Читать книгу Autumn Light - Edwina Norton - Страница 13

In the early 1990s I learned of a job teaching English at a women’s university in Okayama, Japan. I had the requisite academic credentials and experience. I had twenty years of Zen practice, which included some knowledge of Japanese culture. I thought living in Japan might shake up my thinking as I had been wanting. I applied and got the job. I was fifty-seven.

Before leaving for Japan, I heard about the Rinzai Zen monastery, Sogenji, located in Okayama. Sogenji was a training center whose Abbot, Shodo Harada, welcomed European and American Zen students. Once in Japan and settled into teaching, I visited Sogenji and met the Abbot. I spoke with him about becoming a guest student during the university’s summer vacation. When I formally applied in writing, he granted me permission.

I was delighted but a bit nervous about this opportunity. I had participated in many week long sesshins, but I had never lived in a monastery, much less one in Japan. Also Rinzai Zen was reputed to be more rigorous than Soto Zen, plus I knew I would be handicapped linguistically. (I didn’t have to know much Japanese to teach at the university, which hired English-speaking teachers to improve students’ pronunciation.) Monastic practice would be a challenge. I hoped it would increase my confidence as a Zen student.

Most Sogenji monks spoke English, but the services, ceremonies, and Abbot’s talks were all in Japanese, so at first I felt bewildered about what to do and where to go. The schedule was challenging—awakened at 3:30 a.m., to bed at 9:00 p.m. with days full of zazen, ceremonies, and work tasks. For the first two weeks my back and legs ached from long hours of sitting and rushing to keep up with the other monks. After that my body adjusted. I needed only the twenty minute nap after lunch that all the monks took to get through the long days. Being able to follow the rigorous schedule would give me the new confidence I sought.

It was a privilege to live amidst the graceful beauty of Sogenji’s 350-year-old structures and gardens, first built in the early Edo period. One entered the monastery by a long walkway up through ancient pine trees from the residential street on which Sogenji was located. The monastery’s classical, two-tiered Buddha Hall at the center of the compound greeted the visitor. Its two tiled roofs and majestic, curved eaves bespoke both serenity and power. Inside the cavernous Buddha Hall every morning from 4:00 to 5:00 a.m., we monks sat and chanted in Japanese. We chanted so rapidly it took me two weeks to get my tongue around all the syllables.

This daily hour of rapid, full-throated chanting was invigorating. Afterward, we processed silently downhill to the zendo for zazen. On my first morning, once we were settled on our zafus, a bell was rung, and, thinking it indicated the start of zazen, I was startled when everyone leaped up and ran out of the zendo. Bewildered, I followed as quickly as I could, back up through the woods to a spacious room between the Abbot’s apartment and the Buddha Hall. There we sat and waited to be called for sanzen, the daily private interview with the Abbot. Later I learned that the monks ran to be sure they would get to speak to the teacher. This racing was a monastery tradition but actually not necessary because the Abbot saw everyone every day. I learned to run too but never fast enough to be first in line. My best was to be second, once only.

The resident monks each worked on a koan with the Abbot. As a visiting monk, my daily sanzen consisted instead of the Abbot demonstrating the powerful, slow breathing technique of sussokkan to calm and focus the mind. Following my sanzen, conducted mostly in silence as I knew little Japanese and the Abbot, little English, I enjoyed the solitary walk back down through the woods to the zendo for more zazen.

There were many aesthetic pleasures to enjoy at Sogenji: Outside my room at 3:50 a.m. each morning, I relished the exuberant stars in the black sky as I waited to join the other women monks and walk arm-in-arm up to the Buddha Hall. On rainy mornings, I found equal pleasure walking huddled under umbrellas, large raindrops spattering on ancient granite steppingstones. And each time we entered the dark, cavernous Buddha Hall, a tiny thrill of fear energized me.

Later, after morning zazen, I enjoyed bustling from the zendo in tight formation with the other monks to crowd before the kitchen altar. There we chanted a fast and guttural, possibly animist, chant, to the “kitchen god” before entering the dining area to sit at a long table for our oryoki meals. Though I never knew the meaning of the chant, its primitive energy cheered me.

The resident monks rotated daily as tenzo (cook). A second monk acted as assistant cook. Several times I was allowed to be assistant, washing rice and chopping vegetables. I was amazed at how fast the tenzos worked to cook three meals a day for twenty-five people. At day’s end I followed the tenzo in ritually closing the monastery. In the dark at 9:00 p.m. we walked the entire compound, striking two wooden clappers (hyoshigi) together sharply and shouting an ancient incantation to ward off any evil spirits lurking on the grounds. It was spooky, especially as we scooted by the graveyard to enter the furthest, dark building, the Founder’s Hall, where intruders conceivably could be hiding. I had to laugh: middle-aged and still afraid of ghosts.

The monastery week offered many sensory pleasures. During zazen in the zendo, which was located next to the graveyard, I was soothed to hear the occasional splash of water, the hollow clink of watering cans, and the swishes of bamboo brooms as neighborhood family members faithfully cleaned the graves of their ancestors. Once every five days when we monks had a partial day off from the normal schedule, I luxuriated in the monastery’s wooden hot tub (heated by a wood fire) in the bathhouse with the other women. On summer evenings, I relished sitting zazen as twilight softly turned to night. On a few nights at dusk in August I was astonished to hear bullfrogs in the Zen garden pond clear across the monastery compound “throat singing” in two deep tones, like Tibetan monks.

Both the aesthetics and the practice at Sogenji were rich culturally and spiritually. I enjoyed finding my way in Rinzai Zen practice and into friendships with monks from Japan, Europe, Australia, and the U.S. After my summer residence, I was permitted to attend several seven-day sesshins throughout the year. I also stayed at the monastery some weekends. I have many good memories of Sogenji and Japan, one of which relates to my mind’s development.

Participating in monastic practice, as well as living in Japan with only the most rudimentary literacy, did have the effect I had wanted. Experiences intensely different from what I was used to shook up my mind. Before moving to Japan, I had been warned about “culture shock.” Though I read several descriptions of this phenomenon, I could not have imagined the actual experience. On three occasions during that year in Japan, one at Sogenji and two in my teaching life, I experienced culture shock.

These episodes were characterized by mental confusion that built up over a few days concerning particular situations in daily life and work. One was about my sophomore English students’ behavior. They wouldn’t speak in class. I tried many ways to get them to talk, but they refused. I concluded that their resistance meant they did not like me. Only at the end of the year did I come to understand: they did not want to disappoint me. Their resistance was out of respect.

At the crisis point of this and the other culture shock episodes, I realized I had absolutely no idea what was going on. My brain felt both clogged and dizzy. I couldn’t relate cause and effect. On the surface, things appeared to be understandable, but in the state of culture shock, for a few hours I felt intensely confused. I observed activities and analyzed their meanings from my Western perspective, but my analysis completely missed the boat. My mind whirled, I couldn’t catch my breath. I had no process for sorting things out. I just had to capitulate to not knowing. It was humbling—and enlightening. The antidote for an episode of culture shock was simple and at hand: I just needed to talk to another American or European who had lived in Japan longer than I had. With their support, in an hour or so, my frenzied mind would calm down. I would see the humor in the experience; I felt cleansed, like my mind had been rinsed. I had come to Japan to shake up my thinking. This was the shaking.

Being functionally illiterate in Japanese gave me new respect for immigrants finding their way in new countries. Being illiterate also made it necessary to fall back on an unconscious awareness I didn’t know I had. For example, I could find my way to and from locations even though I couldn’t read street signs or understand the directions I asked for when taking the bus or train. It was harrowing to feel lost, but apparently my unconscious mind recalled the details for getting to and from where I wanted to go and staying safe, for I always found my way.

These “peak experiences” of culture shock had the additional benefit of boosting my self-confidence. When I returned to California a year later, I felt able to make several major life changes. I did not return to corporate work but found jobs in the nonprofit and education worlds. I did not return to Zen practice at Kannon-do but participated in a variety of meditation groups—a Vipassana group in Palo Alto, which introduced me to retreats at newly established Spirit Rock in Marin County; two different Tibetan Buddhist groups in the San Jose area and their associated retreats. Most importantly, I found Tenshin Reb Anderson of San Francisco Zen Center, who would become a significant teacher for me.

Reb’s ability to elucidate the mysteries of Buddhist thought was remarkable. It was from him that I first learned about the Buddhist teachings on the co-arising of all phenomena, a fascinating description about how the mind works: Phenomena exist for us in the way they do because we bring our preconceptions to them. As a product of Western dualistic thinking, I had never questioned that reality exists “out there” and that my task was to perceive and understand it as best I could. If my understanding differed from that of others, I usually concluded that I was wrong or confused.

But Reb described perception as a mental process of matching current experience with previous experiences: Our senses and brains respond to sounds, sights, smells, etc., based on our unconsciously stored memories of similar or identical phenomena. We first perceive and then immediately identify phenomena we encounter, such as bird song, apple tree, lavender. In this way, we bring our prior experience to each current sensory experience. In doing so, we actually co-create our experience.

We add to this basic recognition and identification of an object our emotional associations with it. For example, when we feel warmth toward a person new to us, our positive feeling may arise from unconsciously associating him with someone we loved in the past. Or when we fail to recognize someone who greets us, we have not called up or perhaps ever stored a memory of that person from a previous encounter. In this way, our conscious and unconscious brains work with our senses to form and shape our present experience. As Reb explained it, a split second before we become consciously aware of a sound or a smell, etc., unconsciously we pre-select what and how we think about it based on our unconscious storehouse of past experiences. In fact we select for conscious acknowledgement only that which we recognize from past experience. Of course, this perception mechanism can also perpetuate misunderstandings we never corrected, potentially causing us no end of trouble.

The idea of co-creation was electrifying. I can still picture myself in the cavernous, candle-lit zendo at Green Gulch, listening with fascination to Reb’s words. I could not then quite grasp how co-creation worked, but the truth of it resonated in me. Its implications were thrilling: If our brains actually help shape the phenomena we experience, we have more influence on its meaning to us than I had realized. And thereby more ability to relieve our suffering. Reb’s teaching, I later learned, was based on the third century work of Buddhist psychology called the Abhidharma. I looked for books about this but did not find anything until ten years later when I read Understanding Our Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh. It describes a similar process as the unconscious “seeding” of our perceptions (Hanh 2006, 23-33). I have since learned that Theravadan monk Bhikkhu Bodhi has translated an Abhidharma resource (Bodhi 2003).

Contemporary neuroscience findings about how human brains work corroborate these ancient Buddhist teachings. Our unconscious pre-selection processes shape our experience of reality. Starting late in the first decade of the 2000s, some ten years after I first learned from Reb about co-created perception, developments in magnetic resonance imaging technology began to yield scientific insights into how the human brain works. Books for the lay audience about brain function began to appear. I intuited that this information might help me better understand Buddhist teachings about the mind, and I eagerly read everything I could find.

A book particularly important to me was The Master and His Emissary. In “Part One, the Divided Brain” (McGilchrist 2009, 15-209) I learned that our left brain hemisphere (termed The Emissary) contains our conscious mind, which produces and controls language. It performs many important functions to insure our survival, such as finding and inhabiting shelter. The left brain analyzes, categorizes, and thinks abstractly; it has a sequential, linear approach to reality. It deals in facts, uses denotative language. It pins things down, makes them clear, precise, fixed. The left hemisphere seeks control over the environment. It wants to be in charge and because it is conscious, it usually seems to be.

The right hemisphere (The Master), conversely, is largely unconscious. It is the storehouse of our previous experiences, the “seeds” Thich Nhat Hanh described, upon which we draw to identify and understand our present experience. The right hemisphere lacks vocabulary, but it accesses and inhabits the land of relationships, of the individual and of the ever-changing, evolving, and interconnected “between-ness” of things/beings (McGilchrist 2006, 95, 97). The right hemisphere “knows” that we exist only in terms of and through our encounters with other beings and things—the very insight of the Buddha. The left hemisphere is concerned with survival of the individual and seeks to dominate self and other. The right hemisphere’s forte is the broad awareness of and connection with other beings. Empathy and emotional understanding are largely right hemisphere functions. It appears that the insights of Buddhism into the interdependence of phenomena arise from our right hemisphere, whereas our persistent self-centeredness and desire to be in control, our penchant for having preferences, and our resistance to change arise from our left hemisphere.

This information about how each of our brain hemispheres operates was life changing for me. It revealed faulty thinking patterns I had developed over a lifetime. The tension between the two hemispheres explained the difficulty I often had in believing the direct experience I accessed through my intuitive, right hemisphere—the kind of understanding one can have in zazen. I saw now that I habitually doubted my natural insights. When I sensed something but could not articulate it, my cognitive, verbal left brain jumped in, commandeered the nonverbal insight, and put it into language that wasn’t always sufficient to represent what I felt or knew intuitively. Instead of crediting my intuition, I discounted what I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust myself.

I had acquired this habit of self-doubt from my earliest years in part because I was repeatedly told, directly and indirectly, that the way I felt or thought about things was not right. “Don't be so sensitive,” Mother repeatedly urged. “You’re always Doing. Why can’t you just Be?” my husband complained. Implored to be different, I learned to doubt what I felt. When I sensed that a person was angry or fearful but claimed he was not, I routinely discounted my insight. In general, I persistently doubted my own judgment. How miraculous to discover, then, that though I might not always be able to verbalize my understanding, I actually could rely on it as my experience. This new information about the brain enabled me at last to trust the deep and broad awareness that zazen makes available. My beloved teacher Kobun had been acting from this knowledge when, to my amazement, he accepted what I told him was true for me.

I was excited that contemporary neuroscience helped me better understand the Buddha’s teachings of twenty-five centuries ago, teachings I believed but had found hard to apply in my daily experience: If all phenomena are empty, co-dependently arising, and without separate, abiding nature, as Buddhism teaches, then everything, including ourselves, is continuously changing. It is impossible to cling to or push away something that is always changing. But because it still appears to us that things, including ourselves, are permanent or ongoing, we do cling and push away. And we suffer. We feel dissatisfied, frustrated (or hurt or afraid or grief-stricken) because we forget that everything is changing. Forgetting, we become attached to what we want and refuse what we don’t want. Either way, we (our left brains) suffer from not getting what we want.

The Buddhist teaching is that since clinging and pushing away are what cause us suffering, we must relinquish both being attached to what we desire and resisting what we don’t desire. We must live in the immediate, present moment, without attachment. Accept that we and all phenomena are in flow. Know that pleasant will soon turn to neutral or unpleasant and back again. Grasping and pushing away are pointless. Worse, they perpetuate our mistaken belief that we are separate from our experience and can control it.