Part Two - I wrote this around February Seventeenth 2000, the forty-third day out of ninety.
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I realize that this letter may come right on the heels of my last, but it can't be helped. When you have a song in your heart, you have to sing out. I don't really currently have a song in my heart, but I do want to write another letter, so here it is.
Today is February 14th. Happy Valentines Day, I wish love to everyone. Tomorrow morning, we begin a nine-day Sesshin; I've never sat one of that length, and I am a little excited and nervous. We had a five-day Sesshin a while back, and, as is usual about Sesshins, given their unusually experiential nature, I find myself unable to come up with a metacomment about how it went. (I have the same communication block around Burning Man each year for perhaps the same reason). I do remember having an emotional and seemingly profound experience, something having to do with my life when I was a teenager, over the afternoon of the last day of the five-day. For readers of this letter who have not sat one, I think that the settling and deepening that happens during Sesshins, even more than during our normal daily sitting here, brings up all the stress points (places of unresolved past experiences, locations of tightness and resistance) in one's body and psyche. The surfacing is, I think, mostly experienced as painful or challengingly raw until it is worked through, and then comes greater peace, energy and clarity. I try to respect Sesshins and approach them with intentionality; today I am trying to generate that.
Many of my friends and family have told me that they don't think they could do what I am doing here now at Tassajara, and I disagree; all that is fundamentally needed to do this practice is a willingness, which we all potentially have, to meet the resistance involved in the transformation into a bigger, deeper, more open life, and all the other details, I can't sit in the lotus position, I couldn't stand the cold, are negotiable. I have a reaction, however, when people here sometimes say that this life is easy. Sometimes, it feels easy to me, and that happens more frequently the longer I'm here, but some things about being here, most especially the sleeping schedule, feel anything but easy. I think that if I was in a normal life-mind, if I wasn't in a meditative state, with an intention to open to and work with pain and resistance, I would find life here grounds for lots of complaining. At the very least, I am incredulous that, apparently, there has been talk for years of establishing a fourth SF Zen Center campus (besides this place, Green Gulch in Marin and City Center in SF) that would be even more rigorous than here, for example no social talking ever and a Sesshin-like sitting schedule year-round. But I also know that many old-country Asian monasteries are set up like that or even more difficult, and that I was almost unbelieving when someone first told me about the Tassajara set-up years ago, and it has turned out OK.
My job as Tenzo's assistant involves disposal of large amounts of mice shit, as well as dead mice and also mice that still have some hop to them. The live ones (caught in Buddha-approved non-lethal traps or found in food boxes) I take across the river to the old abandoned bathhouse and send off into the woods, hoping they can't swim far and that they won't follow me across the bridge back to the food.
There are lots of international students here: two French, two German, an English, an Irish, a Norwegian, a Bulgarian and a Columbian, and probably some Canadians. The Americans are from all over the USA. The age range is wide also, with Kendra being the youngest young'n here.
About half the people here are women, and sometimes I think all of our spiritual advancement would be best served by separate male and female monasteries. That being said, I've noticed that, for me, one little austerity about being here is that most of the women are bald or buzz-cutted, and that what they wear are monk's robes or work clothes. I've noticed the pleasure that I take from days off when one or two women wear simple long skirts, from the few painted nails or heads of long hair here, and from Kendra at our home. I am clearly seeing, by contrast, the pleasure I take in the outside world when I see women dressed femininely -- skirts, dresses, stockings, makeup, etc.
The Roshi (Reb) had a heart attack last autumn. Because of this, he has not been running up the mountain on his day off. Because of this, the temple does not send a vehicle up to the crest to bring runners who ran up back down. Because of this, any days I run up, I end up running or walking down, which hurts my meditation-posture-sensitive knees and seems to make my joints tighter the next time I sit. Because of this, I have not run as often as last year, and have instead been swimming laps in the pool here, splashing around, armed with goggles and flippers.
We have the option of having Dokusan/practice interviews with the teachers (I have found that these are sometimes like the classic Zen conversations of a thousand years ago ("what is the sound of one hand clapping?"), sometimes like therapy, and, for you Landmark-heads, sometimes like a "committed conversation for action" (the action being Zen Buddhist practice). Since I got here I've done one with Gaelyn Godwin, that was challenging and seemed valuable, and I am pleased during Sesshin I am scheduled to do my third with the director Leslie James (who I am beginning to see as my third Zen Center teacher) and one with the head Monk Charlie Luminous Owl Henkle (who is about my age but who has been ordained now for six years). I've only had one with Reb, and for now I am choosing not to do more because I find them unproductive in a hard to define way. My first few weeks here, I wanted the ability to have practice discussion with my other teacher, Paul Haller, who is in the City, and who I was in to classes with this fall; I had some questions that I wanted to discuss with him.
At Zen Center, we vow to "refrain from all intoxicants." In my experience, there are some mind-altering drugs that, if used properly, I think can help people to be more profoundly alive (LSD and mushrooms), some that can do this if used in moderation but that also often seem to exact a physical and mental cost for it (MDMA and alcohol), and some that I honestly feel are just rushes, escapes, intoxicants, crutches (speed, cocaine, cigarettes, sugar and caffeine). I've seen people near me unable to function without caffeine. I have at times been unhappy with my own relationship to it (a gallon of Diet Coke a day when I was eighteen-- rushing up and crashing down), and it was two years ago that I made a decision to stop using it, I do not think it's good. However, I'm tired of spending most of my first two sitting periods here asleep, feeling by the end of it that I'm wasting my time. So, I've decided to follow the lead of many or most of the people here (the Ino (director of Zendo discipline) seems to drink 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day) and started drinking a cup of green tea some days when I wake up. It's great, I'm alert, instead of nodding off I can actually steadily and precisely watch and be aware of the sensations in my body and the plans, memories and analysis going through my head - y'know, I can "meditate." I feel anger at the institution, however, because I see my choices are to follow the schedule and sleep through half of it, to sneak around skipping events so as to try to take a few partially satisfying naps, or to use this drug I don't ultimately like.
For all the difficulties and challenges, though, I feel an appreciation for the opportunity that being here provides to drop defenses and complications, to simply be more and more aware, and to feel deeper, more alive, clearer and more satisfied. I believe that both the schedule and the social and physical environment support that, they provide a container to relax into, and I value them for that.
My most profound interest in life may be how people communicate, especially about conflict, and many places I go I watch how people do this there. What I observe here is that many people have damaged or otherwise partial social skills, they are here like physically sick people are in a hospital -- even though Zen practice is not directly about developing the skills they lack. Some people here I would even describe as difficult -- angry, dead inside, mopey, out-of-it, or, worst of all, possessing stupid senses of humor. I wonder then, why I feel such a sense of trust and relaxation about people here, a belief that problems and differences can be worked through fine if they arise. To be fair, I think that many people came here with strong communication and people skills, I am often inspired, and most people had some. But I also have another theory.
At Zen Center, we study "emptiness," a Buddhist concept that I find complex but that seems to have many practical implications, one of which is that anything a person says, thinks or believes is held as just an utterance, a thought or a belief, not as solid, unchanging capital T Truth. I appreciate that people here, practicing in this way, are more willing to be aware of their subjectivity, to not necessarily hold on tight to the first belief that pops into their head, to be willing to understand a different point of view. Another factor that helps here is the perception of ourselves as students, as people who are not finished products ("you are perfect just the way you are, and you could use a lot of improvement" Suzuki Roshi once said). I also believe that the practice here is to think in terms of service, Sangha (Community) and "the welfare of all beings." This, I think, makes people more willing to do the work of really meeting another person, even when it's difficult, and to genuinely focus on mutually agreeable solutions rather than narrowly-defined, immediate self-interest. We set our intention on being present to ourselves and honest with ourselves which I think helps us to listen to and be honest with others. Finally, the vibe here is that we are practicing, working on and challenging ourselves, and I think that translates into a willingness to stretch our smallness. I have certainly found such skills in people all over, many of my homies for example, i.e. many people reading this letter, and certainly not everyone here practices them all the time. However, my observation is, again, that the practice here indirectly develops communication skills relative to life at large, and I appreciate that.
Peace, over and out
Adam
"We are all afraid of three things: other people, death, and our own minds."
--R.D. Liang