Earlier today we learned that one of our local members is unvaccinated. Despite this, she has been attending evening practice unmasked since the beginning of the pandemic — chanting, sitting meditation, and drinking tea and chatting in the kitchen, including with an immunocompromised resident. When she tried to enter practice tonight, we treated her the same way that Australia treated the top-ranked pro tennis star and proud anti-vaxxer, Novak Djokovic, who is also apparently a world-class idiot: she was turned away at the door. She immediately began sobbing, as if some right had been taken away from her. But what about the rights of the elderly resident here, and the resident who has struggled with such a level of immunocompromised disease that she recently entered a coma, and lingered at death’s door?
I’m not paranoid about the virus, but I guide a residential community which includes an unhealthy elderly person and the immunocompromised woman. I’m also the son of a woman who had a doctorate in biochemistry: I’m not unable to sift through some of the competing arguments about the virus and its several medical interventions. (I also believe that the virus was very likely leaked from a lab, so I have some autonomous thinking on the matter which bucks the mainstream media viewpoint.) No one who knows me for ten minutes would ever accuse me of bowing to crowds, disinformation, or conventional wisdoms.
But we must all take a stand against rank ignorance. There’s absolutely zero patience for that. That’s all — nothing personal.
Since time immemorial, it has been customary in Asian temples to place donations on the central altar for several days. The donation is arranged carefully on the altar, with the donor’s name inscribed on a card. The candles are lit, and a stick of incense is mindfully offered in the incense burner. The Housemaster or Kitchenmaster, Head Dharma Teacher or Abbot will then bow three full prostrations towards the altar, bowing the forehead to touch the floor.
From 김은주 and husband, in South KoreaFrom Mark R., the Netherlands
When newcomers to the Zen Center see this simple “ceremony“ being carried out, they sometimes cock their head or knit their brow in curious consternation. “Why would you bow to these objects?“ is a typical kind of question we receive. And since the “objects“ remain on the altar for a minimum of three days, there is also a further wondering if we are not overly valorizing the objects, or the receipt of them. These are natural reactions, and very understandable.
When we publicly situate the donations so, and when we bow three times before a smoking stick of incense situated amongst the donations, we are not bowing to the “objects”. We are not really even bowing to the donation, in a material way.
This simple, wordless ceremony allows the spiritual community to fully bow to the mind of generosity. It is an expression of profoundest gratitude not for the getting of “things,” but gratitude to the mind of giving. In a world always threatened with the forces of ignorance and an acquired “me-first” selfishness that often navigates our movement through competitive social spaces, it is a jewel worthy of reverence when a human being gives some part of their limited resources for other people to wake up to themselves, to realize their nature, and possibly to add some light and goodness to the world thereby. It is not the “objectness” that we bow to on the altar. We are bowing to kindness, to openness, to the pure wishes of people who make efforts to support any of the work of waking up. And since the donations remain on the altar for three days, we practitioners encounter them again and again before using them for our nutrition or warmth or health or whatever. When we do multiple sittings, as during a retreat, every practitioner brushes past the donation multiple times during the day, circling the room again and again and again. In this, we are silently reminded to maintain a spirit of profound gratitude and humility. This inspires in us — again, completely without words — the subtle yet strong ambition to “give back“. We increase our own gratitude for having received the greatest gift of all, which is the gift of dharma, which is the gift of a neutral technology, honed over thousands of years, using not fear or coercion to affect its sublime ends, to become better friends of Reality.
Someone in the Zen Center Regensburg is presently trying to stick her finger in my rectum. I shit you not. So I am, at this moment, hiding for a while in a storage room where she cannot find me. There are a few important Zen Center projects which require my attention before submitting to this slightly medieval experience that she wishes for me: I cannot have her finger in my butt just yet. So, I am hiding here a wee bit from her gloved-love dharma.
You see, recently I had a minor medical procedure which should have solved the years-long re-appearance of painful hemorrhoids whenever I sit these long hours of meditation during the traditional 90-day retreats (Kyol Che, or ango), in which we are engaged until February 22. Today, I woke up to find that the situation “down under” had taken a very bad turn for the worse -– I cannot even sit on my butt long enough to eat lunch with everybody! (Well, unless I balance completely on just one butt cheek.) It looks now like surgery will be unavoidable, and I am waiting to get a doctor’s appointment to face the music like a Man. But it is now Sunday night, and the soonest appointment I could get is in 2 to 3 days. I need to soldier through this, while leading an intensive retreat for which people will have travelled from as far away as Atlanta, Texas, and even Oregon. So, what to do?
One of our residents, who also endured a hemorrhoid operation over ten years ago, is insisting that, until I get real medical attention, I must try a regimen of what seem to be oiled-finger rectal massages. Apparently, some traditional healing methodology involving the direct application of a special homemade “arnica tincture” at the site of swelling can reduce some of the extraordinary bulging and sharp, itchy pain. It might even allow me to stuff this foetus-hand-sized lump of blood and nerves back into the Holland Tunnel whence it came. My student here received very strong training in this “art” several years ago from her gynecologist in Munich, and insisted before the Zen Center family todaythat I must follow this regimen. Therefore, she announced to the group at the conclusion of lunch that she needs to stick her finger up my ass. And seems unnaturally happy about the prospect of doing so.
Why would one see fit to post publicly about such a matter? For Zen practitioners, it’s a matter of our peculiar temple culture. Let me explain:
The Chinese character for “hemorrhoid” is actually a compound character of two radicals, which means it is the combination of two separate radicals (“words”) which give a new meaning than their separate meanings. The compound character for “hemorrhoid” is:
“Hemorrhoid”
As anyone who has spent any time in Northeast Asia will recognize, at the heart of this Chinese character for “hemorrhoid,” is the character that is used for “temple” — Buddhist temple:
“Temple”
And the radical which surrounds the word for “temple” — like a house — is the radical for “illness,” or “ailment.”
“Sickness,” “ailment”
So, the Chinese word for “hemorrhoid” means “temple ailment.” Too much meditation with legs crossed causes stagnation of the blood, much less lots and lots and lots of venous pressure. Our asses were not evolved to handle this much unmoving sitting, sometimes for up to 10 hours per day, carried out over 90 straight days without a day off. (And I seldom mention this, but I have done the 90-day intensive retreat at least 50 times over 30 years of mad meditation.)
So, cause and effect are very clear: Hemorrhoids are an ailment of life in the (Zen) temple. I already saw lots of that stuff, but thought it was people with bad living habits on top of all the sitting. Maybe too much white rice and fermented veggies. Since I do a vigorous Ashtanga training most days of the week, and eat so much fiber, and even live by constant intermittent fasting, it could not possibly happen to me, right?
I sat a retreat in 2006 at Jeong Hae Sah temple with a monk who was known for his fierce determination to sit in meditation. He even sat meditation during the rest periods, when the rest of the guys were lying down in their rooms or hiking in the mountains. One day, when he stood up from a round of sitting to do the walking meditation together, there was a huge red blotch on his meditation cushion. It looked as if someone had spilled a large glass of burgundy right smack in the center of his cushion! (And this happened during the winter Kyol Che, which means that in order to manifest so clearly on his meditation cushion, the blood had passed through not only his panties, but also through his thick long-underwear, and also his heavy winter padded monk’s pants!) Several of the other monks, seeing his blood-soaked cushion — and there was a LOT! — began joking to him later in the tea room, “Hey, how did they let a nun into this retreat?” “Yo, didn’t the other nuns teach you that you can take a few days off during ‘that time of the month’? Ha ha ha ha!” The poor monk ended up having to leave the retreat to have a difficult bit of surgery. I was involved with the monk’s after-care, so I got to learn lots of the dirty details about the process of this. Not something I would even wish performed on Slobodan Milosevic (though maybe).
Which is what I face now. Which is why there is a woman in my Zen Center now who is trying to find me so that she can slather some arnica tincture into the walls of my rectum. I have protested loudly, in the open kitchen, in front of everyone washing the dishes, that I could just do this tincture-massaging by myself. But she has argued with me that I could risk puncturing the engorged blood vessels and creating a serious risk of infection (E. coli delivered fresh, daily!), if I do not have the procedure done by someone who was once trained by a professional.
@davidshrigley
Which is why I am hiding in the storage room right now.
For those of you who follow our twice-daily YouTube of our daily meditation here: if you do not see me on the meditation cushion, when everyone else is practicing, well, now you know why. You’re welcome.
