poetry notebook

I’ve been remiss. Nothing I wanted to communicate. So here’s what’s up, anyway:

I generally like to be involved in learning something about language somewhere. Ancient Greek is wonderful, but at this point of my life it’s rather abstracted from what I do and where I am. German comes easily, and I could read Goethe and Nietzsche and Rilke and listen to Wagner and Mahler and Strauss and enjoy it, but that’s not really with me either. French? Don’t really care for it. Old French? Might be worth it for Villon and Rabelais, but that won’t hold me, either. Latin? Not really interested. Considered learning Italian. That would open up a lot of opportunities, and I would have means to practice. But…

The place of peace for me these days, aside from my sweltering back yard, is Abhayagiri monastery, in the hills about 7 miles northeast of Redwood Valley, which is itself merely a little settlement between Ukiah and Willits. Not that I’ve been there often. But even at home the peace of Abhayagiri beckons to me. I’ve been a Buddhist for many years now. I’m not a very good practitioner, but it is the place of my heart.

My first introduction to Buddhism was to the Nichirin sect. A doctor attending to me in a hospital 6 weeks after I went temple first into the metal retaining bar of a windshield at 85 mph (fracturing the head, blinding the eye, leaking spinal fluid, mid-saggital paralysis which mostly remains as it was 31 years ago) told me that there was nothing medicine cold do for me. He suggested that, after my release from hospital, we go together to a “meeting”. Since my tongue was (and is) paralyzed down the center, and since my speech center had taken a pretty hard knock, it was difficult for me to speak, but I assented.

You may know this sect as “nam myo ho renge kyo”. It was founded by the Japanese Tendai (Chinese Tien Tai) monk Nichiren in the14th century ce. Chanting Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo” thousands of times and reading excerpts (in Japanese) from the Lotus Sutra twice a day restored my speech. The link in the previous sentence is to a translation of the Lotus Sutra (this link is to a different translation on a different website) on the Sokka Gakkai website. The Sokka Gakkai is the largest organization that follows Nichiren’s teachings. They are culturally traditional Japanese. I have nothing against the Japanese. The Japanese culture is deep and beautiful. Basho is one of my favorite poets. I love Japanese painting and food. But, alas, I’m not Japanese, and I didn’t feel comfortable in the Sokka Gakkai. I also think that most Japanese people would find them too literal and authoritarian.

But, in all of my life, there had never been anything that had helped me so much as this practice, which I couldn’t keep up on my own. Also, I wanted to learn more about Buddhism in general, and about “Western” philosophy in particular (excuse the weak attempt at humor).

Many years later (10 or 11), in Manhattan, after having done my yeoman’s work of reading Kant, Hume, Hegel, and Husserl to name but a few, 4 guys jumped me (a long story, I won’t go into any details – one could easily enough blame my own refusal to back down out of fear rather than their aggression). When I was down, one of them kicked me in the head and re-fractured my skull in the same place. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the previous time. I only spent a week in the hospital.

After a few weeks, I was still rather foggy, and prone to sudden fits of absolute torpor. One warm day, I was sitting in Union Square Park reading the Pound’s Cantos in an attempt to restore my concentration. A young woman walked up to me and said, “have you ever heard of Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo?”. Indeed I had, and under similar circumstances. No-one during the intervening years had ever mentioned it to me without my bringing it up first.

So, I went with her and began practicing with the Sokka Gakkai again. And my concentration returned, or at least as much of it as I could hope to recover in a very short space of time. And the attacks of exhaustion disappeared. And I still wasn’t Japanese. Although I read Nichiren (against the advice of most of my contacts in the Sokka Gakkai, who wanted me to accept their interpretation on faith); and although some of the writings of Nichiren are to this day very dear to my heart, e.g. “The Buddha is a provisional Buddha” or “The real Buddha is the common man”, and resonate continuously with me, once again, I couldn’t persist in the training.

Then I got into computers. This was nearly all I did for a few years. Then I sold print advertising space. These were my practices, and I felt life to be pretty vacuous. I thrashed around a bit looking for a path to follow. To make a boring story brief, I decided that I would practice Buddhism. The problem was: which form of Buddhism? Nichiren was a monk of the Tendai who went out on his own. The Tendai came from the Tien Tai in China. I decided that I’d pursue Tien Tai.

I put out a fair amount of effort attempting to find out about the Tien Tai and/or to contact an organization of Tien Tai, but to no effect (this was some time before the www was available to me). But everywhere I turned, I ran into Tibetan Buddhism. I had some pretty narrow Ideas about Tibetan Buddhism. I wanted nothing to do with it. But, in the absence of Tien Tai (and knowing that Zen wasn’t my path either), I went ahead and read the ever-present book by Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying And what a revelation! I was no longer against Tibetan Buddhism. Through the kindness of the Rigpa organization, I was able to receive a Guru Rinpoche empowerment (a foundational empowerment of the Nyingma school) from the very great and wonderful master Nyoshul Khnepo Rinpoche.

But, alas, the Rigpa organization was not for me.

By good fortune, I was introduced to a man named Robert Newman, who has since founded Medigrace. Robert, whose kindness in this respect I can never repay, introduced me to Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Rinpoche gave me a one-to-one transmission in a small room in Robert’s apartment. Though he spoke in a patois of English and Tibetan, for some reason I understood every word he said, though ever since I’ve struggled to understand him when hearing him talk. He accepted me as his student. Unfortunately, he was about to leave for Brazil to found a center there. I only saw him very rarely after that. He was usually in Brazil, and I never managed to overcome my entanglements. Chagdud Rinpoche died in 2002.

But, after moving to San Fancisco (which was the consolation prize for not moving to the redwoods for which I’d left New York City), I was fortunate to find people to practice Buddhism with, mostly related with Chagdud Rinpoche’s organization Chagdud Gompa. Even more fortunate, while attending an empowerment being bestowed by His Holiness Pema Norbu (Penor) Rinpoche, I notice a monk strutting around like he owned the place (and Penor Rinpoche had given him the seat of honor). I walked up to him through the crowd and asked him who he was. He laughed and gave me his card. I called him. He called me back. This was Khenpo Gyurmed Rinpoche, a great scholar of the Nyingma Lineage and teacher to the Royal Family of Bhutan. To me, he was simply “Khenpo”. We argued a lot. We practiced together a lot. We laughed a lot.

I ineffectively (except for procuring a 501(c)(3) status for the group) helped him to get Osel Dorje Nyingpo off the ground, even keeping a center for him in a rented storefront in the Haight for a while. He began moving in places distant from San Francisco, and we drifted apart. He died on January 30th of this year, in India. A close friend (and fellow student) and I kept telling each other that we’d drive up together to see Khenpo soon.

Now it’s too late.

In this context, I find Abhayagiri. The monks are mostly American and Brittish. The lineage comes from Ajahn Chah, the Thai meditation master of the Forrest Tradition of Theravada. For the past few years, I’ve been spending more and more time reading the Sutas in the Pali Canon, the teachings of the historical Buddha Gotama, as preserved and presented by the Theravada school. I’m no scholar, but I’ve read and practiced quite a bit in the Vajrayana (Tibetan) tradition, without sectarian views. I’ve learned a great deal from Zen teachers as well as my Nyingma masters and masters from the Gelugpa, Kagyupa, and Shakyapa schools of Tibet. I’ve even been fortunate enough to rub shoulders with Tien Tai. What I’ve witnessed is the continuity of the Buddhist tradition from the Pali Canon through the “Mahayana” and into the Vajrayana. I am in complete awe of the vast diversity of this tradition that meanwhile retains the core of what is important.

It was the Mahayana Chinese Buddhist Venerable Master Hua who willed the large parcels of land for Abhayagiri.

I’ve begun studying Pali (on my own, with a grammar: Introduction to Pali, by A.K. Warder. This is the source and the root of the entire Buddhist tradition. I think it’s a good language for me to encounter. I began with the intention to write about Pali, which is an extremely interesting language in it’s own right. Forgive the digression.