading Judith Warner’s New York Times blog from March 5 as well as a few of the comments. These provide a remarkable document of where mindfulness is at, right now. The writer writes clearly about a practice that she has an admittedly limited grasp of, and the hundreds of comments seem to come from a wonderful diversity of experience. To my way of thinking, she suggests several important conflicts and misunderstandings about mindfulness and Buddhist practice that will continue to represent its leading edge as it enters the mainstream of American culture.

One problem some of us face is simply definitional, and this is right at the heart of TAS’s quirky relationship to the public schools. This problem would be the difference between a spiritual practice and the techniques associated with it. Our curriculum is completely secular, but we teach and use certain techniques to support our students intellectual development.

The breath is a good example. The breath is the fundamental element of meditation. It is what one first concentrates on and always returns to. In Zen practice it is, practically speaking, synonymous with living in the present moment: tracking with the breath and fantasizing about something else are mutually exclusive activities. But mastering this technique is only one of a long sequence of carefully cultivated practices that a serious Buddhist engages throughout a lifetime. This is especially true with the teaching matrix developed by the Zen Mountain Monastery, one of the two traditions in Zen that I have a little more than passing familiarity with.

Yet this simple practice of aware breathing has such profound benefits for so many people that it is easily adapted to many situations, including school settings and western religious traditions. It works with certain types of post-traumatic conditions, and has been researched extensively for use with anxiety and depression. It is so intimately associated with Buddhism that many believe them to be co-extensive. There are not.

Another practice that many people are very familiar with are the various gratitude practices, deeply associated with the “loving-kindness” exercises associated with Tibetan Buddhism. There are many others, many of them subject to empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative. Ms. Warner, like most middle and upper-middle class Americans, are shopping in this country’s vast psychological supermarket. And, as has been the case for the last fifty years, the most popular and effective self-help techniques are humanistic, easy to grasp, and results oriented.

Think of Carl Roger’s Client Centered Therapy, Abraham Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy, Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy. Mindfulness has had its table set by these approaches. These all assume that I am the central force my own life, that I must make meaning out of my experiences, and that I get trapped in counter-productive habits of thought and action. Americans on the various roads to recovery and self-improvement seem to assume that these things are true.

All of these approaches are rooted in the Existentialist critique that arose in response to the destruction of old Europe in the years 1914-1945, and the ascendance of consumer culture in post-war America. The growing popularity of mindfulness practice in all areas of western life follows a well-worn path. One might say that only those characteristics of Buddhism most like the existentialist or humanist frameworks will have any cultural traction at all. Zen practice, on the other hand, is not about making life easier or less painful. It is about living life directly, with all the worry and suffering that comes with it. I can ask: is my life easier as a result of ten years of deepening practice? My answer is that I cannot know. There is no other "me" to compare it to, and many other forces are at work as we all grow older. I am often much more sad, and much more joyful. Life may be richer, but it sure isn't easier.

Exploring the non-existence of an enduring self is the sine qua non of Zen practice. It will be many, many years before a genuine, American Buddhism can be said to exist.

Mindfulness practice makes modern life more satisfying; like the cognitive and client-centered therapies that emerged out of existentialism in the mid-twentieth century, it is an heir of Christianity and its doctrine of an eternal soul, an enduring self. Christianity is itself an heir of Greek Classicism, and Neo-Platonism. All assume a reality of the self. Buddhism rejects this.

Buddhism and Mindfulness meet only at one edge, and extend in very different directions. It is important to keep this distinction clear. However, we do live in a particular place at a particular time. There is probably nothing to be gained by scrambling your average teenager (whose nihilism and developmental confusion is hopefully at its peak) with abstract ideas of no-self. It is far better to emphasize the values we all share, such as community and self-reflection, and support them with techniques that have been empirically tested for 2500 years. Even if it runs the risk of hopelessly confusing just about everyone.