A capital sin in Christian morality
used to be sadness, disgust, acedia. Nowadays it is translated as
laziness, idleness. Otium,
leisure, has become a vice, and negotium,
business, a virtue.
R. Panikkar
July 2
My next stop has been to co-lead a retreat/worshop at
Tassajara Zen Mountain Center called “The Spirit of Practice, Christian and
Zen.” It winds up that the gentleman I am co-leading with, Ryushin Paul Haller
(former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center), was waiting for a ride at
Jamesburg, the way station halfway down Carmel Valley, when I got there, so I
drove him in too and we got to get to know each other and talk through some
things. (We had never met before.) He’s a lovely guy, originally from Ireland,
maybe in his 70s. He’s been a Zen practioner since the 1970s, first in Thailand
and then for many decades with this center. Oddly enough, he and I both thought
that the retreat started last night, but it actually only starts tonight,
Monday! So we happily have both had a free day. It’s wonderful to be here. It’s
really a magical place. I took a nap right away––and woke up having absolutely
no idea where I was. A lovely vegetarian dinner––all the food here is
wonderful, and then back to my room, excused my self from evening meditation,
read a little bit and was asleep before 8. Kept waking up and falling asleep
again, all the way ’til a little after 3. There’s a coffee and tea counter here
open all night so I made something to drink and then went down to the hot tubs.
There is electricity here now, solar, but the lights were not on yet in the
bathhouse. Lucky I brought my flashlight. I went in the nice indoor pool and
then went out on the porch that is right above the rushing creek and went in
the little outdoor plunge. With a scrim of trees in front of me, the sound of
the rushing creek, the night sky overflowing with stars, all there just for me.
I felt eminently spoiled. I sat for a while in meditation on the outdoor deck.
I had that sensation again, where my body just wants to meditate. Then I
walked farther down the trail to the room where we are going to be doing our
retreat. It’s great, a wooden floor, like a small yoga studio. I had brought my
mat so I did some stretching in there to kind of own the space. Then I joined
the practioners here for an hour meditation at 5:50. It was fine except for the
fact that I was not comfortable on the cushion that was provided in my space
and had to adjust a lot for my poor fractured tailbone and my wonky hips and
back. I didn’t want to make it worse.
I think the retreat is going well, though the group is not
very interactive so it’s hard for me to assess. They are a very interesting
group of participants. Most of them are Catholic with some kind of Buddhist
practice, though some have “fallen away,” as we say. I was half-expecting
that there would be a lot of disgruntled or “recovering” Catholics wanting to
talk about their problems with the Church or their struggles with this or that
doctrine, but to my surprise––and delighted relief––there is little to none of
that. Br. David Steindl-Rast did this retreat here with Paul for years and this
was one of his specialties, deconstructing and re-interpreting difficult
teachings. More I find they are interested in finding a way to bridge the two
traditions.
I usually give some rather short teaching, 10 minutes or so,
based on something that has come up. Then Paul responds from the Zen
perspective and we open it up to comments, questions, etc. One problem is that
the sessions are two hours long, longer than I have normally done by myself. There
is a time just sitting there, but I suppose that has its benefits too in this
tradition. We have been adding more participatory elements to the sessions, a
song here and there, some stretching. Paul brings poems and did an interesting
exercise with one of them. It was a poem of Mary Oliver (he seems to be a big
fan of her) and it had a series of questions that she answers in the poem. He asked
the questions and then had us answer them to the person next to us––what did you
notice? What astonished you? What do you want to see again? I can feel the
memory of Br. David hovering among us. Paul talks about him a lot, and David’s
name gets mentioned by the participants regularly over meals. I wonder if they
are comparing me to him, and perhaps a little disappointed.
There is a practice called dokusan in Buddhism, where you meet one on one with a master or
your teacher. I think it is traditionally very formal, like an interview to
assess how enlightened you are. Well they had asked me to be available for dokusan, but I thought it was with our
retreatants, but it wasn’t. It was with the Zen students who are here. Five had
signed up right away, without even knowing me, except maybe by reputation,
simply because I am a monk. I had my first session yesterday with a guy who was
asking me about monasticism, what are the essentials and how would he know if
he is being called to that. He has been reading Thomas Merton’s writing on
monastic renewal and the why of monasticism, and he wondered, marveled that
there is nothing like his writings in Soto Zen. How is it that he is being
inspired to be a Buddhist monk by the writings of a Christian monk? Here again
is proof of the ground we share, the perennial philosophy and the universal
wisdom, the scopos. Having just come
from the ITMS it was especially poignant to me. I wound up recommending
Panikkar’s Blessed Simplicity to
him––yet another Catholic.
Here at Tassajara they do not have a tradition of celibate
monasticism, which seems so incongruous to us. There is some celibate
monasticism, but the tradition they mainly inherited from Japan was that they
are monks when they are at a monastery or center, even if for a few years, and
priests when they leave. After all these years of coming here this is the first
time I have understood it, and it makes more sense to me now. For us those two
elements––celibacy and stability are essential ingredients. Though we have
talked about “temporary monasticism,” the Ora et Labora program being an
example of a small experiment with that, and of course we have examples of
monks living out in the world and doing ministry, as I did and Michael Fish is
doing now.
I must confess, though I was planning on it, I haven’t been
going to the formal za-zen with the practitioner community here, an hour at
5:50 AM and 40 minutes in the evening. First of all, as comfortable as I am
sitting on the floor in half lotus, I am not used to doing that for two hours
at a time several hours a day so my legs and feet and my poor beleaguered
tailbone are a little sore. And secondly, I have still been getting up at
2:30-3:00 AM, so after dinner I am pretty tired after a long day. They knock on
a large piece of wood called a han
for 15 minutes before meditation, and last night again I heard it begin but I
was asleep before they stopped. I can feel a little more exhaustion and tension
dripping off of me every day. This morning though I had my early morning hot
tub (at 4 AM I have the whole bath house to myself!), did my yoga and was
raring to go for the morning sit. It was very good to be with them. I realized
two things: one, how much power there is in sitting in a group; two, how much I
was influenced by this particular school of Buddhism and its founder––Japanese
Soto Zen and Dogen Zen-ji. I have experienced pretty much every other school,
but nothing resonates with me as much as this.
In the Trinity a true encounter of
religions takes places, which results, not in a vague fusion or mutual
dilution, but in an authentic enhancement of all the religious and even
cultural elements that are contained in each.[1]
R. Panikkar
July 4
I feel as if Paul and I really hit our stride at the session
yesterday morning, keeping in mind we have never worked together before. I
started with a song and then launched into a little bit longer teaching and
then he responded. I have been using Bruno’s Silence-Word-Music-Dance as a
framing device a lot for the past few years, the quaternity, if you will, but
yesterday I started off with just the first three, and how Panikkar taught that
the three persons of the Trinity represent universal aspects of the spiritual
journey. I deftly try to avoid using even words like “Father,” “Son or “Christ”
or even “Holy Spirit,” and try to stay with 1st Person, 2nd
Person, 3rd Person. Putting Bruno’s and Panikkar’s names together
I’ve got my own titles now: Silence-Mysticism (though if I have time I expand
that to talk about the 1st Person as Ground of Being and Great
Mother); then Silence Manifesting; and finally Immanent Energy. Of course then
follows how each spiritual tradition specializes in one particular aspect, and
so how we can learn from each other. My favorite example is always that I
learned about Silence-Emptiness-Mysticism first from Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta
and Taoism, and that led me to discover the apophatic tradition in
Christianity. In other words I learned something new about “the Father” from
Buddhism! My other favorite example is how much I have learned about the
indwelling Divine Energy from the tribal peoples and from kundalini or Tantric
yoga.
Well, to my surprise, Paul launched into an exposé of the
three bodies of Buddha––the Dharmakaya, the Nirmanakaya and the Sambhogakaya.
The first is the realm of being, the “womb of suchness”; then that first body
made manifest in Shakyamuni Buddha but also everything that is Buddha nature;
and then the third which is––ready for this?––the interplay of the two and so ananda, the “bliss body.” That of course
reminded me of satchitananda, in
which the founders of Shantivanam’s saw an intimation of this trinity (and the
Trinity) as well: Being-Knowledge-Bliss, the bliss-of-being-in-consciousness.
This is not to diminish or to deconstruct the Christian Trinity, but it is to
try to go beyond our images, which can become idols. With due reverence to the
fact that Jesus’ favored term for God is abbouni,
for example, that does not mean all other names are prohibited.
