Zen and Budo Commentary Chosei Priest Training Gordon Greene Roshi October 13, 2019

We are picking up Omori Roshi’s Zen and Budo today. I am going to approach this in my usual way, bringing my experience to the text and noticing what strikes me.

For many years I was very judgmental about the English translation of Zen and Budo. I considered it to be poorly written and had the attitude “if you really want me to understand this book, you should have written it more clearly.” But what a useless excuse for not engaging with this blunt-edged, almost literal translation from the Japanese. The arrogance was an attempt to hide my ignorance. But now that I am past that, I must admit that I find it a ferocious text, frightening in many ways now when I encounter it.

SOME CONTEXT

The most immediate context is what happened yesterday in Fort Worth, Texas. I read a news report from there that said a man saw a neighbor’s front door slightly ajar and thought something might be wrong. He called the local police, but not on the hot line, describing what he saw and asking for a wellness check. Several police officers arrived at this neighbor’s house and began their investigation by walking around the outside of the house. One of them saw a figure inside through a window and shouted, “put your hands up!”

Within five seconds of that shout, the unarmed woman inside was shot dead. I don’t have to tell you what color she was. She was shot dead.

That to me is raw fear. In what context other than fear could somebody begin a wellness check, see a silhouette through a window and shoot somebody dead. That fear killed not only the woman in the house but the person who fired the bullet. More than one life had been shattered.

What Zen and Budo talks about is the necessity of fearlessness, but we don’t have an American context for that kind of fearlessness. Here we think of fearlessness as personal bravery – someone who is cool and calm, who doesn’t react instantaneously, who is willing to set aside a need for personal safety. But we don’t have a concept of how there can be a form of bravery when no one is present. That is the difficulty we face in Zen. We talk about a no-self when there is no American concept of a no-self.

Long ago when I began my Aikido training it was a time when people sought martial arts in order to learn self-defense. That phrase – self-defense – always bothered me because it seemed so obvious that the best self-defense was to simply have no self to defend. That insight drove my Zen and budo training. Back to more context for Zen and Budo. It was written in 1968 toward the end of an era of wide-spread social violence in . There were strikes, the likes of which we saw here in the early 20th century when coal miners struck. There was violence, deaths, and fear of the spread of Communism. For example, in 1966 there were violent protests in opposition to the construction of Narita Airport. Those protesting were an alliance of student activists opposed to capitalism along with the farmers and villagers who had large amounts of property taken by eminent domain for the airport.

Five years before Omori Roshi finished his book, there was violence in the city of Hue in Vietnam. At this time, the president of Vietnam was Catholic. Even though ninety percent of the Vietnamese were Buddhist, he had banned any public display honoring . In 1963 people decided to defy the ban by flying Buddhist flags and by chanting in public. As a result, nine people were killed by the police.

In June of that year, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk protested those deaths, sitting in a major intersection in Saigon. A fellow monk poured a can of gasoline over the seated monk’s head. This seated monk then lit a match. For the next ten minutes, he continued to sit in zazen until he fell over dead. No sounds, no cries, just zazen. This had to have had a huge impact in Japan. After all, this was a Buddhist monk. Later that year, five more monks in Vietnam died the same way.

We can go even further back for more context – to World War II. I only know some of the history of that time but stories about the role of Rinzai Zen temples in Japan during this era are very critical. Some of the statements coming out of the temples were as militaristic as anything coming out of the army. Buddhism gave the buildup to the war, and the war, a spiritual cover.

In contrast, Omori Sogen was ferociously opposed to the buildup to the war and the language used to justify it. You can read in his biography the steps he took and how personally he took responsibility for not preventing the war from happening. But I also must say, in a way I can’t pretend to understand, that he came to believe once the war had begun that, if Japan was going to fight, then it should fight to the death.

That “fight to the death” is personal for me. My father was in the army that fought in Europe. Once surrendered, he was on a troop ship headed for Japan. The casualties that would have resulted from the planned invasion of Japan were estimated to be enormous. There was ferocious determination throughout all of Japan not to surrender but opposing that would be battle-hardened American soldiers hungry for an end to the war. The odds of any given soldier, or civilian, surviving an invasion were slim.

My father’s ship had just passed through the Panama Canal when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I carry this history in me because most likely I am alive only because those bombs were dropped, Japan surrendered, and the war ended. I’m going to take one more step back in history to keep developing the context for Zen and Budo. All of that militarism in Japan during the decades leading to war came out of the earlier samurai tradition. That tradition had become greatly distorted in the 20th century, with people simply mouthing language that once had deep meaning.

One example of that language is the phrase “the sword that gives life,” suggesting that the act of killing can be life-affirming. As a belief, that is incredibly destructive and cruel. But it is only when that phrase is a lived experience that it has any meaning. The only people I know in recent history for whom that phrase was a lived experience were Omori Roshi and my own teacher, Tanouye Roshi.

Here’s a story from D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture that illustrates that experience of a sword that gives life. It tells of a test of the blades of two swordsmiths, Okazaki Masamune (1264 – 1343 AD) and his best student, Muramasa. According to legend, someone once placed a Muramasa blade into a stream carrying dead leaves in the current. The live edge of the blade faced upstream. The story goes that each leaf that was carried into the edge of that sword was split in two. That is sharp. Then the person testing the blades placed one by Masamune into the same water. Now all the leaves avoided the blade. That is divine.

In Suzuki’s words, “the Muramasa is terrible; the Masamune is humane. One is despotic and imperialistic, and the other is superhuman.”

That Masamune standard is the damning standard of our form of Zen training. That is the standard we inherited from Omori Roshi and Tanouye Roshi, two individuals who knew viscerally the difference between the two blades in the water, two individuals who could be that Masamune blade. What Suzuki does not say is that Masamune had to pass through that “terrible” phase in his own training. He had to know that sword that kills – that cuts a leaf – before he could know the sword that gives life.

I’ll now shift away from the context of Zen and Budo to the content. I’ll do that by highlighting what I find at the core of each of the four chapters.

CHAPTER ONE

In Chapter One, you read the Japanese phrase, “bunbu ryodo,” roughly meaning that things cultural (“bun”) and things martial (“bu”) are two sides of the same coin. If you think of the two sides, you think they are opposites but if you think of the coin, you know that both are part of the same thing.

One example of this is the shodo training I am undergoing this year as I prepared for the Fall Art Tour. In working hour after hour with Yamaoka Tesshu’s I find he is teaching me swordsmanship. He is showing how he moved his body, how he breathed, how he used his hara. These things were embedded in his brush movement. Brush and sword as the two sides of the same coin.

Similarly, we can consider the tea ceremony. If it is only polite, ordered, and peaceful, that is not the highest level of tea from our training perspective. Tea ceremony should feel like there is a ferocious kamae, a sword stance, by the person performing the tea ceremony. There is just an unrelenting open but focused attention that holds all other thoughts at bay. As a result, the calming effect is not because there is a rippling of water and a flower on the butsudan. The calming is because the person performing it is in effect a swordsman, a swordswoman, holding your thoughts still, holding them at a point of the blade so that they can’t move. That would be a tea ceremony done to our standard.

In tea, in calligraphy, in Zen, the sword that gives life is the sword that cuts dualism at all times and under all circumstances. You kill a flower when you cut it for a flower arrangement. You kill spinach when you pick it for a small side dish at dinner. Take away the “you” and life becomes possible for that which was killed. And that life can be experienced when you taste properly prepared spinach and properly arranged flowers. That killing and life-giving are the two sides of the same coin that Chapter One is describing.

This coin lies at the heart of our challenge in continuing our Zen . We think of martial arts and cultural arts as part of our lineage. We think these arts help people because they may not want to come straight into Zen for the zazen. They may need another entry point into our form of training. Over time, their use of Zen, martial arts, and cultural arts balances out and they become well-rounded individuals.

But no! That is such a weak portrayal of what we do or how we do it. We are not trying to create well rounded individuals. What we are trying to do is open doors for someone and say, “Walk through this door and if you take the path in front of you and push it to the extreme, you’ll be transformed as a human being.” That’s the nature of the arts that we are meant to teach and offer. That it is not a cultural art in the usual sense of the word, that it is about transforming individuals as a human being.

So for me, for all my years of sword training, I don’t teach sword. And I guess the honest reason is that I don’t feel yet that I am at that level where I can teach sword in a way that can transform human beings. But it is kind of surprising that I am getting there through the back door via shodo training. It will get me there. I want to teach sword. It’s going to be something that explodes out of my calligraphy training where it comes alive and it can be transformational.

GA: You were just speaking a little bit about the historical context of Zen and Budo, the time of writing in 1968. Is any of the reason why you don’t teach sword yet, as you just said, related to some of the reservations that Japan had culturally about teaching sword and martial arts after WWII, given its associations with mere violence? GG: I know very little of that history. The way I heard it phrased was that it wasn’t a Japanese decision to not teach martial arts. The ban was imposed by the US Army occupation because of the ties between sword training and militarism. I only know that side of the story. I can’t speak more broadly than that but, no, until I can show a sword that gives life, I don’t want to talk about it.

I’ll get to this later, but in my calligraphy, if it does not create fearlessness, then my calligraphy training is not finished. The only form in which my calligraphy training has meaning is if it creates fearlessness, another way of expressing the idea of a sword that gives life.

GA: I’m wondering if you are especially hesitant to teach sword but you’re more willing to teach calligraphy because teaching sword, if it is misconstrued can be so much more dangerous than wrongly teaching calligraphy.

GG: That would be accurate but ultimately I can’t teach calligraphy without teaching sword. Somehow for my own self, for my own life, swordwork infuses my calligraphy. Maybe that is also what I am waiting for. Is there another thing that comes out of me that doesn’t need to draw upon a sword? Because we have so little context in American or European or much of our cultural history for a sword that brings peace. Japan has a huge cultural context for that.

I’m wide open for help of all sorts with this. I’m not looking to get off the hook on this one. But as I say, this is our lineage and we have to come to grips with it. And we must come to grips with the fact that Omori Sogen was willing to die because the Emperor was going to surrender to the US. That is part of our DNA and if we don’t face it, we will be incomplete in our Zen training.

CHAPTER TWO

Chapter Two’s opening question asks, “What is the relationship between a killing art and a way for man?” Later in the chapter, Omori Roshi states that there is no human life that does not including killing or death. Given this question and this statement we can now come at “the sword that gives life” in a way that fits more realistically into an American and European context.

We kill to eat, and whether we kill an animal or a fish or a vegetable, we are killing. I know and respect people for whom killing a spinach plant is morally different from killing a steer, but I can’t feel that distinction in my own body. I just feel the killing.

We can go beyond killing for food. Think of the phrase, “I’m dying of boredom.” That boredom is a form of killing – that is an interaction between people that is deadening. Somehow life has been squeezed out of the encounter. Right now, as we talk on the phone together, we can ask, “Is life being created or not?” If it is not, then I am killing something, maybe best labeled as the potential for life. I would ask myself, out of my last one hundred human interactions – the neighbor who stopped by, the student on the phone, the people I talked to yesterday at Mifflin Street – how many of those blasted the hell out of the moment, gave that moment as much life as possible?

If I’m generous, maybe two out my last one hundred interactions had that quality. That means that in ninety-eight of them I killed the potential for that to be the most significant moment of that person’s life and my life.

Here’s what is tough about bringing our style of Zen training into America: Buddhism is thought to be about peace and compassion and goodness and calmness and sensitivity. What kind of place is there for our talk about killing?

Every human being alive kills for food. Every human being has killed a moment, has killed a relationship. Without coming to grips with that, we are just wandering around in our suffering because we don’t understand killing.

The era when I was teaching in the Family Medicine residency program was a time of fearlessness for me. I had come through such painful experiences with physicians after Sam’s birth that I was driven to change the entire culture of American medicine. I had nothing to lose. I had no professional standing, I had no prestige, no educational baggage. I was just somebody who got led in the door almost by mistake. They should have never let me in the door. They had no business letting a Zen guy into a medical school. There I was.

Early on, the phrase that came to me there was that “you can’t heal if you can’t kill.” Likewise, you can’t kill if you can’t heal. That was just Tanouye Roshi’s voice in my head throughout many of my encounters with physicians because they were so intent on healing – investing their whole lives, making a tremendous amount of sacrifice to become healers. But I saw also how hard it could be for them sometimes when they had to make a difficult decision about removing life support, knowing that the person most likely would soon die.

I had to confront this for myself when I went into chaplain training because now I was part of those who were meant to be healing. There was one conversation that started with a question, “Am I dying?” And the answer was, “Yes you are.” That led to a phone call with a long-estranged son. So, hope for recovery was killed but something in that patient’s life was healed at the same time.

CHAPTER THREE Chapter Three centers on the 17th century Japanese swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi. From what we know of his early life, he was an angry and amoral person. He saw no difference between accepting a challenge and killing someone and issuing a challenge and killing someone. There is nothing about that life I can comprehend. It was just blood everywhere.

That era ended around age thirty, after surviving some twenty life-or-death duels. For the next twenty years he trained - without fighting – until achieving enlightenment at age fifty. We don’t know what his daily life was like for those twenty years. What was his form of shugyo then, or was that already over? We don’t know answers to these questions, only that it took twenty years for his shugyo to ripen.

Omori Sogen goes on to describe the common understanding of the three outcomes of a life-and-death duel with swords: you defeat an inferior swordsman, you are killed by a superior swordsman, or you both kill each other. You’ve seen examples of all three of these in any variety of samurai movies. Two men facing each other, taking their kamae. One has the sword high over his head, one has it down and to the side. They yell, they rush forward, they cut, and one or both fall over dead.

But it is one of the wonders of Japanese sword culture that they recognized a fourth possible outcome. The Japanese word for this is ainuke, translated as “mutual passing.” Though we can translate the word, I don’t know of an example of this kind of outcome outside of Japan.

It is not a matter of recognizing that this swordsman could possibly kill me, but then again it is also possible that I would kill him. So, why don’t we just both step away from this encounter. That is not ainuke. Mutual passing occurs when there is no self present. There is no one there to kill or be killed. Now, looking from the outside, there is a person standing there holding a sword. And that person is not in a trance but in a highly alert and deep state of , an experience in which there is no sense of a self. The self doesn’t exist.

Out of that condition, maybe the sword swings, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it strikes flesh, maybe it doesn’t. What happens might simple be fate, or the playing out of circumstance but it had little to do with that individual with a sword in his or her hand. This is the sword that gives life.

RR: I’m thinking about my sports career where there were the games that played themselves. And you have no memory of this happening but there is a reporting of it.

GG: Yes, it’s that kind of experience. Michael Jordan is my favorite American example. It’s the NBA final, the Bulls are down by 9 points with 30 seconds left in the game, and you then watch him become no self, scoring 10 points. RR: It is transcendent and there is a part where, I know I’ve been in audiences where that has happened too and we were carried up with it.

GG: Music has that ability where the distinction between the performers and the audience disappears. Musicians don’t feel present.

As you say, we have experiences of this no self, but they are most often contextually based. They happen in intense sporting moment, or they happen in intense fine arts moments. But they don’t exist as a life. That’s where Zen comes to bear because Zen says yes, you can take a fine art, you can have a martial art and you can have that experience but it is still contextually bound. It’s not available at all times, under all circumstances at all places.

That’s the Zen standard for that. It’s not just okay on the basketball court. What are you going to do about making that your life? Here is where we get the phrase that you’ve heard us talk about so often: when you negate the negation. That transcendent experience of no self is a negation. That self is negated. You didn’t even have to negate the self, it wasn’t like a willed action to negate the self. It’s like there was no self, therefore it was negated.

But that was when Tanouye Roshi would attack, one of his toughest blows during Sanzen, where you thought you had come in with no self. The negation hadn’t been negated.

That is the standard that Chapter Three is posing to us. It is not enough to transcend, you must transcend the transcendence. And that work is what makes it so ferociously difficult to train in our style of Zen.

CHAPTER FOUR

Chapter Four is about the gift of fearlessness. The entity that personifies this gift is Kannon, the of Compassion, also known as Se I Sha. This equivalence of compassion and fearlessness is antithetical to any sort of American context or Western Civilization context that I know.

Here’s what makes the link so meaningful. You’ve heard me say for myself and for my students, “Don’t judge someone’s level of training by looking at them. You can only effectively judge someone’s training by what is happening around them.” The quality of my training cannot be evaluated by the number of years I’ve been training or the severity of my training. Those have no meaning. Instead, look around me and evaluate the quality of what is happening. Similarly, for the gift of fearlessness, don’t look at the giver. Look at what’s around him or her.

I’ve seen this portrayed in physicians. Where they step into a room and fear disappears. Now that is in a particular context and it is a hard-earned context and their training to get to that point was severe but it’s still contextually bound. They have their white coat on. They step into a room so all the contextual elements are there and fearlessness takes place.

As I said earlier, that’s my personal challenge with calligraphy. There is zero context for me doing calligraphy. I am not Japanese, I am not trained properly. I am not anything other than a Zen guy who comes from an obscure line of Zen, who uses calligraphy as element of training. I want Westerners, people who have no knowledge of me, who have no knowledge of Zen, I want them to encounter calligraphy that takes away their fear. That to me is the measure of how well I’m doing, and I know I’m not very far along.

I’m thinking maybe around age 80, there might be a glimmer of that coming off my brush. I can’t wait until 80 to pick up the brush. It’s going to be what happens between now and what happens at age 80. What is the training going to be between now and then that determines whether that happens or not?

So, any you, all of you, that is available at any time, any moment for that to be true. We talked about those last 100 encounters with a human being that you’ve had. How many of those induced fearlessness in the person you encountered? To get there, you need an art, you need a way. For me it’s through calligraphy. That is the training ground by which I push this. But simply doing it within the context of calligraphy is virtually of no significance. It is only when that give me the ability in every encounter of any sort - gas station, a phone call - that fearlessness takes place.

That is what I have to say about Zen & Budo. As I said earlier, I hate the book because the standard it holds up is so damn severe.

CLOSING QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

RR: The way that I have interpreted the marital art [of our training] is, something that takes you to your physical breaking point so that you learn to use your body in a different way. I don’t have this question decided for myself, but I wonder in the context of learning sword, or not having access to that or somebody doesn’t have learning archery in the traditional martial arts, how should we be training?

GG: That should be the dominant question for us as an organization and for us as teachers. I’d say if you are futurist, then I want you creating the future for the planet. It’s up to you. Whatever we look at 20 years from now, it’s up to you. You got nobody else other than you who’s responsible for that. If that becomes the essence of your work, that would be shugyo.

I think about Alex & his bodywork, where his is the statement in the Chozen-ji cannon that the entire universe is the true human body. That is a phenomenally great statement and it is worthless as a belief. It is either a lived experience or it’s not. So, if his bodywork can attain to that level where he is responsible for the bodywork of the universe, yes, that would be shugyo. How to find something in your life that takes on that quality where the goal, the standard, is incredibly absurd. And yet that is what you devote your life to. That is shugyo.

HS: I just got back from presenting at the WHO policy work that we’ve been working on for the past 2 years. I got comments from people afterwards that felt like high-fives. “Wow, you really shattered that one,” or “I liked it when you did that.” It made me deeply uncomfortable. It made me reflect on an aspect of our Zen training that has made me a bit sharp.

I remember getting feedback from this Soto Zen man at Yale when I was trying to set up a Rinzai Zen sitting group and he was pushing back at me about it. He made some comments about Rinzai Zen guys being too sharp and I see a lot of truth in that. Yes, we just have a sharp edge, and this lecture made me think about what does diplomacy look like that doesn’t leave someone coming away with the impression that someone won and someone lost.

I’ve seen it done. I can’t say that they did it out of “no mind,” but I recognize when it is being done well. It’s not apparent. It’s like the person is saying something subtle that shuts it down and still making the other person look good in the process. It leaves you, confused about what just happened. It’s something I want to sit with a bit. I aspire to lose that sharp edge. I want to know what kind of interaction I could have to leave people with the feeling of, “What just happened?”

I’ve struggled a lot with how to bring Zen training to my work because I’m not a body worker or a carpenter. There are a lot of things that I’m not. But the other thing you brought up is about how all interactions with people should basically give life. I think a lot about the presentations we give at work or how you can cause death by PowerPoint and that is not a great thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about this more as I am shifting in my career from just doing things to teaching people and trying to build more capacity in a variety of ways. Like what are the best practices, and how do we teach people, and what would be the ideal state of a teaching interaction or presentation. This talk has given me a lot of fodder for what is the right way to do things and what is the wrong way.

GG: Thanks for speaking up. It helps me to hear things. I agree there is a damning quality of our Zen training. If our training is going well, you’ll get a sharp edge. And it makes people uncomfortable if they encounter it. So either you say oh, well that’s just who I am, or that’s my training, or you encounter more and more situations where that is the blade slicing leaves in two rather than the blade that gives life. I’ve got so many decades of training in our lineage of Zen and it’s tough to watch people who can’t get beyond that sharpness

RR: So, you’ve gotten on a conveyor, and it’s like you’re on that conveyor and you really got to take it all the way to the end.

I am going to sign off now. None of you had to be on this call but I’m grateful you were. I find it enriching to keep picking up these texts. There is no end, there is no text that I’ve exhausted. Every time I encounter one it brings out something deeper. I encourage you to bring your whole self to whatever next ones we pick up. Make sure to include your honesty because sometimes there can be a frustrating feeling when you talk with others. “Wow! This person seems to get a lot out of this. What is wrong with me?” Well, start with that. That is what is true. Until you can say that, you are stuck. You got to push it every step of the way.