Jane Hirshfield, "A Branch of Yellow Leaves" (April 24, 2019)

so I just want to welcome everybody and and and thank you all for coming out at such a busy time of the year this is the this is the season finale of the Buddhist Studies department but it studies year-long lecture series called putting pen to palm leaf and my name is Ruth ozeki and I'm standing in today for a Jay Garfield who is sadly absent dealing with the family medical emergency so Jay has given me the delightful job of introducing Jane and but and he's also asked me to say a few words about this series that we've just that were concluding tonight putting pen to palm leaf is the second lecture series of its kind organized by the Smith College Buddhist studies and the five College Buddhist studies consortium the first of these series was a very successful series called robed warriors which we did two years ago and it was featuring women monastics women Buddhist monastics who were involved in social justice issues I think that that's a fair summary isn't it and you know attracted it attracted audiences from the college community students faculty staff as well as the general public so it was a very it was a wonderful series and we decided to reprise it this year with putting pen to palm leaf which is a series about Buddhism and contemporary literature and so we've we've hosted four distinguished writers Norman Fischer Lila Kate wheeler Jane Hirschfeld and me so actually that makes it three distinguished writers and and one somewhat more disreputable one each of the writers gave a reading a public lecture a con seminar a student seminar and a five college Buddhist faculty seminar in other words we worked these poor writers me.we to the bone but the writers have been have been very gracious and generous with their time and the series has once again been oh it has been a wonderful success a series like this can only come about with the generous support of many many sponsors and and so I'd like to publicly thank the office of the president the Kahn Institute the College lecture committee the Smith departments of religion English literature and comparative literature the Buddhist Studies program the poetry Center the ADA how can't fund and then from the five colleges Amherst College Department of religion Mount Holyoke College Department of religion Hampshire colleges school for a critical social inquiry and five College incorporated so thank you to these generous sponsors for making this possible we're in the process of planning the next series which will take place two years from now so if any of our sponsors are here tonight you will be hearing from us again soon so now it's my it's my very great pleasure to welcome Jane Hirschfeld and I'm delighted to be introducing her for several very personal reasons one reason is that of course we share a vocation writing and a passion for words another reason is that we share a lineage Soto Zen as transmitted and taught by shun Diaz Suzuki founding abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center so first let me tell you a little bit about Jane's vocation Jane is a prolific writer and the author of I think 11 books of poetry it's a little hard to keep track Jane yeah okay and I think there's a 12th coming out very shortly okay her work has received many awards and distinctions including the California Book Award the poetry Center Book Award the Bay Area book reviewers award and in addition her books have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award jane has also written two wonderful books of essays nine gates entering the mind of poetry and ten windows how great poems transformed the world she is also a translator and has Co translated the love poems of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu two Japanese women poets living and writing at the Heian Court during the 9th and 10th centuries these women were famous in Japan they were counted amongst the 36 poetry immortals but they were relatively unknown in the rest of the world Jaynes code translation which is entitled the ink dark moon such a beautiful beautiful title changed all of that and brought their words back to life in in another tongue as if this weren't enough Jane has also edited several collections including women in praise of the sacred 43 centuries of spiritual poetry by women she is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation the Rockefeller Foundation the American Academy of the Academy of American poets and the National Endowment for the Arts among others and in 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American poets all of this to say that if we here in America had 36 Poetry immortals Jane would certainly be amongst their number the Polish Nobel Prize poet chess Swami washe wrote that in Jane's work he sees quote a profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings it is precisely this I praised in the poetry of Jane Hirschfeld the subject of her poetry is our ordinary life among other people and our continuing encounter with everything earth brings us trees flowers animals and birds in its highly sensuous detail her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness I would add that her work illuminates many other Buddhist virtues and truths as well the truth of impermanence of interdependence of emptiness of human suffering and the virtue of courage of not turning away but Jane has long resisted the label Zen poet perhaps for the same reasons that women have long resisted being called women poets or women novelists I am a human poet jane says that's all but even so there is Zen in Jane's work she was a full time Zen student for eight years starting in 1974 when she was driving to California in a red Dodge van with yellow tie-dyed curtains and took a detour down a steep perilous 14 dirt road to Tassajara Zen monastery where she ended up living as a monk for three years now I I know that perilous 14 mile dirt road I was on it two weeks ago driving back up after spending three months at that same monastery waking up at 3:30 in the morning sitting zazen for hours chopping gallons of carrots and onions and cabbage going to bed at 10:00 too tired to fall asleep honestly it was one of the hardest things I've ever done and I was on the fair for three months Jane lived there for three years and that was long before the monastery had heat or electricity she refers to this time spent in monastic training as the diamond at the center of her life whoever I am now she says came out of that experience so who is Jane Hirschfeld well according to Lisa Russ bar writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education Jane is a visionary whose work has at its source quote the riddle the existential joke of being of meaning of Dickinson's prank of the heart at play on the heart Spahr writes that central to Hirschfeld vision is a kind of holy delight that is at the heart of riddles and Cowen's the deep pleasure of discovery of the word in or beot behind or beyond the world and vice versa and it's true Jane's poems exert a strong Cohen like hold on the mind and the imagination they are visionary objects of contemplation that delight you move you confound you and stay with you long after you've read the last word they are words that enlighten the world in nine gates Jane writes immersion in the life of the world a willingness to be inhabited by and speak for others including those beyond the realm of the human these are the practices not just of the Bodhisattva but of the writer well in her practices Jane embodies both so it's my great pleasure to give you a true Bodhisattva a writer a poet and an American poetry immortal changer shield well I thank Ruth for that extraordinary introduction and I will just say please lower your expectations immediately I I won't repeat the list of gratitudes but I will say I feel them deeply I'm very glad to be back here I will also say that I'm glad this is a more intimate group than last night's poetry reading because I was wanting this group to be people who I hope are somewhat familiar with Buddhist ideas and terminology and not not just everybody who likes my poems because one might feel a little lost every once in a while if I use a word that I and I then don't go ahead and define it but you know it can all be looked up or asked afterwards and I also want to apologize so I am a lifelong it's it's it's not just my my stage of life oh the woman with no memory and I had to decide long ago whether I would speak extemporaneously when I give talks like this and not get all of the particulars quite that I would have intended to or whether I would give formal talks and write them beforehand and I was very relieved when I saw one one of the founding Zen teachers of America Aiken Roshi read his Dharma talk in the zendo when he came as a guest visitor and so I take permission that if Aiken Roshi could read a talk in a meditation hall I can read a talk in a college auditorium so I will and here it is as I was doing the final revisions for this talk news came of the sri lankan Easter Sunday bombings one more unfathomable act of chosen violence in a line of so many others in so many places beyond counting or naming writing a Sri Lankan writer friend moments after I heard the news I expressed only my sadness but then afterwards I did what I often do and thought perhaps there is some fuller response perhaps there is something more I might want to be thinking now what would that be and the first thing that came to mind when I asked myself this question to think and feel a little more further fully was the second of the four Buddhist Noble Truths do those not the truths the vows see that's what happens when I don't look at the paper delusions are inexhaustible I vow to end them and then a second thought followed on that one and what arose surprised me a little it was the simple wish for some increase of basic humility as an antidote to the psyches darker energies that drive suffering human beings to such unfathomable acts and then I began to think about the ideas in Noah hari's recent book sapiens and Horus proposes that one part of the explanation for our species evolution into planet-wide dominance over all others is twofold first we're a species that flexible we have many modes of behavior and the second is that an immense social power is created by the fact that we are a species who makes up shared fictions and this shared belief in created stories is what lets human beings take action together in large numbers in those stories names now one of the stories of Buddhism and Zen is about stepping outside of story belief preconception ideas of self and other ideas and still the Dharma comes to us quite often in the form of stories we cannot help that we are human and story is how humans think when we first put pen to palm leaf it was to hold the stories by which we parsed the world and yet as a species we also have stories complimentary capacity to question so much of a child's early cognitive work is figuring out the world by questions what is that how does it work where are we going when will we get there why why why why why questions we learn for questions we come up with new stories and so I've always very much liked the traditional image that Buddhist practice rests on a tripod great effort great faith and great doubt each equally mattering I would like to dedicate this talk to doubt and to the hope that we may as a species somehow find our way more fully toward it that we might surrender some of the coupled energies of Pride and humiliation for some increase of simple humility some allegiance to doubting our own rightness it's not a very Buddhist concept or word humility but it seems to me for myself at least just now a useful human space to consider embracing to take on the practices of humility and the simple modesty of questioning our own stories a person not sure of their own correctness will not bomb a church or a mosque a neighbor a stranger a school an ecosystem and now I'm going to start this talk the way I was going to start it before last Sunday with a handful of quotes and yes stories first in December 1967 during the so the shows on question and answer ceremony at Tassajara Zen mountain center the first practice period to be held at the first Zen monastery established in America a student's question to Shin Rio Suzuki Roshi was very basic doctor Roshi the student asked who are the Sangha Suzuki Roshi answered we are we here in Tassajara are the Sangha in the limited sense but really all of us all sentient beings are Sangha second a Russian interviewer asked the great polish poets Vigny of herbert what is the purpose of poetry herbert answered to wake up next two quotes from Antoine de saint-exupéry the little prince what makes the desert beautiful said the little prince is that somewhere it hides a well and the second quote the eyes are blind one must learn to look with the heart and last the story from which I don't know if any of you even know the title of this talk maybe you just came the talk has a title a branch of yellow leaves poetry Buddhism in the world so the story that I that I took that title from which appears in the Mahayana Buddhist Mar maha nirvana sutra a child is weeping inconsolably nothing helps finally at wit's end the parents pick up a branch of bitter willow covered with bright yellow leaves and say here don't cry here is some gold for you the child stops crying smiles and reaches out for the beautiful bright shining branches about this story Zen master Lin Chi founder of the rinzy lineage of Zen made this comment all the teachings of Buddhism are a branch of yellow leaves given to children to stop them from crying what I want to talk about here is going to be more of a cloud than a single premise or thought it has something to do with interconnection compassion beauty and transformation their inhabitants in our lives and in words it has something to do with recognising that the heart minds looking is omnipresent and omniscient and the desire to wake up our human thirst that don't come under only the label Buddhists it has something to do with invisibility and the value of hidden Wells with waters found in expected and unexpected places in ways it has something to do with beauty's capacity to unbuckle us from our suffering it has something to do with what is known in Buddhism as oppaya skillful means and in poetry might be called rhetoric prosody craft it has something to do with the way the spirit of Zen practice and the practice of poetry and the simple intention to conduct our ordinary lives as aware human beings can in any moment join hands so to enter the cloud let's let's pick up from Vinci's comment all the teachings are a branch of yellow leaves given to children to stop them from crying that statement if it were just taken on its own without any context might be understood in a multitude of different ways taken not on its own with context it can be understood in a multitude of different ways so heard one way it could be heard as an assertion that all teachings are deception and distraction after all the origin story of Zen is that it is the teaching outside of words and sutras transmitted by the silent holding up of a flower but Lin Chi's comment might also be heard as meaning something exactly the opposite it may mean that whatever stops crying and lessens suffering is indeed a teaching especially in its original context in the Sutra the parents actions can also be seen as an example of skillful means and the story and illustration of rupiah's compassion the teaching is only effective if it can be heard by its receiver just as the most beautiful poem would be incomprehensible to us heard in a language we don't know parents child branch may also be understood as part of a single and larger whole we ourselves are the parents the child the branch but then we might also stop and think how does it happen that some bit of offered beauty a branch of shaken bright leaves can stop a child from crying is it really that the leaves are called gold that stops the crying I don't think this is a story about instruction and greed though it could be heard that way I also don't want to take it as a story about distraction or mistaken concepts though it could be heard that way too perhaps because I am a person on the path of art making I like to think the word gold is simply a way of saying look don't cry here is some beauty and to think that offered beauty the untrained small self whose ceaseless discomfort is an image of dukkha the suffering named in Buddhism's first noble truth pauses its wailing the child is reminded that something in this world exists beyond our personal this moment grief and finds the reminder irresistible because of its shining we cry for one thing offered some unexpected beauty outside our own story stop crying to call this beauty gold does raise the slippery matter of value but a willow branch like a bit of metal is after all useless to a child it cannot be eaten it does not sing to sleep it is simply something the parents hold out in the spirit of look this is better in a story in which parents are trusted perhaps one point if this story is that a branch of this world's rustling golden leaves and a shining nugget of rock in a stream and the gold of awakening buddha-nature are not so different what that thing is is not the point that the baby stops crying that is the point that there is something we might value more than continuing our suffering unexpected beauty we know does startle us out of our plot points a bus comes off the Golden Gate Bridge in California and around a curve heading into San Francisco and through its window you suddenly see a great blue heron it is literally breathtaking heart-stopping whatever you may have been thinking leaves your mind which for a moment is entirely only Heron poems and the practices of Buddhist awareness are herons they invite us to notice any moment that a few words or the sounds of the pebbles striking a piece of bamboo or a bird can break the self open such moments we make the selfs experience and expectations who and what we are changes who and what Suzuki Roshi called things as it is changes when the mind stops spinning stories about this and that here and elsewhere self and other all existence can in that moment be felt as intimate as Sangha now you see an unexpected City heron and you want to tell someone about it moments of realization and moments of expression do seem to want one another here then is another part of the cloud and another story a 19th century igloo look Eskimo woman who evolved nook went out one night for the usual reason and was met by the light of a great bow light she instantly awakened into a different condition of being and returned to her hut as a shaman singing what would become her lifelong song the Great Sea frees me moves me as a strong River carries a weed earth and her strong winds move me take me away and my soul is swept up in joy I think many in this room will recognize even in the diminished form of an English translation the throne openness liberation and boundless sense of connection that of Avnet describes her poems images of earth and sea and wind bring to mind for me the image and story of the historical Buddha's gesture of touching the earth in some tellings in that moment the earth itself speaks proclaiming itself witness to the truth of his awakening in some tellings the Buddha then sees the morning star and says now I and all things awaken together two days ago was Earth Day a reminder of all beings interconnection it matters that realms beyond the human are included in what we think matters that awakening isn't for some people or some beings it is everyone's awakening everything's awakening we care for the future of what is included when we say the pronoun we and so it matters also that we recognize that liberation and awaken don't belong to any one path or tradition there move of Knox they are Vigny of Herbert's who wanted poetry that wakes up Santa exuberance little prince knows that any desert holds its hidden Wells for the heart that can see and seen they are sung the aboriginal dream songs of Australia are maps not least to hidden water knowledge found wants to be kept and so experiences of Awakening and freedom do seem very often to lead to poems something in us feels often not always but often that what is beyond words still can be pointed to by them held in them created by them as it is in this famous haiku by basho old pond frog leap splash the poem red superficially might seem like almost nothing a mere description red with fully open ears eyes heart mind its few words can be felt as the light of a life-changing bow light Basho's poem doesn't describe it enacts an entrance into this moments the sness when we become pond frog and water sound all at once every limited idea of the self breaks open we know our lives as not only what sits inside one body dry outside ponds as I talked about at yesterday's question-and-answer which some very few of you were also at I think good poetry works to wake up by carrying us from one way of being into another any good poem invites and creates some changed understanding that is what makes it at least for me good part of how it does this is by poetry's and arts and the psyche zone skillful means beauty works first by releasing us from the status quo of a moment of a life to take it in at all a person must first become permeable vulnerable to the presence of something new we step out of the separation of self and other what Basha saw and heard and felt we now in this moment see and hear and feel you can't understand what the words old pond mean with that becoming for a moment that quiet long-standing pool of water and all water means within both the archetypes of the psyche and the ordinary experience day you cannot comprehend the words frog leap without feeling it in your own thighs neuroscience confirms this when we read of a leaping frog the brains motor cortex engages and then the sound of water which is the literal of the Japanese phrase I've given here as splash but in Japanese it has onomatopoetic and it sounds like what it's talking about so in English we have to go with splash that moment that splash is the felt entrance when the changeless and the changing intersect in the readers whole body and mind so this erasure of status-quo and transformation of self it happens in all poems I firmly believe not only in poems by people like basho who does have both a biographical and an aesthetic connection to the practices and understanding of Zen Homer Sappho Wordsworth all work by the same warmth of interconnection by the same dissolving of fixed boundaries and undoing of separation a bird in any poem is the actual black bird owl mountain cuckoo it's also your own experience of birds of singing a flight swiftness of landing within and outside self a mountain in a poem is both the shaped and actual uplifted rock of the Earth's mantle and your own interior life of steepness stillness precipice persistence stone nests meeting an image our lives and the thing we read of become for a moment one not self not other so I've chosen almost arbitrarily three poems to read you that speak to our inner and outer stone nature the first one is the poet Charles simek's very well-known stone go inside a stone that would be my way let somebody else become a dove or Nash with the Tigers tooth I am happy to be a stone from the outside the stone is a riddle no one knows how to answer it yet within it must be cool and quiet even though a cow steps on it full weight even though a child throws it in a river the stone sinks slow unperturbed to the river bottom where the fishes come to knock on it and listen I have seen sparks fly out when two stones are rubbed so perhaps it is not dark inside after all perhaps there is a moon shining from somewhere as though behind a hill just enough light to make out the strange writings the star charts on the inner walls second poem black stone lying on a white stone by Cesare Vallejo I will die in Paris on a rainy day on some day I can already remember I will die in Paris and I don't step aside perhaps on a Thursday as today is Thursday in autumn it will be a Thursday because today Thursday setting down these lines I have put my upper arm bones on wrong and never so much as today have I found myself with all the road ahead of me alone says Ave who is dead everyone beat him although he never does anything to them they beat him hard with a stick and hard also with a rope these are the witnesses the Thursday's and the bones of my arms the solitude and the rain and the roads and the third one another haiku by basho stillness a cicadas cry drills into the rock these three poems are different in speaking and texture in feeling Vallejo stones appear only in his mysteriously perfect title Simic makes of his stone a surreal narrative of interior exploration in Basho's haiku the rock is perhaps most actual it is like his previous haikus old pond also however both the outer worlds visible granite or basalt are also Shunyata entered by the crickets brief singing spoken in words that lead us to glimpse these as inseparable from one another there's nothing buddhist sounding in the poems of Simic or Vallejo and that is part of my point here that I'm not talking only about a certain kind of foam I could have chosen any image any type of poetry move from poet to poet poem to poem point of study to point of study in each case and experience familiar to us from Zen appears taking in a noun or verb self drops away will become for a moment however fleeting stone Ness rope Ness cicada and this stone nough Sui find while within it is not inert or limited it is an expansion of being of freedom of possibility like Charles Simic we find ourselves moving within it we find ourselves discovering new writing hidden charts of navigation for a poet born as he was in Belgrade in 1938 I will add who lived through the Second World War as a child to find new ways of being in the face of granitic circumstance might be guessed a necessity for preserving aliveness there is no human being though who doesn't at some point feel themselves facing something impenetrable who doesn't need to find that what cannot be escaped can still be entered reaching reading each of these poems I feel some measure of evolved knocks sheer exhilaration her augmented aliveness freedom accompanies whatever other emotions a poem may hold we become vallejo strain and bones simek's fishes the show singing insect we become the poems punctuation and pauses it spells and consonants its music the poet's breathing becomes our breathing inside their words by these intimate small accumulations of enterings and transformation poems come to function in our lives as life rafts as antidotes to isolation and depression entering even another person suffering inside a good poem our own suffering is stepped outside of recalibrated sometimes forgotten we are reminded that we are not alone in whatever we ourselves feel and we are reminded that within any experience any emotion an original response can be found one that restores some sense of malleability resilience agency a Peruvian poet in exile as Fay a ho was born in a remote Andean village describes himself as having been beaten all his life by an uncaring word with sticks with ropes and still contemplating even his own future death finds a kind of exuberant Authority in the describing I have put my upper arm bones on wrong and never so much as today have I found myself with all the road ahead of me alone writer and reader are restored to the sense of this person as a maker not only victim we can know ourselves not passive before what happens the lines hold immense grief but they hold also the recognizable signature of the artist a person larger than the grief he describes they hold a freedom images in a poem ask us to become one with what they evoke and so remind us that we are not separate beings we are continuous with the nun Charles nonces our nan Basha world and it in turn is continuous with us nothing human is alien to me wrote the second century BCE Roman playwright Terence a Zen equivalent to that thought might be simply not one not two in poetry nothing in existence is alien to writer to reader and more everything in existence is made malleable whatever is fixed in us becomes open to change emotionally intellectually experientially and that transformation softens and warms what has become set in our ways and comprehensions this is true also of meditation practice and this is one of the cloud things I'm trying to say today how both of these ways of working with self and world and inhabiting a moment move us from small self to large self Kafka famously described it literature is an axe that breaks open the frozen sea inside of us that sounds to me a lot like a description of kensho we also need art to carry what cannot be grasped and yet can be conveyed in their traditions of Zen and other Buddha's poetry this is explicit snow in a silver bowl the moon in a dew drop the green mountains are always walking a stone woman gives birth to a child in the night the capping verses of Cohan collections the pali terracotta and terracotta poems of the early nuns and monks hold accounts of awakening in other literature the elusive awakening may seem less direct and yet I've always loved the poet go awaken Elle's suggestion that the secret title of every good poem might be tenderness an aquifer of compassion runs under all good poems and it appears in the recognition that one person suffering is everyone suffering that one phrases finding of freedom is everyone's increase of freedom imagination beauty on literal meaning all our expansions of the possible augmenting awareness we find also in zazen I don't need to say to anyone who would come to a talk like this at all how much of contemporary life seems designed to blunt to dull to distract rather than awaken I've heard it said that across the globe young people now spend more of their free time playing video games than they do any other way even surfing the web or doing social media or listening to music and to play a game is to enter a story a highly seductive narrative designed to lessen larger awareness the awareness for instance that violence is violence actual and painful or that a win-lose zero-sum frame of understanding is not the only way to know our relationships to one another the awareness of game playing is pretty much the opposite of Buddhist practice mind of doubt the practice mind of poetry's multiple possibilities there is just no time for questioning any given games given premises and if what humans do on this planet is created by our stories what is the story in Noah Horace terms that video video game playing teaches and what is the story that meditation or art making teachers I tried but I couldn't think of any poem that has the structure of a video game in these dimensions even the poems that our riddles are about the pleasures of complication and of multiple meanings no one wins or loses a poem and a video game I didn't want to be so mean about video games and I will say they do perhaps instruct in strategic thinking and hone certain kinds of concentration and all play is a human good play is good but maybe not to be so hypnotizing that it crowds out the desire for enlarging contemplation or the awareness of what they might be missing from a life in a deeper way a good poem like meditation invites a concentration that is open not narrow plotline closed and it wants to drink from Santa capris hidden Wells inexhaustible 'next risk inextricably from even the deserts beauty so I'm coming now to the last part of this cloud and I am going to do something I almost never do and speak a tiny bit more personally not very personally but know a little tiny bit more and some of it you you heard Ruth referring to my earliest entrance but didn't hear all of my earliest entrance into Buddhism came from poetry's images the first book I bought with my own money when I was seven or eight was a Peter popper press collection of Japanese haiku and I cannot guess now what I might have parsed at that age from those poems or their meaning but I certainly knew there was something in them I wanted in my own life and later in high school certain words of Wordsworth Emerson and Thoreau they became branches of yellow leaves and the poems of Horace that I could read at that time in Latin and some of the early images poems of pound and Williams in 10th grade on an entirely incidental school outing I was toss on one afternoon by the young Japanese priest who would later become known as Edo Roshi a few years after that in college I began to sit on my own and I very foolishly dropped out of a mahayana buddhism course being taught by Bill Lafleur I know I didn't know that two years later I would be driving over a mountain dirt 14 mile road to Tassajara to begin years of formal full-time training in Soto Zen but I did at least take every East Asian Studies class there was in Japanese and Chinese literature in translation and I went to the East Asian Studies coffee hour at which Gary Snyder described the Yamabushi Mountain monks and their precipice practice gary was the first American Zen practitioner I'd seen ponytail earrings twinkling eyes a poet who'd done trail work and wrote love poems along with translating the work of the ancient masters that Gary looked like anyone else that he was an American person writing fully American poems made a gate that I still walk through I didn't know at the time that the gate of nothing special is also part of the tradition that Zen is not about anything exotic it is only the taste of your own tongue in your own mouth so I hope everyone here is familiar with the ten ox herding pictures of Zen if you aren't you can google them it's a set of images and accompanying poems originating in the 11th century depicting the practices the stages of practice and understanding the final tenth picture and poem described a return to the ordinary world the ox herder looks like any other ox herder walking with his quiet bowl into the marketplace going forward with what seemed to be ordinary human engagements he doesn't look like a bodhisattva the image just shows a person simply helping others outside of specialized buildings schedules clothes just a person buying or selling groceries in a way that quietly lessens suffering while nearby trees break into spring blossom and the first bees of the year gather nectar for honey not thinking about pollinating the trees as they go on with their own lives and tasks just that's how the world has evolved to flourish when I first arrived at Tassajara I was only allowed to stay a week as a summer guest student and after that I had to go to the city center in San Francisco for a year to learn how to cross my legs and sit still and and to eat and all those basic things before I then could re-enter Tassajara for three years of the much stricter winter monastic practice but it was during those very first few months at page Street that I heard in an informal talk another description that struck me the way Gary had struck me in a way that became a lasting gauge and it was a description of four possible modes of practicing Zen one is monastic practice one is the temple practice of a priest one is layperson practice in which a person combines an ordinary-looking life with still being part of a Sangha and having a formal relationship with the teacher and the fourth was called tea house practice a practice that can hardly be outwardly recognised as practice at all you just pour tea wipe the counter greet your customers when they enter and people about knowing why just kind of like to go to that particular tea house the idea of tea house practice seemed to me a good fit with American life it was Gary Snyder looking like anyone else walking around a college campus and it also I realized quite a long time later chimed with the stories I'd encountered in those East Asian Studies classes in a no play about the ninth century Japanese woman poet oh no Komachi Komachi was considered the greatest poet and the most beautiful woman of her age and I learned again you know many years later when I actually was working on the ink dark moon I realized being the greatest poet made you the most beautiful woman of your age it wasn't about bone structure and and in in the no place Komachi is shown ending her life as an unrecognized hundred-year-old half-mad hag living in a thatch roof hut outside the walls of kyoto but still writing poetry and still wise in the ways of buddhist understanding and one 14th century no play based on her legend so tava Komachi has pretty much stayed a lifetime teaching for me and i I'm not going to take the time to tell you the story here but if you want easy access to it a lot of it is excerpted and the basic story is told in the last chapter of my nine gates book and her poems are very available to you and in in the ink tech moon as well so it didn't occur to me until many years after I had embraced both this proto-feminist unrecognized old poet practicing on the paths and trouncing Buddhist monks in Dharma combat what she sat on the wrongs dump us first they were concerned and then the tea house practice idea it didn't ever occur to me that both of those are stories about women and I was a very young committed feminist and I don't think I quite realized how closed off the regular paths of practice had been because I wanted to believe that every path was open um so here is in yoga and senzaki and Paul reps words the story of where the idea of tea house practice comes from its from a Cohen called the old woman in the fire poker master Jaco and ikkaku used to tell his students about an old woman who had a tea shop nearby praising her understanding of Zen the students didn't believe that such a person could have much wisdom and so they would go to the tea shop to find out for themselves whenever the woman saw them coming she could tell at once whether they had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen in the former case she served them graciously in the latter she beckoned them to come behind the screen to the back of the tea shop the instant they obeyed she hit them with a fire poker so this unrecognized teacher is a hidden well outside the gate of any visible temple her authority is hidden as well her Abbot stick is an ordinary fire poker tucked behind her shops rice paper screen and I hope nobody here is too shocked by the beating part of this you're probably really familiar all the old Zen stories have a great deal of hitting and striking in them and I know that my my Buddhist community now has given up the stick but when I was there it was carried every single period of zazen and I truly understood it as a generous offering and not something abusive even though my tiny bony shoulders if I ever was hit with the stick would hurt for two we but you know this is a thing the conceptions change and people at Zen Center said that it was awakening trauma for them and the stick was as far as I know stopped and so I'm just going to ask for this few minutes that we chained we set aside the fact that we have changed conceptions about these things not least because the tea house story is about changing conceptions and about how preconceptions lead to blinded eyes and not Santa capris seeing heart one preconception in the story is surely gender these monks were skeptical of the practice of a woman another is status the monks have taken vows they are official visible home leavers in their black robes and the old woman you may echo here the 10th ox herding picture she lives in the world of Commerce and thirst of road dust and fatigue how the monks think could her understanding rooted in that ordinary distracted life in which they of course were part of the distraction how could her practice compare to their own long effort and strict meditation she might as well have been a video game player in their eyes but for those who are not ambitious skeptical or competitive for those with simple genuine thirst no fire poker comes the old woman just pours hot water over fragrant green leaves then wipes the counter with her clean cloth and Haken up the road who may be an abbot but is not blinded by his own status or robes knows her for who she is and sends his students to her for testing and ripening a person of no rank reaching back and sleep for a pillow throughout Zen we find realization described in such images as a mountain whose grass is any donkey can browse what is Buddha one student asks the teacher replies have you eaten your breakfast yes then wash your bowl when I left my years of formal training in Zen and began to make my way of support I didn't hide my background in practice but I didn't announce it I didn't want my poems hung on a Buddhist coat peg or read with any pre-existing expectation of what they might mean they have fewer explicit mentions of Buddhism than the poems of many people who have never sat on a sofa and I do want them to be read only as human poems coming from only a human life and as I've been saying throughout this talk that's also kind of how I want my own practice as well and this is no disrespect to the other three paths I honor them I treasure the fact that I had the opportunity to live in that strict monastery in robes in that schedule but I also valued the fact that Buddhism offers the tea house practice path and so you know I like the idea that the Dharma can be found anywhere looks like nothing special and and then in 1999 Bill Moyers was interviewing me for a television special and suddenly on camera I found him asking me I've heard that in Zen you do something called tea house practice what does that mean and all I could do was blink and say it means you've just burned down in my tea house but my poems still do tea house practice even if I standing here in front of you talking at a Buddhist Studies program series cannot any more so I'm going to end with one one last small story I was once on the phone with a friend who said that he'd just been offered a contract to write a book about Buddhism and he said all Buddhism and they're only giving me 40,000 words and I just sort of heard myself answer only 40,000 words whoa that's that's either way too you or it's way too many and he said what do you mean way too many and I'd never thought about any of this before but out of my mouth I heard the words coming well you only need seven and then he of course asked the obvious thing what are they and out of my mouth I heard seven words emerge correctly counted which was I just said oh you know all you need everything changes everything is connected to pay attention and later on I had the chance to think about did I think that was correct and I can work it out you know I can I can I couldn't go through and say why I think that the ideas of compassion and as well as impermanence so you know how these can all be found in in these seven words and they kind of caught on I taught them to one of my workshops at Tassajara and one of the students said can I make a t-shirt of that and and now they've been inscribed in - permanently installed sculptures one in Washington State and one in Milwaukee but I realized after a while that you only need to you only need pay attention because if you pay attention you will see that everything is connected and everything changes and so that's just where I'm gonna leave us tonight that pay attention and if we do if we can if we want to if we choose that maybe we will be able to look around us and find some branches of yellow leaves to lessen this world's inconsolable crying thank you [Applause] I don't mind answering a few questions it can only be a little bit longer because I have something else on the schedule pretty soon yes they they do run us as we said but I would be very happy if anyone has one raise your hand really fast yes temple priest yeah you're welcome that was easy if I was an auctioneer yes yeah so I was writing throughout my childhood and when I drove West in that red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains but I thought I was look doing was looking for a nice place to live be a waitress and write poems but I knew this one monastery existed and I was curious and I just want to look at it I had no idea I was going to enter practice so seriously for so long and I think that that buried seed of the Chi house practice and lay practice as being complete and viable ways allowed me to really go into this I felt two things one was I felt like I was never going to be any good at anything I tried to do in the world if I didn't do this practice first I knew that I was a timid person who didn't know how to stay inside her own experience and face it or what to do if the dragons were came over one and so I simply knew I had to do this and then I also felt when I entered the Monastery the rule then was so strict people weren't even allowed to do yoga it was nothing but this practice and so I knew I was and I knew three years was at that time the longest anybody had stayed at Tassajara now some people who entered with me stayed on but up until that time three years was sort of the traditional thousand days maximum of you know it's not like a Catholic monastery where you'd go for life and I simply realized as I you know entered and and knew that I wasn't going to write a poem for three years I broke the rule once I was having coffee before zazen on on the front deck of my Hill cabin and I wrote a haiku about the Stars that was at three lines and three years just walloped me tonight the trees are hung with stars implausible poems undone by morning I think that's it I think that's it so I was perfectly prepared for never to be a poet but when I left the monastery and I was practicing under the less stringent rules of Green Gulch the third of Zen centers places poems began coming back and Zen Center was very kind and they I never went to graduate school but there was an Adult Ed course at UC Berkeley that was really good and they let me sleep in the next morning so I could go to this night class and just very very gradually my life went so that on weekends I was a full-time cook at greens restaurant owned by Zen Center in San Francisco and in weekdays I was starting to teach poets in the schools in the elementary schools of my hometown and it just very gradually evolved but I'm sure the comfort of that for me was partly made by this idea that lay practice and tea house practice are complete I wasn't giving anything up I was simply practicing within the image of Ono no Komachi not too bad do you know and if my roof was gonna leak well then let it leak yes hmm I thank you very much for that yes ah I understand your question so here is I think the element that might be missing from your did people hear the question the the four different paths very disciplined outward looking and and not so disciplined looking the tea house practice and and I think the the the link that makes them equally valid is that they are all of them in their different expressions built on the intention of complete awareness and so the old lady in the tea house might not be getting up at 3:40 in the morning and going to sit for six hours but when she pours the tea she does it with a hundred percent mindfulness and that is true for the writing of poetry as well the poetry is a tool just like zazen is for increasing awareness it's not that we're born with complete awareness and it's not like we ever arrive at complete awareness but the practice of being alert to the difference between the article the window and saying a window that is a complete practice of awareness and we do it whether we are consciously cultivating it or simply without even thinking about it going I think it should be a window not the window that's crossing your legs and sitting down for six hours you're welcome you're welcome so maybe that's a good note to closed on I know some of you are continuing on to the next event and some of you aren't thank you so much for giving me your ears and time and attention tonight you you

Channel: Smith College Buddhist Studies

Views: 1,357

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: rC_E-F7AQXY

Length: 68min 56sec (4136 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019