In the dream I was engaged in a heated argument with a mathematics professor about my decision to drop out of the course he was teaching. I don’t recall how he persuaded me not to, but after his class we agreed to go for a beer; en route to the pub we were joined by Samuel Beckett, the minimalist playwright; he and I went up to the bar together and just as I was about to ask what he fancied to drink I woke up.
Some of the dream I could interpret: mathematics for me represents mystery; the professor: education; but Samuel Beckett, the Francophile dramatist who upended the staid theatrical world of the 1950s? I was reading about Beckett’s life around the time of the dream and the more I read the more I came to admire him, but the main thing I got out of my reading was an appreciation of his goodness. Those who spent time in his company spoke of his humility, his warmth and intelligence, his “infinite kindness” and “indeflectable courtesy.” [1] He was, by all accounts, a witty and exceptionally generous man. Approached one day in a Paris street by a beggar seeking a handout, Beckett emptied his wallet, but when asked by his companion why he’d given such a large sum of money to a fellow who was so clearly a con artist, Beckett replied: “I thought he was, but I just couldn’t take the chance.” In my dream, Beckett I suspect represents the frailty of the human condition: he exemplifies the struggle to keep the precarious business of life going; he has no answers to anything; he manages, that’s all. In the example of his writing I include here, a brooding voice shivers at the edge of oblivion:
You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. [2]
The only second-hand bookstore worth visiting in downtown Vancouver is MacLeods Books on Pender Street. The seven books on my bookshelf authored by the Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa came from there. Trungpa was a very singular type of teacher; categorised as an exemplar of “crazy wisdom” and highly intelligent and perceptive with it, I read each of his books closely. Too, Macleods is where I found Damned to Fame, a Beckett biography. Reading about Beckett’s life, his struggles, the success he was so ill at ease with, I began to feel a kind of impatience, not with Beckett, but with Trungpa. Beckett, it seemed to me, was the better man because, to quote George Orwell, he was “…prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life…” My increasing admiration of Beckett was the catalyst for my waning interest in Trungpa and his doings.
Chogyam Trungpa had an enormous number of admirers, but he was also an unabashed alcoholic and drug abuser and was, at least when he lived in the Scottish Lowlands in the 1960s, a family wrecker (my wife’s, in fact). I saw him in person only once, at a Quaker Friends’ Meeting House in London, where he was scheduled to give a talk. He was very late and when he finally appeared onstage he had to be helped to the podium, where he stood in awkward silence, eyes downcast; he was obviously in distress and after about five minutes exited the stage without addressing the audience.
The thousands of followers Trungpa attracted in Europe and the USA (including stars like Ram Das, the former LSD guru Richard Alpert until he found religion, [3]) were unfazed by his drinking, drug abuse, and sexually exploitative behaviour; his eclectic, predominantly hip audience, were drawn to him precisely because of his crazy wisdom style of teaching. [4]
Grounded as he was in the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism – renowned for its emphasis on meditation practice – he knew his subject and wrote about it well. Despite a hedonistic lifestyle, his knowledge was rooted in the ageless wisdom of Vajrayāna Buddhism. But being a serial abuser of stimulants it’s hard to see where the self-discipline could have come from that would have allowed him to continue writing. As a young man he would have used a pen and written on paper, or even tapped away on a typewriter, but his later publications, the thinner volumes published in the USA, are padded with the laboured content of Q&A sessions culled from his talks, with the whole transcribed and edited by his followers.
The contradiction between the rigorous monastic education of Trungpa’s early life in Tibet and the recklessness of his later life in the West is tragic and perplexing: this is the terrible paradox at the heart of his work, and it is a challenge to accommodate the profundity of his ideas, expressed so eloquently in his books, with the reality of his dissolute lifestyle.
His mental acuity would have progressively deteriorated to the point where the clarity of thought necessary to engage with the creative process of writing would simply not have been possible, and given his partiality to stimulants the habit of meditation too would have fallen away long before his descent into alcoholism; perhaps he felt he’d been there and done that, no need to bother anymore.
There is a YouTube video of Trungpa and Jiddu Krishnamurti in conversation, the two celebrity gurus having been brought together to discourse on spiritual matters. Krishnamurti, preened and very much the urbane senior partner, rambles on in his superior way; Trungpa, squeezed into an ill-fitting suit, sits mute and glassy eyed. At the end of a lengthy preamble Krishnamurti gives some elbow room to his fellow interlocutor by asking, “Why should one meditate?” Trungpa pauses for a few seconds before replying: “Don’t you think in the living situation of a man that meditation happens as part of life’s situation?” It was a thin response to his companion’s haughty peroration. One can see how the prospect of getting these two spiritual big guns together in the studio would have been an enticing prospect, but the Old School luminary, unable to get out of his own light, and our New Age guru, his lights much dimmed, were distressingly ill-matched. They were like two old heavyweights shadow boxing.
Bill Shankly, the iconic manager of the football club I’ve supported since childhood, said of one of his under performing players, “Aye, he talks a good game.” I began to think of Trungpa in that way: he talks so lucidly about the nature of mind as seen through the prism of Mahayana Buddhism; and the books he wrote – Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, Meditation in Action, The Myth of Freedom and The Way of Meditation – are profound, informative texts and display a deep understanding of the nature of consciousness. Trungpa talked a terrifically good game, yet his life was a train wreck. Go figure.
When Trungpa Rinpoche lay dying in 1986 at the age of 47, only an inner circle knew the symptoms of his final illness. Few could bear to acknowledge that their beloved and brilliant teacher was dying of terminal alcoholism, even when he lay incontinent in his bedroom, belly distended and skin discoloured, hallucinating and suffering from varicose veins, gastritis and oesophageal varices, a swelling of veins in the oesophagus caused almost exclusively by cirrhosis of the liver. [5]
I’ve never been without the desire – desire when I was young, but a visceral need now that I’m a decaying old geezer – to embed daily meditation practice into my life, cack-handed though my attempts to achieve this over the course of my life have been. For a number of years in my late 30s I was immersed in the work of the Arica School, though my eventual disenchantment with the philosophy of its founder, Oscar Ichazo, and his sometimes delusional followers led me to sever my connection with the school. I slipped into a depression that went on for so long I gave up meditation for 17, perhaps 18, years. But I returned to it, as I have always done.
Maybe it was the pristine air streaming in off the Pacific, or the abundance of majestic native trees; or the fact that my wife and child were happy in the green environment we were living in, but not long after leaving Hong Kong to go and live in Canada I took up meditation again. It took a while to establish a regular practice but during this time I was holding on to the idea that I ought to seek advice from someone with insight into the meditation process. To this end I began scanning the holy flyers pinned on the notice board of another Vancouver bookstore I used to visit in the hope that something would catch my eye. Banyen Books & Sound is the only bookstore in the city given over to the literature of world religions, esoteric disciplines, alternative therapies, etc., and I thought it likely that I’d spot something there eventually. One summer’s day a flyer did get my attention: a visiting Tibetan monk was giving a talk on Buddhism at the Central Library; “That could be a start,” I thought.
The basement auditorium was filled to capacity, but I had arrived early and had managed to bag a seat. The young monk began by reading from a prepared text on his laptop screen; this, as it turned out, was the style of his delivery, without any digression into extemporaneous speech; and what with his poor pronunciation and avoidance of eye contact with his metropolitan audience it was no surprise when bums began vacating seats. The monk’s incomprehensibility didn’t deter me from attending another “talk” he gave a few days later, conducted in the same fashion as the first. At the end of the evening I signed up for a meditation programme he was leading the following weekend. All I can say is that I was needy.
In a packed, airless venue early Friday night the monk’s explanation of the historical origins of the type of meditation he had planned for the weekend, read from his omnipresent laptop, was so lengthy and impenetrable the bubble I was in burst: whatever I thought I needed wasn’t to be found here. I was sitting in the middle of a large group of people and didn’t feel bold enough to stand up and head for the exit; instead I began furtively looking around the room; everyone was attentive and concentrating on the monk’s slippery English.
A young man in front of me was perched on a stack of cushions and holding himself ramrod straight, but whatever was going on in his brain was dilating the trapezius muscles in his neck and shoulders and swelling the musculature of both arms; the backs of his hands rested on his knees, the fingers on each hand forming a wiry gyan mudra, but it was the deep concavity in the lumbar region of his spine that highlighted how tightly wound was his self-absorption. A few of the older participants were sitting on plastic stacking chairs around the edge of the room; one or two seemed as distracted as me. Spiritual hunger had driven me to follow the monk to this crowded place, but my appetite had gone; when his mumbo jumbo discourse came to a close I made for the street door; early next morning I called the event’s organiser to apologise for dropping out of the programme.
Some months later another flyer on the Banyen notice board caught my attention: a group called the Mountain Rain Zen Community were organising a weekend Retreat in the Liu Institute, a venue on the grounds of the University of British Columbia’s Asian Studies complex, which, fortuitously, was just a short distance from where I lived. When I returned home I put a cheque in the mail, hoping a spot could be found for me.
The Liu Institute sits on a coastal ridge high above the ocean and is just a stone’s throw from one of the most beautiful museums in the world, Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology. Behind the Institute are the walled grounds of the Nitobe Memorial Garden, a traditional Japanese garden; and across the road, at the bottom of hundreds of twisting wooden steps, runs an extensive foreshore littered with tide wrack from up-country logging operations.
I cycled over to the Institute on a midsummer Friday evening; I felt nervous about spending the weekend with a group of complete strangers, but there was no need to fret, all was low key and unhurried. Three walls of the room in which the Retreat was to be held – the zendo – were made of glass and one could look out onto a meadow. I’d brought my own big cushion, the zabuton, and a little cushion, a zafu; I unpacked them and found a space to lay them out, sat down, and waited. A young, black-robed Canadian monk got the proceedings underway by explaining the monastic formalities and rituals we were required to observe over the weekend, the rules of behaviour, and instructions on how to do zazen meditation; and for the duration, all activity was to be conducted in silence. This was my idea of fun.
I hadn’t come on the look-out for a teacher; after the let-down of the Tibetan weekend my yearning for spiritual pedagogy had dissipated; I went to the Institute with the simple idea of doing more meditation than I was able to at home. I spoke barely a word over the weekend, and even declined the invitation to put my name on a list to do dokusan, a face-to-face meeting with the No.1 monk; an innocent refusal as I knew nothing of Soto Zen practice.
The No.1 monk gave a talk each afternoon and presumably spent the rest of his time working through the dokusan queue. His talks, though by no means pabulum, weren’t overly illuminating; he self-deprecatingly volunteered that he was devoid of charisma. More than once I imagined him sitting at home in California: hands poised by his keyboard, staring into space, waiting on the inspiration that would stitch his thoughts into a discourse. I thought of his talks as simply a break in the meditation schedule.
I don’t recall how many hours we sat or how much walking meditation we did; I ate my frugal meals in silence and at the end of the day I cycled home to my wife and our little boy. But in the silence of the zendo by the Salish Sea my meditation practice underwent a change, a process best described as a falling away of unnecessary things. It happened without drama; I sat, I walked, and counted breaths; essentially, nothing more than this. In any case, the hours passed and the zazen and walking meditation generated a welcome internal clarity. It was enough. I had no wish for more on my plate; I clocked in, did my shift, then clocked out.
During the Retreat I heard The Heart Sutra for the first time. It is the shortest of all Buddhist sutras and elucidates the concept of emptiness: mu. If the sutra was a quiver and its words arrows, I was a sitting target. It would serve no purpose in this narrative to theorise about the Buddhist concept of emptiness, but if I were to paraphrase jazz trumpeter Miles Davis when he said, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there,” I’d say: “Don’t listen to what’s there, listen to what’s not there.”
I participated in three Retreats organised by the Mountain Rain Zen Community. The first two were held in a room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that overlooked a meadow resplendent with wild flowers and tall trees. But the organisers could barely squeeze the bodies into the little zendo for the second Retreat, and because the third Retreat attracted even more people a bigger space had to be found. They didn’t have to search far: a venue was located just around the corner in The Asian Centre complex: but the new zendo, a windowless hall, was an airplane hangar.
The form for the third Retreat was familiar, but some things were different: the intimacy of the old zendo had gone; there were no wild flowers or trees to gaze at in idle moments; an antique air conditioning system was intrusively noisy; and the two lines of forlorn looking meditators sitting opposite each brought to mind a picture of refugees waiting to be processed But more to the point, I was out of sorts even before I turned up.
The rituals are still the same: lots of bowing: to the zafu; to each other; to the assembly of meditators; to No.1 monk before and after his Dharma talks; chanting of incomprehensible Japanese texts; sitting through ceremonies for the dead and the ill. And never mind the ceaseless whispering as bodies shuffle in and out to attend dokusan with No.1 monk. And after every sit, kinhin, walking meditation.
I spend most of the time in fruitless negotiations with my breath, trying to nudge it past my knotted solar plexus, seized up as a result of the acrimonious breakdown of a relationship with a one-time friend. It’s a seemingly unresolvable conflict; we are unable to agree even a simple practical arrangement to allow our children – who are devoted to each other – to play together. So much excruciating effort-trying-not-to-be-effort observing my constricted breath; endless mental re-plays of imaginary scenarios where I get to be wise and Friend X gets to understand how unreasonable and weird she’s being; but I’m unable to dissolve the numbness paralysing the centre of my body.
The absence of daylight gives a gloomy cast to the new zendo; sitting under the cold glow of the fluorescent lighting and unable to zone out the clamour of the air conditioning, I begin to feel grumpy; having to endlessly put on and take off my spectacles to bring the action at the far end of the hall into focus only serves to aggravate my ill-humour. But it is the two chattering monks I encounter in the bathroom that make me realise how much of a square peg I have become in their round hole: the older one, stripped down to his underpants, is swabbing his armpits with a damp flannel and chattering to his younger colleague idling in his black robes in front of the only urinal; he moves aside as I step up to pee. I take in their sidelong glances and am relieved neither of them choose to speak to me as I am observing the Silence rule, which they should be doing too. I’d clocked these two fellows at different times during the previous sesshins, in their monk’s gear and frowning mien, and here they are, wittering on like a couple of fishwives.
To give each meditator an opportunity for a one-on-one talk with No.1 monk, ex-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, a lot of time was taken up with dokusan, but I had no burning questions I wanted to put to the monk and did not meet with him during any of the Retreats. For an hour each day he talked to us about Buddhist doctrine or commented on the significance of a Buddhist text; he was an erudite man and evidently gave serious thought to what he wished to say in his discourse. As a scholar and teacher, he was, as far as I was aware, highly regarded in Canada, North America, Mexico, but on this particular day he began his address by saying, “People seem to be being nicer to each other these days, don’t you think?”
Perhaps the absence of natural light had affected me more than I realised, but No.1 monk’s fatuous utterance stayed glued to my agitated mind like a housefly to flypaper.
There we sat, safe and replete in so many ways, and if the monk’s remark was anything to go by, self-satisfied. The austere regimen, the proliferation of shaved heads, the black robes worn by twenty-somethings, the endless bowing, the droning of incomprehensible Buddhist liturgy, the rituals, had all begun to pall; I suspect my inner worm had begun to turn when the hall doors swung shut against the daylight.
At the end of the Retreat the monks were scheduled to perform a ceremony for some of the meditators who wanted to publicly embrace Buddhist precepts. When the senior lay nun asked for a show of hands to see who would prefer not to stay for the ordination ceremony I raised my hand, the only person to do so. In the space of a few minutes, zafu and zabuton were stowed in my rucksack and I’d left the zendo; not a word was spoken; coming or going, standing or sitting, the rule was Silence at all times.
An hour later I was in the company of my family, wandering in the woods close by where we lived. It was peak season for salmonberries and the woods were awash with them. I spent the remainder of that summer afternoon filling up three yoghurt pots with the multi-coloured berries. Sunshine poured through gaps in the leaf canopy and Owain was a good little helper. As I plucked the berries I made up nonsense chants to amuse him, and then out of nowhere he chirped up, “I have the best mummy and daddy in the whole world!” That night after dinner we enjoyed a delicious salmonberry cobbler.
I had no further contact with the The Mountain Rain Zen Community. The group may have organised more Retreats in The Asian Institute’s cavernous arena, but the thought of spending a weekend cloistered in an ill-lit, noisy hall had no appeal. And I no longer pored over the Banyen Books & Sound notice board. The bookstore was on my route home from the organic supermarket in Kitsilano I biked to once a week for supplies; it was an eight-mile round trip and I usually broke up the ride to dawdle among the Banyen bookshelves. I scanned the notice board each time I was there, but only from idle curiosity about who was in town offering comfort to the city’s more affluent lost souls.
The Zen Retreats made a deep impression on me, including the last one: regardless, I sat through all the distractions; counting exhalations, from one to ten, again, and again; I breathed, the diaphragm rose and and fell; the mind roamed, like a dog after bones; it returned to the count, and wandered again after a few exhalations; so it went, ad nauseum. This is how Soto Zen monks corral the mind. Twice over the weekend, unheralded, tumble-dryer mind stopped spinning as my breath receded almost to nothing; my spine was straight and I had no muscle pain from the extended sitting; everything quiet. Just being there, nothing else; no unspooling B-movie to sit through.
I was surprised by how the simple discipline of zazen touched me and how it had evolved into such a good fit. I cannot now imagine not doing it. I can’t say the practice of zazen makes me a noticeably better human being, or that it holds out the promise of Enlightenment, whatever that may be; except for its ameliorating effect on my numerous shortcomings, it provides no obvious solution to any of my problems. But to be sitting upright and alert in the quiet of the early morning is its own attraction: one breathes, one counts each exhalation until, gradually, the turmoil of the mind subsides; or it doesn’t.
Amid the jumble of turbulent thought that crowds the start of a sit any one of a constellation of jitters is likely to flail out of my unconscious: anxiety about my child’s future, or the probability of synaptic collapse and the likelihood of ageing into a slack jawed old dribbler are recurring fears. But regardless of whatever fright assails me, it is generally subsumed into the meditation: after putting on the timer, closing my eyes, and folding my hands into the dhyana mudra, the mayhem is navigated with the breath; and when the mind wanders it is brought back and the counting begun again. Occasionally, the froth of chaotic thought is so batteringly persistent it colonises the sit; or, if not all, most of it. Then all one can do is observe the chaos with whatever detachment one can manage. I find even this chaotic state preferable to not meditating at all.
This morning a big wind from a North Sea storm howled around out back, the double glazing muffled the engine noise of passing cars, rain lashed the windows, a clock tick-tocked in the kitchen; small noises, heard but not heard in the silence. In the not far distant future I will cease to exist and whatever I’m constituted of will be absorbed into energies disconnected from human intelligence. Until then, I stare down cognitive decline by learning how to speak, read and write Scots Gaelic, a very difficult language which challenges the shrinking elasticity of thought and memory; and when time allows, I walk around the city. In addition, I’m a dumbfounded witness to my son growing into adolescence; and time spent with my wife is ever more precious. Still, I can feel in my marrow that life is approaching closure, but I won’t bang on about that.
Given the absence of teachers and gurus the daily ritual of zazen may very well see me to the end of things. That isn’t to say I’ve never wished I’d had a teacher on hand to offer guidance, or (in my dreams) a guru to exemplify The Way. But it’s a disappointing fact that the teachers I’ve known, in the flesh and in print, have all been men – and nearly all of them unmarried – each one willing and ready to explain the mystery of what constitutes a spiritual life; all of them figuratively – and literally – hawking techniques to achieve Enlightenment. Krishnamurti referred to “the truth” as a “trackless land;” and I suppose this is where I see my corporeal self: somewhere that leads nowhere. This is the reason I enjoy Samuel Beckett’s gift for extracting humour and poetry from a darkness that is literally just a breath away.
Two shelves of my living room bookcase are loaded with books on meditation and spirituality, teachers, gurus, etc., but I haven’t opened any of them for a long time. I don’t know any meditation teachers, and am unlikely to get to know any at my age; spiritual goals as such just seem to have evaporated – Enlightenment, if such a state is to be found, has to be be experienced in the place I live with my wife and child, amid the grocery shopping and laundry and vacuuming, and dog walking. I’ve been reading about this mythical state and hearing references to it for decades; if I was a resident of a Buddhist monastery and meditating 10 hours a day I might have a clue or two about it, might.
My home is the monastery: the alarm goes off, I get up and walk to the kitchen, open a window to let in some fresh air, then drink a glass of water; I wrap a woollen shawl around my shoulders, then lay out the zabuton and the zafu and sit; when I’ve finished I make a cup of coffee and a slice of toast and wake up my wife and son so they can start their day. I live in a big city; Owain is in the first year of high school, my wife goes to her office at the university. This is The Way for me; how can it be otherwise? Enlightenment, if there is such a package, I strongly suspect is all in the commonplace; always here, not there. I eat what is on my plate; I can’t eat what isn’t on it; full plate, empty plate.
I’ll end with this, from Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet: “All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.”
Endnotes
[1] Robert Scanlon; Beckett Remembering Beckett in Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him; Bloomsbury; 2006.
[2] Samuel Beckett; The Unnamable; Grove Press; 1958.
[3] Ram Das; It’s Here Now (Are You?), Broadway Books; USA, 1997. He spoke of the prevailing atmosphere at Trungpa’s Naropa Institute in Colorado: “The party energy around [Trungpa] was compelling. In fact, that’s basically what Naropa was: a huge blowout party, twenty-four hours a day… It was all too much.”
[4] Such as R. D. Laing, renegade psychiatrist; Allen Ginsberg, beat poet; William Burroughs, beat novelist; John Cage, avant garde musician; Marianne Faithful, Joni Mitchell, musicians.
[5] Katy Butler; Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America; Common Boundary Magazine; May / June 1990.
Endless Buddhas 
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