Doraku-An Zen-Dojo

Reading about someone might be interesting, but it is nothing compared to meeting the real person. Alas, most of the prominent characters of Zen are long ashes and dust. For me, the closest experience to meeting face to face one of our Zen-ancestors is through their art-work, namely calligraphy.

Studying an old master-piece, the rhythm and energy of the brush strokes, the pace or slowness of writing is almost like seeing the person in action. Maybe more than a decade of practising and teaching Hitsuzendo, the Zen-Way with Brush and Ink, helps me to imagine a person’s character from the ink-trace he or she left on the paper.

Wherever I travel, I visit museums or exhibitions having Chinese or Japanese calligraphy on display, and I feel grateful for having the chance to meet not just a few of my spiritual ancestors on my tours all over the world. Last week-end I met Ikyyu Sojun  (一休宗純), the eccentric Zen-Master of the Muromachi period. Passed away more than 500 years ago, I like him because his life and action confronted certain aspects which are still an issue in contemporary Zen, namely selling Zen for money and condemning exchange with female. Ikkyu made quite a point concerning both aspects …

I met Ikkyu just “around the corner”, in the recently re-opened Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne. Have a look at the picture I took, can you imagine what character Ikkyu was? A smooth, easy to deal with person? Someone who liked to make a point concerning what to do and what to leave? Someone vague, or someone decisive?

The piece was displayed in the framework of the exhibition „Mitleid und Meditation“: Der Mahayana Buddhismus („Großes Fahrzeug“) in Ostasien (“Pity and Meditation”: The Mahayana Buddhism (“Great Vehicle”) in East-Asia).

I wonder who made up that title? Why link Buddhism to pity (Mitleid), not compassion (Mitgefühl)? The question was not answered … and the longer I stayed the more I thought “what a pity!” The text by Ikkyu was not transcribed and not translated, the short text (and all the others) were only in German.

Quite speechless I was when reading the explanation concerning a statue of Ananda, one of  the Buddha’s main disciples. It states, Ananda carafully listened to Buddha’s teachings and wrote down all his words. How could the curator of the exhibition ignore one of the most basic facts concerning the transmission of Buddhist teachings, that is, the strictly oral transmission for the first couple of centuries? Not just a little detail, as we all know …

No wonder in the second exhibition, a collection of old photography from the Museum’s late founder Adolf Fischer (1856-1914), Nanzenji was spelled “Nazenji” and a picture showing the Kaisando (開山堂) at Tofukuji in Kyoto was labelled as “Tofukuji, Nara”. We still know nothing about Asia, while Asia knows us so well. What a pity!

Today is August 6th. Almost 70 years ago 70,000 Japanese people died on that day within seconds in the city of Hiroshima, and the world as we knew it changed forever.
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A few days ago I was having a Cafe au Lait on my way to work at a Bistro somewhere in Quartier Latin, it is August 1st., 2014. The French lady at the other table finished her newspaper and hand it over to me with a smile, so I can read a bit in Le Parisien. Sitting close to the counter she must have heard my German accent when I ordered, yet no problem. I never felt anything else but welcome in France, our neighbour country, the country where I enjoyed the best Aikido. The country where my Grand-Grandfather’s generation killed 1,4 million people within 4 years.

Le Parisien printed the facsimile of a document in it’s centre page which on the day is exactly 100 years old, the announcement of general mobilisation of the French, the country’s begin of World War I against Germany. The whole day, nobody in Paris showed the slightest resentment against the German guest. We had another war after this, and difficult times after then. Now we are friends …
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While we are sitting on our pillows practising Zazen, a civil air-plane with 298 people on board was shot down. Day and night the killing in Israel and Gaza continues, and we just sit and breath. Desperation about the lost ones merges with increasing public anger,  in Germany we experienced public demonstrations which were openly anti-semetic just a few weeks ago.

The war, the wars arrived once more in the middle of our life and our cities. What is our response, as human beings practising Zen, maybe as Buddhists? Shouldn’t we stop sitting silently on our pillows and go out and fight for justice, against the war I had been asked?

As a father I can hardly imagine anything worse than losing your beloved child. I possibly cannot comment on the emotions and responses of those directly affected by such tragedy. One step aside, that’s “us”. Having Dutch colleagues active in HIV related research, I anxiously checked the passenger list of MH-17 and was relieved not to find a familiar name on it. Suddenly it affects “us”, not some others far out there.

What is a Zen-reply, a Buddhist answer to all this. What shall we do?

As a first action, let me suggest not putting “us” against “them”. “Us” and “them”, we are all human beings, each of us different, yet connected. The rebels with guns which we can see standing at the crash field on press pictures, possibly fathers with kids, seeing the toys lying around in the rubble, that’s “us”. The British news reporter driven by a hard to imagine black-out opening a victim’s bag showing personal belongings to the live camera, and the news agencies multiplying this hilarious scene, that’s “us”. The men carrying away the corpses who days ago were passengers like you and me, that’s “us”. The war-lord in shabby cloths on the phone and the grim looking armed man standing around him, they are “us”. Not so different as we might wish, not so unconnected from our life and circumstances as we want to believe.

“Us” against “them” means continuing, fuelling a conflict, a war. First of all, let us stop putting more fuel into the fire! Let us fight the immediate emotion “us” should now stand up and fiercely fight against “them”.

A second aspect is to understand nothing happens out of “fate” or “by co-incidence”. The principle of cause and effect shows off most cruelly when beloved ones die.

We continue making a fortune by producing and selling killing technology (called “weapons”) while ignoring the fact they will be used for killing human beings, sooner or later. When it hits “us”, we cry out loudly … and continue business as usual. There are reasons for what happened and what will happen. Whatever we do today has a consequence in the future, necessarily.

Let’s sit on our pillows and breathe, let us deeply investigate ourselves and thus understand what is going on: we are not separated, and all our actions have consequences!

In May I opened my new Dojo, and luckily without further advertisement nice people start attending the “Zen Introduction” and regular classes. I very much do enjoy exchange with the interesting characters who found their way into my Dojo the past couple of weeks. Not much of a chance the place will ever become a dulled “House of Silence”, there is plenty enough Sound of Silence when we sit on our pillows …

The other day a mother of an eleven years old son told me she had difficulties explaining to him what she is actually doing in the Dojo. Just sitting on a pillow, not talking … and the “teacher” is also silent most of the time.

“Zen-teacher sounds like a pretty cool job” her son replied, “even I can do it!”. “Let’s decorate our garden hut with some drapery, and people coming will pay me for doing nothing!”.

If running a place to study Zen was just that easy … a bit of decoration, and anything else to do is making people sit down, shut up (and pay). Said that, sometimes I get the impression certain Zen Dojo operate exactly that way: a place like a silent torture chamber with a pay slot, and all you can learn over the years is suffering silently in a prescribed posture. Well, you get what you pay for …

What then is “teaching Zen”? My approach after studying with and assisting good teachers over a long time, making many sorts of good and bad experiences, is: I can allow others to observe and participate my Zen-Way. Not just passively, as an onstage show-case which could as well be recorded and presented on youtube or TV, but actively, in a communicating fashion. When you come through the Dojo door, when you sit on your pillow, I see you, I see who you are … and if our communication succeeds, I have something to show to you which might help to improve your life!

My wish is this … not “teaching”, not “lecturing”, but an invitation to “participate” and “study” what I gratefully received and experienced with my teachers over decades of Zen-practise. The message might not arrive at first glance, we are so used to titles, authorities and other people cramming information into our over-full brains. Studying Zen is different, it starts with creating an empty space to allow growing something new. A garden hut is maybe not a bad place, I seriously thought about this alternative … just for the ambitious smart-pants: forget the drapery and the donation box for the time being!

This blog became rather silent. The reason is: I am very busy at my new Dojo. After searching, waiting and negotiating a specific location in my current home-town (Mülheim an der Ruhr/Germany) for more than a year, I am happy to announce that the Doraku-An Zen-Dojo has a new place to practice Zazen, Hitsuzendo and soon Aikido and Iaido!

Although I am still setting up the Dojo, regular Zazen as well as weekly introduction classes are already offered from the first day I got the key for the house (and visited by people who happened to find and hopefully like the new Dojo). From July on we will have a fixed schedule with Aikido and Iaido included into our regular exercise.

Practice hours can be found on the Dojo homepage (currently in German only) and on the Dojo’s facebook-page (German/English). We will also offer one-day seminars on Zazen and Hitsuzendo every first Saturday of a month (from July on).

Guests are always welcome, the location is easy to reach by foot from Mülheim an der Ruhr Central Station.

larger view

Every now and then I write about my Zen approach towards photography, for which I coined the term Shazendo (写禅道). As I outlined in previous posts, I believe photography can be practised as a real Zen Art or Zen Way (Zendo 禅道), similar to Hitsuzendo (筆禅道), the Zen Way with brush and ink.

Recently I had the idea to extend Shazendo beyond just taking pictures by including certain steps of post-processing to completely change the look of the finished imagery. What sounds pretty technical and maybe far away from any direct and simple Zen approach is actually the opposite: I use modern digital techniques to get even closer to the images I have in mind (or, poetically speaking, I see with my heart) when pressing the shutter. It’s not just those accidental rays of light which happen to pass through my camera’s lens in a fraction of a second at some coincidental day and time that I want to communicate. It is the whole way of experiencing a certain location, a certain atmosphere, and it is also a dialogue with my artist ancestors’ past attempts to visualise the same subject.

Concerning Japan, a very popular traditional method of image creation is woodblock printing. Once considered a cheap craft for mass production, the artistic qualities of certain prints are nowadays beyond question, not just because of their strong influence on Western artists like Vincent van Gogh and others. While taking pictures in Japan I every now and then realised my view on a subject was pre-occupied (or sharpened) by certain woodblock-prints I had seen before, and from time to time I wished to capture a scene more in the coarse style of such a print rather than producing a high resolution digital image.

Recently I visited an exhibition of the European artist Emil Orlik, who went to Japan at the beginning of the 20th century to improve his skills in woodblock printing. What I saw inspired me trying to carve out this certain view from my own images, yet with 21st century digital technology. I am not really sure the modern process is anyhow easier to accomplish than the ancient craft, especially when considering that the artist designing the plot, the wood carver and eventually the printer used to be three different people. After various trial and error I eventually found a work-flow which allowed me to achieve some satisfying results, which come closer to what I actually saw and experienced than any plain photographic image.

A collection of my first tries with “woodblock-print photography” can be seen on my facebook page in the album “A View from the Outside”. Please enjoy!

Cherry blossom was at it’s peak when I returned from a five days Zen-practise at Joutoku-ji in the countryside North-West of Kyoto. Once a great party appreciating impermanence under blooming trees, hanami of the digital age appears to become more and more a picture-hunting event. Not a single beautiful tree without masses of people watching it through the displays of their mobile-phones or more expensive photography equipment. There must be a billion pictures of cherry blossoms taken by the Japanese and tourists every year! Unable to simply enjoy the fleeting beauty, I couldn’t withstand the temptation of adding not just a few digital blossoms to the virtual cherry orchard.

Obai-in, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji in the North of Kyoto had a special opening these days. The temple is famous for it’s beautifully maintained garden, one of the finest in Kyoto (designed by Sen no Rikyu), yet photography is strictly forbidden. What a relief, to enjoy the beautiful place for more than an hour until it closed, without even thinking about taking a single picture! This experience made me once more realise how much my camera sometimes obstructs what I actually could see and experience, if it was not just through a viewfinder or display.

In this week’s “ZEITmagazin” I read an interview with Elton John. I don’t know much of his music, but part of the interview addressed a similar point:

What’s all that nonsense with mobile-phone pictures? What kind of people is that who come with iPads to the concerts and shoot everything? They don’t watch the show at all, but only stare at their iPad! That’s sick!  Elton John (1)

For me it remains a tightrope walk to find the balance between photography as a Zen-way and true Zen-practise, or experience taking pictures as just getting in the way of any real experience.

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(1) Interview with Elton John, “Das beste Bett aller Zeiten”, ZEITmagazin Nº 16/2014 (the English quotation is my back-translation from the German text).

Some time ago I wanted to attend a one-day Zazenkai conducted by Brad Warner near the place I live. I never met him, but I once read one of his books and thought it might be interesting to see him in person. It did not come true, I caught a bad flu and had to stay in bed all day long … I mention this because the on-line registration procedure for the seminar was quite remarkable: I had to specify weather I was “beginner”, “lay person” or “ordained”.

I don’t remember anyone ever asked me such question. Maybe, when leading seminars or Sesshin the participants assume I must be a “Zen Monk” because I am teaching? Or they assume I am not a “Zen Monk” because I am not Japanese, or because I still have some of my hair left and occasionally talk of my daughter? Very likely they don’t care at all about ranks and titles and are more interested in what I am saying and doing …

Recently I read an article where some American Zen teacher describes his life as an ordained Zen Monk with having a job, a family, a house, a car, a mortgage and a life insurance, very much like anyone else. I thought that’s interesting … so what does it mean then, being a “Monk”? And in addition, maybe we might need a new name for those who indeed give up all their belongings, forever leave home, shave their head, live in celibacy only from begging, and who spend all day and night in meditation, studying and teaching the Dharma?

I am not in preference of the one or other life-style, both come along with few advantages and severe hardships. Yet I have a certain feeling that imagining a “Zen Monk” busy fixing his carport roof on a free Sunday afternoon while his wife expects him to finish soon and help preparing some snacks before the members of the local school committee will come over for their monthly meeting is slightly disturbing. I imagine the same person, dressed up in a Japanese style robe during a weekend-long Zen-retreat might derive advantage from the cliché of an austere Monk having spent years in unheated Temples somewhere high up in the mountains together with his old Master, just coming down for a few days to offer his teachings.

If asked in person (and not by a web-interface), how would I respond? Living with a family, a job, having some belongings (even an old car) … yet leading Sesshin, giving Dharma talks, once receiving what is called the 10 Grave Percepts and a Dharma name, and from time to time living in an unheated Zen temple in Japan – someone who is going and sharing Ways of Zen? What is that? Cheekily I borrow a prominent testimony from an ancient Japanese Buddhist (not from the Zen branch), who described himself as “非僧非俗（ひそうひぞく）”Neither Monk nor Lay Person”. This concept is almost 800 years old … yet, for some Zen-practitioners it might provide a surprisingly fresh and honest inspiration.

Though, if forced again to select from a pre-defined multiple-choice, I’d not hesitate to chose “beginner” again …

Some time ago I visited an interesting Japan-related photography exhibition. During the introductory talk an eminently educated scholar related the artwork on display to avant-garde and it’s relation to different periods in the history of art, to other contemporary work, and to aspects of the ethnological approach of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He pointed out, to properly understand your own culture the view from outside is essential. For the German photographer going to Japan was a necessary precondition to develop his specific view towards his own culture.

Recently I began seriously questioning if I should not give up the more traditional aspects within my practise and teaching. Does it really make sense for us 21st century Westerners to burn incense, perform polite bowing when entering a Dojo, recite a Sutra in ancient language, maybe even wear Japanese style clothing? Is my teaching of writing Chinese characters on the floor with a big brush (Hitsuzendo) or handling a Japanese wooden sword (Aikiken) really suitable for us? Or couldn’t we sit as well on comfortable chairs and discuss over a cup of tea? Why not? Just because I spent decades with and therefore love the Japanese aesthetics so much … should my personal taste count as a sufficient argument?

I got another inspiration through the scholar’s talk at the above mentioned exhibition. Putting everything into a setting coming from a completely different cultural background, our ways of perception get re-adjusted. It is usually the task of art and poetry to present the presumably familiar in a new, unexpected or maybe shocking way. Could this approach to open our eyes and senses, this looking back from the outside at what we thought to know be helpful for understanding ourselves in a better way?

During a Sesshin or seminar conducted in a Japanese-style environment everything is new, every movement, every activity seems to make somehow sense and is yet so strange. All sensations from hearing over seeing to smelling and the perception of the body sitting on a cushion on the floor is new. A perfect condition to learn something new, to leave something old behind! Looking back from such exotic experience to my ordinary day to day life, I have a chance to discover something new in there as well. I discover patterns and structures and habits I have not been aware before, a first necessary step towards changing them.

I will stick with the Japanese Rinzai-Zen inspired approach of teaching I call Raku-Zen. It provides the precious opportunity to look at our every-day life from the outside.

Today three years ago the disastrous earthquake and tsunami occurred which triggered the meltdown of three blocks of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Over 300.000 people had to be evacuated, many of them for an uncertain time to be. While the dead are buried and mourned and rest in peace, the living still suffer. From beginning of April 2014 former residents of an eastern strip of the Miyakoji district of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, are “being allowed” to return back to their homes.

I vividly remember an evening in May 1986. I was cycling for two hours through heavy rain, and after arriving back home all soaked I heard the urgent warning on radio not to go out. A few days earlier a catastrophic disaster had occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant, some 1500 km away. Over the day the politicians’ soothing message repeating there would never be any danger “for us” was replaced by scary news of ever increasing radiation levels.

The summer was awful, friends of mine engaged in organic farming had the radioactive contamination of their grass and harvest measured and decided to discard all the milk from their cattle. Mothers were concerned about food safety and we helped them to measure radiation levels with cheap and clumsy devices, just to find occasional probes contaminated far beyond any safety limits. At playgrounds and school-yards “hot spots” of singular highly radioactivity particles were found, and I spent a significant part of my spare time explaining to an ever growing audience the scientific basics of what radio-activity is and how it can cause harm … it was a time of much fear and much confusion.

Remembering my own experiences from 1986, I feel with those who have no chance but to return to a superficially decontaminated area. The objective risk for children developing cancer later in their life is adding to the fear concerning something which cannot be sensed, only measured and reasoned. By operating a technology which can cause such harm over centuries if not millennia to come, I wonder if this shouldn’t be considered a new kind of “dukkha”? Not like the “dukkha” known under that name for 2500 years, a suffering caused by circumstances unavoidably linked to human life (birth, ageing and death) or man-made distress (greed, aversion and delusion), but a suffering from a man-made impossible future, which does not provide any hope to live “good” and “healthy” ever again? The “nuclear dukkha”.

Recently I read a description (1) of how a young Western Buddhist tried to convince an educated Monk in the Tibetan tradition that the world is not, as the monk was sure to know, flat and square shaped with the huge Mount Meru in in it’s centre and surrounded by a circular ocean. They did not reach agreement though, and the Western Buddhist had to admit his arguments for a spherical earth were no better than those of the monk for the square with mountain.

This is a strikingly honest insight. If you lack the scientific training to either find out the way things are by yourself, or at least follow your fellow scientists’ arguments in all detail, it makes no difference if you believe the narratives of the one or the other grey-haired (or bald) wise old man or woman. In our enlightened Western society, the vast majority of people believing, for example, that the earth is spherical simply do believe so. They do not know, and even worse, they don’t even know they do not know.

The other day I received a message from Thailand. An old friend of mine who was ordained in the Theravada tradition a decade ago informed me the universe experienced 91 big bangs so far, and took this as a proof for the superiority of Buddhist wisdom, since modern science has not yet been able to confirm such ancient truth. Others try to proof their rendering of certain Buddhist beliefs by findings of modern Physics, namely Quantum Mechanics. Astrophysics and Quantum Mechanics. For a rather intelligent person it takes at least five years of dedicated full time academic study to master the basics of these disciplines … so if one takes a few random quotes from popular science literature to illustrate one’s spiritual believes, isn’t this just blending believe with believe? Like merging a square shaped earth with a spherical one and call it convergence of western science and Buddhist wisdom?

Shouldn’t maybe any serious Buddhist study nowadays begin with an undergraduate course in modern science? Just to catch up with some basics of an educated world view of the 21st century, for sharpening the mind towards a better awareness for the line separating what can be weighted and measured and what experienced by other means? And to thoroughly understand the difference between to know and to believe?

Though it might be more comfortable and soothing to just turn over and over again the prayer wheel enshrining ancient scriptures, and throw in some scientific believes here and there …

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(1) Stephen Bachelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Spiegel&Grau (2010)
(2) Martin Brauen, The Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism, Shambala Publications (1997)