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editor’s view

buddhism: for adults only?

“HOW DID YOU COME to Buddhism?” It’s a question I’ve Robert Bellah, who claimed in his Fall 2004 interview with
asked plenty of Buddhists I’ve met over the years. People editor-at-large Andrew Cooper (“The Future of Religion”)
often answer that they came to Buddhism because they felt that “a purely private Zen is a contradiction in terms.”
their churches or synagogues had lost touch with their According to Bellah, what we often call spirituality is often
faith’s spiritual ground. Or that they felt they could no little more than this “purely private” pursuit, as opposed to
longer abide by mores or live by tenets that did not suffi- religion, which evokes community and institutions. Bellah
ciently address the realities of their day-to-day lives. pointed to the pitfalls of spirituality and its self-help ethos:
Attending ritual after empty ritual, they associated key
dates of the religious calendar more closely with holiday Spirituality in this new sense is a private activity, though it
sales and seasonal vacations than anything else. And yet, may be pursued with a group of the like-minded, but it is not
“institutional” in that it does not involve membership in a
when it came to weddings and funerals—and, even among group that has claims on its members . . . [that] expects that
the more secular-minded, baptisms—they found them- they will stick it out even when the going gets tough, and
selves seeking out the local rabbi or priest. In this issue’s will not leave at the first indication that their needs are not
“Dharma Family Values” (p. 80), one pastor tells con- being met.
tributing editor Clark Strand that parishioners usually fall
away at fourteen or fifteen, after which “you’ve basically What Strand points to in his essay for this issue is thus
got only three opportunities to get them back—when they symptomatic of a broader problem, one that Bellah would
get married, when their children get baptized, or when describe in part as an undervaluation of community in
someone in the family dies.” American society at large. At a time of general institu-
Still, they do come back—even many Buddhists. Without tional decline, forms of spirituality that exalt individual-
such rituals to provide the cultural framework for continuity ism at the expense of the collective might contribute to our
across generations, Strand argues, Buddhist sanghas in the self-serving conceits rather than alleviate them.
West, populated with baby boomers gone gray, will leave Lifting Buddhist practice out of its cultural context chal-
future seekers to reinvent the dharmic wheel. lenges us to create a context of our own. Here, many voices
On the other hand, who among us came to the dharma need to be heard. Strand’s is one, Bellah’s another. As
in order to raise our children as Buddhists? Many of the Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal told me in an interview for
elders in Western sanghas converted to Buddhism against the Winter 2002 issue (“Living Two Traditions”), in some
the backdrop of a counterculture that held a bias against ways incorporating more traditional Buddhist rituals into a
institutional life—precisely what child rearing requires. stripped-down American practice makes sense because “rit-
They became Buddhists in spite of their upbringing, and in ual is helpful in better integrating our lives, as well as in
spite of a consumerist culture that at nearly every turn building a community that supports practice. It’s very hard
opposed core Buddhist tenets. And many, if not most, to practice Buddhism, especially all the way to enlighten-
came to Buddhism before they had children or considered ment. A community can help us integrate our Buddhist
how to raise them. practice with all aspects of our lives.”
So it’s no surprise that raising children “Buddhist” was an But it’s important not to forget that there is still room
afterthought and, in the absence of a supportive culture, for the traditional monastic view and that of the solitary
even a long shot. The individualistic spirit that motivated yogi—the independent spirit that led American elders of
so many to leave their own traditions and become seekers is Buddhism to find the dharma to begin with. As the quin-
not necessarily compatible with hearth and home, let alone tessential American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I con-
institutional life. And that same spirit—or at least its tradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am
extreme—has been decried by thinkers like sociologist large, I contain multitudes.)” ▼

James Shaheen, Editor & Publisher

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E |7
8 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 letters to the editor

TRANSGENDER BIAS
Pagan Kennedy’s account of Michael
Dillon’s quest to become a Buddhist
monk (“Man-Made Monk,” Summer
2007), and the bigotry he encoun-
tered, hits a tender spot in me. In
2005, having studied Buddhism for
ten years, I cut off my hair and
aborted my four-year-long transition
from male to female to seek ordina-
tion as a Gelug monk. Careful
research revealed, though, that as a
“eunuch” I was ineligible to become
even a novice monk.
My ensuing disenchantment with
Buddhist monasticism propelled me to
seek my own truth, and at long last I
joyfully completed my transition to
womanhood in the spring of 2006. My
disillusionment with Tibetan Bud-
dhism became complete last fall when
an American laywoman with whom I
studied traditonal Tibetan dance
repeatedly put me down in front of the
other women. Currently I sit zazen
while writing my autobiography and
deciding whether I’ll continue to study
Buddhism or move on in search of a
religion that isn’t steeped in sexism.
ing Theravada Buddhism and the “Americans brought the cream but
Joni Kay Rose practice of Vipassana in the U.S. for left the cake behind.”
Rio Rancho, NM seventeen years. Sharf very succinctly I believe this was partly due to the
described the “quick fix” technique of Burmese political climate during the
Vipassana that has been imported to sixties when Westerners were study-
THE CREAM AND THE CAKE the States while pointing out that ing and practicing there. At that time
I was delighted to read “Losing Our what has been left behind is the Westerners were given permission to
Religion,” the interview with Professor sangha or community that holds the stay in the country only if they stayed
© NEAL CROSBIE

Robert Sharf in the Summer 2007 Buddhist heart and soul. When in meditation centers for a restricted
issue of Tricycle. I am a Burmese-born asked what I think of Theravada period and for the specific purpose of
dharma teacher, and I’ve been teach- Buddhism in America, I often say, meditation. Even now, when the

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E |9
 letters

issuance of tourist visas has eased up, tion from the work on the cushion. . . .
it is still difficult for foreigners to live Rather than compare the ‘results’ of
in a community with Burmese fami- science and religion, we would do bet-
lies and friends. I feel that without ter to compare the experiences, aspira-
firsthand experience of what makes tions, and training of the most
Buddhism tick in the lay community, dedicated practitioners of each
it would be impossible to feel the stream.” There is some truth in what
essence of Buddhism and how it has he says, in that both disciplines
profoundly affected the Burmese peo- demand an unflagging commitment
ple for over sixteen hundred years. to truth, but fundamentally there is a
For members of the Burmese com- drastic difference between the aspira-
munity, going to retreats at the med- tions and experiences of scientists and
itation center is only one part of their those of spiritual practitioners.
lives as Buddhists. The lay communi- When Professor Frank pursues theo-
ty is constantly exposed to the teach- retical astrophysics, no matter how
ings through movies, novels, maga- abstract, sophisticated, or far-reaching,
zines, and plays as well as sermons by it is an objective, conceptual analysis
monks and tutoring by elder rela- of nature. Even if he took a few weeks
tives. There are all kinds of courses off from astrophysics and developed a
available at monasteries and nunner- grand unified theory of all the forces in
ies, courses run by lay teachers, where nature so that his graduate students
anyone can study the full range of could put the equations on their T-
scriptural teachings. shirts, it would be a conceptual
I think if Westerners traveling to scheme whose objectification would be
Burma in the sixties had had a chance shown directly by its mathematical
to live among the local Burmese formulation. This is not the main aspi-
Buddhist community, a chance to ration of Buddhism in any of its fla-
learn the language and get to know vors. In his book How to Practice, the
the integral role of Buddhism in the Dalai Lama writes:
lives of the laypeople, the story
of the emergence of American To apprehend the “mind vivid, with-
Theravada Buddhism could have out any constructions, just as it is” or
to know the “luminous and knowing
been different. Of course, that is only nature of the mind unaffected by
my personal opinion. thought” is an experience of identity
between the knower and the known.
Dr. Thynn Thynn Alternatively, the empirical subject,
Sae Taw Win II Dhamma Center what we normally take ourselves to
Sebastopol, CA
be, becomes so attenuated by the ces-
sation of conceptual thinking that it
no longer impedes a direct apprehen-
sion of the mind. Such knowledge is
NONCONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS neither an objectification nor reifica-
Professor Adam Frank draws many tion. Such a first-person experience is
excellent parallels between science and radically different from scientific
knowledge, which must be fully
Buddhism as forms of spiritual prac- objectifiable and quantifiable.
tice in his essay “In the Light of Truth”
(Spring 2007). However, his main I love physics and astronomy and
point is fundamentally misleading. have dedicated my life to their
Professor Frank writes, “When carried research and teaching. However, if the
forward with right intention and an Buddhist tempter Mara asked me to
open heart, science is a kind of spiri- choose between a grand unification
tual practice, no different in its aspira- scheme and a nonconceptual appre-

10 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
hension of emptiness, I would have no
trouble deciding. Nor do I think
would Professor Frank.

Victor Mansfield
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Colgate University
Hamilton, NY

HOW MANY YEARS?

Even the best of scholars slip up occa-
sionally. The Spring 2007 interview
with Professor Peter Masefield (“Found
in Translation”) was a wonderful insight
into the roots of Buddhist scripture and
the Pali canon. But he certainly did not
mean to say that the mid-nineteenth-
century European scholars who discov-
ered Theravada Buddhism came from a
culture suffering “a growing disen-
chantment with religion following the
Hundred Years’ War, which was largely
fought over religion.” Well, the Hun-
dred Years’ War that ended in 1453 had
nothing whatever to do with religion—
it was a dynastic catfight between Eng-
land and France—and anyway, it was a
very distant memory by Victorian
times. I suppose Dr. Masefield might
have been thinking of the Thirty Years’
War that ended in 1648, but by the
same token it’s hard to see why that
should still be casting a shadow more
than two centuries later.
Otherwise, it was a fascinating inter-
view with a true scholar.

Philip Jenkins
Professor of History and Religion
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA

Tricycle welcomes letters to the editor.

Letters are subject to editing. Please
send correspondence to:
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
92 Vandam Street
New York, NY 10013
Fax: (212) 645-1493
Email address: editorial@tricycle.com

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 11
12 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 insights

To study the dharma is to study the self. To

study the self is to forget the self. To forget
the self is to be enlightened by all things.
–Dogen

Simply Stop words. We can get tired of all

these words, even the word
THICH NHAT HANH elucidates the
“Buddha.” So to wake people
no-frills wisdom of ninth-century
up, Master Linji [Japanese,
Chinese Zen teacher Master Linji,
Rinzai] invented new terms
founder of the Rinzai school of Zen.
and new ways of saying
things that would respond to
“As I see it, there isn’t so much to do. the needs of his time.
Just be ordinary—put on your robes, For example, Master Linji
eat your food, and pass the time doing invented the term “business-
nothing.” less person,” the person who
—Master Linji, Teaching 18 has nowhere to go and noth-
Rinsai (detail); Jackie Stack Lagakos; 2005; stained
ing to do. This was his ideal glass, concrete, and sanded grout; 7 x 3 feet
IN MASTER LINJI’S TIME, some Bud- example of what a person
dhist terms were used so often they could be. In Theravada Buddhism, the ity of that thing. Our notion of the Bud-
became meaningless. People chewed ideal person was the arhat, someone who dha may just be an idea and may be far
on terms like “liberation” and practiced to attain his own enlighten- from reality. Buddha is not a reality that
“enlightenment” until they lost their ment. In Mahayana Buddhism, the exists outside of us, but is our own true
power. It’s no different today. People ideal person was the bodhisattva, a com- nature. The Buddha outside ourselves
use words that tire our ears. We hear passionate being who, on the path of was a human being who was born, lived,
the words “freedom” and “security” on enlightenment, helped others. and died. For us to seek such a Buddha
talk radio, television, and in the news- According to Master Linji, the busi- would be to seek a shadow, a ghost Bud-
paper so often that they’ve lost their nessless person is someone who doesn’t dha, and at some point our idea of
effectiveness or their meaning has been run after enlightenment or grasp at Buddha would become an obstacle for us.
distorted. When words are overused, anything, even if that thing is the Master Linji said that when we meet
even the most beautiful words can lose Buddha. This person has simply the ghost Buddha, we should cut off
their true meaning. For example, the stopped. She is no longer caught by his head. Whether we’re looking inside
© JACKIE STACK LAGAKOS, BOTTLESTRUCTURES.COM

word “love” is a wonderful word. anything, even theories or teachings. our outside ourselves, we need to cut
When we like to eat hamburger, we The businessless person is the true per- off the head of whatever we meet, and
say, “I love hamburger.” So what’s left son inside each one of us. This is the abandon the views and ideas we have
for the meaning of the word “love”? essential teaching of Master Linji. about things, including our ideas
It’s the same with Buddhist words. When we learn to stop and be truly about Buddhism and Buddhist teach-
Someone may be able to speak beauti- alive in the present moment, we are in ings. Buddhist teachings are not exalted
fully about compassion, wisdom, or touch with what’s going on within and words and scriptures existing outside us
non-self, but this doesn’t necessarily around us. We aren’t carried away by the on a high shelf in the temple, but are
help others. And the speaker may still past, the future, our thinking, ideas, medicine for our ills. Buddhist teachings
have a big self or treat others badly; his emotions, and projects. Often we think are skillful means to cure our ignorance,
eloquent speech may be only empty that our ideas about things are the real- craving, and anger, as well as our habit of

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 13
 insights

seeking things outside and not having happiness, love, or hate. She lives in
confidence in ourselves. awareness as an ordinary person,
Insight can’t be found in sutras, whether standing, walking, lying
commentaries, verbal expression, or down, or sitting. She doesn’t act a part,
–isms. Liberation and awakened even the part of a great Zen master. This
understanding can’t be found by devot- is what Master Linji means by “being
ing ourselves to the study of the Bud- sovereign wherever you are and using
dhist scriptures. This is like trying to that place as your seat of awakening.”
find fresh water in dry bones. Return- We may wonder, “If a person has no
ing to the present moment, using our direction, isn’t yearning to realize an
clear mind which exists right here and ideal, doesn’t have an aim in life, then
now, we can be in touch with liberation who will help living beings be liber-
and enlightenment, as well as with the ated, who will rescue those who are
Buddha and the patriarchs as living drowning in the ocean of suffering?”
realities right in this moment. A Buddha is a person who has no
The person who has nothing to do is more business to do and isn’t looking
sovereign unto herself. She doesn’t need for anything. In doing nothing, in
to put on airs or leave any trace behind. simply stopping, we can live freely
The true person is an active participant, and true to ourselves and our libera-
engaged in her environment while tion will contribute to the liberation
remaining unoppressed by it. Although of all beings. ▼
all phenomena are going through the
various appearances of birth, abiding, From Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go
changing, and dying, the true person (2007) by Thich Nhat Hanh. Reprinted with
doesn’t become a victim of sadness, permission of Parallax Press, parallax.org.

Think Not Thinking

Try it. According to BRAD WARNER,
it’s not as hard as they say.

PEOPLE WHO ARE new to Zen practice it up—you’ll notice that thoughts
have all kinds of weird ideas about the don’t just go on and on continuously.
state of nonthinking. Some people envi- There are little spaces between them.
sion it as some kind of trippy spaced-out Most of us tend to habitually try and
sorta thing. I’ve even heard the term fill these spaces up with more
mushiryo (“not-thinking”) consciousness thoughts as fast as we possibly can.
thrown around as if it was some way- But even the best of us can’t fill them
cool and mysterious altered state. Some all, so there are always little gaps.
folks are even scared by the idea. See, you might say that there are
But it ain’t like that, folks. In fact, it two basic kinds of thought. There are
feels real nice to stop thinking. And thoughts that pop up unannounced
it’s not nearly as difficult as people and uninvited in our brains for no rea-
want to make it seem. son we’re able to discern. These are
You just kind of think not thinking. just the results of previous thoughts
It’s like this: If you start really pay- and experiences that have left their
ing attention to your own thought traces in the neural pathways of our
process—I’m talking here about the brains. You can’t do much to stop
process itself and not just the contents these, nor should you try. The other
of the individual thoughts that make kind of thought is when we grab on to

14 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 one of these streams of energy and start
playing with it the way your mom
always told you not to do with your
wee-wee in front of the neighbors. We
dig deep into these thoughts and roll
around in them like a pig rolling in its
© PHOTODISC ILLUSTRATION/GETTY IMAGES

own doo-doo, feeling all that delicious

coolness and drinking deep of their
lovely stink.
To practice “thinking not thinking,”
all you need to do is ignore the first
kind of thoughts and learn how not to
instigate the second. This is easier said
than done, of course. But get into the
habit, and it begins to come naturally.
When you start doing this, you’ll
begin to notice that your thoughts
never just appear all at once fully ver-
balized. They start out much more
nebulous, and you sort of shape them
into stuff you can tell your friends or
write down in a book or whatever. If
you don’t understand what I’m talking
about here, just put this magazine
down for a second, get out a pencil and
paper, and try to write down whatever
it is you’re thinking about right now.
Did you try it? Even if you were just
thinking, “The guy who wrote this
doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking
about,” it’s pretty interesting how dif-
ficult it can be to just turn your nebu-
lous thoughts into something solid
like that.
Now try to look at the natural spaces
between thoughts. Learn what it feels

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 15
 insights

like to just stop generating more and That’s kind of an apt analogy for what
more stuff for your brain to chew on. we do in our heads. Only with cows,
Now see if you can do that for longer this activity performs a useful function
and longer periods. A couple of seconds in digestion. In human beings its use-
is fine. Voilà! Thinking not thinking! fulness is a little more doubtful.
One thing about thinking that few The trick to not thinking is not
of us ever really, uh, think about is the adding energy to the equation in an
fact that thinking actually takes a cer- effort to forcibly stop thinking from hap-
tain amount of effort. We often hear pening. It’s more a matter of subtracting
the word ruminate used in reference to energy from the equation in order not to
going over stuff in our heads. The barf the thoughts up and start chewing
word ruminate, though, literally refers them over again. This is easier said than
to what cows do when they barf up done, of course, like most things worth
half-digested food and chew it some doing. But work on it for a while, and
more before swallowing it again. eventually you’ll get the hang of it.

Bite-sized Buddhism
PEMA CHÖDRÖN comments on three slogans from the Tibetan lojong, or
“mind-training,” teachings.

If you can practice even when distracted, situation will be some day in the future.
you are well trained. What you do right now is what matters.
If you are a good horseback rider, your
mind can wander but you don’t fall off Two activities: one at the beginning, one at
your horse. In the same way, whatever the end.
circumstances you encounter, if you In the morning when you wake up,
are well trained in meditation, you you reflect on the day ahead and
don’t get swept away by emotions. aspire to use it to keep a wide-open
Instead, they perk you up and your heart and mind. At the end of the day,
awareness increases. before going to sleep, you think over
what you have done. If you fulfilled
Abandon any hope of fruition. your aspiration, even once, rejoice in
The key instruction is to stay in the that. If you went against your aspira-
present. Don’t get caught up in hopes of tion, rejoice that you are able to see
what you’ll achieve and how good your what you did and are no longer living
in ignorance. This
way you will be
inspired to go forward
with increasing clar-
ity, confidence, and
compassion in the
days that follow. ▼

From Always Maintain a

Joyful Mind, © 2007 by
© KYOKO HAMADA

Pema Chödrön. Reprinted

with permission of Shamb-
hala Publications, Inc.,
shambhala.com.

16 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 And if you find you just can’t do this on
certain days, no problem. Everyone has
days like that. Everyone. Me, you, Dogen,
the Dalai Lama, all of us. Effort is more
important than so-called success because
effort is a real thing. What we call “suc-
cess” is just the manifestation of our mind’s
ability to categorize things. This is “suc-
cess.” That is “failure.” Who says? You says.
That’s all. Reality is what it is, beyond
all concepts of success and failure. ▼

From Sit Down and Shut Up, © 2007 by

Brad Warner. Reprinted with permission of
New World Library, newworldlibrary.com

No Satisfaction
AYYA KHEMA explains why we
won’t find what we’re looking for.

WHILE WE STILL HAVE our “self ” intact,

that’s the one we love best. We won’t
find anybody who will love us as much
as we do ourselves. Yet, because of our
ego delusion, we believe that there
must be somebody like that some-
where. In reality we should look at this
search in a different way. We shouldn’t
try to find somebody who will help us
to support our self-delusion but rather
someone who will help us to get rid of
it. That can be the Buddha and his
teachings, because such is the essence of
the dhamma.
Introspection shows us the difficul-
ties in making the self solid and secure.
In fact, this is such a burden that we
cannot be deeply happy. We can be
pleasurably excited, but complete hap-
piness is not possible with a view that
needs constant reinforcement. We are
not satisfied with telling ourselves how
wonderful and clever we are. We need
another person to reinforce and support
this view.
The bigger our self-image is, the eas-
ier it gets knocked down. We often
believe that it is sensitivity when our
feelings are hurt, but it just means that

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 17
insights

we are self-centered and want to pro- we would have an immediate lessening

tect our threatened ego. of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), since
To look for total satisfaction in one- dukkha arises only from wanting some-
self is a futile endeavor. Neither satis- thing. Also our self-concept would be
faction nor self really exist. Since minimized, as ego is no longer con-
everything changes from moment to stantly in the forefront of the mind.
moment, where can self and where can To get to this enormous root sys-
satisfaction be found? Yet these are two tem that entangles us, we have to use
things that the whole world is looking mindfulness. The reason we find it so
for and it sounds quite reasonable, does- difficult to be really mindful is the

© FRANCIS BAKER
n’t it? But since these are impossible to fact that true attention shows us that
find, everybody is unhappy. Not neces- there is no person, only mind and
sarily because of tragedies, poverty, body. It is like coming up against a
sickness, or death: simply because of wall and instead of digging through
unfilled desire. Everybody is looking that wall, the mind veers off and
everyday garden: containment—concept,
for something that isn’t available. It’s doesn’t want to know anything fur-
Francis Baker, 2003, cyanotype on vellum
worse than looking for a needle in a ther. True mindfulness has arisen
haystack; at least the needle is there, when there is only the action but no ded in our mind/body process. We
even though it is hard to find. But sat- doer. With divided mindfulness we can never forget that experience. ▼
isfaction and self are both delusions, so experience both, the one who is
how can they ever be found? Searching mindful and the one who is being From Within Our Own Hearts, ©
here and there keeps everyone busy on watched. If we use precision in our Ayya Khema. Published in 2006 by the
this little globe of ours. If we were to attention, we see—even if only for a Buddhist Publication Society, www.bps.lk.
stop looking for satisfaction for the self, moment—that no person is embed- Used with permission.

18 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 19
20 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 on language

To Speech
JANE HIRSHFIELD

This first, this last:

there’s nothing you wouldn’t say. I didn’t expect to make a difference, and didn’t. And yet.

Unshockable inclusion your most pure nature, Your vehicles are air and memory,
and so you are like an iron pot— teeth, tongue, papyrus, woodblocks, iron,
whatever’s put in, it holds. signing fingers, circuits, transistors, and ink.
A wheel is not your vehicle, nor an engine.
We think it’s the fire that cooks the stew,
but, speech, it’s also you: Terence was your vehicle,
teacher saying in Latin:
of fire-making and stew-making, “Whatever is human cannot be foreign to me.”
orator of all our plans and intentions.
Your own truth as well—
We think we think with a self. For of all our parts, you are our closest mirror,
That also, it seems, is mostly you— growing thin or fat, muscular, clumsy,
sometimes a single spider’s thread of you, speeding or slowing as we do.
sometimes a mountain.
The wolf-child without you called wolf-child, not-fully-human.
The late sun paints orange
the white belly of a hawk overhead— You are held, in the forms we can know you,
that wasn’t you, only by creatures
though now and here, it is. able to pass you to others
living often in sadness and tiredness, sometimes in hope.
If a hungry child says “orange,” her taste buds grow larger.
A friend, who is sometimes sad, said this:
If a person undamaged says “hungry child,” “To be able to hope means also that we can regret.”
his despondence grows larger.
You rest, fierce speech, in both.
You are not, of course, omnipotent. As well as in bargaining, persuasion, argument, gossip,
In fact, you do little unaided by muscle, by matter. flirtation, jokes.
And still, present and absent, speech, you change us.
Fear, hunger, rage stammer beyond you:
As Issa changed, writing after the death of his daughter, what lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

This world of dew And so it is good we sometimes set you down

is a world of dew. and walk—
And yet. unthinking and peaceful, planning nothing—
© ABLESTOCK IMAGES.COM/IPNSTOCK

by the cold, salt, unobedient, unlistening sea.

How much of you
was left uninvited into those lines. Only then, without you, are we able to see you completely,
That silence your shadow, bringing his grieving to me. like those wandering monks
who, calling nowhere home, are everywhere home. ▼
For days
I made phone calls to strangers, Jane Hirshfield’s sixth book of poetry, AFTER, in which this poem
the few words repeated over and over, appears, was named a best book of 2006 by the Washington Post,
between the “please, if you have a moment” and “thank you.” San Francisco Chronicle, and London’s Financial Times.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 21
 teachers

Being True Love

Sasaki Roshi, a founding father of
American Zen, turns one hundred.
SEAN MURPHY

THE SONGWRITER LEONARD COHEN recently said of his

teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “He became someone who really
cared about—or deeply didn’t care about who I was. There-
fore, who I was began to wither. And the less I was of who I
was, the better I felt.”
A “master’s master” or “teacher’s enment, you have to make up a new
teacher” are common phrases I heard language.” This morning he pokes
in speaking to people about Joshu gentle fun at scholars and philoso-
Sasaki Roshi, who celebrated his one phers, while delivering his own star-
hundredth birthday on April first. tlingly fresh presentation of Zen, a
A Rinzai monk since the age of four- notoriously difficult one to summa-
teen, Sasaki Roshi came to Los Angeles rize. (His long-time translator Shinzen
from Japan in 1962 and founded an Young quips, “Is there a succinct way
American lineage known for vigorous, to express Einstein?”) Fond of mathe-
uncompromising practice. Beginning matical formulations, Roshi famously
with a neighborhood center in Gardena, renders emptiness as “zero.” Ego he
California, he later established Cimar- calls the “I am” self. The dualistic
ron Zen Center in Los Angeles in realms of “plus” and “minus” contin-
1966, Mount Baldy Zen Center in uously merge into and reemerge from
1971, and over thirty other centers unity, expressed as “God,” “perfect
since then. He still leads twenty to time,” or even “true love.” All is con-
thirty weeklong retreats a year. stantly changing; nothing, as Roshi
“He’s a throwback to an earlier likes to put it, is “fixated”—even
kind of teacher,” says Seiju Bob ultimate reality.
Mammoser, senior monk at the
Albuquerque Zen Center. “He LATER I’M TALKING with Giko Rubin,
teaches students to look through fresh Roshi’s current translator, when Seiju
eyes at their own experience.” appears with a surprise invitation:
When I discover Roshi is lecturing at “Roshi wants to see you both. Now.”
his Bodhi Manda Center in Jemez Sasaki Roshi awaits, seated in an
Springs, New Mexico, I can’t resist driv- armchair; several senior monks join us.
ing the two hours from Taos to listen. As expected, my introduction pro-
Despite his being “a little wobbly,” as vokes some traditional Zen jousting.
Roshi puts it, there’s hardly any sign of “Buddhist magazine?” Roshi says.
this once he takes his seat before the “Hmm. Maybe not so good.” Laugh-
group. He could easily be a man in his ter. Someone brings a copy of Tricycle,
sixties; some of the college students which he flips through, examining
present don’t look half so alive. each page. “Still, you make money
Sasaki Roshi has been quoted as say- with Buddhist magazine, maybe
ing, “If you want to explain enlight- good.” More laughter.

22 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 Sasaki Roshi, 100, at Bodhi Manda Zen
Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico
this summer

What more is there to say? He hands

the copy of Tricycle back. “Good maga-
zine,” he says, though I’m not sure how
he came to this conclusion.

THE QUESTION with Sasaki Roshi

always remains: will he name a succes-
sor? He has some twenty-five senior
© CAHLEN LEE

monks—“oshos”—many of whom have

been with him for decades, now teach-
ing at affiliated centers. Yet none has
received inka, his complete seal of
There’s nothing for me to do but approval. Alone among the original
dive in. “Roshi, you’ve said you teachers who brought Zen to America,
wouldn’t die until Zen was born in Sasaki Roshi has held out in naming
America. Has that happened?” anyone to lead his lineage after he has
“I’m a hundred years old. My ears gone. Is it because no one meets his stan-
can no longer hear stupid questions.” dards, or because, to use Seiju’s words,
This is par for the Zen course. Roshi he doesn’t want to lose the chance to
knows I practice; he’s telling me to get “relentlessly push” his primary disciples
real. “Roshi, what did you mean by “to deeper and deeper insight”?
perfect time?” When I ask Koyo Engennach, leader
“Not subject, not object. Not to be of the University Zen Center in Boul-
taken lightly. I would like you to der, Colorado, and Sasaki Roshi’s stu-
awaken to that state, please.” dent since 1973, whether any
At this someone corrects Giko’s American has completely grasped
translation. “I don’t think he said Sasaki Roshi’s dharma, he tells me, “It
‘please.’” Laughter. It’s kind laughter, remains to be seen.”
though. They’ve been through this Why, I ask Koyo, have so many sen-
themselves. ior monks stayed with Sasaki Roshi for
“Roshi, what did you mean by true so long, through such a difficult prac-
love?” tice? “Because he has such a deep reach
“If you want to understand true into the human condition. He’s always
love, you must be true love. If there is offering a little bit more—always
not true love in relationship, the result drawing up a deeper and broader
is trouble.” understanding. It doesn’t grow old.”
He looks straight at me and I sud- How long will he go on? Joshu
denly intuit his meaning. In Zen what Sasaki Roshi shows no signs of stop-
you put out is what you get back. I ping. But then Master Joshu, his
lean forward; although his eyes seem namesake, is said to have lived to be
bottomless, they are not difficult to one hundred and twenty. ▼
look into. “I’d like to understand true
love, Roshi.” Sean Murphy is the author of the American
“Ah, true love.” Roshi nods, smiles, Zen chronicle One Bird, One Stone, and
and extends his hand. Deeply moved, I three novels. His Hope Valley Hubcap
take it in mine. He laughs softly. “The King (2002) won the Hemingway Award
result of everything is true love.” for a First Novel.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 23
24 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 sangha spotlight

Coming Home
An outreach organization helps veterans of
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars piece their
lives back together.
BRIGID BRETT

JESSE HAS BEEN blinded by shrapnel. Paul cannot swallow of betrayal. Rory lost his best friend
properly or digest his food. Claudia doesn’t remember giving in the same blast that blew out his
eye, on his twenty-second birthday.
birth to her daughter. Although they’re no longer in Iraq, When soldier-poet Brian Turner
the war is still with them. reads from his book, Here Bullet, I notice
It’s a Friday night in Berkeley, California, and about a hun- a middle-aged man with roses tattooed
down the inside of his arm wiping his
dred of us are gathered at the First Congregational Church for eyes. During the break I learn that he
a community meeting called “Impacts tried to whisper his name, I would served in Vietnam. “It was hell there,”
of War—Paths to Healing.” The splinter into a million pieces.” he tells me, “but at least we had a jungle
meeting is sponsored by the Coming When Cynthia finishes speaking, to hide in. Out there in the desert these
Home Project, a non-profit organiza- Rory comes up to hug her. Three guys have nowhere to hide.” Then he
tion that tends to the psychological years after his injury, he’s tall and adds, “But at least they’re not getting
and spiritual wounds of Iraq and handsome and wears a patch over his spat on when they come home.” He ges-
Afghanistan veterans and their fami- missing eye. From a distance it’s hard tures around the hall. “If I’d had this
lies, by providing free stress-manage- to tell that his face has been rebuilt. kind of support, things might have
ment workshops, retreats, and Although he’s healing faster than any gone different than they did.”
building community support. doctor predicted, he’s still in physi-
We’re a mixed bunch: residents of cal pain and struggles with over- THE SEEDS FOR the Coming Home
Berkeley, interfaith leaders, veterans whelming surges of rage and feelings Project were planted at Plum Village, in
and their families, military personnel,
Jesse Acosta (left), blinded by shrapnel in Iraq, shakes hands with fellow Iraq veteran
trauma therapists, and some, like me,
Jeremy Williams at the Coming Home Project retreat in Berkeley.
from the media. We’re listening to
Cynthia Lafever describe what it was
© CHRISTOPHER O’DEA, COURTESY OF THE COMING HOME PROJECT

like to see her son Rory for the first

time after he was injured in Iraq:
“I began to inspect every inch of
my six-foot-three, 220-pound son,”
she says, her voice trembling as she
speaks into the microphone. “I
remembered the feel and smell of his
baby-soft skin as an infant. I wanted
to hold him in my arms, but I was too
afraid to touch him anywhere but his
hand—there were wires and tubes
and hoses everywhere. I noticed he
still had dirt and blood under his
nails. I wanted to speak words of love
to my son, but I knew that if I even

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 25
 sangha spotlight

southern France in the early 1980s, Jeremy Williams, a veteran of mul-

according to Joseph Bobrow, a Zen tiple deployments in Iraq, stands up
teacher, psychologist, and founder of the and answers without missing a beat.
Coming Home Project. For two sum- “Don’t ask me if I’ve ever killed any-
mers Bobrow lived and studied with one,” he says. “Thank me for my serv-
Thich Nhat Hahn amid Vietnamese ice. Ask me how I’m doing today, how
refugees, most of whom had been my family is doing. And then listen.”
severely traumatized. Bobrow observed He tries to go on but the tears come.
and experienced how Nhat Hanh used His wife, Christina, who is sitting
the power of community to heal the beside him, touches his arm. Jeremy
trauma of war. has been medically retired from the
“It is possible to reknit broken bones, marines for severe PTSD, and now the
but how do we try to reweave the heart, young couple and their two little boys
mind and spirit? Community is the find themselves in their own private
missing link in healing PTSD [post war zone. So many things catapult him
traumatic stress disorder],” says into a state of terror: seeing someone in
Bobrow. PTSD and other effects of war a military uniform, watching the news
are not just stress and anxiety disor- on TV, a balloon popping at a child’s
ders, he explains. “They impact us birthday party.
spiritually at the level of identity, When the community meeting
character, meaning, purpose, and ends, the vets and their families go
worldview. Our very being, our life back to their hotel on the bay.
and death, how we experience our Fundraising efforts have made it possi-
relation to ourselves, our loved ones, ble for the Coming Home Project to
the community, the country—often it pay for the families’ accommodations
is all shattered.” and transportation, and for most this is
In early 2006 Bobrow and medita- the first semblance of a vacation
tion teacher, Sharon Salzberg began to they’ve had for years. Many feel
explore how they could help Iraq and reduced to labels and sets of initials—
Afghanistan veterans and their fami- TBI (traumatic brain injury), PTSD,
lies start piecing together their lives. depression, anxiety, alcoholism, mem-
Bobrow reached out to leaders in mili- ory loss—and it is only when they
tary, interfaith and therapeutic set- come together, as they have this week-
tings and together they began end in an atmosphere of safety and
“building a community of mutual acceptance, that they begin to feel
support, healing and education for the whole again. As Stephanie, whose hus-
long haul.” band committed suicide shortly after
“The important thing about this his last deployment, says, “When I’m
project is that it's not about the poli- here I feel like I’m home.”
tics of war—it’s about being able to
get out our feelings and come together A COUPLE OF months later, I check in
despite our different views, politics with some of the people I met in
and religions,” Bobrow says. Berkeley—some of them over the
Tonight’s meeting is just the first phone and others in person. Most are
part of a weekend retreat where the struggling. They don’t know how
veterans and their families will share much longer they can fight the system
their stories, draw, write, practice to get the benefits they are entitled to.
yoga, and meditate together. There are bills to be paid and no money
“What do I say to someone who has to pay them. Spouses and parents are
returned from combat in Iraq?” some- experiencing caregiver burnout. And
one asks. yet, when we talk about the Coming

26 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
Home Project and about an upcoming
retreat over Veteran’s Day weekend in
November, it is as if someone has lit a
candle in a dark room.
Rory’s mother says they wouldn’t miss
it for the world. “Rory has never been
able to have individual therapy,” she
says. “The only time he feels safe enough
to really open up is when he is with this
group. It’s the unconditional acceptance,
the ability to be who he needs to be, that
is helping him get better.”
“I fought like hell not to go in the
beginning,” Jeremy tells me. “I didn’t
even want to get on the plane. It
reminded me too much of getting on
the plane three times to go to Iraq. Do
I want to go back in November? I’m
there.” He uses the word “comforting”
when he talks about Bobrow and some
of the older veterans he met.
“November is too far away,” Kenny
says. Kenny has TBI and PTSD and
normally hates going anywhere—it
makes him anxious to leave his house,
to be around too many people. The
thought of getting on a plane fills him
with dread. And yet he’s counting the
days until the Veteran’s Day retreat.
Nancy, whose reservist husband,
Rick, is at a VA hospital, says she
almost didn’t go to the retreat in
Berkeley. “I was thinking of ways to
get out of going. I thought, why do I
need to go? I was so mad at the mili-
tary . . . ” She pauses for a second. “But
I felt so good being at the retreat,
being with other military members
and their families, listening to what
has happened to them and sharing sto-
ries. You can express your feelings, and
no one is there to judge you. You
become like one close family, and that
feels good.” ▼

For more on the Coming Home Project, visit

cominghomeproject.net.

Brigid Brett is a columnist and freelance

writer. Originally from South Africa, she
now lives in San Diego.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 27
28 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 29
 dharma talk

love is all around

JOHN MAKRANSKY encourages us to recognize the unconditional love in our lives.

MY ROOT SPIRITUAL teacher, Nyoshul Khenpo, once The “blessings that are always pouring forth” include
said that a moment of enlightenment is a moment when the love that has permeated our lives, peeking at us
we realize “the blessings that are always pouring forth.” through many eyes. Think, for example, of someone you
We are, by nature, endowed with qualities of absolute loved to be near when you were a child: a parent or
goodness—purest love, compassion, wisdom, and tran- grandparent, a special aunt or uncle, a family friend or
quility. Those radiant qualities are intrinsic to our teacher—someone it felt wonderful to be with. Why
being. They are among the “blessings” to which did you like to be near that person so much? Probably
Khenpo refers. A moment of enlightenment is a because she radiated a wish of love to you through the
moment in which we newly notice such “blessings” as quality of her presence, her words, her play with you, or
having been all around us, and within us, from the simply through her smiling eyes when you came near.
beginning. Whenever we are ready to notice, we can Try to remember someone like that from your childhood
sense their healing, liberating energy pouring forth right now. Hold that person in your mind for a moment
right here, right now. and recall how it felt to be near her. That’s what it is like
One such radiant quality is unconditional love, the to receive the love that simply wishes for your happiness.
kind of love that doesn’t care what someone has thought We like to be near people like that because we have a
or done but simply wishes him or her deep well-being deep need to receive their unspoken love, to drink up its
and joy. It’s like the unconditional and unreserved love life-giving goodness.
that a wise, devoted parent has for a child. That capacity That radiant blessing of love has been coming to us
for love is within each of us and has been active all around from the start, not just from a few people close to us,
us, pervading our world from but also from many not personally known to us or peo-
John Makransky is a pro- the moment we were born. ple long forgotten. So many have offered themselves to
fessor of Buddhism and The claim that love per- us quietly, unnoticed and unremarked upon, such as
Comparative Theology at vades this world may not those who served in our school, who coached sports for
Boston College. sound real to you but that us as small children, who taught us music and clapped
doesn’t mean it isn’t true. for us, who watched over us with kindness and care
Most of us just haven’t learned to pay much attention to wherever we ran and played. Then there are all the
the countless moments of love, kindness, and care that adults who put loving care into their work, as our teach-
surround us each day: a child at the store reaching for ers, doctors, nurses, social workers, craftsmen, bakers,
her mother’s hand, an elderly stranger at the park who librarians, and waitresses. Yet we may never have
smiles upon a young family, a grocery clerk who beams noticed the extent of such care and consideration. No
at you as she hands you your change. one actually verbalizes: “Out of (continued on page 32)

30 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 Border Crossing, Alex Webb, Nogales, Mexico, 1979

Guided Meditation #1: Commune with Spiritual Benefactors

It is important to learn to recognize deeply spiritual the fatherly television personality and minister
people in your world, past or present, who function as who helped generations of American children feel
spiritual benefactors. These are persons that you feel at home in this world. Because spiritually weighty
embody great goodness, a force of love and compas- beings have communed so deeply with the very
sion that extends to all without partiality, including source of love and compassion we share in that
yourself. These may be people in your life whose fun- ground when we open to their wish of love. It
damental goodness and way of being profoundly blesses our life. This is part of the reason that
influenced you. If you have a mentor or teacher who images of the Buddha, the Dalai Lama, and other
inspires your spiritual practice, he or she would be revered spiritual teachers are so important to
© ALEX WEBB, COURTESY OF MAGNUM PHOTOS

included here. You could also include the teachers of Tibetan Buddhists—such figures are sources of
your own spiritual teacher. People most profoundly spiritual energy and inspiration for those who reg-
holy to you, such as Shakyamuni Buddha or Jesus, ularly commune with them. Try to bring to mind
would fall into this category. Try to identify ones you one or more spiritual benefactors now, whether
feel to be such sacred beings and trust your own personally known to you or admired from a dis-
maturing sense of that, without trying merely to con- tance, and imagine their smiling presence before
form to others’ assumptions. you. Relax and gently open to receive their wish
You can keep a picture of a spiritual benefactor of love that radiates to you and many others.
near you to help you relate to this person. One Commune with them in that way for a little while,
meditator I know keeps a picture of Mr. Rogers, and enjoy.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 31
 dharma talk

(continued from page 30) loving concern for all the children In addition, there are people in the world and
in this neighborhood, including you, I am helping to throughout history who have benefited many people
build this playground,” or “I am now sending you the beyond their personal lives, people whose way of being
wish of love; that’s why you like to be near me.” And the embodies such powerful concern for others and for the
child doesn’t think “I am now receiving the wish of world that they epitomize our greatest human potential:
love.” So we may never become conscious of how much Shakyamuni Buddha and Jesus, St. Francis, Martin
loving care pervades our world. Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Mother Theresa, the Dalai
As we grow older, we learn to pay attention to things Lama. Such potent spiritual beings have radiated their
that society considers more real and significant than the love to all of us without discrimination. But with our
loving care of all those people. According to the social dis- modern, secular worldview, many of us have forgotten
course around us, it seems much more important to iden- how to acknowledge and to receive the liberating power
tify those whom we should hate, fear, or compete with for of such love. Instead, we’ve learned to ignore it.
affirmation, power, and wealth. Meanwhile, television Our society provides no curriculum or schooling on
news and magazines focus our communal attention each how to notice love or to recognize the many people who
day on the horrible things that some people have done to have transmitted its life-giving power. Most of us
others, as if that is all that happened in the world that day. haven’t been taught that to receive love deeply and
Much of our discourse is spent propping up this nega- transmit it wholeheartedly is a real human possibility,
tive worldview: “Oh, yes, I know what you mean, my rela- that it can be learned, and that to do so is the key to our
tives are horrible too.” “I can’t stand that politician either.” deepest well-being, our spiritual life, and our capacity
“Can you believe how stupid those people are?” We have to bring more goodness into this world.
become so smug in our cultural cynicism we don’t notice So as adults, we need to become newly aware of the love
that even the people we generally look down upon have that has infused our lives all along, to turn our attention to
had moments of integrity and kindness. it afresh with the eyes of a child. To do so is to become con-

Guided Meditation #2: Discover the Benefactors in Your Life

We discover love’s transformative and liberating moments when someone’s unreserved love came to
power first by receiving love more fully, then by you—through a kind word, a gesture, a smile, or a
offering it more inclusively, and finally by reflecting it comforting presence. It could be someone well known
from the ground of our being. To enter into this to you or a seeming stranger.
process, we need to identify benefactors who have Try to recall someone like that from your childhood
been emissaries of love in our lives. right now. Envision his or her smiling presence
“Benefactor” here means someone who has sent before you. Recall how good it felt to be near that
us the wish of love, the simple wish for us to be person. That is what it is like to receive love. Hold
well and happy. Once we start to notice such beings, that person in mind for a little while, communing
we find, actually, that there have been many that with him or her in the simple goodness of their wish
have radiated such love to us, but we had mostly of love for you, their wish for your happiness and joy.
overlooked or forgotten them. Take a few minutes just to relax and receive that
A benefactor is someone you perceive as such in wish from him or her. Right now.
your own experience, not just someone you assume When you feel ready, try to think of a few other
you should pick as benefactor. Your benefactors may people you adored being near as a child. An uncle
be living or not. The power of love transcends how or aunt, perhaps? A schoolteacher that you loved to
we think of time. be with? A friend of your parents whom you looked
Benefactors need not be infallible or perfect people. forward to seeing? When I began to do this exercise,
Just allow yourself to become newly aware of my second-grade teacher suddenly appeared in my

32 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
scious of the tremendous capacity for love that even now goodness of being, the intrinsic goodness of experience
permeates our being—to open to it, to be healed by its itself, the joy of being alive. It brings out the natural wis-
life-giving energy, and to participate in its power to renew dom that was hidden in our minds—a purer vision that
our world. We can awaken to the deepest goodness in our- knows the beings and things all around us to be utterly
selves and others. We can learn to recognize and commune holy, as if they were all messengers of the Buddha.
with the blessings that have always been pouring forth. To receive love in this way is to become conscious of
The first step is to learn to pay new attention to what a fresh, sacred world that was somehow obscured by
has been ignored. Many people are extending love, the our tired, socially constructed worlds of self-centered
simple wish for us to be happy—and have been since the worry and cynicism. When someone awakens in a
day we were born. What is remarkable to me is what moment of receptivity to the “blessings that are always

To receive love deeply and transmit it

wholeheartedly is a real human possibility.
happens when we are willing to notice it. And even more pouring forth,” the fresh, sacred world that was long
remarkable is what happens when we are willing to ignored suddenly unveils itself. It is self-revealed as
receive it. The simple act of accepting a stranger’s wish one’s true home. ▼
for our happiness empowers us to experience the world
in a completely different way. All portions of this article have been adapted from Awakening
To receive such a simple wish of love quietly opens our Through Love © 2007 by John Makransky. Reprinted by
minds to an innate wisdom that recognizes the essential arrangement with Wisdom Publications, wisdompubs.org.

mind’s eye—Mrs. Kirchner, whom I liked so much people you have probably overlooked who make a
that I accidentally called her “Mom” at school. She wish for your happiness, but you haven’t realized
wasn’t just teaching; she was expressing her love for yet how important and life-giving it is to pay atten-
her students through her teaching. Then there was tion to them.
my Uncle Morton, who expressed his love with silly As your practice progresses, you may find your-
jokes and by snatching some of my french fries when self widening your range of benefactors by sponta-
I wasn’t looking—while making sure I would catch neously recalling instances when you were the
him in the act. When you have thought of a few such recipient of unconditional love, even from people
benefactors in your life, imagine them before you that you long characterized as unloving. One medi-
one by one or all together. Mentally hold the smiling tator who had a particularly difficult relationship
faces of those benefactors before you; then relax and with his mother told me how during a meditation
just accept the simple goodness of their wish for session he found himself recalling a scene from his
your well-being and happiness, their wish of love for early childhood. He had been in a fever, foggy with
you. Take time for this right now, accepting, receiv- delirium, when his mother came to soothe him by
ing, and enjoying the power of their wish. There is placing her hand on his stomach—a gentle, healing
nothing more important to do. touch. The memory of that simple, loving gesture
If you do this exercise repeatedly, you will recog- suddenly reawakened. Again, we are not looking
nize more benefactors not only from your early life for infallible people; just moments when genuine,
but also from other periods. Even now there are unreserved care came through.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 33
 on practice

full body, empty mind

WILL JOHNSON explains that by turning our awareness to the full range of
physical sensations, the body becomes a doorway to awakening.
Photographs by Warren Darius Aftahi

In many Buddhist groups, the body is addressed only without feeling as though we are detracting from our
in basic instructions on posture for meditation, usual sitting practice? This focus on awareness of the
sometimes lasting no more than a few minutes. body is what, for me, the teachings always kept leading
Many practitioners are drawn to body-based prac- to. The part of the Four Noble Truths that attracted
tices such as yoga, martial arts, or the Alexander me the most, for example, was the explanation about
technique to complement or even enable their sit- why we suffer. The Buddha’s observation that we create
ting practice, but they are often on their own when it upset for ourselves when we’re in reaction, and that we
comes to integrating these traditions with their larg- manage to do this to ourselves through the twinned
er spiritual path. What is being lost in this gap? One actions of desire and aversion, just rang true.
of the most convincing voices for the importance of The teachings tell us that actions disturb our peace of
the body in meditation belongs to Will Johnson, mind, but what I’m suggesting is that we can’t just
author of several books on the topic, including The look to what we conventionally call our mind to sort
Posture of Meditation; Aligned, Relaxed, and this out. Reaction, clinging, and aversion are physical
Resilient; andYoga of the Mahamudra. actions that the body performs and that, no matter how
Johnson, the director of the Institute for subtle, create muscular tension through the repeated
Embodiment Training in British Columbia, Canada, motions of either “pulling toward” (desire) or “pushing
began his Buddhist practice in 1972 and was certi- away” (aversion). Repeat anything often enough, and
fied in the deep bodywork system of Rolfing in you create holding patterns in the body that predispose
1976. Drawing on his experience in these traditions, you to continue doing that action. Sitting practices that
Sufism, and others, he now teaches embodiment focus on relaxing the underlying tensions and holdings
training, what he calls “a path of awakening that you feel in your body, as well as restrictions to the
views the body as the doorway, not the obstacle, to breath, help you mitigate the legacy and habit patterns
personal growth and spiritual transformation.” I of reacting, clinging, and aversion.
exchanged emails with Johnson to discuss how As the eleventh-century Mahamudra teacher Tilopa
meditators can explore the body and what they said, “Do nothing with the body but relax.” When we
might gain from the practice. start to relax, we start feeling the body. Tensions and
–Andrew Merz contractions in the body serve as a numbing blanket
that keeps the tiny physical sensations that exist on
You’ve said that in order to experience emptiness of every part of the body from being felt. Learning how
mind, one must first experience fullness of body. to relax while remaining upright in the sitting posture
© WARREN DARIUS AFTAHI

While this intuitively resonates with many medita- allows the body’s full range of sensations to come out
tors, clear explanations of why that is true and how it of hiding and make their existence felt. It’s always
can be integrated into a Buddhist meditation practice struck me as peculiar: If I know that sensations can be
are hard to find. How do we start to understand this felt to exist everywhere in the body, then why don’t I
view in a Buddhist context, and how do we address it feel them? And what effect does blocking out aware-

34 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 on practice

ness of feeling have on me? And finally, if the mind A good place to start is examining what happens to
that is “lost in thought” is somehow dependent on my the body when you’re lost in thought. This, of course, is
not feeling the sensations of the body, what happens to tricky to do, because when the mind is off wandering in
the mind if I let myself feel the entire body, head to involuntary thought, you’re not very aware of the body
toe, as an unbroken field of sensations? The sitting at all. But if you can include an observation of the body
posture itself can be a kind of crucible for burning off while you’re off in a thought, you’ll find that the condi-
the tensions and restrictions to body and breath that tion “lost in thought” is directly accompanied some-
all too often keep us lost in thought and unaware of where in the body by muscular contraction and tensing,
feeling presence. stillness and rigidity, and a subtle contraction or holding

© WARREN DARIUS AFTAHI

Exercise: Dissolving Thought into Sensation

Sensation and thought cannot easily coexist. Another Now shift your awareness. Remember: sensations
way of saying this is that sensation and thought can- exist in every part of the body, and thought and sen-
not occupy the same space. So, locate where your next sation cannot occupy the same space. So relax and
thought is positioned in space. It’s probably going to let yourself start to feel the tactile sensations, the
be somewhere around or inside your head, but it’s feeling presence, that also occupies that space. Just
definitely somewhere in your body. Find out where it let the feeling presence in this space start to come
is. Plot out its spatial coordinates. Where does it start forward. Where is your thought now?
and stop in your body? What shape is it? –W. J.

36 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 Exercise: Expanding Sensation into Presence

Never look upon the involuntary thought process of that you can see the entire visual
© WARREN DARIUS AFTAHI

the mind as an enemy that needs to be subdued or field all at once. Next include
vanquished. Look upon it instead as an infallible the entire field of sound. Be
guide that is constantly “re-minding” you that you aware of every little bit of the
have momentarily lost awareness of sensations. Once ever-changing field of sound, as
you have dissolved thought into sensation in the area though you were listening to a symphony and hearing
of your head, expand your awareness of sensations to what every single instrument was playing.
include your entire body. Without bringing any tension Feel the entire body. See the entire visual field.
into this shifting of awareness, staying completely Listen to everything that is here to be heard. Stay
relaxed, feel the entire body from head to foot, all at completely relaxed as you do this. In this condition of
once, as a unified field of tactile sensations. awakened presence, where have the thoughts gone?
Now expand your awareness to include the entire Where have YOU gone?
field of vision. Soften any tension around your eyes so –W. J.

quality to the breath. In other words, when you’re lost in the time, have very little conscious awareness of the felt
thought, you’re tense in body. It follows, then, that if presence of their bodies. In other words, we are uncon-
you can consciously work with the body during your sit- scious of the presence of sensations, and so it is in the
ting practice to soften and relax the tensions and allow unfelt sensations of the body that the unconscious is to
more resilient and natural movement to accompany the be found. I would suggest that most people, at any
passage of the breath, the chatter of the mind can be given moment, are probably only aware of 5 to 15 per-
reduced, and your practice can start going really deep. cent of their bodily sensations.
The work of Buddhism is to awaken, to come out of
Once we begin to burn off the tensions and restric- the sleepy dreams and notions of reality that we hold to
tions, how is this release manifested in the mind and be true and replace them with a direct experience of
emotions? Vipassana teachers speak of sankharas, the what is more accurately occurring. To awaken in this
accumulated residues of resistance and reactions that we way, we need to become conscious of what’s actually
store in our bodies and that, through long, focused going on at the very depths of our experience.
hours of meditation, gradually come to the surface of
awareness in the form of sensations (often not very So when we unlock a particular physical tension, are
pleasant ones). If we can simply feel them without we also releasing potentially difficult emotional
reacting to them, they eventually burn themselves up aspects of the clinging or aversion that originally
and disappear, leaving a much more pleasurable shim- caused the tension? Many people report strong emo-
mer in their place (that is, until the next deeper level of tional reactions to bodywork—memories of a child-
sankharas make their way to the surface to be felt, hood trauma arising during massage therapy, for
accepted, and released). instance. In Buddhist terms, is this our karma stored
Wilhelm Reich, one of the earliest Western psy- in the tension in our bodies? For Western somatic ther-
chotherapists who became interested in how the ener- apists and Theravada Buddhists alike, much of the work
gies of the body affect states of the mind, believed that that needs to be done is to rekindle a felt awareness of
what we call the unconscious is not stored in some the whole body as a field of vibratory sensations. I some-
remote repository in the brain but rather in the soft tis- times joke with people that as we start to become aware
sues of the body. Think about this for a moment, of bodily sensations, we very quickly realize why we
because it makes a lot of sense. Even though we know haven’t wanted to feel them! We may have visions of
that sensations can be felt to exist on every part of the relaxing the body and opening to an awareness of shim-
body down to the smallest cell, most people, most of mering bodily sensations that feel like soft falling rain,

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 37
 on practice

but more often than not what we are first going to have tually to abate, and what appears in their place is worth
to go through is a phase in which we feel highly intensi- the price of admission. Sometimes the clearing of the
fied, sometimes very painful sensations, and through storms can take quite a bit of time (this is not fast-food
these periods of practice we face our karma directly. therapy), and it is for this reason that I increasingly pre-
When we silently weep in our meditation practice over fer to enter into retreats that last several weeks.
the discomfort we might be feeling, it is likely that a Meditation practices that instruct students to focus
sankhara of sadness has come to the surface and is being solely on the activities and contents of what we conven-
released through that sensation of pain. When we get tionally call the mind may unwittingly contribute to
angry and irritated in our meditation because of what we keeping contained the deep unconscious sankharas,
might be feeling, it’s likely that a sankhara of aversion which always appear as sensation. Many techniques can
has emerged out of the repository of our unconscious. bring about a calming effect at the surface level of the
So when I speak of relaxing the tensions and holdings mind, but if we’re sincere about wanting to truly
in the body and breath through sitting meditation prac- awaken and become truly conscious, we really need to
tice, please don’t think that I’m implying that every- embrace the experience of the body as a focus of our
thing is going to proceed like a pleasant Sunday outing practice and allow the deeply unconscious and unfelt
in the country. More often than not, large emotional sensations to start coming out of hiding. And yes, this
and physical storms may occur during practice before can be a very intensive undertaking, one definitely not
the skies clear. But if we can be courageous enough to for the faint of heart! But what, really, is our choice? We
work with the simple principles of alignment, relax- either face our karma and release the accumulated ten-
ation, and surrendered resilience during our sitting sions of the past, or we continue to avoid feeling the
practice [see box, page 39], these storms do seem even- reality of the body and enshrine the tensions forever.

As you say, this does indeed sound like an intensive

undertaking and one that many practitioners today
may feel they simply don’t have room for in their busy
lives. When we sit down and encounter our deepest
unconscious feelings first thing in the morning, how
do we then get up and go about our day effectively?
How can we approach this work in a manner that
doesn’t threaten to make us fall apart completely?
The kinds of emotional storms that we’re talking about
generally only erupt during long, intensive retreats.
When we return home to our more familiar environ-
ment, things will settle out after a day or two, and so I
don’t think you really have to worry about falling apart
while driving to work. If we’re sincere about truly
going deep and purifying out some of the residue of
our karma, then I think an intensive retreat at least
once a year is very important. When we come back
from retreat, it’s helpful to keep up our formal practice
by sitting daily for an hour or for however long our
© WARREN DARIUS AFTAHI

schedule permits.
As important as formal practices undeniably are, I feel
that it is even more important to view the rest of our
lives as “informal” practice. What I mean by this is that
the awareness of embodied presence need not be con-

38 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
3 Keys: Alignment, Relaxation, and Surrendered Resilience

Alignment: The tallest skyscrapers and trees are are able to relax, we can start to feel the body and our
only able to attain their remarkable height because formerly unfelt sensations start emerging.
of their vertical alignment. Gravity supports struc-
tures that are balanced and aligned in this way. If you Surrendered resilience: To stay relaxed, the entire
can consciously, but effortlessly, bring the major body must be able to remain in subtle but constant
segments of your body into a predominantly vertical movement, like an amoeba that continually expands
alignment, gravity will support you as well. and contracts. Breath, for example, can be felt to
move through the entire body, causing subtle move-
Relaxation: The purpose of alignment is that it allows ment to occur at every joint. If we resist this natural
us to relax. A body that is not aligned relies on con- bodily movement by holding ourselves still, we will
stant muscular tension to remain upright, for if it were bring tension back into our body, forfeit our relax-
to relax its tension, it would fall to the ground. Tension ation, lose awareness of sensations, and yet again
blocks out our awareness of sensations, so once we become lost in the involuntary story lines of our mind.
–W. J.

fined to the time spent sitting on our meditation cush- Let alignment, relaxation, and surrendered resilience
ion. Every single moment provides an opportunity to be your physical guides not only in your sitting practice
relax the tendency to create tension in the body and but also as you go about your day. These three keys allow
unconscious thought patterns in the mind, and this can you to stay in touch with embodied presence. Merging
be a very gentle process. If intensive retreats are like an awareness of body with the awareness of vision and
turning up the flame on the stove, informal practice is sound allows you to truly become one with this present
like simmering at a low and steady heat that is practi- moment. As you bring alignment, relaxation, and
cally unnoticeable and so allows you to go about your resilience into your daily life, your breath automatically

If we’re sincere about wanting to truly

awaken, we need to embrace the body as a
focus of our practice.
daily life without the emotional upheavals that can becomes fuller and starts moving through your entire
occur during more intensive periods of practice. body, just as the Buddha suggested in his description of
I think of informal practice as “embodied mindful- meditation. Without forcing a thing, let your breath
ness.” In truth, every single moment of our lives pres- breathe you: breathe into your entire body, and breathe
ents us with a choice: either awaken to the reality of the out just as effortlessly. This condition, nothing more,
present moment, or stay sleepy and push aspects of that nothing less, is really the reward and benefit of the prac-
reality away. Sensations are here every single moment. tice. And in this way you can walk in full awareness
Why don’t we feel them? The visual field, in all its daz- through the city or countryside, like a knife cutting
zling play, is here every moment that our eyes are open. through the softest butter. Always be on the lookout not
Can we remember to look and actually see? Sounds are to bring any tension into this practice. Striving to attain
here constantly. Blocking them from our awareness cre- this kind of awareness is simply self-defeating. Relax
ates a great deal of tension in the body. into presence. It’s been there all the time. ▼

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 39
 ancestors

the sensualist
MIRA TWETI recounts the remarkable life of Zen pioneer Alan Watts.

WHILE THE USUALLY sleepy English village of Chislehurst view,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that the whole
was being bombarded by German aircraft in the early point and joy of human life is to integrate the spiritual
morning of January 6, 1915, Alan Watts— —who was to with the material, the mystical with the sensuous, and
become one of the foremost interpreters of ancient East- the altruistic with a kind of proper self-love.”
ern wisdom for the modern West— —was born to Laurence As much as he respected his native religion, Watts
Wilson Watts and Emily Mary Buchan. was troubled by its solemn hymns, its rigidity, and the
The elder Watts was an executive with the Michelin dualism he found in its teachings, although its harsh-
tire company in London, and his wife taught at a local ness was tempered by the natural tranquility he found
school for daughters of missionaries to China. It was around him in his mother’s garden and surrounding
because of his mother that Alan had early exposure to countryside. “I used to lie in bed feeling my spirits
Asian culture, via art and other gifts brought by parents raised by the bird symphony, a choir of angels in praise
returning from China. A Sinophile all his life, Alan of the sun. And at sunset a solitary thrush would perch
attributed the start of his interest in the writings of Chi- at the very top of the rowan tree and go into a solo,”
nese poets and sages to his mother’s gift of a Chinese recalled Watts of his youth.
translation of the New Testament. Watts’s mother was overprotective of her only surviving
Watts’s spiritual journey began with a bucolic childhood child (she had suffered two miscarriages and an earlier
steeped in the cobwebbed mores of Edwardian England. son’s death at just two weeks old); she discouraged Alan
He had a religious upbringing in the Church of England, from sports and pushed him toward artistic and intel-
and by his teens he’d become an expert on ecclesiastical lectual pursuits. His father read to him from Rudyard
ritual. He took as his early role models local priests who Kipling and spoke of Buddhism, both of which
lived large and showed him that one could be worldly enchanted the boy with “curious exotic and far-off mar-
and a holy man, too. In later years he described himself vels that simply were not to be found in muscular Chris-
as an unabashed sensualist and openly admitted he was tianity.” In the evenings Alan joined his parents in the
ill at ease with people who militantly abstained from living room, where his mother played an upright piano
smoking, sex, and drinking. “I am committed to the and his father sang arias from Gilbert and Sullivan. Dur-
ing school holidays he would write heady papers—often
Mira Tweti has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York
on theological subjects—for the fun of exploring his
Times, the Village Voice, and the LA Weekly. Her last article for
Tricycle, “Daughters of the Buddha,” appeared in the Winter 2006 own ideas, and then read them to his parents, launching
issue. She is currently working on a book for Viking Press on parrots. family discussions that ran long into the night.

40 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 In high school Watts considered his Anglican religious received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ver-
education “grim and maudlin though retaining fascination mont; instead, he designed his own “higher education”
because it had something to do with the basic mysteries of curriculum, with Humphries as the preceptor.
existence.” His view of the universe was forever changed
after reading about nirvana in Lafcadio Hearn’s book IN 1938, NOW ALL OF TWENTY-THREE, Watts moved
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields. “Buddhist bells sound deeper to New York City with his first wife, Eleanor Fuller, a
than Christian bells,” he later wrote, “. . . and om mane Chicago socialite and practicing Buddhist. Watts and
padme hum ran in my brain as something much more inter- Eleanor studied with the Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki
esting than ‘O come let us sing unto the Lord.’” So in Roshi (1882–1945), who had a temple in a one-room
1929, at the age of fourteen, he declared himself a Bud- brownstone apartment in the city. Of Sokei-an, Watts
dhist and started a correspondence with the most famous said, “I felt that he was basically on the same team as I;
English Buddhist, Christmas “Toby” Humphries, a high that he bridged the spiritual and the earthy, and that
he was as humorously earthy as he was spiritually
awakened.” Some years later, Watts’s mother-in-law,
Ruth Fuller, married Sasaki and became a Buddhist
teacher herself.
In 1940, Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness and
started lecturing and writing in earnest to an American
audience. His talks were well received by small groups
in local bookstores and private homes, but on the whole
he felt dismissed as “a crackpot with green idols, thigh-
bone trumpets and cups made from human skulls”
adorning his home. In contrast to the openness to Bud-
dhism he had experienced in England, in his early years
in the States Watts found himself marginalized by his
vocation. And while he would ultimately help popular-
ize Buddhism to a mainstream American audience, he
COURTESY OF MARK WATTS

would always remain an iconoclast carving out a new

spiritual path through stubborn terrain.
Although Eleanor came from money, Watts felt pres-
sure to be the breadwinner. Interest in his writing and
lectures was limited, and he struggled to earn a living,
fearing he was on his way to becoming “a misfit and an
oddity in Western society.” So at twenty-six, in order to
Alan Watts in the mid-sixties
have a steady job, he decided to leave New York and take
court judge, Shakespearean scholar, and chairperson of the ordination as an Episcopalian priest at Seabury-Western
Buddhist Lodge in London. When Watts, chaperoned by Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He later
his father, showed up at the Lodge, Humphries and the wrote of this move, “I did not then consider myself as
other members were astonished to learn that their bril- being converted to Christianity in the sense that I was
liant new associate was a teenager. abandoning Buddhism or Taoism. The Gospels never
Watts became the organization’s secretary at sixteen, the appealed to me so deeply as the Tao Te Ching or the
editor of the Lodge’s journal, The Middle Way, at nineteen Chuang-tzu book. It was simply that the Anglican com-
(a position he held for the next four years), and wrote his munion seemed to be the most appropriate context for
first book, The Spirit of Zen, in a month of evenings at the doing what was in me to do in Western society.”
age of twenty. He chose not to attend college, although Though Watts later said of this time in his life that he
much later he was made a Harvard research fellow and had deliberately gone “square” and that his gift for “ritual

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 41
 ancestors

magic” made him more shaman than priest (“priests fol- A longtime friend and colleague, the scholar and
low traditions,” he said, “but shamans originate them”), esteemed religions author Huston Smith said of Watts,
his position as priest gave him the power to do away with “He was a consummate liturgist. We were together
the elements of Christian ritual he abhorred. This once on an Easter Sunday at Esalen [Institute, the
included personal Christian prayer, which he called a renowned alternative education and retreat center].
“clumsy encumbrance” that got in the way of the fact And at 10 a.m., to a full house in the Huxley room, he
that “God is what there is and all that there is.” Watts sang the Anglican liturgy and he had a beautiful voice.
took a position in 1944 as Episcopal chaplain at North- I won’t speculate or probe about his belief in that, but
western University, where he threw open the church’s he was from first to last a consummate performer.”
doors and developed a dedicated following of students Watts was also a bohemian, a term he defined as
who came for prayer and stayed for tea, cocktails, and reg- someone who “loves color and exuberance, keeps irreg-
ular late-night discussions. He jazzed up church services ular hours, would rather be free than rich, dislikes
by performing “magical liturgies,” banning “corny” working for a boss, and has his own code of sexual
hymns, limiting sermons to fifteen minutes or less, and morals.” His lifestyle went directly against the
celebrating mass as “a joining with the Cherubim and Church’s mores and those of his wife, who felt that his

LEFT TO RIGHT: © THE BUDDHIST SOCIETY, LONDON; PHOTO BY JEFF BERNER, COURTESY OF ANNE WATTS

Left: Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki at the Rembrandt Hotel in London in 1958; right: Alan Watts on the Vallejo ferry boat in 1967

Seraphim, the Archangels and Angels, in the celestial libertarian views on sexuality (particularly his belief in
whoopee of their eternal dance about the Center of the free love) didn’t make for a solid marriage. In 1949 she
Universe.” Watts had creative ideas about those angels, left him, taking their two young daughters with her,
saying, “When I contemplate such ordinary creatures as and had their marriage annulled.
pigs, chickens, ducks, lazy cats, sparrows, goldfish, and Smith notes that the chaplainship at Northwestern
squids I begin to have irrepressibly odd notions about the was “too small a puddle for Alan Watts,” and that was
true shapes of angels.” surely a factor when in 1950 Watts hung up his robes

42 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
and left Illinois with one of his students—and former Oscar Janiger’s experiments and took LSD as a subject in
babysitter—Dorothy Dewitt, who became his second Keith Ditman’s studies at UCLA. Watts continued to
wife. The couple moved to a farmhouse in upstate New drop acid recreationally through the rest of his life. He
York, where they lived until 1951, when Watts was was so fond of what he considered its enlightening
offered a faculty post at the newly formed American aspects that he offered each of his children a guided trip
Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco (now the when they turned eighteen.
California Institute of Integral Studies). Among its stu- In the spring of 1957, Watts left the Academy of
dents were the future Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Asian Studies and went out on his own. By then he had
Snyder; Richard Price, cofounder of Esalen Institute also had enough of the “obsolete institution” of mar-
(Watts was invited as the center’s first speaker); and riage and the white picket fence that came with it. He
teachers like the Indian thinker Krishnamurti and the had fallen out of love with Dorothy and left her and
religion professor Frederic Spiegelberg. their four children.
Watts paid a high price for his personal freedom. During
AT THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Asian Studies, Watts their split-up, Dorothy found she was pregnant with their
was finally in a place he loved, doing what he loved. He fifth child. Now, with seven children to support, Watts
could spend all his time engaging in “spiritual mis- had to work incessantly. He wrote books (fifteen after
chief” and exploring issues of human identity and the 1957), poems, and articles (some for Playboy magazine);
transformation of consciousness. He was free to teach created art and music; lectured; and traveled (including
what he liked and utilized techniques ahead of his trips to Japan and Switzerland, where he spoke at the Carl
time, such as mixing disciplines. In a single course stu- Jung Institute and met with Jung at his home). Watts
dents were exposed to Buddhism, Tantric yoga, bio- took care of his children and never missed a writing dead-
physics, cultural anthropology, cybernetics, and guest line, but often did not care for himself. The unrelenting
speakers who spoke on a number of subjects. Watts work schedule combined with years of heavy smoking and
believed that “no intelligent person should restrict escalating vodka consumption drained his health and
himself to artificially segregated fields of spiritual or energy. He is reported to have been hospitalized with
intellectual adventure.” delerium tremens, a serious condition indicative of late-
Watts disdained equally formal education and reli- stage alcoholism.
gious practice and came to the defense of his friend D. T. Watts found a drinking partner in Mary Jane Yates
Suzuki when he wrote: “The uptight school of Western King, known as “Jano,” a journalist and public relations
Buddhists who seem to believe that Zen is essentially executive who shared Watts’s spiritual, philosophical,
sitting on your ass for interminable hours (as do some of and creative interests and whom he described as the
the Japanese), accused [Suzuki] of giving insufficient soulmate he had been “looking for all down my ages.”
emphasis to harsh discipline in the course of attaining They eventually married and stayed together until his
satori [awakening].” Watts, like Suzuki, believed that death. Apart from their struggles with alcoholism, the
“too much zazen is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha,” couple enjoyed the ideal bohemian lifestyle to which
and sat only when the “mood” was upon him. Watts Watts had aspired. They lived in Marin County, Califor-
supported this belief by quoting the Sixth Zen Patri- nia, alternating their time between the Mount Tamalpais
arch, Hui-neng, who said, “A living man who sits and bohemian community of Druid Heights and a Sausalito
does not lie down, a dead man who lies down and does houseboat. Watts attended tony Hollywood parties
not sit. After all, these are just dirty skeletons.” with fellow guests like Marlon Brando and Anaïs Nin,
During the mid-fifties, Watts guest-lectured at and shared with Jano a profusion of interesting artistic
Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Cambridge, and Harvard, and intellectual friends.
where he befriended Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert In 1960 Huston Smith arranged for Watts to meet
(later Ram Dass), who were conducting their LSD exper- Aldous Huxley at dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
iments at the time. Although Watts didn’t publicly when Watts was again lecturing at Harvard and Huxley
endorse drug use, he was a mescaline “guinea pig” for was a visiting professor at MIT. (continued on page 114)

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 43
 surviving the dragon
From sheltered youth to forced laborer to government official, ARJIA RINPOCHE
tells the story of his extraordinary life in Chinese-occupied Tibet, including an
eyewitness account of one of the most infamous events in recent Tibetan history.

Arjia Rinpoche was born in 1950, the same year acted as his assistant for many years and was with
Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army invaded him the day before he died in 1989—an event still
Tibet. His early years were ones of geographical shrouded in rumors of foul play. After the Panchen
and political isolation. His nomadic family herded Lama’s passing, Arjia was named a member of the
their yaks across the high plains of the Tibetan- Communists’ nominating committee, created to
Mongolian border, their camp never far from the select a new Panchen Lama, a task traditionally left
vast blue waters of Lake Kokonor. At the age of two, to the standing Dalai Lama. He witnessed firsthand
he was recognized by the Tenth Panchen Lama as the Communists choreographed the “lottery” for
(the second-ranking figure in Tibet after the Dalai the Eleventh Panchen Lama. (The little boy who had
Lama) as the reincarnation of the father of been the Dalai Lama’s choice was apprehended by
Tsongkhapa (the founder of the Gelug sect of the Chinese; tragically, the boy’s whereabouts are
Tibetan Buddhism). At the age of seven, he was still unknown.) After the rigged selection, Arjia
sent to live in Kumbum Monastery, one of Tibet’s Rinpoche was named tutor of the new Panchen
six great monastic universities. Lama. Demoralized and realizing that he could no
In the following years, the Arjia Rinpoche’s life longer support the grim charade of a false Panchen
became a series of extreme swings of fortune: first Lama, Arjia Rinpoche fled China. Against tremen-
as a carefree child, then as a protected and revered dous odds he successfully eluded the Chinese and
incarnate lama, then as a youth singled out and in 1998 reached American soil, where he was
ridiculed by the Communists, then as a forced granted political asylum by the United States
laborer in a Chinese camp, then as a “rehabilitated Government. His escape remains a major source of
counterinsurgent” released from hard labor at the embarrassment for China’s Central Government.
age of thirty, and, finally, as a favorite of the Beijing In 2005, the Dalai Lama appointed Arjia Rinpoche
hierarchy. He was named head abbot of Kumbum the director of the Tibetan Cultural Center (TCC), in
Monastery, a position that proved to be more politi- Bloomington, Indiana. His Holiness’s eldest brother,
cal than religious; it paved the way for even higher Professor Thubten Jigme Norbu, established the
positions, including vice-chairman of the Chinese strictly nonpolitical, nonprofit TCC in 1979 to sup-
Youth Association, vice president of the Central port Tibetans both in Tibet and in exile and to pre-
Government’s Buddhist Association, and member of serve Tibetan (and Mongolian) Buddhist culture.
Beijing’s Central Government. This past March, I interviewed Arjia Rinpoche at his
Arjia Rinpoche also remained closely aligned with office in Bloomington.
the Tenth Panchen Lama throughout this time. He –Mikel Dunham

44 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 Left to right: Arjia Rinpoche with his parents in 1955 in Kokonor, Tibet; Arjia Rinpoche in 1981 with the Tenth Panchen Lama in front of
Lama Tsongkhapa’s stupa at Ganden Monastery in Lhasa; Arjia Rinpoche with Chinese President Jiang Zemin at Kumbum Monastery in 1993.

Rinpoche, one of the fascinating aspects of your tumul- him toward the bottom step of the high stage so that
tuous life is the extent to which you were insulated everyone could see him. They yelled, “You are sucking our
from the Communists up until the very day that they blood! You are eating our flesh!” The abbot was sobbing.
seized control of your monastery, Kumbum. You were He was the first one at Kumbum to be treated like that.
eight years old at the time. Would you recount that day? In all, over five hundred monks and lamas were
It was in 1958, the beginning of Mao’s Great Leap For- arrested, beaten, and dragged away that day. My tutor,
ward and a year before the Dalai Lama fled Tibet. Free- my housekeeper, my assistants—all of them were pulled
dom to practice Buddhism was deteriorating rapidly, but away from me where I was sitting. The only rinpoches
I had no idea. The cadres who were stationed at Kum- who were not arrested were the very young boys like
bum Monastery had been forcing all the monks at Kum- me—ages six to ten, something like that.
bum to attend political sessions for months on end. But I The meeting lasted until late in the afternoon. I was
guess because I was so young, I wasn’t required to attend. paralyzed. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t even know
The monks, particularly the monks in their teens and where I was supposed to go. It was the first time in my
early twenties, were being successfully brainwashed by life that I had no adults to take care of me. The only
the Communists and trained to speak out against reli- thing I could think to do was to go back to my rooms.
gion, landowners, reincarnates, teachers, and so on. But when I got there, young monks had been moved
COURTESY OF THE TIBETAN CULTURAL CENTER, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

One day that winter, the cadres called the entire into my space. My residence had been reorganized into
monastic community to an outside meeting in Kum- a commune: Team Number One, it was called.
bum’s central square. There were somewhere between In the following weeks, we were forced to cut up our
thirty-five hundred and four thousand of us. Soldiers maroon robes, dye them black or dark blue, and refashion
with guns surrounded the courtyard and lined the them into Mao suits. Those became our new uniforms. We
rooftops, their machine guns trained on us. had mandatory study groups every day, endless: the cadres
Some of the monks who had been drilled by the Com- taught us why religion was so bad, and why religious
munists began to shout slogans at the rest of us: “Time for reform was so necessary, and why the most venerated lamas
revenge!” “Time to uncover the wrongs of religion!” It was were the ones who most deserved thamzing. Basically,
the first time that I had witnessed thamzing—a Chinese Kumbum became a school where children were taught to
“struggle session” [public trial]. The police grabbed a few denounce monasteries and the elder lamas who ran them.
of the most important lamas, including the head abbot of
Kumbum, who was in his early sixties. They tied his The following March, in 1959, His Holiness the Dalai
hands behind his back with rope, very tightly. He cried Lama fled Tibet, leaving the Panchen Lama the most
out. Young monks yanked him by the rope and pulled powerful religious figure in Tibet. What was your con-

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 45
 nection with the Panchen Lama? There was a family Beijing until 1982, when the PRC authorities pro-
connection. The Panchen Lama’s tutor, Gyayak Rin- nounced him “politically rehabilitated.”
poche, was my uncle. Also, we all came from the same
area in Amdo province. And historically, all the Panchen When were you pronounced “politically rehabili-
Lamas had been closely aligned to Kumbum Monastery, tated”? Two years before the Panchen Lama, actually.
so there was that as well. It was the Panchen Lama who Kumbum Monastery was reopened. Monks could return
identified me as the reincarnation of Lama Tsongkhapa’s to practice there, including my uncle, Gyayak Rin-
father when I was two years old. The Panchen Lama was poche—although he was held under house arrest at
only fourteen at the time. Then, in the early 1960s, he Kumbum. Whenever my uncle and the Panchen Lama
passed through Kumbum and made arrangements for me needed to privately communicate with one other, I
and another young monk to be transferred to acted as their go-between. I traveled back and forth
Tashilunpo—the official seat of the Panchen Lama, in from Kumbum to Beijing to relay their messages. That

COURTESY OF THE TIBETAN CULTURAL CENTER, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

Central Tibet [Shigatse]—so that we boys could study
the sutras without so many cadres watching us.

Some historians have portrayed the Tenth Panchen

Lama as little more than a Communist puppet—a
stooge for Party rhetoric and propaganda. Not at all.
After the Dalai Lama fled to India, the Panchen Lama
became the number one protector of Buddhism inside
Tibet. In spite of the difficulties presented by the Com-
munists, he stood up, spoke out, and did his best. He
traveled tirelessly and investigated many places to see
firsthand what was happening to his people and their
monasteries. He complained to Beijing: “You said that
communism would be good for us, but you are doing bad
things in my country.” In 1962, he met with Zhou Enlai,
the premier of the People’s Republic of China [PRC], to Arjia Rinpoche at his home in Bloomington, Indiana

discuss a very critical petition he wrote about the worsen- was when I really gained the Panchen Lama’s trust, even
ing situation in Tibet. And eventually, of course, he got though I was fourteen years his junior. Then, after he
into serious trouble with the Central Government for was “rehabilitated,” he quickly rose to important posi-
being so confrontational, particularly after the onset of tions, including vice-chairman of the National People’s
the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown in jail in 1968. Congress. This allowed him an enormous amount of
freedom, including trips abroad, which was quite
You didn’t escape the hardships of the Cultural Revo- unusual in those days. Often I went with him as his
lution either. No, I didn’t. I was singled out because I assistant: Nepal, Canada, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay,
was a recognized reincarnation. Apart from the mental Peru, and other South American countries.
abuse, I was also sentenced to hard labor, from the time
I was fourteen until I reached thirty; fieldwork in the You also helped him establish his private company,
summertime—plowing, planting, hoeing, harvesting, Kanchen, which among other things oversaw the
animal husbandry—and the rest of the year I was sent building of the only hotel in Beijing catering to
out to work on the construction of dams or roads. Six- nomads. What was that all about? The Panchen Lama
teen years I worked like that, until about 1980. wanted to establish an office separate from the Central
Government. He wanted complete control of his activi-
Why so long? The Panchen Lama got out of prison in ties. In order to do that, he had to be financially inde-
1977. Well, yes, he was released from prison after Mao’s pendent—thus his construction of the Tsongtsen Hotel
death in 1976, but he remained under house arrest in in Beijing and other enterprises. Kanchen was quite suc-

46 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 The Panchen Lama confronted the police,
“Why would you start shooting the people?
You are supposed to represent and protect the
people.” The Panchen Lama could be fearless.
cessful. Kanchen means “the treasure of the snow lion.” you went with him. The mood was very ugly. The
He created branches in different provinces. His idea was Panchen Lama headed up three teams flown out to
to supply all necessary funds for Buddhist projects with- Lhasa in a private jet. There were about one hundred of
out the Chinese authorities constantly breathing down us: the religious team, which was the Panchen Lama’s
his neck. Financially, the government would not have to hand-picked group; the political team, which was com-
worry, so his association with the Buddhist monasteries posed of Communist cadres; and the police. You can
in Tibet became a more independent affair. It was a bril- imagine the tension in the airplane. There was the
liant plan. Throughout the eighties, until his passing, unspoken understanding that if the Panchen Lama
the Panchen Lama was able to acquire significant funds couldn’t clean up the mess, more drastic measures
for the monasteries. He was responsible for retrieving would be taken by the Central Government.
countless sutras and statues and sacred objects—all The TAR [Tibet Autonomous Region] cadres
taken away from the monasteries during the Cultural arranged for a viewing at the Panchen Lama’s residence
Revolution. Those that hadn’t been destroyed, he would of videotapes taken during the demonstrations that
track down and persuade the Communist leaders to would prove the Chinese were blameless. There was lots
“make gifts” to the monasteries, which was just a nice of footage of the monks shouting and demonstrating in
way of saying return property to the monasteries. the streets, but no coverage at all of how exactly the
police were handling the Tibetans. When it was over,
Party leaders were never jealous or suspicious of his the lights came on and the Panchen Lama looked
independence? Well . . . there was always a lot of pulling around the room. He said, “That’s it? That’s all? Where
and pushing—positioning of power, that sort of thing. are the police in all this?”
And then he got really mad. You should understand
But the Chinese never openly objected to the privileges that the Panchen Lama could be very imposing when it
his independence afforded him? Not in so many words, suited him. He cast a big shadow. So he walked over to the
no. Of course later, after the Panchen Lama’s passing, there guy who was operating the video and grabbed him by the
was the rumor that he had died of poisoning. That was collar and yanked him up to his feet and yelled at him.
never medically proven. But if the rumor was true, I think It must have been about midnight. The Panchen
the most likely reason for his poisoning would have been Lama said, “Okay, let’s go!” and herded us out to the
his establishment of Kanchen, and the independence his cars waiting outside. “Get into the cars!” he ordered.
company gave him from the Central Government. “All of you!” Off we went to TAR Headquarters—just
five or ten minutes away—which was also the private
In your forthcoming autobiography, you write about residence of the TAR Party Chief, Hu Jintao [currently
the difficulties the Panchen Lama faced in Lhasa in the Paramount Leader of the PRC].
the autumn of 1987. A few monks from Drepung The Panchen Lama knocked on Hu Jintao’s front door.
Monastery came into the Barkhor District [the old All of us Tibetans were a little proud. It was such an
part of Lhasa] and shouted the two treasonous words unusual feeling to watch a high-ranking member of the
“Free Tibet.” Four days later, several hundred monks Party being bullied by a Tibetan! Hu actually came to the
from Sera Monastery marched on Barkhor, and all door in his pajamas. Personally, the Panchen Lama and Hu
hell broke loose. The Chinese opened fire. Lhasa were friends at that time, so when Hu saw him, he called
became a battleground. Beijing sent the Panchen him “Great Master” or something like that and was very
Lama to Lhasa to assess and quell the situation. And shocked and asked what in the world had happened.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 47
 Around the perimeter of the main temple were
plainclothes police, shoulder to shoulder.
The Panchen Lama said, “Do you trust me or not? If Lama gave a long speech, and much of it was critical of
you don’t trust me, I can go back to Beijing. I can leave the Chinese government. It was a political speech. But
tonight! You don’t want me to investigate, then you it was given in the context of recent history. In other
report back to the Central Government!” The Panchen words, he recounted many bad things that happened
Lama—I’ve never seen someone so brave. The next during the Cultural Revolution and then cautioned the
thing I knew, everybody was making phone calls. The Chinese government to take heed of its own mistakes
Panchen Lama was calling Beijing. Hu Jintao was call- and to avoid them in the future. As always, he had to be
ing his police. A little later, a Chinese guy came to Hu’s careful when he did this.
residence and produced a tape and gave it to the People have accused the Chinese of killing the
Panchen Lama. This version was entirely different. This Panchen Lama because of that particular speech, but I
time, we could see Chinese police all along the rooftop don’t think that’s logical. They kill him because of one
of the Jokhang, the holiest temple in Tibet. Then the speech? I don’t think so. For one thing, anytime the
monks came crowding down the street. The police Panchen Lama was scheduled to give a public message,
started yelling very bad things down at the monks, and he had to submit a draft of his speech to be approved by
then we saw the police open fire on the monks. the Chinese censors, so really, that one speech could not
The Panchen Lama confronted the police, “Why have come as a big surprise.
would you start shooting the people? You are supposed Anyway, the celebration lasted for two weeks. The
to represent and protect the people.” The Panchen Lama night before everyone returned to their own monasteries,
could be fearless. we had a big party. Everyone was so happy! And then we
left. My group was returning overland to Kumbum. We
Many contend that he paid for his fearlessness with had just arrived at a place north of Lhasa when we heard
his death. You were with him in 1989 in Tashilunpo, a radio broadcast that announced the unexpected passing
the day before he died. Can you explain why so many of the Panchen Lama. We were stunned. Speechless.
lamas had come to Tashilunpo at that time, and why Every Tibetan felt torn apart, and suspicious.
the rumors of murder won’t go away? Traditionally,
the final resting place of the relics of the previous What was the official reason for the Panchen Lama’s
Panchen Lamas was Tashilunpo. Prior to the Cultural death? High blood pressure. It’s a plausible explana-
Revolution, each Panchen Lama had his own memorial tion. He was considerably overweight. I would be sur-
temple. During the Cultural Revolution, most of the prised if he didn’t have high blood pressure.
relics were taken and the temples were destroyed. But
after 1980, people began to secretly approach the Tenth But your uncle, Gyayak Rinpoche, remained in
Panchen Lama with bits and pieces of the relics. Eventu- Tashilunpo with the Panchen Lama after you left. What
ally, he collected the relics of five of the previous Panchen did he say about the Panchen Lama’s death? I was told
Lamas. So he built a temple with a central stupa and, that after the big party, the Panchen Lama complained
within this stupa, he put five safes to house the relics. that he was feeling uncomfortable. A doctor came in and
The opening ceremony for this stupa—a two-week gave him a pill and that was it. The next morning, early
affair—was the reason for the Panchen Lama’s last visit to in the morning, they discovered him in his room and he
Tashilunpo. This was in December 1989. Almost all the had passed away, apparently in his sleep.
high lamas of Tibet were in attendance. Naturally, his But there is something very interesting beyond that.
unexpected death was a major shock to everyone. Gyayak Rinpoche’s assistant told me that when they
visited his body that morning, the Panchen Lama’s face
But there were also political overtones to the celebra- was very calm and beautiful. They began doing prayers
tions, right? That’s true. At one point the Panchen for him. But when the Chinese found out, they brought

48 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 in guys who tried to resuscitate the dead body nearly all of Tiananmen Square took place and everything was
day! Until four o’clock in the afternoon! They just turned upside down. As you recall, the students came
would not leave his body alone. Why would they do out in massive demonstrations. As fate would have it,
that? Is that not a little strange? From seven a.m. to the number one supporter of the Tiananmen students
four p.m.—nine hours of resuscitation? within the Chinese hierarchy was Yan Min Fu, who also
supported the idea of including the Dalai Lama in the
And was Hu Jintao still the Party Chief of the TAR at Panchen Lama selection process. Tiananmen Square
the time of the Panchen Lama’s death? Yes. marked the end of his career, and once the smoke
cleared, the tentative consultation relationship with the
And rumors arose connecting him somehow. Yes, but Dalai Lama also collapsed. The Central Government’s
people soon turned their attention to choosing the next principal concern, after Tiananmen Square, was stabil-
Panchen Lama, the Eleventh. That became the most ity. Given the mood of the leaders, there was no way
important thing. that anyone could pursue contact with His Holiness.
It’s a great tragedy, really. If there had been secret con-
The selection didn’t occur until 1995—almost six tact with His Holiness, the Chinese would have been
years after the Tenth Panchen Lama’s passing. Why able to publicly announce the candidates and make it
the long gap? From the very beginning of the process, look like it was their idea, and then there probably
there were so many obstacles created by the Chinese would have been no problem. Saving face is extremely
government. Number one: they made it quite clear that important in Chinese politics.
COURTESY OF THE TIBETAN CULTURAL CENTER, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

they intended to be part of the election process. In the But that’s not what happened. From what I understand,
first stages, they seemed open to speaking to the Dalai there was a little bit of a mistake. His Holiness made a
Lama. They formed two teams: the political and the public announcement first, I guess because Dharamsala
religious team. I was appointed secretary of the Reli- wanted to demonstrate their authority over the choice of
gious Selection Committee. But there was also the the next Panchen Lama. The Chinese were furious, and
problem with the Tibetan community.
Before I go on, I think I should mention something
about the character of the Tibetan people in general.
They have a kind of weakness when it comes to har-
mony with one another. Our mind process is like this:
I’m from Amdo, you’re from U-Tsang, he’s from
Khampa; we are all different—separate. Tibetans don’t
really think of themselves as one big family. So right
from the beginning, there were regional rivalries that
played into the selection of candidates for the Eleventh
Arjia Rinpoche with the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C. in 1998
Panchen Lama. First of all, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
and the Tenth Panchen Lama were both from Amdo. So everything got very difficult after that. An emergency
some of the people said, “This time, the Panchen Lama meeting was convened in Beijing. All the lama members
should come from Lhasa, not Amdo.” The general feel- of the religious team came. Right before this meeting, a
ing among the Tibetan team was not one of compromise. high-ranking Party official and some of his associates
To make matters worse, Gyayak Rinpoche, who was ini- interviewed me and asked me, “What is your opinion?
tially head of the religious team and a very powerful Are you supporting the Central Government or not?” I
influence, became ill and was hospitalized. Things went told them the truth, that I thought that they should
downhill from there. include the Dalai Lama in the selection process.

What was your role as secretary of the selection com- How did the official respond? “This is not negotiable.
mittee? In the early stages I did not play a significant Luckily you are from Kumbum in Amdo. If you were from
role. I was busy with other duties. But then the events Central Tibet, from Tashilunpo (continued on page 116)

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 49
 Smell is the most ephemeral of the senses and the most evocative.
For Buddhists, it’s a lesson in awakening. For fragrance guru Joel Leonard, it’s a
way of life. CAITLIN VAN DUSEN Photographs by Helle Hanghøj and Henrik Hasse

50 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 JOEL LEONARD IS afraid he may be coming down with a cold. As we walk along Copen-
hagen’s lakeshore, the February winds have caused his nose to run. His adopted city, Joel
has written, smells to him of “Baltic salt, cold mud, broken reeds on the lakes’ surfaces, and
damp woolen coats.” Removing a black leather glove, he reaches into his coat pocket and
pulls out a handkerchief, which he presses gently to each nostril. Joel, who is sixty-two,
hasn’t blown his nose since he was four years old. “It ruins my sense of smell,” he told me
once, his native Bronx accent untamed by forty years in Denmark.
Joel’s nose is bulbous and robust, webbed with broken capillaries like a road map of some
seldom-traveled region. The fragility of his nose is just one of the many challenges Joel
faces in founding his livelihood on something as tran- gnosticism, Aztec religion, and particularly Bud-
sient as smell: it demands abstemiousness. Joel has to dhism—that have used scent as a means of communi-
avoid not only nose-blowing but also steam baths and cation between the individual and a higher realm, and
hard liquor, two staples of the Scandinavian lifestyle, translates these concepts for the modern world.
particularly during the dark and frigid winters. In his book Perfume: Joy, Scandal, Sin, professor
We’re headed to a yoga center where this afternoon Joel Richard Stamelman describes perfume as “a fable about
will be leading a scent-meditation session. A light snow the impermanence of life,” “the essence of absence.” In
has begun to fall, speckling the shoulders of his black Joel’s world, smell is about the present moment, and
cashmere coat and the mustard-brown shawl he’s thrown it’s possible to smell with a sort of nonattached attach-
around his neck. Joel is short and a bit paunchy with a ment. “If I smell a flower, first it’s a floral scent, then
leonine froth of white hair. White tufts of eyebrows wilt it’s a rose, then it’s a rose in rainy weather, then it’s a
over his eyes, and a permanent flock of furrows rises into rose in rainy weather with the sun going down, then it
his forehead, giving him an expression at once bewil- reminds me of smelling a rose in a garden by the sea as
dered and hopeful. a child. I think, Wait! I’ve got it! And then it changes
Joel is a fragrance designer and scent-meditation into something else.”
teacher. He runs his business out of his one-bedroom From a commercial standpoint, the increasingly pop-
apartment, where he lives alone. He has no employees; ular use of custom aromas to market otherwise
he has never found anyone with a kindred sense of unscented products and to mask odors or create ambi-
smell. Companies come to Joel when they want to ence in our cars, offices, and homes (the latter is a $4.4
infuse scent into a product they’re trying to market, or billion industry) has dovetailed conveniently with Joel’s
create a suggestive aroma for a public space. In his work as a fragrance designer. He has found ways to
scent-meditation sessions, Joel burns incense and infuse fragrance into cleaning fluids, felt furniture pads,
anoints participants’ foreheads and wrists with a series air-conditioning systems, and textiles. Two years ago the
of fragrant oils, whose scents progress from subtle to managers of a Scandinavian restaurant in Copenhagen
intense. He has found that when his clients experience asked Joel to create Nordic scents for their dining room
their own odors and breath merging into the shared to enhance the cuisine. Joel traveled around Scandinavia
aroma of the room, their individual boundaries dissolve collecting scent memories of pine forests, fjords, and
into a kind of olfactory communion. Joel also teaches coastal ports. He re-created these scents and worked
koh-do, an esoteric Japanese scent-meditation game akin them into the restaurant’s wood polish, table linens, and
© HELLE HANGHØJ AND HENRIK HAASE

to the tea ceremony. What ties these pursuits together is waiters’ uniforms. Bang & Olufsen asked him to design
Joel’s belief in fragrance as a form of nonverbal communi- a trio of scents for the plastic in phone receivers meant to
cation that can liberate us from ourselves and connect us appeal to three different types of female consumers: the
to each other. He draws on ancient traditions—Sufism, young mother, the “career girl,” and the middle-aged
housewife. The authors of a psychological coaching book
Caitlin Van Dusen is Tricycle’s art editor. She lives in Brooklyn, enlisted him to create an aroma for the books’ spines that
New York, and from her window she can smell diesel bus exhaust, would stimulate readers’ memory of the material. And a
laundry detergent, and distant waftings of freshly mowed grass. Danish society for the blind hired him to invent a “scent

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 51
 language” to help its students communicate their needs “travel altar,” which he has unpacked from a black plas-
( Joel created vials of smells representing twenty-five tic attaché case (along with—sheepishly—a copy of
basic words that could be used in combination: pizza + Eurowoman magazine). Now, sitting cross-legged in a
car = go out for pizza). Currently, he’s developing medita- dark wool sweater and pants, a white cotton shawl
tive scents for the chapel in Copenhagen International draped over his shoulders, Joel looks every bit the fra-
Airport. “It’s like storytelling with fragrance,” Joel says grance guru. Until he speaks, it’s hard to remember that
of his work, “using mnemonic devices to communicate he grew up in the Bronx.
nonverbally a history or a feeling.” “Close your eyes,” he says. He tells us to concentrate
In today’s culture of materialism and instant gratifi- first on our own odor. I inhale and smell complimentary

He had told me he could smell emotions

and illness, but he’d never told me he could
smell change.
cation, however, it can be a challenge to convince people hotel shampoo and the sweat trapped in my sweater
that something as ephemeral as smell can transform a from when I ran to catch my flight three days ago. I start
space or facilitate serenity. Joel works only with natural to worry that Simon can smell me. I open one eye and
scents. Synthetic fragrances, which are created in labs peek at him, but he’s sitting like a yogi. (On the last day
from man-made molecules, are the mainstay of the of my visit with Joel, I asked him the question anyone
commercial fragrance industry. Because they are not would be wondering after spending ten hours a day with
derived from raw materials, synthetics are less expensive a master nose: what do I smell like? Joel blushed, then
to produce and often last longer, making them a more responded: “You smell like you’re growing.” I was sur-
economical option for large-scale projects. Synthetics, prised, embarrassed, and unexpectedly moved; Joel had
however, lack the complexity and richness of natural told me he could smell emotions and illness, but he’d
scents, much as the sound of a synthesized cello can’t never told me he could smell change.)
compete with the resonance of the stringed instrument. There’s the flick-rasp of a lighter, and smoke from a
It isn’t Joel’s mission to abolish synthetic fragrances. beeswax candle infused with incense curls into my nos-
But he has witnessed a growing market for his services trils. All of Joel’s scents include agarwood—his signa-
and a growing interest in his belief in “experiencing ture fragrance, and one of the rarest raw materials on the
scent at the physical, mental, and spiritual levels.” planet. I try to stop thinking about my smelly sweater
and let the smoke take me out of myself into the room.
HANSA YOGA CENTER, where Joel will hold today’s Joel places a small piece of agarwood in our hands. It is
meditation, is a low-slung gray building off an alleyway dry and light. I let the warmth of my palms release the
in northern Copenhagen. Inside, winter light washes fragrance. The scent reminds me of wood smoke, maple,
across the bare white walls and floorboards, bathing the mothballs. I begin to draw deeper breaths, and for a few
room in stillness. Simon, a long-limbed yoga instructor moments I’m transported to a cabin in the woods. His
with keen eyes and a shaved head, is lighting tea lights in fingertips press cool oil onto my wrist and forehead; it
the windows. As today’s session was arranged at the last has the smoky sworl of whiskey. Warmth descends
minute, he and I will be the only participants. through my body and I exhale it into the room. I imag-
“Do you want me to air out the studio for you, Joel?” ine the smell of my scalp mingling with the smell of
Simon calls from across the room. Simon’s rag-wool socks. It’s like there’s a ribbon of scent
“There is a sort of rosy smell in here, isn’t there?” Joel weaving from the altar, through me, through Simon,
sniffs. “Maybe it’s the geranium.” There’s a pink geranium and returning again. It occurs to me that Joel’s theory of
in a clay pot on the windowsill. Joel walks over to the scent communion is not unlike being stuck in an eleva-
plant and considers it. Rather than exiling it, he carries tor with a group of heavy breathers, only the smells are
the geranium across the room and sets it beside his rare incenses rather than cologne and Quiznos subs.

52 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 The room is silent except for the susurrations of the When we open our eyes, it is snowing. Simon wiggles
candle and a distant plinking of melted snow dripping his toes. We smile hesitantly. I feel a flush of shyness, as
into a gutter. We continue inhaling and exhaling, using if I were facing someone the morning after an intimate
an adaptation of the alternating nostril technique of confession. A ring of heat pulses the final feathers of
yogic pranayama breath. Joel seems bodiless now, the smoke from the incense stick. I feel as though I have a
only evidence of his presence the rattle of his mala beads safe, warm space inside me in this bare room with the
washing against each other. tea lights and the snowflakes fluttering past outside.
Some traditionalists might frown on Joel’s scent medi- Joel rises from his cushion and bends down to lift the
tation sessions as an appropriation rather than an incor- geranium from the altar. Wordlessly, he returns the
plant to the windowsill.

JOEL FIRST DISCOVERED he had an unusual nose at age

four, in his backyard in the Bronx, during a game of
Blind Man’s Bluff. He realized that even when blind-
folded he could identify his friends by their smell. “Peo-
ple would run by me and I’d call out their names and
they said, ‘You’re cheating,’ you know, ‘only a dog can
smell people.’ I was very unhappy. I came home and I said
to my grandmother, ‘The kids don’t understand that I
can smell who they are.’” His grandmother told him he’d
© HELLE HANGHØJ AND HENRIK HAASE

inherited a family gift. “She told me that I had to be very

careful with my nose, that this would be my tool in life.”
It’s dusk, and we’re sitting in a café overlooking
Copenhagen Harbor. As Joel talks about his rather
To protect his nose, apocryphal-sounding past, he occasionally shrugs and
fragrance designer
Joel Leonard avoids
shakes his head, as if he can’t quite believe it himself.
nose-blowing, Joel’s education began in his grandmother’s kitchen,
steam baths, and
hard liquor.
where she trained him with cups of kitchen spices. In
high school, during a year abroad in Mexico, his host
poration of ancient rites. As UC Berkeley professor mother taught him how to make his own plant-based
Robert Sharf explains, most Asian Buddhists view scents. He studied anthropology and pre-med at the
incense as an offering to something outside of the self— University of Chicago and Columbia, spent a year in
to a buddha, bodhisattva, or protector deity. Offerings of Jerusalem studying biblical archaeology and fragrance,
incense, like offerings of food, flowers, and other objects, and two years at medical school in Grenoble studying
are seen as expressions of respect to a higher being and as rhinology. In 1967 he found himself in Copenhagen,
a means to cultivate good karma. Joel’s use of incense to where he met and fell in love with the Danish woman
facilitate communion strikes me as more of an internal who would later become his wife (they are now divorced)
offering, even as meditators lose themselves in the min- and the mother of his three children, now in their thir-
gled fragrances of the meditation room: the practice is ties. The couple settled in Copenhagen, where he’s
less reverential than self-centering. Still, as Roshi Pat lived ever since. At the mention of his family, Joel
Enkyo O’Hara of New York’s Village Zendo points out, pauses and turns to the window, where a fishing boat is
“Incense is always a reminder of the transience of the slipping by against the darkening skyline. His eldest
solid thing changing to emptiness,” a notion that forms daughter and two young grandsons live in Thailand.
the core of Joel’s philosophy. She also notes that because For all Joel’s talk of nonverbal communication, there
of the potency of our smell memory, the familiar scent of are some distances even incense smoke can’t bridge.
incense at the start of a meditation serves as a reminder (He once wrote me: “Pardon the bragging grandfather,
to practitioners that it’s time to clear the mind, which please, but my eldest grandson told me he only plays
certainly plays a role in Joel’s sessions. with kids ‘who smell right.’”)

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 53
 Joel had already begun a career as a fragrance importer
when one day, in 1988, he got his first whiff of agar-
wood. A friend had mentioned that a Zen master was
coming to Copenhagen to conduct a koh-do ceremony,
and Joel decided to attend. When the Zen master lit a
piece of agarwood and passed it around the room, Joel
says, “I felt that I knew this fragrance from somewhere,
and I had to know why it was so appealing to me.”
Agarwood (also known as aloeswood) is the most
valuable wood in the world. Its fragrance has consis-
tently eluded synthetic imitation. The scent derives
from an aromatic resin that the Aquilaria tree, a flower-
ing evergreen from southeast Asia, produces as an
immune response to a fungal infection. Attempts have
been made to wound the trees to make them more sus-

© HELLE HANGHØJ AND HENRIK HAASE

ceptible to the infection, but the fungus is so rare and
the scented wood so valuable that agarwood farms have
been prey to poachers. Joel once showed me photo-
graphs of a farm he had visited, surrounded by barbed-
wire fences and machine gun–wielding guards.
Though Joel now has his own collection of agarwood,
he brought me to see a three-hundred-year-old piece in
the Japanese fragrance collection of Copenhagen’s
National Museum, a room he was commissioned to Leonard uses incense to facilitate communion
design and which he oversees. The museum piece, about in his scent-meditation sessions.
the size of a small cat, is enormous by agarwood stan-
dards. The gnarled wood grain resembles a turbulent duced himself to the other participants and described his
river frozen in midstream. unexpected reception from Bayashi. “They all looked at
After that first koh-do ceremony, Joel found himself me incredulously and said, ‘We can’t believe what you’re
haunted by his memory of the smell of agarwood. “Every saying. Kawata Bayashi is practically blind!’” When I ask
night for about two months, I dreamt dreams with this how Joel accounts for this, he throws up his hands and
fragrance,” he tells me. He wrote to Shoyeido, the incense chalks it up to the power of nonverbal communication.
company that had sponsored the ceremony, requesting a So began Joel’s induction into the world of incense.
visit, but received only rebuffs. Four years later, at the age With Bayashi’s sponsorship, Joel became an apprentice
of forty-eight, Joel obtained a study grant and made his at Shoyeido, commuting between Copenhagen and
way to Japan. He had in his pocket the address of the Zen Kyoto, learning the fundamentals of Buddhism and
master who had conducted the service. “I got on a train incense craft. He spent his mornings meditating in a
and went to his house, a humble abode in a quiet part of secluded garden, trying to capture the smell of “mist
Kyoto, and I knocked on the door,” Joel says, “and he rising from a garden at dawn” for one of the first
opens it, and he says, ‘Where have you been? We have no incenses he was asked to create. “My experience in
time to waste!’” Although Joel had attended his koh-do Japan led to a kind of spiritual awakening for me, where
session, the two had never been introduced. teachings from different Buddhist schools have been
Kawata Bayashi, who was eighty-four at the time, integrated in my own meditation form,” he says.
spent the next few hours racing up and down the stairs, In 2002, Joel visited a mountaintop village in Viet-
throwing books from the shelves, trying to impart as nam’s Mekong Delta whose inhabitants cultivate
much knowledge as possible to his long-awaited disciple. agarwood and practice an esoteric form of Buddhism.
Later that afternoon, he dropped Joel off at a temple “As soon as we come into the village,” he tells me,
where an incense meditation was taking place. Joel intro- “there’s this guy, he has like a headdress on, and we

54 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
make eye contact.” His interpreter told Joel the man Japanese way of fragrance”—during his tenure in Japan,
was a local priest. “He starts running toward me and and he periodically hosts koh-do games as an alternate
he says, ‘The Buddha has brought you to me.’” The form of scent meditation. Mika, 33, is an aspiring musi-
parallels to Bayashi were uncanny. The priest told Joel cian with a soft voice, a shaved head, and delicate hands.
that in the Buddhism his village practiced, agarwood Though he is Joel’s closest friend in Copenhagen, and
was used as a bridge between the individual and a sees his father several times a week, this is his first koh-
universal expression of the Buddha. “He told me, ‘I do session as well.
travel on the incense smoke up to the heavens, and As soon as Joel opened his front door and ushered me
when I come there I am met by the spirits. This fra- in, the smell of incense wafted across the threshold, min-
grance is the fragrance of the gods.’ For me this was a gling with the stale cigarette smoke hovering in the
breakthrough, and I felt that I was coming back to stairwell. The room is furnished with a tapestry-covered
some kind of collective-conscious knowledge.” couch, a ceiling bulb covered by a rice-paper shade, and
Joel returned to Copenhagen, eager to bring the tran- low bookshelves bulging with dictionaries. Dozens of
scendent benefits of scent to his city. Danes are fond of flasks, atomizers, and jars holding perfumes, flower
saying of their country, “There is no one who has too petals, and pieces of wood are haphazardly crammed into
much, and even fewer who have too little.” But accord- every available nook, from the living room to the bath-
ing to Joel, who is a Danish citizen and is unabashedly room. The walls are covered in photographs, prints, and
proud of his country’s history, beneath Denmark’s vigi- souvenirs. Joel serves us bowls of green tea and hard, col-
lant safety, obedience, and classlessness lies an under- orful Japanese rice candies. He’s put on a CD of gamelan

“Scent is the universal language, which will

be able to reach people in a society quickly
becoming overburdened with information.”
belly of dissatisfaction. “It’s the most unhappy place music to drown out the drum session taking place in the
I’ve ever experienced,” he told me. Joel has felt the apartment above. A gooseneck lamp arches over the
shadow side of hygge, or coziness, the Danish concept of table where Joel is unpacking his koh-do implements—
shutting out the turmoil of the outside world—which, worth $10,000—from a red cellophane bag that looks
he says, can sometimes extend to foreigners. Joel is an like it came from a fruit stand in Chinatown.
unmistakable New Yorker here: he speaks fluent Dan- In an official koh-do game, the “master” selects
ish, but with a strong Bronx accent, and shuns the pro- incenses to represent verses of a seasonal poem or story.
scription against jaywalking, earning him glares at The first verse might represent “evening mist settling
every intersection. “My clients have BMWs, nice on cherry blossoms,” the second, “lady standing on a
houses, but they seek me out because they’re not con- bridge,” a third, “sound of a distant flute.” In a series of
tent on the inside.” When I ask Joel why he’s chosen to ritualized gestures, the master circulates a censer of each
stay here, he tells me he views Copenhagen as a micro- fragrance among the participants, who are each given
cosm of where the world at large is headed. “Scent is the three inhalations to commit the aroma and its verse to
universal language, which will be able to reach people memory. In the final round, the master selects one of the
in this society that is quickly becoming overburdened incenses at random and passes it around. The “winner” is
with information,” he says. Copenhagen provides an the person who correctly identifies the fragrance. Given
endemic challenge to his mission: “to bring joy and the game’s meditative element, however, koh-do is less a
relief through fragrance.” competition than a collective invocation of time and
place through the commingling of incense and poetry.
ONE BLUSTERY NIGHT, Joel; his son, Mika; and I are But since Joel hadn’t applied to his master in Japan for
seated around the table in Joel’s apartment for an infor- permission to host this evening’s game, and as Mika and I
mal koh-do ceremony. Joel learned koh-do—“the are the only attendees, he empha- (continued on page 111)

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 55
 Bodhidharma tore off his eyelids. Jack
Kornfield’s teacher told him to meditate
at the edge of a well. The Buddhist
tradition is full of stories of practitioners
who have found unique techniques for
stimulating and maintaining their
practice. In fact, anyone who has sat on a
zafu more than once probably came up
with a trick or two for staying there. To tap

meditator’s toolbox 21 tips to power your practice. Illustrations by Michael Wertz

into this resource, we’ve asked seasoned

Buddhist teachers and longtime practi-
tioners to share their favorite meditating
tools. Check out what they have to offer,
and if you’ve got some tricks that you
don’t see on these pages, don’t keep
them to yourself: visit the tricycle.com
Meditator’s Toolbox forum and share them
with other readers.
56 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 1 Just get in the posture 5 Be patient
“Try making a commitment to getting into the medita- When you plant seeds in the garden,
tion posture at least once a day. You don’t have to sit for you don’t dig them up every day to see
any particular length of time, just get on the cushion. A if they have sprouted yet. You simply
lot of times, the hardest part is getting there. Once water them and clear away the weeds;
you’re sitting down, you think, ‘I might as well sit for a you know that the seeds will grow in
few minutes,’ and more often than not, you’re getting time. Similarly, just do your daily prac-
full sessions in.” –Insight Meditation Society co-founder tice and cultivate a kind heart. Aban-
Joseph Goldstein don impatience and instead be content
creating the causes for goodness; the
2 Reflect on the big picture results will come when they’re ready.”
“The breath is not only a useful object of concentration –Tibetan Buddhist nun and author
but also a sign of life. A little reflection can bring a Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron
sense of gratitude and delight to each breath, which is
further enhanced by sensing what the Indian mystic and 6 Play with postures
poet Kabir called ‘the breath within the breath,’ the “Even though we generally refer to meditation as ‘sitting,’
mystery that is riding along on each inhale and exhale.” when you find that hard to do, you can also ‘sit’ lying
–author and meditation teacher Wes Nisker down. When I wake up at night with insomnia, I pay
attention to the breath or do lovingkindness practice.
3 Use a timer One year, I could only get myself to ‘sit’ by lying on
“When you sit in medita- the ground in the backyard, sensing the layers of
tion, use a timer instead the earth, and listening to the sounds of a garden
of a clock. If you have to in the city.” –Barbara Gates, Co-editor of the
keep opening your eyes journal Inquiring Mind
to check on the time,
restlessness can be 7 Make a vow
exacerbated. By using “Don’t give yourself a choice. Don’t ask your-
a timer, one frees one- self: ‘Do I want to get up and do this?’ because
self from the concept of you will think of a million other
time and discovers a things to do. Just set your
deepening of relaxation alarm and get up and medi-
and a sense of the timeless.” tate—no questions. It also helps
–Cambridge Insight Meditation to make a vow. Try promising the
teacher Narayan Liebenson Grady Buddhas that you’ll meditate every
day for a month and see what hap-
4 Get your priorities straight pens.” –Tibetan Buddhist nun and
“If meditation is a priority, then it’s helpful to take that author Ani Tenzin Palmo
word literally and put meditation first. An example
would be my rule of not turning on the computer before 8 Use incense
I’ve meditated. Simple, but effective. “Time a stick of incense. Once
© MICHAEL WERTZ

Probably the most trenchant advice I ever heard was you know how long it takes to
in eight words from Suzuki Roshi: ‘Organize your life burn, you can use it to determine
so you can sit well.’” –senior Shambhala teacher the lengths of your sessions.”
David Schneider –Tricycle founder Helen Tworkov

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 57
 9 Widen your practice field ble seduction estab-
“Don’t put arbitrary limits on the field of practice. Try- lishes the vigor of our
ing to live graciously, reading and reflecting wisely, intention.” –Russian
appreciating virtue in others, not making those around River Zendo teacher
you miserable, being a mensch—practicing in this way, Darlene Cohen
which is pretty traditional, there is never a lack of
opportunity. As for sitting meditation itself—that’s 13 Experiment with
something we do for others, so that maybe we can have the breath
a more generous spirit and be less of a pain in the neck.” “My teacher Than Geoff
–Tricycle editor-at-large Andy Cooper has always reminded me
that when the mind is
10 Still the mind in unusual positions fighting the meditation,
“I like to interpret what the Buddha said when he ask it, ‘What kind of
talked about the four postures suitable for meditation— breath would feel really
seated, standing, walking, and lying down—as an invi- good right now?’ It
tation to watch the mind in any position, any place, any tricks you into
time. I begin my practice periods with a breathing experimenting with the breath, and
practice from my teacher Mingyur Rinpoche; then I get usually the breath becomes interesting enough and
into a yoga posture and stay in it for some time. pleasurable enough that concentration can settle in.”
Working in this way, I can watch my mind –Tricycle contributing editor Mary Talbot
play around with discomfort,
effort, desire, and aversion. 14 Drink coffee
Plus I receive the benefits “Some people say that it was actually Buddhist
of the pose by staying monks who discovered coffee. The story goes
in it longer.” –Vajra that they were wandering around in the forest
Yoga founder Jill somewhere when they came across the beans.
Satterfield They started chewing them and thought,
‘These are great. we
11 Sit with others can use this
“Find others to sit energy for
with. Sometimes our medi-
showing up for others is tation prac-
easier than showing up tice.’ If you are
for yourself.” –Tricycle editor going to get up in
and publisher James Shaheen the morning and sit, it
doesn’t have to be first
12 Make the right decision thing. Get up and have a
“Every practitioner I know who has been able to con- cup of coffee if it helps.
tinue to practice for years has had to deal with their It’s when you start tak-
resistance to sitting. It seems that when we hurl our- ing out the newspaper
selves in a particular direction with vigor and intention, and doing other stuff
we are also creating a shadow of resistance at the same that you lose the fresh-
time. This matter is resolved over time by the decisions ness of mind you have
we make in the immediate situation: do we watch TV or when you first wake
sit? Do we schedule a date with a friend during our usual up. But if you can have
sitting time? Do we skip our sangha night when our coffee without turning on your cell phone, go for it.”
parents visit or do we ask them to join us (or excuse us)? –Downtown Meditation Community teacher
Deciding to sit over and over again through every possi- Peter Doobinin

58 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 15 Sit because you need to annoyed? Excited (or anxious) at the prospect of a new
“I’d say to meditators pretty much what Rilke said to day? Is your brain still in slo-mo, or was it jolted into a
poets: don’t do it unless you have to! In my little experi- panic by the alarm clock? It can be good to notice where
ence, any other motivation than necessity demeans med- you’re at before you start counting breaths.” –Tricycle
itation to a conceit, another tool for ego-consolidation of associate editor Andrew Merz
one form or another. Not for nothing is the first point of
the Big B: There is SUFFERING. That’s the one and 19 Have faith
only actual gate.” –contributing editor Eliot Fintushel “Seek the support of a Power Beyond the Self. Dogen
says, ‘Throw body and mind into the house of Buddha,
16 Don’t cheat so that all is done by Buddha.’ If we rely only
“If you’re counting the breaths, for upon our own resources in trying to
example, don’t let it be Enron develop a meditation practice, we will
style. An honest accounting quickly exhaust ourselves. It is important
works wonders for the spiritual to know that the Buddha himself sup-
bottom line.” –contributing ports us in all kinds of ways, some easy to
editor Mark Magill recognize (through the teaching passed
down from master to disciple, for
17 Tune up by reading some- instance), and some not. Some of those
thing you love supports become visible to us only when
“I don’t mean a text that you’re we believe in the Buddha. Belief in Bud-
studying—you don’t want to dhahood as a Power Beyond the Self can
encourage the mind to cogitate. encourage us when nothing else seems to
Near the place where you like to work. That statue on your altar isn’t just a
sit, keep a little selection of read- decorating idea.” –contributing editor
ings that inspire happiness or quiet; Clark Strand
they can be from any tradition. Recently
I’ve had by my side Thomas Merton’s 20 Don’t push
Thoughts in Solitude, the Avadhuta Gita, “There’s an old Zen saying, ‘When you sit Bud-
and a folder of short poems and quota- dha, you kill Buddha.’ Whatever else it might
tions from past issues of Tricycle and mean about blowing away preconceptions or that
other sources. For a session when the kind of thing, it always stuck with me as a very
mind is really stirred up, here’s a friendly reminder not to try too hard, or push
wonderful quote to put it in pause too hard, don’t try to be a Buddha when
mode, from the mind training you’re sitting.” –Tricycle webmaster Phil Ryan
teachings in The Great Path of Awakening:
When I am in this kind of mood 21 End carefully
My mat is by far the best place to be. “When you end your meditation, be very careful with
This present mental state is fine. how you open your eyes. Try to maintain your center
Moreover, by putting up with this unpleasantness, inside rather than letting it flow outside. Then, main-
I won’t be born in the hell realms. How wonderful! taining your center, get up from the cushion and keep
I won’t be baked or roasted. How wonderful!” the center inside as long as you can. As my teacher
–Tricycle copyeditor Karen Ready Ajaan Fuang instructed: ‘When you start out sitting in
meditation, it takes a long time for the mind to settle
18 Check in before you start down, but as soon as the session is over you get right
© MICHAEL WERTZ

“Once you sit down, in addition to doing a quick scan up and throw it away. It’s like climbing a ladder
of your body for tension, take a moment to look at your slowly, step by step, to the second floor, and then
heart and mind before you ‘start’ officially. Sure, maybe jumping out the window.’” –Metta Forest Monastery
you just rolled out of bed, but what is your mood like— Abbot Thanissaro Bhikkhu ▼

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 59
 free
expression
DZIGAR KONGTRÜL RINPOCHE on his paintings, natural
creativity, and the art of living a sane life

WHEN WE WALK into a good antique shop we appreciate the craftmanship of the pieces. We
see the time and skill put into the glass, silver, and wood. Antiques have a quality of rich-
ness because in the past artisans had more time to put into their craft—things were not
mass-produced, and there was a sense of lineage, a way of doing things. The energy put into
the creation of art reflects our own richness and communicates this richness to others. Our
appreciation of a beautiful piece of art is not limited to the piece itself—we experience the
process that the artist went through as well; it is a transference of consciousness. Whether
we are an artist or an onlooker, we feel the creative When we speak about natural creativity and its
energy. When it has been formalized into a piece, the expression, we are not talking about something separate
artist’s energy has not become the piece itself, but the from our own mind and experience. All that we call
piece is blessed by the creativity of the artist. “existent phenomena” is experienced by mind. This
We usually think of creativity as “belonging” to awareness is primordial and omnipresent—is there ever
the artist. But in a larger sense, creative energy is a time when we don’t experience? Experience can be
innate and spontaneously present. It is unborn, with dull, we may be asleep, we may be ignorant or dis-
no center or boundary, yet nothing exists outside of tracted, but we are always “awake” in one way or
it. The mountains and oceans, the sun and moon, another—experiencing our thoughts, our emotions, our
even the seasons arise spontaneously from it. What state of mind, experiencing our dullness, our distracted-
has become “our life,” everything we are and every- ness or joy. There has never been a time when we have
thing we have been since we stepped into this world, been inanimate, like a rock. This creative energy never
is spontaneously present. Our genetic makeup—the leaves us, whether we turn toward ignorance or enlight-
egg and sperm of our parents—arose from and is enment; whether our intelligence is obstructed or not;
encompassed by the creative energy of our basic whether we operate from the ego or from a bigger state
nature. The great Buddhist practitioner Kunchyen of mind. It remains in its own naked state at all times.
Longchenpa said: “The universe is spontaneously Even if we aspire to enlightenment, if we don’t appre-
present, who could have created it? It is the grand ciate and trust the potential and expression of our natural
production of its creative energy.” And all appearance creativity—which is all phenomena—and we look for
is blessed by it. enlightenment elsewhere, our spiritual path will become
dualistic. It is an egoistic tendency to try to arrange phe-
Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist Lama and nomena according to our preferences rather than appreci-
author of It’s Up To You and the forthcoming “Light ate them for what they are. This approach leads us to
Comes Through.” An exhibition of his artwork will be held resent certain experiences and search for an enlighten-
at the Tibet House in New York City this October. ment—or a creativity—divorced from what we directly

60 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
© KONGTRÜL JIGME NAMGYEL

Untitled # 42 (detail), 2005, oil on canvas, 36.5 x 136 inches

encounter. Resenting experience is resenting the natural at the natural unfolding of life beyond our ordinary way
vitality of mind and prevents us from having a trust in of looking at things. When we talk about creating art—
the fullness of the way phenomena unfold. So we need to or more importantly, the art of living a sane life—it
see this primordial potential in all of our experiences in means trusting our basic nature and its natural creativity.
the same way a doctor sees the health and well-being in Natural creativity is something very large, the essence of
his patients. If a patient didn’t possess a fundamental everything. As artists we make such a big deal about cre-
well-being, what would be the point of prescribing such ating something “good,” something “pleasing.” We want
antidotes as medicines, exercise, or new diets? everyone to love our creations in order to confirm our
In truth, enlightenment is always grounded in our own existence. Our insecurities, hopes, and fears haunt us.
direct experience of mind and its activities, no matter Either we feel we lack the ability to create or we use art as
what they may be. When we trust our creative energy, we a means to solidify ourselves: “Look here, my art is in the
encounter a supreme kind of enjoyment—an amazement Guggenheim!” “Look at my résumé, I danced with the

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 61
 © KONGTRÜL JIGME NAMGYEL

62 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
© KONGTRÜL JIGME NAMGYEL

Above: Untitled # 37, 2005, oil on paper, 23 x 35 inches; Opposite: Untitled # 5, 2005, oil on paper, 35 x 23 inches

Russian Ballet!” Don’t let your insecurities rob you of fests as ripples and sometimes as enormous waves, yet
your trust! Just remember, this natural energy created the essentially this movement is always made of water. We
entire universe—a humbling thought that puts our own cannot say the waves and the water are one thing, yet we
artistic creations in perspective! Think: “The universe is also cannot say they are separate. It is the same when we
here! Where did it come from?” Then have some trust speak about mind and its activities. In meditation prac-
and let this natural energy express itself. tice we see that all movement of mind is the manifesta-
tion of the primordial creative energy. So whatever
ABSTRACT ART EXPRESSES itself without structure, arises in the mind we understand to be blessed by this
theme, rules, concepts, or guidelines. We gather energy. Like water and waves, mind and activities share
together the elements such as the paint, canvas, and tur- this relationship of essence and expression.
pentine, and with a minimal amount of technique we My instruction from Yauhne reflects a discipline that
just “let it happen.” This is the kind of work I do. My integrates this view of meditation and art. She would
painting teacher, Yauhne de Tamlin, studied traditional say, “When you get attached to anything that emerges
art much of her life and later started to experiment and on the canvas, destroy it!” I would watch her create
let go of those forms. I became interested in working something beautiful and then paint over it or scrape off
with this formless practice because I felt it would the paint. “Destroy, destroy, destroy.” This is not to say
enhance and compliment my meditation and free up my that beauty or attachment to beauty is a problem.
creative expression. I didn’t engage traditional art but Destroying them is not an aggressive act, an annihila-
dove right in with my teacher and what she was doing. tion of self or a rejection of experience. It enhances cre-
As with art, in meditation practice we begin with ativity. It is a natural wearing away of attachment and
techniques or reference points that help us engage the becomes a part of the creative process itself—a way to
mind in a sane way. But as we come to know the mind, engage a bigger mind. The more I do this, the greater
we begin to see mind and its activities like we see the the satisfaction. I am not fixated on creating something
ocean and its waves. The activity of water often mani- “good” or “pleasing.” My interest or focus is on the

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 63
 Left: Untitled # 230, 2007, oil on canvas,
30 x 30 inches; Opposite: Untitled # 7,
2005, oil on paper, 12.16 x 9.5 inches

© KONGTRÜL JIGME NAMGYEL

process of creating and connecting to my natural cre- arrived at that point I just drop any activity—stop—
ativity. The main discipline is to let go. and leave the painting right there without trying to
Usually I go through the process of destroying many improve or manipulate it. I never judge my paintings—
times in order to get beyond my insecurities, hopes, and I always appreciate and spend time with them because I
fears. Often the paintings I destroy repeatedly are the appreciate where they come from. It is similar to appre-
least contrived, raw, and most provocative. They are ciating and coming to understand all aspects of my
often unrecognizable from one moment to the next— mind through the process of meditation: whatever
even the colors change. Because we paint with oil and arises teaches me something. Everything I encounter is
turpentine, the paint is easy to manipulate. The combi- fresh and surprising. In this way I never become stag-
nation provides a freedom of expression, because one nant in my work. Sometimes I access this freedom more
can easily add, remove, or scrape away any paint. quickly than at others, but I trust that it is always pres-
Recently I heard an artist talk about her experience of ent as the nature of all expression. This is an invigorat-
creating a painting. She had a big red shape in the middle ing and deeply fulfilling liberation. I feel in awe of the
of the painting that she got attached to. She wanted to whole process, which is simply an expression of my own
keep it in. Somehow she found she couldn’t move freely and others’ creative energy.
with her creativity because she was painting around it When it comes to art, the process we engage in is
and this restricted her creative movement. Finally she reflected in its expression. If we trust in the basic
decided to let it go. Only then could she move ahead and nature—it is communicated. If art is contrived and self-
be surprised at what would finally emerge. focused—it is communicated. Ultimately, because
When I have exhausted my fixations through the everything arises from the creative nature of primordial
process of destroying, I let the painting be. At this point mind, there is nothing that is more profound, miracu-
I have reached what I call the “mark of non-creating”—a lous, or “creative” than anything else. My hope is that
state of uncontrived creativity where the artist just steps my paintings communicate the beauty of this unhin-
out of his or her own way. When I find that I have dered practice of free expression. ▼

64 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
© KONGTRÜL JIGME NAMGYEL

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 65
 the art of reality
BRUCE WAGNER remembers the “simple but not easy” lessons of
his teacher, Carlos Castaneda.

And I say to you: When someone leaves,

someone remains. The point through which a
man passed is no longer empty. The only
place that is empty, with human solitude, is
that through which no man has passed.
–César Vallejo

WE SOMETIMES PASSED a billboard in L.A. that digi- I’m incapable of taking measurement. Of crunching the
tally tallied how many had died that year—thus far—from numbers. The space they whistle through isn’t really
smoking. (It is there still.) If I was driving, he’d literally about my teacher anyhow, though I do miss him at this
cover his eyes when we approached, wincing in disapproval. precise moment, terribly, which is unusual, because
Each time he made that gesture, I was surprised and moved: most times I feel like he was never here, and also that he
yes, it was true, he’d endlessly instructed how one should use never left.
death as an advisor—“I have said it until I am blue in the He assuredly did not believe in goodbyes.

OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GEBERT CONTEMPORARY, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
face”—but the roadside version wasn’t at all what he meant. He used to speak of ontological sadness, what he called
No learning, no urgent poetics came from numbers that might “the sadness of the microbe,” lost in the nebulae.
well have been a telethon’s tote, and nothing evoked the teach- Perhaps it was this too: I once heard a rinpoche talk
ings of his lineage: to intend awareness with each breath, for about the mixture of joy and sadness befalling those
such is the birthright of the impeccable being who is going to who take responsibility for the wellness, pain and igno-
die. None: merely another ad, a crude binding upon the clear rance of sentient beings. How to lead the blind?
green chakra of the heart, and it filled him with sorrow . . . There is a chant that begins with the Tibetan word
Today the winds are high and piercing. They shake kyema. Sadness, weariness, wariness. A certain sorrow.
the house and shiver the skin: ineffable, gusty, gutsy, The wind is haunting and brings its own effulgence:
merciless. They come in wild, majestic packs—from The unbearable clear light-ness of being.
left field—at once sentimental and indifferent. They do Of awareness—
not care. The Nagual used to begin lectures with this simple
They blow in from the ocean of awareness. entreaty: “Please suspend judgment.”
From “the border” . . . How harshly I have judged those who were privileged
Their respirations conjure a major melancholy: my to write of their teachers, some in these very pages! I
teacher. He is ten years gone—or something like that— viewed such essays as pretentious exercises in false
humility—anecdotal rose petals of self-importance
Bruce Wagner is a novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker based flung at the sangha. Now here I am, writing of my “root
in Los Angeles. His novels include The Chrysanthemum guru,” the Nagual Carlos Castaneda, with whom I stud-
Palace and Memorial. ied, so to speak, for ten years. He always told me I was

66 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
Blue Cowl, John Randall Nelson, 2007, mixed media on panel, 30 x 25 inches

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 67
 arrogant, and back then I wondered: But how? In what Matus, had literally saved his life. Carlos Castaneda
possible way? How could he even think this? asked what he could do to repay him. Don Juan Matus
One day my teacher said that he was compelled to bring answered, “Give me your full attention.”
me “to the border.” He said he had failed to do that very In my teens, transfixed by Henry Miller’s Big Sur, I
thing, long ago, with another, and his debt must be paid. threw away my wallet and hitched a ride north, wind-
Egotistically, I thought, “I have entered one of his Tales ing up in a halfway house. In that place, I became
of Power. I might even rate a chapter in a new book.” obsessed with stowing away on a freighter to Peru.
Sometimes it is a great teaching to be so wrong. After this phase ended, I watched Kwaidan and read the

EXCERPT REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF EAGLE’S TRUST. GEAI BLEU © FRANCIS PICABIA, COURTESY WADDINGTON GALLERIES, LONDON; PHOTOGRAPH © PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES, LONDON
Only now am I beginning to understand the potent ele- ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn, cultivating a sudden,
gance of the phrase’s impossible simplicity: to the border. powerful desire to move to Honshu, where it seemed
The Nagual Carlos Castaneda was not an easy man to that both the living and the dead were startled to dis-
find, especially if one went looking. It is curious that cover they had somehow changed places. I sobbed over
Tobias Schneebaum’s flamboyant attempts to obliterate
his identity in Keep the River on Your Right. Even though
this gorgeous memoir contained a well-known epigram
from The Teachings of Don Juan, I had not yet read Carlos
Castaneda. I was seventeen.
The quote Schneebaum chose was this:

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as

many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself,
and yourself alone, one question. This question is one
that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me
about it once when I was young, and my blood was
too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do under-
stand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have
a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the bush, or into the
bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long,
long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s
question has meaning now. Does this path have a
heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, the
path is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one
has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful
journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it.
The other will make you curse your life. One makes
you strong; the other weakens you.

Geai bleu, Francis Picabia, 1948, oil on board, 41.5 x 32 inches I’ve left the passage intact because Mr. Schneebaum’s
instincts were correct. The phrase “path of the heart” is
our first encounter was at a brunch in Santa Monica. too often removed from its original context. Torn from
I should briefly explain: nagual can denote many its nest, the abbreviated bird still sings the loveliest of
things. In my teacher’s case, the word was associated songs, yet too easily becomes the dove of peace, a slogan,
with the leaders of a distinct ancient lineage of Mexican a greeting card emblem.
sorcerers. For me, it is an honorific of great respect and The Nagual told me that I needed energy to even find
affection as well, equivalent to rinpoche or roshi. He also such a path. To do so, he encouraged me to recapitulate my
used nagual in his books, to denote the realm of dream- life. While such a discipline has a parallel in medita-
ing—“the second attention”—as opposed to “the first tion—the ends are the same, the means different—the
attention” of everyday life, or tonal. energetic act of recapitulation remains unique to his tradi-
I’ve always liked the employment of that word, atten- tion. During the recapitulation, attention is paid to
tion. He told me that his teacher, the Nagual don Juan inbreath and outbreath as one performs a studied remem-

68 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
brance of every single being one has ever known or TIME IS SPHERICAL. Now I was thirty-five and writing
encountered, from parents to intimates, lovers to friends, my first novel. Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat
acquaintances to strangers. You begin by compiling a Hobby Stories, it was about an aspiring screenwriter
list; many of those on that list have names—many cannot. whose spirit was broken by Hollywood. I met the
The compilation itself can take months. The very act of Nagual at brunch in a private home. He was ebullient,
list-making distracts the mind; the recapitulation is a life- gemütlich, gregarious. I liked him instantly. He told me
long preparation for entering silence. (It was of curious of the studios’ attempts—even Fellini’s—to adapt his
note for me to read a lecture in which Chögyam Trungpa books. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation
Rinpoche spoke of a practice “known as smrti, which with the man who wrote Journey to Ixtlan.
means ‘recollection.’”) Another activity exclusive to Car- We had many lunches after that, and I slowly came to
los Castaneda’s lineage is the discipline called tensegrity, a understand he was and would be my teacher.
word my teacher borrowed from Buckminster Fuller to We traveled to Mexico. He showed me places that
describe the vast suite of physical movements called had been of great significance on his journey. We vis-
“magical passes” that don Juan Matus taught his stu- ited the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico
dents, and which are taught to this day. The modern ver- City; the pyramids of the sun and the moon; the caves
sion of those ancient passes is another way of quieting the of Cacahuamilpa; and Tula, the Toltec capitol that fig-
inner dialogue in order to court silence. ured in The Eagle’s Gift and The Art of Dreaming. At
One night at dinner I told him, as Almodóvar put it, dusk, the church opposite our small hotel and the
“todo sobre mi madre”—all about my mother. Afterward, benches of the town square filled one with longing,
we wandered outside. He pointed to the night sky and blurring the borderlines.
spoke with casual scholarship and warmth, as if the stars But what were his teachings?
were old friends. He showed me Coma Berenices. Such “They are simple,” he said, “but not easy.”
was my ignorance that I’d never even heard of this con- Last year, I had a pivotal dream. I was set upon by dogs
stellation, yet I was touched because my mother’s birth that threatened to tear me apart if I mistepped. I was
name, a name she ultimately rejected, was Bernice. able to remain relatively calm; eventually, with the help
Again, he spoke about the act of energetically recapitu- of bystanders, I escaped. But just before awakening, a
lating one’s life, and I was reminded of a stunning chap- voice informed, “These dogs are from another dimen-

Carlos Castaneda was vibrantly empty, a

screen that played the movies that run in
our heads as we make angels or devils out
of whomever we encounter.
ter in The Autobiography of a Yogi called “Outwitting the sion. This is how it is going to feel—and this is how it is
Stars.” Paramhansa Yogananda wrote that man can escape going to smell. This is the beginning of how it is going to be.”
the destiny imposed on him by the stars, the constella- In shock, I lurched to the computer and wrote every-
tions of which were actually there as a goad and reminder thing down. What set this apart from a “normal”
from his moment of birth. “The soul,” Yogananda wrote, dream was this: rather than being feral, the dogs were
“is ever free; it is deathless because birthless. It cannot be bizarrely composed of purebreds, including poodles
regimented by stars.” The shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s and chihuahuas. (The Nagual had spoken to me of just
lineage described a force called the Eagle that devoured such incongruous indicators. He called them scouts or
awareness as our bodies came to the end of their useful- “foreign energy” that invited one to a broader aware-
ness. The recapitulation provided a facsimile of one’s life ness.) Since the vision had terrified me so, it needed to
experience that the Eagle accepted, allowing one to enter be closely examined, and manipulated by intent. I
the realm of pure consciousness and be free. remembered something extremely useful he had said:
I have always been devastated by the beauty of that. One can change the course of dreaming through intent,

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 69
 just as the course of rivers are changed by the erosion of to other worlds! Visit the realms of the gods!”) The Dalai
wind and Time. Through the act of recording my dream, Lama and the Rinpoche were speaking of the Meditation
I could see how my initial interpretation was malevo- of Non-Meditation—what Carlos Castaneda called
lent, yet it slowly became clear that the dogs were bring- dreaming or not-doing. I always thought I had failed miser-
ing an enticement to awareness. This was their gift. ably as a dreamer. It was hubris to think that dreaming
As I went deeper, I saw that the beasts were indiffer- could not be enacted in the “first attention”; that reality
ent—reminders not to run from my responsibilities as a was a place of no-mystery—of doing, instead of not-doing.
sentient being. Around the time of this dream, I’d been Not to believe in the dream of everyday life.
going through one of those periods in which everyday life It is so easy to conjure permanence.
seems pernicious and threatening. The dogs were warning To imagine paths leading to goals and endgames.
me to stay sober and vigilant, to accept the help of the The Nagual’s lineage taught that each of us has a
Other. (For me, the “Other” is that evoked in the metta “double,” or energy body, that waits for us beyond the
bhavana prayer, or lovingkindness meditation: the friend border—the home we return to upon rejoining the
or acquaintance, the parent or teacher, the lover, enemy, or Source. He said the energy body could be accessed in
stranger. From The Way of the Bodhisattva: “Those desiring ordinary life, but this act required impeccability. The
speedily to be / A refuge for themselves and other beings, / double could be summoned only from a place of inner
Should interchange the terms of ‘I’ and ‘other,’ / And thus silence, of discipline and acquiescence. I now associate the
embrace a sacred mystery.”) They were herders and border dreaming or energy body with the deity or Buddha
dogs. The horror show had been provoked not by them but within; the Buddha that is sometimes visualized—or
courtesy of the usual source: Bruce Wagner. teacher, parent, Other, et cetera—during meditation,
To lack awareness is the real terrain of nightmares. and even, as I have read, with the visualization of oneself
The border is here, not elsewhere. in the form of the deity that occurs in the “transferring
I didn’t have the energy to follow those dogs— of consciousness” practices called nirmanakaya phowa
But so what? and sambhogakaya phowa.
Of course, to become self-important because of one’s Why is it that the life and death of the body still
small epiphanies is yet another turn of the dreaming takes us by surprise? (A devotee in Taxco was shocked

To lack awareness is the real terrain of

nightmares.
screw. There is a superb quote from Khetsun Sangpo when the Nagual excused himself to urinate.) My
Rinpoche that evokes the same images: “When a dog teacher said that whenever we needed to be reminded of
comes upon lungs, it considers them to be so delicious it our birthright as magical beings, we had only to note
wants immediately to gobble them up; just the same, the profound shamanic act required of us daily in order
when we meet with any superficial teaching, whatever it to share the consensus of the social order. The world, he
is, we voluntarily sink ourselves into it or grab onto it.” said, is held together by spit. He famously wrote of the
In Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying, the Dalai Lama is in moment that his own teachers left, how he saw a line of
conversation with a group of social scientists and medita- “exquisite lights” that reminded him of the plumed ser-
tors. He speaks of the Tibetan tradition of dream yoga, pent of Toltec legend. Some who met Carlos Castaneda
noting that some people are able to access the dreaming and were interested in the journey insisted on getting
body by natural talent alone. The Dalai Lama talks about a their money’s worth—a backstage path at Burning Man.
woman “of sound mind” who stayed on a mountain They demanded their payment, in full: in rainbow
behind the Drepung Monastery. She spoke to him of hav- body, in residue of amber relics, in Yaqui somersaults
ing watched the disciples of an old lama fly from one side into the abyss. They could not fathom that when the
of the mountain to another. (At a retreat, Chökyi Nyima alarm goes off in the morning, one is already forced to
Rinpoche was asked, “But what should one do while jump into the dream that is reality, the dream of affec-
lucid-dreaming?” To which he replied, “Play around! Go tion and accountability, the dream that leads to the ulti-

70 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 mate Other: the dreaming body. (The Daily Double.) To He also said that he liked the American tradition of hug-
begin to know this is to begin a journey toward aware- ging because when people hug it is a kind of meditation
ness, the border of personal power. wherein they achieve “perfect time.” My teacher called
Once, with chilly directness, the Nagual told me, “I am this “stopping the world.” The Roshi also said that “the
not interested in sponsoring your absurdities.” It has been invisible realm cannot exist without the visible one.”) At
said that the foremost teacher is he or she who exposes one’s a satsang in Bombay, a woman railed at me because I’d
faults, and whose advice resonates. Carlos Castaneda was let a pamphlet written by Ramesh Balsekar touch the
vibrantly empty, a screen that played the movies that run ground, an act she said was careless and forbidden.
in our heads as we make angels or devils out of whomever (Ramesh would be the first to say that her anger had no
we encounter. Often, those loops involve the parent: blam- meaning beyond an expression of genes and condition-
ing the parent, competing with the parent, currying their ing—as he would have said of my own unpleasant reac-
favor, fearing and worshipping them, craving their love tion.) On another occasion, I went to see Chökyi Nyima
and attention. Teachers do not come into our lives to pro- Rinpoche in Northern California. A visitor who came to
vide day care or psychoanalysis. I am enthralled that give thanks sat in contemptuous judgment of a stranger
Ramana Maharshi’s teacher was a mountain! In my experi- before learning that the object of his scorn was the Rin-
ence, obsessing on guru-as-guru without recognizing the poche’s awe-inspiring translator, Erik Pema Kunsang.
© FRANCIS PICABIA, COURTESY WADDINGTON GALLERIES, LONDON; PHOTOGRAPH © PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES, LONDON

Other as the true teacher leaves one worse off. With a That scornful visitor was me . . .
teacher, it is possible to simply find a new enemy—and a I had made the pilgrimage to thank the Rinpoche for
new sponsor for one’s absurdities: oneself. allowing me to generously quote from his Bardo Guide-
Even a mountain can become one’s enemy . . . book in one of my novels. Just as the pugnacious voice
A few years back, I took a guest to attend one of of Nisargadatta Maharaj in I Am That had eerily
reminded me of the Nagual—the humor and elo-
quence, the heart-chakra emptiness—so did the essence
of the being who had assembled the Bardo Guidebook
remind me of the Nagual as well. They even shared an
uncanny physical resemblance. Chökyi Nyima Rin-
poche was “short and brown”—as Carlos Castaneda
used to mischievously describe himself—with large,
dimpled creases when he smiled. I thanked him as
planned, before dramatically adding that I’d never
gotten the chance to say goodbye to my teacher. (The
Nagual died while I was celebrating the fortieth birth-
day of a close friend. He had urged me to attend the
honoree’s party in New York.) I told him that I wanted
to take this opportunity to say goodbye—now—and
“hello” as well. I became emotional and began to choke
on my words. The Rinpoche said, “I understand. There
is no need for you to finish.” He touched his forehead
to mine. “Your teacher and me—the same.” Then:
“Perhaps we will meet again, in Tibet.”
He might as well have said “Beverly Hills.”
Or “Ixtlan”—
Tender for all that, Francis Picabia, 1945, oil on cardboard, 25 x 21 in. Your teacher and me . . . the same.

Kyozan Joshu Roshi’s arcanely poetic teishos in L.A.— THERE IS A PERFECT story written by Jorge Luis
afterward, my friend said the roshi was a confused old Borges called “The Garden of Forking Paths.” It’s about
man who had wasted everyone’s time. (“Time,” Joshu two men—a translator who has spent his life studying a
Roshi said on that day, “is an activity of the Buddha.” mysterious manuscript that is also a labyrinth, and the

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 71
 respectful visitor who seeks him out. The cordial ordinary perception by putting that furrow first.) The
Translator tells the Visitor he has come to realize that Nagual Carlos Castaneda’s lineage believed that time was
the Book of Mystery is “infinite,” that it is about every- the essence of attention: the Eagle’s “emanations” were
thing possible and impossible, imagined and unimag- time and no-time itself. In that sense, Borges’s story is very
ined, everything that is happening, everything that will much about the dream of the union of first and second
happen, and everything that won’t, everything that has attentions—the tonal and nagual—and also about what
happened—all of Consciousness and intent. The Transla- the Nagual called the three realms: the Known, the
tor mentions an occurrence in the Arabian Nights: Unknown, and the Unknowable. The secret was to investi-
because of a copyist’s error, Scheherazade is forced back gate the visible world, for, as Roshi implied, it contains
to the beginning of her tale, doomed to reach the part the invisible as surely as a table contains atoms.
where, because of a copyist’s error, she must start over I am always interested in those who in rebuke, agi-
again. (Perhaps this is the ultimate metaphor for aware- tation, or enmity assert Carlos Castaneda’s writings to
ness gone awry—or never realized. The Wheel of be fiction. To me, such critics are from a long lineage
Karma.) The Translator tells the Visitor that it took of teachers themselves, and I say this without irony.
him a long while to realize that the single word never Even a novelist like me needs to be reminded that all
is fiction. I should have said: even a novelist like me

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GEBERT CONTEMPORARY, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
needs to be reminded that even fiction isn’t real. It’s a
tonic to be reminded of the folly and “incoherence of
philosophers”; that crazy wisdom is merely crazy; that
the great and wondrous tales of Mahamudra may not
or could not actually have occurred, nor could have
Christ’s more bizarre—or banal—travails; that after
cogently telling his own followers to question and
challenge his concepts, the Buddha up and died of food
poisoning. One needs to be reminded that the least
reliable witness to an event is always the eyewitness—
and that there can be no outwitting the stars because
there are no stars as we understand them to be; neither
is there wit. One needs to be reminded of the Nagual’s
inherent or learned knowledge of chacmools—the famous
stone reclining figures of Central Mexico and the
Yucatan. According to Carlos Castaneda, the chacmools
were warriors who had entered dreaming with the help
Precious State of Grace 6, John Randall Nelson, 2007,
mixed media on panel, 48 x 48 inches of each other’s gaze (the double dreaming the Self and the
Self dreaming the double; the merging of first and second
used in this book of books is “time”; hence, the Transla- attentions into the Buddha-field), and the weights on their
tor deduces that Time must be its very theme. stomachs were energetic tools to aid their usherings—it
In The Wheel of Time, Carlos Castaneda wrote: is good to be reminded that this is an outlandish suppo-
“[Shamans] had another cognitive unit called the wheel of sition, and rather, that some chacmools were in fact
time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say athletes holding discs used in ancient sporting events;
that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, and some were priests who propped up trays employed
a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infi- for burnt offerings or human sacrifice. It is good to be
nite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living reminded that all is Fable, be it emanations of scholar,
creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to artist, academician, or Eagle; even this epic artful
gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone dream—especially this—of man’s shared perception. It
meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.” (Reality, is good to know that amid this grand and grandiose
or everyday life, is simply one furrow; my teacher spent a fiction, the paths of the heart are indeed lonely hunters,
lifetime showing others how to break the monopoly of and good too to be gently reminded of the axiom that

72 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
no one gets out alive. Because in a dualistic cosmos, it affection,” the Nagual used to call it—as I visit her
agreeably follows that no one gets out dead either. for lunch.
One must always be reminded that impermanence Mother is so happy to see me that she subtly orches-
is permanent. I should have said: one needs to be trates the meal: its portions, the order in which I eat,
reminded that impermanence is not permanent, nor is when to pick up my glass and to wipe my mouth.
it transitory. It is simply empty. In the end, it’s of the There was a time this irritated me. Last week, I went to
essence to somehow grasp that Time, Space, and her house. I called out but she didn’t hear me. I entered

The foremost teacher is he or she who

exposes one’s faults, and whose advice
resonates.
Memory are a fiction, and shall remain so against all her room as she lay sleeping. Backing out, I sobbed.
of our efforts, even if one is enough of a magician to (I’m now of the age when one comes across the startling,
note that the truth of this fierce and beautiful poignant image of an old parent, asleep.) That is an
planet—the appearance and events of ordinary image of her I will always carry. I fear her death, and
reality—resides in select documents and myriad digi- any agonies she will endure, but that is no nightmare.
tal tote boards. No more than was my vision of the wild dogs . . .

THE NAGUAL TALKED a lot (until he was blue in the Like the death of a child in a dream,
face) of the failure of syntax and the necessity to experi- Through holding the erroneous appearance
ence knowledge bodily, which is what he meant by “see- Of the varieties of suffering to be true
ing energy directly.” He loved what T. S. Eliot said about One makes oneself so tired.
Dante in a lecture: “It is therefore a constant reminder to Therefore, it is a practice of bodhisattvas when
the poet [substitute warrior/bodhisattva/dharma student] meeting with unfavorable conditions to view them
of the obligation to explore . . . to capture those feel- as erroneous. (from The Thirty-Seven Practices of a
ings which people can hardly even feel, because they Bodhisattva by Ngulchu Thogme)
have no words for them; and at the same time, a
reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of In the end, pain and joy are the same, democratized
ordinary consciousness will only be able to return by Time. They are paths, forking from the garden.
and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has a constant Feathers of the plumed serpent––
firm grasp upon the realities with which they are Thank you again, my teacher, for doing your very best to
already acquainted.” show me. I am still not anywhere, and do not understand,
Carlos Castaneda left this earth in full awareness, just though my blood is less vigorous. But now—at least this very
as he lived—in what Buddhists call “the natural state.” I instant, as I finish this puzzle piece—I can make out the one
am pleased to see him in everything each day, and when I path that has meaning.
lose my footing he is there, audacious yet indifferent, I will try to have the courage to take it.
affectionate yet impersonal, overflowing yet empty. I have heard that this path crosses the border.
He is in my father’s hoarse voice, talking into the I have heard that it leads nowhere.
phone, post-chemo, as we continue the rapproche- I was once reminded that nowhere = Now Here.
ment my teacher urged me to begin so many years A path with heart—how breathtakingly simple.
ago, and he is in my mother’s eyes—in her rascal’s Simple but not easy.
smile and stolid vigilance, bound by boundless How clever I think I am, yet I’d never have known.
Time—my mother, who watches me like a hawk—an And Nagual:
eagle!—with unbending affection—“a blank check of Why would I ever think of saying goodbye? ▼

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 73
 out
washingemptiness
In our own impermanent bodies, we face our deepest fears and
aversions. Drawing on Dogen’s writings and her personal experience
as a nurse, SALLIE TISDALE challenges us not to look away, but to
practice in this most intimate realm. Artwork by Daniele Buetti

AFTER MY MOTHER-IN-LAW’S recent funeral, my husband Bob and his two sisters, Bonnie
and Val, took her ashes to the bank of her favorite creek and sprinkled them in. They hiked
back with ash-dusted hands.
“I hate to wash,” said Val, rubbing her mother’s powdered body into her palm. “It’s Mom,
you know?” I could see the dusty gray ash on her knuckles.
“Were there any big pieces?” I asked. “A few chunks,” she answered, as she turned toward
the sink.
Val teaches veterinary medicine. Her sister is a nurse AS BUDDHISTS, we work to accept the impermanence
like me, and none of us is squeamish. We do things at and inevitable decay of the physical body. But it’s not
work that most people find hard to imagine, and all of us enough to accept it as a fact; we can believe in this and
wash our hands with great frequency. I work with cancer still not want it in plain sight. Nagarjuna said, “Change
patients. Not infrequently, makes all things possible.” It is only because of change
Contributing editor
people ask, “How can you that suffering can end—and it is because of change that
Sallie Tisdale is the author
stand your job?” They mean our bodies fall apart, like all compounded things. We
of Women of the Way:
different things by this cannot have one without the other, but we try.
Discovering 2,500 Years
question. Some mean the It’s one of the blessings of my work, this intimacy with
of Buddhist Wisdom.
pain, the deaths, but many the authentic, unmasked body, with the body as an object
simply mean the bodies, the bodies themselves—sick in a world of vibrant, shifting forms. But it isn’t enough. I
and weak bodies, and all the fluids bodies produce and can talk bluntly about funk and decay all I want, but
we try so hard to hide. Part of my job is to help people unless I can squarely face my own body as it is, I’m missing
deal with matters we are all trained to think of as the point. We fear bodily fluids as vectors of disease, but
intensely private. I know that bodies leak and smell; I this is actually a modern concern. Our real fear is a deeper
know that bodies fall apart and turn to ash in our hands. and more primeval one—a fear of taint, of corruption.

74 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 Bodily fluids are vectors of change, harbingers of all that form of clinging—in this case, clinging to what is not, a
we can’t truly control. desire for change from the way things are. One form of
The natural function of our fluids is to invade the aversion we all know is that of holding onto our ignorance,
world. The word effluvium is from Latin; it means refusing to accept the whole of reality—picking and
“flowing out.” Our fluids leave us and spread them- choosing what we prefer, and turning away from the rest.
selves into public space through odor and sight and The physical control we maintain over our bodies is an
touch. Every day, my body produces effluence that aspect of internal control. It is an expression of all our
ideas about what constitutes self and what is truly other.
Small children may be proud of their bowel movements,
of this interesting thing they have produced. Their natu-
ral and innocent inclination is to share what their bodies
make—until they are told, by tone of voice and facial
expression and command, not to do so. Part of what we are
training children to do is keep the body to itself, to hold
onto the fiction that the body can be controlled—that it is
not the poorly bound sack of fluid that we secretly feel it
to be. Westerners are often toilet-trained to a level of fas-
tidiousness so intense it becomes a kind of loathing.
Those who are free or open about toilet functions may be
seen as coarse or deliberately offensive. To be simply
relaxed about one’s toileting—to be, that is, unashamed—
is seen as a kind of licentiousness. It is traditionally a
mark of people outside the pale of a society, that they
are freer with their bodies and the bodies of others than
people in the mainstream. Little social respect is given
to those who care for the bodies of others. In the caste
system of India, only the untouchables handled corpses.
© DANIELE BUETTI

The fact that the Buddha’s disciples made robes from

the clothes of the dead and sat with corpses were some
of the Buddha’s most radical acts.
Blue Hands I–X, 2005, perforated digital c-print on aluminum lightbox I have reared three children and now have three small
grandchildren by my eldest son. Their mother has
needs to be managed in some way. Can I manage it strong feelings about privacy around toileting, and even
without flinching? Feces, vomit, sweat, sputum, blood, at the age of three my granddaughter is quite reserved
semen, urine, saliva, and tears—none of us can escape in the bathroom. But at the same time, she is as fond of
these things. In fact, if there is anything that can teach her own smell as most people are. Smell—effluence—is
us we are more alike than different, it is the sickbed one of the ways we bond with people we love. The terri-
and the toilet. For Buddhists in particular, they are tory of the body is the territory of relationship. We like
places of great spiritual practice. the perfume of the nest, the smells and flavors we asso-
People in most cultures are trained from an early age to ciate with home, with our tribal identity. These may be
be somewhat private with their bodily functions and averse as different as shared food or a parent’s cologne, but they
to those of others. There is a lot of wisdom in this, instinc- are always the flavors of bodies themselves.
tive feelings about privacy and sanitation. This kind of In a sense, all of Buddhist practice takes place here, in
aversion, more of a polite avoidance, has an important this most intimate realm: here, in the family, shoulder
place in community. But aversion is also a Buddhist techni- to shoulder with fellow workers, beside each other on
cal term, pointing us to a deep koan. It includes a contin- the cushion. Even alone in a cave, there is no way out of
uum of reaction from mild distaste to deep disgust. It is the sense object we call the body. We meet each other
resistance, obstruction, and desire at once. Aversion is a face to face, and so have all our teachers and ancestors

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 75
 met each other. In this way have all the Buddhas wise. It means noticing our aversions and turning
taught. Hand to sweating hand. toward them with curiosity and attention.
Dogen was fond of referring to people as “skin bags.”
THE MEDIEVAL JAPANESE Zen master Eihei Dogen He never tired of reminding us what fragile vessels we
described at length the proper way to brush one’s teeth. are. His own teacher, Rujing, had, at his own request,
He tells a story from the Kengu-Kyo, “The Sutra of the been Head of Toilets. Dogen developed a great respect for
Wise and the Stupid,” about the Buddha brushing his the varied meanings of hygiene and its power in practice.
teeth with a willow twig. When he threw the twig to Dogen’s particular wisdom shines most brightly at
the ground afterward, it grew into a great tree under the precise intersection of the vast view and the blunt
which he preached the dharma. For Shakyamuni, to act, and in his years of teaching, he sometimes focused
clean his teeth with complete attention and whole- intently on taking care of the body. In the fascicle Senjo,
heartedness was itself the foundation of the Bodhi devoted to the topic of washing, he wrote, “At just the
seat. By brushing his teeth, he made a place from moment when we dignify body-and-mind with train-
which he could speak the dharma. Dogen notes the ing, eternal original practice is completely and roundly
cause and effect at work here, but more than that, he realized. Thus the body-and-mind of training manifests
is pointing us at the irrevocable nature of the body as itself in the original state.” The very next sentence refers
the vessel for the Truth. to cutting one’s fingernails.
Dogen wrote detailed instructions on how to clean
oneself after a bowel movement, how to cut one’s nails,
shave one’s head, use a towel, brush one’s teeth, and wash
one’s face. A certain amount of his instruction is simply
the necessary teaching of the untutored, and the kind of
attitude required for people to live in close quarters in
harmony. Some of the advice is painfully relevant today:
For one who is in the toilet, he writes, “Do not chat or
joke with the person on the other side of the wall, and do
not sing songs or recite verses in a loud voice. Do not
make a mess by weeping and dribbling, and do not be
angry or hasty. Do not write characters on the walls, and
do not draw lines in the earth with the shit-stick.”
Shakyamuni’s life and teaching was based squarely in
the management of the body in daily life, and so
Dogen’s work is based on a great foundation of teaching
about the body. He cites a number of Vinaya texts, sev-
eral sutras, and Chinese texts on monastic behavior. He
grounds the details not only in his current place and
© DANIELE BUETTI

time but in history, in the ancestors themselves as the

body of the Way. “The buddhas have toilets,” he wrote,
“and this we should remember.”
Dogen’s instructions can be minute, covering every
aspect of movement into and out of the zendo, into and
Blue Hands I–X, 2005, perforated digital c-print on aluminum lightbox
out of robes, the precise way to fold a towel over one’s arm
Buddhist practice requires us, as it were, to encounter while walking. He is teaching a level of mindfulness that
the body with the body itself. That sometimes means can be seen as infinite—infinite in its nuance, and infi-
looking deliberately at what we don’t want to see. It nitely deep in its meaning. By forcing us to consider the
means smelling what leaks out of ourselves and each most commonplace details, he forces us to consider how
other, and noticing what thoughts arise with the smells. details become the vessel of enlightenment. His tone is
It means noting our reactions, both physical and other- matter-of-fact when he is describing how to brush one’s

76 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
 I can talk bluntly about funk and decay all I
want, but unless I can squarely face my own
body as it is, I’m missing the point.
teeth, and just as matter-of-fact when he is describing IF WE SEE THE BODY and its fluids as tainted, we our-
how brushing the teeth is awakening itself. For Dogen selves become tainted—not by the fluids, but by the fear.
the acts themselves are layered with dharma—marbled To be truly untainted is to be free of fear—that is, free of
with dharma, for the deeper mind cannot be separated self-concern and self-regard. Impurity lies in fleeing reality
from using the toilet and folding a towel. on any level, physical, metaphysical, or in between. Both
Dogen criticizes those who don’t care about hygiene the acts and their meanings—the commonplace acts and
or reject the possibility of using care of the body as a the multiplied meanings—must be taken together. This
vehicle in practice. But he also criticizes those who seek way we are able to step outside both, and embrace both.
after purity, who want to skirt past the messy nature of The opposites of pure and impure disappear. Completely
the human. An earlier ancestor, the famous Chinese present, we emerge into true purity.
woman known as Kongshi Daoren, wrote in a poem on One of the blessings of long relationships is seeing
a bathhouse wall: “If nothing truly exists, what are you the changes in the body of another, and embracing
bathing? Where could even the slightest bit of dust them. We watch our friends and family grow gray and
come from?. . . Even if you see no difference between wrinkled and stooped, and this is a gift, a strange kind
the water and the dirt, it all must be washed completely of nakedness. We watch our own faces change and blur
away when you enter here.” in the mirror, and we are watching endless, endless
Dogen reminds us that we are neither pure nor change. We are watching eternity.
impure. Awakening is the state of seeing past the false At the end of our lives, we will find ourselves in the
opposites of emptiness and form, purity and profanity. hands of others. I go to work. I cause pain, I relieve
So brushing teeth and having a bowel movement are pain. I clean up vomit and feces and blood. I dig in, and
not acts that can lead us to purity—they are themselves sometimes I get disgusted, from somewhere down near
purity. They are complete in themselves. And even so, it the brain stem and the gut. I keep a straight face. I see
isn’t enough just to wash—we have to discover what it is how afraid people are of being judged in just that way,
to be this naturally pure form. “Without washing the how devastating it is for them to confront the way their
inside of emptiness, how can we realize cleanness within bodies crumble. They are so afraid that I will turn away,
and without?” Such apparent paradox is part of the endless that they are no longer worthy because they are crum-
repeated pairing of Buddhism: wisdom and activity, bling. But we are all crumbling, all the time.
each incomplete alone. Such couplings are the skin and Now and then, I think about Dogen dying, soiling
bones of the Buddha’s body, and they are found in our his bed, being nursed by Egi, one of his female students.
skin and bones. They are the inside of our emptiness. I imagine nursing my own teacher someday. I think of
Aversion is one of a pair; to be averse to one thing the Buddha dying from food poisoning, puking in his
implies being drawn to its opposite. But if we are averse to death bed. I think of myself washing him, his unde-
the body, toward what are we drawn? What else is there fended, old body: his skin as fragile as fine paper, tear-
for us here? “Remember,” Dogen writes, “purity and ing at a rough touch, so thin I can see the pulse of blood
impurity is blood dripping from a human being. At one along the veins of his hand. I imagine his wasted, bony
time it is warm, at another time it is disgusting.” The body, the tendons on his neck standing out plain and
opening of the wound may be hard, but the flowing of clear as he gently takes his last breaths.
the blood is very easy. Dogen cautions us not to be drawn I think of Dogen and Shakyamuni, and all the rest,
into a life solely of the mind or spirit, away from the after this last breath—after their bowels relaxed and
reality of the body, but to be working always at a true ran, and their bladders emptied and their eyes clouded
and total presence in the self, here and now—the self, in over. I think of the flies arriving, and laying their eggs,
his words, that is always “flashing into existence.” and what happened after that. ▼

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 77
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FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 79
 my view

Dharma Family Values

Or, Why American Buddhism must change or die
CLARK STRAND

A PROTESTANT MINISTER I know recently lamented that his on to their children. Imagine having
congregation seemed to be aging. It’s just too hard to keep to learn as an adult how to sing Christ-
mas carols, dye an Easter egg, or play
teenagers in the church, he explained. They fall away, usu- dreidel. The truth is, you probably
ally around fourteen or fifteen, after which you’re lucky if wouldn’t do it, or if you did, it would
you see them on Easter and Christmas. “After that, you’ve feel forced or phony when it came
time to offer those same rituals to
basically got only three opportuni- social fabric is torn and therefore in your kids. The problem, in most
ties to get them back—when they need of the kind of repair offered by cases, is that children aren’t ready for
get married, when their children get religious liturgy and ritual—quite lit- the kinds of Buddhist rituals that
baptized, or when someone in the erally because someone is entering, or adult converts have mastered—like
family dies.” departing, from the fabric of family life. meditating, going on silent retreat, or
“But what if your church doesn’t Whatever spiritual life we seek for reading difficult Buddhist texts.
have Easter and Christmas,” I asked, ourselves as individuals, the religious Another problem, well documented
“or if it doesn’t have those marriage, life truly begins and ends here—with among religious scholars, is that Bud-
birth, and funeral ceremonies to draw the life of the family. To the degree dhism in America has tended to follow
them back in?” that American Buddhism recognizes a self-help rather than a religious
He looked at me a little incredu- that truth and embraces its demands, model in that it has functioned mainly
lously, then remembered that I was it will flourish. If it ignores it, it’s just as a tool to meet the needs of the indi-
coming from a Buddhist background. a matter of time before it slips into vidual (or, in the case of more socially
“Well,” he said after a moment. “In serious decline. conscious individuals, of society at
that case, I guess you’re screwed.” The problem today, of course, is that large). We see evidence of this in the
Birth. Marriage. Death. Those are with few exceptions, Buddhism is not absence of meaningful programs for
typically the three great milestones being passed down in families by children and teens at many, if not
any human life. They’re the moments members of the convert community. most, American Buddhist centers.
when we tend to stop and take stock of There are many reasons for this. One is In essence the problem is this: Bud-
things, when we come together as that, not having grown up in the reli- dhism swelled its ranks during the
extended families to consider the past gion themselves, convert Buddhists post-1960s era to accommodate the
and future in a spiritual or religious don’t have the preexisting cultural spiritual interests of the baby boom
light. A sociologist might tell you templates to work from that Jews and generation that is even now begin-
that those are the moments when the Christians do in passing their religion ning to die off, and yet those Boomer

80 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
© BENJAMIN F. FINK JR./BRAND X PICTURES/JUPITERIMAGES

Buddhists, although they might fina- gious community than, say, the chil-
gle a way to get themselves married or dren of Zen or Vipassana practitioners
buried as Buddhists, in most cases or Tibetan Buddhists. Children
haven’t birthed their children or brought along for the ride to the local
raised them as Buddhists (or not effec- Zen center are likely to experience
tively, at least). As a result, Buddhism themselves as tagalongs unless there
in America will face a serious crisis are adults willing to forgo their medi-
over the next few decades, when it tation practice in order to make them
will be forced essentially to start over, feel welcome and involve them in
bringing new Buddhists to the fold activities that offer meaningful paral-
instead of making them. And who’s to lels to what their parents are doing.
say that those new converts won’t Even then, they aren’t usually that vis-
encounter the same difficulties in ible in the zendo. What healthy six-
establishing a meaningful family cul- year-old wants to sit on a cushion
ture for the Buddhism they practice? when he could be outside running
This generation owes it to the next to around instead?
do that work now. Even with their many youth divi-
For all that, the largest American sions and childrens’ programs, the
Buddhist group, the Soka Gakkai SGI still hasn’t solved the koan of how
International (SGI), is doing a lot bet- to get born, married, and buried as a
ter than most at keeping their Buddhist. In many cases they’ve got
teenagers happy and their Buddhism the ceremonies themselves in place—
in the family. Their twice-daily chant- at least at the community centers in
ing practice takes place at home— major cities—but those ceremonies
before the altar that virtually all SGI are still largely improvisational; they
members have enshrined in their don’t yet have the cultural resonance
houses or apartments. Likewise, of kaddish, the sacraments of baptism
because meeting locations rotate or marriage, or the mass for the dead.
among local members’ houses, their Moreover, like other American Bud-
children are more likely to be dhist sects, the SGI doesn’t yet recog-
included in the life of the broader reli- nize them as being a particularly

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 81
 my view

important part of its Buddhist teach- And their children? Well, a lot of with the various other forms of
ing. So far, almost no one seems to times they’ve been baptized or bar meditation-based Buddhist teachings
have noticed what an essential role mitzvahed, but as often as not noth- that crossed the Pacific during the six-
these ceremonies play in Western reli- ing was done to welcome them into ties and seventies, Zen has yet to
gious life. the Buddhist community. “When they develop a Buddhist culture that pro-
get old enough,” one father told me, vides the context for a fully lived
TIME AND AGAIN, when I share these “my children can decide for them- life—a life lived from beginning to
concerns with other American Bud- end and shared with all members of
dhists, I am told that in fact they do the family, through folk tales, festi-
have welcoming ceremonies, mar- vals, and the daily rituals of Buddhist

PRE-FABRICATED INNOCENCE: ANTICIPATION 2004, ADIA MILLETT,

riages, and funerals at their temples. family life. It has to provide a way of
And of course I know this is true, being born Buddhist, married Bud-

© ADIA MILLETT, COURTESY OF MIXEDGREENS.COM

because I have performed Buddhist dhist, and buried Buddhist. Otherwise,
weddings and funerals myself, and whatever American Buddhism might
my daughter was officially “wel- contribute to the spiritual life of its
comed” as a child at the local Zen adherents, it will be severely limited
monastery. But when I ask how many in what it can offer them as a religion.
of the members avail themselves of Until it accomplishes this, it is
such ceremonies, I meet a lot of selves whether to meditate or not.” unlikely to reach critical mass in
downward gazes. The answer is Which is another way of saying, “Zen America, but will remain a kind of
invariably “Well, not everyone,” and just isn’t for kids.” therapy or life strategy instead.
when I push the matter, I find that And maybe that is true. Then again, Though this may sound a little con-
most have been married as Jews or it ought to be for kids if it wants to find voluted, in considering the problems
Christians and buried as the same. a lasting home in America. Along faced by Buddhism as it transitions

82 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
out of the countercultural movement for instance, when a Buddhist gets prominent that it often consists of lit-
of the sixties and seventies through together with a Christian minister tle else), there is little discussion of
the self-help methodology of the and the local rabbi and all three want needing to recover the original spirit
eighties and nineties, and on to what- to provide their teenagers with a of the religion. My Jewish and Christ-
ever it will become next, I have meaningful initiation into the adult ian friends constantly speak about the
increasingly turned to the model of religious community. The rabbi need for spiritual renewal in their tra-
the local church to figure out how wants to make sure it doesn’t degen- ditions and, more often than not,
Buddhism can at last become the reli- erate into the usual blowout party, attribute their losing battle of attri-
gion that, until I had a wife and kids, the minister wants to avoid the bor- tion to the lack of meaningful study
I didn’t know I always wanted. Conse- ing predictability of the same-old, and practice. “It’s nothing but Christ-
quently, as the expression goes, these same-old confirmation class, and the mas and Easter to a lot of my mem-
days “some of my best friends are Buddhist is looking for some exist- bers,” says a minister friend. A rabbi
Christians and Jews.” They also are ing Western model to work from tells me that after the bar mitzvah he
trying to make their religion work, because his teacher, now dead, never won’t see a particular family again
often botching it in the process and told him how a Tibetan teenager until their son is ready to marry. In
having to start over, reimagining becomes a Buddhist. such conversations it is profoundly
their programs with an emphasis on Although I don’t have the same hol- humbling for me to see that each of us
welcoming teens and families, offer- idays or sacraments my Christian and has something that the other desper-
ing them an experience that matters, Jewish friends have to work with, I ately needs. ▼
and finding ways of articulating a find I have something valuable to con-
religious message that are fresh and tribute to such discussions. Because Contributing editor Clark Strand’s next book,
vital and real. spiritual teachings and practices How to Believe in God (Whether You
That’s where some of the most occupy such a prominent place in Believe in Religion or Not), will be pub-
interesting conversations take place— American convert Buddhism (so lished next summer by Doubleday.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 83
 give & take

Zen Basics
Harada Sekkei Roshi offers clear
answers to life’s big questions.
Harada Sekkei Roshi is a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition
and abbot of Hosshinji monastery, in Fukui Prefecture,
Japan. This past May, his student Keiko Kando spoke with
him about the meaning and function of Zen. Harada Roshi’s
book of dharma talks, The Essence of Zen, is to be reprinted by
Wisdom Publications next February. This interview was
translated from the Japanese by Heiko Narrog.
What do people search for in life? What kind of solution does Bud-
People are looking for liberation from dhism offer? Buddhism has taught
their fears, worries, and anxieties; that the dharma (the law, or the truth) by
is, for freedom from the bonds of speaking about the theory of condi-
birth, old age, sickness, and death. tional causation. This means that since
Even in our times—where mankind everything comes to life and ceases
has developed this amazing modern through causation, everything is with-
civilization with scientific wonders— out a center and nothing has real sub-
people still continue to lead their lives stance. Therefore, everything changes
trying to figure out solutions to these constantly (that is, everything is
fundamental matters. impermanent) and is without begin-

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 Harada Sekkei Roshi, 2007

ning and without end (that is, every-

thing is without self ). One cannot rec-
ognize any form in things. However,
ordinary people mistakenly think that
there is some real substance in things.
As they cling to this delusio and run
after it, various afflictions arise. These
afflictions are ultimately all related to
birth, old age, sickness, and death (the
COURTESY OF HOSSHIN-JI, FUKUI PREFECTURE, JAPAN

four sufferings).
Shakyamuni Buddha taught that all
material things are subject to laws.
Birth, old age, sickness, and death are
laws in themselves, and not problems
that have to be solved through the
power of human beings or through
some other power. On the contrary,
giving oneself over to birth, old age,
sickness, and death as they come is the
way to liberation. There is no “good”

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 85
 give & take

and “bad” in laws. Only through the us consider the example of Eihei An eyeball doesn’t judge anything as
intervention of people’s views does this Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect. beautiful or ugly, it just reflects. Our
notion of “good” and “bad” arise. It took Dogen Zenji an enormous ears, noses, and tongues are the same.
amount of hardship and effort at All things arise as causes through the
What is Zen, then? In the Soto sect, Mount Tiantong in China under Mas- function of our ears, eyes, noses,
it is taught that Zen itself is enlight- ter Rujing before he attained libera- tongues, and bodies, and the tool that
enment. Zen is everything in daily tion. In his book Shobogenzo (Treasury makes judgments such as “I like it” or
life. There are people who think that of the True Dharma Eye), Dogen “I don’t like it” is called “mind” or
sitting is the best way of practicing Zenji endeavored to explain the “consciousness.” Zo (treasury) means
Zen and that everything else is sec- essence of the Buddha-dharma as that all our functions—suffering as
ondary, but this is a grave mistake. exhaustively and in as much detail as suffering, fear as fear, distress as dis-
Zen is becoming one with all truths. possible. Basically, however, he tress—are already liberated. All
It is easy to be misled by the word taught with a lot of repetition how to these taken together, Shobogenzo,
“zazen” [Zen sitting meditation] become familiar with oneself. means that we ourselves are the eye
and think that it refers to some spe- I will explain the book title word that sees everything truly as it is. The
cial practice, but this is not the case. by word. Sho (true) means something fastest way to affirm that we our-
If the goal of all religious practice in that eternally doesn’t change. Ho (law selves are the Treasury of the True
the world is to become one with the of the dharma) is everything that Dharma Eye is to face a wall, cross
truth, then this is all Zen. Ulti- appears before our eyes, that reaches our legs, and do zazen.
mately, there is no way to peace of our ears, and that is touched by our
mind outside of Zen. hands. Gen (eye) means literally the What methods are there in zazen?
eye and simultaneously connotes the When one sits zazen, pain in the legs
Why, then, is the form of zazen nec- function of all six of our sense organs and various delusive thoughts arise.
essary? To answer this question, let (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind). I therefore teach three methods:

86 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
susokukan (counting the breath), anxieties, and freedom from the bright moon chases away the fresh
zuisokukan (following the breath), bonds of birth, old age, sickness, breeze” expresses, the mind has
and koan kufu (working with a and death? The priest Wumen once stopped seeking. It has freed itself of
koan). These are only temporary wrote, “A hundred flowers blossom the silliness of letting the precious
expedients for the sake of zazen, like in spring, the moon shines in gem held in one’s own hand slip
a stick used to walk, and not ends in autumn, there is a fresh breeze in away while longingly gazing at the
and of themselves. summer, and there is snow in winter. moon far away in the sky. As the
Susokukan is the Zen of silently If your mind isn’t occupied with triv- expression “If heart and mind are
counting “one, two, three . . .” until ial matters, every time is a good wiped out, fire itself becomes cool”
ten, and then returning to “one” time.” In this poem, everyday mind is tells us, there is nothing as refresh-
again. Zuisokukan is the Zen of view- described in terms of snow, the moon, ing as to forget oneself.
ing one’s breath, becoming one with and flowers. A world is expressed that Wumen’s closing words mean “at
every out-breath and in-breath. And doesn’t belong to intellect or to non- that time a human being can truly
finally, koan kufu is the Zen of think- intellect, and where human thinking be a human being, nothing to be
ing about a problem to exhaustion, is of no use. There are flowers of delu- worried about.” However, as Master
becoming one with problem con- sion and flowers of enlightenment, Zhaozhou told his disciples, “There
sciousness, grinding down conscious- flowers of exhilaration, anger, sad- is no better thing than no thing.”
ness through consciousness. ness, and joy. That is, no matter how wonderful
One can choose one of these three The samadhi [nondual conscious- something is, there is nothing more
“sticks” and sit single-mindedly with ness] of all these activities is like wonderful than no thing. These
it. This is zazen. hundreds of flowers in full bloom; words very accurately express the
there is nothing to search for outside ultimate point of practice and the
If you do this, can you indeed attain oneself. As the poem “A fresh breeze austere and impermanent beauty of
liberation from fear, worries, and chases away the bright moon; the human life. ▼

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 87
 on retreat

Mindful Yoga
A leading-edge program integrates
Buddhist meditation with classical
yoga training.
JOAN DUNCAN OLIVER

A FEW YEARS AGO, a group of dharma teachers at Spirit Rock

Meditation Center began to notice an emerging trend. “We
kept hearing reports from all around the country of yoga
teachers teaching mindfulness meditation at the beginning
or end of their classes, or on daylong retreats,” recalls Phillip
Moffitt, “and we wondered, ‘Who’s training these teachers?’”
Spirit Rock moved to fill the gap. Moffitt, a yoga practi-
tioner for thirty-five years as well as a meditation teacher,
turned to Anne Cushman, a Tricycle and states of meditation the yogis were
Yoga Journal contributing editor who interested in exploring.” Patanjali’s
has practiced yoga and meditation for Eight-limbed Path reflects the influence
more than twenty-five years. Together of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path;
they created the Mindfulness Yoga and together they provide the philosophical
Meditation Training Program, sched- and practical underpinnings of the
uled to begin in October 2007. Spirit Rock program.
Expressly for experienced yoga practi- Central to the training are three ten-
tioners and teachers, the eighteen- day silent meditation retreats organized
month training is designed to ground around intensive yoga practice, sitting
participants in the deeper, meditative and walking meditation, dharma talks,
dimensions of yoga as set out in Patan- workshops on yogic and Buddhist princi-
jali’s classical yoga system, through the ples and practices, and private interviews
integration of asana (posture) and with the teachers. Between retreats, par-
pranayama (breathwork) with mindful- ticipants will keep up the momentum
ness meditation techniques taught by with daily yoga and meditation practice
the Buddha. and study, supported by email check-ins
The program’s integrated approach with a “dharma buddy” and phone con-
harks back to the way yoga was prac- sultations with the teachers.
ticed thousands of years ago. Though For some participants, long periods
yoga and meditation came to the West of meditation may come as something
on separate streams, historically “they’re of a culture shock, Cushman notes.
two branches of the same contemplative “Yogis are used to being present with
tree,” Cushman notes. In Patanjali’s intense physical sensation, but it will
classical yoga, “the practices of asana be a new experience to sit with sensa-
and pranayama were always imbedded in tion in their body for forty minutes
the context of a meditation practice. without shifting.”
They were developed to facilitate the They’ll have the opportunity to
process of moving into the more refined gain far more than a lesson in sitting

88 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
still, however. “On the retreats they’ll
have a deep experience of the integra-
tion of these practices,” Cushman
says. “They’ll come away with a sense
of how to use the tools to feel bal-
anced and present and open-hearted
in their daily lives.” Yoga teachers,
for their part, will gain the skills and
confidence to guide students in
developing a deeper practice that
engages the mind and heart rather
than limiting their focus to perfect-
ing the postures.
Yogis and Buddhists stand to benefit
equally. “It will give the yoga commu-
nity an opportunity to go deeper into
the meditative aspects of their own tra-
dition, using tools developed by the
Buddha,” Cushman says, “and it will
offer the Buddhist community tools of
hatha yoga that are powerful in prepar-
ing the body for meditation, cultivat-
ing body awareness, and dissolving
some of the obstacles to embodied
presence that arise in the body and
nervous system.” In sum, says Moffitt,
“we’d like them to come away with an
understanding of the first foundation
of mindfulness—mindfulness of the
body—as a gateway to liberation.” ▼

For more information on the Mindfulness

Yoga and Meditation Training Program,
visit the Spirit Rock website, spiritrock.org.

Joan Duncan Oliver is a Tricycle contribut-

ing editor and moderator of the Karma Queen
blog at tricycle.com. Her latest book, Coffee
with the Buddha, is due out this September.

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 reviews film

A Carthusian monk walks through the Grande Chartreuse Monastery

in the French Alps, from Into Great Silence.

Inaction Film wholly devoted themselves to the their white hoods and robes, sawing
Getting serious with silence inner life? firewood, digging snow from seedbeds
DEAN SLUYTER Into Great Silence comes closest to and later planting and watering the
this goal in several poetic low-light vegetables. Inanimate objects are as
INTO GREAT SILENCE sequences, speckled with optical noise eloquent in their silence as the
PHILIP GRÖNING, DIRECTOR that almost palpably suggests the spir- humans: water droplets gathering at
Zeitgeist Films, 2006 itual presence sparkling through sim- the lower edge of a just-washed bowl,
ple objects and routines. Gröning the single red candle in the darkened
A LAMA I USED TO study with once said might well have been thinking of the great room in which hymns are sung
he didn’t understand why people great Christian poet and mystic Ger- through the night, even the twice-
would listen to recordings of Tibetan ard Manley Hopkins, with his sense of glimpsed white jetliner—a strange
chanting. “That,” he said, “would be the divine presence as an all-pervasive emissary from the outside world, so
like watching someone else eat a meal.” electricity: “The world is charged with high overhead that it makes this world
That’s precisely the challenge of the grandeur of God.” Certainly the feel even more remote.
Into Great Silence, Philip Gröning’s film doesn’t try to finesse the problem We are pulled so powerfully and so
respectful documentary on the ultra- through verbal explanation. In keep- rhythmically into this silent world—to
austere lives of Catholic Carthusian ing with its title, it is almost entirely suggest a lifelong commitment to
monks at the Grande Chartreuse wordless, as it follows the monks monastic routine, Gröning makes lib-
monastery in the French Alps. How through their days and seasons of eral use of repetition, returning again
can film, which by its nature shows silence and solitude: kneeling in and again to the same kneeling monk
the outer surfaces of things, convey motionless prayer in their individual or the same red candle—that the rare
the experience of men who have have cells, walking in twos or threes down a instances of talk are shocking. Before
taken a vow of near-total silence and long, vaulted white stone corridor in the assembled brotherhood, two novi-

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tiates are formally inducted into the
order (“What do you ask for?”
“Grace”). Near the end, an elderly
monk with extravagant eyebrows like
gray weeping willows explains why his
closeness to God makes him unafraid of
death and even grateful for his blind-
ness. The elders of the community
enjoy their prescribed Sunday walk,
where they indulge in high-spirited
gossip concerning the practices of
neighboring monasteries, clucking
their tongues over the order that sets
out six wash-basins before the meal
instead of just one (imagine!). When a
grizzled monk loudly calls a missing
cat to its dinner, his voice feels so rau-
cous we want to shush him.
Gröning does use words in another
way, occasionally filling the screen
with passages from the texts that guide
these men’s lives, rhythmically repeat-
ing these as well: “Anyone who does
not give up all he has cannot be my dis-
ciple”; “Behold the silence, allow the
Lord to speak one word in us, that he
IS”; and, most insistently and haunt-
ingly, “O Lord, you have seduced me,
and I was seduced.” If you’re reading
this magazine instead of, oh, watching
TV, you probably know something of
that seduction. Hindus have a lovely
metaphor for it in their stories of Lord
Krishna, whose skin is blue because he
embodies the sky-like vastness of the
infinite. He’s the rock star god, perpet-
ually twenty-three years old, roaming
the countryside, playing the siren song
of enlightenment on his silver flute,
seducing all the local milkmaids, or
gopis. (Nowadays we call them groupies.)
Of course, we are gopis, and once we’ve
heard that song it’s hard to take any
other very seriously.
The question is, how far will we go
to follow it? That’s the real challenge of
this film: to see the lives of men whose
total commitment to practice makes
the little set-it-and-forget-it daily ses-
sions on our cushions that many of us
call a spiritual path look pretty measly.

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 film reviews

I’ve been to one professional basket- in this evening of constant stimulation hours, Into Great Silence is a long film
ball game in my life, Bulls vs. Nets at might leave us doubting whether we’d about nothing happening; it’s shock-
the Meadlowlands during the golden had a good time. My point is, we’re so ing to realize that the film’s entire run-
era of Michael Jordan. Having previ- acclimated to a world of stimulation ning time is what, in real time, a monk
ously watched the games only on tele- that it’s easy to congratulate ourselves might spend in one kneeling prayer
vision, I was shocked to see the on taking half an hour a day to put session. (A few folks in the audience
crazy-pinball electronic display on the down our iPods and newspapers, to couldn’t handle the tedium and walked
big scoreboard every time there was a stop checking our email and just sit. out, and the lack of dialogue presented
pause in play, and the assorted clowns Carthusian monks have committed to no cover for the snoring of the guy in
and jugglers and dancing dogs that a life that is precisely the opposite, a life the row behind me.)
were trotted out during halftime; even of minimizing stimulation. They’re
as I walked across the parking lot at serious, and getting a taste of their BUT DOES SERIOUSNESS, in the form of
game’s end, it was to the strains of the lives provides a useful benchmark austerity, correlate directly with spiri-
Nets’ theme song, blaring over against which to check our own seri- tual progress? Are these monks getting
scratchy, lo-fi speakers, as if any break ousness. At two and three-quarters the juice? For me, that’s the real mys-

92 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
tery. Watching them pray their long, both, pointing to the Middle Path minute or so to gaze directly at the cam-
silent prayers in what look to be excru- that is all that’s left when these two are era. Weirdly reminiscent of Warhol’s
ciatingly uncomfortable wooden pews, renounced. I think the Middle Path is Screen Test films of Bob Dylan, Allen
the friend who saw the film with me often misconstrued as a lukewarm Ginsberg, Edie Sedgwick, and others,
commented, “They look like they’re compromise, a sort of shrugging resig- they set the same ruthless exam—to
trying too hard.” When the novitiates nation that goes with middle age. In just sit and just be, to be who- or
are welcomed into the order, they’re fact, the Middle Path is the most whatever one is, deprived of the usual
told they’re entering a life of “everlast- relentless, on-your-toes, moment-to- props and plots. Nowhere to run,
ing peace and joyful penitence.” Again, moment challenge imaginable. With- nowhere to hide. Some of the monks
it’s impossible to judge from the out- out falling into the sleepy routine of shift their gaze uncomfortably, some
side, but, frankly, it doesn’t look so joy- pleasure-seeking, without falling into gulp or blink, some gaze steadily, some
ful. This is not a matter of Christian the potentially equally sleepy routine may or may not be trying too hard. As
or Buddhist theology, but of skillful of world-denying and ritualized God- we gaze at them gazing, trying to
or unskillful practice. There are seeking, can you wake up to each fathom whether they’ve squeezed some
plenty of Buddhists who try too hard, moment’s encounter with whatever measure of realization from their hard
and there are plenty of skillful medi- comes along, just as it is? path or merely squandered their lives
tation tips in the Gospels: Jesus’s The film comes closest to addressing in a sterile struggle, we might also
exhortation to “be as alert as serpents that question in its most uncharacteris- wonder how we would fare in such a
and as simple as doves” is about as tic sequences. In a departure from his screen test. ▼
precise a pith instruction on medita- usual candid, nonintrusive observation
tion as we could ask. of the monks going about their lives, Dean Sluyter is a teacher, Buddhist prison
Austerity can be an indulgence, a Gröning occasionally cuts to obviously chaplain, and sometime film critic. His most
false refuge, as much as sensuality. set up, mercilessly lit, full-face closeups, recent book is Cinema Nirvana: Enlighten-
Shakyamuni tried both and rejected in which each monk gets a long half ment Lessons from the Movies.

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 books reviews

Open Up human touch. And even though you

Prescriptions for a connected life will grieve, the absence of this feeling
PETER ALSOP will somehow seem necessary. It will
seem like self-protection. It is hard to
ONE CITY: A DECLARATION OF
remain at the edge.
INTERDEPENDENCE
Several years ago, before I left New
ETHAN NICHTERN
York, I would sometimes bring my
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2007
lunch to Union Square on warm days.
224 pp.; $15.95 (paper)
Most of those afternoons I’ve since for-
gotten—they seem unremarkable to me
YOU COME INTO the city and if you’ve now—but one in particular I remem-
been away for a while, you return as a ber. On that day, a woman with wild
child. The world feels stark, the edges white hair shuffled into the park, sat
sharp, your senses are on fire. Your down stiffly on the bench across from
condition is one of wonderment; you me, and slowly, as if anointing herself
cannot help but stare. But you know with holy water, emptied a bag of bird-
this will change if you stay. Life will seed upon her shoulders. I remember
assume a rhythm. You will fall into a this vividly: the way the tiny yellow
routine. You will begin to hurry and kernels clung to the wool of her sweater
to cast your eyes downward, and after and pooled into the folds of her skirt and
several months you will suddenly scattered over her shoes. She leaned
notice, with something like grief, that back, looked at me fiercely, and closed
when the subway jostles and your her eyes. First one pigeon flew to her,
body collides against another’s, you no and then several more, and then a
longer feel that cool electric shock of dozen. They crowded upon her arms,

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 95
 books reviews

pecking at one another in blind, furious hypnotic power of this act, which I’ve This is not a project new to Bud-
hunger, blurring the edges of her body come to think of as a kind of offering, dhism—to be open you need first to
in a flutter of wings. It was an act of that for an hour afterward, on the long be aware, and training in mindful
madness—she had lost her mind, she walk back to work, I felt as if I were in a awareness has always been at the core
was being devoured by birds. It was an waking dream, and the streets of New of Buddhist teachings—but Nichtern,
act of magic—she was whispering an York appeared to me again as new. a twenty-nine-year-old teacher in the
incantation, she was disappearing into a If we stay in the city—if we stay any- Shambhala tradition, is perhaps well-
whirl of feathers. I stared, slack-jawed, where long enough—we lose our won- suited to consider the ways in which
with my half-eaten sandwich on my lap. der, we forget even that we once modern life derails us from our efforts
When I looked around, I saw that possessed it, and then something hap- to remain open. Like the rest of us, he’s
others were staring, too. People glanced pens to shatter the routine—a blizzard been long tethered to the wheel of
up from their newspapers and gasped. descends upon us, or a blackout dark- communication technologies—the
Others halted on their hurried walks. It ens our streets, or a woman disappears daily whirligig of email, internet, cell
was a gesture of such grandiose and before our eyes—and for a few brief phones, IM, and pagers—which we
appalling strangeness that it shook us miraculous hours our lives are upended employ in pursuit of greater connec-
from the narrowness of our lives, and and we come once more into the pres- tion but which so often leave us feeling
we, her audience, began to murmur to ence of one another and into the possi- emotionally frayed and oddly discon-
one another. We forgot ourselves, and bilities of human connection. We talk nected. And Nichtern, who grew up in
for a few minutes, before the birds had to strangers. Our hearts feel open. The a generation coveted by advertisers,
had their fill and before the woman question that Ethan Nichtern pursues knows well the effects of relentless
calmly clasped her purse and shuffled in One City, his first book, is whether consumerism: the rootless desire it
away, we acted as if we were not this experience of openness, which we creates, the feeling of constant inade-
strangers but friends, as if there were no know to be unpredictable and fleeting, quacy. “So much time in life has been
walls between us. And such was the might be cultivated and made to last. lost chasing the morphing ghosts of

96 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
Cool,” he says, “when I could’ve been Nichtern quotes from some of our try to say ‘thank you’ every time a serv-
learning how to be Kind.” more unexpected dharma masters (the ice is performed for me, every time I
As you might expect, the path to rapper Nas: “Life’s a bitch and then you am part of a financial transaction.”
openness, what Nichtern calls “the prac- die / that’s why we get high”; or the This is hardly revolutionary stuff,
tice of interdependence,” is a familiar Velvet Underground: “Between but it deals with the here and now,
one: take your seat on a cushion and thought and expression lies a life- with the simple interactions that
watch your mind for a while. Much of time”). But some of his analysis feels make up our daily lives. I wanted more
One City is basic Buddhist primer, albeit shallow (as in his discussion of the of it, and I hope that Nichtern and
for an audience in their twenties. effectiveness of nonviolent move- others will continue to think in this
Nichtern explores Buddhist notions of ments), and he occasionally meanders direction. With a set of such common
self and emptiness, and he examines the into thickets of abstraction—language and earthly tenets, we may begin to
Six Perfections (meditation, generosity, that feels at a remove from everyday chart a course back to an everyday
discipline, nonviolence, exertion, and experience. Nichtern’s dilemma is, of experience of openness and connection
wisdom) in terms of contemporary social course, one faced by all Buddhist and wonder. And if we can manage to
ills. He is at his best when he uses these teachers (and spiritual teachers in gen- live this way—on the edge, with our
ideas to help us understand the difficulty eral): how to make new and relevant to hearts open—when it’s over we might
of feeling connected in a world where our times teachings that have stood for be able to say, as Mary Oliver has writ-
each of us is tied to thousands of others in centuries. In his prescription for three ten, “all my life / I was a bride married
myriad, tenuous ways—through the “post-meditation practices,” he comes to amazement. / I was the bridegroom,
forces of globalization that give us T- closest to doing so. “I try to question taking the world into my arms.” ▼
shirts stitched by the hands of laborers one consumption choice that I make
on some far corner of the earth. every day,” “I pick up and dispose of Peter Alsop is a Tricycle contributing editor.
One City crackles at times with three pieces of garbage that I did not After several years away, he recently moved
humor and fresh insight, as when create each time I go outside,” and “I back to New York City.

FA L L 2007 T R I C Y C L E | 97
 books reviews

God Cannot Be Great Morality, and so on, are specious and

But what about Buddha? have repeatedly been proved wrong; it
ANDREW GOODWIN is equally important to notice that
their speciousness, combined with a
GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION perfectly complete absence of empiri-
POISONS EVERYTHING cal evidence for god’s existence, would
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS inevitably lead any intelligent person
New York: Twelve Books, 2007 to rule them out. Hence, one’s appar-
288 pp.; $24.99 (cloth)
ent arrival at the gates of St. Peter
could mean only this—if I am not hal-
IT WAS THE BRITISH philosopher and lucinating, then god is an epistemo-
renowned atheist Bertrand Russell logical sadist. Either way, while it may
who delivered the most comprehen- be agreed that god is not great,
sive riposte to the theists when asked Hitchens is (for once in his life) insuf-
what he would say, should he find ficiently aggressive—the atheist posi-
himself in a postmortem state at the tion is, in the end, surely, that god
gates of St. Peter. His reply (quoted by cannot be great.
Christopher Hitchens in his new book) Nonetheless, the militant atheist in
contains the totality of objections to me can only gasp in admiration at
religious belief: “I should say, Oh God, Christopher Hitchens’s rhetorical skills,
you did not give us enough evidence.” when, on page four (page four!), he
What on first impression seems delivers a quadruple whammy: “There
merely witty actually turns out to be a still remain four irreducible objections
tremendously important meta-critique to religious faith: that it wholly mis-
of the god concept. (I am going to fol- represents the origins of man and the
low Hitchens in lowercasing the deity, cosmos, that because of this original
on the grounds that there is nothing to error it manages to combine the maxi-
lose when one risks the wrath of a non- mum of servility with the maximum of
existent entity.) Because of course it is solipsism, that it is both the result and
not just that arguments from First the cause of dangerous sexual repres-
Cause, Best of All Possible Worlds, sion, and that it is ultimately grounded
Intelligent Design, World Bank of on wish-thinking.” You might survey

98 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
that list and deduce that Hume, Dar-
win, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche are
being summoned to duty. But no, the
author tells us that he had reached these
conclusions before he reached puberty,
simply by thinking. And then, quite
correctly noting that there is nothing
arrogant about saying this, Hitchens
provides the clincher: “I am morally
certain that millions of other people
came to very similar conclusions in very
much the same way.” Well, he’s right,
isn’t he?
What follows is not so much a sys-
tematic or philosophical critique of
theism (for that you might try Richard
Dawkins’s The God Delusion) as an exer-
cise in textual criticism that demon-
strates inconsistencies in the Christian
and Muslim holy texts, trots out the
no-dinosaurs argument (that there are
no creatures specified in the Bible that
exceed the knowledge available to men
at the time is in itself sufficient to lead
us to reject the idea that these books
are of divine origin), and makes the
compelling argument that religion is a
form of child abuse.

BUT THEN THINGS go seriously awry. In

a chapter titled “There Is No ‘Eastern’
Solution,” Hitchens asks someone (him-

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 books reviews

self perhaps?) a poorly worded ques- of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown up assault on the monotheisms with a full
tion: “How might one easily prove that by the Taliban in 1999); the second twenty pages dedicated to a positive
‘Eastern’ faith was identical with the leading to an understandable, if ulti- appraisal of Buddhist meditation.
unverifiable assumptions of ‘Western’ mately unhelpful, nineteenth-century Hitchens might have gone after the
religion?” My own answer to that query tendency toward Orientalist Mysti- reincarnation doctrine, which, from an
is simple—you cannot easily prove a cism to which Christopher Hitchens athiest’s point of view, is surely the
nonexistent correspondence between here unwittingly contributes—for most damaging and dangerous of all
the three Abrahamic monotheisms and instance, when he too refers to “the the Buddhist ideas (when understood
the Asian religious traditions because god Buddha.” as something that literally refers to the
they are very different in scope, tech- When Hitchens makes the unfor- transmigration of souls) and also the
nique, and objective. Wasn’t it pre- tunate decision to attempt to skewer most “religious.”
cisely the narrow-minded attitude of the “Eastern” solution in just one Instead, Hitchens takes shortcuts,
colonialists, warriors, and explorers, chapter of a mere ten pages, and when such as his unconvincing critique of the
both Christian and Muslim, who you notice that there appear to be no Dalai Lama. Now, I am not a follower of
insisted on understanding “Boodoo” as footnotes to this chapter (actually, one the Dalai Lama. I know very little
a god, that led to charges of idolatry book is referenced, but it is listed about him; I have never read, nor do I
and to the (related) distortion of the under the wrong chapter heading), own, a single book by the great Tibetan
dharma into something Westerners then you realize that this is not going teacher. However, there are two things
might recognize? Both attitudes have in what we might call a Sam Harris that I do know about him, and for
been quite damaging: the first literally direction—wherein the author of The which I think he deserves the admira-
so, leading to the destruction of Bud- End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the tion of Buddhists and atheists the
dhist art, temples, and culture (think Future of Reason concludes his scathing world over. The first is that he has said,

100 | T R I C Y C L E FA L L 2007
repeatedly and in plain language, that unreason of “Eastern” teachings by ing an ethical problem. Would I like
he is not a special person or a supernat- showing how the Zen establishment to discover that his research was this
ural being, but an ordinary man. The supported Japanese fascism, and I’ll poor throughout his book? Or not? It’s
second point of significance is his com- grant that these are matters that an interesting question.
ment that if science proved Buddhist should give Buddhists great pause for
teachings incorrect in any way, then thought. But Hitchens’s choice reveals “IT CAN EVEN BE ARGUED that Bud-
Buddhism would have to change. that he is out of his depth and would dhism is not, in our sense of the word,
One might have expected that a have done well to restrict his critique a ‘religion’ at all.” Better that
book written by a well-informed jour- to the assault on monotheism. Hitchens had left it at that. Indeed,
nalist who is appalled at the irra- Hitchens shows not the slightest Daniel Dennett’s recent Breaking The
tionality of religion would have found interest in the exploration of con- Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
space to mention this. Instead, sciousness, nor in the meaning of tran- hardly mentions Buddhism and pro-
Hitchens insists that the Dalai Lama scendent experience. You will search vides a definition of religion that
claims to be appointed by “heaven” God Is Not Great in vain for any dis- would exclude it: “Social systems
and that he “anoints” Hollywood stars cussion of the Four Noble Truths, the whose participants avow belief in a
like Richard Gere as “holy.” He then Eightfold Path, or the Five Core Pre- supernatural agent or agents whose
deploys one book, the only source cepts, but all you will find there is the approval is to be sought.” It is clear
cited in his reflections on Buddhism, One Convenient Footnote. When that the atheists (or “the brights,” as
to critique the dharma, and that book Hitchens concludes his section on Dennett and Dawkins laughably sug-
is . . . Zen at War, by Brian Victoria. It’s Buddhism with the staggeringly gest we might say) have a problem
a clever choice, one that suits the inept barb that it is “a faith that with Buddhism, but much as we may
author’s desire to demonstrate the despises the mind,” I was left ponder- like to take the agreeable exit from this

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 books reviews

debate that is offered by Sam Harris they died, and would not reach you- everyone else to love George Orwell as
(meditation as a type of science, a first- know-what. much as he does.
person exploration in the uncharted So what is religion? It is, surely, a Nonetheless, he offers a wonderful
waters of “consciousness”), Hitchens’s form of culture. And Christopher demolition of literalist readings of the
uncompromising and categorical con- Hitchens appears strangely resistant to Bible and the Quran. This can only be
demnation of all religion, including this idea. “Literature, not scripture, helpful. But it leads to an unfortunate
Buddhism, is worth considering. sustains the mind and—since there is tendency to take these texts literally—
Buddhism does not have a no other metaphor—also the soul.” which most people do not do, because
“heaven,” but it does lead many peo- This would be a fine statement if it they do not know what is actually in the
ple to embark on an endless trek up were not for the fact that literature and founding texts of their religion. Actually,
the slopes of Sugarcandy Mountain, in scripture are not mutually exclusive the atheists all miss what is increas-
search of permanent peace, everlasting (something Hitchens himself acknowl- ingly a substitute for “old-fashioned”
calm . . . nirvana! Buddhism tells us edged a few years ago, while singing ideas about god—this is the narcissis-
to trust our own experience; but it the poetic praises of the King James tic notion that Everything Happens
also requires us to check in with Bible, in a review of Adam Nicolson’s for a Reason, that the universe has spe-
teachers to find out what our experi- wonderful book God’s Secretaries), and cial plans for moi. Hitchens notices
ence “means.” Buddhism tells us that if it were also the case that we could one especially disgusting monotheis-
we must suffer; but we read with agree upon a definition of “literature.” tic version of this (God spared me,
anguish stories of suffering people Hitchens seems worried that there is thank the Lord!) but does not look
who had to be consoled by teachers nothing to sustain his view of the into the utter pervasiveness of this
because they were worried that they future, because we do not have a com- idea; if he did so, he’d have to
would not get enlightened before mon culture, not unless he can get acknowledge that it is essentially not a

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religious idea at all, but an existential
form of bad faith.
Hence, while one can easily imagine a
world thousands of years from now in
which the three monotheisms have
become minor cults, it is much harder to
imagine a humanity that never engages Caution: Zen at Work with one key addition: “One World,
in magical thinking. Christopher Meditation at street level One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.” For
Hitchens almost acknowledges this ANDREW MERZ their trouble, they would endure sev-
when he writes: “Sigmund Freud was eral days of very unpleasant Chinese
quite correct to describe the religious PAVEMENT: REFLECTIONS ON MERCY, custody. Now that’s activism, I thought
impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as ACTIVISM, AND DOING “NOTHING” to myself. Two months earlier, I’d been
essentially ineradicable until or unless FOR PEACE on retreat with the videographer,
the human species can conquer its fear LIN JENSEN Shannon Service, in Colorado; now she
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2007
of death and its tendency to wish- was in a Chinese jail, a hero for the
128 pp.; $12.95 (paper)
thinking. Neither contingency seems Tibetan cause. Shouldn’t I be taking
very probable.” Indeed. But getting to action, too?
know your own mind, in my experi- THE PIXILATED ONLINE video shows a The common criticism that Bud-
ence, certainly helps. ▼ group of activists from Students for a dhism and its practitioners are
Free Tibet at the base of Mount Ever- “detached,” more concerned with the
Andrew Goodwin is professor of media studies est, holding up a banner carrying the nature of their minds than the state of
at the University of San Francisco. slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the world, is pretty outdated in this era

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 books reviews

of engaged Buddhism and the high- For one thing, I underestimated the
profile activism of Thich Nhat Hanh extent of my own frustration, the
and the Dalai Lama. Indeed, the inten- urgency I felt over the continuing
world violence—and often saw anger
sity of Buddhist ideals makes me feel well up in me. . . . The conditions of
from time to time that I can’t possibly the street made a student of me again,
do enough to save the world, or at least and the street’s first teaching was the
that sitting on my cushion every day most humbling. I could do nothing
and attending the occasional antiwar for peace unless I stepped aside. Peace
was its own agent and I—at best—
rally just doesn’t cut it.
merely its instrument.
In a way, the sitting practice chroni-
cled in Lin Jensen’s new book offers a Appropriately, then, Jensen writes
solution: He hits the streets with a from the perspective of a student,
placard and a cushion. For more than finding a teacher in every stranger
two years now, Jensen has been sitting and challenge that comes along. As
daily peace vigils in downtown Chico, in his first book, Bad Dog, he writes
California, meditating right there on episodically, an approach belying his
the sidewalk. For a Soto Zen teacher interest in exploring the deepest
and founder of the Chico Zen Sangha, truths of a particular situation and
this might have appeared at first to be forsaking more drawn-out linear
a straightforward undertaking: be a development. In Bad Dog, a memoir,
peaceful presence, endure some name- Jensen skillfully draws the reader pages long, and many recount one-
calling with equanimity and compas- into the sensory world of his bleak time sidewalk encounters. He
sion, go home. Jensen found it to be youth on a turkey farm. In Pavement, describes these odd run-ins with all
not so simple. most chapters are no more than four due color and detail—from the

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shouts and spittle of a large man back to the dog: “It might seem it is, somehow doesn’t elicit the guilt I
named White Wolf to the woman strange to count a chocolate Labrador felt when I learned that my friend was
who asks him to baby-sit her daugh- retriever among my significant sitting in a Chinese jail. Jensen’s call to
ter while she goes grocery shop- dharma teachers, but I wouldn’t activism is a call to practice:
ping—but the book isn’t about the know how to do otherwise.” In the
characters he meets; it’s about the hands of many writers, these connec- To be truly and wholly present even
moment of meeting them, and what tions might seem pat—if you really for the briefest moment is moment is
to be vulnerable, without defenses of
happens next. try, it’s not that hard to find the big any sort. It is here that the boundary
The strength of Pavement lies in dharma picture in anything—or they that fear constructs between myself
Jensen’s ability to get to the pith of would devolve into a ramble. Jensen, and others dissolves. The heart is
these moments, moving from the fortunately, writes with clarity and a drawn out of hiding, and the inherent
event and its impact on himself and rare earnestness. His insights are not sympathetic response called compas-
sion arises. I cease seeking my own
others to its deepest possible implica- portrayed as easily come by, and thus
personal happiness at the expense of
tions, weaving in Zen parables and they feel like experiences any one of others because I see that the suffering
past experience as necessary, all in the us might go through with a little of others is my suffering as well, and I
space of a few pages. A brown Lab effort and clarity. see too that my happiness is insepara-
that flops down next to him one day Jensen’s vigil turns out to be a pecu- ble from that of others. Stripped of
becomes a teacher of watchfulness, liar and challenging form of practice. personal preference, I’m left exposed
to the circumstance of the moment
evoking memories of his time at a For most of us, dealing with the voice in and find myself in the one place
monastery, which lead to a reflection our head during meditation is more where I truly enter my life as it is. ▼
on opening to the needs of others, than enough; Jensen winds up emcee-
then the destruction wrought by ing an open-mic night. But he’s not ask- Andrew Merz is Tricycle’s associate editor.
Manifest Destiny, the need for watch- ing us to go sit on the sidewalk, and his His interview with Will Johnson, “Full Body,
fulness on a societal level, and finally commitment to activism, impressive as Empty Mind,” appears on page 34.

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 books reviews

Buddhism for the that the next Dalai Lama may be born
Beach outside Tibet or may not even return
Searching for the next Dalai Lama at all. But this fast-paced new novel
DAN ZIGMOND by the English novelist Paul Adam
goes straight for the trickiest sce-
ORACLE LAKE: A THRILLER nario, imagining that the next Dalai
PAUL ADAM Lama has been born somewhere in
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007 occupied Tibet and the Tibetan
416 pp.; $24.95 (cloth) Government-in-Exile has to find him
before the Chinese government does.
It’s a great setup for what should be a
ORACLE LAKE OPENS in Dharamsala, riveting adventure.
India, with “the scent of death in the Unfortunately Oracle Lake never
air,” a “stillness of despair” envelop- quite delivers on its promising prem-
ing the “shabby collection of build- ise. This failure is due in part to the
ings clinging precariously to the unwelcome presence of Maggie
hillside,” and proceeds to pose a fasci- Walsh, a British photojournalist
nating question: what will happen obsessed with bringing the world’s
when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama tragedies to network television. Paul
passes away? Adam chooses her as his principal
His Holiness himself has been protagonist, perhaps in an attempt
somewhat noncommittal on this to make the book more accessible to
point, leaving open the possibility Western readers. Sadly, Maggie is a

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nearly perfect cliché: the tough-talk- mostly to devotees of that genre. begrudging respect for Major Chang
ing war correspondent who has no Although the book is immensely Wei, the officer in the secret police
patience for sentimentality and is readable, much of the dialogue is assigned to find the monks, but
inclined to respond to earnest ques- almost comically bad. The low stan- Adam does not make this easy, paint-
tions with a “cynical snort.” Her last dard is set early on, in a throwaway ing even the amazing perseverance of
vacation was “three weeks in a Russ- sequence set in Latin America that this “gritty little bastard” in a fairly
ian army detention cell” in Groszny, serves to establish Maggie’s bona negative light:
though she confides knowingly that fides as a world-weary reporter. Here
“most people wouldn’t count that as she is arguing with an American mil- The snow on the ground was two feet
a holiday.” All this is particularly itary adviser: deep and more was falling every
minute. Most police commanders,
regrettable as Maggie steals the never mind one with a cushy office
limelight from Adam’s many more “There’s a civil war going on down here.”
“Oh yeah, and whose side are you on?” posting, would long ago have called a
intriguing characters, particularly “I don’t take sides, I take pictures.” halt to the march and set up camp to
Tsering, the Tibetan monk assigned wait for better weather. But not
to lead the search party into These sorts of exchanges contribute Chang. He’s driven the commandos
relentlessly through the blizzard, tak-
China. He may be something of a to the cartoonish quality of much of
ing his turn in the vanguard where
stock character, too—the conflicted Oracle Lake and its often one-dimen- the swirling snowflakes, propelled by
monk who can’t help but wonder sional characters. Unlike those in the wind, hit the face with the force of
about the lay life he’s left behind— Eliot Pattison’s successful series of flying needles.
but he’s vastly more interesting Tibetan thrillers—which revolve
than Maggie. around a Han Chinese inspector—the Despite these flaws, there are some
Oracle Lake bears the subtitle “A Chinese characters here are almost beautiful descriptions of Tibet’s awe-
Thriller,” and it will likely appeal uniformly evil. We begin to feel some landscape and intriguing cul-

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 books reviews

THE SOUND OF SILENCE:

THE SELECTED
tural observations sprinkled through destruction, the “row after row of TEACHINGS OF AJAHN
these pages. Maggie’s gloss on the barrack-like concrete buildings that SUMEDHO
“package tour Buddhists” who gather had been knocked up on the cheap” Wisdom Publications, 2007
in Dharamsala will strike a chord with filling the streets of Lhasa, and the 400 pp.; $16.95 (paper)
any readers who have made their own gradual grinding away of tradi-
pilgrimage to Asia: tional culture.
The plot, too, is gripping enough
Backpackers, travelers, mostly young to hold our attention, and while we TEACHINGS FROM Ajahn Sumedho, a
but many much older, who thought may suspect the outcome from early popular American-born teacher and
the east offered spiritual peace, some
kind of meaning to their lives they’d
on, Adam holds back a few surprises founder of the first Theravada monastic
been unable to find back home in Bas- until the very end. It may not be community in the West, have been hard
ingstoke or Baltimore; dreamers who great literature, but there are worse to come by in print. So it’s good to see
thought a fortnight of incense and ways to while away a few hours at the that the talks collected in this volume—
chapattis would bring nirvana. beach or pass the time on a long com- delivered mostly in 2001 and 2005—
mute. As Tsering himself advises, preserve his warm, humorous style, and
The flip side of his sometimes one- “you should slow your life down, reflect his flexible view of teaching as
sided portrayal is Adam’s scathing take some time to cultivate and “presenting things for you to investi-
depiction of life in Tibet under Chi- nourish your spirit.” Or if you need a gate.” These spontaneous talks are acces-
nese occupation. He describes the break from all that, you could read sible, but they are explorations and
arbitrary detention, torture, and this book. ▼ require attention. The title comes from a
murder of ordinary Tibetans in meditation practice Sumedho developed
unflinching detail. And he is equally Contributing editor Dan Zigmond is a writer on his own over forty years of practice,
astute in describing the subtler living in Menlo Park, California. one not found in the Pali canon.

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 reviews books in brief

BUDDHISM: TOOLS THE GREAT MEDICINE MIND BEYOND DEATH

FOR LIVING YOUR LIFE THAT CONQUERS DZOGCHEN PONLOP
VAJRAGUPTA CLINGING TO THE Snow Lion Publications, 2006
Windhorse Publications, NOTION OF REALITY 318 pp.; $25.95 (cloth)
2007
SHECHEN RABJAM
180 pp.; $16.95 (paper)
Shambhala Publications, 2007
142 pp.; $16.95 (paper)

VAJRAGUPTA, a teacher in the Friends IN A STYLE traditional to Tibetan DRAWING ON A great range of material,
of the Western Buddhist Order teaching, Shechen Rabjam, the grand- this book about death is very much a
(FWBO), is here “attempting to give a son and spiritual heir of the beloved book about life. The Dzogchen Ponlop
feel for what a ‘Buddhist life’ might be Nyingma teacher Dilgo Khyentse (born 1965) is known as one of the
like, for people of all kinds of back- Rinpoche, presents his commentary finest Tibetan teachers of his genera-
grounds and experience.” He sets on a classic text by a past master—in tion, and he is considered to be as well
about this task in an appealing, read- this case Shechen Gyaltsap, his grand- versed in the psychology of his West-
able, and practical fashion, blending father’s root teacher. Though the title ern students as he is in the dharma.
accessible teachings, practices, and may sound intimidating, Rabjam’s The bardos, or intermediate states, are
personal stories. In the style of the commentary is engaging and accessi- popularly understood to be the realms
FWBO, one of the largest Buddhist ble as he covers many topics with an between death and rebirth. In these
groups in Europe, he draws on diverse ease that is as welcoming as it is formidable and skillfully elucidated
sources and presents an approach to authoritative. This is a concise and teachings he explains the bardos of life
Buddhism intended to be as directly valuable teaching on bodhicitta, or as well, and how an understanding of
relevant to modern life as it is compre- enlightened mind, and other funda- all six bardos is an essential guide in
hensive and rigorous. mentals concepts. the present as well as the hereafter. ▼

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 THE ESSENCE OF ABSENCE

(continued from page 55) sizes that it will be more of a conductor coaxing a slow movement out of an orchestra.
“demonstration.” To select a poem, he wrests a If you ask Joel the correct way to smell, he’ll tell you to
Wordsworth volume from the bookshelf and paces the sniff in short, quick breaths and focus on the inhalation.
room in his socks, flipping through the pages, his white Joel is only just beginning to develop his synesthetic
hair corralled into a nubbin at the base of his neck. vocabulary, under the tutelage of an oenophile friend, and
Finally he settles on a verse from “Intimations of Immor- he often looks puzzled when you ask him what some-
tality” and reads it aloud in his incongruous accent: “O thing smells like. He’ll respond with anything from
joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / “tinge of wet dog” to “the sea and mildew, with an
That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive.” “Joy, undertone of schwarma” to “like a kiss with big red lips.”
embers, nature,” Joel murmurs, snatching some paper The use of incense in Buddhism and for spiritual
and a pencil stub from the desk and scrawling down the communion can be traced to ancient times. As Kiyoko
words and his ideas for matching scents. Though the Morita recounts in The Book of Incense, in 595 C.E. a
poem doesn’t evoke a season or a story as traditional koh- strange piece of wood washed ashore on Awaji Island,
do verses would have done, Wordsworth’s celebration of near Kobe, in central Japan. The island’s inhabitants
nonattached attachment seems appropriate. tossed the wood into a cooking fire, and were astonished
Joel lights the first chip of incense and raises the when it released a potent aroma. They presented the
censer to his nose. As he inhales, his slight paunch piece of wood to the royal court in Nara. Prince Shotoku
recedes beneath his thin sweater. His nostrils don’t immediately recognized the fragrance as agarwood,
move. His eyes angle off to the side, and his lips form a which was burned during the Buddhist rituals that had
thin, serious line. He tilts his head. I have seen Joel at recently made their way to Japan via the Korean penin-
other times draw the object he’s smelling toward his sula. Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, had
nose, thrust it away, then pull it toward him again, like a begun to incorporate many of the features of mainland

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 THE ESSENCE OF ABSENCE

Buddhist practice, most notably the use of incense incense smoke to hear the Buddha’s words. This idea—
smoke to invoke the Buddha’s presence. along with Joel’s experience in the Mekong village—
As interest in Buddhism led to increased cultural formed the core of his theory of scent as nonverbal
intercourse between Japan and China, the Japanese communication. And when it is finally my turn to cup
learned that the Chinese burned incense for pleasure as my hand over the top of the incense bowl and stick my
well as religious use, and the Heian courtiers began to nose through the hole in my fingers, it does feel like
do the same. They draped their hair over scent pillows there’s a sort of music—or at least a vibration—emanat-
at night, and invented incense clocks that used scent ing from the incense within.
rather than sound to mark increments of time. A cul- Joel places the censer by my elbow and pronounces
tural distinction developed between sonae-koh (burning “Joy,” smiling encouragingly. Inside the cup, a chip of
incense as an offering to the Buddha) and soradaki (non- agarwood no bigger than a fingernail releases a plume of
religious burning of incense). From the mid-1300s to pearly smoke. I feel his and Mika’s eyes on me as I try to
the late 1500s, Japanese aristocrats began increasingly perform the gestures correctly: rotate the bowl, elbows
to use incense in scent contests, and as its popularity fil- up, inhale, exhale to the right. Holding the smoke in, I
tered down to the common classes, elaborate sets of summon some mnemonic device for joy. A not unpleas-
rules developed to govern its appreciation. It was dur- ant plastic quality in the incense brings to mind a doll
ing this time that koh-do developed. named Christine, which my sister and I had torn in half
Significant for Joel has been the Buddhist idea of “lis- once during a fight on a family road trip. Hoping I
tening” to incense. He often cites a Buddhist story in won’t have to tell Joel I’d first thought of plastic when I
which the bodhisattva Manjushri instructs his fellow smelled his sacred agarwood, I repeat to myself: Joy,
bodhisattvas that in the Buddha’s world everything is Christine, joy, Christine. I realize that in my desperation to
like fragrant incense, and therefore one can “listen” to capture the fragrance, I’ve completely abandoned the

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 THE ESSENCE OF ABSENCE

communal aspect of the game. I should be seeing visions accent, to Mika and his gentle ears, to the upstairs
of embers and joy and nature. Instead, I’ve been trans- neighbors and the bowl of cooling tea by my elbow and
ported to the backseat of our Jeep, Christine’s severed the table streaked with incense crumblings, the single
head in my hands, cotton stuffing and tears everywhere. bed glimpsed through the door of Joel’s bedroom, how
As the censer makes its rounds with nature and embers, his eyes light up when he talks about his grandchil-
I realize that the key to koh-do is really a kind of grace. dren, his handkerchiefs and his tales of Zen masters
You have to be able to hold on to the scent enough to and holy mountains, his penchant for jaywalking, for
remember it, while relinquishing it enough to be able opening doors for ladies, and for bodies of water that
to experience the scents that follow. It’s like competing carry the smell of the sea. It seems to me that, in the
in equanimity: the transcendence—and the victory—is end, our little incense ceremony was very much in the
achieved by being as present as possible for each breath. spirit of the Buddhist idea of incense-as-offering. Ours
In the end, both Mika and I guess the mystery scent was an offering not to the deities, however, but to
incorrectly, but, of course, it doesn’t matter. I feel a lit- something else outside ourselves: the mundane aspects
tle stoned. Joel, however, doesn’t want the party to end. of everyday life that serve as a kind of god or beacon.
Like someone creeping into the kitchen for a midnight These are the daily reminders that can center us in the
snack, he reaches into the bookshelf behind him and present moment, and that help us to remember the
brings out three pieces of rare agarwood, which he ways in which we are all connected.
lights all at once. “It’s like opening a $150 bottle of The incense fireworks are over. I glance across the
champagne!” he cries, waving the smoke toward him. table at Joel. He smiles, and I think—but I’m not
Sparks fly. I get a second wind. But this time I’m sure—I see a flicker of wistfulness cross his lips. But
transported not to my childhood, nor to Wordsworth’s, then that too is lost in the ghostly sketches still linger-
but to this moment: to Joel with his ponytail and his ing in the air. ▼

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 ANCESTORS

(continued from page 43) The two had been at the same social All along Watts disdained the role of yogi or Zen master,
gatherings before but had never conversed. Smith recalls although he understood the desire of some people to have
the end of the evening: “I could almost see the wheels in one. To him it was just another ego trap, and he discour-
Aldous’s mind sort of sorting things out after Alan left. aged his close students from treating him as such. Instead,
And then came the verdict, ‘What a curious man. Half he encouraged them to become his friends once he felt he
monk and half race-course operator.’ I told Alan some had taught them sufficiently. Of a friend who disappeared
time later. Alan loved it and said, ‘He’s got me exactly to India to seek enlightenment, he wrote, “I miss him. I
right.’” Huxley and Watts became close friends. wish I could show him that what he is looking for is not in
In 1959 and 1960 Watts taped twenty-six lectures India but in himself, and obvious for all to see. But he will
collectively titled “Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life” not believe me because I am not a guru, and all gurus rep-
for National Educational Television, the precursor to resent an endless ‘come-on’ where ‘veil after veil shall lift,
the Public Broadcasting System. He traded in the tra- but there must be veil upon veil behind’ until they bring
ditional classroom setting of educational shows dur- us by our own desperation to absolute surrender.”
ing that period in favor of a Zen garden; he would
arrive at the studio in time for taping and just start THROUGH THE SIXTIES, Watts and Jano embraced the bur-
talking. His intimate presentation and informal set- geoning counterculture movement of which Watts was
ting won many viewers and brought him a following one of the heroes. His work was a magnet for a generation
of non-Buddhists across the United States. Watts looking for meaning and trying to define themselves and a
gained such a devoted following, Smith recalls him new society. What many baby boomers today know of
once saying that he could have opened his own Buddhist ideas they learned from Watts’s work, and it is
monastery in California “because he was so charis- unlikely that Buddhism would have gained the popularity
matic and turned on crowds.” it did in the U.S. without his presence. “Alan Watts and

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 ANCESTORS

Suzuki Roshi were the two people writing about Zen in Watts’s death from heart failure on November 16, 1973,
“EPITAPH FOR ALAN WATTS” FROM MIDDLE WAY (VOL. 58, NO. 4), THE JOURNAL OF THE BUDDHIST SOCIETY

the 1960s,” says American Zen teacher Roshi Bernie at age fifty-eight, at his home at Druid Heights was as
Glassman. “Anyone who was around then and interested in unorthodox as his life. Hours after he died, but before
Buddhism would have been influenced by Alan Watts.” authorities could get involved, Jano had him cremated on a
In the end, Watts lived a life bound by no rules save wood pyre at a nearby beach by Buddhist monks. Although
his own. At the conclusion of his autobiography, In My public cremation is illegal, no charges were brought.
Own Way, published in 1972—a year before he died—he After Watts died, Gary Snyder (whom Watts once
wrote, “As I look back I could be inclined to feel that I famously said he would have liked to claim as his spiri-
have lived a sloppy, inconsiderate, wasteful, cowardly, tual successor) wrote this “Epitaph for Alan Watts”:
and undisciplined life, only getting away with it by hav-
ing a certain charm and a big gift of the gab. . . . A real- He blazed out the new path for all of us and came
istic look at myself, aged fifty-seven, tells me if I am back and made it clear. Explored the side canyons and
that, that’s what I am, and shall doubtless continue to deer trails, and investigated cliffs and thickets.
be. I myself and my friends and my family are going to
have to put up with it, just as they put up with the rain.” Many guides would have us travel single file, like
Regardless of how modestly—and uninhibitedly—he mules in a pack train, and never leave the trail. Alan
may have viewed himself, Watts had profound insights taught us to move forward like the breeze, tasting the
into the nature of life and existence that have affected berries, greeting the blue jays, learning and loving
millions of people. “My point was, and has continued to the whole terrain. ▼
be, that the Big Realization . . . is not a future attain-
ment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eter- For more on Alan Watts—including an animated tribute
nity and that one must see it now or never,” he said. from the creators of South Park—visit tricycle.com.

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 SURVIVING THE DRAGON

(continued from page 49) Monastery, you would be in big Gonggar Airport, we realized that the Central Govern-
trouble right now! Never say these things again.” ment was proceeding with a great show of urgency. The
I learned something very important that day. While terminal was swarming with armed PLA [People’s Libera-
the Panchen Lama was alive, I felt like a child protected tion Army]. As you know, Gonggar Airport is sixty miles
by a father. But during that interview, I realized I was south of Lhasa. Along the way, from the terminal to the
an orphan who had lost all “parental” protection. Lhasa hotel—on both sides of the road, about fifteen feet
apart—there was an armed soldier! All the way to Lhasa!
What about the emergency meeting held the next And that kind of intensity never let up. After we
day? All of us who were members of the religious team checked into the hotel, we were called together and
were forced to agree to all the Central Government’s told: “You will not leave the premises of the hotel. You
proposals, which included removing the Dalai Lama will not ask friends or associates to come into the hotel
from the process and agreeing to the Communists’ to visit. You will be prepared to leave for the ceremony
implementation of a lottery, which would take place at without prior warning. During the ceremony, if any of
the Jokhang in Lhasa. you act up or do bad things, there will be no excuses and
I think I should add that during the meeting all of the punishment will be severe.”
the lamas were silent. But the meeting was filmed, and About midnight, or maybe one in the morning, we
that night on TV they panned over the lamas with sub- were once again called together. “Time to leave!” they
titles that said, “So-and-so-lama said this; so-and-so- said, and by two in the morning we left the Lhasa hotel.
lama said that!” It was all lies. We boarded a bus. The distance couldn’t have been more
than fifteen minutes. This time the PLA were on both
In your autobiography you describe the trip to Lhasa sides of the road the entire way, shoulder to shoulder—
as intense and surreal. Yes, even when we landed at faceless men with helmets, face masks, and big guns and

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 SURVIVING THE DRAGON

shields. The Chinese were doing everything they could room was dark, and it was very, very crowded, and on
to make it feel like a major historical moment. the big table sat the Golden Urn.
We entered the Jokhang. The main temple room was
already full of witnesses saying prayers: high lamas, Had you ever seen the Golden Urn before? I don’t
local representatives, important monks—I don’t know think any of us had ever seen the Golden Urn before.
how long they had been there. The ceilings are very This was a Chinese thing—something mentioned in old
high inside the Jokhang and it’s very dark, even with Chinese history books—but I don’t think it was ever
thousands of butter lamps flickering. But as my eyes used, at least in Tibetan ceremonies. If you go to Chi-
became used to the darkness, I realized that around the nese temples, you can see these kinds of urns with sticks
perimeter of the main temple there were plainclothes inside that they once used to divine the future.
police, shoulder to shoulder. The urn they had flown to Lhasa was impressive: big-
My group was escorted up to the main altar. ger than a basketball, with a stem like a goblet’s. Inside,
Directly in front of the main altar, in the position of there was a vase within the larger urn. And in this
honor, sat the highest-ranking Communists from Bei- smaller vessel, there were three ivory sticks about a foot
jing. There was a big table between them and the long and one inch wide. The nominees’ names had been
altar. Perpendicular to the right end of the table was typed on paper—except for the Dalai Lama’s choice, of
another group of lesser officials. We religious leaders course. The altar attendants (they weren’t the regular
were ushered to the left end of the table and seated fac- altar monks) glued the papers to the ivory sticks, pulled
ing the lesser officials across the way. I was in the sec- tight-fitting gold silk covers down over the sticks, and
ond row. The Karmapa sat directly in front of me and replaced them in the urn.
partially blocked my view. Visibility wasn’t great for Bumi Rinpoche, who was the president of the Bud-
most of us. Incense was billowing up everywhere. The dhist Association of TAR, was asked to come forward

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and select a stick. He did as he was told, then handed it escape route. First we went south and eventually ended
to the head official, who, after inspecting it, handed it up in Guatemala. We were hoping to get visas to the
over to the official next to him, and so on, over to the United States, but it took a long time. In the meantime,
next representative from Beijing. we had to be on our guard. I could be kidnapped and
The event was televised. Later, when we saw the video forced back to China, or who knows? Finally, we were
on TV, we could easily see that the stick that was chosen cleared to go to America. That was 1998.
was a little longer the others. Obviously, this raised every- I arrived in New York City about the same time as
one’s suspicions—not that we weren’t already suspicious. the Dalai Lama did; he was scheduled to give a teaching
in Manhattan. It was the first time I had seen the Dalai
So you returned to Beijing demoralized? It was not a Lama since 1954, when he briefly passed through Kum-
happy time. And sometime later, after we returned from bum on his way to Beijing.
Lhasa, officials came to me and offered me the position
of tutor to the new Panchen Lama. They said I was You had a private meeting with him in New York? Yes,
going to gain a lot of prestige and power, if I would and I was shocked by what he told me. You see, up until
accept. Of course it was not really an invitation. It was that moment, I had only been thinking about getting
an order. They said, “Anyway, you have to be his tutor away from the Chinese safely, and hoping that the people
because your uncle, Gyayak Rinpoche, was the previous I had left behind were going to be okay. I really hadn’t
Panchen Lama’s tutor. He did a wonderful job. Now you thought about what my escape might mean to other
have to do a wonderful job.” people outside of the People’s Republic of China.
I realized that I had reached the end of the road. The When I had my meeting with His Holiness, he told
only thing left for me to do was to defect. Four of the peo- me, “In the eyes of the Chinese, except for my escape,
ple closest to me escaped with me. It was a complicated your defection is the most politically sensitive escape

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they have ever had to deal with. You shouldn’t criticize background. What kind of nice place are you searching
them or denounce them. Don’t do that. You should try for? You had such a high position in China. Do you
to keep a good relationship with them. Write to Beijing have an equally high position in America? Do you think
and try to reestablish your relationship with them. that the Government in Exile will really believe that
Make this connection.” you are now on their side?”
I had just escaped! The last thing I wanted to do was
to have contact with them! I hadn’t thought about all This was Jiang Zemin’s way of inviting you back to
the political ramifications. But the Dalai Lama was China? Well, yes, the implication was that I would be
right: Good relations might be beneficial for the better off if I returned. And in fact, the Chinese left my
Tibetan people, no matter what I personally believed. position open for a couple of years after that, so I guess
And the future of our Tibetan society was more impor- they hoped that I would eventually come back, even
tant. So I wrote to Beijing. though I had sought and received political asylum here
in the United States.
Did you get a reply? Eventually. It was strange. I
received a poem from the President of China at that Have you avoided politics since then? Yes. His Holi-
time, Jiang Zemin. ness asked me to come here to Bloomington two years
ago, and the TCC is strictly nonpolitical. TCC is not an
President Jiang Zemin wrote you a poem? Yes, a poem anti-Chinese organization. The question and real chal-
about how wonderful Kumbum Monastery was. “A lenge for the TCC is: how do we maintain the Tibetan
hundred thousand buddhas have gathered here. So why traditions and culture in twenty-first-century America?
have you left?” it said, or something like that. “The I don’t know. It’s not going to be easy. But at least we
town is beautiful and the Lotus Mountain is in the have to try. TCC is a place for healing and hope. ▼

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