radioshenyen dharamkot, india july-august 2006
healthy again after almost three months of minor but continuous illness. walking down the street feeling the animal gentleness of the body as rhythm and energy and quiet awareness... in the desire realm this is about as good as it gets: your body, briefly returned 'as new', before continuing its shuttle towards old age sickness death... but realising also that what i've been calling 'healthy' in india over the last few years is actually just a case of lowered expectations.
in an almost deserted restaurant a girl suddenly stands up from her table, from within her introspectiveness, and walks to the edge of the garden terrace to look out over the valley. but its not just the view that's pulling her: its that same animal gentleness, which i see flow out of her as she takes hold of a tibetan banner fluttering in the wind, holding it taut and still. her arm outstretched, her hand plugged into the universe of touch, her emotions pacified for a few moments.
i didnt really want to come back to india this year - other things pulled me back, teachings i couldnt miss. and as soon as i decided to leave (i'm returning to thailand in a few days) the illness started to disappear. a couple of weeks ago, watching a movie from the west with scenes of cityscapes - neon, subway crowds, bus stops, billboards, etc - i suddenly realise that that's where i want to be. sickness and art giving me the same message: 'go now'. properly handled, hunger can be an amazing compass, a moment by moment attunement to the hidden economy of one's unrepeatable life. i trust it more and more. of course it can also be a red herring. it depends entirely on ourselves: on how much goodness we've collected in the invisible golden hive of our consciousness, how disciplined and sincere we've become. how honest. that beautiful old-fahioned word i find myself using more and more these days: virtue. invisible light.
but you dont want to read about my illness do you? you want to read about the mind of a master film-maker, about the difference between CEOs and CDOs, about how to make the universe respond to your questions, about mobius strips and nagarjuna and what shenyen's actually been up to and where he's going next - yes? ok, let's go...
chris marker, talking about the japanese film-maker akira kurasawa: "... he has tremendous spiritual presence. he lives his life like a master swordsman: he has no time for abstractions. when asked on the film-set why he did something in a certain way he replied: 'i simply make a film the way i want it to be.' ..."
you have to hear that last remark very clearly. he's not saying 'i do what i like.' he's saying: my life is totally conscious, and so everything i do is unrepeatable, immeasurable, perfect. there is no formula involved, no aesthetic that can be 'understood' and repeated. you cant compare it to anything. its my world. its unrepeatable. and truly singular phenomena are, by nature, inexplicable.
we have to live like that if we are to transcend hope and fear and die without regret - my working definition of what it means to call oneself a buddhist. we have to stop listening to all the noise, all the gossip, all the opinion polls and just live totally true to where the heart is. nobody can tell you how to live, how to make that movie. you're on your own. but if you shine within the truth of that, if you relax and actually start living your unrepeatable disappearing life, people will love you, people will want to be around you, people will help you.
i've just finished teaching in a temporary space in dharamkot, the little village outside tushita. seven weeks of teachings and retreats, with a few spells of solitary time scattered through. with the help of a group of friends an empty farmhouse was transformed into a meditation space in half a day and dismantled within two hours of the last retreat ending.
i remember, last year, reading an article about some business guru's recent visit to mumbai, quoting some of the wonderful off-the-wall ideas he offered during his seminar there. one of which was that in the future the heads of companies will be known as CDOs rather than CEOs - Chief Destructive Officer, not Chief Executive Officer - because their job will be to 'destroy' the company before the competition does. and he quoted with approval the example of some company - maybe it was the company that created Netscape Navigator but i cant remember - which burst onto the scene and made 2.5 billion dollars in 18 months before going bust. he said he would rather have this on his CV than something like 'he met his sales targets every quarter for 17 years.' i remember smiling as i read this. i felt i knew exactly what he meant, and how it could translate smoothly into my high-speed/superslow buddhist universe...
for years i have been captivated by a remark of Thich Nhat Hanh's: "there are enough zen centres; what we need now are zen corners..." last year i started thinking in that space but was too busy helping tushita with its teaching schedule to try it out. this year, returning to dharamsala after that nine month wander around the world, i knew it was time to try. of course, the buddhist universe and Netscape Navigator only partially overlap, novice monks and CDOs only partially overlap, but that's ok. i'm a 'translator' in the most open sense of the word...
it started with a ten day retreat that some friends from various courses last year invited me to lead. it went really well - lots of silent sitting all day, and then the magic of the night laced with emptiness teachings, loving-kindness meditations and sweet dedication prayers. and all of this placed within the four powers (refuge, repentance, aspiration and practice) so that the whole day's activity was seen as a purification practice. but the cool thing was watching it all happen from nothing, watching it shine briefly but truly, and watching it disappear without a trace and without regret.
the group was amazingly disciplined and warm - focussed, generous, present. everyone serving in some way to make the place function, and everyone practicing to transform themselves. this was 'community' in the full sense of the word - naturally disciplined, naturally joyful - but within the high-speed/superslow now-you-see-us-now-you-dont ethos of the twentyfirst century (four of them are now on the road to tibet, others leaving soon or already left for korea, italy, israel). once i accepted the invitation to lead the retreat everyone freely, spontaneously adopted some kind of responsibility for making it happen, and everything happened: some wandered the hillside looking for venues, others set up the kitchen and got the food supplies in, arranged the meditation room, organised logistics. an empty farmhouse transformed into a temporary 'zen corner' that felt beautifully established and strong after just a few days. now i know just how possible it is, and just how sweet it can be, with the right people around.
and what we established together became the site for several weeks of open and closed teachings, and a platform for newcomers to encounter the buddhist path. after that opening retreat i continued renting two rooms, teaching in one of them: with old friends in the evenings, and stranger-friends who responded to the posters announcing the presence of 'radio shenyen' and the free teachings available there in the afternoons. all kinds of people came, but then came a group of four students in one day who all felt in harmony with each other and with the space and ended up staying for a month. on the morning of the last day of the last retreat we dismantled the place in two hours, traceless except in the minds of those who passed through it.
and in between the string of teachings and retreats i was able to just be there alone: standing under the stars at night after a day of interconnected teaching sessions; mornings memorising the heart sutra in sanskrit on the rooftop or watching the clouds of mist come rolling up the hillside, silencing everything. most of the time half-undressed by tushita standards but dressed like a king in exile by my own emerging ones, and it felt so natural being outside the institution, semi-invisible, just talking naturally to whoever came to listen, studying alone at night, praying in my own language (and the ones i borrow - pali, sanskrit), doing nightly formal confessions in the thai style with an 'imaginary monk' listening to me (just to get the pattern of call-and-response back into my memory), and listening to music before falling asleep as if it were snow or rain falling in some perfect space...
i didnt have to leave the hillside at all during those seven weeks (fortunately, since i was ill most of the time and too weak to walk up and down the hillside) - marta, the italian girl who watched the entire world cup with me, would bring up everything i needed from town (including students!). and both before and during the spell on the hillside there was so much kindness and support - my begging bowl filled each day by scott and anna, room rent taken care of by anonymous donors, food parcels from tushita, and other gifts large and small.
two years down the road as a monk i now have no choice but to just trust in the workings of karma, to study and meditate and share what i'm thinking with others, to make the decisions that seem right and are calling clear, even if they're a little vague sometimes, even if they stray beyond the limitations of my rationale... and so far its been fine. i feel myself unravelling in the sweetest way, shedding hesitations along the way. some lama said recently that fear itself isnt suffering, its the fear of fear that is suffering. its fascinating watching the boundary of hesitation shift. its directly related to awareness of impermanence, which is directly related to awareness of art, music, mathematics, architecture, sentence structures, the body, emptiness....
i feel myself moving towards a kind of shamata-zen-tantrica vision - a semi-invisible practice focussing on the silence and simplicity of meditation, a non-dual faith, and the wildest, most ruthless worldview in the buddhist universe: nagarjuna's endless destruction of logical limitations. a universe of unfindable objects, unfindable freedom, unfindable truths. unfindable but not unreal. and as everything becomes unfindable what emerges - completely unstated - is a universe of potential miracle and dream. when karma and emptiness merge what emerges is the miracle of your unrepeatable life.
and i can do what i want there - in that unfindable, wild universe - because what i want is buddha-universal. discipline doesn't negate desire - it polishes it, makes it almost invisible, superslow, high-speed. " to live outside the law you have to be honest." - recently i have started to see the truth inside that statement and its the sweetest thing to communicate to people. more and more i find myself teaching pure morality - beautiful conduct - within a universe of unlimited possibility. and by pure morality i dont mean being a nice person, i mean being another kurosawa, answerable to no-one (because you've already announced that you're not going to harm anyone, and what more can people ask of you? can they seriously ask you to make them another dead, formulaic movie? would you seriously respond?), and beautiful conduct in the sense of feeling your unrepeatable, disappearing life and rescuing it in the very moment. if people lived like this they'd see angels. 'unrepeatability' is the language of angels..
zen doesnt talk about the angels - it doesnt talk very much at all - whereas tibetan buddhism talks about them endlessly, but within the baroque intricacies of carefully defined lineages and initiation-connections and complex, unchanging sadhana architectures. but between geshe michael and nagarjuna i feel sure that we can meet them directly, talk to them directly. the 'soft logic' lineage of invisible communities, the lineages of winter branches and three-second conversations, the miracle spaces of saint francis's garden and dante-style childhood sweethearts meeting us there. white convertibles, abandoned cars, white limousines. something between the semi-mythical and the natural next step.
more and more i see buddhist philosophy as a series of mobius strips, creating infinite loops out of seeming dualities: karma and emptiness, pure morality and limitless beauty, precision actions and invisible worlds, the high-speed and the super-slow.
when i'm not talking about the (unfindable) buddhist universe i like to dream, study, meditate. i dont really know how to just chat anymore. i need the right questions to keep me going - or nothing at all. when i stay at el balcon, my friend john just leaves me lying in the hammock on the balcony all day, listening to music, reading art magazines, gazing at the edges of trees. i never feel lost, and so i dont need to be found.
i would like to spend more time with science and art and beautiful things. with neon, subway platforms, electronic voices, supersize posters. in that space which, out of habit, i still refer to as 'the West' but which may actually be anywhere from arizona to iceland to shikoku. a refugee from the tradition (including the tradition of the new), riding the infinite loop of anonymity and plenitude.
i know i'll find it. more and more the universe feels like the internet: 2,400,000 responses in 2.2 seconds. and as ibn arabi said back in the 12th century: "when a question is posed ceremoniously the universe has to respond.".
so i know i'll find it. i'll write again from there.
with love, shenyen
(p.s. you dont know what a mobius strip is? well, take a long strip of paper and glue the ends together to make a loop, with the inside and the outside as two separate, unconnecting loops. that's not a mobius strip. now take another strip of paper and glue the ends together, but before gluing them flip over one of the ends. now you will have one continuous loop that traverses 'both' sides. this is a mobius strip.)
in an almost deserted restaurant a girl suddenly stands up from her table, from within her introspectiveness, and walks to the edge of the garden terrace to look out over the valley. but its not just the view that's pulling her: its that same animal gentleness, which i see flow out of her as she takes hold of a tibetan banner fluttering in the wind, holding it taut and still. her arm outstretched, her hand plugged into the universe of touch, her emotions pacified for a few moments.
i didnt really want to come back to india this year - other things pulled me back, teachings i couldnt miss. and as soon as i decided to leave (i'm returning to thailand in a few days) the illness started to disappear. a couple of weeks ago, watching a movie from the west with scenes of cityscapes - neon, subway crowds, bus stops, billboards, etc - i suddenly realise that that's where i want to be. sickness and art giving me the same message: 'go now'. properly handled, hunger can be an amazing compass, a moment by moment attunement to the hidden economy of one's unrepeatable life. i trust it more and more. of course it can also be a red herring. it depends entirely on ourselves: on how much goodness we've collected in the invisible golden hive of our consciousness, how disciplined and sincere we've become. how honest. that beautiful old-fahioned word i find myself using more and more these days: virtue. invisible light.
but you dont want to read about my illness do you? you want to read about the mind of a master film-maker, about the difference between CEOs and CDOs, about how to make the universe respond to your questions, about mobius strips and nagarjuna and what shenyen's actually been up to and where he's going next - yes? ok, let's go...
chris marker, talking about the japanese film-maker akira kurasawa: "... he has tremendous spiritual presence. he lives his life like a master swordsman: he has no time for abstractions. when asked on the film-set why he did something in a certain way he replied: 'i simply make a film the way i want it to be.' ..."
you have to hear that last remark very clearly. he's not saying 'i do what i like.' he's saying: my life is totally conscious, and so everything i do is unrepeatable, immeasurable, perfect. there is no formula involved, no aesthetic that can be 'understood' and repeated. you cant compare it to anything. its my world. its unrepeatable. and truly singular phenomena are, by nature, inexplicable.
we have to live like that if we are to transcend hope and fear and die without regret - my working definition of what it means to call oneself a buddhist. we have to stop listening to all the noise, all the gossip, all the opinion polls and just live totally true to where the heart is. nobody can tell you how to live, how to make that movie. you're on your own. but if you shine within the truth of that, if you relax and actually start living your unrepeatable disappearing life, people will love you, people will want to be around you, people will help you.
i've just finished teaching in a temporary space in dharamkot, the little village outside tushita. seven weeks of teachings and retreats, with a few spells of solitary time scattered through. with the help of a group of friends an empty farmhouse was transformed into a meditation space in half a day and dismantled within two hours of the last retreat ending.
i remember, last year, reading an article about some business guru's recent visit to mumbai, quoting some of the wonderful off-the-wall ideas he offered during his seminar there. one of which was that in the future the heads of companies will be known as CDOs rather than CEOs - Chief Destructive Officer, not Chief Executive Officer - because their job will be to 'destroy' the company before the competition does. and he quoted with approval the example of some company - maybe it was the company that created Netscape Navigator but i cant remember - which burst onto the scene and made 2.5 billion dollars in 18 months before going bust. he said he would rather have this on his CV than something like 'he met his sales targets every quarter for 17 years.' i remember smiling as i read this. i felt i knew exactly what he meant, and how it could translate smoothly into my high-speed/superslow buddhist universe...
for years i have been captivated by a remark of Thich Nhat Hanh's: "there are enough zen centres; what we need now are zen corners..." last year i started thinking in that space but was too busy helping tushita with its teaching schedule to try it out. this year, returning to dharamsala after that nine month wander around the world, i knew it was time to try. of course, the buddhist universe and Netscape Navigator only partially overlap, novice monks and CDOs only partially overlap, but that's ok. i'm a 'translator' in the most open sense of the word...
it started with a ten day retreat that some friends from various courses last year invited me to lead. it went really well - lots of silent sitting all day, and then the magic of the night laced with emptiness teachings, loving-kindness meditations and sweet dedication prayers. and all of this placed within the four powers (refuge, repentance, aspiration and practice) so that the whole day's activity was seen as a purification practice. but the cool thing was watching it all happen from nothing, watching it shine briefly but truly, and watching it disappear without a trace and without regret.
the group was amazingly disciplined and warm - focussed, generous, present. everyone serving in some way to make the place function, and everyone practicing to transform themselves. this was 'community' in the full sense of the word - naturally disciplined, naturally joyful - but within the high-speed/superslow now-you-see-us-now-you-dont ethos of the twentyfirst century (four of them are now on the road to tibet, others leaving soon or already left for korea, italy, israel). once i accepted the invitation to lead the retreat everyone freely, spontaneously adopted some kind of responsibility for making it happen, and everything happened: some wandered the hillside looking for venues, others set up the kitchen and got the food supplies in, arranged the meditation room, organised logistics. an empty farmhouse transformed into a temporary 'zen corner' that felt beautifully established and strong after just a few days. now i know just how possible it is, and just how sweet it can be, with the right people around.
and what we established together became the site for several weeks of open and closed teachings, and a platform for newcomers to encounter the buddhist path. after that opening retreat i continued renting two rooms, teaching in one of them: with old friends in the evenings, and stranger-friends who responded to the posters announcing the presence of 'radio shenyen' and the free teachings available there in the afternoons. all kinds of people came, but then came a group of four students in one day who all felt in harmony with each other and with the space and ended up staying for a month. on the morning of the last day of the last retreat we dismantled the place in two hours, traceless except in the minds of those who passed through it.
and in between the string of teachings and retreats i was able to just be there alone: standing under the stars at night after a day of interconnected teaching sessions; mornings memorising the heart sutra in sanskrit on the rooftop or watching the clouds of mist come rolling up the hillside, silencing everything. most of the time half-undressed by tushita standards but dressed like a king in exile by my own emerging ones, and it felt so natural being outside the institution, semi-invisible, just talking naturally to whoever came to listen, studying alone at night, praying in my own language (and the ones i borrow - pali, sanskrit), doing nightly formal confessions in the thai style with an 'imaginary monk' listening to me (just to get the pattern of call-and-response back into my memory), and listening to music before falling asleep as if it were snow or rain falling in some perfect space...
i didnt have to leave the hillside at all during those seven weeks (fortunately, since i was ill most of the time and too weak to walk up and down the hillside) - marta, the italian girl who watched the entire world cup with me, would bring up everything i needed from town (including students!). and both before and during the spell on the hillside there was so much kindness and support - my begging bowl filled each day by scott and anna, room rent taken care of by anonymous donors, food parcels from tushita, and other gifts large and small.
two years down the road as a monk i now have no choice but to just trust in the workings of karma, to study and meditate and share what i'm thinking with others, to make the decisions that seem right and are calling clear, even if they're a little vague sometimes, even if they stray beyond the limitations of my rationale... and so far its been fine. i feel myself unravelling in the sweetest way, shedding hesitations along the way. some lama said recently that fear itself isnt suffering, its the fear of fear that is suffering. its fascinating watching the boundary of hesitation shift. its directly related to awareness of impermanence, which is directly related to awareness of art, music, mathematics, architecture, sentence structures, the body, emptiness....
i feel myself moving towards a kind of shamata-zen-tantrica vision - a semi-invisible practice focussing on the silence and simplicity of meditation, a non-dual faith, and the wildest, most ruthless worldview in the buddhist universe: nagarjuna's endless destruction of logical limitations. a universe of unfindable objects, unfindable freedom, unfindable truths. unfindable but not unreal. and as everything becomes unfindable what emerges - completely unstated - is a universe of potential miracle and dream. when karma and emptiness merge what emerges is the miracle of your unrepeatable life.
and i can do what i want there - in that unfindable, wild universe - because what i want is buddha-universal. discipline doesn't negate desire - it polishes it, makes it almost invisible, superslow, high-speed. " to live outside the law you have to be honest." - recently i have started to see the truth inside that statement and its the sweetest thing to communicate to people. more and more i find myself teaching pure morality - beautiful conduct - within a universe of unlimited possibility. and by pure morality i dont mean being a nice person, i mean being another kurosawa, answerable to no-one (because you've already announced that you're not going to harm anyone, and what more can people ask of you? can they seriously ask you to make them another dead, formulaic movie? would you seriously respond?), and beautiful conduct in the sense of feeling your unrepeatable, disappearing life and rescuing it in the very moment. if people lived like this they'd see angels. 'unrepeatability' is the language of angels..
zen doesnt talk about the angels - it doesnt talk very much at all - whereas tibetan buddhism talks about them endlessly, but within the baroque intricacies of carefully defined lineages and initiation-connections and complex, unchanging sadhana architectures. but between geshe michael and nagarjuna i feel sure that we can meet them directly, talk to them directly. the 'soft logic' lineage of invisible communities, the lineages of winter branches and three-second conversations, the miracle spaces of saint francis's garden and dante-style childhood sweethearts meeting us there. white convertibles, abandoned cars, white limousines. something between the semi-mythical and the natural next step.
more and more i see buddhist philosophy as a series of mobius strips, creating infinite loops out of seeming dualities: karma and emptiness, pure morality and limitless beauty, precision actions and invisible worlds, the high-speed and the super-slow.
when i'm not talking about the (unfindable) buddhist universe i like to dream, study, meditate. i dont really know how to just chat anymore. i need the right questions to keep me going - or nothing at all. when i stay at el balcon, my friend john just leaves me lying in the hammock on the balcony all day, listening to music, reading art magazines, gazing at the edges of trees. i never feel lost, and so i dont need to be found.
i would like to spend more time with science and art and beautiful things. with neon, subway platforms, electronic voices, supersize posters. in that space which, out of habit, i still refer to as 'the West' but which may actually be anywhere from arizona to iceland to shikoku. a refugee from the tradition (including the tradition of the new), riding the infinite loop of anonymity and plenitude.
i know i'll find it. more and more the universe feels like the internet: 2,400,000 responses in 2.2 seconds. and as ibn arabi said back in the 12th century: "when a question is posed ceremoniously the universe has to respond.".
so i know i'll find it. i'll write again from there.
with love, shenyen
(p.s. you dont know what a mobius strip is? well, take a long strip of paper and glue the ends together to make a loop, with the inside and the outside as two separate, unconnecting loops. that's not a mobius strip. now take another strip of paper and glue the ends together, but before gluing them flip over one of the ends. now you will have one continuous loop that traverses 'both' sides. this is a mobius strip.)
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