Shambhala Sun | July 2013

About a Poem: Geoffrey Shugen Arnold on Yunus Emre’s “Those Who Learned to Be Truly Human"

Those who learned to be truly human
found everything in being humble.
While those who looked proudly from above,
were pushed down the stairs.
A heart that must always feel superior
will one day lose its way.
What should be within, leaks out.

The old man with the white beard
never sees the state he’s in.
He needn’t waste money on making the Hajj,
if he’s broken someone’s heart.

The heart is the seat of God,
where God is aware.
You won’t find happiness
in either world, if you break a heart.

The deaf man doesn’t hear,
the blind man mistakes day for night.
Yet the universe is filled with light.
We’ve seen how those who came later moved on.

Whatever you think of yourself,
think the same of others.
This is the meaning of the Four Books,
if they have one. 

May Yunus not stray from the path,
nor get on his high horse.
May the grave and the Judgement be no concern,
if what he loves is the face of God.

To be truly human—have we ever been anything other than this? And yet... and yet. Is the most simple always the most difficult? Never apart from my original nature, what kind of “learning” allows me—liberates me—to be truly human?

Look to humility, Yunus Emre sings. But what is that? My dictionary speaks of not being proud or haughty, yes, but also of submission and ranking low. Is this why we find so little interest in humility today, but instead seek our place among those who look proudly from above? How much do we give for this fleeting moment of glory? We grow weary of tumbling down the stairs, only to find that it is we ourselves who keep giving the push.

May I never lose my way, and so my heart. My gift to you is to fill every crack so nothing leaks out. I respectfully plant the seeds for my own patience; may it be resilient. My vow is to break my heart—ruined! shattered!—so I will never break yours. To make my pilgrimage to the heart of being and die there—not just once, but again and again. until the very sense of returning is itself ruined.

May I be the deaf one who hears every sound, the blind one who sees all the beauty and the bro- ken. I admire Yunus for offering clear and direct counsel to himself; I too need this. To love the path so deeply that we never want to part from it. To no longer be drawn to peer through the thin curtains into another’s house, to escape into a different, better life. Even when we see that we can no longer stray from life’s breadth and depth, may we love life and all that is true and be diligent so we never stray one hair’s breath.

My guess is that the truly humble never speak of humility. Perhaps I’m wrong. In any case, I am humbled in the midst of this dharma—God’s original face—by my own need for humility.

Poem from The Drop That Became the Sea, translated by Kabir Helminski and Refik Algan. Courtesy of Shambhala Publications.

From the July 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. To see what else is in this issue, click here.

Shambhala Sun | July 2013

Lost in Time

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
By Ruth Ozeki
Viking 2013; 432 pp., $28.95 (cloth)

Reviewed by BRIAN BRETT        

Inspired writers are the ones who walk sideways to what most would consider the “real” world. At their best they can portray the confusion that life is and make it feel more real than reality. Ruth Ozeki, a recently ordained Zen priest, is still very much with this world, yet a spiritual benevolence invests her novels with kindness.

In 1999 Ozeki wrote the bestselling My Year of Meats, a romp through Japanese and american culture and an attack on the American beef industry and its talent for scary hormones, such as DES, and feeding rendered animal products to herbivores like beef cattle. It’s the story of an androgynous six-foot-tall documentary filmmaker rescued from poverty by a job directing a Japanese TV show, My American Wife. She soon learns, however, that this show is not about shining a light on American culture but rather luring more Japanese viewers into eating potentially tainted beef.

My Year of Meats integrates multiple viewpoints, fascinating and sometimes flaky characters based on real people, and current political issues. This previewed an approach that would grow through Ozeki’s ensuing novels, All Over Creation and, now, A Tale for the Time Being.

All Over Creation tackles farming and genetic modification. A group of dedicated anti-GMO radicals who call themselves seeds and drive a biofuel car they’ve named “Spudnick,” which they run on liberated McDonald’s french-fry oil, move onto the farm of two traditional older farmers they admire—Lloyd and Momoko Fuller. Momoko is suffering from Alzheimer’s and Lloyd rapidly develops heart troubles. Their daughter, Yumi, moves back home to help her parents, and soon the family is tangled up with corporate spies and the nuttier fringes of the anti-GMO movement as they battle the dreaded Cyanco and its NuLife potato. 

In A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki pulls out all the stops with her new cast of beautiful, batty, and sad characters and a host of worldwide issues. She immediately challenges the premises of fiction itself when a character named Ruth finds some flotsam on the beach and takes it home to her partner, Oliver, an eco-artist who sounds suspiciously like Ozeki’s partner, Oliver Kellhammer. The flotsam is sealed in plastic bags within plastic bags, all holding a sealed Hello Kitty lunchbox, which contains a “hacked” copy of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The novel has been cut out and replaced with blank pages filled with a Japanese student’s English-language diary. Inside the lunchbox are also a number of letters in Japanese, a thin composition book, and an old watch. It’s quite the time capsule, washed up on the shores of Cortes Island, British Columbia, a year after the tsunami that devastated Japan.

This gives Oliver an opportunity to explain the currents of gyres, which are controlling the ecology of the Pacific Ocean, and further explain the mechanics of the Turtle Gyre that probably brought the package. At first Oliver is more device than human being; that is, he’s a vehicle for explaining various scientific principles. The reader is intrigued, however, by Oliver’s design and planting of a brilliantly peculiar eco-forest as a scientific/ ecological/artistic experiment. He’s charming, but he doesn’t come alive until toward the end of the novel.

The diary begins elegantly. “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is?” We soon learn this is a being who lives within time, which is moving quickly. In other words, we’re all time beings. This was explained to Nao by her 104-year-old great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun who in her younger years had been a novelist, a lover of men and women, and an intellectual anarchist feminist politically active almost a century ahead of her time. 

The mood of the novel shifts quickly when Nao announces her intended suicide. Nao spent a privileged childhood in the silicon dream of California, where her father worked for a dot.com success and was its Japanese wunderkind. but then came the dot.com bubble, and her father had unwisely invested everything in the company before it went bust, or so he says. now they’re back in Japan and he’s become a “house ghost,” so crushed he’s incapable of looking for work anymore. He’s already “accidentally” fallen in front of a subway train and then been billed for the subway’s rescue costs.

Meanwhile, Nao is spending her spare time in Akihabara, the electronics and manga heart of tokyo, where many of the zany fads of Japan arise. She has a fondness for the district’s French-maid cafés and describes how at her favorite one the predominant color is pink, and frilly skirts and push-up bras are the standard. In the entryway there’s a naked sculpture in a fountain—the hot spot glowing. yes, mighty tacky, and every hostess has a price. But the café is an escape for Nao. She’s being cruelly bullied in her new school, and Ozeki explores this with fury, especially in one horrific scene in which Nao’s classmates have a funeral for her. 

The diary is just that—a diary written in the first person. But Ruth’s voyage of discovery is told in the third person. Trying to decipher Nao’s life, Ruth fears that Nao was lost in the tsunami of 2011 that killed more than 29,000 people. Ozeki points out, chillingly, that the coast of Japan is dotted with ancient stone markers that state: “Do not build your homes below here.” Most of those markers were ignored in the last century. The 2011 tsunami washed up to the base of several markers.

Bullying, poverty, tsunamis, suicide, child prostitution—A Tale for the Time Being grows even more complex, widening out like the confusing world we live in. The opening pages are awkward to read. Ozeki works so hard to make Nao’s child-voice authentic that it seems boring and dumb, and oliver’s initial deus ex machina appearances don’t help. Yet the novel grows more fascinating within pages. 

The eccentric characters of Ruth’s home island soon enrich the novel, especially when they gather at the local post office. They are so island, so funny. Cortes Island, like a few of the san Juan islands and some of Canada’s other Gulf Islands, has a classic island atmosphere, where hippies, rough-and-ready oyster fishermen and loggers, and the retired wealthy with their beachfront mansions collide. Ozeki manages to have fun with the community of Cortes Island—rednecks and philosophers alike—yet with a gentle fondness. It’s a rich picture but it isn’t cruel.

The novel keeps growing richer, especially with the appearance of Jiko, who has become a ghost in Japanese history, a ghost that even disappears on rRuth’s computer screen. One day Ruth finds one mention of Jiko on the internet, but by the next day that mention has disappeared permanently, and this is where the novel takes a mystical turn, and we start encountering quantum mechanics and a magical raven.

Better still, we discover the austere yet rich world of monastery life. The ancient dying Jiko proves to be one of the most magnificent Zen creations I've encountered, on a level with some of the masters glimpsed in the writings of Gary Snyder and Peter Matthiessen. She’s a caricature and yet so perfect a caricature, so simple and beautiful, that she is invested with life and warmth and devious humor, and the pages glow whenever she appears.

At this point the novel takes another twist. We discover that suicidal tendencies run in Nao’s family, and the composition book found in the Hello Kitty lunchbox belonged to Nao’s great uncle, who was a Heidegger disciple cruelly “volunteered” as a kamikaze pilot in WWII. He wrote his last notes in French so they would be somewhat safe from the prying eyes of his roommates.

Nao learns that this quiet man recognized that he couldn’t kill, so he vowed to steer his plane into the waves at the fatal moment. In an odd way, this tragic passage gives inspiration to both Nao and her troubled father. He realizes how terribly he has abandoned his daughter and wife and attempts to turn his life around, while at the same time we realize that he was actually fired from his cushy job because he was attempting to sabotage his computer programs that would be used for drone killing and various other kinds of hi-tech warfare.

While I won’t reveal what ultimately happens to nNo, her father, Jiko, and Ruth, I will say that each of these characters is invested with life. It’s a quirky, deep, occasionally hilarious, and occasionally depressing montage of a novel. A sneaky charmer.

Its only serious flaw, aside from the clunky characterization of Nao and Oliver at the beginning, is that it’s a bit of a jumble and all the leaps aren’t smooth. I would have liked a little tighter editing. For instance, as part of an explanation of events, we are given a too-long lecture by Oliver on Schrodinger’s cat (a famous physics problem) and quantum physics. It’s a clumsy attempt to over-explain information appearing and disappearing in the novel. But this is a mystery that doesn’t need to be tidily tied up.

Still, A Tale for the Time Being is such a romp—so unafraid of the disasters of life, so full of delight—that it’s well worth the read. Forget the easy escape route of quantum mechanics; the novel more than supplies enough old-fashioned reading magic.

From the July 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. To see what else is in this issue, click here.

Collage by Megumi Yoshida / Source print by Katsushika Hokusai

Shambhala Sun | July 2013

Books in Brief

By ANDREA MILLER

ZEN CONFIDENTIAL: Confessions of a Wayward Monk
By Shozan Jack Haubner
Shambhala Publications 2013; 240 pp., $14.95 (paper)

If you want to hold on to your misty-eyed notions about the peace and purity of monastic life, don’t read this book. But definitely read it if you want gritty truth steeped in wicked irony and really grotesque potty humor. “Shozan Jack Haubner” is the nom de plume of a Buddhist monk living at a monastery in California, and in Zen Confidential he unpacks his spiritual journey. Readers of the Shambhala Sun will already be familiar with some of his misadventures, including all-time side-splitter and cringe-inducer “The Shitty Monk.” Haubner is the son of conservative Catholics—his father manufactured gun barrels— but he grew up to ditch Jesus, major in philosophy, and pursue a career in stand-up comedy. In one of my favorite essays in the collection, he explores what he calls “the abortion koan.” Doubting the accuracy of a pregnancy test, the monk-to-be insists that his snarly girlfriend pee on a second wand. When she holds the results up to the light, he knows one thing with absolute certainty: He will never have sex again. “As always,” he writes, “the only thing I was really wrong about that evening was that of which I was most convinced.”

WALKING THE WAY: 81 Zen Encounters with the Tao Te Ching
By Robert Rosenbaum
Wisdom Publications 2013; 384 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Taoism and Zen go back a long way together. In the fourth and fifth centuries, when Buddhism was taking root in China, Indian scholars struggled to explain Buddhist concepts in Chinese and found the best way to do it was by using Taoist terms.                                         

Linguistically joined at the hip, the traditions influenced each other, and in the sixth century Taoism significantly contributed to the emergence of Chan, later called Zen by the Japanese. In Walking the Way, Robert Rosenbaum offers original Zen-infused commentary on the eighty-one poems of the Tao Te Ching, as well as engaging personal anecdotes to illuminate them. Rosenbaum is a senior teacher of dayan qigong in the lineage of Yang Meijun and received lay entrustment in Zen from Sojun Mel Weitsman of Berkeley Zen Center. He’s also a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and behavioral medicine specialist and the author of Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy.

HOUSE UNDER THE MOON
By Michael Sowder
Truman State University Press 2012; 85 pp., $15.95 (paper) 

House Under the Moon is a collection of Michael Sowder’s poems about spirituality, meditation, and fatherhood. Sowder is the founder of the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality, an organization dedicated to exploring and teaching the practices of the world’s wisdom traditions, so it’s unsurprising that his poems borrow from various religions, including Buddhism. In his poem “Hiking at Oselong, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of Andalucia,” Sowder writes: “Buddha left his family, like Mirabai, Indira Devi, Peter, and Paul. I followed that call once, crushing hearts like soda cans, but then came home.” Pages later, we find “The Fourth Noble Truth,” in which Sowder describes his one- year-old son running off with a map he’d snatched from a car. The poet concludes: “Clutching your booty too tightly—map of Mt. Naomi, veined as any heart—you had no hands to spare, and your face met the cement... It takes time, my son, to learn to break a fall by letting go of what you want.”

THE SUPREME THOUGHT: Bodhichitta & the Enlightened Society Vow
By Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Dragon 2013; 87 pp., $22 (paper)

“Basic goodness” and “enlightened society” are key concepts in the Shambhala tradition. However, “good” here does not mean good as opposed to bad, but rather “pure, intrinsically good.” That is, despite our struggles and confusion, there is something essentially good about our existence as human beings. “Conventionally, society, politics, and human interaction might not be described as good or pure,” says Shambhala Sun columnist Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, writing here under his full Shambhala title, Kongma Sakyong II Jampal Trinley Dradül. “But when society develops confidence in basic goodness, that goodness can manifest and emanate into all fields of human activity. Having confidence and inspiration in the message of basic goodness, a good society can dawn here on Earth.” The Supreme Thought can be purchased through Shambhala Media at shambhalamedia.org.

99 BLESSINGS: An Invitation to Life
By Brother David Steindl-Rast
Image 2013; 128 pp., $14.99 (cloth)

Brother David Steindl-Rast is acclaimed for building bridges between religious traditions. A Catholic monk of the Benedictine Order, he has studied extensively with Zen teachers and is the coauthor, with the late Robert Aitken Roshi, of The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian. In 99 Blessings, Steindl-Rast offers a series of original interfaith prayers. Pithy and lyrical, they celebrate everything from sparrows to birthdays, from hidden things to fresh linen. To learn more from Steindl-Rast, you might wish to check out the course on awakening the heart and mind that he and Zen teacher Paul Haller will be co-leading from June 28 to July 5 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

DEEP RELAXATION: Coming Home to Your Body
By Sister Chan Khong
Parallax Press 2013; 40 pp., $14.95 (cloth)

When I have trouble sleeping at night, I move from my regular bed to the bed in the guestroom, and sometimes just this change of scene helps me nod off. But if not, I have an even more effective tool in my pajama pocket: deep relaxation, as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh’s closest collaborator, Sister Chan Khong. Her deep-relaxation technique involves finding a comfortable position, closing your eyes, focusing on the breath, and releasing the tension in your body from head to toe. If you wish, you can then go deeper by focusing on a part of your body that needs special attention or healing. But deep relaxation is not just helpful for falling asleep; it’s also an excellent way to take a breather when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Khong suggests dividing a stressful workday into segments and doing short sessions of deep relaxation between each segment. When you do this, she says, you’ll come to your next activity with increased freshness and effectiveness.

On the cover:

EUROPEAN INSTALLATIONS
By Spencer Tunick
Self-published in a limited edition of 1,400, 2013; 112 pp., $80 (cloth)

When we were looking for a cover for this, the “Body” issue of the Shambhala Sun, we knew we wanted to avoid easy, clichéd imagery—and what could be more clichéd than the way popular media and advertising represent the body? We were looking for something fresh and real, pointing to the common identity we all share by way of our human bodies. We chose “Dead Sea 6, 2011” by Spencer Tunick, the longtime video artist/photographer whose first book, European Installations, has just been released.

Tunick has been documenting the live nude figure in public, with photography and video, since the early 1990s, organizing nearly one hundred site-related installations that make use of volunteers sometimes numbering into the thousands—all nude, unless you count the occasional bit of body paint.

The artist describes his “human installations” as a combination of performance art, photography, sculpture, and land art that transcends the sexuality usually associated with the naked form. His aim is to reveal abstract “new shapes” that challenge our views of the body and also ask us to consider the complexities of presenting art in public spaces.

Of course, not everyone is willing to go there with Tunick; his choice to work with as unusual and controversial a medium as nude bodies has resulted in five arrests. But in May 2000, the Second U.S. District Court recognized that his work should be protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court then ruled in Tunick’s favor too, allowing the May ruling to stand and the artist to freely organize his work in New York City’s streets.

Self-published in a limited edition of 1,400, European Installations can be ordered from spencertunick.com.

From the July 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine. To see what else is in this issue, click here.

Shambhala Sun | July 2013
EXCERPT

Try a Little Tenderness

It’s not a luxury to feel loved and cared for—it’s what makes us emotionally secure. If it didn’t happen when we were children, says psychotherapist TARA BENNETT-GOLEMAN , meditation can help us develop a secure emotional base now.

 When I was seventeen, a couple hired me as a mother’s helper to take care of their infant. One night the parents were out, and the baby and I both fell asleep early. A few hours later, the infant’s hysterical crying woke me. When I went into the baby’s room and lifted her into my arms, I could feel her poor tense body shaking from crying so much. Holding her close, I felt such warm empathy for this baby I loved, and I tried to comfort her with my voice. Suddenly, I felt a strong wave of tenderhearted compassion, almost like a surge of energy that seemed to flow out of my heart into her body. as soon as this happened, the baby melted in my arms. Her tiny body became heavy and limp, and she fell fast asleep.

Such moments are routine for parents caring for an infant, but as I was still a teenager, I had learned something new about compassion. that was the first time I had experienced so vividly how expressing a sincere, tenderhearted love just might help someone find security.