ON SHI KE’S TWO MINDS IN HARMONY

We don’t know precisely when Shi Ke drew it. The day, unfixed by coordinates, ambles somewhere across the Tenth Century’s calendric grid. But it must have been a sunny day for such history as we have informs us that the Master, preparing to execute his composition’s major strokes, picked up a handful of dried grass, squeezed the clump into a brush, and lapped the bristles round the ink tray until they were soft enough to yield to rice-paper demands.

If we look carefully we can hear the monk snoozing in soft cadence to the tiger’s steady purr. “Two Minds In Harmony”, Shi Ke called the work. What was he trying to tell us when he furiously scribed into existence this mellowed, dozing pair?

What else do we see? On gross examination the two figures are conformed to suggest the “on guard” position of the martial artist’s hands: the right hand is contracted into a fist and the left hand is laid securely upon it. Together they are furled and held before the chest.

The configuration is an ancient diagram of polarity: Yin/Yang. Shakti/Shiva. Power and the Law Power Obeys. The fist is power, emotion – movement away from. The overlaying hand is law, intelligence – the internal governance of reason, a hand position which reminds the martial artist that his mind must always control his use of force.

What happens to this Yin/Yang hand-configuration when the man who is poised for combat becomes the man who reposes in meditation? As the function is reversed, so is the hand position: the clasped hands are simply inverted, rotated l80 degrees, and gently relaxed, the left hand going from suppression to support and the right hand from fist to cup – a spiritual begging bowl. Indeed, the meditator assumes a passive posture and in a conscious act of supplication surrenders to the Buddha within himself.

But the Yin/Yang configuration suggested here is neither that of combat nor of meditation since both activities require an alert awareness; and the monk and tiger, in this Yin and Yang embrace, drowse as a unit in blissful oblivion. Again, what is Shi Ke trying to tell us?

We know that in our everyday lives of chopping wood and carrying water we must balance emotion and reason, the interests of eros and logos. We know that we cannot have an harmonious performance if we entertain one member of a duet to the exclusion or disadvantage of the other.

The harmony of tiger and monk has not been achieved, let us quickly add, by the victory of some vaunted superior human nature over an equally mis-termed inferior animal nature. Dogs can be more loyal than men; cats more affectionate than women. We should all improve from the company of wolves.

Neither can we suppose that the drawing conveys the idea of sexual hegemony: male sovereignty over some vassal female state, Creative over Receptive. Science has taken us beyond supposing that “seminal”; conveys the fact of “seed”, that the male supplies a pret-a-porter zygote needful only of a convenient female’s nutritional depository. The Yin and Yang concept admits to no such facile interpretation. Were this an intended meaning, Hexagram 12 (Heaven over Earth) would be a desirable one; it is not. It indicates No Progress… Disjunction… Obstruction. And the left or “sinister” hand would be represented as the female force. It is not. The right hand is the fist.

It is a matter of artistic license to term certain qualities feminine. But feminine is not female. In order for any human being to be complete the qualities so described must be equally present and harmoniously blended with those qualities designated as masculine.

But this message, however valid, is mere commonplace, too jejune and trivial in its limits… hardly enough to engage a master and surely insufficient to inspire him. What, then, is Shi Ke so determined that we see?

Where are the dynamics of intellect and passion? Isn’t the slumber an expression of peace, and the peace an implication of harmony?

Isn’t he illustrating the Seventh Day… The Day of Rest… The culmination of effort… the stasis of sleep?

Shi Ke has depicted the transcendence of opposites: the passing beyond prejudicial judgments of good and evil, of male and female, of eros and logos, of need and satiation, of conflict and repose; and, most especially, of ego and other. There is no more Yin and Yang. The distinctions are obliterated. Sleep has emptied the Circle. Shi Ke has taken us into the Nirvanic Void.

This is the effortless state of simply Being… a freezing of the pulse, a stoppage of the Turning Wheel, an end to the alternations of struggle and repose. Sunyata. Perfect entropy. The heat death of Samsara.

On Saving Others by Yao Xiang Shakya

All one can do is hope to endure the pain that comes with creation. Mary Kinzie

We cannot escape the material world in watery attempts to save another. The same is true when we ourselves might want another to save us. This murky bath of wishful salvation often in the guise of niceness, of fixing, or defending ourselves or another is off the mark and is no match for the relentless suffering of desire that is at the root of all our misery.

It is spiritual materialism in the form of a bandaid which arises in the guise of being nice….being a nice person….or wanting someone to be nice to us….

Salvation and being nice have nothing to do with one another. Being nice is a worldly convention salvation requires a leaping clear.

In order to stick with the work of spiritual salvation, we must know this or we will be duped by those who see themselves as nice….or our own internal wish to be saved by a nice person….or thinking being nice is salvation. 

Being nice, being a nice person, wishing for others to be nice to us clouds and weakens our endurance to face the pain that comes with the creation of what it takes to be a spiritual aspirant. It is a mistake of the novice or one who thinks he is a spiritual seeker but who has gone off in the wrong direction.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with any particular religion, dogma or doctrine.

When we make this mistake we do not yet know a basic requirement of a spiritual path; we do not know what is real and unreal. If we want a spiritual life, when we seek the higher aim with conviction, we seek the real. But often we stumble at this very first requirement. We do not know what is real and unreal and often mistake the unreal for the real.

Once we fall for the unreal it leads to defensiveness. We defend the unreal with pride and anger.  

This unreal place is difficult because we tend to respond to what we think is real even when it is not. Our devotion to it strengthens around our pride, a sense of self-satisfaction of seeing the unreal as real. It’s the classic tale of mistaking a rope for a snake and responding to it as a snake. This is known as hell for we have forsaken heaven for something unreal. We have wandered off the narrow path in reaction for the sake of something unreal. 

The unreal will never sate or satisfy our thirst for God.

The first step for a spiritual aspirant is to begin to look for the real and unreal, even a little discrimination is helpful….because the seeker can cultivate it.

ON FA SHI’S “I’VE COME TO SEE THE PIGEONS RIDE”
by Ming Zhen Shakya

I had never heard the entire poem. I had heard only the opening line which Fa Shi (Gisho Senderovich) had recited in the course of conversation. “Ah, yes,” she had said, “it’s just as I first wrote, `I’ve come to see the pigeons ride a crested wave of air, to fish for ocean memories…'”

I forgot the conversation but I did not forget that line. It came to mind frequently, always as an incantation that conjured up images of forgotten summers at the Jersey seashore: sea birds – sunlight glinting off their flapping wings – a handful of confetti tossed into the air: hungry birds, hovering over the surf, then dipping – the beach a smorgasbord of tiny shellfish.

The images were so pleasant that the mere remembrance of the line could improve my disposition. I was sufficiently moved to attempt a city-dweller’s haiku.

Fa Shi’s surfing pigeons
Devour worrisome crabs
On sun-drenched sidewalks.

It wasn’t much – too bad I can’t say that it suffered in translation – but it did have that virtue of mediocrity: it was sincere. Someone gave her a copy of my little salute and she graciously thanked me. I was feeling rather pleased with myself until a month later when I got a copy of the entire poem. “What a great fool she must have thought me,” I announced after I got over the impact of the piece. Her poem was an agonized prayer whispered in extremis. It was definitely not intended to be a pretty little mnemonic for childhood pleasantries.

Of course, like those of all fine artwork, its lines are deceptively simple. Surely, we think, a stroke here, a dash there, and it was finished. Fa Shi cannot comment upon the creative struggle: she has no recollection of writing it. She can only explain that she composed the poem while sitting on a Southern California beach. “I was verging on suicide,” she says simply and without poetic license, “I had been falling through space for a long time and then the ground obliged me by coming up to meet me.” She adds, smiling, “It was quite a collision.”

It would have had to be. Gisho Senderovich sets high standards for calamity. She is a Jew, born in Poland in the Thirties, a survivor of the Holocaust.

The “free fall” and the depression about which she now so casually speaks was, this time, occasioned by the self-persecution of hopeless love. The man whom she had worshipped (not too strong a word to describe her obsession) had suddenly, and with stark cruelty, terminated their relationship. Confused, grieving, she began walking around Los Angeles and found her way to the beach at Santa Monica. Whatever hold she still had on reality, she let go of at the beach. She gave away all her money, and then as if to lost her identity, too, she threw away her purse. For three days she sat on the cold sand; then someone called the police who came and put her in a hospital’s psychiatric ward. A week later, coherent – but not much more than that – she was released into her daughter’s custody.

Fa Shi remembers little of the hospital and those days on the beach. She remembers only the lines she composed and that it was Passover and the moon was full.

I’ve come to see the pigeons ride
A crested wave of air
To fish for ocean memories
That are no longer there
To beg pardon of the setting sun
That it must go down to rise
And ask the moon ascending
If it will shine for me tonight
And hesitant, though willingly,
I too await the tide
That, inexorable, washes in
No matter where I hide.

The theme of this exquisite poem is resurrection and the redemption which resurrection implies. Though the words are taken from a universally understood religious vocabulary, they are particularly meaningful to Mahayana Zen Buddhists. Of all Buddhists, we are most devoted to Amitabha, He of the Infinite Solar Light, and to his divine, lunar emanation, the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, whose name is variously translated as the “Savior Who Is Seen Within” or the “Savior who looks down from above.”

What is there about the moon that so attracts us, especially when our defenses are down? Why, when torment separates us from our rational selves, do we come finally to appeal to the moon for help? What racial memory, what code-transmitted message of salvation speaks to us when our distress is so extreme? Why, poor moonstruck lunatics, do we turn to that one face which countenances us when all other faces have turned away?

To understand Fa Shi’s poem, we must first consider the origins of our moon-dependence. Surely it was in times as ancient as our phylum that the moon began to fix its awesome hold upon our psyches.

To recapture a little of the essence of this attachment we need only imagine ourselves living – cut off from all things modern – in some remote agricultural community.

During nights and dark winters the moon would be our principal source of light, often our only source. Out of doors, without the moon we would be immobile.

We would number our days and mark our seasons by a lunar calendar and we would even take a lunar cue for planting seeds.

We would see that it was by lunar command that the tides ebbed and flowed and that women menstruated and were fertile according to the same directive. We would count from the time of conception until the time of birth exactly ten lunar cycles, one for every finger on our prayer-pressed hands. We would labor hard by day, but in the evening, by moonlight, we would know the kind time, the time when, with family reunited, we could rest, eat, drink and love. It was the moon that presided over the best hours of our lives; and we would know we owed it more than veneration.

April is the cruelest month, if, of course, you have survived March. And March is only bearable to those who were not among February’s winterkills.

By the autumnal equinox, we would harvest crops and stockpile fuel, praying that both would last us not only through the winter but far enough into the spring to sustain us through the reaping of our first planting. But which of us would have laid-in enough? By the vernal equinox, we would all be trembling with hunger and uncertainty. This is when the passion begins. Around the northern hemisphere, there is no day so holy as Passover.

Fasting is a spiritual exercise. All religions recommend it especially to those who crave the sights and sounds of divine fantasy. (On or about the fifth day of fast, the human body produces a substance similar to lysergic acid.) And so, with so many starved into spirituality, we observe Lent (Spring’s “lengthening” of days). As long as we have nothing to eat, we might as well fast.

The priests would guide us. They would remind us of our sins and we would offer our hunger in atonement for them. But we would fear, with dreadful anxiety, that if this sacrifice were not enough, the Moon, sickened by our iniquities, would wane and die and enter Nirvana, leaving us to suffer forever in nocturnal darkness. The Rites of Spring are sacrificial rites.

Two weeks later the moon would indeed die, and for three terrible days and nights there would be no moon. But then, our Bodhisattva would hear our cries and, foregoing the pleasures of celestial paradise, would return to help us. Just as the full moon always rises at sunset, the new moon always rises at dawn; and so, on the third dawn, the morning yet dedicated by many to the Goddess of the Dawn, Eastra, our Lord would appear to us anew. (Also Sprach Zarathustra!)

Zen’s connection to Judaism and Christianity is not mere coincidence. Proselytizing Persians brought the salvation cult of Mithras (Maitreya) to China. This is why there is still debate about Bodhidharma’s nationality. Was he an Iranian or an Aryan from India? Aryan, Iran, and even Erin, are all cognates – the Chinese ideogram signifies their common meaning, “noble”. There in the land where Zen was born, the lunar, salvific attributes of Mithras were assimilated to the Guan Yin androgyne, Avalokitesvara, even as Ahura Mazda, the Solar figure, fused with the Buddha of the West, Amitabha. (Recall the many silver, “argent-moon” statues of Avalokitesvara and the golden images of haloed Amitabha.)

There are but three places for the heart: heaven, hell, and purgatory: Nirvana, Samsara, and the slough that separates the two. At critical times in our lives these places meet. We usually locate them through the coordinates of grief.

So, Gisho Senderovich (she was not yet Fa Shi) found herself at the beach where ancient elements converged. There, on the sand, by the sea’s edge, in the chilling ocean air, she brought her passion’s burnt offering: Earth, wind, water, and samsaric hellfire for the ego’s immolation. It was the time for great reckoning.

Gisho had been guilty of the worst sin that a mature person can commit: idolatry. She had failed to detach herself from the things of this world. She had not turned her ego-mirror around to let it reflect the Buddha Self in whose image it had been made. Instead, in the way of adolescents, she continued to look outward at things and people in order to give herself definition and purpose. She had not yet learned that we may need and worship nothing but our Buddha Self. “I am the Lord, thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me!” Indeed.

She had bankrupted her spiritual resources. She had emptied her vaults to squander adoration upon another human ego. And so, sitting amidst the converging elements, she watched the pigeons and contemplated the sun which had not yet set and the moon which had not yet risen.

The persons of her poem are none less than the Holy Trinity; God or Godhead – represented poetically as the setting sun, Amitabha, the Buddha of the West; the redeeming Savior or Bodhisattva, divine offspring, represented by the moon; and the Holy Spirit, the expression of divine love that is breathed into each of us, which is represented here, as it is universally, as a sacred bird – dove, phoenix, quetzal, among others.

Ego-dead, Gisho submits to judgment. She explains, “I’ve come to see the pigeons ride a crested wave of air..” The image is lovely. The Holy Spirit is borne upon a crown of spume-filled wind.

“To fish for ocean memories that are no longer there.” The lines tantalize us. Who is fishing? She or the birds? Both, for they are one in the same. She has lost everything. Not even in the depths of her unconscious `ocean’ is there a minnow’s worth of sustenance. “To beg pardon of the setting sun that it must go down to rise.” Here is the great mystery of the human condition. How we regret our need for divine sacrifice, that vital death and transfiguration without which there can be no salvation.

“And ask the moon ascending if it will shine for me tonight.” This is the poet’s crisis. She begs God to intercede and send the Savior.

Will the Moon rise for her? Will He illuminate her darkness? There can be only one outcome. The Bodhisattva of Compassion will hear her cry and He will come. He will look down upon her and she will find in his face the comforting assurance of the ancient covenant. The tide will flood, a baptismal cleansing. With understandable anxiety she awaits completion of the sacrament. She need not fear. Such is the mercy of our Lord that even if she were to hide, she could not escape His mercy.

The conclusion is always “inexorable.” Those who have been delivered know this to a certainty. (Recall Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, “I hid from Him, and under running laughter… I sped… From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.” Huysmans, too, in his introduction to A Rebours – that disturbing `yellow book’ that Wilde places in Lord Harry’s hands in Dorian Gray – confirms the same ineluctable conclusion. “… while certifying that the will is intact, we must nevertheless allow that the Saviour has much to do in the matter, that he harasses the sinner, tracks him down, shadows him, to use a forcible phrase of the police.” Huysmans, famous and successful after publication of his masterwork on decadence, left Parisian society to enter a Trappist monastery.)

To those who are bereft of resource or habitat there remains the primordial medicine: the healing solace of nature.

Can man be born again? Can his deadened body be filled with life again and can his spirit be redeemed? Of course. It was not long after this remarkable seaside communion that Gisho Senderovich, splendidly tranquil, became Fa Shi, a Buddhist renunciate.

The pigeons were doves of peace.

Gisho Senderovich’s poetry is published under her American name, Gloria King.

It’s important to understand that the spiritual life and the religious life are two different things.

The Spiritual Life

The spiritual life is always an interior life. It is a universally known, protracted series of ecstasies and ecstatic visions, experienced during the state of meditation. By definition, then, there is no ego consciousness involved in any of the experiences.

The spiritual life is not contrived in any way.

Although it exists in potential form in every human being, as a pupa in a little chromosomal cocoon; many people will never see it emerge in its butterfly splendor. Not every human being gets to experience mystical transcendence, and those who do rarely care to discuss it.

Since it is beyond the ken of ego-consciousness, it must be experienced to be understood. Worse, not only do people fail to understand what they are told, they have a peculiar resistance to the information and will not hesitate to dismiss the narrative as fanciful, absurd, and even heretical.

The Religious Life

The religious life, regardless of any spiritual experience, is exterior to the point of advertising itself: parochial schools; distinctive temples; ceremonies and festivities; the raiment of hierarchical rank; garments and adornments that identify the laymen as a follower of the religion – prayer beads, special headdresses, and jewelry that displays a symbol associated with the religion. Prayers – openly said at meals, at the ringing of the Angelus or to the call of the Muezzim – also indicate the individual’s religious affiliation. Genetic endowment is irrelevant except as it indicates family relationship. People tend to follow the religion into which they are born.

The spiritual life, then, being independent of cultural organization, has a commonality which renders it approachable from any religious base. Since visionary experiences vary little among the world’s cultures, it is as if the characters, plot, and setting constitute a drama that can be translated into any language.

Written by Ming Zhen Shakya in collaboration with Master Yin Zhao Shakya & Fa Jun Shakya, Assault on the Summit. Zatma, Order of Hsu Yun. Painting of Ming Zhen Shakya by Fa Ming Shakya of the Order of Hsu Yun in Romania. We are grateful for both teachings.

I Looked Too Hard for Things That Aren’t There

by Yin Kai Shakya, Zen Buddhist Priest Order of Hsu Yun

‘Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realization
he overcame all ill-being.’

‘Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.’
-The Heart Sutra Thich Nhat Hanh

The greatest thing the late Ming Zhen Shakya taught me was the importance of living in a productive, fulfilling way in daily life. This teaching helped me overcome my tendency to cling to metaphysical thinking. Eventually it became the vehicle for my ongoing awakening. I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for it!

Like so many others, I “looked too hard for things that aren’t there” not only in my spiritual practice, but also in life. And after finding nothing, I abandoned the superfluous “looking” altogether. Allow me to illustrate with several antidotes from my daily life.

At Work

I had a challenging day at work. It was one of those days where there were several things on my To-Do list. While working diligently to complete every last item on the list, in a timely and efficient manner, my boss, without warning, calls and tells me to drop everything immediately.

The Executive VP needs something done and he needs it to be done now!
You know what I mean, an urgent request with an alarming deadline followed by the inevitable question, ‘can you make this happen before the end of the day?’ My answer? Well, my answer is always yes, maybe a bit quixotic but still a yes. It comes from my desire to do my best and to do it on time.

And heaven, by god I soldiered through it and delivered the goods with enough time left over for my boss to review the work. Before he handed it off to the executives he made sure that human beings would actually be able to decipher it.

Voila! It was on time and it worked. Yahoo!

At Home

By the end of the day when good-old Miller Time came around, I went outside, sat down in one of our big, plastic Adirondack chairs on the porch, cracked-open a cold one, and watched my dog frolic in the yard.

Sure, it was a challenging day, with unreasonable deadlines, but I got the job done and enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment. As I sat outside in my chair, watching my dog chase the squirrels that are forever zigzagging and whizzing by her, I thought, I worked hard today. We can pay the rent, and am enjoying a rest in my backyard where I imagined my twins to come will play. I felt good.

When Miller Time was over, I went back inside to cook gumbo for me and my wife, and our two babies who are growing inside her tummy. That took me from feeling good, to feeling great (it always does).

On Facebook®

After dinner my wife and I retired to the living room sofa, to relax and catch-up on what we’d missed on Facebook® while we were both at work.

That’s when I went from feeling great to feeling like I wanted to choke people.
A friend of mine had posted a link to an article on Vice.com, entitled “Millennials On Spirit Quests Are Ruining Everything About Ayahuasca” and it caught my eye as I scrolled-through my newsfeed. I should’ve just chuckled and continued on, but I didn’t. Nope. Like a jackass, I clicked on it and started reading. I won’t go too deeply into the details of the article here, I’ll just give the premise and leave it at that-

Apparently, upwardly-mobile young adults who feel unfulfilled in their lives are traveling to South America to hang out with Native Peoples and drink the hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca, with the hopes of having spiritual visions. This, in-turn, has brought a lot of unwanted attention to the afore-mentioned Native Peoples, and such attention is becoming a threat to their culture.

Like Cain, the anger rose up, and from that anger I formulated a comment which I left on my friend’s post. It read something like this-

“What’s this vision quest bullshit? Really? These people need a vision quest? What sheer stupidity! Let me tell you something. There is nothing, nothing more to life than working hard, raising your family right, exercising, and fly fishing (or whatever task you prefer to master). If you’re looking for anything more out of life than that you’re a rube, because it doesn’t exist. Period. Full-stop.”

Ugh! I know, the less a man makes declarative statements the less likely he is to look foolish in retrospect. But as no one fully understands the workings of karma I was blessed with an experience while washing the dishes not long after I’d posted the comment.

In the Kitchen Holy Place

It’s no accident that I enjoy spending time in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning. I suppose I could be described as “Old School” in the sense that yes, I believe the old adage that “a man’s home is his castle,” but I take it to include my wife and my forthcoming twins. I do my very best to make it our castle. But there’s one stipulation: The kitchen is where my best Dharma work is done. This translates into the kitchen is my holy place.

It’s where everything is cooked up, eaten, washed, dried and put into place. It’s a place of refuge where my consciousness is cooked, chewed, washed, dried and put straight. It’s a mortar and pestle where cause and effect, karma, and the whole universe are ground down and changed in the ordinariness of cooking, eating, and cleaning.

Everything is fine, there.

Those words came to me, after I finished doing the dishes, while I stood there looking at the clean countertops and the empty sink, which all seemed to glow in absolute perfection in the evening sunlight which beamed through my kitchen window. I knew the sink wasn’t perfect because I washed all the dishes that were in there, and the countertop wasn’t perfect because I wiped it clean.

I saw they were perfect because washing the dishes washed me off, and wiping-off the countertop wiped me clean.

I stood there, giddy…giggling as the experience occurred.

My consciousness, indeed, me, arises just the same as dirty dishes arise from cooking and serving dinner. And for some ineffable reason, this realization makes me suffer less, and gives me a deeply-abiding peace and joyfulness unlike
anything I’ve ever felt.

Zen, lovely in its inherent simplicity, gives everything in the here-and-now to experience this joy. The beloved Heart Sutra is a lens to contemplate and follow the Eight-Fold Path in a life in-which to practice.

What more is needed?

Nothing.

Equanimity comes from the experience of keenly discerning that without dirty dishes and dirty countertops, a clean kitchen cannot exist, and if your kitchen is clean, sooner or later the need to eat, along with literally everything else, contributes to the arising of a dirty kitchen.

It’s life… and it’s all fine… this not looking for things that aren’t there.