Always the Best

Sometimes while reading some little phrase will pass by me with little attention being paid. Yet it seems to cling in the memory and refuses to pass into oblivion. One such phrase recently was of some zen master. Alas what book it was I am unable to recall - just his words have continued to echo. As I remember it, some "searcher" was asking questions, and asked the master what was the best cut of meat in the shop. The master said:- "every cut is the best". 

Is there a best? Perhaps we find one tastier?

At the time I skimmed past, my mind in search of more profound "answers", deeper insights, whatever the mind searches for when not content with what is already "the best"!!

But as said, the words of the master (and I do not even like "masters") have stuck, or at least have continued to pop into my mind as cakes have been baked and other pursuits indulged in.

 "Every cut is the best".

Who is the best master?

I think comparisons can be pernicious. Which flower do we like the best? Who is our best friend? When can I get past this moment and get onto something better? So it goes on. In such a scenario when will anything ever be "the best"?

The master's words have resonance with many other pearls; not quite the very same point being made yet having parallels, correspondences, connections. 

If you wish to know the truth then cease to cherish opinions

Judge not lest you be judged

Beginner's mind

Made to become so of itself beyond our calculations

Nothing like a good calculation

Obviously, if we love "calculating" we can continue to judge, continue to reach for the "better" - surely, surely, surely that is how we "improve" and wend our way towards that "self" that will finally gain our approval. Or the approval of the great Lawmaker in the sky. The self that will be "the best".

But to me the "best cut" means acceptance, trust, faith, grace, mercy, all in the unfolding moment. Which some have called the flowering of emptiness. Maybe that is why the words of the master kept popping up. All I was seeing was that which I already was, for better or for worse.

Trust. But what about jumping from the top of a 100 ft pole without a safety net (as the zens say)?

Related Quotes:-

"Simply the best, better than all the rest" (lyrics from "The Best", Tina Turner)

Just pondering the above and for my own benefit - the words, understood within a Universe of duality, would issue in suffering. While "within" non-duality they can be enlightenment itself. (If I understand Dogen correctly duality can "be" within non-duality, or, better, duality needs non-duality to be known without suffering)

Continuing with another quote, from "Zen Cosmology" by Ted Beringer, which relates to this:- "Of all distortions concerning nonduality, the antithetical polarization of 'duality' and 'non-duality' is the most common and most pernicious. This antithetical polarization results from mistaking coessential foci of nonduality (i.e. nonduality/duality) as independent entities (or unrealities), and thereby seeing them as two distinct, exclusive positions....." 

Well, there you are. We can have our cake and eat it too.

Seriously, it seems to me that much of this complexity is simply to do with language being essentially dualistic and thus not entirely suitable for expressing - or capturing -  reality as it is. Yet life is lived, not thought, and therefore, as the Good Book says, "a little child shall lead them". Or can do, if we let them. 

                                                                                                 

Chiasmus and the Kalogenic Universe

Well, what is the point of extending our vocabulary day by day, weighing ourselves down with new words, thoughts and ideas? Possibly no point whatsoever. But sometimes my own mind drifts to the story of the Jewish scholar who, awaiting his execution in the morning, nevertheless sits studying the Talmud until late into the night. 

A Jewish Scholar though perhaps not awaiting execution

(Or is it the story of the man who sermonises of the world's end on the morrow who is spied that night planting his next crop of vegetables? Not sure. But no matter) 

Does there have to be a point? If Meister Eckhart is correct in saying that love has no why does there have to be a point in extending our vocabulary, any particular point to any learning? Musing further, possibly we all have our own mental map of "things that are important" and "things that are not important". Ah yes; this is good, useful, valuable......whereas that is bad, useless, worthless. And so with all things, and people too. Dogen had something relevant to say on all this, that flowers fade no matter that we think them beautiful, while weeds grow even though we dislike them. This has its affinities with the Pure Land saying that things are made to become so of themselves beyond our calculations. 

Good advice - or not?

Chiasmus and Kalogenic, two new words, at least for me. The dictionary definition of "chiasmus" ( ky-az-muz) is that it is a linguistic twist or turn that you can use to express a crosswise mode of thought, as in:-

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Recently I was dipping into a book where the author sought to demonstrate that the concept of chiasmus "can be generalised so that it is not only a figure of speech but also, and more importantly, a figure of thought and a figure of reality."

In doing so he approached the thought, once again, of Dogen, a man I have been quite engrossed in lately, a man whose thought - like all - issued from his own concrete reality in time and space, from his own attempts to find meaning and significance within a limited time span of just one age and no other. 

Onto "kalogenic", from kalos, the Greek word for beauty, and genesis, which of course means bringing into being. Many now are seeing that our reality is a Kalogenic Universe, in which we live and move and have our being. Maybe to see this we must needs think crosswise and not simply align our thought to a simple linear progression. Then again, there can be a linear progression of some sorts. An example of our Kalogenic Universe is the butterfly, as mentioned by Hyatt Carter in one of his many little books. The butterfly, or the mariposa in Spanish, or again, a dealbhan-de in Gaelic, which translates as "Fire of God". Here we have some images of the butterfly.....

Which here is the weed and which the flower? This can possibly show just how limited our own judgements can be when our minds seek to stand still within a world of becoming.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, 

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

(T S Eliot, lines from Four Quartets)

 

The still point of the turning world

The still point of the turning world - again

John Keats once said that if something was not beautiful then it could not be true. He also spoke of "negative capability", the ability to live with uncertainties and mysteries and doubts, "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." 

For now, I must go. Just two more images to finish.....of two modes of thought, one of letting things BE, and one of "calculation":-

Yet what do you see as your own finger points at the moon?

The Moon and the Fingers that Point

No one can wander far on any so called "spiritual" forum without stumbling upon the words:- do not mistake the finger that points for the moon itself. I have used it myself. Now I find that there are some who call into question its profundity! In fact, assertions are made that "finger" and "moon" are both part of a non-dual reality. 

Here we go again. Yet which is important? Finger OR moon OR both?

Dogen, who I have mentioned before, wrote a famous little poem, much admired by those who live in the land of zen:-

To what shall I 

Liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane's bill.

Dogen - cause of all the trouble

We are told that the entire world is fully contained in each and every dewdrop, each one symbolic of all impermanent moments, yet each "not an illusion in contrast with reality", this simply because they are "liberated by their reflection of the moon's glow". Conversely, the moon as a symbol of Reality-as-is is not an aloof realm since it is fully merged in the finite and individuated manifestations of the dew. In fact, "the poem itself becomes one with the setting it depicts."

A crane, perhaps seeking for a tasty dewdrop

Again, we are asked to pay attention to the word "shaken". We are not to understand all this as some sort of static image but, by virtue of being shaken, the metaphor becomes "dynamic and interactive". 

Putting any further analysis aside, I open here to the sheer richness of my being here, where assertions of "eastern pantheism" and "quietism" must yield to a very dynamic and transformative way of being in our world.

It does seem that if we wish to pay attention to much of the "new physics", of "quantum leaps" and "superstrings", then such a Reality as evoked by Dogen can act as a guide. 

It seems that in Reality's "ceaseless advance into novelty",  finger and moon are "dual" movements of a non-dual reality. Just as well that the actual living of Reality can be so simple.

Speaking of the simplicity of reality, perhaps it could be asked as to whether much of this is purely academic, of no consequence. As I see it, yes, in some cases that is so. When everything valuable is given, is gift, some can well find themselves naturally expressing such a way of being (or non-being!) without any exploration of various ways and means, dewdrops or moons. But I find such thoughts can add clarity, and I think again of the words of Jane Hirshfield which I have already quoted in a previous blog on "Zen Poems". 

Jane speaks of the potential of great art or poetry "to evoke, a truing of vision, a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways.......by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share." 

I also think here of just what it is that we should seek to communicate to others, again of what was said in a previous blog. That true communication is communion, that what can only be truly communicated is that which we already are. Often children can see the truth of us no matter our words. We are communicating all the time, like it or not. Whatever helps "true" our vision is therefore of worth. 

Two takes on "communion"

So, whatever, no matter. We have all eternity so there is no time to lose.

Related Quotes:-

Hee-Jin Kim, writing of the "deeper matrix" of Dogen, that it was.......a passionate search for liberation through concrete activities and expression.

(Kim is widely recognised as one of our greatest authorities on Dogen)

......the aim is to discourage the 'craving for generality' - to encourage people to look before they think. 

(Ray Monk, on Wittgenstein, from his biography of the latter)

Language is a poison that can be used to seduce, mislead and bewitch us, but it can also heal, as when we speak truly. 

(Wittgenstein)

Dogen's emphasis is not on how to transcend language but on how to radically use it.

(Hee-Jin Kim)

Ultimate speech is to be rid of speech; ultimate action is to be rid of action. 

(Zhuangzi)

Words and letters, however socially constructed, are never mere signs in the abstract, theoretical sense, but alive and active "in the flesh and blood." Contrary to the conventional view that language is no more than a means of communication, it is profoundly internal to an individual's life. Language flows individually and collectively through the existential bloodstream, so much so that it is breath, blood and soul of human existence. Herein lies the essence of Dogen's radical phenomenalism. Thus knowledge becomes acesis, instead of gnosis or logos - "seeing things as they are" now means "making things as they are." In this light the indexical analogy of "the finger that points at the moon" is highly misleading, if not altogether wrong, because it draws on a savifically inefficacious conception of language.

(Kim-Jin Kim)

Maya and the Book of Revelation

"All is suffering" claims the Buddha. Just how pessimistic can you get? But to walk the path is to seek the heartwood of the Dharma, perhaps even to find that the walk is the heartwood itself. 

The Dharma claims that to see rightly is to know the end of suffering. To know it, be it and share it; more, to see and know it in this world. Just how much better can it get? What is being said is that if we truly see Reality for what it truly is we shall be free of suffering - and this without any betrayal of this world for any imagined other. What a wonderful affirmation of Reality, our cosmos, our home. 

Searching for Reality

Thus "maya" is not that this world is illusion but, as far as the Dharma is concerned, the claim that to see and know this world falsely is to suffer. 

Maya

It has been interesting recently to dip into a few books concerned with "zen cosmology", particularly in the thought of the 13th century Japanese thinker and zen practitioner Dogen. Early reports of this man suggested that he liked to sit on cushions and meditate his life away, perhaps a challenger to Bodhidharma whose own preference was to stare at walls. I am now finding that Dogen was often on the move and loved the Lotus Sutra, its metaphors and imagery; loved words in fact. That he would have echoed the thought of Paracelsus....."As you talk, so is your heart". 

For Dogen the Lotus Sutra expressed his very own take on Reality, of the liberative qualities of spatiality and temporality. I too like such metaphors and imagery, especially when they transform the heart. Bodhisattvas of healing. Well, they sure beat charging around on a horse wielding "rods of iron" to "smite the nations". I was also reading recently of a Church in Pennsylvania where the congregation were asked to bring along their AR-15 semi-automatics to a "Blessing Ceremony". Such weapons, said the Church Elder, related to the "rods of iron" mentioned in the Christian Book of Revelation. 

Another take on the "rod of iron"

"As you believe so shall it be unto you" as the Good Book says. Yes, continued the Church Elder, when Christ returns he shall bring with him his very own rod of iron. 

Each to their own.

Getting back to the Lotus Sutra and its own Mahayana imagery, such imagery "expresses the vastness and the immanence of the sacred in space as well as time and breaks open limited, conventional, linear perspectives of both space and time." (Dan Leighton, in "Visions of Awakening Space and Time")

For various reasons I see the "linear perspective" as being the one to go, at least as being a sole perspective. A simple example of such a perspective is that the progression of time will provide the only final answer to suffering; the "world to come"; rewards, compensations and punishments.  In simpler terms, that we can really start living once we are dead. This is not to mock but to recognise that "now is the time of salvation".

Read all about it ( or listen )

 Stories and imagery have to be made our own:-

The love that inspired Oya-sama to go through

All the sufferings and all the hardships

I thought I was simply to listen to the story

But that was a grievous mistake, I find.

To "make them our own" is the path.

Related Quotes:-

"This world is very far from being an objective, Newtonian realm of dead objects that humans hold dominion over and manipulate and utilize for their human agendas. Rather, the myriad aspects of phenomena are all energetic partners in spiritual engagement and devotion."

(Dan Leighton)

No Success Like Failure

One of my favorite Bob Dylan songs is "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" which has the great verse about "success" (or lack of it):-

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall

Some speak of the future

My love, she speaks softly

She knows there's no success like failure

And that failure's no success at all

Where many talk.......

........of situations (conclusions optional)

I have always found it quite interesting to try to figure out various lyrics, especially if they appear enigmatic. Like a zen koan, they tease me out of my habitual thoughts. In my quest for some degree of understanding I have also reflected upon some words of another mentor of mine, Thomas Merton, who was once asked to contribute to a book on the subject of "success". His (unused!) contribution was as follows:-

If I have a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.......If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget how to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

(From "Love and Living")

I once quoted the above on a discussion forum and someone there said that his view of Merton was somewhat diminished by his (Merton's) opinion on the pursuit of success. Well, each to their own, but in my eyes this poster was missing the fundamental nature of all life, it's paradoxical heart and thus missing the point that for all intents and purposes, Merton was indeed a success!

As I see it, all we need we already have; gift, grace. The "task" is fundamentally realisation and not a progressive attainment. Therefore, in as much as we "have to become that which we already are", if we instead seek to achieve - or become - something we think ourselves not to be already, that which we pursue becomes an object beyond ourselves. Success, happiness, wisdom - whatever. They are always, always, just out of reach; and will always remain so.

Divided from ourselves, not yet in possession of that which we seek, we enter the never never land of futility; and often worse, perhaps we enter the hapless world of the pharisee who, believing themselves to have "achieved" righteousness, looks down with disdain upon those "others" who have made no such effort.

From success to happiness......

"My greatest happiness" says Chuang Tzu, "consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness." This is the way of the Tao, the way of effortlessness ( wu wei ), analogous, as Merton says, to the Christian "life of faith". "It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one's efforts." In my own Pure Land way, which is no way at all, it is the path of non-calculation where things are made to become so of themselves.(In the more austere world of Theravada Buddhism, it is to know that all things are a by-product of wisdom; wisdom here defined as "the mind/heart, thirsting for emancipation, seeing direct into the heart of reality.") But in the less austere world of the Pure Land, it is called faith. Faith in the infinite compassion, the infinite wisdom and the infinite potential of Reality-as-is. 

The search is on

Moving on, and wandering on to another aspect, exactly what can be done on earth to produce happiness? Chuang Tzu seeks to tell us that the answer to such a question is that it has no fixed or predetermined answer to suit every case. But if we are in harmony with the Tao then "the answer will make itself clear when the time comes to act", acting not in a self-conscious mode of deliberation but in accordance with the Source of all Good. 

Alas, often, taking pride in ourselves and having a rich stock of answers built up over the years as part of our precious "self", we pour those "answers" over each and every moment, thus never actually seeing the moment at all - meeting only ourselves, our unending ambitions.

Therefore the "east" speaks of emptiness and suchness, often variously misunderstood in the "west" as nihilism and "the relativity of all morality" (as opposed to what is seen as the fullness of "being" and the absolute good - this always in opposition to an absolute evil) 

Appropriate somewhere in all this waffle

Before drawing to a close (deep sighs of relief all around) I see much of this as having to do with the thorny subject of theodicy, the problem of suffering and evil and of how to know it and see it in all its horror and yet to rest, knowing "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". I will leave that with anyone who has read this far. I would only say that to act in the face of suffering is perhaps, for us, the only answer worth having.  And to add further:-  a human being, for me, is one who will grieve and weep at the loss of a loved one, not throw a blanket of belief and "answers" over the loss and count it as "faith". The last thing we want is an anaesthetic, however venerated in the creeds of our world. 

Related Quotes:- 

"Not many people have clearly understood that cosmology is a literary art form, not a religious or scientific one" (Northrop Frye)

"(Reality is) a ceaseless advance into novelty." (A.N.Whitehead)"

"Truth is inherently fluid - open, alive, metaphorical, and inclusive; dogma is inherently rigid - closed, fixed, literal, and exclusive" (Ted Biringer, in "Zen Cosmology")

PS:- I have always loved quotes and would welcome any others considered relevant to any particular blog. Please feel free to offer them in the "comments" section.  If appropriate I will transpose the quote onto the end of the blog. I will keep my own eyes open and add any as and when, to current and previous blogs. Thank you.

Of Blooks and Blogs

My blog is going into print - yes folks, the "vanity project" of the year. The initial print run is of one copy and I have jumped in quick and bought mine before it is sold out.

 But seriously ( I think ), I did want to print it out. Whatever is held exclusively on a PC is always in danger of disappearing in an instance, even though such disappearance would often be considered a mercy by many. Well, my blog is on Google - but then, is even Google eternal?

Eternal?

Anyway, I googled "print out blog" and up came a site "Blookup" which promised to print out any blog for a fee ( of course ) Their site was easy-peasy, even for a non-geek like myself .

Not a geek, but other options exist

 They imported the entire blog, gave options of fonts and type size, made it easy to design your own cover - back and front - and also offered a very good editing option. A detailed preview of the finished blook is given, "exactly as it will be printed", all indexed.

Editing was a bit of a bane. Obviously videos had to go, so farewell Frank Zappa, and the Stones strutting out "Start Me Up". Also the Dalai Lama and the "make me one with everything" joke. 

The Dalai Lama gives thanks

Then all the "pictures on the left" ( or right, or up, or below ) had to be amended to "the right" ( or overpage, or above, or whatever) Surely Google could sort this out, I cried in despair. 

But finally the job was done. My Blook is at the printers. 

Faith and Belief, or Faith v Belief

One of the deepest acclamations of any of the Christian mystics is that of Mother Julian of Norwich. "All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." 

T S Eliot, who knew the mystics well, echoed her words in Four Quartets:-

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and 

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one 

For me this is neither escapism into a world of vain hope, nor escapism from the "reality" that our world is in fact one of suffering and is ultimately "a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The faith that "all shall be well" allows me to dig as deep as I am able into the pain and suffering of our world, to look it directly in the eye. The holocaust, the pain of children, the insidious onset of cancer..........We all have had our own share and I give thanks that so far my share has not been as great as for many others. 

I have noticed that many shy away from such subjects, which makes me suspect that faith and the will to know of them do go hand in hand.

As I know it, faith is not belief. Belief is in something specific. That we "live on after death", that the "perpetrators will get their comeuppance". Beliefs are endless and can be grasped at. They can divide us from others. Often they can be clung to through thick and thin and pride taken in the way we do so, looking perhaps for our reward from some Sky God who seeks out the "true believers."

Faith, for me, is a letting go. Faith has the potential for communion, to unite two as one; perhaps even to act in the face of suffering.

It can be ridiculed.

Whether I am heading for the Pure Land

Or heading for hell

All is in Amida's hands

Namu-amida-butsu

No more to say