form is substance, substance is form

form is substance, substance is form (or the clogged sink is an altar, the altar a kitchen sink)

from 2014-2018:

The car

The house

The life savings

Various identities

The old ambitions

Gone. 

I also had to sacrifice a good chunk of a record collection that boarded on hoarding.

You can’t own music, either:

it’s in the heart until you want to share it, and in the air for good once you do.

You will either become visible to the larger world, to yourself, or you won’t. The chronically ill are, like  those who are poor or isolated for other reasons, residents in an Invisible City, a city filled with people under the radar, of whom not much is expected given their relatively erratic ability to produce in the visible cities of work, school, relationships. But no matter what situation both you and Chance have provided, you will rise above your challenges or mistakes or you won’t. But you can accept yourself exactly where you are living, with exactly what you are

losing, and move forward, and along the way try and help other people become visible too.

In Buddhism it is believed that each of us is already enlightened, in possession of Buddhanature; we only need to work through our fears, biases and delusions in order to see that what we seek is already within us. The city of our “True Selves” is also, in a sense, an Invisible City, a vague but oddly familiar place, one we recognize inside us once we stop looking for it outside of us.

So in gain and in loss there is a golden opportunity to change, to burn off delusions and maybe discover some skillful means for helping other people, or develop compassion is ways not possible without illness, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Times of difficulty are also times for being scared shitless, for living without a net.

An old Zen kung-an asks: "There is nothing to do. So what will you do?" We all embodyingmany possible answers, unique to ourselves alone, yet common to all. Where to go next?

What to keep,

what to finally admit isn’t worth holding onto to as a possibility?

For Thought or Non-Thought:

Five Books

Nikos Kazantzakis—Saviors of God

James Agee—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Walter Benjamin—The Arcades Project

Paul Fussell—The Great War and Modern Memory

Nicanor Parra—poems and antipoems

One name:

Baekoon Kyunghan, Korean Zen monk and poet (1299 – 1375)

The Names of Trees

 (I’d like to dedicate this to my late friend Svein Myreng, a disciple of Thich Nhat Hahn, and a find poet and chronic illness advocate. Check out his Plum Poerms if you can find it.)

For most of my life I have been carrying around a kong-an that has at various times challenged and disturbed both my creative life and worldview. It is a quote by the Russian writer Isaac Babel: “How can you be a writer when you don’t know the names of trees?” Sometimes I’ve taken this as a challenge to learn as much as I can from life, that nothing is such that I should casually dismiss it. At other times, however, I have seen it as a challenge to my lack of attention to life, the simple details of the world that were alien to me. Yet the Dharma might say that the name doesn’t make a difference: see the tree and see that both it and whatever you name it is of the same nature as you, empty of essential substance and interdependent with all fleeting sentient life! In other words, through attention and mindfulness, it is possible to see the world for what it is, and that it doesn’t revolve around me.

I realize now with irony that in both my inattention and my occasional passion to learn the names to everything I was trying to become the self I wished to be, and with a self that I barely knew. That disappointing self, like all my versions of it, only existed in those inner narratives we all constantly spin to ourselves and given life by my believing them. Implicit in this, of course, was the idea that my spiritual path only concerned me. It was not on my radar that it, if honest and in correct view, was meant to serve others, not the crazy heart of those narratives.

Thoughts may be ephemeral and without substance, but once they are grasped and viewed as necessary and vital to one’s navigation of the world, they are very real, grandiose as well as detrimental. The persona I created was one of fearlessness and openness to the point of recklessness. I sought extreme experiences. Those stories—being shot at, being chased by the police through the inner city in a car driven by a friend high on crack, arguing with my first wife over whether or not infamous Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau had appeared in her backseat to talk her while driving home from her job as a blackjack dealer—were all true, and certainly gave me plenty of material for my writing. I can see now that they also served the purpose of providing me with a kind of armor. I was proving my ability to endure, so I thought; in reality I was donning an armor which prevented me from truly engaging with the world—with curiosity, vulnerability, focus.

One may be aware of the incongruence between what one wishes to be and what one is, but ignorant of one’s framing and feeding both desired and undesired self.  That was my situation. I was torn by my inability to live up to who I wanted to be, who I “knew” I really was, but never questioned whether that future Mike was even possible or realistic.

What is there to do? For me, I finally sat down, took a breath, and looked around to see where I was. Literally. Not where or who I wanted to be, not with a scholarly understanding of the underlying concepts and scientific designations of what I saw. I looked without seeking a name for myself.

We have oak trees in our yard, and a Japanese maple, plus some evergreens that are overgrown. I am sitting in the kitchen facing a large window that looks out on a tree I still can’t name. What is the name of that tree? What is this? To deeply question one’s beliefs and biases, to penetrate into the Great Doubt, is to become less concerned with personal preferences. To fully see the tree, to hear it, to touch it, to see it as a part of you, is to not be concerned with labels. If you are really looking at your life, paying attention to it with curiosity, no Self is even there. It is not needed.

Look at the tree. Let the tree look at you. You’ll both like it that way.

Are You With Me, Emperor Wu?

Apocryphal or not, Bodhidharma’s verbal jousts with Emperor Wu upon his first appearances in China are foundational in Zen for our understanding of our true nature. These brief mic dropping encounters give a lot to think about; one could say they represent our practice in a nutshell. There are variations to the story, in sequence, setting etc but the main teaching is the meat; all the details are just wrapping paper.

The scene and the message are satisfactorily and tersely stated in Case 1 of The Blue Cliff Record and Case 2 in The Book of Serenity:

Bodhidharma arrives in China, Liang Province, around 527 AD. He has come to India per the instruction of his Master, who heard that, despite a flourishing 300 year old Buddhist monastic tradition in China, there haven’t been too many reports of enlightenment. Soon after arrival he has an audience with the Emperor, who has studied Buddhism and contributed a lot to the material needs of both Buddhist and Taoist monks, including building monasteries. Some versions of the story have Emperor Wu greeting him on the shore as he lands, while others speak in some variation of the Emperorsending for Bodhidharma, having heard of his reputation.

The Emperor asks the monk to tell him which is the highest holy truth. Bodhidharma’s reply, “There is nothing, no holy truth,” was not only unsatisfactory to the Emperor; it both shocked and insulted him. This lead him to ask his famous question, “Who is this that stands before me?” To which Bodhidharma replied in equally frustrating fashion. His “I don’t know” chrystalizes the nature of our practice, the Keeping of “don’t know mind,” the Great Doubt, the constant reflection on impermanence and the conditional self. Those three words would shake the world.

More immediately it pissed off the Emperor, whose reaction to offer the monk a litany of all he has done to promote Buddhism in his kingdom, all the material goods he has provided monastics and lay practitioners, implying his own deep devotion to practice. He says to Bodhidharma:, “What merit have a accumulated through these actions?”

“No merit whatsoever,” is the reply. This wasn’t merely shade; Bodhidharma cut to the marrow of the Emperor’s practice and exposed an inherent selfishness of his magnanimity.

Bodhidharma’s “I don’t know” wasn’t intended to be smart-ass, nor was it meant to pass down into legend a core Zen tenet. It was a lifeline.

When you dive into the river to save me from drowning I hope you don’t ask for my name first. Bodhidharma is, as it were, letting the drowning man/Emperor know that who is speaking is not important. What is being said, or done, is what is important. Bodhidharma was saying pay attention! By saying there was no merit in all of the Emperor’s great actions, he was challenging him to realize he was asking the wrong question.

We all ask the wrong questions—to ourselves, family, random rescuers who come from the West.

Did I do a good job?

What’s in it for me?

Who are you to talk to me like that?

What is the mind?

When will I be enlightened?

Can I lose my enlightenment once I get it?

Keep doing what you are doing, out of necessity or compassion or whatever. Don’t think good or bad, reward or waste of time, heaven or hell, revered teacher before me or smart-ass. Do what you are doing. And let that be enough. See that it is enough. Live in that “enough” without all the questions.

It’s human to ask those questions. 

But since you’re human: everything you do is human!

So it is also part of your nature to not need answers to those questions.

Rev Jinji Sunya

Monk With Wound

“I’m telling you what I own.”--Stonehouse

 It is August 2023. I have now been an ordained Zen monk for nine plus years.,I’m happy to report that I still know very little, but am gratefully going forward anyway.

There have been many losses, surgeries and a range of insights during these nine years, deteriorating health and many surgeries, losing my home and declaring bankruptcy due to medical bills, becoming dependent and unable to drive anymore, the death of my mother: those personal battles have been rocket fuel for my practice, helping me loosen some attachments, helping me melt my heart and teaching me compassion. Being human, they have also scared the hell out of me, caused me to go fetal and often could only, to paraphrase a Zen saying, grab my wife’s hand and walk through hell together.

 It has been a raw classroom.

 I’m still sick, still unsure and dependent, still a jackass. Now I’m losing my vision and am having some cognitive struggles.:Deep bows to all of it: I’m still here, and don’t want to be anywhere else.,As I sit and practice in this fire, I can’t be anywhere else.

 “The most important thing to remember is the most important thing.”—Shunryu Suzuki

 I sometimes wish I had remained a novice, or wish there was an option for permanent novice. There is so much to do at the starting line! I remember in the early days I was burning to be of use, to serve, to “help.” I still don’t knowmwhat that means, but I really didn’t know back then either. Now I just do the best Imcan for everyone around me, and try not to give it a name.

I sit, I clean the house and feed the cats, I read and hand-copy the sutras and other Buddhist texts (I’ve filled 17 100-page notebooks of miscellany that one day I will donate to the Collective or maybe some other order, the collection named after my choice of name for my Zendo, should have ever been realized: Common Sparrow.). I walk, chant, study (assorted poetry and texts, the Compass of Zen, Tao de Ching, and the Vimalakirti and Suragama sutras.

 I still know next to nothing, and I’m comfortable with that—and uncomfortable, and that helps fuel the iron ball in my mouth. I haven’t been able tomconsistently have contact with you, so essentially I have practiced by myself.

Here our Sangha has stepped up. I’ve made several great Dharma friends, and have learned and shared the teachings with them. Given my health I’m unable to sit Sesshin or attend the annual retreats, so this access has been my lifeline.

 I can’t in good conscience offer to teach or set up any consistent meditation classes, let alone start my own practice space. I may never be able to. But through my limitations and dependence I’ve have received illusion-blasting insights into the marrow of impermanence and in the hidden depths of mymattachments (due to health loss of career, home, car, life savings, partial vision, independence, sense of smell and taste, et-effin-cetera), and this has also helped me deepen my compassion and realize interdependence in ways that just would not have been possible without those experiences. I know my practice is real because I’ve held on to my practice thru the grief and anxiety and losses of the last five years, held on to chanting, to sitting—even if some days all I can do is get up, sit for ten minutes and then go back to bed for the day—to keep reading sutras and learning to develop & express genuine joy for the achievements of my friends in their lives.

 Given my health, would I be able to cut it in a monastery with all its rigorous practice? Would I even now be able to run thru a series if Kung-and, given my cognitive losses? Probably not, but I love being a monk/priest. Not because of the name or the threads but because to me it represents my commitment to working toward a greater awakening, a greater commitment to all beings around me, no matter your own limitations. I see it as an offering of myself as a reminder to keep one’s eyes on higher insights, to do the hard spiritual practices to that help in those realizations, no matter what disability one has. I could do that without a robe, a title, etc. But I’m not; I’m doing that with them, most of the time, and I takethe responsibility that comes with it eagerly.

Hopefully my posts will show up regularly and that you find something in them to help with whichever of the ten thousand illnesses with which you struggle.

Two Raw Vimilakirtis

Much like Vimalakirti, the sly layman of the eponymous sutra, we often meet people who challenge us with their pain, shake us out of our stupor by the mere fact of their presence or, rather, the jarring presence of their suffering. Vimalakirti’s illness was Upaya, skillful means for instructing even some of the great Bodhisattvas in the uncomfortable face of suffering, the true cost of compassion.

So this means too that one of the basic points of the sutra is that though ultimately there is no sickness, in this realm of form, and that sickness can be useful not only as a tool for awakening, but as a means to helps others wake up, it is also real, and acute, and a cruel teacher. To learn compassion, or inspire compassion in others, then, is to recognize both the form and emptiness of pain.

Much like the short Pali teaching The Monk with Dysentery, illness becomes the sharpest of blades, challenging our compassion, our vows, the true cost of the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings. Illness reminds us that practice has to include the dirty work.

Two friends of mine died, years apart an under drastically different circumstances, but their teachings have become, for me, inspiration for living my vow and constant challenges to any bullshit or pride inherent in my practice.

Roger was a resident of the nursing home where I was to do my practical portion of CNA training. My (and my partner’s) duties for him included the most feared of tasks for the trainees: He had an colostomy bag, which had to be emptied and replaced as part of washing him and getting him ready for bed. Once we got him undressed and in the shower, we saw clearly that no one had changed his bag in some time; it was full. I jumped right in and volunteered to the one to change him. I barely touched the bag when it popped loose from his side, and shit therein was now all over me, over him, over my partner. I was also face-face with the open stoma, which was oozing more shit.

Shari Faye Smith was a friend I only met once, on an episode of Forensic Files. She had been abducted by a serial killer who taunted her family by phone once she was in his clutches. Before he was to torture and kill her in the most unspeakable ways, he made her write out a last will.  Fully aware that she was going to die not soon after writing it, fully aware of the horror and pain she about to endure, she spent her last few clear-headed moments to show compassion to her parents, and to meet her fate with a steely grace that goes to the marrow of the bodhisattva vow:

I love you Mommy, Daddy, Robert, Dawn & Richard (her boyfriend) and everyone else and all other friends and relatives. I’ll be with my Father now, so please, please don’t worry. Just remember my witty personality & great special times we all shared together. Please don’t even let this ruin your lives, just keep living one day at a time for Jesus. Some good will come out of this. My thoughts will always be with you & in you. Casket closed. (Emphasis mine.-mw.)

Mom, Dad, Robert & Dawn, there’s so much I want to say that I should have said before now. I love y’all! I know ya’ll love me and will miss me very much, but if ya’ll stick together like we always did – ya’ll can do it! Please do not become hard or upset. “Every thing works out for the good of those that love the Lord” (Romans 8:28).

She had just turned 18.

While she derived her strength and resolve from a faith source we may or may not share, the lesson of the power of pain to speed up a realization of, access to, the marrow of practice is clear. Shari Faye Smith embodied Great Faith, Great Doubt and Great Effort as resolutely as any Patriarch.

In Vimalakirti’s little room, the great radiant Bodhisattvas of the 10,000 Realms had no answer to his bringing them face-to-face with simple sickness and death. Of course, there was really nothing in the room at all, illness being ultimately empty as is all form. So that form was empty, but in the moment experienced was a hammer to the face of ignorance, to the dreams of bliss and mastery.

My friends the old man, the teenage girl, and all teachers and bodies (including my own), remind me that the dharma gates we sometimes enter in order to help all beings are doors to sickness, to shit, to incredible pain, to a lost cause, all icy-hot challenges to our own vows, our own Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Effort.

What in your life or your practice helps you run toward the dirty work?

What pain do you avoid or turn away from, because it isn’t comfortable or is too painful to embrace?

My answers to that last question include abused animals/images of factory farming, aggressive mental illness, hungry kids; I’m sure that behind the many other doors that need to be opened by me, are suffering beings for whom my tears, self-doubt, squeamishness and pity are not welcome and shown to be hollow.

How can we possibly live our vows? How do I come to embrace the dire needs that are always present? Advancing toward the light is the same in emptiness and form, in contingent and Ultimate realms as shit, and blood, and helpless, raw suffering. How does all that simple yet kinda esoteric idea play out in the mud of your daily life? By getting as close as you can to it, eyes wide open, and become what the moment needs.

Rev Mike Jinji Sunya

The Vomit of Insight

Roughly thirteen hundred years ago, one Zen master showed us, through his vomit, how we create—and can overcome—birth and death. This is a rather extreme example of insight, yet Wonhyo, one of the great iconoclasts in Buddhist history, used this common experience we all share— as the spark for his awakening. That his story has made it to us today further shows its relevance, though it probably has also lasted due to its seemingly perverse nature. As with many Buddhist stories, though, the point is not whether or not the events actually took place, but with its message.

In Korea, Wonhyo (617-666) was on his way to China, in the hopes of finding a master who would teach him Buddhism. While on his long walk, he became thirsty, but kept walking. By nightfall he was becoming dehydrated, and retreated into a cave. By luck, he found inside a bowl filled with water. He drank greedily and fell asleep. The next morning, in the light of day, he realized in quick succession that the cave was a tomb, the bowl was a skull, and the water inside it was fetid and filled with maggots. He threw up violently, at which point he was enlightened and saw no need to continue on to China.

A lesson that can be learned here is that we create the good and bad of a situation through our biases, knee-jerk reactions, and conventional understanding. Yet the lesson is also that any situation is a moment to realize liberation, and any challenging moment can be endured without making it any more dire or rosy than it ought. We can realize that we are already liberated by meeting any situation head-on, like Wonhyo, who in his disgust realized that it was only his perspective that caused him pain. Not that drinking maggot, gristle stew out of a skull is recommended—but the night before it had been some of the best water he ever drank. The primacy of personal experience and choice is clear.

The mind is a terrible thing to listen to, a wild jackass of fragments of memory, experience, lies, fears, hopes, dreams, songs, TV shows; we’ve talked to ourselves for long that we’ve churned all that mess into a semi-coherent narrative that we come to believe is true. This jackass becomes a thief, taking you away from a real experience of life with its powerful and seductive judgments and resemblance to a linear factual assessment of who you are.

We can use even the most harsh, sick, disgusting moments of our lives as vehicles for awakening, for breaking the spell of that inner tele-novella . As we can become aware that negative actions and thoughts are just energy, powerful energy that can in turn be redirected for beneficial use, we can also see times of illness or stress as times when there is useful energy present. All of life is our practice: if we are sick, we practice experiencing our sickness, without judgment; likewise with despair, rejection, insult, etc. This does not mean trying to convince ourselves that we don’t feel like shit, or that we are not afraid or grief-stricken. There are times when listening to what our minds are telling us about our bodies is critical to maintaining good health.

It does mean realizing that, if any moment, this moment, is the moment to wake up, and if this is moment of discomfort, so be it. Wonhyo experienced through nausea—and its insight into life and death—an enlightenment moment. Literally puking out ignorance and fear, and realizing that discomfort and fear can be good news for practice, and sharp insight into the ephemeral nature of our emotions. He might have mentioned the hazards of laughing while vomiting, but we nevertheless can be grateful to Wonhyo for his being able to carry this lesson onto the Bodhisattva path and pass on that insight for the benefit of others.

Though Wonhyo could be ambivalent about the necessity of a teacher in one’s awakening, he was a teachers, albeit of the primacy of individual experience. No one can puke out my illness for me; a good teacher, though, like these sages, could point out my sickness for you, and hold the bucket while I vomit out some more of my ignorance.

Rev Mike Jinji Sunya