Why Buddha Touched the Earth

A rewrite of the chapter previously titled "Shamans and Priests"

Industrial Strength Shamanism

From the windows of trains speeding through rural Japan, you see that the hillsides are covered with forests. Some scars are visible - areas cut down to the bare ground, or even where part of a hill has been covered in cement to prevent collapse - but it look as if Japan's strict development laws have done much to protect wilderness in such a crowded nation.

When I decided to hike into the woods near the Tekishin Zen center in Kameoka (just outside Kyoto), however, I was in for a shock. I found that what appeared to be forest was straight rows of trees, an artificially replanted area with no undergrowth. When I climbed a hill, instead of soil under my feet the rocky side had been covered in plastic netting to prevent erosion.

In the decades since World War II, Japan has undertaken a tremendous reforestation effort. This is a praise-worthy endeavor, and the rest of the world can learn much from the Japanese example. But the deforestation that makes it necessary is a stark illustration of the toll heedless industrialization can take on the landscape - and on the culture. If this can happen in a place where the forest religions Shinto and Buddhism dominate, in a land where individual rocks and trees are seen as objects of veneration, what of Europe, with its desert-religion Christianity, that directs men to go and subdue nature?

The Industrial Revolution first got underway in England, and so it was England that first experienced the consequences - both positive and negative. It is no coincidence that England played a key role in the history of the modern Pagan movement.

A revised draft of the chapter "Zen Paganism"

Zen Paganism

It was some time in 1986 or 87 that my good friend, fellow karate student, and general co-conspirator Mike Gurklis and I were sitting around talking about our readings about Zen. We had been inspired by some references to it in a book by our karate school's founder, to seek out more information about this philosophy and its relationship to the traditional martial arts.

One thing we discovered was that Zen, while arising from Buddhism, wasn't limited to it.

So you could be a Zen Christian, one of us said. Or a Zen Jew.

Or a Zen Pagan.

I don't remember which of us said it. But it struck a chord with me. A few years later when I trundled off to my freshman year of college and decided to personalize my knapsack with some magic-marker graffiti, in among "Make love not war" and "Stop Planetary Suicide" was the logo "Zen Pagan".

At the time, it was just something that sounded cool. I didn't have any great idea what Zen or Paganism was, was still shaking off the lingering remnants of my childhood Catholicism. Sometimes, though, the title finds us before the piece, the work of whatever art, does.

This chapter would go in the "practical implications" part of the book. Still a little rough around the edges but I'm fairly satisfied with what it says. I do want to add some more about actually being mindful at mealtime.

There is perhaps nothing so miraculous and yet so commonplace as eating. Several times a day (for those of us fortunate enough to live where food is readily available), we engage in amazing transformational alchemy that turns the food on our plates into our living breathing bodies.

And because of the intimate nature of our relationship with food - "you are what you eat" - we can have a tremendous emotional investment in the choice of what things we turn into us. So much so, that it can be nearly impossible to get people to change what they eat.

People will allow their health to deteriorate, they will die of heart disease or diabetes, commit suicide by fork, rather than give up unhealthy diets. Many Americans have their bellies ripped open and their digestive tracts surgically modified to "cure" gross obesity, because they find themselves unable to alter their eating habits.

I recall my shiatsu sensei, Barbra Esher, once noting that it was easier to get people to change their religion than to change what they eat.[*] This is interesting to consider. If early Christians had made Gentile converts keep kosher, would anyone have heard of Jesus of Nazareth today?

Rough draft about the Buddhist notion of Hell, and Jizo. I want to add a bit more about Jizo, need to research a bit more.

Mahayana Buddhism never met an idea, a myth or a metaphor, that it didn't like. While the Buddha used the Hindu concept of re-incarnation as a teaching tool, he didn't have much to say about the afterlife. It wasn't relevant to his primary mission, relieving human suffering; and notions of a afterlife don't mesh all that well with the ideas of anatman and sunyatta, "no-self" and "emptyness". If the "self" is an illusion, if "I" am just a character in the story my mind is telling, what is there to be reborn?

Rough draft of a chapter about the "mystical sense". It could stand a little expansion.

To get around Osaka, I've been doing a lot of bicycling, on a cheap secondhand bike I picked up in my local shotengai. The city is good cycling territory, no steep hills, bike lanes on most of the sidewalks. Everybody has a bike here - it's not uncommon to see a housewife with two small kids and a load of groceries balanced on her shopping bicycle, or a young man peddling along with his girlfriend sitting behind him on his bike's cargo rack. (The down side is that bicycle theft is also surprisingly common - this is my second bike.)

The great thing about biking is that it's brought me right up close to the everyday beauty of the city. Tonight, heading downtown to sit in a bar and write, I had just such a moment as I was waiting at the crosswalk near the bridge by the Osaka Dome. A man about my age, perhaps a few years younger, ordinary guy in khaki windbreaker holding hands on either side with his daughters, maybe six and eight years old. And the daughters were on unicycles! Unicycles, one pink, one yellow, white tires; the girls in matching outfits (unicycle team outfits? or just kawaii?): blue jeans with mutli-colored star patches low on the legs, pink sweatshirts, white puffy parka-type vest over top.

Me with a big smile, trying not to stare; the girls sneaking looks at the funny-looking long-haired gaijin. All beautiful.

Rough draft of what will probably be a later chapter, where we deal with the big issue...

Life and Death in the Stream

Today I took a little hike up into the woods uphill from the Tekishin Zen center in Kameoka (just outside Kyoto), where I'm spending a few days. Sat zazen by the stream for a while, watching the water eddy around the rocks.

I've written about the precepts, about the Noble truths, about magick and mysticism, since I've been here, but I haven't much touched on the big one, the thing so many people turn to religion for comfort regarding: death.

The most popular way to deal with death, of course, is to deny it. "I'm going to Heaven when I die" - never mind that, as Mark Twain pointed out, the popular notion of Heaven sounds like a dreary, awful place. Or, "I will be re-incarnated when I die", an increasingly popular one here in the West. especially among Pagan folk.

Re-incarnation is sometimes argued as being "natural", the way of the seasons, and so as something that should be embraced by Pagans. As the chant goes, "Hoof and horn, hoof and horn / All the dies shall be re-born / Corn and grain, corn and grain / all that falls shall rise again." But when the corn falls, are the stalks that rise again the next spring the same plants of corn? Am I the same as my grandfather? And if I and my brother - the last, so far, of his descendants - don't have kids, then what? Immortality through reproduction seems an unsatisfactory sort.

Let's go back to the stream. Sit near some rocks in it's flow. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds from certain conditions, then melts away as conditions change.

But then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.

Is it the same whirlpool?

Rough draft of what will probably be a later chapter. One of my favorites.

Sex (or the lack thereof) and the Single Gaijin

Last Friday, after I got back home from Kyoto I decided to bike down to Shinsaibashi and go out for the evening. I ended up at Cinquecento, a martini bar frequented by gaijin and gaijin-friendly Nihonjin.

A Japanese girl a few stools down decided to introduce herself. Introduce herself rather vigorously, one might say. She was nice to talk to, seemed an outsider in her own country, a hardcore punk rock fan, lonely, and I was happy to talk to her (even as, I must admit, I was eying other women). But I just wasn't interested in taking her home, as she quite clearly suggested.

"Do you like Japanese girls?" she asked.

"Sure. I like all kinds of girls - Japanese girls, American girls, whatever." In my life I've gone from a hamburger-lover to a vegan, from a Catholic to a Zen Pagan, but I had it figured out real early that I liked girls. It was certainly never a matter of "choice", as some homophobes would have it - I was born heterosexual and seem stuck that way, even if logic suggests we'd all be better off bi (and thus maximize our chances of a date).

When I said she was cute (which she was, in a punk sort of way) but I didn't think it would be a good idea to take her home, she asked, "So are you gay?" Obviously the only reason a gaijin guy wouldn't want to bed any available Nihonjin girl would be that he preferred guys (presumably Nihonjin guys), right?

This will probably be a later chapter. Rough draft.

Compassion and the "Meaning" of Life

The Buddha started with the problem of human suffering, and ended up recommending cultivating compassion. Since compassion means opening ourselves up to the pain of others, this is worthy of some deeper thought.

Compassion? What's in it for me, you wonder.

Can't talk about Zen without Bodhidharma. Rough draft of a chapter introducing him.

A Red-Bearded Barbarian

Tucked away in off a side street in Kyoto, about a mile from Nijo Castle - where the last shogun announced to his daimyo the restoration of the Emperor and the end of the shogunate - is a small Zen temple known as Daruma-dera (though it's official name is Hoorin-ji).

Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, the man considered to be the founder of Zen - and also of many of the healing and martial arts that trace their origin to China, including both karate and shiatsu. He is probably the most-portrayed gaijin in Japan, his image is everywhere - not just in portraits, but in a peculiar sort of figurine. It is for its collection of these figurines that Daruma-dera is known. (Supposedly, the temple houses ten thousand of them, but in Chinese and Japanese culture 10,000 often just means "more than you'd care to count".) The temple itself dates to 1718, but it was when the 10th abbot, who took up his position in 1933, who used the Daruma figurines as a teaching tool and started the famous collection. [http://www.amie.or.jp/daruma/Hoorin-ji.html]

The temple was not in my guidebook, but I found a little bit about it on the web and knew I had to check it out. Fortunately it's marked on the Periplus map of Kyoto I bought this morning. It's not much of a international tourist destination, no English brochure or signs other that the one in front, but it's definitely worth a visit if you know a bit about Daruma.

Rough draft of a chapter, where we stick it to conventional religion....I think this will need some reworking, but the ideas are critically important.

Religion Is A Mess

Religion, as we commonly know and experience it in out culture, is a mess.

There are a couple of things that get mixed up. There's the desire for a certain experience, that experience of existence, of connection to the Universe, of the Godhead. There are ethical teachings - both in the 'Thou shall not...' and in the 'For your contentment, we suggest...' variations. There are myths and legends that give us role models. There are the superstitions born of fear, and the supernaturalism born out of ignorance. There's the preservation of the knowledge needed for the community to thrive. There's the deliberate hiding of knowledge that would threaten the priesthood's power.

For about 200 years, from Newton to Napoleon, we had the "Enlightenment". It was supposed to be the triumph of reason over superstition in Europe and, later, the United States; maybe leaving behind some sort of benign Deism, but ushering in a new age of rational behavior. But it all sort of fell apart in imperialism and war, the American revolution, the Napoleonic era, the War of 1812, eventually the American Civil War. And the Industrial Revolution, which was supposed to bring freedom, brought instead the "enclosure" which kicked small farmers off of their land, the sweatshop, the dehumanization of labor, and the "smoke" of the industrialization.