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One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir

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One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir

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sometimes we make more progress when we give up.

If what we’re looking for lies outside of imagination or calculation, we can’t know what it is until it hits us.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT HOW I found a path when I didn’t even know I was looking for one. For a long time I didn’t know where I wanted to be; I just knew I wasn’t there.

Everybody else, the whole world, is rushing about all day long, they don’t have time to learn nothing, if they just stopped still a moment they’d be amazed what they’d learn.

He was his home.

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. D. H. LAWRENCE

Everything took a long time. Some things, especially good things worthy of the fact that we live and die, can’t be rushed.

I thought I had learned that how one accepted discomfort was the measure of a man. But a frightened squirrel was darting around inside my skull, and that squirrel was my own mind.

This is a story not only of awakening but of healing. Perhaps the two can’t, or shouldn’t, be separated. No healing without a wound.

As we walked under the old houses and dark elms, for a moment I’d feel a strange relish in his presence, a shared relief, a sense that life could be okay and my misery had been imaginary.

Now that I was an adult, I didn’t want to be part of the human race.

But help is always at hand. We just may not know where to look for it.

Somehow she found that to sit still each day, as Socrates had done, and Heraclitus and Pythagoras, offered a way to be, in the face of psychic and domestic disaster. Although you didn’t move, it was a kind of path, and took you in a good direction. It could take you, in fact, on the journey of a lifetime, she said.

The world fell back into its proper place. Streets, buildings, cars, even people—they were not menacing any longer, not a threat. They were neutral. They were not at war with me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized for how long I’d thought they were.

Even those with a dart stuck in the breast Piercing their heart moment by moment— Even these here, stricken, get to sleep; So why should I not get to sleep When my dart has been drawn out?

You will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome … You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.

There was a sweetness in the sorrow. Sorrow wasn’t bad after all, if you just let it come.

Who knows. But death unites us, love unites us, and grief unites us.

It was mostly books that had made it popular: The Three Pillars of Zen, Zen in the Art of Archery, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But you could read a lot about it and still be in the dark.

Zen was a form of Buddhism influenced by Chinese Taoism wherein the main activity, rather than forms of worship or scriptural study, was meditation.

Zen had “lineages” of masters who had “confirmed” one another down through the ages. What they had confirmed was that the student had had the same insights into the nature of consciousness or reality that the master had, and had learned to live by them in daily life.

If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.

It wasn’t that you had to transport yourself to other realms. You just had to puncture a conditioned view of reality that had been filtering your experience.

“What does ‘Buddha’ mean?” George asked rhetorically. It meant to wake up to the fact that our true consciousness was shared with all things. It was vastly broader than it seemed.

You and your experience were one. Nothing mediated subject and object.

Sit down, be quiet, find out that the relationship between you and everything else is not what you thought.

According to George, Zen’s view was that we were busy being wrong all the time in ways we didn’t realize. “Awakening” was nothing other than to see this.

The knee pain was still there, the sound of the wind was still there, but there was no one experiencing them. It was the strangest thing. There was no me. The very center of my being, the core of my life, vanished. I vanished. Where had I gone? What had happened to me? Where I used to be, there was just a broad openness. All things were happening just as before, nothing had really changed, yet everything had changed, because there was no me to whom everything was happening.

I had found the answer to the teacher’s question. Who was I? I was no one. I had made myself up.

Not only that, but without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure.

This new discovery was different from the one on the beach, yet also the same. It, too, struck out of nowhere, with a sense of complete resolution. Part of its nature was that it could never be different, and when you saw it you knew it had been with you all along. Yet it could never be the same.

At the time, I was mostly so blissed out that George could have told me to bury myself in manure and I’d have done it.

It’s a strange business. Zen as a whole is quite divided on the issue of “awakening experiences.” Zen calls them kensho: seeing reality, or seeing one’s “original nature.”

I wanted the result, not the process.

But what if the day when things counted was not far off, but here, now, and the closest we would get to a result was what we were seeing before us. This was the result. Perhaps in a sense there were no results—this whole universe was just doing what it did. It wasn’t interested in results, only process.

Friday evenings at his Institute he would invite unwitting subjects onto a small stage, and proceed to expose and ridicule their implicit belief system. At the end, far from feeling humiliated, these victims would rise from the stage feeling supported and freed from long tyrannies of self-wrought misery.

It just asked human beings to shelve their usual busyness and look deeper into their own experience, their very consciousness, and offered a means for doing so.

I had been so much my own man, I hadn’t realized there were people willing to help.

Koans could help to deepen our awareness of the reality we glimpse, and teach us to embody it in our lives.

The koans are verbal formulations that the student ponders while meditating, said to be impossible to penetrate with the mind: “dark to the mind, radiant to the heart,” they say. The only hope is to give up trying to understand the koan and instead let it reveal itself to us. Whatever that means.

In meditation we could pursue the fundamental investigation of a lifetime: the search for our identity.

But a few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology (though the practice itself should help with that), and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide.

In the end we may find we hadn’t been holding on to anything at all; we just thought we had. When we stop holding, all is fine.

How to compress a radical shift in worldview into a few words? Koans have mastered that.

They allow only one path: Be still and give in. There’s a Native American saying: if you’re lost in the forest, the forest knows where you are; be still and wait for it to show you. The koan wants to show itself to us. But it has to be that way round. We can’t go to it; it must come to us.

Yamada Koun wrote that we are like billiard balls: it doesn’t matter what color a ball is—if struck a certain way, it will travel in a certain direction.

And all without any god. So good was this universe, intrinsically and unto itself, that no god was needed. Nothing extra at all was needed.

The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language. The great silence of all things opens up, where words are just flotsam and jetsam.

Zen wasn’t—had never been—about individual revelation. That was all very well, but the core of Zen was sharing.

Zen begins with our own suffering, then evolves into concern for the suffering of others.

How much better it is to sit in a zendo and let the unrealities drain off like the toxins of some drug trip, and start to see the bare bones of our actual existence, unentranced.

We talk a little about it, but now there’s not much to say. The koan needs, in a sense, to cease being a koan and become our experience. Then what is there to say?

That’s what Zen training is for: to suck us out of life as we know it, out of our self as we know it.

Dogen said that ordinary beings have no illumination in their consciousness, but Buddhas have no consciousness in their illumination. Awareness has to be extinguished, all trace of a witness gone, for the path of Zen to flourish.

I had learned that the secret to a happy relationship was not believing that it must be with the right person, but that your partner was the right person.

The midlife crisis could become a crucible of growth, of alchemy.

Over the past few years you’ve felt two people living inside you. One is the usual old you, with his struggles, hopes, dreads; the other is different, at peace, made of gentle promise. He loves to sit. He loves other people. He loves helping. He doesn’t care about your career, except insofar as it helps the family. He doesn’t look ahead. You’ve even said to Joan that you feel like two people are living in you, at which she smiled and said nothing. Now it’s as if these two entities are having at it, in hand-to-hand combat. You can’t believe you’re actually sitting still. But you are. If you move even a little, the fighting stops. Like two animals shy of being noticed, they won’t wrestle unless you keep absolutely still. They go into hiding. Resume stillness and they’re at it again.

As you receive these sense experiences—breathing, seeing, hearing—you try to find out who it really is sitting in the middle of them. What is there, in the space between hearing, seeing, breathing? There must be something there, because that’s where you are. But the more deeply you examine this space in the middle, the harder it is to identify who’s in there. Suddenly it’s clear: there’s no one there. Just empty space. Breathing is happening, but there’s no one breathing. Where there ought to be a breather, only space. There’s hearing, but no one hearing. Where there should be a hearer, just space. It’s this again: no one.

Such peace. Like living in the aftermath of a long war.

It was only a beginning, but finally I had given myself up. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and without any god or divinity or magic intervening.

Zen may undermine false assumptions, but its goal is to help us live more helpfully—not in servitude to an imaginary tyrant called “me,” but in the service of others. In the core of “ancestral Zen,” this happens through the collapse of the prior notion of who we are. It’s hard to believe that what is then revealed might be a universal reality that includes all beings, that this could be a palpable and intimate experience rather than a grand idea, but that’s how it is. It’s because the tradition is about living this reality, rather than positing it as a metaphysics, that Zen training takes so long, and why it is worth grinding through hundreds of koans with a teacher, and then doing so all over again. Nothing matters more than finding that our “real self” is absolutely inclusive. And learning how to live it is the journey of a lifetime.

A war was over. It wasn’t clear if I had won or lost—but presumably lost. An infinite, marvelous loss. The contents of the war, its causes and rationales, its bitterness and rage, had already become vague memories. It was a great absolution.

Zen had actually done the impossible: it had changed me. Over time, I stopped being able to tell whether it had “worn off” or not. It no longer mattered.

But that’s what this practice is for: to deliver such a blow to our conditioned construction of reality that the factory itself is knocked out.

Instead, each tiniest phenomenon is beloved, is love itself. In spite of being limited, mortal, multi-flawed beings, we are nevertheless capable of finding timeless love in the depths of our being.

THE DRAMA WAS OVER. THE whole thing called “my life” had been just that: a drama, a story. A dream. I had woken from it. It had ended.

was born in the real world now, not the world as I had thought, but as it was—beyond description, marvelous and ordinary at the same time, limitless yet just exactly as it seemed. “What needed to be done has been done,” as Buddha said.

was free at last to be who I was. And who that was I couldn’t say. Yet I knew.

I WROTE TO JOHN. The world has turned back to front, inside out, upside down. Things I had thought bad are not bad, and things I’d thought good aren’t good either. I realize I have never known people I’ve known for years. I long to sit long hours while the thing that has been born grows stronger. I am fully awake yet don’t know who I am. A fuse has blown, there is only silence. I feel so grateful to my parents for giving me this life. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to Clare and the boys. And to you and Joan. I see how much of this life I have lived to gratify “Henry.” It makes no sense at all, and never did. A long childhood has finally ended, and a new one has begun. Thank you, thank you.

So this was what Zen existed for: to bring a human being to a condition that, impossibly, resolved everything. And to pass it on.

Gradually it became clearer how this reality got obscured: it was through thinking and then believing the thoughts. It was a subtle process, but ubiquitous. But once this dark, radiant fact opened up, we had an alternative. It was possible to see the obscuring process in action, and cherish it without being caught by it. It, too, was empty, after all.

Non-thinking: a luminous clarity that didn’t seem to fade no matter what I was doing, even when asleep.

I DON’T MEAN TO BRAG about any of this. A real danger in practice is to seek, then become proud of, our “awakenings.” The Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa dubbed it “spiritual materialism,” and it’s just another form of self-serving egotism.

Oddly, this idea brought relief. These days I liked being less good than others, less known. Life was sweeter in the lowlands of modesty and failings.

No need to achieve: all was achieved already. The great project of this life had been to realize that. Dogen said, “The great Way is intrinsically accomplished; the principle of Zen is complete freedom.” All that came next was service, love, trying to be helpful and open.

Zen is the opposite of withdrawal from the world. It’s a radical acceptance of life, the pain and suffering no less than the beauty of the dawn skies, of the sea in rain, the mountain dark under morning clouds, and the shopping list. Unless a path leads us back into the world—reincarnates us, as it were—it’s not a complete path. For Zen, this life, this world, is the very absolute. Making a cup of tea, fetching milk from the fridge, standing outside on the front step, watching the remains of a storm drift across the dawn sky, and hearing the drip-drip of rainwater into a puddle from a roof are miracles. The miraculous, in the end, is the fact of anything existing at all.

It wasn’t something. But it wasn’t nothing either. Utter goneness. Yet not nothing. But still, not something.

whatever the circumstances, powerful gusts blew in in new ways, destroying more assumptions and preconceptions, revealing new dimensions of wonder, peace, and simplicity.

The teaching was about anything except me.

What if the very idea that something was wrong were merely an ancient habit? Perhaps everything was all right. Not that there weren’t manifest problems in our world, but that the old, customary sense of being in error myself was an atavistic inheritance, out of date now. Things were as they had to be, the good and the bad. We had to do what we could to make them better, that was all. And anyway, I would never stop being a student.

Zen: the only way to keep it is to give it away.

All I had really wanted, all along, was to be taught to love this world, and now I had. Even if there were another, better world, I didn’t want it.

SO IS “ENLIGHTENMENT” REAL? I’VE no idea, but: Experiences wherein space and time disappear and all is revealed as one infinite consciousness; or as utterly without form and void; or where we ourselves vanish into empty sky; or where no trace of anything, including any witness, remains—real. Experiences that leave indelible, beneficent changes in the psyche—real. Becoming more filled with love, more concerned for others—real. Lasting, positive character change, meaning less aversion and anger, less craving and clinging, more ease with the arising and passing of things as we live with less domination by self-centeredness—real. Perhaps we can claim the personality can get just a little bit better through practice, that’s all: small improvements, but they’re enough.

There is no inherent incompatibility between Western culture and meditation practice. The core teachings need not be presented as exotic, since they aren’t; they are about the human mind, heart, and body.

In other words, a wisdom that is not knowledge but rather a state of being.

Perhaps the “self” that spiritual traditions attempt to pacify, tame, or even annul is a kind of potential, the seed of a second growing up that a human being can go through. Through infancy, childhood, and adolescence we develop a self that functions in the world. There’s a first wiring of the neurology in the earliest years, then a second wiring in adolescence. In time, often around midlife, or sometimes earlier, we start to wonder whether our view of life is complete, if there could be more. While some may understand that kind of inquiry in theistic terms, perhaps what we are really doing is tasting the possibility of another stage of development, beyond self: not a metaphysical or cosmological excursion, but rather a deep incursion, into experience here and now. Some neuroscientists speak of a third wiring of the brain, an optional one, a shift that the great wisdom traditions foster. In my case, since my teens I’d been picking up the scent of a trail that might lead to this shift, alternately following then balking at it. Finally I was ready, and fell in with good guides, and with their help stumbled to the brink of an abyss, to a point of no return where there was only one way to go.

“We should say of every thing that it no more is than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not.”

It means that we can’t hold any views at all. We can’t even hold the view that we can have no views. Plato said, “Destroy all hypotheses,” which sounds similar, except that he held to that view, and in time it would become a dogma of the Athenian Academy.

It seeks to free us from a mistaken perspective generated by a misunderstanding about our sense of self: namely, that it’s a thing, that me is a fixed entity. On the other hand, it doesn’t seek to replace wrong views with right ones. Rather, it seeks to free us of all views. Therefore it is valid to say it has no agenda.

So it is true that Zen has no agenda. Were it to have either agenda or content, it would be violating its own freedom. Yet that innate and infinite freedom is not Zen’s. It’s not anyone’s or anything’s. It belongs to no one, never has and never will. It doesn’t even belong to us. But it’s ours to find.

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