ZAIKE TOKUDO For Mike Inmo Dretsch

This Saturday (February 18th) Mike Inmo Dretsch will take the next step in his Dharma Practice--he will be ordained in the Zaike Tokudo Ceremony at the Wiregrass Zen Center in Headland, Alabama. Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi of the Silent Thunder Order will be officiating. The service schedule is detailed below in Mike Inmo's letter to me.


Several years ago Mike was in El Paso to do research at William Beaumont Medical Center and Fort Bliss. He was staying at the home of John Fortunato where our sangha was practicing at the time. Mike sat with us one Sunday and he immediately started walking down his own path of dharma practice and the study of self. For several years he studied with me personally through phone and Skype conversations, and he received the precepts at a Jukai Ceremony concluding a sesshin at the Clear Mind Zen Temple in Las Cruces. His Buddhist name became Inmo. I chose Inmo because it's rhythm has a certain manliness about it, and, if you know Mike, he has the presence of an athlete. When I first met him he was concluding his active career as a martial artist (free-style), but he still trains students. "Inmo," literally, means "it," as in "That's it!" or "Do you get it?" But the way Dogen and other Zen teachers use the term, it has come to mean reality or truth. I thought it a perfect fit for Mike.

Later he and his wife Elizabeth honored me by asking me to serve as the priest in the celebration of their marriage. Mike Inmo, as part of his practice, began the Long Leaf Zen Center at their home in Enterprise, Alabama. On the way to their wedding celebration, it was my honor to sit with them one night and to offer a teisho. 

 Mike Inmo's 1st Rakusu: Jukai January 15, 2011

From the beginning Mike Inmo knew how to bow. This might sound strange and insignificant, but usually when a person first bows in a zendo during all the rigamarole of Zen services, the bow is accompanied with all sorts of personal baggage--hesitation, embarrassment, pride, whatever we come with. It's interesting to watch over the weeks, months and years as a person's bow evolves. But with Mike Inmo it was different. From the first, he bowed with presence and authority. At the time I said to him he came from Alabama to teach us how to bow. My feeling is that he learned to bow in his practice as a martial artist--respecting his opponent, respecting the act of fighting, respecting himself. He's strengthened this understanding as he continues to sit and stare at a wall and as he shares his understanding with others. I am proud and delighted that he's taking this next step.

May he be a blessing to his family, his community, his Sangha and to us all.

To send Inmo your congratulations, his email is dr.dretsch1@yahoo.com. Here's his announcement:

Mike Inmo Dretsch to receive Zaike Tokudo

Please mark on your calendar Saturday, February 18th. I will be going through a lay ordination ceremony called Zaike Tokudo.  Zaike Tokudo means "remaining at home and attaining the Way"  versus Shukke Tokudo which means "leaving home and attaining the Way."  With Shukke Tokudo leaves home... and you often see the monk shave his or her head. Luckily, I already do this :)

Zaike Tokudo symbolizes and reinforces a path in life devoted to practice. Zaike Tokudo is the penultimate ordination prior to ordination as a novice priest (the first initiate ceremony being Jukai). In essence, I will receive official status as a disciple of the Silent Thunder Order under the purview of Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi.

The day will start with a morning of sitting meditation (zazen) and liturgy. We will break for tea and prepare for the ceremony which will start at 1pm. All of this will be held at the Wiregrass Zen Center, 610 Mitchell Street, Headland, AL. A special thanks to Frederic Ji Ryu Lecut for hosting the event. Those of you that live closer to Enterprise where we practice can follow us from my house or meet us along the way. If you cant make it for the morning session, you can just attend the ceremony. After the ceremony we will have a potluck style luncheon. I will send out a sign up list for those that want to bring a vegetarian dish.

It would be a great if everyone could make it for the ceremony. For the last several years I have undergone mentorship (with Rev Bobby Kankin Byrd and Rev Harvey Daiho Hilbert out of Texas and New Mexico, and most recently with Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi from Atlanta Soto Zen Center/Silent Thunder Order), academic study (and sewing two rakasu's), and rigorous zazen/shikantanza from various cushions locally and at various locations (El Paso, TX; Las Cruces, NM; and Atlanta, GA).

For me, this ceremony is something I want to share with all of you, which I am very grateful for having crossed paths with, and without hesitation, consider my Sangha (community) and my family.  Without the Sangha, there is no refuge in the Three Jewels. For it is the Sangha that brings about abundant good. Similar to what they tell you in football games... there is no "I" in Sangha :)

Gassho,
Mike

Michael Inmo Dretsch
Experimental Psychologist/Soto Zen Buddhist
http://longleafzen.vpweb.com/

Zenshin Philip Whalen on Writing and Meditation

The poetry and life of Zenshin Philip Whalen is probably one of the big signposts along the trail that led me to become a Zen practitioner. His poems cleaned up all the intellectual mumbo jumbo along the way and helped me realize that it's okay just to sit down on a round cushion (aka zafu) and stare at a wall. I started reading Whalen's work in the mid-60s. First he pushed my own poetry along. In the 80s, when I first got down to some "erratic practice," his poetry was there waiting for me with some goofy advice. Just recently, because of some correspondence with a friend, I pulled out his collected poems. Perfect timing. His advice, goofy as it is, has always been a nice antidote to my psyche when the damn thing takes over and starts SERIOUSLY driving down the road like it's in charge. Here's some quotes I copied from my journal. They rang some bell for me. Ding. 

--Bobby Kankin Byrd

from the essay ABOUT WRITING AND MEDITATION

by Philip Whalen

(Pages 840 and 843, The Collect Poems of Philip Whalen

I thought I’d write books and make money enough from them to travel abroad and have a private life of reading and study and music. I developed a habit of writing and I’ve written a great deal, but I’ve got little money from it.

With meditation I supposed that one could acquire magical powers. Then I learned that it would produce enlightenment. Much later, I found out that Dogen is somewhere on the right track when he tells us that the practice of zazen is the practice of enlightenment. Certainly there’s no money in it. Now I have a meditation habit.

I like the idea somebody mentioned of erratic practice. It immediately reminded me of rocks that were left around when the glaciers receded. A lot of times setting out in a field there are no other rocks. It’s a very strange appearance. You can’t account for the rock’s position unless you remember the glacier that carried the rock there and then went away. Zazen is slow but leaves erratic boulders.

•

So far all we’ve been able to invent in the United States is the business of building small cabins in the woods and going there to hide out, then come back and write a book about it. That practice, that sort of individual, hermit, erratic practice is something that’s really important. The danger of Zen Centers or monasteries is that people will take them seriously as being real. We should find our own practice; we might start out in an official place, but we should discover somehow that we don’t need official institutions. It’s exactly like Lew Welch says in his poem about the rock out there, the Wobbly Rock, “Somebody showed it to me and I found it for myself.” The quote isn’t exact. Lew was an erratic Zen practitioner who was a great poet.

--Zenshin Philip Whalen

Saying Goodbye, Saying Hello

 

Zensters JB Bryan and Bobby Kankin Byrd

enjoying a tea ceremony hosted by JB

Placitas, NM[1]

Dear All, 

I needed someway to get ready for the New Year on our blog, and I found a wonderful librito put out by my friends at the Three Stones Sitting Group (aka Ordinary Mind Group) in Albuquerque, NM. The little book has a number of statements about Zen practice collected from Joko's writings, like these below answering the question: What Is Practice? The TSS is informally organized in the tradition of Charlotte Joko Beck although their connection is more figurative than literal if that makes sense. They sit every Wednesday night. If you're in Albuquerque, please join them. It's a trip. 

Happy New Year to you all. May we all bea blessing to your communities. And I thank you for your continuing practice.

--Bobby Kankin Byrd

  

•

WHAT PRACTICE IS  

Practice is about experiencing the truth of who we really are.

Practice is about being with our life as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Practice is about the clash between what we want and what is.

Practice is about the transformation of our unnecessary suffering.

Practice is about attending to, experiencing, wherever we are stuck, wherever we're holding, whatever blocks us from our true nature.

Practice is about turning away from constantly seeking comfort and from trying to avoid pain.

Practice ultimately deals with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence—the fear that I am not.

Practice is about willingly residing in whatever life presents to us.

Practice is about seeing through our belief systems; so even if they remain, they no longer run us.

Practice is about turning from a self-centered view to a life-centered view.

Practice is about learning to be no one; not giving solidity to any belief system-just being.

Practice is about learning to be happy; but we will never be happy until we truly experience our unhappiness.

Practice is about slowly increasing our awareness of who we are and how we relate to life.

Practice is about moving from a life of drama to a life of no drama.  

Practice is always about returning to the true self.  

Practice is about fmally understanding the paradox that although everything is a mess, all is well. 

Practice is about learning to say "Yes" to everything, even when we hate it.

Practice always comes back to just the willingness to be.

--Charlotte Joko Beck

 

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[1] I took this photo using a 10-second time delay on my camera. JB, who had recently finished building his adobe teahouse in Placitas, had invited me to a cup of tea—and a remarkable introduction to his version of the tea ceremony. As he made and served me tea, he told me the history of the tea ceremony. It was quite a remarkable event. If you visit JB's page, you'll find other links to tea ceremony documents, plus a variety of other odds and ends.

Chiyo-Jo

A friend, the artist Linda Lynch, came by the other day and she shared with me this haiku.

Clear water

No front 

No back

--Chiyo-Jo

Nice. And nice translation too. In Japan this is her most widely known poem:

morning glory!
the well bucket-entangled,
I ask for water

Which is the subject of the painting.  

Chiyo-Jo was a woman poet of 18^th Century Japan. She lived the century after Basho but certainly welcomed the open heart of his poetics.  

Turns out that Linda, who lives in Columbus, NM, also sits and stares at a wall doing nothing. Studying self. Forgetting self. Whatever you want to call it. Shikantaza is a good word to call it, huh? You can see Linda's work here and see how Zen understanding and her work intertwine, especially with her expression of negative space. 

Zen through the Side Door

Zen thru the Side Door

Those newcomers walked right by.
Polly yelled after them,
“There’re a bunch of side doors.
But this is the one we use.”

This little poem comes from an improvisational riff we had before services two Sundays ago. I had taped that note on the front door. We were expecting two new comers. Polly said that would be a nice name for a collection of poems, “Zen thru the Side Door.” We all laughed. The newcomers came, saw the sign, followed directions through the gate but then walked right pass the side door. Polly went after them and shouted “There’s a bunch of side doors. But this is the one we use.” Deb said, “Well, that’s sounds like a line in a poem.” “Oh, yes, it does!” Susan said. Thus our sangha’s collaborative poem.

I sent this story in our weekly newsletter and Susan followed up on it with two wonderful signs--one with Bodhidharma's fierce profile,  the other with with a bunch of side doors--which she framed and gifted to the sangha last Sunday. I'll photograph them and post soon.


By the way, this week we'll be back to our usual hours on Sunday (10am) and Tuesday (7pm). I apologize for having to cancel last night (Tuesday, 11/8)

--Bobby Kankin

Seeing matter as emptiness. Huh?

This is a recent blog posting from my teacher Harvey Daiho Hilbert of the Order of Clear Mind Zen. I recommend wholeheartedly that you follow Daiho on his blog or write to him to be included on his email list. The photo of Daiho I found on the Upaya Website. Somebody took it during Daiho's Street Zen practice.--Bobby Kankin 

With palms together,

Good Morning Everyone,

“Seeing matter itself as emptiness produces great wisdom so one does not dwell in birth and death; seeing emptiness as equivalent to matter produces great compassion so one does not dwell in nirvana.”  Yun-feng

We should each study these words.  They arise from the teaching of the Wisdom sutras and yield much support to our practice.  All things come and go, why dwell in the coming and going, the seeking and the grasping?  Since the true nature of coming and going gives rise to things themselves, we open to hear their cries. Neither seeking or grasping, we exist as an open channel in the flow of the universe.  As an open channel, we experience the shore, the tides, the ebb and flow of all things.

As the meal chant concludes, “May we exist in muddy water with purity like a lotus.”

Be well.

Rev. Daiho Hilbert
On the web at Clear Mind Zen

Zen & the Making of Art

Last month I read Stephen Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Somewhere in there (he’s a writer and photographer, his wife is a photographer) he makes the statement that Zen is the only religion (he doesn’t like that word, I don’t like that word, but we use what we got) that emphasizes art as a means of practice. It was such a simple statement, I was startled. He was correct (see postscript), but I was surprised that I hadn’t made such a statement, it’s so obvious. In fact, as I thought about it, it was art that brought me to Zen—in particular the peculiar little poems that go deeper and deeper the more you know them, and also the wonderful ink drawings and calligraphy pieces where negative space is such a constant.

If you hang out around me, you’ll hear me say that Zen is the only spiritual practice that teaches that those tiny moments of understanding—looking at a flower, a person, the ocean, when the self seems to drop away—is understood as a spiritual experience. The experience of oneness. Many of us first see this connection between our experience and a spiritual experience in haiku or other poems from Zen.  Take for instance, Basho’s famous haiku:

The old pond.
Frog jump in.
Plop!

Back when I was growing up (teens, 20s, etc) I read a lot of poems by those American “Dharma Bums” Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. They were both serious students of Zen. Gary studied in Japan at a monastery; Philip was a longtime student at the San Francisco Zen Center with Shunryu Suzuki and later Richard Baker. Here’s one of my favorites of Whalen’s poems, which I’m always finding a reason to quote. I was sitting on the floor of the University of Arizona library when I first read it, oh, something like 44 years ago:

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
                         splashed picture—bug, leaf,
                         caricature of Teacher
    on paper held together now by little more than ink
    & their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—
Cheered as it whizzed by—
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.

▲

But I don’t want to talk about being a witness to art. I want to talk about making art as a way to practice Zen.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe.

This is what Dogen said, and this is what we do when we sit zazen. And this is what the Zen practice of art is all about.

One of my favorite all-time books is Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It’s a remarkable book. I used it a long time ago. I was interested in trying to figure out if the experience of being a visual artist is like the experience of being a poet. Besides, I was envious of visual artists. I wanted to be one too. Edwards uses all sorts of exercises to teach hoof-handed folks like me how to draw. The two exercises I remember the most are drawing upside down and drawing a portrait.

Edwards said that forgers always turn a signature upside down to copy it. Why? Because they don’t want to be confused by what a letter “means,” they want to see its shape. They want to see the letters as they really are, not what the “think” they are. I did upside down signatures and I did a couple of upside down drawings. I was amazed at the results. Her point was that the rational mind (“the left side of the brain” in her terminology) got in the way of seeing. We have to figure out ways to let that go.

The same thing holds true for portraits. Most people (non-artists) when they try to draw somebody’s portrait it comes out totally out of proportion and warped. The face is usually magnified and takes up the whole head. The eyes are near the top of the head and the forehead is shriveled down. But really, she says, if you look at a head rightly, you’ll see that the eyes are in the middle of the skull so what we think of as the face is a much smaller element of the whole skull.

I was so happy. Especially when she described the experience of doing art as a place where time and place get lost. Minutes and even hours can go by and we’re not sure of what’s happened during that time except we were drawing. Also our sense of everything around us is dropped away. What’s essential is the act of drawing.

This is what happens when I write poems. Or “play with them,” editing them down to this and that. People ask me what some poem means or why did I choose that word, but really, I’m not making decisions like that. I’m listening to the poem, playing with it until “I feel it’s right.”

I think everybody has this experience in one way or another if they do something with conscious intention. What we could call love. Maybe they are doing martial arts or gardening or cooking or making love or other forms of creative activity. It’s our job, as Zen practitioners, to bring this experience to all parts of our lives—washing the dishes, resolving a conflict with a friend or spouse, engaging in our community or walking in the desert. By concentrating, by paying attention to what we are doing, by studying the self. Again, to repeat Dogen:

To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe.

 So, when people not used to drawing or writing poems, try to do so, they let their “self” get in the way. When I teach poetry writing, I’m always inventing exercises to try to get people to get out of the way of their self. And I tell them, by the way, not to worry. No matter what you do, your real self will be there. Your own unique experience and your perceptions will not be lost. To this end I want to remind you of Joko Beck’s adaptation of the Four Noble Truths, what she calls the Four Principles of Practice:

Caught in the self-centered dream, only dukkha (suffering).
Holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream.
Life as it is, the only teacher.
Being just this moment, compassion’s way.

Now think of these not so much as principles for deeper spiritual understanding, but think of them as a way to make art. And enjoy your practice.

Thank you.
Bobby Kankin Byrd
POSTSCRIPT: This was originally a dharma talk that I wrote up in July. I read a part of it on a Tuesday night, but went riffing off somewhere else. Also, I don't like to get into the never-ending discussion about Zen as a "religion." At least not here. I should say that I believe that some people would argue "that Zen is the only religion that emphasizes art as a means of practice." He's speaking of recognized world religions like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Muslim. He's not speaking, for instance, of all sorts of indigenous religions or practices that include the making of art as central to their spiritual practice. Although they wouldn't make these categories. I think too that every religion has a sect in some nook and cranny where art-making is at the core of what's happening. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi and his Dervish brethren come immediately to mind. But generally I think Batchelor's statement is true. The making of art is a vital facet of Zen practice, although all practitioners of Zen are not necessarily artists in the narrow sense.