Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1 - NO WORD
Chapter 2 - NO BUDDHA
Chapter 3 - NO MOUNTAIN
Chapter 4 - NO HOME
Chapter 5 - NO BEGINNING
Chapter 6 - NO FORM
Chapter 7 - NO MIND
Chapter 8 - NO WORK, NO FOOD
Chapter 9 - NO DUST OR MIRROR
Chapter 10 - NO DAY OFF
Chapter 11 - NO PEACH BLOSSOMS
Chapter 12 - NO EAST OR WEST
Chapter 13 - NO NORTH OR SOUTH
Chapter 14 - NO FLOATING BELLY-UP
Chapter 15 - NO END IN SIGHT
Chapter 16 - NO GOING BACK
CHINESE LEXICON
INDEX
Copyright Page
Also by Bill Porter/Red Pine In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu The Platform Sutra The Heart Sutra Poems of the Masters The Diamond Sutra The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain The Clouds Should Know Me by Now The Zen Works of Stonehouse Lao-tzu’s Taoteching Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
For my fellow pilgrims Finn Wilcox and Steve Johnson
So the 20th Century—so whizzed the Limited—roared by and left three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly watching the tail lights wizen and converge slipping gimleted and neatly out of sight. —from “The River” by Hart Crane (1899-1932)
1
NO WORD
I finally returned home, just as the long twilight of a Northwest summer was beginning. A few hours earlier, I had been sitting in a plane flying so low over the town where I live I could see the stand of doug fir next to my house. I wondered how high the grass had grown. I had been away ten weeks. The plane banked, and the town disappeared. Thirty minutes later, we landed in Seattle. A taxi to the Coleman Docks, a ferry across Puget Sound, and two buses later, my friend Finn Wilcox picked me up next to the Port Townsend Safeway and drove me to my side of that five-acre stand of trees someone donated to the town as a bird sanctuary. It was the Buddha’s birthday, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, which fell on May 5 that year. Buddhists mark the day by pouring water over small statues of a standing, infant Shakyamuni. I celebrated in the clawfoot tub upstairs and thought about the journey that just ended. Afterwards, I tried to sleep. But I was still in China. So I got up and began writing this book, which begins in Beijing. I arrived the night of February 26. It was spring. In China spring begins on New Year’s Day, which was January 29 in 2006. So it had been spring for nearly a month. But the ancient Chinese who decided when spring began—on the first day of the new moon closest to the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox— lived along the Yellow River, three hundred miles to the south. In Beijing, it was still winter. While I was standing in the airport taxi line, I opened my pack and got out my parka. It was just a shell, and what I really needed were my long johns, but putting them on in public was not an option. Normally I would have headed for a hotel. But my friend Ted Burger had offered a roommate’s bedroom. His apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up at the top of a dark stairwell in a dark building in a dark compound in the eastern part of the city. The taxi driver found the right street and the right compound, but there were a dozen buildings in the compound and no outside lights. I couldn’t see the numbers, and it took me three tries before I found the right building and the right stairwell. Ted wasn’t there. He was at a film festival in America showing his documentary on Chinese hermits, Amongst White Clouds, but his American roommate was home and let me in. The apartment was small and furnished as the young furnish their apartments everywhere, as if no one was planning to stay very long and money would be better spent on something more useful, like a bottle of wine. But the place was heated, and there was a radiator in every room. It was so warm I had to leave the window open in my bedroom that night. The bedroom belonged to Ted’s Chinese roommate, who had offered to stay with her parents while I was there. There wasn’t much in the room besides the bed, a bedside table, and a chest of drawers. But I was glad to begin my trip in something other than a hotel, and the accommodations seemed just right. I was making a pilgrimage to places associated with the beginning of Zen in China, specifically its first six patriarchs: Bodhidharma, Hui-k’o, Seng-ts’an, Tao-hsin, Hung-jen, and Hui-neng. These were the men who put Zen on the map, and I wanted to pay my respects. None of the six ever made it to Beijing, but there were some underlying issues I wanted to consider before I met the old masters. The first of those issues was language. And Beijing seemed like a good place to begin. Zen was known for its cavalier, if not dismissive, attitude toward words. “To talk about it is to go right by it,” those old Zenmen were fond of saying. And yet no school of Buddhism has generated as much literature. Thousands of books have been written, in the East as well as in the West, about what cannot be expressed by language. I didn’t expect to find an answer to this conundrum, but I wanted to circle around from behind and maybe catch it unawares. So when I woke up the next morning, I called my friend Ming-yao. Ming-yao was the editor of the Buddhist magazine Chan, which was how the Mainland Chinese romanized the word “Zen.” Whenever I say Zen, people are always correcting me: “It’s Ch’an/Chan (the Wade-Giles and Pin-yin romanizations of the word).” They say, “Zen is the Japanese form of Ch’an. Chinese Ch’an is different from Japanese Zen.” That’s one way of looking at Zen, as a cultural phenomenon. But Chinese Ch’an, Japanese Zen, and Korean Son all point to the same moon of the mind. And there aren’t two kinds of mind. The reason I like to point with Zen, as opposed to Ch’an, is that I love a good Z. Also, zen was how people pronounced this word back when Zen began (the reconstruction preferred by linguists is dzian). And the people who live in the Kan River watershed of Kiangsi Province, where zen became Zen, still pronounce it that way. The pronunciation used at court changed when the Manchus invaded China in the seventeenth century and established the Ch’ing dynasty and their own pronunciation as the arbiter of proper usage. But down in Zenland, it’s still Zen. Besides, Zen isn’t Chinese or Japanese anymore. It belongs to anyone willing to see their nature and become a buddha, anyone who lives the life of no-mind and laughs in these outrageous times. So I called up Ming-yao, and he asked me to meet him for lunch. He said his wife Ming-chieh would be there too. Ming-chieh translated my book on Chinese hermits, Road to Heaven—except, of course, for the parts about politics, the military, and the police, which never made the Chinese edition. Everyone liked her title: K’ungku-yu-lan: “Hidden Orchids of Deserted Valleys.” Strange as it sounds, no one had ever written a book about hermits in China, and the publication of Kungkuyulan had a noticeable impact. In the Sian area, it even resulted in the formation of a hermit association, which sounds ludicrous. But the association has since compiled a record of hut and cave locations in the Chungnan Mountains south of Sian where I conducted my interviews. And it now sends someone around periodically with medicine and food—and even mail. Of course, that is not necessarily a good thing. The Cultural Revolution was nothing new. Times are good for monks and nuns right now in China, but everything changes. And when bad times come, someone will have to take the blame. Throughout Chinese history, that someone has often included its Buddhist and Taoist clerics: those unproductive slackers living off the sweat of others. Still, most of the hermits I talked to were not greatly affected even during the worst years of those decades everyone in China still wants to forget. The Buddhists and Taoists who felt the heat were the ones living in monasteries and nunneries, not the ones in huts—yet another advantage of seclusion and a low profile. I met Ming-chieh and Ming-yao in the northeast part of Beijing, just off Liufang Nanli Street. They were waiting for me outside a vegetarian restaurant called Hotang Yuehszu (Lotus in the Moonlight). The calligraphy of Master Ching-hui hung over the doorway: EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY. Ching-hui was vice director of the Buddhist Association of China and our mutual connection. Ming-yao and Ming-chieh were his disciples, as was the woman who owned the place. She was there to greet us and led us into a private room. Ming-yao later told me she supplied a good deal of the money that paid for Chan. The magazine was the reason I called Ming-yao. I wanted to know more about what was involved in publishing a magazine about Zen in China, which he told me over a lunch of vegetarian dishes and an infusion made from freshly picked plum blossoms. The magazine was started by Ching-hui. Ching-hui had turned Fayin, or Voice of the Dharma, into the leading Buddhist magazine in China. It featured articles focusing on Buddhist philosophy and sacred texts as well as news about the Buddhist community. But in the wake of the events of 1989, Ching-hui decided to launch another magazine. Ching-hui was also a Zen master, and he decided the times were right for a magazine about practice, especially a practice that wasn’t separate from daily life, which was what Zen was all about. He kept it simple and called the magazine Chan, and Ming-yao offered to help. In the beginning, he said, the magazine was a quarterly with a print run of three thousand copies. But it had since become a bimonthly, and its print run was up to twenty-five thousand. For a run of that size, he said, it cost around 60,000RMB ($7,500) to edit, print, and distribute, or about 2.5RMB ($0.30) per copy. Because the magazine was free, it was completely dependent on donations from people like the owner of Lotus in the Moonlight and the Hong Kong family that owned JeansWest. But ordinary readers also contributed. Nearly all the money went to cover the costs of printing and mailing. The magazine had an office at Pailin Temple south of Beijing, but Ming-yao edited each issue wherever he and his wife happened to be living at the time. People either picked up a copy at their local temple, or they sent Ming-yao their name and address, and people at Pailin sent them a copy. When I asked if the government ever interfered or censored the magazine, he said he had never had any problems. He didn’t have to clear issues in advance, but he was required to send copies to the religious affairs authorities after it was printed. He said they actually encouraged the magazine’s publication and considered Chan a model of what they hoped other religious organizations would do. As for its content, Ming-yao said the magazine published articles sent in by Buddhist writers from around the country. But most of the material was from Chinghui’s disciples, both lay and monastic, who shared his emphasis on what he called Sheng Huo Ch’an, or “Daily Life Zen.” The focus was on promoting a practice that could be cultivated in an apartment building as well as in a monastic setting. Ming-yao said there was a revival of interest in Buddhism in China, but it was still superficial, and often misdirected. “Most people,” he said, “are attracted by the magical powers of Vajrayana Buddhism or the devotional path of Pure Land Buddhism as a means of temporary escape, not complete liberation. But every practice is based on Zen, including Pure Land and Vajrayana. Zen is a buddha’s mind. Sooner or later, anyone who practices Buddhism practices Zen. But Zen just about died out in China. It’s making a comeback, but it’s still uncertain how successful it will be. “More and more people are becoming interested in Zen, especially young people and people with a college education. But it’s going to take a while to reach a wider audience. Also, more and more Zen temples are being built, or rebuilt. But more important than restoring temples is restoring the spirit of Zen. That is what our magazine tries to do. There is no going back to the T’ang dynasty when Zen first began to flourish. It’s going to take time to teach people how to manifest Zen in their daily lives in the modern world. That is really what Zen is about. Every place is a place to practice. Every time is a time to practice. Zen is concerned with the thought we have this moment rather than with rituals or rules of behavior developed in the past.” Ming-yao said that even though interest in Zen was growing, one of the problems was the lack of competent teachers. People didn’t know where to begin or how to begin. The magazine helped. It provided knowledge and encouragement. But it couldn’t take the place of a teacher. Ming-yao admitted that those truly able to teach were still far too few. Many people who claimed to teach Zen, he said, didn’t. They just mouthed the words. Finally I got around to the reason why I wanted to talk to him. I asked him how he dealt with the problem of language, since Zen masters traditionally showed such disdain for words. He said, “There is no way to teach people about Zen without using words. Our magazine uses language that makes sense to our readers. We try to put everything in terms they will understand. But the true Way transcends dialectical distinctions, and language is based on distinctions. From this standpoint, language is an obstacle to practice and needs to be overcome. But before we realize the truth, we need language to tell us how to realize the truth. Understanding the Way oneself and teaching the Way to others can’t be separated from language. When Zen masters pointed directly at the mind and told their disciples not to get sidetracked by language, what they meant was that the Way doesn’t exist in words. They didn’t mean that we shouldn’t read books or study scriptures. Words point to the truth, just as a finger points to the moon. This is what language is for. This is what our magazine is for. It points to the Way. People still have to see the moon for themselves if they want to know what it looks like.” It was a long lunch, and Ming-yao talked about other things as well. Afterwards, it was my turn. He asked me to come with him to meet some nuns. There were about a dozen of them, and they were staying in Beijing while their new nunnery was being built six hundred miles to the south, near Fourth Patriarch Temple outside Huangmei. The nuns were also disciples of Ching-hui. Ching-hui was a monk I had met in 1989 just before Tienanmen. It was Ching-hui who told me where to find the hermits who made Road to Heaven possible. So I, too, had a karmic connection with him. We were all dharma brothers and sisters. Just inside the front door of the apartment that was their temporary abode, we took off our shoes and put on slippers, and the abbess, Master Hung-yung, invited us into the reception room. While several of her fellow nuns served us bowls of Uighur-style tea made from dried longan fruits and red dates, the abbess said they were all planning to attend the first recitation ever held of the six-hundred-chapter text of the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. Hsuan-tsang (602-664) brought this text back from India and translated it into Chinese in the middle of the seventh century. It was the longest single text in the Buddhist Canon and the granddaddy of all the scriptures that taught Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom. The recitation was being organized by Ching-hui and was scheduled to take place in two days at Pailin Temple, three hours south of Beijing. The abbess said she was hoping I would talk to her and her fellow nuns about prajna. I didn’t know what to say. It was certainly unusual for a monk or nun to ask a layperson about Buddhism. Some monasteries and nunneries even had rules against laypeople giving Dharma talks. I thought she just wanted me to say a few words, a polite gesture to a visiting guest from afar. So I agreed. But I was mistaken about it being a polite gesture. The abbess got up from her chair and led us all into the living room, which had been turned into a meditation hall, and the other nuns followed us in. After we all sat down on meditation cushions, the abbess repeated her request. I took refuge in the Heart Sutra, the shortest of all presentations of the teaching of Prajnaparamita, and she and her fellow nuns were too kind in not demanding more than I was capable of explaining. Prajna is the word around which Mahayana Buddhism formed in the Kushan Empire of Northwest India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan just before the beginning of the Christian Era. It means “what comes before knowledge” and refers to our original mind undefiled by discrimination or what passes for knowledge: Adam and Eve before the apple, religion before religion, the mind before mind. In a word, prajna means “wisdom.” And adding the word paramita distinguishes it as “ultimate wisdom” or “the perfection of wisdom.” It’s the cultivation of such wisdom that enables a person to see things as they are, empty of self-existence and inseparable from the mind that conjures them into existence. Master Ching-hui
It was the arrival of Prajnaparamita scriptures in China in the second and third centuries that laid the philosophical basis for what later became Zen. But along with these scriptures emphasizing wisdom came others that taught dhyana, or meditation. When these Buddhist scriptures were first translated into Chinese, the Sanskrit word dhyana was transcribed zen-na and then shortened to zen. But it was the combination of dhyana (zen) with prajna that resulted in the tradition we know today as Zen. However, this didn’t happen for several more centuries, not until Bodhidharma, Zen’s First Patriarch, came to China at the end of the fifth century. Up until then, people cultivated meditation, or they cultivated wisdom, but they didn’t practice Zen. They still made distinctions between the two—not to mention everything else. But the practice of Zen involves the manifestation of both simultaneously and without distinction, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down. Prajna without dhyana is Pie in the Sky Zen, while dhyana without prajna is Dead Tree Zen. Zen is the practice that eliminates the distinction between prajna and dhyana, between wisdom and meditation. But it is also the practice that is based on both. Thus, we take refuge in no mind, our buddha mind. After I gave this simplistic explanation of prajna and followed it through the thirty or so lines of the Heart Sutra, Hung-yung and her fellow nuns bowed in thanks, and I got up to leave. But on the way out, the abbess told me that Ching-hui had invited me to join them for the recitation of the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. I had other plans, but it was an invitation I could not refuse, and we arranged to meet the following afternoon and go to Pailin Temple together. Afterwards, I returned to Ted’s apartment and waited for my friend Dave Murphy to get off work. Dave was first secretary at the U.S. Embassy and a fellow member of the Taiwan Expat Mafia. He picked me up at a hotel two blocks from Ted’s apartment, and we drove out toward the airport to the Beijing International School, where his son and a hundred other students were performing a concert that evening for stringed instruments, meaning Western stringed instruments. There wasn’t a Chinese lute or zither in sight. But even stringed instruments needed some accompaniment, and Dave’s son played the drums. They were all quite good. I tried the violin once in the fifth grade, but my real passion was marbles—outside in the dirt or inside on the carpet. I tried to recall when I put my agate shooters away for the last time. I wondered what happened to them. They probably sank into the earth out of sadness. They were such good friends. They had magical properties. I wondered what I gave them up for. I think it was TV. It wasn’t the violin. On the way out after the concert, we met Dave’s wife, Mao-hwa. She had been sitting near the back of the auditorium and hadn’t seen us in front. We didn’t dwell on the performance. It was late and we were all hungry, so we went to a Malaysian restaurant nearby. Mao-hwa had worked for Hewlett-Packard ever since I knew her, and she was now business manager of their China services division. She was always doing two things at once, not just walking and chewing gum, but carrying on two conversations at once, and in this case, three: with me, with Dave, and with their son, all different conversations. I feel as if I’m only half present when I try to talk to more than one person. I’ve never learned to juggle. I don’t remember what we talked about or what we ate, except for the satay, of course, and the coconut brûlée. By the time we finished, it was too late to go back to my overheated bedroom at Ted’s, so Dave and Mao-hwa invited me to spend the night at their place. They lived close by in a gated compound of more than a hundred two-story villa-style houses—houses with yards, in Beijing. The place was called River Garden, and it was built by a Taiwanese woman whose own villa occupied a whole block. Her bedroom light was on when we drove by, and Mao-hwa whispered that she was divorced and still quite attractive. I don’t know why she told me that, or why she whispered. They didn’t stop to let me out—I could just imagine myself knocking on her door and asking for a snifter of port. I woke up the next morning in the spare room and returned to the city with Dave when he went to work. It was snowing, and we drove back into a strangely muffled city. After Dave dropped me off at Ted’s, I waited around for a couple hours, then took a taxi to meet Ming-yao and Ming-chieh and the nuns. We left in a convoy of three black Audis whose drivers took turns weaving through the expressway traffic at over seventy miles an hour. Even at that speed, it still took us more than three hours to reach Pailin Temple in the town of Chaohsien.
Chaohsien was where the Zen monk Chao-chou finally put down roots in 858 after wandering all over China for more than twenty years. All the regular roads leading to his old temple were being torn up for a new sewer line, and we had to come in through the south end of town by the Chaochou Bridge, the oldest stone-arch bridge in the world, built in AD 600. When someone once asked Chao-chou what kind of bridge it was, he answered, “The kind of bridge that donkeys cross and horses cross.” That’s what I mean about language and Zen. It’s just a breath away from no language at all. And yet hundreds of thousands of Zen students have sat on their cushions and thought about that one, or Chao-chou’s answer “No” to the question, “Does a dog have a buddha nature?” They all seemed to ignore the fact that on another occasion he answered “Yes.” We turned into a dirt lane just past the bridge and wove through a part of town that recent development had left behind. We finally reappeared in front of the temple and parked behind the guest hall. As we got out of our cars, one of the monks came out and ushered us along a series of corridors to the abbot’s quarters near the back. The abbot, Ming-hai, graduated from Beijing University with a degree in philosophy in 1989 and managed to escape the wave of arrests that followed Tienanmen that year. He became a monk soon afterwards. Ching-hui recognized his ability and turned over abbotship of the temple to him in 2003, when he was only thirty-five. Ming-hai saw us approaching and came out of the reception room to greet us, then led us inside. Chaochou Bridge
Ching-hui was at the far end of the room talking to some wealthy patrons. As soon as he saw me, he got up, rushed over, and grabbed my arm, pulling me over to sit beside him. Ching-hui was always grabbing my arm, like my grandmother, and leading me around. Before I could say anything, he chided me for wearing a “Muslim cap.” It was actually a Buddhist cap, the knitted kind worn by monks and nuns all over China during winter. But together with my beard, it often got me mistaken for a Uighur. The Uighurs weren’t all that happy with the Chinese occupation and control of their section of the Silk Road, an occupation that began in 1949, and they were known to set off the occasional bomb in protest. I’m sure Chinese authorities wished they were more passive, like the country’s other ethnic minorities. No doubt their activities caused problems for people like Ching-hui, who had to deal with the reaction of the central authorities to movements that had a religious component. The Uighurs were followers of Mohammed, not the Buddha. But the government tended to lump all practitioners together. It was an old trick. Lump everyone together and let them inform on each other. My cap must have reminded Ching-hui of the difficult position he found himself in whenever he had to attend meetings in Beijing. He asked me what I had been working on, and I told him I had just finished a translation of the Platform Sutra, a text that records the teaching of Zen’s Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng. I volunteered that I had based my translation on the Tunhuang Museum copy recently edited by Yang Tseng-wen. Ching-hui cringed and shook his head. Suddenly I remembered he had written a book about the sutra and had given me a copy the previous year. The sutra turned around a poem. One day Hung-jen, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, told his disciples that whichever of them could write a poem that revealed their buddha nature would become the Sixth Patriarch. Hung-jen’s chief disciple wrote:The body is our Bodhi Tree the mind is like a standing mirror always try to keep it clean don’t let it gather dust.
An illiterate rice-pounder named Hui-neng responded with:Bodhi doesn’t have any trees this mirror doesn’t have a stand our buddha nature is forever pure how can it gather dust?
That was what Hung-jen was looking for, and Hui-neng became the sixth and most famous patriarch. His old home was the next-to-last stop on my pilgrimage itinerary. Suddenly the image of all the dust on the trail ahead of me came to mind, the mind that still gathered dust. Ching-hui brought me back to the poem. He said the Tunhuang copies were wrong and that the third line should read pen-lai-wu-yi-wu: “actually there isn’t a thing” (present in later copies). It was the very foundation of Zen. What bothered him was that both Tunhuang copies of the sutra, written less than a hundred years after Hui-neng died, had instead fo-hsing-ch’ang-ch’ing-ching: “our buddha nature is forever pure.” Basically, it was Buddhism’s School of Emptiness versus its Mind Only School, but Ching-hui shook his head and scolded me for translating the “wrong” version. I didn’t know what to say. And it didn’t matter. He grabbed my arm again and laughed, as if to say “gotcha.” Suddenly, and thankfully, I heard the sound of the dinner board being struck. We all got up and walked outside and made our way to the dining hall, the one reserved for guests of the abbot. The food was served buffet-style, and it was so good I went back for seconds. I used to lose weight when I traveled in China but not anymore. After dinner, one of the monks led Ming-yao and me and two other laymen to a set of bedrooms normally reserved for visiting monks. It wasn’t that late, but we all went to bed, if only because it was too cold to do anything else. It was so cold I completely disappeared beneath a blanket filled with twelve pounds of cotton wadding. Fireworks celebrating the coming recitation were going off, but I went right to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a big day. Morning services were scheduled to begin at three o’clock, and thousands of people were expected. I resolved to take refuge in a visitor’s right to sleep in. I figured I could join the Prajna Chorus after the sun had warmed things up. I figured wrong. Ming-yao woke me at 2:45. It was time, he said, to begin the opening ceremony. I didn’t want to go, but when you’re a guest “No” is not an option. In case I was wavering, he said the “Old Monk,” meaning Ching-hui, was expecting me to attend. So I opened my cocoon and sat up. I was already wearing my socks, so all I had to do was put on my pants and shoes and grab my shirt and parka on the way out. I was still half-asleep, until I felt the air. It was freezing. Even the stars looked like they were shivering. As we made our way across a courtyard the size of a football field, I finished buttoning my shirt and zipping up my parka. Finally we stepped into the huge, frigid hall. Over a thousand monks and laypeople were already inside and more were coming in behind us. Against the back wall there were five huge gilded buddha statues, and the surrounding walls were lined with ten thousand more, each about a foot high. It was the biggest buddha hall I had ever seen and cost the equivalent of five million U.S. dollars to build. I soon found out that Ching-hui was serious about me being there. In the middle of the hall there were 108 small tables set up for the occasion. Each table was covered with yellow brocade and a set of three exquisite porcelains bowls: the one in the middle was for burning incense, the one on the left held sandalwood powder, and the one on the right was full of sandalwood sticks. Each of the tables also had a wooden book frame that held a copy of the text to be chanted. There was also a piece of paper taped to each altar cloth with the name of the person who was supposed to serve as officiant at that table. Someone led me to a table with a paper that read “Pi-er,” or “Bill.” There was no escape. Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas at Pailin Temple
I hated ceremonies. When I was a kid, it was church. Later, it was military school, and later still, the Army. On my last day before shipping home in March of 1967, the sergeant major called me into his office and told me I was the worst soldier he had ever known. It was no secret. I didn’t like ceremonies. As far as I was concerned, they were the denatured version of shamanistic rituals. Maybe if there was more dancing. But there I was, along with ten thousand buddhas and more would-be bodhisattvas than I could count. I heard later that three thousand people managed to crowd inside and a thousand more stood outside, as we called upon the deities of the ten directions to bless our communal efforts. I guess that was all any ceremony was meant to do anyway, instill a sense of community among participants. I think it must be my karmic heritage—as soon as I become part of a group, I’m looking for a way out. It wasn’t bad for the first hour or so. We were all still waking up. I kept busy...
Sharmik