Here in this form of meditation,
you haven’t got to perform any particular action in order to develop mindfulness,
but you have only to be mindful and aware of whatever you do…
[but] you should forget yourself completely, and lose yourself in what you do.
~~
Walpola Rahula,
What the Buddha Taught, p.72

So many questions of the right and the proper.

The feeling of cold water upon the tongue is beautiful, holding the liquid in the mouth, feeling its temperature rise as it interacts with the natural heat of the body; an intimate copper kettle preparing water. The moment is broken, and there appears an unnecessary anger.

An agitation.

No reason.

Cold comfort.

Writing without Buddhism means nothing to me.
Zen without writing is OK, but it’s not as lovely or as alive for me
without the writing. For me, the combination is my true expression.
~~
Natalie Goldberg
“Natalie Goldberg and Steve Hagan: Zen and the creative process,”
The Writer, v.114, i.12 (Dec., 2001), p.26.

I can’t write by hand. I enjoy the rhythm of the clickety-clack of my keyboard. The space bar sounds different than the other keys. I use it the way drummers use the high hat cymbal. It’s always there, setting up what immediately comes after it more than it comes to presence under its own terms. The sound of the space bar resounds in the meaningful silence between the words. I play the space bar with my index finger. No thumbs for me, and I mean, no thumbs. I don’t use them when I type. I use four fingers only. And when I come down on the space bar after a period, there is a little thing I do with my finger, where it comes up, shoots up, the way a jazz drummer will fling his stick off the high hat, rolls his wrist, and bring the stick back onto the set in the exact place he needs it to.

But I’m stuck on that four fingers thing. Seriously, what are my other six fingers doing while their buddies are so busy? I’m reminded of the way my oldest brother had to do all the big chores, like painting the house, while I got to sit inside and play G.I. Joe’s. It wasn’t because I was lazy, but rather because I was so small and useless that it was more efficient without me. When I try typing the proper way, using the home keys and all that, I’m slow slow slow. Then again, perhaps that is half of my problem as a writer. Perhaps if I forced myself to use the home keys, my mind wouldn’t be able race ahead of the cursor so much. Perhaps forcing my body to slow down would inadvertently slow my mind down as well.

I’m not going to try it now. If I had the opportunity, I would rather speed my fingers up. There’s always the fantasy to write at the speed of thought. The interesting thing is that it feels as if that is what is actually happening. “The speed of thought” conjures up a fast-moving line, a bullet train. In my experience, thoughts are less like trains and more like bubbles on a boiling opaque surface. There are no necessary connections between them other than the source of their opaque origin.

But in both of those images, you have to ask, where is the self? In the first, is the self standing at the station? In the second, is the self in a sort of life-raft, floating on the surface, effected only by thoughts that bubble up under it? And in both of the images, how is the self envisioned if it is separated from thought?

The words on the page are snapshots. The question, however, is where one determines the outer frame. Does one write the word, the phrase, the sentence? At what level is the thought engaged? Or is there no engagement in the first place, since the engagement implies the acceptance of a difference between mind and thought, a difference that Buddhism suggests is illusory? Then there bubbles up yet another question: what is doing the writing here?

It’s a wonderful practice for stepping out of ourselves,
for stepping back and freeing ourselves from rigid structures that say,
“You must do it this way.”
~~
Steve Hagan
“Natalie Goldberg and Steve Hagan: Zen and the creative process,”
The Writer, v.114, i.12 (Dec., 2001), p.26.

I love the Grateful Dead. I love those moments when I have no idea where the sound is coming from. It is when the sound is the Grateful Dead. It is not Jerry on lead guitar, Bobby on rhythm, Phil on bass, Mickey and Bill on drums, and whoever is sitting down at the keyboards. There are no individuals at that moment. There is only the band. The Grateful Dead.

They open themselves to the song and channel it. Vessels.

“The gentleman is not a vessel,” a stodgy old man says.

The Grateful Dead is no gentleman. They do not contend.

A nicer old man, on an buffalo, on his way out of town, offers, “Become the channel of the world…Become the pattern of the world.”

The Grateful Dead has a song — though it is not a song — that is known as “Space.” I haiku it for you now. It comes like the wind, disconcerting like the wind. Sand pebbles scatter. Ooooh.

The worst enemy of Zen experience, at least in the beginning,
is the intellect which consists and insists in discriminating subject from object.
The discriminating intellect, therefore, must be cut short
if Zen consciousness is to unfold itself.~~
Victor Kobayashi
“The Quest for Experience: Zen, Dewey, and Education”
Comparative Education Review, v.5, n.3 (Feb., 1962), 218-219.

Did I really just write about the Grateful Dead? How ridiculous can this paper get? And I mean seriously, just how ridiculous can it get? I really feel as if I could make this thing as ridiculous as I could push it, and that there would still be a valid argument for its description as a term paper for an Asian Philosophies class.

There is a standard, of course, but the standard cannot be used to measure the level of a paper’s ridiculosity. The standard measures on a completely different plane. It would like measuring light in pounds. Light moves horizontally, while pounds measure vertically (unless of course, they don’t). Whether this paper addresses the standard must be determined without reference to its level of ridiculousness.

This entity, this thing ridiculous, is not apart from every standard. In analytical philosophy papers, for example, the standard provides a safeguard against a high level of ridiculousness. For analytical papers, the desired low level of ridiculousness manifests itself in the entire goal of the philosophy. One of its major aims, after all, is to not be ridiculous.

In Asian Philosophies, however, some of the major tenets of the canonical works read, to an American audience, like a rerun of Old Wise Men Say The Darndest Things, with Bill Cosby: “’Name can name no lasting name.’ That’s cute. Would you like some Jell-o Pudding?” And the studio audience groans.

How is this possible? What is it about the writing of Asian Philosophy that allows it to be empty of meaning, but at the same time, mean so much to us?

Perhaps it is only empty like a jar is empty. It waits patiently for you to fill it. And Tao overflows. The text before you, the Asian Philosophy text on the page, is the jar. The words form the jar, but it takes a reader to pour herself into it, the Tao of the reader pours out and into the jar, and next thing the reader knows, she finds herself in the text. It is open enough to give the reader the space in which to find herself within it. It is a welcoming space. The ocean to the fish.

The analytical standard is all angles. If one happens to find oneself there, one arrives within a confined space, a tight hallway between introduction and conclusion. There is movement, but it is a rigidly confined movement. A rat through a maze. But usually, one rarely finds oneself in an analytical paper. The experience is more akin to looking down on the empty maze, and it is almost always accompanied by the self-doubt that you just might be the rat.

The paper is changing its feel, now. It has become something more Western. There’s a sense of humor about it. Asian Philosophies have a sense of joy about them, but not much humor. What humor there is definitely appreciates Karaoke. I can’t help but picture Mr. Miyagi — God rest his soul — with his knee-slapping laughter. And when he was Al in Happy Days, the same kind of humor. It was funny. He was funny. But there was something about it that made you feel like there was a lesson in it. One didn’t laugh with Mr. Miyagi. One learned from Mr. Miyagi’s laughter.

It is as if the Asian will forever appear wiser than the Western. This slips into Orientalism, in its Saidic sense, but that doesn’t mean its not true at least at the level of the type. I’ve never read Said, but I imagine that there is something to be said of the fact that the sun rises in the East. That day begins there is understood as time begins there. The Asian, then, is understood as being older, and hence wiser and more experienced, than his Western brothers. There is more to it, of course — Said’s book is 432 pages, and I’m pretty sure it bases its claim on historical facts, not geographical and metaphorical ones — but something really must be said about that pattern of facts. It really should be included in some scholarly paper on Asian Philosophies.

But under what discipline could such a fact be introduced? It couldn’t be history, and it couldn’t really be geography, unless we’re talking some special niche of a socially-focused geography, but it couldn’t be a politically-focused section of the niche. The pattern of facts talks no politics. The pattern of facts seems to speak without compulsion. Perhaps the niche we’re looking for is more of a socially-focused geology. The position of people upon the earth in relation to the position of people upon another part of the earth, but except for the facts of consciousness, few other social elements are needed. An awareness of each other, sure, but beyond that? The facts of each other measured in a socially-geologic relation determines the typecasting of Mr. Miyagi. Or is that just a little ridiculous?

Know what is enough—
Abuse nothing.
Know when to stop—
Harm nothing.
~~
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
trans. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 41.
~~
This is how to last a long time

I picture a… I describe. There’s an amateur mistake to understand describe as see and report. The professional knows that describing is so much more than seeing. There’s a complete embodiment. You want every sense firing. The toes should crinkle in a flame, the shoulders should pulse up through the neck, the tongue should feel tight, constricted, pressed flat against the bottom of your mouth, the massive heavy weight of the tongue. There needs to be a sound. A kind of round sound, but one that is not afraid to crackle. There should be at least two sounds playing off of each other. This becomes the voice of the piece. It begins to speak on its own. It speaks to itself, but knows itself as other than itself. This allows for judgment. It also allows for value. It should be a bouncing sound, and the bouncing should be felt. This bouncing is the same as a dancing. The two selves dance. Sometimes a third appears, and when it does, there is usually an apprehension, but you often have to trust that this new self means no harm. It will stop just short of interfering. It only wants its place at the table. These are no tigers. No animals. Everyone is welcome at the table. It has the ability to get a little creepy at this point. When three are present, there is always the chance that you might miss something. You’ll be facing one and all of sudden you’re not facing another. Without being able to look each other in the face, all three at once, then something always has the potential for creepiness. At the same time, there is a force to three people facing each other. It may not be an attractive force, but it sure acts as one. This is not to say that the result of this force is always attractive. Often violence breaks out. There is a certain sense of security to having the table between all three of you. Everyone has their own space, and at the same time, everyone shares the space of the table. The creepiness goes beyond just the force pulling the three of you together. There is always a question of a force pushing you, or worse, a force pushing the three of you together. The possibility of a fourth force implies the potential for a fourth one of you out there. It all gets very weird from here. Much simpler to keep it at two voices. With two voices, the outcome is either fight or fuck. Unless of course, there’s dancing.

And there’s always time for dancing.

The fly
Wringing it hands and rubbing its feet
Don’t swat it!
~~
Kobayashi Iba
Classic Haiku: a master’s collection
trans. Yuzuru Miura
(Rutland, Vermont [no shit!]: Tuttle, 1991], 49.

Do your thing. That’s what we’re talking about here. That is the basis of it really. At the end of the day, as the sun dips on California, that’s what Asian Philosophies tell us. Do your thing.

And that’s cool. It really is. You got your thing. I got my thing. Once in a while, those things hook up, and we do our thing. That’s cool.

That’s the surface of it anyway. That’s what you get when you first look at it. But there’s more to it than that. Ever wonder why American rock songs are three minutes long? It’s because the surface level can only interest us for so long. It’s like watching three minutes of the same collection of patterns. Its fun to watch for a little bit, fun to figure out, but if that’s all there is, well then, that’s all there is. What’s next?

But there’s something to be said for going deeper. We watch the pattern come at us, but if we give it enough depth, we can enter the pattern. All of sudden the pattern has changed. It’s not a pattern anymore, but a maze. And we start scrambling through it. Certain similarities are acknowledged, and soon we’ve got a sense of neighborhoods. But this sense is necessarily not present in the maze. It has to possess…but no, no it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to or not have to.

The only thing it has to do is go deeper.

I’m writing this on a word processor. My screen is situated so that as I type this line, it is located near the equator of my screen map. There is a long blue emptiness below it (blue because of a preference I’ve set on my word processor). I type into this emptiness. The blue space ends at grayish horizontal bar that stretches across the entire width of the screen. This gray bar contains statistical information. Right now, it says “Page 7, Sec 1, 7/7 : At 5.4” Ln 17 Col 74 : 2607/2608 : then there is this crazy little icon that moves with my cursor. What is this thing for? The icon is of a book turning open, and a little pencil writing lines on the book. As the icon gets to the end of a line its “writing” it picks itself back up and returns to the other side of the book, and the little page turns. I mean, if I’m looking at the cursor where my words are coming out, I can’t see this little pencil moving, or at least can’t see it as other than some little fly out of the corner of my eye, why would some person, or really, some team of persons actually decide on the necessity of this icon. I can’t appreciate its purpose unless I’m not looking at my words. Because when you stop typing, the pencil stops. And if you stop for long enough, the pencil turns into a red X, as if the fact that a person wasn’t writing, wasn’t actively producing something on the page deserved a red X. That is the icon of the moment you stop. It represents it. Are you trying to tell me that Microsoft doesn’t focus all of its needs on management, that it doesn’t ignore the plight of the worker? I didn’t think so. Anyway, what was I saying?

Here in this form of meditation,
you haven’t got to perform any particular action in order to develop mindfulness,
but you have only to be mindful and aware of whatever you do…
[but] you should forget yourself completely, and lose yourself in what you do.