Recently I discovered when some of the seeds of this apparent attitude of mine were planted. I never went to kindergarten. When I started school in first grade, parochial schools were crowded, often fifty students to a class. Maybe I wasn’t ready. I found most of the work easy and boring. I would spend the entire day staring out the window, wishing I were outside (I threw myself absolutely into recesses and always came home dusty and grass-stained). But mostly I was dreaming, making up stories, my mind afire. I had to spend nearly every day after school because I had not completed the work with the other kids. Usually I could get through the incomplete work quickly, especially when the terrifying second grade nun, Sister Sarah, was watching, her grey face peering through the glass of the classroom door. But I began to learn that people had expectations and that in order to get them off my case I had to start pretending to fulfill their expectations. I never thought that the expectations might have any value for me. They were their expectations, after all. By the time I was ten I had forgotten why I was pretending, and so living other’s wishes became real.
Many of us have such stories where someplace between then and now we have gotten lost. The way back is easier than we could have imagined. It is right here in whatever we do each day. The “practice” at the Zen Center of Syracuse is a lay practice. It is founded on the simple understanding that if Buddhist practice cannot help ordinary people live ordinary lives more completely, then it is not much good for anything. One should not have to become a special case or live in extraordinary circumstances in order to grasp the fundamentals. Zen emphasizes ordinary day-to-day things because when we grasp the essential emptiness in the least thing we simultaneously apprehend it in the universe.
The novelist Masao Abe has said, “In our daily life, there are moments when we are here with ourselves—moments in which we feel a vague sense of unity. But at other moments we find ourselves there—looking at ourselves from the outside. We fluctuate between here and there from moment to moment: homeless, without a place to settle.” He goes on to add that only humans experience this divisive self-consciousness, that plants and other animals just are what they are.
On the positive side, while we live self-consciously, we think and create human culture, science, art—we think how to live and how to develop our lives. But we do it looking from the outside and are thus separated from ourselves. Abe says, “So far as we are moving between here and there, between inside and outside, looking at ourselves in comparison with others, and looking at ourselves from the outside, we are always restless. . . . Insofar as one is a human being, one cannot escape this basic anxiety.”
In a talk on Sufism, Thomas Merton, in an aside, cites Martin Buber: “In Eden Adam and Eve could do only good. It was their nature to do good. They could not be or do otherwise. There was not in their frame of reference anything other than good, so there was no real good in the sense that it is something opposing of evil. Evil was not in the picture. What they came to desire through Satan’s temptation, was to see themselves doing good.”
Abe goes on similarly about this theme, “God created a tree as a tree and saw that it was good: it is in suchness as a tree. . . . Everything is in its own suchness. It was the same when he created Adam and Eve. . . . They are just as they are . . . .” But, as we know, according to Genesis, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. This is more than a question of ethics. Abe suggests, “The eating of the fruit suggests the making of value judgments. . . . The ability to make value judgments is a quality unique to self-consciousness. . . . By means of self-consciousness we also make a distinction between oneself and others. As a consequence of this distinction, we become attached to self, making ourselves the center of the world.” This is the sin of Eden. And it is ours.
Buddhism regards self-consciousness as ignorance, a loss of awareness of the reality of our suchness. Our outside view of ourselves is a basic ignorance inherent in human existence. Masao Abe continues, “As long as the human self tries to take hold of itself through self-consciousness (out of which feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc. develop), the human ego-self falls into an ever-deepening dilemma. At the extreme point of this dilemma, the ego can no longer support itself and must collapse into emptiness. . . . The realization of no-self is a necessity for the human ego. . . . We must realize that there is no unchanging, eternal ego-self.”
This is not the end, but rather a point of departure. Suchness is our ground of being in the world, living without “otherness,” without conflict, so each day and each ordinary activity becomes a good day and a good act. This is what is meant by the saying, “everything is empty.
Talking to God
It is odd how the lessons we are given are sometimes not learned for many, many years. When I was about four I was playing one day in my grandfather’s studio. It smelled of wood ash, oil paint, and turpentine. It was on the second floor of the 200-year-old house he and my grandmother rented. There was a fireplace, and there were beamed ceilings, dark with age, and bookshelves built in between the corner windows that looked right out over the old coach road. I was moving chess pieces (red and white, oddly enough) around the sloped surface of his desk (the very desk at which I write now), pretending they were soldiers. He shuffled into the room in his slippers, baggy pants, and old cardigan. He stood over me for a few minutes, hand on my shoulder, silently watching me. His hair was still dark, and his teeth were brown. He asked if I would sit for him. I knew what this meant. He was working on a portrait of his youngest son, my uncle Brian, then in the navy. He needed me to sit still with my uncle’s naval cap on my head so he could get the pose and angle right. I agreed because I knew he would talk to me. I loved to hear him talk.
He posed me as he wanted, with the cap at a rakish angle over one eye. I thought that it looked stupid and pushed it to the back of my head where I knew it would stay on. He fixed it again. Again I pushed it back. I wore all my cowboy hats like that. He said, “Damn it, keep it like this. Look, let me tell you a story.” And while I became utterly motionless, he began a story that had been going on for some time. It featured a glass mountain that was wondrous to see but slippery to climb; a character named Injun Joe of dubious reputation; a number of giants, trolls, and elves; and an absolutely terrifying Big Bad Wolf with yellow eyes, blood dripping from his huge yellow teeth—something that filled my nightmares for many years later.
At some point the story petered out or he became absorbed in some problem on the canvas. Things grew quiet. I could hear the old mahogany grandmother clock, brought over from Ireland and called that because it was smaller than a grand father clock, ticking loudly and slowly downstairs. “Granpop?” I asked suddenly, “Why do you paint?” He paused, brush in hand, a dark lock over his brow. His eyes, often bleary, became very clear and looked at me as though he had never seen me before. “Well, my boy,” he said, “Art is a way to talk to God.”
Shortly after that, he finished up and freed me to go. I shot down to the kitchen. I had been smelling baking for some time now and had to see what my grandmother was up to. The kitchen was a long, low-ceilinged room that looked out on a dirt road and parking area between the rambly old stone house and the dairy farm next door. As I entered the kitchen I heard the milk pump start up in the barn. My grandmother was leaning over a low table, her hands white with flour. She was making potato rolls, small yeast rolls for which she became famous. There was a wooden bowl filled with fresh-baked ones. I watched, fascinated as she pushed the lively dough with her hands, took an old milk glass dipped in flour, and cut circles with it in the dough. Then she took up each circle, brushed it with butter on half of one side, folded it tenderly, and lined it up on a baking sheet. It was all done with economy, speed, and a kind of tenderness I couldn’t explain but which was palpable to my young eyes. She did it as intently as my grandfather touched the brush and layered the color on the canvas.
“Gran?” I asked, “Why don’t you paint?”
She said, “I’m not an artist.”
“But don’t you want to talk to God?”
She paused, letting the dough spring back over her fingers as she kneaded. “What do you mean, my little one?”
“Granpop says art is a way to talk to God.”
She turned to me, flour up to her elbows, wisps of grey hair