Homework

Over time I have collected some information on eremitic life; a little on Western/Christian traditions, more on Asian, especially looking into Chinese recluse poets and Zen retreatants.

The idea in Asia seems to be to eschew the "red dust" of the cities for several or more years, and then, in most cases, to return to serve society, or at least be open about one's findings to visitors.

One of my favorite reads at the hut is the poetry of Stonehouse, as translated by Red Pine:

Red Pine's visits to huts and caves in the Zhongnan Mountains produced the standard work in English on contemporary hermits in China.

Another favorite is Japanese Soto monk poet Ryokan:

 And, of course, Chinese Tang dynasty madman Han Shan (Cold Mountain).

Another text that I return to regularly is Hojo-Ki, "My Ten Foot Square Hut" by Chomei, a Heian poet who retired into the hills near Kyoto. 

 Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation.

Having moved, as his circumstances were straitened, into smaller and smaller quarters, and having witnessed the destruction of a great many homes during a series of vividly described disasters, he eventually designs for himself a portable (by ox-cart) hut with space for a sleeping mat, tea stove, wash basin, lute, altar, and a few utensils and items of clothing. He professes to be happier there than he has ever been, though his loneliness and misgivings are recounted with wistful honesty.

I know of the lives and thoughts of poet-hermits and Zen master-hermits, because their findings were written down and then, centuries later, translated, and I'm grateful. It does help to follow lamplight when one enters, as it were at night, upon an unfamiliar pathway.

Most of such findings seem to concern the experience of unmediated sensory data -- by which I mean, I look at the shivering leaves of the cottonwoods while not distracted by conversation.

It's like the difference between talking about microbes and having a look through a microscope. I can tell you, to the best of my ability, about what I've seen, later, but I'll say it better if don't step over to you until I've had that solitary look. Does that make sense?

Of course, the hermits in China take a more severe view of the matter than I seem prepared to do. One abbott explained to Bill Porter (Red Pine) that it's necessary for monks to live alone for a long time (years) to rid themselves of their attachment to material things. 

Embedded as I am in obligations, and already so dependent in my decrepitude on my zero gravity chair that I might as well be sewn to it, I admit my hut time has been insufficient to clarify my spiritual (if I may call it that) vision. Not enough to be able to make the claim to be able to benefit the world.

But benefit is hard to weigh.

The most I'm going to be able to claim is that down time is a form of restraint. Sitting alone in the middle of nowhere for even an hour, you're not (or mostly not) stealing, lying, murdering, poisoning, misusing libido, abusing substances, backtalking, throwing shade, gossiping, or undermining others. Without going so far as to say these restraints have value, i.e. are beneficial, which, again, is very hard to weigh, we may say that practicing these restraints and clarifying that inward vision seem to bear some relation to each other.

One cannot discover the entire context of an action to determine fully whether or not it is a good or bad one. Be true to yourself and keep your intentions clear of concern for past and future and just do what most appears to be the good thing right now.

Alone, this is easy. Carve a cup and hang it by the spring.

With others, it’s more complicated: Am I offering this cup of water to a friend or an enemy? No way to know! So one just does it. 

One day, the literary giant Bai Juyi paid a visit to Chan Master Niaoke Daolin. He saw the Chan Master sitting upright by a magpie’s nest, so he said, “Chan Master, living in a tree is too dangerous!”

The Chan Master replied, “Magistrate, it is your situation that is extremely dangerous!”

Bai Juyi heard this and, taking exception, said, “I am an important official in the imperial court. What danger is there?”

The Chan Master said, “The torch is handed from one to another, people follow their own inclinations without end. How can you say it’s not dangerous?” (The meaning is to say that in officialdom, there are rises and falls, and people scheming against one another. Danger is right before your eyes. Bai Juyi seemed to come to some sort of understanding.) Changing the subject, he then asked, “What is the essential teaching of the Dharma?”

The Chan Master replied, “Commit no evil. Do good deeds!” Hearing this, Bai Juyi thought the Chan Master would instruct him with some profound concept. Yet, they were just ordinary words. Feeling very disappointed, he said, “Even a three-year-old child knows this concept!”

The Chan Master said, “Although a three-year-old child can say it, an eighty-year-old man cannot do it.” -- Hsing Yun, Tr. Pey-Rong Lee and Dana Dunlap

 

So it seems I have homework to do.

Investigate this fully

I began to accumulate comforts and conveniences. Here's an inventory from 2017:

Broom, cot, two blankets, two pillows, four chairs, electric desk lamp, desk, altar, censer, Buddha statue, vase, several clay offering bowls, candles, incense, lighter, cleaning rags, ointment, toothbrush, hairbrush, soap, ointment, two steel bowls, two soup/tea mugs, tumbler, two spoons, two forks, two pairs of chopsticks, a knife, steamer, coffeemaker, several Mason jars of dried tea, beans and grains, salt shaker with salt, water bottle, hammer, pair of pliers, assortment of hardware, pair of scissors, sewing kit, about twenty books, Guanyin statue, a copy of a Soto order of service, four chairs, framed enso, framed image of a statue of the medieval abbess Mugai Nyodai, trunk with several changes of clothes and a pair of slippers, oil-filled heater, kerosene lamp, four bamboo window shades, work gloves, a gardening apron, secateurs, camp saw, rakusu (for a layperson) in its envelope, mala, lineage documents, pennywhistle, magnifying glass, flashlight, thermometer, and a hori hori. Outside, tucked into the crawl space, usually reside a bucket, hoe, sickle, and watering can. 

 

I don't remember when I brought my dad's old steel cot from Georgia, possibly four decades ago. My mom's roll-top desk arrived in 2012. It's made of cheap woodgrain composites, but the cover does roll and it looks surprisingly nice. So I wrangled it out to the hut and it was my desk for five years or so, and presently resides in Beloved's hut. Daughter had it for awhile, too. It gets around. I've checked the brand name and you can get one of these new for about a hundred and fifty, but that seems steep for what it's made of.

Until recently, I've been able to sit at desks for more than twenty minutes and so have read a lot of books and written a few books and written many letters sitting at them; but as time went on, this desk became more and more of a shelf, lamp base, altar, dinner table, and general storage.

A niece completed her degree at the local university and migrated back to California, so I inherited her card table and matching folding chairs, which I carried out to the hut with ideas of having sangha members over to sit chair zazen with me. Few came, though. Modern visits tend to originate in phone calls and texts, neither of which are part of my universe, so.

The kitchen moved to a crate on the north wall. 

For several years the altar rested on a freebie pressboard TV cart.

At almost no cost but my labor, I now had, effectively, a home away from home. Overnighters were few until December 2019, when I elected to live in the hut for an intensive sesshin called Rohatsu.

This consisted of sessions of zazen/kinhin/zazen/kinhin/zazen, thirty minutes of zazen, ten of kinhin, formal meals (oryoki), and semi-formal work-release 😁 (samu), from six in the morning until eight at night, with services featuring chanting of the heart sutra and Fukanzazengi, all carried out in Zoom meetings. There were also formal Skype visits with the teacher, called dokusan.

In between sessions, I mostly drank tea and stared out the windows.

My son tells me what all I'm doing is called "cosplay" and that I'd be better off to just drink tea and stare out the window. 😂

He has a point. I respond that sometimes a framework helps prevent re-inventing the wheel. But I do sound like I'm trying to convince myself of that.

On the other hand, if an inquiry is honest, and I think this one, at its core, is, then I should see where it takes me. One of the things Dogen said to his followers more frequently than just about anything else is "investigate this fully."

 

Movement isn’t right and stillness is wrong
and cultivating no-thought means confusion instead
the Patriarch didn’t have no-mind in mind
any thought at all means trouble
a hut facing south isn’t so cold
chrysanthemums along a fence perfume the dusk
as soon as a drifting cloud starts to linger
the wind blows it past the vines 

-- Shiwu (Stonehouse) tr. Red Pine

 

A level playing field

Winters here can sometimes be downright exciting. 

 

Our acre is not a prime one, consisting of rocks and heavy clay, sloping away from the sun, and graced with an ill-made house that would cost more to bring up to code than its sale value. Accordingly, we were able to afford it. 😁

 

As the "dry wash" runs through the middle of the place, there's also the risk of flooding. In January of 1996, four inches of rain fell on the pasture lands uphill from us in a day, the creek jumped its banks to nearly reach the floor of the playhouse, moving it a couple of inches downstream. A bow wave appeared on the corner of the farmhouse's foundation, our creek bridges and a couple of fences vanished, and several trees leaned in the direction of the flow, which was north. Half their root wads were lifted into the air; they had to be firewooded.

Summers are interesting in their own way. Rain can hold off for as much as one hundred days at a time. Garden soil often cracks in zigzags even beneath deep mulch, the Douglas firs drop millions of needles, and the foliage of Oregon ash turns a wintry, shriveled brown. All this can be from just the dryness, but in the last decade, there's been a notable increase in heat as well.

The natural grain of the hut's weathered fence-board exterior was attractive, but without the shade tree something would have to be done to increase reflectivity. I painted the roof white.

Then the walls.

And finally even the trim.

 

Nothing much helped. If the ambient temperature was ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the interior approached one hundred. This was disconcerting, as painting the roof of the farmhouse had dropped summer highs by ten degrees. I installed a small fan to blow out air from near the ceiling, which helped a little, but what really worked was to add inexpensive reed shades to the west-facing exterior.

 

In March of 2019 I notified my teacher that my body was beginning to fail me; not only could I not really hear Dharma talks, even with a hearing aid, but I was having trouble lasting through the retreats sitting in a chair, let alone on a kneeling bench.

She advised me to look into practicing with an online sangha. This proved to be a good match, and the hermitage became, in effect, a bit of a monastery, as I began "sitting" with people from all over the planet on a regular basis. The summer heat proved to be no obstacle, as I could simply take my laptop into the house and participate from my relatively cool bedroom.

Spring and fall are the most comfortable times for hut life, but all seasons are good for online fellowship.

Gatherings are important to faiths as a rule, as one gets to practice what one is learning about ethics by interacting with others. Shakyamuni's four truths concern eliminating unnecessary suffering through letting go of regret (past) and anxiety (future), a skill one can practice in a hermitage, but much of the point of having such a skill is to apply it in the presence of others, thus making the means of achieving equanimity available to society at large.

This is why Shakyamuni's fourth truth concerns mostly ethical admonitions. Right speech, actions and livelihood can barely be practiced in a social vacuum. Immersed in a sangha (community of Buddhists), one practices these paths in a setting with agreed-upon rules, then extends the practices into interacting with the wider world.

Since the beginning of the Internet (and even earlier) there have been discussions as to whether teleconference practice "counts," but, in the words of Ikkyu:

If at the end of our journey 

There be no final resting place, 

How can there be
A way to lose ourselves in?

An online sangha might seem to present limited opportunity for right action, but by participating in the e-bulletin board, one discovers who needs what and has an opportunity to be of use to them (and, of course, vice versa). All this in a setting in which the action-at-a-distance, non-synchronous nature of online communications importantly provides access for people with disabilities.

I'm nearly deaf, but can hear others through a headset or earbud. I don't see well, but can adjust the distance to the screen, and play with the lighting. I have chronic lumbar strain, but can "sit" in a zero gravity chair. I have memory issues, but can unobtrusively work from an on-screen cheat sheet for all my chanting and ritual needs. I'm incontinent, but can drop out any time by turning off my video, and run to the pottie and back. 

Lastly, I'm prone to seizures; if I'm involved in a discussion and feel a petit mal coming, again I can turn off the video for a bit and return when I'm myself again. All this without materially inconveniencing others. Driving to and from our "brick-and-mortar" zendo had taken fifty minutes each way; aside from the carbon footprint, I'd become a bit dangerous and needed to get out from behind the wheel.

Also, as the online sangha records its events, if I'm too sick to log in or am double booked, I can catch up later.

All this was true for not only me but many others, so the online sangha, an almost unique one at the time, provided the one spiritual home many could find, due to a wide array of circumstances and conditions they may have felt could inconvenience others in person.

Laptop hermiting/zazenkai attendance proved to be not only very freeing and provide a level playing field, but perfect for those times the roads were covered with snow or the hut's temperature soared toward a hundred.

And then ... the pandemic arrived.

Safe to re-occupy

Not long after I began using the hut in earnest, I became aware that it was getting hotter inside in the summers, because the shade tree was not throwing much shade. Drought stress, combined with my having built too close to the tree 😓, denying rain to some of its roots, was creating an emergency of sorts. Though the tree appears here to be leaning away from the hut, across the fence line, its weight definitely trended downhill, to fall across the roof toward the creek.

I considered tearing down the hut for salvage, but I really liked it, and would rather keep it for the time being (attachment woes). I thought of sending for a bonded arborist, but that would get into money we didn't really have. 

I had been, in a previous life, a chainsaw professional -- but I hadn't been that person in a long time. I sensed, seeing shelf fungi ranging up to the first branches, that this tree's heartwood had been losing cohesiveness for several years, meaning that if I successfully felled it uphill, using a jack, the sapwood could "barber-chair" (split part way up), kick back, and smash the hut anyway. 

 If I were to take this on, it would have to be done with wire rope, cranked tight, perhaps with a thick hinge, so that the trunk would not separate from the stump as it went down. I hoped also to keep the tree off the fence, less than a foot away from the stump, and off the neighbor's land. This would have to be precise.

Wire rope I had on hand, having dragged it from abandoned clear-cuts in days of yore. Also in the tool shed there were a suitably sized set of single- and double-block pulleys, chains, and a come-along. 

I removed all the branches of the tree that I could reach from a ladder placed on the roof of the building, set my "chokers," so to speak, using another large fir tree a hundred feet away as my anchor point. I tightened the cable, working from the anchor end, and then cautiously gnawed away at the tree trunk with a small electric chainsaw, such as is intended for much smaller work.

I distributed my efforts over a period of weeks, much to the amusement of the neighborhood, but eventually the tree began to follow my plan. When at last I was able to take off the remaining branches with a pole saw, it became safe to cut through the hinge and drop the tree trunk.

I cut up the trunk and branches and hauled them away to the woodshed.

Attachment had led, perhaps, to considerable taking of pains, so to speak, but also to a test of patience. What we set out to do, often we find we can, especially if there is no hurry.

While I was working on this project, I noticed that I was not thinking about world problems, or my problems, or in fact much of anything. Hands grasp, arms lift, legs carry. It was as much like meditation as anything I'd ever done that bore the name.

Traditionally in Zen, physical work is practice close to, or on par with, or indistinguishable from, zazen practice. During a sesshin, or days-long zazen-practicing gathering, there are breaks from zazen for chores, called samu. The tradition of labor -- farming, forestry, construction, let alone kitchen and housework -- for monks dates back over a thousand years, and when it's being taught, the story is often told of the Tang dynasty master Baizhang, who, having made such work a rule for his monastery, would not except himself from field labor even in his old age.

“When the master did chores he always was first in the community in taking up work. The people could not bear this so they hid his tools away early once and asked him to rest.
The master said “I have no virtue; how should I make others toil?"
The master having looked all over for his tools without finding them, also neglected to eat.
Therefore there came to be his saying that "a day without working is a day without eating,” which circulated throughout the land.” -- Steven Heine, tr.

When I see a neighbor concentrating on a task, such as ditching with a backhoe or windrowing hay, I feel I'm witnessing something that is not different from zazen, in the sense that in the immediacy of the task, all pretensions, regrets and preconceptions drop away. All zazen has going for it is a deliberate effort to extend that immediacy -- which has the goal of the effortlessness that comes when there is no goal.

Desiring to have a hut in which to drop desire is ironic, of course, but to lift yourself by your bootstaps you begin by having bootstraps. Anyway, the building was now safe to re-occupy.

Do not think “good” or “bad.” Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a buddha. How could that be limited to sitting or lying down? -- Dogen, Fukanzazengi

Making an inhabitable space

As we worked on the playhouse in 1994, near the fence, a neighbor strode purposefully over. I chirped, "Hi! The kids had a playhouse like this at our last place, so we're building a replacement."

"Oh, okay." He pushed his ball cap, with its tractor-supply embroidery, back from his forehead. "I was gonna tell ya th' county don't allow building within ten feet of the th' line." 

I had suspected as much, but seeing as we already had a building that close, namely the large stamping shed up in the corner, built in the 1960s, I had hoped the new little shed would not be an issue. 

It must not have been, at least as a playhouse, because we never met the man again, other than to wave at him as he roamed around beneath his oak trees on his riding lawnmower.

 

In 2009, an empty nester and retiree, I looked over the little building, to which I'd paid little interest over the years, and thought it might be a suitable place to read and write. I brought yet more materials -- old carpets for insulation, old fence boards for the interior walls -- and reroofed the building. 

For reading, I put in rustic shelves and a comfy chair. 

 

For writing, a small desk and office chair. There was an old metal folding cot that had been my dad's, which I covered with a bit of foam and a blanket. In warm weather I could take breaks by napping on the cot.

The hut was off grid at first, being well away from the house, but laptop batteries and thermal mugs offer a few hour's independence. As winter came, I ran power to the hut and added a low-wattage space heater.

 

Eight by ten, insulated, with a low ceiling, warms quickly even in winter, and I was able to leave the thermostat on a very low setting, or even turn off the heater and dress in layers.

Once you have power, though, one thing will lead to another. In 2014 it occurred to me to add a rudimentary kitchen.

The centerpiece was a thrift-store steamer that was missing its oblong plastic basket liner. I found that it could make assorted meals perfectly well in a bowl placed in the basket. 

One fills the water reservoir, places the bowl under cover (not shown), and sets the timer. In five minutes it made ramen, in twenty it made rice, and even announced lunch with a pleasant "ding" as the mechanical timer wound down.

You might think the only thing missing was a bathroom. I had run a garden hose out to the hut and brought a couple of steel bowls from the house, with towels and the like, for various purposes. As for other business, I could run to the house, but friends had given us a composting potty, and I elected to park it in the barn, halfway between the hut and the garden and so convenient to both.

It was now possible to be independent from the house for days at a time.

 Not that there was anything wrong with running to the homestead, and as a rule I hung out more there than at the hut. It has been a fine place to hang out.

 The idea I was forming in my mind, though, was to try to spend part of every day, or of every available day, in a concentrated space, with relatively few things and distractions. Would it be possible, in short, at least on Thursdays, to emulate one of my childhood heroes?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms ... --Thoreau, Walden

About that hut

Over the last eight years, I've been experimenting with living part time in a hut. I want to talk about this for a few posts, because I think there is some resilience/knowledge value in what went on there.

I'm retired, on a fixed income, so it's a luxury, time-wise, I can afford. In the days when I worked full time at the university, this was a level of simplicity I could not have explored fully. There's a dress code, after all.

But now that there's little constraint, if I want to hole up in a hut wearing a bathrobe, it's my call.

About 1994, I put up the 8x10' building, with the help of my son, using scraps and salvage, as a playhouse for the children. It was located at the far end of the acre, just downhill from a growing Douglas fir tree and on the bank of a dry wash that becomes a creek in winter.

The young ones made use of it for a decade or so, and then it sat empty until I retired, in 2009. For the next few years, whenever I was not hammering and sawing at our easily-condemned farmhouse or working on the garden and in the orchard, I wrote books -- not bad ones -- not earth shaking either -- you can find them all in PDF form at the top of the right hand column.

And then there was a shift.

A longtime environmental activist, I had been reading some articles by a friend, Bodhi Paul Chefurka, about thermodynamic overshoot. His conclusions as to our future as a species were grim but I felt the math checked out. His advice to his readers was to continue doing all the right things anyway, but also, to find out what you really want to do, and do it. He then described his own inward spiritual journey as his own response to the situation, gently intimating that some of his readers might try something of the sort, as, say, an outgoing hobby: meditation. Hospice meditation, one could say. 

As it happened, one of my hobbies over most of the preceding six decades had been to read all I could get hold of on Taoism and Buddhism, specifically Zen Buddhism. This meant that for many years I had been mostly exposed to literature about Rinzai Zen as a kind of existential philosophy, as presented by D.T. Suzuki and some others.

While reading Heinrich Dumoulin's history of (largely Rinzai) Zen, I had come across a chapter on Eihei Dogen. Dogen, already well trained in Tendai and in Rinzai Zen, had traveled from Japan to China in the decade after the Chinese Lin-chi School (in Japanese, Rinzai) was brought to Japan, discovered the less popular (at the time) dharma lineage of the CaoDong School (Japanese Soto) there, and brought it back to Japan as its sole Japanese proponent.

Soto became a thing after a couple of generations, so Dumoulin devotes a chapter to its founder, but then turns away from it to his primary interests. But at the end of the biography within the chapter he sympathetically offers a translation of one of Dogen's last poems:

To what indeed shall I liken

The world and the life of man?

Ah, the shadow of the moon

When it touches in the drop of dew

The beak of the waterfowl.

I had read, and been very much affected by, this poem (and Dumoulin's descriptions of Zen hermits), at an early age -- perhaps nineteen -- and so became interested in Soto Zen as it was transplanted to San Francisco by Shunryu Suzuki (no relation to D.T.). I had considered going there to investigate, but marriage, family, work and events intervened.

In 2012, after spending six months in Florida with my parents, who were in hospice, I heard of an old friend, whom we had known in our early homesteading years, returning to the area after becoming a Zen teacher in the Suzuki lineage. I asked for an interview and became involved in her sangha, attending monthly all-day silent retreats (zazenkai).

It is in this context that it occurred to me to convert the playhouse into a hermitage, so as to carry out my long-deferred investigation. 

 

My motivation in launching this series of posts is, however, not to try to interest others in Buddhism but to discuss some aspects of hermit life.  

To be continued.

I always wanted to go to East Cliff, 

more years than I can remember, 

until today I just grabbed a vine 

and started up. Halfway up
wind and a heavy mist closed in,
and the narrow path tugged at my shirt: 

it was hard to get on. The slickery
mud under the moss on the rocks
gave way, and I couldn’t keep going.
So here I stay, under this cinnamon tree, 

white clouds for my pillow,
I’ll just take a nap. 

 

-- Cold Mountain (Han Shan), tr. J.P. Seaton

Concerning memorial donations

 

We have been asked where to make a donation in Emily Bear's name. If you wish to do so, consider Food for Lane County, earmarked for Grassroots Garden. Thank you.

 

https://foodforlanecounty.org/go-learn-more/other-programs/gardens/grassroots-garden-2/