Abbot's Teaching
A Chapter from The Original Frontier
by Michael Zenkai Taiun Elliston Sensei
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Intimations of Mortality from Early Childhood
Experience counts in Zen. One’s authority in Zen comes from direct experience, rather than scholarship, erudition, scripture or institutional backing. So it is important to honor experience, especially when related to the tenets and experience of Zen practice. Please bear with me while I recount some of the seminal experiences from my childhood and youth, which I feel, if only in an indirect way, laid the groundwork for my later embrace of Buddhism and Zen.
There must be something to Buddha’s doctrine of rebirth. For example, my interest—your interest, anyone’s interest—in Zen Buddhism does not seem to be simply a matter of exposure to it in this lifetime, but something more innate. This does not lead me to embrace predestination, however—nothing so extreme. But there was something strangely familiar about Zen, particularly its meditation (zazen) when I first started practicing, which many other practitioners have confirmed. Another reason I feel rebirth to be a genuine is the relatedness of certain strange experiences I had as a child, long before I had ever heard of Buddhism or Zen.
As a child, I spent a lot of time alone, as I suspect many people in the professions typically considered “creative” also did. I have asked various artists and musicians about this, and many have indicated that they, too, spent considerable time entertaining themselves. This is especially so compared with today’s generation, who seem to need constant entertainment. I was alone in a good way, however—and felt not at all deprived. To this day, I still value solitude highly, and it is a vanishingly rare commodity.
The most memorable parts of my formative years were spent on a small farm in southern Illinois with my immediate family, and in the Missouri Ozark mountains with my maternal grandparents, over the summers. There was plenty of time to spend alone outside, in the barn and sheds, exploring the fields, pastures and nearby woods, as well as around a small lake near our home. Walt Disney’s illustrations and movies had a particularly strong effect on my perception, as they often included fantastical depictions of the kinds of pastoral scenes that I experienced in reality.
Winters were very cold, so we were often cooped up indoors. We gathered around a pot-bellied kitchen wood stove in the mornings while dressing for school—at a one-room schoolhouse, believe it or not. At about seven years old, I moved from a bedroom shared with my older brother in the front of the house into one above the kitchen in the back of the house. My “Grandma Nelly,” on my mother’s side, helped me clean it up and move in.
I used to “show off” for her by performing the kind of amateur gymnastics many kids do to get attention. I would stand on my head, drop my legs into the crossed (lotus) position and walk around the room on my knees. Grandma Nelly encouraged (read ridiculed) me, saying, “You ought to join a circus—people would pay money to watch you do that.” When I began practicing Hatha Yoga about a year before I got into Zen, it seemed strangely familiar also, not surprisingly. It is as if these things were pre-known.
I began drawing at an early age, probably because my older brother was a musical prodigy and had cornered the market for attention in that arena. When I was in third grade I did a crayon rendering of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that is probably as good as I could do today. My worldview as a child was thus more visual than normal.
My new bedroom was next to the unfinished attic, separated by a small door a couple of feet off the floor. Being next to the attic was a bit spooky for me and for my younger sister, although we played in a small, enclosed room built under the dormer, and I loved to dig through an uncle’s possessions, stored in our attic while he and the others were overseas in WW II. He was a commercial artist, so I had my first exposure to exotic art materials, such as high-quality drawing pencils. I loved the feel and smell of them.
Sleeping next to the attic was even more fraught with (imagined) peril because a former tenant of the farm had died suddenly, collapsing into his plate at the dinner table, or so rumor had it. The idea that the place might be haunted, combined with exposure to the horror movies of the day, such as “Frankenstein’s Monster” starring Boris Karloff, and “The Thing,” featuring a young James Arness, added to the dread. After returning from the movies, my chore of tending the coal furnace in a forbiddingly cavernous basement late at night, contributed to a pervasive aura of fear. This fostered a high level of awareness, particularly to sound, and especially at night when I would feel so all alone.
There are a few incidents that stand out in my memory of that room, including when the attic door opened of itself one night. It may have simply been a draft, but it never happened again. I was too terrified to move, but nothing else happened that I remember. Another night, ghostly apparitions stood at the foot of my bed—one taller, which I “felt” to be my aunt, the other my sister or perhaps a cousin—both definitely female. They seemed to be delivering a message, and not at all threatening. This recollected one of my earliest childhood memories, when we were staying overnight at a relative’s house, and I could not sleep. I must have been four or five years old, and remember standing at the stop of a staircase, calling down to my parents who were enjoying the visit with the relatives on the first floor below. I can see distinctly the dark stairwell, and the warm, inviting glow of the light around the door below. I was summarily told to go back to bed, and did so, turning back to a felt, fearful presence in the darkness looming behind me.
A discovery I made one night may be worth recalling here. Some nights I had difficulty falling asleep. We had a dog, a fox terrier named “Squeakie.” He often slept with me, and I would sometimes think of his dying, which somehow I knew to be inevitable. I would cry myself to sleep. It occurred to me later that this exercise was a kind of catharsis—a way of “getting ready”—rehearsing, as it were, for death. As it happened, Squeakie lived a long life, and died the day after I left home to return to school more than ten years later. “Pets” are a strange phenomenon. I believe they often provide a kind of real-world wake-up call for their owners. Later on, I had a dream in which my father fell off a ladder, and died in my arms. It turned out to be another rehearsal, not precognition. But that is not the interesting discovery.
I was lying on my back one night, half-awake and wondering how to fall asleep. I realized I was rocking, ever so slightly, back and forth, to the right and left. I felt as if I were on a cliff, the edge of the cliff running right down the middle of my spine. When I leaned to the right, I was leaning off the edge of the cliff; when I leaned to the left, I was resting on the cliff. I intuitively knew that if I rocked off the cliff altogether, I would fall asleep. And that is what happened. At last I rocked far to the right, and fell into the abyss. I woke up the next morning. This was my first experiment, leading to an abiding interest in the dividing line between the sleeping and waking states.
There were some other “mind games” that I fell into naturally, perhaps prompted by my relative isolation. Sometimes when I awoke in the morning, my gaze would be directed up, at the ceiling. It was fairly low, being an attic room, and so would fill my entire field of vision. Because there were no distinguishing marks on the ceiling, I could not immediately tell how I was lying on the bed, or which way the bed or room was, for that matter. It was disorienting. The first time this happened, I quickly looked around to get my bearings.
The next time, I didn’t move. I enjoyed the sense of not knowing which end was up, so to speak, lying there in the warm glow of being “fresh woke.” On subsequent mornings, I learned to sustain the feeling, deliberately resisting shifting my gaze, while I tried to figure out in which direction must lie the front of the house, the back, and so on. The disorientation was delicious.
The last time I remember feeling that kind of disorientation, other than in zazen, occurred one day in the 1960s in Chicago, when I was jogging along the lakefront, and stopped abruptly to do a headstand on some concrete bench-steps near the beach. I was deep into yoga in those days. Suddenly, my field of vision was entirely filled with blue lake water (above) and blue sky (below). It was thrilling, and severely disorienting, like upside-down vertigo.
Later I read about an experiment conducted at Yale, in which the students were given spectacles to wear, which turned their vision upside-down. After some days, their vision corrected, “up” once again becoming up, “down” once again safely down. After a week or so, when they were instructed to remove the spectacles, their world was suddenly topsy-turvy again! This experiment was based on the theory that “up and down” is a learned perception, developed early in an infant’s experience. The newborn originally sees the world upside-down, and learns to turn it over. (Not irrelevantly, Matsuoka-roshi used the phrase “all Bodhisattvas go beyond all topsy-turvy views, attain Nirvana” in his first transliteration of the heart Sutra into English.)
This “flat-Earth” view (that there is “up and down” stems from our limited vista as an upright primate) relates to one of Buckminster Fuller’s teachings, pointing out the imprecision of language, as in the expressions “sunset” and “sunrise,” which even astronomers use, much to the chagrin of Bucky. Once humankind ventured off the planet into space, we saw definitively that there is no “up” or “down,” only in and out—as in “in to” the planet, and “out from” it. This non-flat-Earth view was ordinary perception to Fuller. He had a great deal of maritime experience, in which world they speak of coming into port, or going out from the shore, the relevant and scientifically proper terminology.
Back to the ceiling. While engaging in my “fixed gaze” exercise above, I began to notice small details of texture in the wallpaper, side-lighted by the early morning sun. There apparently were multiple layers underneath, which had not been scraped clean before applying the outer layer. These small, organic-shaped bumps in an otherwise bland, somewhat flesh-colored surface caught my eye, but not in a way that other visual objects did. In fact, they seemed to move, shifting and changing into all manner of faces and figures. I was intrigued and somewhat entertained by this (we did not have TV after all), and would spend considerable time just watching the show. I never told anyone about this until this writing. Good thing, eh?
Another incident that occurred during these years on the farm revealed something about altered states of mind. I came down with a high fever, apparently unrelated to a virus or any other cause. It was intense, but lasted only three days. When I became feverish, my mother had me sleep in my parents’ bed. I remember lying in the bed with the room spinning madly, and a roaring sound all around. Mom and dad were out one night when the fever was at its peak, and I woke up in the middle of the night, awakened by what I thought to be an approaching tornado (we had frequent tornado warnings on the plains of Illinois). I jumped out of bed and ran into the living room, calling out to the others to get out of the house (I may have imagined this part, as no one else woke up).
Wearing only a tee shirt, I ran out the front door and down our field toward the town’s golf course, Squeakie running with me. I remember outrunning the dog, which was not easy. At the end of the field, we jumped into the ditch and huddled there, me covering his body with mine. Peering back at the house from out of the ditch, it looked to me like a storm was approaching from behind the house. After an indeterminate time, no storm having materialized, I got up from the ditch and walked slowly back to the house, the faithful Squeakie, my sole witness, following behind. The stubble of our recently harvested soybean crop was sharp, and painful to my bare feet. Running madly down the field, I had not felt it at all. The next morning, my fever had broken, and I told my family about that night. They didn’t believe me, but when they pulled down the covers, my feet and legs were covered with mud.
At about fourteen years old, another experience demonstrated the power of the discriminating mind, particularly that of extreme concentration. I was afraid, or unable, to swim, until I was about eight. This was somewhat embarrassing. So one winter, I mentally practiced what I thought must be the way swimming worked. That summer, I tried it, and it worked! This gave me a kind of confidence in my own mind. And I graduated to the deep pool.
The summer of my fourteenth year, I was taking diving lessons at my hometown’s swimming pool (the township high school did not have a pool). Diving off the three-meter board, I gradually gained confidence to try just about anything the coach asked me to do. I became fairly proficient at simpler dives, such as the “swan,” the “pike,” front and back flips, and so on. Then one day the coach asked me to try a “gainer.”
For the uninitiated, the gainer differs from other dives, in that, after stepping off and springing as if one were going to dive forward, one instead throws the upper body and head backwards—toward the board! This is highly counter-intuitive, and “blind.” You are sure that you will crack your head wide open on the unseen diving board.
So every time I tried to do a gainer, I would get through the spring just fine, but then halfway through the back-flip, I would stop. In mid-air, and too late. We wore sweatshirts, which softened the sting when you hit the water on your back, side, or stomach. Which was the sum total effect of my gainer efforts. This was really embarrassing.
One day, when walking home after practice, I was thinking about that damned gainer, wondering why I couldn’t do it. Thinking, thinking, thinking—obsessively visualizing myself going through it. Suddenly, I stepped off, sprang, and watched in horror as my feet flew toward the sky in front of me. I dived backward, headlong into, or rather onto, the concrete sidewalk.
I can still see, in vivid slo-mo, the arc of my carefully rolled towel, unrolling from my left hand, my swimsuit and jockstrap shooting out the end like a soft cannonball. I lay there dazed for what I think was a brief time. Finally sitting up, I saw this woman, on the other side of the street, standing stock still and staring at me with her mouth hanging wide open. Just like you see in the movies. I wish I could have seen it from her perspective. I wonder to this day who she was, and would love to hear what she was thinking at that moment. I guess I owe it to her to “explain” myself. At the time, I quickly gathered my things and hurried on, beyond embarrassment. But the next time I went to diving practice, I did the gainer the first time, no problem.
While some may feel this incident represents something less profound, I like to think that it illustrates the difference, a critical one for Zen, between concentration and attention. Concentration, at its extreme, can become a form of obsession, verging on hypnosis. One ignores everything else, in concentrating on one thing. But in Zen, we emphasize attention, rather than concentration. Had I been paying attention, I would not have dived into the sidewalk. Probably.
I cite these instances from my own life—as “intimations of mortality”(with apologies to William Wordsworth)—in the hope that they may be evocative of your own experiences, at various stages of your life. Each, in its own way, points to a premise of Zen. The ghostlike apparitions reveal the thinness of the veil between this concrete world and the so-called spirit world. In Zen we are never alone, but surrounded by the buddhas at all times, as Buddha taught—why can’t we see them? Diving into the sidewalk shows the limited utility of concentration, as compared to attention. We need to pay attention to the slightest thing, something we may otherwise overlook. Crying for my dog’s mortality embraces both the inescapability of grief, and the sharing of suffering, basic teachings of the Buddha. Falling off the cliff into a deep sleep raises the lingering question of the apparent dividing line between sleeping and waking, or that between ignorance and enlightenment. Where is that trigger, that on-off switch, located?
One more incident, more thought than an event. At a time during my teen years, I had a sudden—and to me, brilliant—intuition that “Life is like a movie!” Many years later, I had another, much more realistic insight, that “Life is not at all like a movie.” I remember watching my father bouncing down the stairs one time, with his hands dangling loosely from the wrists, a rather odd sight. I realized it was a Jimmy Cagney gesture I had seen in a movie. Often, these days, with the ubiquitous presence of television, we see life imitating art—people old and young adapting the mannerisms, gestures and language of their favorite TV characters, if unconsciously. So in many ways we are living in a dream, like a movie. Clearly, certain expectations of reality are born in childhood, nurtured by parents, and molded by societal influences. These are formative forces underlying our belief systems, those fundamental, bedrock layers of what we perceive and conceive to be reality.
But according to Buddhism, a kind of belief in, and about, reality actually precedes birth. Rooted in a primordial “ignorance,” it is actualized through associated links in the twelve-fold chain of causation—from the ignorance, leading to volition; volition leading to consciousness; and so leading to name and form; from there to the six senses; then to contact; on to feeling; then to craving; to clinging; to becoming; finally to birth; to aging-and-death—replete with the dimensions of suffering that Buddha articulated as humanly characteristic of this ordinary lifetime: sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair. Then, unless something extraordinary occurs, the cycle starts all over again. The something extraordinary is where Zen comes in, though it is embedded in the ordinary.
Growing up, maturing, our expectations are inevitably disappointed, engendering “turning points.” These turning points, in life as in Zen practice, are tricky, in that they can go either way—in a positive or a negative direction. My father, for example, tended toward the extreme of bitterness toward the end of what he saw as a disappointing life, while I saw his life as unimaginably rich and rewarding. My grandma Nelly often repeated a saying, “Someone's always coming along to take the joy out of life.” But this is not a mantra.
While there are ups and downs in the circumstances of life, there is hope for balance. The Samadhi of Zen represents such a balance in the midst of life. When one gets off the rollercoaster, all the ups and downs have cancelled out, and one is back where one started. The difference is the experience of the ride in between.
It seems that most serious Zen practitioners, the ones that stick with it, come to Zen following a major crisis in their lives. Sensei always said that people begin to feel, to recognize, “something missing” in their lives. He had a great abiding faith that they would finally come to Zen, to find what was missing. He called it “spiritual confidence.” Often, practitioners are unaware, for some time, of the “trigger” event that brings this about. It slowly emerges from the background,. The putative, reasons for coming to Zen practice are in the foreground—and are eventually seen through, one by one, like peeling the onion in Buddha’s monkey metaphor. What is left at the empty center of the onion is the true reason for practice that was underlying the more obvious reasons. We come to Zen thinking it, like most of our other interests, is about life—and so I shall learn something about life. One of the great turning-points in practice is when we realize that, actually, life is about Zen, not the other way around. What life is about is what Zen is pointing to. Then the arc of our life, with its many apparently disconnected experiences, can be seen as coherent, unfailingly returning us to the path that has no boundaries. All of life’s experiences have this power to trigger insight into the Buddha’s teaching. His truth is not hidden from our direct view by anything other than our own ignorance. And we ignore it at our personal, and collective, peril.
Let us explore the original frontier together.