Tea and Tea Masters

There are a lot of stories from ancient China about tea masters doing dharma combat with—and besting—Zen Masters. Usually these tea masters are unassuming and diminutive older women and the Zen Masters are quite full of themselves, inadvertently exposing themselves to a devastating blow from the tea master’s mind sword. Here’s a modern and absolutely true story:

Once at a major Zen Center on the east coast of the United States, a Hong Kong woman set up her tea table in a corner of the kitchen and was enjoying tea with her students. An American Zen Master appeared and asked if he might join them. “Please be seated,” she said. Now this man fancied himself a teaist, and he began discoursing about tea. “Oh,” she said, “you must be a tea master. Please, I would like your opinion of these teas.” She offered him two cups. The American tasted each tea. He described the first one as smoky and imperfectly processed. The second tea, he said, was much superior with an aged, complex character. “Actually,” she said, “those are both the same tea.” The Zen Master began turning red. She gazed at him for a moment. “You are quite pretentious,” and returned to her conversation with her students.

Bird's Nest

There's a wonderful novel I was thinking about the other day, called Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin. It was published in the 1930s and is set in England and Germany about 800 years after the Nazis have won WW2. It's a horrible world. The Jews have all been murdered. Women are treated like breeding animals. Men of the subjugated nations are second class citizens with no access to power or wealth. German males possess all authority. Hitler is worshipped as a god.

The only people to live outside of this terrible hegemony are random bands of Christians. They seem to live in extended family systems. At least they don't put the women in camps. They treat them with kindness and affection, the way some people treat their dogs.

Near the end of the novel, when the protagonist, an English worker, is hiding out with some of these Christians, he asks his host if he believes that women can go to heaven. His host is shocked at the idea. No, he says emphatically. Women are like birds' nests. Nobody would keep a bird's nest after it's served its purpose.

I'm not sure how the author feels about this. I believe that she was a Christian. I'm sure she was feminist. Did she expect her readers compare the status of women under the German hegemony and snuggle up to the Christian ideal? Did she expect us to rebel, to say, "of course women have souls, too"? Me, I'm reading against the grain. I don't think anybody has a soul. We just have these bodies and these egos and this one opportunity at life.

What does this have to do with Buddhism?

I think that Burdekin has given us a lovely way to think about "the small self," as a bird's nest, constructed of bits of this and that, woven tightly in some places, maybe a little looser in others. Our job as Buddhist meditators is first to see the constructedness of our small selves and second to start to pull away, piece by piece, the twigs and blades of grass and strands of hair and bits of string that comprise the nest of the self. It's really hard work, because we live in those nests and everytime we pull out another bit, we risk . . . what?

How to Meditate

sit on the ground as close
to the longest widest wildest river
you can find

sit as close as you dare

pick a rock in the river
something bigger than a grain
smaller than the mountain range--

any boulder will do--

rest your mind inside the rock

foreswear all desire to follow the water
up to its source in the belly of the mountain
down to its outpouring place by the sea

abide until you feel the thunder
of snow melt parting around you

until the slightest flick of the merest fingerling
quivers your flanks

sit like this for a millennia or two

after a while a crack will appear
the haste of stone the stillness of river
and swallow you

no one no where

adrift in earth rooted in stars