When you wake up and find tea by your bedside, drink the tea.

 
People who are unwell may find that their options appear to be limited. Waking with a dry mouth and eyes and a hammering heart, they wonder if they are going to be able to get up this morning; then they find (this time) that they can do it. They get up and go do a few chores, then find themselves short of breath and the hammer heart has not gone away, which is a little new. They go back to bed and sleep at midday, then awaken to find there is a cup of tea left for them on the side table by a concerned family member. It's not quite hot; that was an unexpectedly long nap.

Perhaps they struggle up again, re-heat the tea, and, spilling a little (Oh, hot!), wander out back to sit in the sun, going over what chores remain that could be done somehow. "I might move that little ash tree that came up in the lawn, find it a safer home. I wonder where the shovel for that is."

Planning a task is not failure to be in the moment. Those who go out shopping must sequence their activities: "bag, check. List, check. Keys, check. Phone, check. Okay, bring a cup of tea for the old-timer and say I'm going out. Oh, she's out cold. Well, she'll figure it out. I'll just tiptoe away."

All these activities are miracles of right now. Planning and listing are the sort of thing those new to zen may feel they must struggle against, but not so. The past vanishes into memory and the future is merely ideation, but these memories and ideas are indubitably part of the present moment.

The trick is to be all of you all the time, because you are all of the universe, with its air and warmth and tea passing through "you," along with the sound of jays out back for the old-timer and the changing colors of the traffic light for the shopper. If what you are doing is what you are doing, inhabit all of it, like a star shining into all parts of its stellar system and on into the great beyond.

Katagiri says: 

Taking care of right now is coping with an emergency case. So when a moment comes, whatever happens, just face your life as it really is, giving away any ideas of good or bad, and try your best to carry out what you have to do. You can do this; you can face your life with a calm mind and burn the flame of your life in whatever you do. This is Buddha’s practice. That’s why teachers always tell you to practice, devote yourself to doing something, and forget yourself. When you forget yourself and put your wholehearted effort into facing every moment, you can do something, and simultaneously you can rest in the continuous flow of life energy. Then you really enjoy your life. 

Suzuki adds:

Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of "form is form, and emptiness emptiness." When Buddha comes, you will welcome him; when the devil comes, you will welcome him. The famous Chinese Zen master Ummon, said, "Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha." When he was ill, someone asked him, "How are you?" And he answered, "Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha." That is the life of "form is form and emptiness is emptiness." There is no problem. One year of life is good.

Manzoku-an 4

She spreads a scrap of drape

chalks a white line to follow

wonders at the collision

of Buddha with Euclid

 

Here be fallacies and contradictions; but let us muddle on.

 

For about a year, I have been too out of it to sew, not to mention my eyes are not what they have been. But my health has unexpectedly improved in the last month or so.

 

I needed an envelope for a new rakusu, so I've revisited a neglected practice. The first stitches were horrible, but perseverance uncovers muscle memory. 

I intend the stitches to follow the more or less straight line of chalk. The thread wanders, sometimes above, sometimes below, the line as conceived. 

 

Even if to my eye the stitching were to go straight, a hand lens would disabuse me of that notion. 

 

At first I was aggravated by my lack of skill, but the gap between skill and sufficiency can never be fully closed, and you have to know when to punt. I've become tolerant of deviation.

A Euclidean object exists at most as a pattern (concept) across a substrate of neurons in our brains. 

 

Its expression into physical form is approximate (map vs. territory). For example, there are no true spheres in nature.

 

If you look at the surface of a bubble closely enough (under, say, an electron microscope), you find it is a polygon or polyhedron, or not even that, because the atoms found at the vertices are in flux.

 

There is no there there.

 

Buddha chose "anatta" as the core of his teaching. He was telling the Brahmins their concept of the everlasting soul is only a concept. 

An axle/wheel said to have gone "out of true" was called, in Buddha's culture, dukkha: when the deviation from the concept reaches the point of inconvenience to the task.

 

Skill may create a functional wheel, but not a perfect one. We know and can live with that. The skilled wheelwright creates a wheel that is within tolerance; no more is asked by the wise.

 

Insistence that our experience match our imaginings will give rise to dissatisfaction. 

This is what is meant by samsara. We are "running around in circles," chasing our delusions, which consist in expecting that idealism will bring us this supposed happiness: that there will not be entropy.

Unless you consult particulars you cannot even know or see. 

--William Blake, Annotations to Reynolds.

 

 

 

 

Manzoku-an 3

We tuck roots in soil, not

knowing if we will see harvest

with wearing the robe

it is the same

 

Ceremoniously offering and accepting tea, teacher and student face each other across the small table. Who knew, when we were neighbors in the woods almost fifty years ago, that this moment would come?

The luminous moon drifts by so lightly,

The sutra hall lies silent without a sound.

Bits of moonlight pierce the cracks between the bamboo,

Its round refulgence perches in the intersecting pine branches.
The dew dampens the nests filled with noisy swallows,

The wind combs the grasses filled with croaking frogs.

I sit with the master after the ceremony is over

As, face to face, we straighten out our robes.

-- Shiyan, in Daughters of Emptiness tr./ed. Beata Grant

The bee moves on (Manzoku-an 2)

Somewhere out back

the seven-year-old cherry

takes up its found duty

teaching evanescence

 

I sometimes don't make it out to the hut for two or three days at a time, especially in rain or snow. I've reached the age of more or less permanently camping in the easy chair, medications at hand, scarf wrapping neck, wall-gazing like Bodhidharma but with perhaps less intent, my sitting interlaced with napping, like Daughter's very old dog who lives with us still.

Son or Beloved bring me teas and nibblets. This perks me up, and seems to do them some good as well.

The thought experiments I've been sporadically attending to have to do with: Occam's Razor and entropy.

Occam's idea, not completely original to him but close enough, is that there is no call to multiply entities needlessly. That is, if you fell off the cliff due to your own carelessness, you need not also attribute the fall to interference in your short life by a demon. 

Applying Occam will tend to lead one toward a monistic materialism devoid of teleology, which many physical scientists hold either explicitly or implicitly, for reasons. "Literary criticism is a branch of biology" -- I. A. Richards.

Core Buddhism as it has come down to us does not have a lot of new ideas: 

1. there is suffering,
2. some suffering is self-inflicted,
3. stop that,
4. here's how.

It stands up well under Occam. 

Buddhism has acquired a lot of cultural accretions, some of which go back to the first generation or soon after. Many -- if not most -- of them may not stand up well under Occam.

Entropy can be thought of in lay terms as "everything runs down." 

To assemble what we may call a state or object, we must find and supply additional energy to the amount originally embodied in it to maintain it as such; otherwise it becomes other stuff. 

A car becomes not a car if it is set up on blocks and its wheels taken away. Leave it there long enough and it becomes an unwieldy and rather forlorn flowerpot.

Combine the razor and entropy when looking at the Four Truths and we get a pretty easily tested life engine that strikes me as having some ontological staying power.

Buddha's charioteer brought him to see the Four Sights, the first three of which were signs of entropy: old age, illness and death. The fourth was asceticism, a somewhat extreme response to the first three, which appealed to the young man and led to his years of practicing some rather severe yogas, as if punishing himself for being subject to entropy. 

After a rather simple meal offered to him, that is, some energy input to maintain his state as a living being, he decided against punishment and proclaimed a Middle Way: live without either seeking too great a buffer against entropy or too little. Entropy just is.

The bee checks out the cherry blossoms for at most a few days. The petals fall. The bee moves on. 

 

The best way is not difficult

It only excludes picking and choosing.
-- Xinxin Ming tr. Pajin

 

Manzoku-an 1

 Slow moving illness

 provides time to review

things done, not done:

release them all

Sitting in the new hut, Manzoku-an, or Hermitary of Quite Enough, she is running out of needs.

Buddha's great discovery was re-discovered millennia later. It's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Because dharmas (things or beings) are not, or do not have, states, but are bundles of energy that is arriving and departing, they are ephemeral. All are equal, all equally evanescent. Resting from concern or anguish over that which is as it is, nothing need stop us from enjoying ourselves, as we might an evening of fireflies.

Whether I sit or I lie,
My spirit roams with the origin of things.
Singing alone or rhyming alone,
My joy runs to the edge of the sky.
-- Songs of National Preceptor Wongam (1226–1292) tr. Whitfield, Park