Brandymore Castle

People want their life to tell a story. When life diverges from the story they wish it to tell, they become anxious and frustrated. Zen Buddhism teaches desire is the cause if suffering. When we as the fulfillment of the desire us threatened. By avoiding attachment to the story our life tells, we can be free of suffering caused by our life failing to live up its story. We are then able to enjoy our real life, the one that just happens, without requiring it to tell a story. This is the true story of our life. This is not a passive attitude toward life. Life happens to us and we make life happen through what we do and our choices. Life happens, we make things happen, and chance and the cards we are dealt govern our life.

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments. The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.' While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, w...

The Zen master Dogen says we ought "to be actualized by myriad things." I take this to suggest sympathy with the haiku and its process of creating, a poetic form centered on paying attention to things, allowing something to become 'ensouled' or noticed, and thus actualized. The haiku form it itself, has as its purpose to actualize things. For haiku does not exist to tell you about the poet's experience, but to recreate the poet's experience in you . Simply, a haiku is a "canned" actualization, like those joke cans of snakes, where when the hapless victim opens the can, a fake snake jumps out. It is as if the poet saw a snake, then made the joke can and gave it to you as a way of experiencing the fright he felt upon first seeing the snake. (Who was Dogen? He was a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, and the quote is from a well-known passage from Genjo-koan).

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan. A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunt...

Tom Davenport, filmmaker, has released part one of his video Bodhidharma's Shoe: Zen Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala Monastery . Part one of a two part documentary on an American Zen retreat at Bodhi Mandala Monastery in New Mexico. A seven day intensive retreat is called a "Sesshin" which means to bring the heart/mind together. The experience of a sesshin is transformative and intense, but there are dangers -- both physical ones ( I ruined my hip, for example) as well as spiritual ones (like believing that the Zen Master is a saint or a god). Zazen of this intensity changes you and a lot of good flows out into the world from it (as long as you take yourself lightly and have a sense of humor). But requires that we (the sangha) all support each other. I doubt that anyone could do this alone. Tom Davenport, a old timer at Zen in America, who got a lot of help from his friends, tells the story of a novice's entry into zen, and says of the experience "...thinking back to th...

Independent filmmaker Tom Davenport has been working on a film exploring the daily rituals of zen practice during a meditation retreat. The film contrasts a series of drawings about zen monastic life in Japan many years ago with images from current practice in the United States. He has posted drafts of his film in segments on YouTube. American Zen Part One American Zen Part Two American Zen Part Three American Zen Part Four Weaving the old drawings through the daily life of zen practice helps the uninitiated feel comfortable with the mysterious happenings depicted in the film. The depiction of a novice's entry into this mysterious world helps us feel secure entering it. Seeing the events and people depicted in the drawings match those before our eyes gives us a sense of continuity. Between the narration and the exotic but familiar scenes, the film goes far to dispel the mystery of zen practice and acquaint the viewer with the history and practice of zen in America. The internet ha...

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People , which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, ...

I was talking with filmmaker Tom Davenport today and the discussion turned to my observations of a tree outside the window of my apartment, which over many years I have observed to display fascinating changes and cycles in response to climate. The conversation turned to haiku as he likened my noticing a leaf falling outside my window on a quiet day to haiku. I was startled when he said "in haiku, the tree and the person are not very separated." This is an idea very close to Zen. I won't go into the details of Zen belief here, but one idea of Zen is that individuals can reach a state where they feel as if there is no separation between the self and the things making up the world around them. Scientists and Zen masters may debate exactly how and why this feeling arises in the human mind, but what is interesting is the possibility haiku may represent a kind of expression or record of this kind of merging of the individual with things. I found myself agreeing with his observa...