A POEM ON DISSOLVING BACK INTO THE COSMIC INTANGIBLES

 Thich Nhat Hanh, Noble Truths

     Today, August 13, 2017,  I saw an online photo of Thich Nhat Hanh arriving at an airport in Vietnam.  Thich Nhat Hanh is a poet, scholar, gardener, a great soul and a wise and generous  Zen Master from Vietnam who came to the US during the Vietnamese War; his purpose was to persuade Americans to withdraw from the hideous carnage among his people.  He seemed, to many Vietnamese, to join the "Imperialists" who had  oppressed Southeast Asia for centuries.  Remember, before the U.S. jumped in, the war was meant to drive the French colonizers out and achieve national independence and reunion with North Vietnam, to reunite the country after European/U.S. forces had divided it.  

   

    Then the U.S. made it a "war against Communism" and all that political confusion cast Thich Nhat Hanh as the pro-Imperialist enemy to Vietnamese freedom fighters.  When the U.S. at last withdrew, the whole region--Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia--had been turned into a vast Killing Field, and US propaganda still blames "Communism"  and refuses to acknowledge all its own genocidal guilt.  

    Because of this complex history, so poorly understood by Americans in the 21st century, Vietnam, the new reunited Vietnam, refused to allow Thich Nhat Hanh to return until 2005, forty years after he left.  In 2008 he visited once more, and yesterday, August 30, 2017 (in the U.S. time zone) he arrived for what seems almost inevitably a final visit.  For in the late fall of 2014, "Thay" (a term of endearment used for a teacher, and the brief name for him among thousands of Buddhist students worldwide) suffered a massive brain hemorrhage.  In the nearly three years since then his health stabilized but he had suffered some paralysis and a limiting aphasia.  He could express his wishes and he could inspire with his deep and radiant happiness, but the long walks together with his students, lay and monastic, and his beautiful haunting long dharma talks in the softest truest voice would never return.  He would never again tell the story of accidentally hitting his left hand with a hammer in his right hand--and how quickly, instantly, both hands gave each other love.  "My left hand," he always smiled at this point, holding back the punchline, "never said: 'I want justice!  Give me that hammer!'"

    Seeing the photo of him this morning, sitting in a wheelchair at an airport after a long, long trip,   broke my heart, again, and yet inspired me.  Thay's face so still, so quiet, so inward.  His body so obviously letting go, retiring, becoming an inadequate container for his great heart and spirit. Like an inflated balloon slowly leaking its air through old soft skin.  And because he taught so well and so much about the interbeing of all creatures, and the illimitless "recycling"  of all the separate elements that we mistakenly see as permanently unique and separate "things"--whether person, plant, star, idea, or emotion--I can also see this process as a grief to those of us who love as a human must, on the 'historical' level. While I also consent to That Which Is on the 'ultimate level, as a perfect illustration of No-Self and Impermanence, of Nirvana perhaps.  

   He has talked so much and so wisely of how the raincloud cannot disappear into nothing.  We see the raincloud in every manifestation that contains water.  The raincloud has not died; it has changed.  It is in the sunflower and the infant child; it is in the mud and swamp where orchids and lotus grow.  It is in you, in me.  And Thay is not disappearing; as he empties his physical body, he continues. His mark may be perpetual.  His thoughts and words and actions were magnificent and may they find continuation in each person, each flower,each calligraphy, each book, that has been touched by him.

 My Poem's sources

   The most recent Zen Scholarship Thay was working on was a new translation of the Sutra (a dharma talk by the Buddha some 2600 years ago) called "The Heart Sutra" or "The Heart of Perfect Understanding" or "The Prajnaparamita Sutra."  The poem I transcribe here is based on my understanding of the Prajnaparamita linked with my experience sitting alone beside my father during his last three days of life. In the Sutra, a Boddhisattva voice says repeatedly, "Listen, Shariputra: Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.  Form is not other than Emptiness; Emptiness is not other than Form."  
     My understanding of the apparent contradiction underlies my Buddhist practice of the last thirteen years: meditation leading to concentration, concentration revealing the concrete reality of the existence of things and beings on one level while on the other there are only transient assemblages of that which is neither particle nor wave, neither matter nor energy. 

   As a Shakespeare scholar and theatre artist, I found semantic memories of  Prospero's words arising in conjunction with the Sutra.  A particular passage from The Tempest helped me "sing" about the mystery of life and death:  in the play, Prospero, an exiled king and a great wizard, has caused an assembly of his loved ones and his former enemies to witness a heavenly pageant, literally a performance by gods and goddesses in the clouds.  When it ends and one, at least, of the onlookers expresses confusion and concern, Prospero chides--or reassures--them:

          Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

          As I foretold you, were all spirits and

          Are melted into air, into thin air,

          And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

          The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

          The solemn temples, --the great globe itself,

          Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

          And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

          Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

          As dreams are made on, and our little life

          Is rounded with a sleep. 

                                 Act IV, Sc. 1, lines 148-158

So I am adding my own ponderings to that stunned witnessing.  Here, as a tribute to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, is my own poem.  You may want to print this out and let yourself take it slowly; it is meant to be a song, maybe a contemporary chant.

 

       Sutra on the Baseless Fabric

                 "Ga-te, Ga-te, Paraga-te, Parasamga-te"

          (Going, Going, Almost going, Almost completely gone)

           

                               I

                ("An actor is a sculptor carving in snow.")

          Ice statues, carving ourselves in a substance

          of endless deliquescence, struggling for permanence,

          the illusion of perpetuity, delusions

          of existence:     Vivo, ergo sum.

          Ice melts as it warms. We melt

          As we cool.  Ice blooms as heat recedes:

         Thick atoms slow and crystallize.

         But we form when heat quickens:

         Our solidity not solid, but crystal motion.

    We are not ice but flame.  All melts. All trembles.

   Dancing and flickering, wavering over ashes,

   Moulten in soft dust, and blown away, blown out:

   Sandcastles labored, compulsive structuring,

   Shoring up ever-evanescing towers,

          Anguished at imperfections, the annual

          Losses, anxious labors to make fixed,

         To firm up artifacts among these windblown drifts,

   These our actors, were all Spirits, men and women

   Of snow:           Les neiges d'antan.

                            II

Watching, then, permanently, my permanent father

Disappear, slip away, the very body diminishing

Hour by hour.  The flesh goes first, a layer of stuff

We think is meat, solid-- the person incarnate,

We think--but yet it disappears. Its absence

Alters suddenly the person, enacts a stranger,

Leaves a body but the skin sinks onto bone

And reshapes, redesigns: an alien emerges,

The gaunt death-ikon appears in place of face:

Jaw, skull and shoulder sockets extrude—

As cheek, mouth, and biceps vanish.

Knee-joints and hip-bones, elbows and ribs

Grow monstrous and huge:  no thighs, no calves,

only jagged lines, only bones.  O scarecrow, skeleton.

O staggering weak collection of rods and sockets

Above the swollen talons that were feet. Leave not a racke behinde.

We are such stuffe  (A pageant, apparition)  as dreames.

He shrank before my eyes--

Like the snow outside those dim December days--

Dispersed, becoming pale and then invisible.

The snow was melting in a winter sun, a slow

and ceaseless warming, and his was cooling,

his life that had been flame, had blazed and sparked,

had spit and glowed, became a pale translucent glow,

Still vaporizing till the heat was gone.

                        III

       And then go thoughts, attention, all

       But a faint trace of person dissolves—

             a smoke dispersed in air;

           mere indistinct wisps remain.

     

     O pale, pale: --where goes the blood

     That its tint not lingers beneath the skin,

     The tinge of living in transparency?

   And the face like an infant in winter, in having

   No person, no tension, no history etched, or hope:

   Habitual frown, wry grimace, lifted eyebrow,

   Winked eye, flashed frown-- all erased:

   What you thought they looked like in the flesh

   that was not flesh, but the imprinted power,

   A present strength of will. . .  all Spirits.

   The chest looms over this rickety scaffolding.

   The thin claws of hands that clasp nothing.

   His feet had lost the ground; he tipped in some

   Gravityless ether.  His hair, bleached and

            Blushing straw, on end.

   Like candleglow, he flickered at the last,

   Like wisps of spark, he sank, dispersed, and sighed.

           So easy this extinction, eternity's bland mask of death.

           Even in sleep, expression remains.

           Not here:  this country from whose Bourne

  

                         IV 

     At last, not human, further gone in time

     To fish or lizard, a mouth that opens slowly

     To no air, once and once and once again

     And then the tiny skeletal foetal curl.

     So silent, gradual. Where was the line crossed,

     when did the bolt slip into the slot,

     when was the door so closed it sealed into wall,

     why can't it come back, why can't we reach through,

     why can't we return, why can't we see further?

The bottom of all runs out. The hole disappears.

There isn't. Not. None.  Gone.  Done.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

J. Rice

Why Buddhism?

If you like your spirituality to be a deep cosmology without superstition, and your mental health practice seasoned with logic, close observation of your own thinking, and a non-fanatical social outlook, you could do worse than studying Buddhism.  Besides, there's no reason to 'give up' a theistic religion for Buddhism.  If you approach the non-magical side of Buddhist practice, you can still be, as many Buddhist practitioners are, Christian, Jewish, Islamic--whatever.

My own favorite commentator and translator is the Vietnamese Zen Master (and poet and artist) Thich Nhat Hanh, whom his followers fondly call "Thay," a Vietnamese term variously pronounced "Tie" or "Tay" as nationality dictates perhaps, meaning  "Rabbi, Teacher, Maestro"-- that kind of title. But you can sample from perhaps hundreds of writers and lecturers and leaders.  What's important, I think, is to differentiate between the psychological/philosophical practice and the religious beliefs and rituals.  I know many Buddhist teachers and practitioners think that you "MUST" believe in spirits, deities, gods, demons and magical formulas and rituals.  Most of all, the most common non-rational tenet is reincarnation.

I can't say any of that is wrong.  It's just that, to quote an apocryphal remark of the scientist LaPlace to Napoleon, "I have no need of that hypothesis."  Somewhere (it's written) that when Buddha was asked by one of his students whether or not there was life after death, he responded in the same vein:  his teachings were not invitations to speculate about invisible and immaterial theories.  His teachings were how to practice supreme and sublime sanity.  Yes, such practice can and must become, to some extent, psychedelic:  i.e., we can all agree rationally that everything is connected to everything else, but when you grasp it deeply, it is said to "make you one with everything."  At that point life and death are no more separate than you and the air you breathe.  It is said.

YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF ALONE

Buddhism, overall, is a system of thought and behavior directed toward reducing suffering--suffering in and of one's self as a direct result of and cause of suffering in "the world."   For if you can grasp deeply and intuitively that within-the-self and outside-the-self is a false dichotomy, you see that every action is an action in the world sum of suffering and delight.  The "self" as a being delimited by the boundary of the skin then becomes an illusion.

Buddhism is inherently consistent with a common First-Americans' belief that the earth is our body, its rivers our blood, its air our life.  Buddhism agrees.  Agrees literally.  No single thing exists entire and to itself alone.  Thay calls the realization of this mutually dependent web of being "Interbeing" as an equivalent of the more complex Buddhist phrase "Interdependent Co-Arising."  "This is because that is.  And vice-versa.  Not just a causation through time, a causation through space. Interbeing.

Louise Erdrich wrote that the Ojibwe word "Manitou" does not name a 'primitive god,' but is the reverent word for that mystery in which all things have their being.  Not primitive at all, but much more comprehensive than most Christians' idea of "God."

Mental health?  No such thing as one person's mental state in isolation.  So your path to personal 'salvation' has to be via an effort for everyone's salvation, everyone's happiness.  Compassion for all, the self included.  Salvation, or 'Enlightenment,' thus cannot be achieved by someone in isolation, because there really is no isolation except a delusion of separateness.

NOTHING IN THE COSMOS IS PERMANENT

All human suffering springs from that delusion, and its twin:  the desire to make things last.  To oppose death, to oppose change, to try to build up a store of things that are yours unchangingly and forever.  Illusion of permanence.  Illusion of separateness.   When/if you read or hear about Impermanence in Buddhism and Emptiness, those words refer to the antonyms of humans' desires to make things last, and their delusion of separateness.  There is no separate self.  That separate self is 'empty' as a concept.

So there's no contradiction between spiritual practice and social practice.  Christ put it like this:  "Even as you do to the least of these, so you do to me."  Or, as he died, tormented by Roman guards, he said, "Forgive them.  They know not what they do."  They don't know that I am one with them and so they languish in ignorance and suffering.

The marks of spiritual and mental health are generosity, compassion, stability, happiness and peacefulness, and stability--equanimity.  These are not considered to be 'feelings' but character traits that come with deep meditation, especially on one's own thoughts.  They are not virtues, as in good behavior that can affect one's value or worth.  The compassionate person is more fortunate than the selfish person, but not "better."  There is no hierarchy in practical Buddhism, Zen Buddhism.  And maybe the hardest habit for a contemporary American to break is the habit of perceiving everything by comparison in a hierarchy:  good and evil, worst and best, least and most, superior and inferior.

There are degrees of freedom from suffering.  That's it.  So if I feel compassion for others who are suffering, it may break my heart but it will not contribute to the world's suffering.  I may grieve for the destruction of the web of life through pollution, waste, greed.  But I do not increase my suffering.
To grieve, to know what one's pain is, is to be free of it becoming a permanent knot in my guts, anger in my mind.

Of course if one holds the goal of decreasing suffering in the world, it's easy to see that compassion is a useful tool.  But it is not a virtue that makes me or you better.  It's not "praiseworthy" so much as it is plain good sense.  In that connection I remember an episode of the "Friends" tv series in which Joey and Phoebe try to find how they can do a good deed that doesn't benefit themselves.  They find it impossible.  I miss Joey and Phoebe.

To perceive reality with good sense, one must be capable of good sense.  Good sense requires a mind that can hold focus and can separate itself from waves of mental chatter and tsunamis of emotions.
To achieve a focused mind, one must train it not to chase after every whim nor wobble with every moodshift and fancy.  Mind-training.  Who or what can train a mind?

FOCUS ON BREATH TO TRAIN YOUR MIND

As in theatre training, the first available physical tool is awareness of breathing.  Instead of worrying about the lines or the audience, turn your attention to the physical sensations of simple breathing.  As you experience breath, the mind is given something practical to do that helps it escape nonsense.  The actor may indeed experience breathing with an increased vitality.  That increased vitality could become nervousness if the mind was given over to looking at it and describing it and worrying about it.  But that increased vitality is mere excitation: it is the same physical sensation as preparation for receiving a football pass, as playing music, entering a stage, or focusing on deep contemplation of what the mind is.

It's intense.  Intensely alive, deeply alert, enlivened.  It is a discovery mode.

 The practice of conscious attention to breath helps a person to locate 'home base,' from which they can see how the will-o'the-wisps and mirages sweep over the surface of the mind like reflections of clouds in a lake.  You don't stop the clouds.  You just don't obsess about them and mistake their transience for the deep inner silence of the water.

Meditation can be as simple as that.  Training the mind to know itself.  Quieting the ideas of passion and finding the physical site of feelings.  Once you can 'feel' your feeling, it can pass. You don't have to keep complaining about it to yourself.  You feel your feeling, you cradle it as if it were a distressed child or whimpering puppy.  And it calms down.

The mind matters.   More on that later.
 

Meditation -- simple but deep

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an almost indispensable guide toward establishing an understood meditation practice. Why, how and what: that is, why meditation, how to meditate, and what is meditation, actually. No nonsense, no hoo-ha, no mystification: this is a book my son uses In PRISON to help prisoners discover how they can avoid despair, rage, bitterness, and actually find compassion for themselves and others.

An affectionate title many of his students use to refer to Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced "thick not hawn") is "Thay," a Vietnamese term for teacher or respected teacher. Like calling someone "Maestro" or "Rabbi" or "Pastor."  Some people will say that "Thay" caters too much to Western middle-class desires for self-help and self-actualization and self-ish personal happiness, but I say, okay, start there if that's where people are. And not only the middle-class craves help and personal development. It's just that the middle class generally has the time and the means to articulate it for themselves and "buy in" to retreats and books and DVDs and CDs. But youth at risk and people on the edge need it just as much if not more.

Many of Thay's books are at least accessible and straightforward. I myself have taken transmission of the Five Mindfulness Trainings and have formally "Taken Refuge" in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
And I started with this, and with his book called simply Anger.  Almost nine years later and I continue to aspire to the path of Buddhism.  A great spiritual teacher, Bo Lozoff, wrote a touching book on practice called Deep and Simple, and in truth that is the spiritual path, just that deep and just that simple: stay aware and open your heart.  Breathe: you are alive.

This book is a great introduction and can pay off in almost instant if gradual changes.




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