Bowing to See True Nature

In the Kwan Um School of Zen we are supposed to perform at least 108 prostrations every morning. I say “at least” because we also have a tradition of performing extra prostrations, usually 500 or 1000, during times of distress. It is a great way to burn up extra karma. I believe that Zen Master Seung Sahn did 500 prostrations a day for most of his life as a monk, which perhaps accounts for his ceaseless and amazing energy.

I have done extra prostrations at various times and can attest to their amazing efficiency. I have never felt so alert or spacious so quickly, nor have I maintained that openness for so long. And I never even got the full benefit because I have bad knees, and they never let me do more than 270 a day. Even then, after a few months, I developed some kind of stress injury in my lower leg where the calf muscle joins the knee joint. When the pain started waking me up at night, I knew it was time to stop!

For a long time I couldn’t do any prostrations, and this became an excuse to cease morning practice altogether. But over the past two or three years, with a little determination and great patience, I have found that I can do 108 prostrations most mornings. It helps if I take a day or two off every week.

Recently I made a vow to do 108 prostrations every morning for 100 days. This has had a wonderful effect on my practice and life. My sitting practice is much deeper and my mind, even when I get up off the cushion, is noticeably calmer and more balanced. Unfortunately, it has begun to cause some problems with my feet and ankles, such that the first few prostrations are painful until I get warmed up, and my feet feel stiff and sore not only in the morning but at various times throughout the day.

The other morning I had to admit that I am giving myself another stress injury. If I don’t stop doing prostrations every day, I am going to have a serious problem. But how can I protect my feet and keep my vow? Easy: I’ve started doing standing bows, peppered with a prostration every ninth or tenth bow. The first day I was in kind of a hurry and was bowing quickly and somewhat carelessly. But somewhere around bow thirty or forty my mind suddenly slowed, and I began to pay attention to my bows. The standing bows are really no different from the full prostrations. This surprised—and delighted—me.

After only two days of this practice, I find that my feet are still sore when I first wake up, but my ankles don’t hurt at all. Maybe in a week or two I’ll be able to resume doing full prostrations—but only five days a week!

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

The Least I Can Do

Two weeks ago during a workshop at Midwest Sangha Weekend a dharma teacher from the Kansas Zen Center reminded me that many years ago I had given her first instruction in meditation. She told me also that she remembers the talk I gave that morning, which was in part about the trials and tribulations of trying to a grow a lawn. I've posted a version of that talk below: click here if you'd like to read it.

When Jane reminded me about that talk I had to laugh because within about two years, our magnificent lawn reverted back to its former state of dirt and weeds and random clumps of grass. Even funnier, I had just decided to try again for that lush green look, and only days before I left for Chicago, the guys at Blueville Nursery came out and overseeded.

If you've ever put in a lawn you know that the secret lies in keeping the seed moist. So twice a day for the last week I've gone outside to water. This is actually a gift, because like any daily practice, watering the lawn offers me a chance to see my own mind. And I am happy to report that my mind has changed over the past nine years: even though I still worry that the grass won't grow, I have a lot more confidence that each of the thousands of seeds knows how to grow and will grow if I keep giving it what it needs.

But I'm also forced to admit that my mind hasn't changed entirely for the best. Since I left the Kansas Zen Center four years ago, my practice has gotten kind of lazy. My mind has sprung a lot of weeds. Greed and anger and ignorance have grown tall and rank.

As you may know, greed, anger and ignorance are the three roots of suffering. The Buddha prescribed various kinds of medicine for suffering. All of them involved some kind of meditation practice. Meditation is like weeding your mind. It creates some clear space so that wisdom and compassion can grow.

After the Midwest Sangha Weekend I prescribed a little Buddha medicine for my mind. So I'm renewing my commitment to perform 108 prostrations every morning--the great mind medicine Zen Master Seung Sahn prescribed for his American students--and to sit for at least fifteen minutes. And I'm adding fifteen minutes of sitting meditation to my evening chanting practice. It seems like the least I can do.

Spring Comes, The Grass Grows By Itself

Here is a version of a talk I gave at the Kansas Zen Center, in Lawrence, about nine years ago.

Good morning. Thank you for coming to practice.

Recently, Margaret and I have embarked on some home improvement. This is truly to enter the cave of poisoned grass, to arouse the mind of acquisition and to stimulate it over and over. There are so many decisions to make, about flooring and walls and countertops. And so many things to buy. So we’ve made this meal of poisoned grass and we feed and feed. This is truly suffering. And we have to see it through to the end. Well, we don’t have to. We could stop now if we wanted, but that would mean living in a very messy situation for a long time, so we choose to complete the project.

The first bit of improvement we did was to put in a new lawn. This is very appropriate, because our home is also Tall Grass Zen Center. Ironically enough, however, we had a totally pathetic front lawn, almost as much dirt as grass. Sometimes we’d joke, I’m going out to mow the dirt now! And certainly it grew tall, but that was only the weeds. The lawn resulted from poor soil and years of neglect and not enough sunlight. We have these two forty year old oak trees, and they block the sunlight, so the first thing we did was have them professionally pruned. But we weren’t sure what the next step should be.

Then one day I saw this sign, “ask us about organic lawn care,” and I thought, oh, we could do that. One reason we haven’t done much for the lawn is because we are leery of putting chemicals into the ground. So I went home and asked Margaret what she thought and she thought it was a good idea and I called the company and someone came out and gave us an estimate—$830—which was higher than I’d hoped but lower than my worst fear. One of the reasons it cost so much was because they recommended putting down a huge amount of organic compost—somewhere on the order of ten cubic feet, a truckful, almost enough to fill this room. Margaret and I talked it over and said, OK, let’s do it. And these people came out with all these machines and dug up the lawn and lay down compost and seed and hay and that was that.

Now, this isn’t usually the kind of consumer I am. I like to do a lot of research, to solicit different bids, talk to people, dicker. And right away some problems appeared that made me doubt the wisdom of doing business with this company. First, there was this problem with the fertilizer, and that took a couple of phone calls to straighten out. Then there was this problem with a lack of directions. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I had no idea what to do with the one thousand square foot plot of dirt. After a few phone calls I got my first written instruction: start watering right away! But that didn’t help me. I didn’t know how often to water or how much to water. I didn’t know anything. I made several more phone calls, and finally this man asked me, well didn’t you get our brochure. No. He promised to send it. Ironically enough the brochure arrived with the bill. And this is kind of funny, because it seems to me that although they really took their time getting us the instructions, they sure didn’t waste a minute issuing the bill. But they arrived on the same day in the same envelope. Funny.

We were instructed to water twice a day, three times if it got really hot, which fortunately it didn’t, because we had no idea how we would manage that. The first time I went out to water, I suddenly remembered that one of the reasons I’ve never gone in much for lawns is because they are ecological disasters. They require a lot of water and we are living through a drought—just ask the farmers; more and more of the wheat crop fails every year because there simply isn’t enough rain. So there I was spraying vast amounts of water onto the dirt and suddenly envisioning a drought-proof rock garden with maybe a few aesthetically placed native plants and kicking myself for acting so impulsively and not looking into other options. But I’d already paid the $830 dollars—not on a credit card but out of my savings—and I wasn’t about to waste that so I just kept watering.

So Margaret and I went out there twice a day, watering and watering. My misgivings grew and grew because nothing was happening! Nothing seemed to be growing. And our neighbors were teasing us a little—nice plot of dirt you got there, Christina! And I started to wonder if I had been ripped off. How do I know they put all that compost down? How would I know if it was organic or not? Maybe it was just sludge. And maybe the seed was old. Despite my misgivings, though, I’d sometimes find myself enjoying myself. I’d do 108 prostrations and go out and simply water. It was kind of nice, in the pre-dawn light. A lot of my neighbors would be out taking walks and we’d say hello. But mostly I worried.

One afternoon, as Margaret and were bending over examining the dirt for signs of life, I told her that I had a very bad feeling about this. She asked why and I told her, “I don’t trust those people.” She said, “I don’t trust them either, Christina. But I trust the grass, I trust the seed.” This is a great teaching. It cut through all my doubts and concerns. Oh, sure, the grass knows how to grow. You don’t have pay the seed or persuade or compel or shame it into growing. It simply grows. There’s a Zen saying that encompasses this point, “spring comes, the grass grows by itself.” I’m very grateful to Margaret for reminding me of this, for putting my mind to rest. It’s one of the reasons that we started Tall Grass Zen Center, so that we would have the opportunity of building a sangha, a community of practitioners, so we could remind each other of the teaching, of our purpose. In Buddhism we speak of the triple gem, buddha, dharma and sangha, the teacher, the teaching and the community of practitioners. Of these three, the sangha is the most important. I would therefore like to encourage each of you to come practice at the Zen Center as often as you can, to let other people help you in your practice and to help others in theirs.

I’d like to talk a little about this phrase, “spring comes, the grass grows by itself.” The phrase “by itself” doesn’t mean “all alone.” As I’ve already said, the grass doesn’t need any special encouragement to grow. But its growth takes place in an immense network of interrelationships. This is signaled by the phrase “spring comes.” Spring brings longer days and more light and warmth, both of which the seed needs to germinate. And spring also brings rain. The grass also needs the soil. And you know, the soil isn’t some inert substance like concrete. It’s alive, full of microorganisms, and not so micro- organisms, and the warmth of the sun wakes them up, and they begin eating and digesting and defecating and fornicating and reproducing, and all that activity helps the grass to grow and the grass by growing helps those beings to live.

This is actually a pretty clear illustration of karma, which is the name we give to the law of cause and effect. Spring comes and the grass grows. Cause and effect. So everything happens by natural process, and this is true for us as well. “Spring comes the grass grows by itself” also means that when conditions are ripe, our enlightenment will appear. We don’t have to do anything special to make our great mind manifest. Of course, conditions do have to be right and we can create the right sort of conditions for enlightenment to appear. The right condition is practice. In my experience daily practice is essential, but so is coming to retreats regularly. Practice is sort of like watering the lawn. All the water helps the grass to grow; all that practice helps our enlightenment to appear. One of the reasons that Margaret and I chose the name Tall Grass Zen Center is because this is kind of practice we want to encourage, practice that isn’t focussed on an outcome, such as enlightenment, but that is complete in itself. I encourage you to practice this way.

Karma, the law of cause and effect, is very interesting. For example, Margaret and I kept watering the lawn and sure enough after a couple of weeks a few blades began to appear and day by day more blades of grass began to appear and pretty soon we had this beautiful green plush lawn, which I can honestly say is the envy of the neighborhood. So this lawn appears and pretty soon a new effect appears, what the capitalists call “pride of ownership” appears. We buddhists call this “attachment.” Every time Margaret and I drive up to our house, one of us will say,” look at that beautiful lawn. We grew that. It’s ours.” So pretty soon a new problem appears. There are lots and lots of dogs in our neighborhood. They eat lots of food and that means that they make lots of shit. And everyday their owners take them around on leashes, and they just seem to love doing their business on our lawn. Most of our neighbors are pretty responsible and they carry around little plastic bags to clean up after their dogs, but still, Margaret and I just hate the thought of dog poop on our beautiful lawn.

I’d like to tell you a little about one incident that happened last weekend. You know, this practice changes you, but the changes are very subtle and sometimes you can’t see them. I’ve been practicing pretty hard for about three years now and sometimes it seems like nothing changes. I’ve still got this yadda-yadda going on continually through my mind. Oh, maybe those lawn care people are trying to rip me off, what can I do, and then there’s my job and then there’s Margaret and then there’s my evil department head and yadda-yadda my life is so hard. But every once in a while something happens and I can say, oh, yeah, this practice changes you. So last weekend I happened to be looking out the front window, and I saw this woman letting her dog crap on our lawn, and so I stepped outside. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. She saw me and pulled her dog along and walked away. Not fast, but I could see that she knew that she was doing something wrong, and she didn’t want to face it.

So I was just standing there not feeling anything really or thinking anything. I remember that there seemed to be kind of green flow. Everything is very beautiful right now; we’ve had a long wet spring and everything is growing. At the back of my mind was the thought that in a minute I’d have to go and get a plastic bag and clear up the mess, but I didn’t feel one way or the other about it. Then this really amazing thing happened. The woman, who had walked out of sight, suddenly reappeared and said, “Do you want me to clean that up?” Now this, it seems to me, is true Zen practice. I don’t know anything about this woman; I doubt that she practices Zen. But Zen Master Hae Kwang says that Zen is recognizing correct situation, correct relationship, correct function and then just doing it. So this woman recognized her mistake and came back offering to correct it. Now I do practice Zen and I was in a pretty good space so I promptly said, “yes, I do.” I wouldn’t always answer this way. If I had been feeling angry for example, I might have said, “no, it’s OK, I’ll do it,” not because it was really OK but because cleaning up the shit would have fed my delusion that I am the most imposed on person in the universe and would have enabled me to cling to that sense of having been treated unjustly. The woman said, “I forgot my plastic bag.” Suddenly, her situation became clear. She wasn’t an irresponsible person, she was a person who had forgotten something. So I said, “Let me get you one,” and as she cleaned up the mess we chatted. It turned out that she often has to go clean up after other people’s dogs and it really bugs her, so maybe this is why she turned around.

What happened there was the fruit of my practice. When I stepped out of house I didn’t know what to say and so I didn’t say anything. And this created the space for the woman to correct her mistake. I didn’t try to make this happen. It simply happened. And more and more it seems to me that the less I say, the better. And my growing ability to keep my mouth shut is proof that this practice has really helped me.

Listen. The world is in really bad shape right now. India and Pakistan are threatening to destroy one another. The U.S. is continuing to flatten Afghanistan. And it’s happening everywhere, as people bump up against one another, too often over religious conflicts. What happened between this woman and me is the true fruit of Buddhist practice. We could have come into conflict, but we didn’t. She and I together managed to make a little moment of peace and understanding, managed to bring a little more love and compassion into the world. And this is how it will happen, individual by individual, household by household, block by block. I hope that you all will practice has hard as you can, for this world.

Yong Maeng Jong Jin (to leap like a tiger while sitting)

Every morning I vow
not to waste another minute

Every minute my mind
wanders away

I don’t know whether to pity or envy the pigeons
endless fucking under the eaves of Gruber’s house

Sun begins another prostration
108 times 108 times 108 equals

Stone bodhisattva swallowing
all shadow, all light, bird song, birds

Where do they go?

KATZ!

Gruber’s cat cries at the dharma room door.