Tag Archives: Buddhism

What Moves You?

Have you ever had a bad day out climbing? I have. Quite a few, actually, but not because anyone got hurt or any other valid reason. Mostly they were days when I didn’t send some route. (Even worse if this tragedy occurred on the last day of a road trip, and I wouldn’t be coming back any time soon!) Once or twice my day was “bad” because my friend, with whom I was competitive, climbed something I couldn’t. So funny-slash-sad how many times I went home moping because I felt my day spent at play in some beautiful natural spot with my amigos was not good enough, or because I was not good enough on that day.

It’s been more than two decades since I started climbing and I still fall prey to such delusions from time to time, but far less frequently. I like to think that through age, experience, and concerted effort I’ve succeeded in clearing away much of the muck that can obscure the reflective inner surface of climbing. It feels so cliché to have to say it, but climbing isn’t about the goal, it’s about the process. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the process and the goal are one. If you’ve ever felt yourself chasing after something with your climbing, and felt dissatisfied when you didn’t get it, it might be worth taking a look at what it is that moves you.

Karma is one of the central concepts of Buddhism. It describes action in the world driven by egotistical wants or fears. When we do something out of desire for gain or fear of loss or pain, we generate karma. Good or bad, Karma turns the ornate, cosmic wheel of samsara: the cycle of death and rebirth. As long as we generate karma, Buddhists believe, we will be reborn into the universe again and again forever.

Me? I don’t really believe in karma or reincarnation, but I do agree strongly with the idea that the things we see as problems — the sources of our suffering, great or small — exist in our own minds. The happiness and peace we all seek in life can be ours if we learn to look inward instead of outward for answers. When we come to a sense of peace with ourselves, we can free ourselves from the cycle of worry and live a more honest, natural, and contented life. Climbing can be a great tool in this quest, or it can be just another way to play out our fears and desires.

You could say I was generating a lot of karma with my climbing when I was younger, always worrying if I was the strongest or the coolest, always imagining how much happier I’d be if I could climb the next grade or the next. For a time, I climbed half out of some natural love for the act, and half to prove something to myself and others.

To be fair, I think this is all a part of the process. “For the beginner,” Shunryo Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “practice without effort is not true practice. … Especially for young people, it is necessary to try very hard to achieve something. You must stretch out your arms and legs as wide as they will go.” But I like to believe that I am continually learning to climb for less needful reasons, to just let it be what it is: a powerful interaction between my mind, body, and various bits of stone in beautiful places.

Karmic climbing is a powerful draw, no doubt. Many an over-achieving die-hard training addict will fight for their belief that might makes right and the ends justify the means. It’s why some climbers lie about or exaggerate their ascents, obsess, brag, chip, number chase, and downplay the accomplishments of others. But you can’t skip through the process and expect to gain anything meaningful. Without the process of learning and progression through experience, climbing is as hollow as a big booming sandstone flake, and just as likely to send you hurtling into the void.

This is where my understanding, ever changing, lies at the moment. Still, my mind draws me back into manufactured worry, needless comparisons. In the practice of climbing and of our day-to-day life, it seems we must constantly tap ourselves on the shoulder with a reminder to stop generating problems and let the moment be as it is, perfect in its imperfection. Each climb, each move, is a new chance to act without desire or ego, to work at the beginningless and endless craft of action for its own sake.

“Begin anywhere,” John Cage wrote. Begin now. Or now. Or now. It’s never too soon or too late. Repeatedly, we will fail to appreciate the perfect inner kernel of climbing, but, as Suzuki writes, “The result is not the point; it is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable.”

On Balance

Balance is central to the act of climbing; it allows for controlled movement, for rhythm and flow from one hold to the next. Balance between a pushing foot and a pulling hand, between two feet pressing against the sides of a chimney, between the downward pressure of a foot and the equal and opposite upward pressure of the rock.

Without balance, climbing becomes nothing but a test of strength: who can haul his poor bones farther up the wall before exhaustion sets in. One who climbs out of balance looks, in climbing parlance, “thrutchy,” which is as graceless as it sounds.

To climb with balance is to climb efficiently. For every degree of misalignment, you must pay with strength. Out of balance and you are out of control, at the mercy of gravity, easily pushed and pulled about in its unrelating warp.

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher,” said the Dalai Lama. In the practice of climbing, gravity is both adversary and instructor. Balance is the language of gravity. The climber speaks it with his body. Fluency comes only through time, study, and relentless practice.

A strong climber might appear impressive, but a climber in balance makes difficult things look easy.

I have a very athletic friend who routinely asks me, “I want to climb 5.13. What do I have to do to get stronger?”

I always tell him the same thing: Don’t worry about getting stronger; work on your technique, your balance. Strength is my friend’s crutch — he thinks it will solve his problems to have more and more of it. In reality, he could do with a little less, as it’s confusing the real issue. He can do many moves using mostly strength, but really, he could do them much more easily if he relied less on his muscles and more on his balance.

The lesson is replayed every time a young couple visits the gym for the first time. The man climbs with his arms, as if trying to pull the wall down to the ground. The young woman dances up the wall, balanced over her feet. “The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world,” wrote Lao Tzu in the Tao de Ching.

Of course, both strength and balance are required to climb. Too much of one and not enough of the other is its own kind of imbalance. Likewise, the mental and the physical must be balanced. Activity and rest must be balanced.

In climbing and in the rest of life, it is easy to forsake one thing for another while completely passing over the Middle Way. Many of my climber friends have let promising careers and relationships stagnate in exchange for more and more time to climb. Many of my career-oriented friends have let their bodies and their senses of adventure atrophy in exchange for advancement or money. These just are a few examples of lives lived out of balance.

I have found it is helpful to constantly monitor balance and to adjust whenever things fall out of line.

Zen Story: Every-Minute Zen

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Sandals and umbrella

Every-Minute Zen*

Zen students are with their masters at least two years before they presume to teach others. Nan-in was visited by Tenno, who, having passed his apprenticeship, had become a teacher. The day happened to be rainy, so Tenno wore wooden clogs and carried an umbrella. After greeting him Nan-in remarked: “I suppose you left your wooden clogs in the vestibule. I want to know if your umbrella is on the right or left side of the clogs.”

Tenno, confused, had no instant answer. He realized that he was unable to carry his Zen every minute. He became Nan-in’s pupil, and he studied six more years to accomplish his every-minute Zen.

It is easy to live in your head. I have been doing it nearly every moment of my existence, for some 30-odd years. The average human only lives “in the moment” for brief flashes, when facing overwhelming joy, fear, pain, or exhaustion, or during other intense moments of engagement. This “nowness” is one of the things I seek when rock climbing — the singular focus when physical and mental engagement overwhelms my self-awareness, my thoughts of the past and future, my insecurities, my anxieties… .

But living in the moment is not only a function of extreme circumstances. When you practice anything extensively, you can access “flow” states and feel that sort of unconscious action. Athletes frequently speak of it, but artists or the spiritually minded might describe it as a kind of inspired or ecstatic state. Still, it never lasts for long. Many a gifted individual has spent his or her life seeking a longer stay in the perfect moment.

In “Every-Minute Zen,” Nan-in reminds Tenno that understanding Zen is all well and good, but what good is it if you cannot keep it with you always?

After you brushed your teeth this morning, which way did the head of the brush face? When you received change from the cashier, how much was there, and in what denominations? When you drove to work or to school last week, how many blue cars did you pass? If you cannot answer these questions, you do not have every-minute Zen.

Don’t worry, I don’t have it either. I always strive for greater awareness in the moment, but end up loosing track of the simplest things: I forget to put the wet laundry in the dryer and leave my keys dangling in the front-door lock.

The world I inhabit seems very distant from the monastic world of Nan-in and Tenno. I monitor Facebook and Twitter. I send text messages and check my calendar for appointments. I think of things I want to write and then work to create them, slowly and with much hand-wringing. At every turn, something asks for my attention to be directed to somewhere else and to some other time in the past or the future. I am not certain this is so wrong, but to the extent that it causes me anxiety, lack of focus, and confusion, it is something I seek to change.

* * *

I kick off my sandals and take note of how they fall, on which side of my umbrella, straining to think of nothing else. But even before they hit the floor, I am adrift — What would it feel like to be enlightened? I ponder. Already I have failed.

But failure lives in the past, which is no longer my concern. We have only to let each moment follow the next as it will; so simple yet so difficult.

Luckily, there is another moment coming — here it is, just now — in which to start the long journey into the infinitesimal nucleus of existence. My thought is, let’s start with one-second Zen and go from there.

*If you find this story to be interesting, please consider purchasing the masterful Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki. I have owned and given away three or four copies of the book already. It’s pretty damn good.

You Haven’t Heard of Mary Oliver?

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Mary Oliver

This isn’t my first blog post about the poet Mary Oliver, but it’s the first to see the light of day. I abandoned the others because they kept straying into the realm of dry, academic analysis. When writing about serious writers, you see, I tend to get an inferiority complex — do I dare comment on the work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet with anything less than polished, incisive, and heavily annotated prose? Do I have the right to even utter Oliver’s name without having read and considered carefully her entire oeuvre? And the words of the many critics who have critiqued her work? And her biographical information? Soon, instead of a quick blog about a poet I rather enjoy, I felt like I was looking down the barrel of a graduate thesis.

But then I reminded myself of a few things:

We are all going to die someday. Maybe soon.
This is my personal blog. It is not the New York Fucking Times. And even if it was the NY F”ing T, that still doesn’t mean everything has to be a work of genius — it just has to say something interesting in an interesting way. I’ve read plenty of sub-genius writing in the Times and The New Yorker and National Geographic. Genius is a very high bar; if you’ll settle for nothing less, then you’ll end up with nothing at all.
My goal here isn’t to convince you, dear reader, that I am the world’s foremost Mary Oliverologist or some sort of poetry expert, but to share something cool with you. The truth is, I haven’t read all — or even most — of Oliver’s 26 books of poetry. In fact, I only own one of those books, called House of Light. And that one didn’t even win a Pulitzer (!). But still, I have read enough of her writing over the years to know that she is worth reading.
Oliver, now 76 years old, is both popular (as poets go) and controversial (in that several critics have given her bum reviews, despite, or because, of this popularity). But whatever any critic thinks of her, I find something of great value in her writing. Therefore, I am under no obligation to defend her, only to share what it is about her that I find to be so valuable. If you agree or disagree, I would be honored if you’d opine in the comments section below.

Now, in brief, my explanation of why you should pick up House of Light and other books by Mary Oliver:

First
She is a master of language. After studying literature in college and getting an MFA in poetry, I have yet to encounter a writer who more powerfully evokes the sensual aspects of nature than does Oliver. Three examples of many (many!):

“the mossy hooves /of dreams, including / the spongy litter / under tall trees.”

“Now the soft / eggs of the salamander / in their wrapping of jelly / begin to shiver. … Off they go, / hundreds of them, / like the black / fingerprints of the rain.”

“the soft rope of a water moccasin / slid down the red knees /of a mangrove, the hundred of ribs / housed in their smooth, white / sleeves of muscle …”

Salamander eggs "in their wrappings of jelly"

Second

Oliver uses the images of nature to great affect in exploring the biggest, most unanswerable of human questions. She uses them as a lens through which to view being and consciousness, the existence (or lack thereof) of God or god-like beings. She ties together the religious and philosophical traditions of the West and the East, mingling thoughts of Buddha (see: “The Buddha’s Last Instructions“) with the images of Christianity (see: “Snake” as well as the various examples of serpent imagery and references to Jesus throughout the House of Light) with the intense love of nature of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. In Emerson’s view, nature was the the inexhaustible source of our greatest understanding. Oliver seems to have taken this to heart, making nature the subject of nearly every poem, the wordless teacher of every important lesson we need to know. In “Lilies,” she even manages to reference a Zen story, which in turn references the alignment between Christian and Zen principles. She writes:

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as that old idea. …

Then compare that to the Zen story “Not Far From Buddhahood,” in which a student reads the following Bible passage to his master “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Luke 12:27). The master, on hearing the passage, offers, sagely, “Whoever uttered these words, I consider an enlightened man.”

Lily of the field

With all of Oliver’s references to Buddhism, it’s hard to imagine she did not read this Zen story. Or, if she did not, it is still hard to imagine she did not read the passage from Luke and see the similarities to what today we would call an Eastern way of thinking. It is a wonderful connection that re-orders the world. We humans could learn a thing or two from the lilies that “melt without protest” on the tongues of the cattle. We could be more at piece with the true nature of our circumstances. But that is not our nature. But we are part of nature. And the serpent eats its own tail…

Third
Because almost every poem in House of Light is about death, in a roundabout way. And since, as I mentioned, we are all going to die (maybe soon), and if you roll that all up with the first two reasons for picking up a Mary Oliver book, you will see that what I am talking about is poetry with an existential purpose. This woman has for over 50 years been intently observing and considering nature, herself, humankind, consciousness, time, and death and has, in her poetry, communicated a vision of the world that very few of us will ever have the time, effort, or talent to formulate. She is offering us an insight into something at once greater than ourselves and within ourselves.

And she does it in a way that is in perfect accord with our times. Unlike the old masters, Oliver speaks in the parlance of our times, in a language that even the least poetically inclined can make sense of without a thesaurus or the help of a teacher. She is carrying on an age-old tradition and doing the poet’s work.

This may not be the golden age of poetry, but that fact does not diminish one whit the value of today’s poetry. Mary Oliver may have sold some goodly number of books in her day, but I do not think most of my friends and acquaintances have been the ones purchasing them. Chances are, you have not been, either. So take this as an excuse to spend a little of that latté money on something with more enduring value. And also, take a walk in the woods.

Zen Story: Not Far From Buddhahood

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A little Saturday night Zen.

“Not Far From Buddhahood” is one of my favorites. When I was a child, my father used to read to us after dinner from both the Old Testament and from Zen Flesh Zen Bones (the source of the story below; you can purchase a copy here, if you like it). At the time, any similarities between Western and Eastern wisdom were lost on me. Now, I’ve come to believe that a universal kernel of truth resides at the heart of our many human philosophies.

Organized religions always seem loathe to acknowledge that truth is not exclusive to one belief system. Zen tends not to have this problem. I do not think it’s fair to say I’m a Zen Buddhist or Zen practitioner, but certainly Zen is the closest thing to the constantly evolving Open Source Philosophy that I’ve created and live by. This story does a good job of expressing the Zen belief that truth can be found anywhere, from the petals of a flower to the Christian Bible.

-TBL

Not Far From Buddhahood

A university student while visiting Gasan asked him: “Have you ever read the Christian Bible?”

“No, read it to me,” said Gasan.

The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these…Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

Gasan said: “Whoever uttered those words I consider an enlightened man.”

The student continued reading: “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, is shall be opened.”

Gasan remarked: “That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.”

Zen Story: The Blockhead Lord

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Zen Temple

Today’s Zen story is about power, wisdom, ego, honesty, and manipulation. It can be read, along with 100 other great Zen stories at 101zenstories.com.

The Blockhead Lord*

Two Zen teachers, Daigu and Gudo, were invited to visit a lord. Upon arriving, Gudo said to the lord: “You are wise by nature and have an inborn ability to learn Zen.”

“Nonsense,” said Daigu. “Why do you flatter this blockhead? He may be a lord, but he doesn’t know anything of Zen.”

So, instead of building a temple for Gudo, the lord built it for Daigu and studied Zen with him.

Gudo’s tactic of flattery did not go over well. Daigu spoke bluntly, without much tact, and the lord saw this as a sign of Daigu’s superior grasp of Zen. Ironically, the fact that the lord chose to build a temple for Daigu may well have proved Gudo right. Who was the more perceptive of the two? Who the more honest? Perhaps Daigu’s remark was only a more complex form of manipulation. One can never be so sure….

The Blockhead Lord

(*If you like this story, consider buying the excellent book Zen Flesh Zen Bones)

The Stone Mind

Exploring the intersection of mind and stone