| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
By M.L. "Max" Roth
SUMMER 2001 | STANDING ON A GRASSY SLOPED hillside, I feel my ankles strain as the morning sun covers us in its warm blanket. For a Jewish funeral, women are separated from men, and today they sit in a small group while we men stand slowly baking under our yarmulkes, managing a smile now and again and shaking hands with family members unseen, never telephoned, and usually forgotten.
While I watch my grandmother being interred on the grounds of Hillside Memorial Park, I wonder if I'm also witnessing the end of a prideful, questionable history. We are not so exclusive after all. We're part of creation, a result of the universe's original statement: an allowance for the space-time to become. We use what the living universe possesses--virtue, the propensity to evolve along certain bioscapes, as a single raindrop contains the virtue to become a magnificent rain forest.
As I ruminate and study the backs of all these covered heads, another soul, my grandmother's, is freed, and I believe I am looking at the result of a violent, beautiful, profane history of which we are all a part and product.
I AM A JEW. I'M PROUD. Though I question where my pride comes from. Perhaps it isn't pride, but the fear of knowing that in a Christian nation I'm an outsider who must stand resolute. I have also some small degree of discomfort, knowing that although the Zen community makes no distinctions and asks no man to leave his tribe, by my own race I'm considered a deserter because I choose to practice zazen instead of davening, and take my sustenance from Philosophical Taoism rather than the Torah. It has been asked of me why I deserted my religion to practice Zen and Philosophical Taoism, and why I write -- the assumption being that I have deserted and have the chutzpah to advertise this infidelity to my Jewish god.
I don't perceive myself as born again into Philosophical Taoism or Zen-- especially when that is stated as an accusation--but simply as a man who has well used the better part of a wondrous life’s journey searching for that truth which binds me to the living universe. My search was spawned into perpetual motion by an intuitive, vague assumption connected, I'm certain, to a monotheistic upbringing; the universe, known and unknown, must be nourished by a single principle.
Meaning? President Bush, the drug dealers on Hollywood Boulevard, L. A. Police on bicycle patrol, the suburban housewife in Encino, prostitutes and coochy dancers on Western Avenue, you, and myself are all driven and thrive by one and the same principle: creative process. We are shadows of that process. The President, the hookers, and I are all works in progress.
Abraham and Moses failed to sell me their vision of God: a powerful, vengeful male entity, a real estate magnate hurling the universe at humankind with grave contractual obligations attached.
I have discovered a principal source which borrows the feminine and whose universe is given freely as a gift with no strings, no morality save nature's. The universe teems with a ceaseless yielding quality--the "allowance" for evolution, the fact of transformation. This allowance, called Tao, is the quantum gesture of the universe. It is our first principle, our original statement. Tao manifests and functions in the material world, not through a man-made moral code, but with natural virtue, the virtue of an event developing along its intended path. Lao Tzu, that old Taoist, describes Tao as the "Valley" or the "Great Mother," the "Womb of the Ten Thousand Things." I am a man, and what man in his right mind will keep loyalties to a burning bush when he can keep company with a mysterious, amoral womb bearing gifts?
Philosophical Taoism explains this creative source, and Zen provides the philosophical and physical discipline to know the source concretely through body and mind. In Judaism I could never know God, I could only know about God.
THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND TAO is witnessing it everywhere, but especially reflected in one's self; a clean mirror presents the truest reflection. The less one's mind is cluttered with preconceived notions of right and wrong, positive and negative, this and that and the other, the more clearly one reflects Tao. At age forty-five, I don't know if my understanding of Tao and Zen koan should be spoken of as correct or wrong; however, it works for me.
Unlike other inaccessible higher truths, my Zen is not to be studied; it is to be lived. Zen forms are not merely a learning system, they are an expression of the Tao, a dynamic, thriving principle to be used. Talking, writing, and thinking are all expressions of intellect, a human virtue, and certainly part of living--thus this essay--but analytical activities are overrated, and that is another reason I instinctively cringe, pulling away from practicing Judaism. A large portion of a Jew's life is expected to be spent in the sedentary pursuit of Torah study and analysis. Climbing the mountain and shouting at God directly, for me, is more rewarding than arguing over the word of God in a book. I've always been a troublemaker.
The Zen of life is in the living of it. To write it in Zen vernacular is to tell the story of the student who repeatedly implored a monk to clue him in on the secret of Zen.
Have you eaten breakfast?" the monk inquires.
"Yes," answers the student.
"Then wash your bowl."
Zen is the practice of realizing what we are about at this moment, how important our actions are. I value the practice because our "destiny stream" originates from this moment. In this way we realize the Tao of an event, yet do not sacrifice our journey to fate. Zen commands that I jump into the stream now, as a happy--though sometimes confused and frustrated--city dweller, becoming an active participant today in the future.
The need to sequester oneself behind the walls of a temple is in no way compelling. In the light of "engaged" Zen practice, to separate from the balance of humankind is even undesirable. Nothing metaphysical or esoteric is waiting here to confuse us. Philosophical Taoism is practical hands-on stuff. Zen practice is hands-on practice whether it is zazen posture and meditation or koan Zen, a mental and emotional changing of perception through working a mental puzzle.
The Zen koan is a dynamic exercise in polishing our mirror, forcing us to leave behind our convoluted thinking about reality and to confront reality directly. None of the habitual ideas we view the universe through can aid in answering a koan. Every moment is an original one, therefore, every action, reaction, thought, impulse, and notion cannot come before its time but must be fresh and original to meet the moment.
PAGE 2: The Torah and Beyond