“Zen Conversations” Epilogue

The May 2024 issue of Tricycle magazine includes an abbreviated description of the personal experience which eventually led me to Zen practice. I provided a fuller account of the event in the epilogue to Zen Conversations:

Epilogue in Island View

There is a story Elaine MacInnes is fond of telling about a Little Salt Doll who went on a journey to explore the world. She had many new experiences and saw many interesting places. “Then one day she came to the edge of the sea and was quite astounded by the restless surging mass of water. ‘What are you?’ she cried. ‘Touch me and you will find out,’ answered the sea. So the little salt doll stuck her toe in, and had a truly lovely sensation. But when she withdrew her foot, the toe had disappeared. ‘What have you done to me?’ she cried. ‘You have given something of yourself in order to understand,’ the sea replied.

“The little salt doll decided that if she really wanted to know the sea, she would have to give more of herself. So next she stuck in her whole foot, and everything up to her ankle disappeared. Surprisingly, in an inexplicable way, she felt very good about it. So she continued going further and further into the sea, losing more and more of her self, all the while understanding the sea more deeply. As a wave broke over the last bit of her, the salt doll was able to cry out, ‘Now I know what the sea is. It is I.’” [Elaine MacInnes, Zen Contemplation: A Bridge of Living Water (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001).]

There is a room attached to my garage which a previous owner had used as an art studio. The property is located on a high, steep bank overlooking the river that the First Nations community – to which my great-granddaughter belongs by virtue of her father’s family – call the Wolastoq, or Beautiful River. The people refer to themselves as Wolastoqiyik, People of the River.

I use the room as a private zendo. It is also used for winter storage and for several months of the year includes lawn furniture and bikes as well as my meditation cushion and mat. There is a wood stove, which I seldom have to use because the sunlight coming through the large windows warms the room even in winter. The tree tops I see through the north window as I sit are actually rooted fifteen to twenty feet further down the bank. Eagles frequently glide by on the air currents over the river, as many as a dozen at a time. Wildlife biologists suggest they are always on the lookout for food, but it’s hard to escape the notion that they are just frolicking for pleasure.

Every morning – except for, as Rinsen Weik put it, the ones I don’t – I come out here. On some winter mornings, it is dark enough that I need to light a candle. There is a Buddha figure placed not so much on an altar as on a shelf beneath that north window. There is also an abstract Haitian statue of the Virgin at the foot of the Cross, a “Stabat Mater” which I acquired when I was doing fair-trade importing. I light a stick of incense without any ceremony, then sit on the cushion, fold my legs, and sit in zazen until the incense stick expires. Outside, there is a set of wind chimes which frequently accompanies my sit along with the occasional sound of critters scurrying about in the rafters. And most morning – except for those I don’t – I look forward to this time.

In the flower bed outside, below the south window, there is a large garden Buddha now partially covered by moss. Like most of the Buddha and related figures I have, it was a gift from someone. I know only a handful of people in central New Brunswick who formally practice any form of Buddhism, but most of the people I know are aware that I seem to. They tend to be tolerant and treat it – if I may use Patrick Gallagher’s term – as an eccentric habit. It’s too difficult to try to explain that I don’t consider myself a Buddhist but rather a Zen practitioner. It isn’t a distinction that even always makes sense to those few professed Buddhists I know.

I have mobility problems, so I have not attended sesshin since Albert Low’s death. I do, however, still host the small sitting group which he asked me to organize in Fredericton. It has a core membership of about eight. The local Shambhala community has – for almost twenty years now – graciously allowed us to use their center one night a week. When Koun Franz’s Thousand Harbours Zen holds extended sits in Halifax, I try to attend. Both of these were, of course, suspended during the pandemic, so for over one full year my practice has been solitary except for bi-weekly Zoom conferences with Dosho Port with whom I am inching my way through the koan curriculum. I’m not in a hurry, and at my current pace it will be another decade before I complete it. Given that I have passed the biblically allotted three-score-and-ten-year lifespan, it’s possible I never will.

On rare occasions I will be asked about my practice. The question is usually posed something like, “What do you get out of it?” And the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” This is something I have been engaged in now for fifty years. I have no idea how my behaviour, my way of viewing things, my attitudes and values would have been different if I’d followed another path.

No one’s experience in Zen is the same as anyone else’s, although there tend to be – as these interviews have demonstrated – some commonalities.

When I was in my 20s, before I knew anything about Zen or Buddhism, I had a spontaneous experience. I had carelessly endangered another person through an act of gratuitous cruelty. I regretted my actions immediately and spent the rest of that evening, with some others, working to rectify the situation. It was nearly dawn before things were resolved, and I was able to return home. I was living in a small cottage, called Birkenbrae, on the outskirts of Fredericton. It was on a two-acre plot filled with wild flowers, fruit trees, and abandoned goat sheds. There was a wrought-iron bench in front of the house, and when I returned I was too exhausted to go to the door and unlock it, so I sat down on the bench. I was thoroughly ashamed of what I had done and felt disgusted with the type of person I had become.

And then it was as if I was just too tired to maintain the effort of being “Rick” any longer. I simply let go of that effort, and, immediately, it was like finding a clear signal on the radio dial. You move closer to the source of the signal as you drive or you nudge the dial just a bit and the static drops away and a signal comes through with absolute clarity – a signal which had always been there, but which you couldn’t pick up until the conditions were right.

It was an overwhelming feeling of connection with the entirety of Being and a sense that everything that exists is united in some way by love in the on-going process of creation which science calls evolution. That was how I expressed it to myself at the time. It was also absolutely clear to me that this was what people – although they weren’t aware of it – meant when they used the word “God.” It would be more than a year before I encountered the concept of Dao and recognized that, if a designation was needed, it was a more appropriate one.

I didn’t doubt the validity of this perception, but I did question what I had done to deserve it. In some ways, it was consistent with – although more intense than – experiences I’d had on psychedelics, which, perhaps, made me more open to accept it. I was also pretty sure that I couldn’t be unique; other people must have had similar experiences. The event redirected the academic work I was engaged in at the time and eventually led me to books on Asian spirituality in which I recognized a similar perspective. For a long time, I had an inflated sense of my own – wholly unearned – spiritual accomplishment. Many of the faux spiritual leaders of the period – like those whom John Negru encountered about this same time – had similar conceptions of their self-importance. Some even gathered disciples.

I, instead, was fortunate in discovering Zen practice. My Birkenbrae experience was acknowledged to have been an awakening, but it was also made clear to me that by itself it was of negligible significance, was little more than what Koun Franz referred to as a “burp of the mind.” It was only the first step in Torei Enji’s Long Maturation. That maturation remains an ongoing process, through which I have cultivated several qualities I treasure.

There is a sense of wonder that anything at all exists, a continual amazement at the reality of the universe and the fact that consciousness is inherent in it.

There is a sense of awe at the interdependence of Being in all its beauty and horror.

There is a – at times overwhelming – feeling of gratitude.

And there is sense of reverence, perhaps similar to what Rinzan Pechovnik referred to as tenderness with its connotation of “tending to.”

I may well have acquired these ways of understanding the world and my place in it without Zen; my initial insight, after all, came about before I had any awareness of Asian spiritualities. Nor am I proselytizing. But it remains the case that I have a sense of being understood when I speak of these matters – as I seldom do – with people engaged in Zen practice.

It is also possible that we are just journeying in tandem.

Above the river, two eagles are in synchronized flight, almost wingtip to wingtip, flying in giant loops over the water. Perhaps they are looking for food, but it seems as if they are just having fun.