Hyakujo's Fox

At the end of the work day I take a shuttle bus from my office building to the Secaucus Junction train station, where I catch a New Jersey Transit train into Manhattan, then transfer to the Long Island Railroad for the 55 minute ride to Syosset. There are a lot of steps to take and connections to be made, and when one element of the commute goes askew, it throws off everything else. A late connection or slow shuttle bus ride means that it can take me an additional hour to get home, which is problematic on the nights my wife has to work late or when we have somewhere to go. Fortunately it doesn’t happen all that often. More typical are the days when everything is just late enough that I have to sprint from one place to another in a state of low grade panic. That happens three out of five days in an average week. The weakest link in the chain is New Jersey Transit, whose trains are invariably late by five or more minutes, despite what the digital boards at the train station say about their arrival times. A little known fact about commuter rail is that trains are still considered “on-time” even if they arrive at a station 6 minutes past their scheduled time.

Missed connections. Made connections. Barely gained connections. Good opportunities to observe the immutable workings of cause and effect. A late shuttle bus translates into an ineffective sprint to catch a train, which causes a missed connection, which means I relieve the babysitter an hour later, which means she gets home late to her family, which means a fight with her husband, maybe a divorce, an angry ride down a winding country road, a deer on the hood, etc. etc. Aside from moving, or getting a new job there isn’t any way out. Of course, there isn’t any way around cause and effect, for anyone, which reminds me of Hyakujo’s Fox:

“Once when Hyakujo delivered some Zen lectures an old man attended them, unseen by the monks. At the end of each talk when the monks left so did he. But one day he remained after they had gone, and Hyakujo asked him: "Who are you?"

The old man replied: "I am not a human being, but I was a human being when the Kashapa Buddha preached in this world. I was a Zen master and lived on this mountain. At that time one of my students asked me whether or not the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: 'The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation.' For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox's body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?"
Hyakujo said: "The enlightened man is one with the law of causation."

At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened. "I am emancipated," he said, paying homage with a deep bow. "I am no more a fox, but I have to leave my body in my dwelling place behind this mountain. Please perform my funeral as a monk." Then he disappeared.

The next day Hyakujo gave an order through the chief monk to prepare to attend the funeral of a monk. "No one was sick in the infirmary," wondered the monks. "What does our teacher mean?"

After dinner Hyakujo led the monks out and around the mountain. In a cave, with his staff he poked out the corpse of an old fox and then performed the ceremony of cremation.

That evening Hyakujo gave a talk to the monks and told them this story about the law of causation.

Obaku, upon hearing the story, asked Hyakujo: "I understand that a long time ago because a certain person gave a wrong Zen answer he became a fox for five hundred rebirths. Now I want to ask: If some modern master is asked many questions and he always gives the right answer, what will become of him?"

Hyakujo said: "You come here near me and I will tell you."

Obaku went near Hyakujo and slapped the teacher's face with his hand, for he knew this was the answer his teacher intended to give him.

Hyakujo clapped his hands and laughed at this discernment. "I thought a Persian had a red beard," he said, "and now I know a Persian who has a red beard."

Mumon's comment: "The enlightened man is not subject." How can this answer make the monk a fox?
"The enlightened man is one with the law of causation." How can this answer make the fox emancipated?

Conflict

Last night I got pissed off at my wife for not making dinner. Which, when you say it out loud (or write it down), seems downright ridiculous. The back-story: When I got home from work last night at 5:30, my son Jack was complaining about pain in his ear, so I bundled him into the mini-van and set out for the after-hours pediatric care center on the other side of town. A diagnosis of an ear infection, a prescription for antibiotics, and we were out the door. I stopped at the drug store to have the prescription filled, then headed home. We walked in the house at seven. My expectation was that my wife would be bustling around in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a meal of some sort which I could then sit down and eat. I was pretty hungry, having last eaten at 3:00, and when I get hungry, I get crabby. I made some sort of offhand comment about there being no dinner, to which my wife responded in kind, so I called her a not-so-nice name, and then we fought for the rest of the night. Notably, neither one of us really ate anything after that, except for a desiccated pop tart (her) and a dry, stale slice of pizza (me).

Even as I was fuming around the kitchen in the immediate aftermath of our verbal exchange, I knew that fighting over something as trivial as who should have put the pizza in the toaster oven was a pretty stupid thing to do. Nevertheless, it is amazing how quickly the ego can make up the most illogical justifications for feeling wounded and how easily you can heap blame on other people when your expectations don’t meet up with reality.  (And this was happening less than four hours after I wrote the last posting on how absurd it is to think we can read other people’s minds. The assertive ego is nothing if not persistent).

What kept running through my head something along the lines of, well, shit, I know if our roles were reversed I would have made dinner. Which is a load of crap, obviously. The truth is, I have no idea what I would have done if our roles were reversed. I was conjuring up a fantasy future where I was the hero, which had absolutely no grounding in reality, and then using it as a yard-stick to measure someone else’s past behavior ,which itself existed nowhere other than in my unspoken expectations. That’s the ridiculous part.

What I could have done, what I should have done, was to walk over to the freezer, grab a frozen mushroom and truffle flatbread (from Trader Joe’s-yummy) and stick it in the toaster oven. Then everyone would have gotten something to eat and no one would have felt bad. Instead, I wrote a script about what was going to happen and when it didn’t happen the way I expected, I freaked out. Yes, blood sugar was low. Yes, it was late. Yes, my wife’s initial reaction was less than ideal, but none of that matters.

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that the ultimate responsibility for my actions lies with me. I am fully aware that I have control-freak tendencies which sometimes don’t mesh too well with my wife’s approach to organization. So, was I upset about dinner, or upset that she didn’t adhere to what I thought was the way the evening needed to unfold?  I think I need to work with this a little, but I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

Conflict does not necessarily have to be destructive. Sometimes it’s the fertilizer from which beautiful things grow, but sometimes it’s just cold pop-tarts and hurt feelings.

No Self

There is a rule of evidence in the law which considers speculative statements by witnesses about another’s state of mind to be inherently unreliable. Consequently, they are forbidden at trial. To me this seems like a sound legal principle. Asking a witness to speculate about what another person is thinking is fraught with the possibility of error. After all, one person cannot be inside of another person’s head, and mind-reading isn’t accepted by science. While the rule is properly enforced in a courtroom, it is more haphazardly applied in our personal lives.

Every day we draw conclusions about what other people are thinking, often without any basis. Often times we go even further, mentally categorizing them based on brief observations and filing them away on a shelf in our minds. There they become part of our mental construct; another delicate strand in our carefully built web of assumptions about the way the world works. Of course it’s all bullshit. There’s very little one can tell about a person’s mind by watching them for a few minutes on a train. Oh, we can pick up clues, like style or dress and reading material, but we don’t really know. Even when we think we know, we’re usually wrong. We think we're better at it when the person we think we've got figured out is someone close to us, but even there, we consistently fail to get it "right".

What I find interesting to consider, is that while we are experiencing other people’s existence in our daily routine and fitting them in our schemas, they are simultaneously experiencing our presence, drawing their own conclusions about us and filing us away on their own mental shelves.  I would imagine if we could see inside of their heads and read their thoughts, we would be appalled at the inaccurate assumptions. All of the begs the question, if we are all walking around with subjective beliefs about everyone we encounter, and they are doing the same about us, and we’re all wrong about everything, is there any objective “self” at all?  The bigger question is, “is there an objective reality at all?”

What I’ve gathered from Zen practice is that there may be an objective reality, but all the mental pictures, assumptions and habits that we consider to be such a solid part of who we are, isn’t part of it. What we consider the self is an aggregate of habits, perceptions and assumptions that is as transient as a snowflake in springtime. The trick is realizing that at the end of the day, there is no objective difference between you and me. We’re all the same, and we’re all in the same pickle boat floating not so serenely down the river of cause and effect.

You Got Problem, I Got Problem, Everybody Got Problem

That's the mantra that Ahmed, my Albanian landlord, used to intone whenever I came up with a fanciful excuse about why I couldn't pay the full $600 monthly rent on my Bronx apartment back in the 1980s.  He was a decent landlord and used to let me slide for a couple of weeks until I could come up with the scratch. I've been thinking a bit about excuses latey. What are they really? Are they reasons things don’t get done, or self-fulfilling prophesies grounded in nothing more substantial than our fleeting and ever-changing views on the way the world should be?  I mean, to some degree we ALL make excuses about why this or that thing never happened or couldn’t get done, and in some cases there is a legitimate basis for the excuse. Example: “I missed the meeting because the train was 30 minutes late”.  There’s nothing you can do about a missing train, so an excuse of that sort is really more of an explanation. No problem there.

The problem arises when we make excuses for why we can’t do something, despite the fact that the excuse is more properly characterized as an act of avoidance rather than an act of random happenstance. Does that make sense? People write all sorts of scripts in their heads and play their roles with great intensity. For example, “I have no time at all to meditate” is really a declaration of subconscious desire. “I don’t really want to meditate but I feel like I should so I’ll say I have no time” is probably more accurate.  The kicker is that most of the time we’re completely unaware that we are mentally shutting things down. This holds even when we’re directly challenged about something we really think we believe.

That said, assuming the role of “Director” and pointing out places where someone can easily, say, carve out 10 minutes of time out of their schedule to sit on a cushion, will not get anyone to change their minds (or behavior), but it will almost certainly get you into trouble. People don’t want their scripts (or beliefs) challenged; only validated. When we are challenged, we lock up. We can’t process the dissonance because it calls into question a very firmly held super-structure of beliefs about the way the world should be. Strongly held beliefs, as the Buddha told us all those years ago, are the principal cause of much of life’s needless suffering.

 I think that the role of Zen practice is to help us re-write our scripts.  What Zazen does is points us to where we’ve gotten stuck, and pries us loose from the web of beliefs and so-called certainties that we spin out of the silk of our mental constructs.

I have always believed that we manufacture a good measure of our own misery. One thing practice has taught me is that problems are never as insurmountable as we think they are. Often finding a solution to a problem that seems intractable is as simple as  sitting with it and unraveling the web of ideas, strand by strand.

Snowed Under

Here in the Northeast we’ve been coping with some pretty foul weather for the last couple of months. At least every other week we’ve been graced with a quantity of snow sufficient to gum up the wheels of commuting and commerce, while simultaneously delighting my school-age children who have gotten a few days off to wallow in cartoons and video games.

I’ve been trying to keep my cool and remain detached about the weather, but I’m starting to get a tinge of cabin fever, and the relentless wrath of mother nature is wearing me down. Snow has been on the ground since early December and it doesn’t look like it’s planning to go anywhere anytime soon. A two hour slog to work in the inky darkness isn’t helping my disposition, nor is the 15 minutes spent waiting on the train platform as icy wind and rain blast across my face while I’m waiting for the 6:26. Usually while I’m standing there, I’m thinking about what a sorry lot of pissed off people live on Long Island and why can’t these motherfuckers smile once in awhile. It usually dawns on me that I am, in fact, one of those sorry-ass, pissed off motherfuckers, and that realization, very occasionally, makes me smile.

Winter weather obviously means different things to different people. To my wife, who works in an elementary school, every weather forecast that predicts snow in any quantity represents the possibility of a day off from work. To my kids, who diligently wear white socks to bed and pray to the snow gods every night before turning off the lights, a big winter storm represents the possibility of being loosened from routine and given a day to do as they will. To me, another big storm represents three hours of shoveling the driveway and digging out the cars and the likelihood of mass transit headaches and a three hour commute.

The snow, of course, doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it; it just falls from the sky and piles up on the lawn. Maybe therein lies the key to successfully navigating the winter. I can’t make the snow stop falling or the wind stop blowing. I can’t make the house bigger. All I can do is clear the snow from my driveway and my mind and keep moving forward. Sometimes bitching about things you can’t control feels good and righteous, sometimes it makes you feel small and mean, but it doesn’t change a damn thing, so why waste the effort? Spring will be here soon enough. In the readiness of time, the flowers will bloom.