ardha matsyEndrAsanA

out of the corner of my eye,
ardha nArISvarA, rectangles of light-
outside the wind howls

falllllll...ing.

yesterday was a beautiful fall day and i markedly felt a sadness at the passing away of fall, of crimson leaves falling from the vine maple tree which i could see from my bed, through the gap in the crimson drapes of my bedroom window (okay it is crimson from my bed but the outer surface is bleached due to constant exposure to sunlight and is probably an ugly rose colour from outside). the tree is almost bare now, like the lady whose hair comes off in clumps, in hiroshima mon amour. there are still some leaves in the lower branches but the grass below is littered with lovely leaves, arranged in that wonderful random order which only nature can pull off, a heady combination of beauty and imperfection, order and disorder. soon it will be bare twigs and the leaves below will be raked up and bagged in ugly black polythene sacks to be taken to some faraway dump.

here is an aloo dum recipe i tried today. its partly something i read online and partly experimental.

peel and cut potatoes into 1.5 in crescent shaped wedges, boil till they are al dente, drain, add turmeric and chilli powder, mix and set aside.

grind onions, tomatoes, green chillies, ginger and garlic in a blender.

in a thick pan, add oil and fry mustard seeds, star anise, raisins and cumin and then add the remaining onions and when it turns translucent, add the potatoes and fry for a while. then add the ground paste and simmer till the raw smell goes away. add garam masala and let it simmer. finally add salt, sugar and garnish with coriander leaves.

serve with hot chapatis and/or rice.

okay, i did not give precise measurements. just experiment with quantities.

and btw precise is an anagram of recipes or an antigram in my case.

hiroshima, mon amour

yesterday, i watched alain resnais' masterpiece of a movie, his first feature film- a love story set in the most unlikely of places- hi-ro-shi-ma. as the movie progresses, we understand that it is a perfect place to fall in love, especially of the hopeless, doomed kind and any personal tragedy is outshadowed by the tragedy that befell the city in 1945, one that continues to exist despite the city having been resurrected. the opening shot of the arms of entwined lovers covered with a layer of ash that continues to fall slowly and softly like snow finally gives way to a documentary like walk through the events of hiroshima narrated by the film's unnamed heroine. we are shown impassive faces in spotlessly clean hospitals, legs of zombie like hordes of japanese people walking the aisles of a museum and viewing almost surreal objects (a bicycle melted into a pretzel, a bouquet of caps), images of horror- of peeled skin and vaporized bodies and mutilated faces and also signs of life- ants and earthworms crawling out of the earth on day 2. alain was asked to originally make a documentary but after having watched the ones the japanese had made commented that there was nothing left for him to make and asked marguerite duras to write a script with a love story set in hiroshima, a script he would strictly adhere to. in many ways, hiroshima mon amour is a story about remembrance and forgetting, of the unraveling of time, of transference and of catharsis. along with rashomon and citizen kane, it brilliantly uses flashbacks (something which is so obvious and banal today but was relatively uncommon then) to reconstruct the heroine's past which we learn was another tragic love story, l'amour premiere, that most powerful of loves, to a german officer who is killed by a sniper minutes before they meet and dies in her arms.

lights far way,
through leaves
of dense autumnal tints

-Shiki Masaoka

hunter's moon

i walked back home around 6 yesterday. the sun had just set but there was still a lot of light and the sky was a rosy pink and there she was in the midst of urban ugliness- power lines, smoke stacks and concrete- but untouched by the grime, noise, and man-made civilization. she kept me company as i walked home, playing peekaboo with me around trees and chimneys.

this fall, i have been observing and admiring the moon a lot. she's a welcome visitor in my house- earlier in my living room and then my kitchen and lately my bedroom. i drew aside my curtains at about 4 am two morns ago and there she was- resplendent and present. sometimes, especially in winter due to the dry air, i get up in the middle of the night or in the wee hours of the morning to drink some water. there is a certain quiet beauty and stillness seeing the moonbeam entering through the kitchen window and lighting the floor.

snow country

i completed snow country by yasunari kawabata last night. it was amazing. much of the feelings expressed in the novel are revealed by their absence than explicit actions or words. it is essentially a love story, a tragic one-sided love a young, feisty geisha named komako has for the protagonist shimamura. he is a married man, lives in tokyo, dabbles in theory of western dance (even though he has never been to a single performance) and spends a lot of time in the mountains and the hot spring village, where he meets komako and where the novel is set, save a short excursion to nearby villages. the hot spring village, which is never named, is in the snow country of remore western japan, a land of forbidding but desolate beauty where 10-12 ft winter snowfalls are not uncommon.

with sparse language bordering on haiku, kawabata masterfully evokes the emotions, the change of seasons, passage of time and the evanescence of life itself. besides these two characters, there is yoko whose ambiguous, shadowy spectral presence permeates the novel culminating in the highly ambiguous denouement. her reflection is the one shimamura obsessively focuses on, during his first train journey into the hot spring village; the fusion of her reflection on the glass and the mountain scenery outside and the fleeting images are described beautifully. she and komako seem to share a love-hate relationship, possibly as a result of vying for the same man (or men), the son of the music-teacher in whose house komako lives and for whom she becomes a geisha to pay his medical bills. nothing is explicitly stated. the events in the book are at the same time deliberate and spontaneous, like a tea-ceremony. shimamura's feelings for komako are never revealed while he admits at some point to himself that she likes him and her actions seem to agree with that. yet, it is hard to believe that he felt nothing for her. the doomed, unrequited love of komako is a poignant portrayal of wasted beauty of the hot spring geishas, who apparently move from one to another, each change drawing them more into misery and waste. running through the book is this thread of acts which are seemingly pointless- komako's love, shimamura's hobby, the traditional (and possibly dying, at the time of writing) art of weaving linen threads in the winter snow into a fabric that is part of summer kimonos, yoko's time spent in the cemetery mourning the dead man. and yet to each of them, their actions are important and fulfilling and seemingly purposeful. or maybe they simply do not realize that. or maybe be they do and still do it.

i will probably reread the novel. it is a complex work that can possibly evoke varied moods depending on that of the reader. perhaps a winter reading will reveal facets of the novel i missed during my autumnal read.

who am i?

One of the suggestions for focusing during zazen is to ask "Who am I?" with an obvious or not so obvious "Don't know" answer, typically questioning during inhalation and answering during exhalation. This is similar and yet different from the upanishadic/vedantic advice of meditating on this question, the answer being the Answer to all questions.

watching an old man and an old woman walking on the lawn, Alzheimer's came randomly to my mind. don't people with Alzheimer's also perhaps ask the same question sometime? wouldn't it be frightening not to know who you are? yet, in reality, we do not clearly know who we are. we are clearly more than a label, an appellation attached to pounds of flesh and tissue. so who is m? is there a big difference between questioning "who am I?" and not remembering who one is?

another such apparent conflict between "psychology" and buddhism is the concept of self. Oliver Sacks moving describes a patient who has completely lost his short term memory and is "stuck somewhere in the late 60s" in his An Anthropologist on Mars and wonders if he had a sense of self. he was truly living moment to moment, a state zen exhorts its practitioners to get into. curiously disturbing.

one final thought, again a conflict. autistic people are not supposed to feel any emotions. yet in buddhism, the practitioner's compassion is awakened and one feels a great empathy for all sentient beings. i wonder how an autist would respond to imeditation (as opposed to medication). are there people fundamentally incapable of feeling? how much of our (as in supposedly non autistic people) feelings are "real"? to use a mundane example, take love. after 'surreal', it is the most abused word. we love x,y,z. we love tv serials, going on long drives, our pets. and yet, we can do cruel acts to people we love.

mapping the senses

this weekend's episode of this american life focused on maps and mapping but the meaning of mapping was extended beyond the usual geographical confines to cover all the five senses. Each act, five in all, covered sight, smell, sound, taste and touch respectively. for the first sense (in some sense, the only one which made sense and was not overly contrived), they had a guy in NC making neighbourhood maps of anything you can imagine- houses with Halloween pumpkin, pattern of light falling through the leaves, houses with people featured on local papers, criss-crossing patterns of cable and utility line maps- basically stretching the definition and purpose of cartography to an artistic sensibility driven creative process. it was no longer mundane, in the true sense of the Latin root meaning world. the other acts were interesting but to call them mapping was a stretch. an electronic nose, a hypochondriacal woman who obsessively palpates her breasts, a chap who

i can see a sequel to this episode covering just the brain. after all these senses do not make, um sense, without the brain. starting from the homunculus which maps the body parts onto the somatosensory and motor cortical regions of the brain to the recent obsession with fMRI based brain mapping.

the desert smells like rain

petrichor is a coinage for the most wondrous of smells- the smell of rain on earth, the smell of red earth and pouring rain. often claimed by many as their most favourite smell, it is supposedly a complex odour created by more than 50 chemicals with redolent names like geosmin.

gary paul nabhan's book captures the world of Papago indians (or more poetically O'Odham in their native tongue) and their Sonoran desert environs with a rare sensitivity and beauty that vanilla natural history books lack. i found the book at Strand Books after several years of hunting in used and new book stores (of course i could've found it online but didn't want to). and incidentally i kept it on my makeshift kitchen altar for saraswathi puja and read it this morning for vijayadasami. it also tackles issues threatening their lifestyle- political problems caused by an artificial border, water hungry and resource devouring anglo-american farming practices and the challenges of keeping their culture and practices alive but without the unbalanced, rhetorical and often polemical approach that characterizes such conflicts.

The title, gary explains in the first chapter, is the answer a young papago boy gives him when he (gary) asked him what came to his mind first with the mention of desert. the papago indians cultivate solely on run-off water after the first late summer rains, a capricious beast that often is propitiated with the drinking (and vomiting afterwards as he wonderfully describes the ceremony in another chapter poetically titled "Throwing up the clouds") of cactus wine. over hundreds of years, they have developed a simple and efficient network of arroyos for channelizing the runoffs and feeding their fields. Gary's descriptions of the stirrings of life following the first rain are enough to make the book worth it. Turtles wake up from their slumber and blindly rush into the water ( it is as if their bodies know it), toads rise and hurriedly make love in a frenzy, winged ants flying around, amaranth seeds bursting into life.

and quietly in the middle of all this, almost inexplicably, rises the smell of the desert, the smell of rain.

work practice

today i helped Dan build a wall for his mum's flower bed. it seemed easy but was tough work. we dug a trench a foot wide and about 6 in deep and leveled it and then filled it with a layer of gravel before laying bricks shaped like annular sectors. we had to haul the gravel and bricks using a lawnmower (or lawnmover?). i thought of it as work practice we do in sesshin. we didn't chitchat and all talk was technical.

the sunset was exceptional. the day started out with clear blue skies but by 3 PM fleecy clouds and wispy swirls started making their appearance. the birches and the red oak against the dark grey swirls looked interesting. and then by 5 PM, the sky was wine-dark as the Greek chap was wont to say but the horizon was still cloud free. the light and colours were extraordinary when the last rays of the sun hit the birches and the red oak tree. i loved taking crepuscular shots of the majestic oak trees and pines silhouetted against a dark orange sky. i had not enjoyed sunset like this in a long time (possibly the last time was on the beach in Diego, Dec 2000). by the time i drove out it was dark and moon deigned to peep out of the clouds. it was rounded, like a belly 6 months with child. i can't wait till next week for the Hunter's moon something tells me it will be cloudy !

kleshas (defilements)

108 butter lamps to counter 108 defilements, Reru, Zanskar (Himalayas)

We heard a nice dharma talk by Steve Armstrong on obstacles to mindfulness. He used the term defilements which is an approximate English translation of Skt. klesha sometimes translated as hindrances or distractions. I now paraphrase his talk from memory (stuff in brackets mine).

When we sit (in zazen), there are visitations of various kinds that try and veer us away from mindfulness. Wanting (i need a better cushion), not wanting (if only the next person didn't move her leg), restlessness (i want to get back and cook), sleepiness (oh well what can i say) are all defilements of various kinds. The basic three are desire (greed), hatred and delusion with various combinations of these adding up to a 1000 in the Burmese tradition !!.

Similar to Jiddu, Steve suggests that the real way to overcome these defilements is not to express (by giving vent) or suppress them or even sublimate them (using metta, for example, to change anger to kindness although it is a good interim solution) but to observe them, especially their rise and ebb. To notice their presence, to accept their presence and finally, to watch where its birth and death. He likens them to paper tigers in that paying attention to them (by giving in to them) will only strengthen them and suggested tongue-in-cheek that a Nancy Reagan approach of saying no helps !! Steve also pointed out that we mistake these defilements for personality traits. For example, if we give ourselves to anger frequently, we say we are short-tempered by nature or impatient or whatever. According to the Buddhist view, the mind is inherently devoid of defilements and pure.

The regular tools for developing concentration or awareness including mantra practice, chanting, breath counting, breath following, awareness of body sensations, awareness of external noises are all basically useful for achieving a quiet mind (samadhi). Insight meditation or vipasyana on the other hand is the systematic investigation of whatever that comes up (typically defilements). Jiddu basically says the same thing. But it seems that the former is needed to be even able to do the latter unless you are an intense, gifted personality which Jiddu and others probably were and didn't that practice. A cliched analogy is to liken the mind to a pool of water, ripples being thoughts and murkiness being defilements like anger which cloud the mind.

I (i.e. my thinking mind) cannot but help notice differences and contradictions between this view (largely Theravadin or Vipasana) and the Mahayana Zen view. Zen master Seung Sahn Sunim of the Kwanum school often exhorted his students to make one's mind pure and clear, clear like space. "Then when red comes it is red, when white white. When someone is hungry feed them or thirsty give them a drink". Simple and clear. Zen doesn't explicitly indulge in this analysis of thought. When thinking mind is cut-off, the mind's true nature naturally manifests. It seems that samsara and living in the day to day world is incompatible with the letting go of desire, aversion and delusion. In Zen, attachment to desire is the problem and not the desire per se. Maybe that's why they say, its like climbing the mountain and then back down over the other side i.e. samsara to nirvana and back but something has changed- subtly yet profoundly. Daido roshi calls it a working samadhi. Now there is no contradiction between following the precepts and drinking sake, between inner and outer, between saying a dog has buddha nature and saying it does not have a buddha nature, between you and me.

smile

Once during his stay at Mount Grdrakuta (vulture peak), the Buddha prepared to address the gathering of monks but sat without saying a word. After a while, he held up a flower and only Mahakashyapa smiled. Seeing his smile, the Buddha said, "My true Dharma is transmitted to Mahakashyapa." This is historically considered in Zen as the first transmission outside the scriptures something which later became central to Zen and the Zen patriarchate.

What if no one had smiled? Or what if everyone had smiled? Or if the Buddha had remained silent? Would the dharma still be here now?

yoga

while this should have been more obvious, i never gave serious thought to the yogic elements in Buddhism specifically Zen. the zazen posture recommended by the Rinzai Zen school as well as some Soto Zen schools is padmasana (full lotus), a yoga classic. susokkan or breath counting or for that matter any breath control suggested in zen is shared with other indic (yogic) traditions. it possibly reflects the fact that the Buddha didn't simply reject everything about the philosophical systems extant during his search for the truth and create something out of nothing (or is it no-thing). he did choose the middle path between asceticism and hedonism but elements of yoga are indispensably part of his middle path.

the soto school maintains that shikantaza or just sitting is all there is to zen practice which means paying careful attention to posture. the correlation between posture and concentration is quite easily observable even doing 15 min. of zazen. philosophically, Buddhism differs considerably from sankhya or whatever school Patanjali's yoga sutras fall into. someday i hope to piece through the metaphysics and dialetics of these schools, maybe not in this lifetime. it will be great to reconstruct the arguments the Buddha might have had with the teachers he studied with- Alara Kalama or Udaka Ramaputta. but then if may not help anyone except historians. a realistic dream of mine is to write a play set on the day of his leaving the palace, wife and son. three acts- morning, afternoon and night. what would he have said to his wife or to his sleeping son? what was going on in his mind? how could he justify abandoning them? what kind of uncertainty it would have been? would he have broached it with anyone esp. his wife earlier?

asymmetry

"as the art of tea evolved, the aesthetic of wabi emerged which eschews extravagance and wastefulness. it is characterized by simplicity, naturalism, profundity, imperfection, and asymmetry. it emphasizes restrained, unadorned objects and architectural space, and celebrates the natural beauty of materials given expression through skillful craftsmanship"

- from the seattle branch of the urasenke foundation that promotes cha-no-yu the japanese art of tea.

we normally tend to give a lot of weightage to symmetry. it is admired and emulated in art (typically western art). people talk of symmetry in nature but in reality, there is very little symmetry in nature. take the human body- one kidney is higher than the other, one lung smaller, one eye a bit different, the heart is more to the left, the left and right halves of the brain being different is almost a cliche. japanese aesthetics is the only one i know of which emphasises asymmetry and imperfection, probably a zen influence. the japanese tea ceremony as we know today owes its development to two key figures Murata Shuko and Senno Rikyu (15th and 16th c), the latter being the legendary tea master and is often eponymous with the japanese tea ceremony itself. they shifted the focus from lavish gatherings and fine Chinese porcelain to a ceremony that emphasises wabi-sabi and the beauty of the present moment and the imperfection. the host and the guest are almost equals and every small detail, every movement, every swish is important.

finally, the enso, the famous zen circle is never complete. why?

connectedness

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-“ with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. Without sunshine, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. The logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see ourselves in this sheet of paper too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

From "Peace is Every Step" by Thich Nhat Hahn

where the green ants dream

the clash between old and new, paleolithic and computer age, black and white, pastoral and nomadic are millenia-old and controversial and prone to polemics. this compelling film (which could easily be mistaken for a documentary if not for direct conversation and some herzogian touches almost bordering on the absurd) covers the clash between aboriginals and a (white) mining company over a land the aboriginals hold sacred- the place where the green ants dream. in the voice over, Herzog claims he made up the green ant dreamtime but in reality such a thing (not sure if it is green) exists but elsewhere in NE Australia. Based on an early legal battle which was ongoing when Herzog was visiting Australia between an opal mining company and aboriginal people of Central Australia, the movie is filled with beautiful, stark and sometimes bizarre imagery starting from an almost eerie, speckled movie of a tornado shot in Oklahoma which strangely enough sets the tone for this very quiet movie. The aboriginals lose the case but the sympathetic judge laments that he is merely following the law of the land even though it is not very fair to the aboriginal people. Later cases were apparently overwhelmingly in favour of the aboriginal people. There are classical Herzogian touches and images- the poignant scene where the 'mute' goes up to the witness box and speaks in a language which no one can translate as he is the sole surviving speaker, the rest of his tribe having died out, reminiscent of the melancholic beauty of Ray Bradbury's short story The Foghorn; the courtroom scene where the two watches worn by the tribe elder goes off; the harrowed search for Mrs Strelow's dog lost in the underground mine chambers; the two elders (mala-mata pair?) sitting in the airplane which is green and almost insect like staring at the East where the green ants fly to; the final scene where the geologist decides to quit mainstream life and science and go live in the outback and walks amidst conical piles of earth dug by the opal boring drills. Oh and there are snatches of a South American futbol commentator orgasming like a fire engine siren on a goal (Argentina scored i believe) played out on a radio, something Herzog claims he listens to whenever he is disturbed !! And there are a couple of mesmerising didgeridoo tracks played by the elder himself.

There is a bit of a "we are natives, so we are in tune with the land, you white people know only to destroy" tone running through the movie which Herzog expresses regret for in the voice over (done many years later) but it is never overdone or sentimental or overly moralizing. Herzog has since challenged the relationship between man and nature, most recently in Grizzly man.

Not surprisingly, i immediately linked it to Chatwin's songlines and it turns out Chatwin and Herzog did meet and talked 24 hours nonstop about everything on earth (Chatwin did 2/3rd of it). Herzog also inherited Chatwin's leather rucksack after his death.

seasons

walking into work, i realized (and i am joining countless others but feel prompted to write about it nevertheless) i am on the summer-autumn cusp of life. if we ascribe eighteen years to each "season" in keeping with the traditionally accepted (but arbitrary) designation of adulthood at 18, then it fits perfectly. the other similarities/associations are obvious- spring/green/young, summer/flowering/maturing and winter/aging/white. autumn is beautiful and sobering in many ways and my favourite season. and the best for moon-viewing.

i couldn't resist a google search with "seasons human life" and i found this-


Winter (with detail). Original approximately 35 x 45 cm. From The Four Seasons of Human Life. Property of Duke University Medical Center Library, Trent Collection, History of Medicine Collections, Durham, NC. Photographed by Bill Bamburger.

a distant crow caws,
a cough and a sigh
brings me back to aching knees

pine is not elm

even the pines are trying to change raiments, emulating their deciduous cousins. one afternoon, tired from hours of zazen, i laid myself down on the bare wooden boards that form the outer walking corridor of the zendo, smoothed by thousands of footsteps, mindful and not so mindful, and listened to the tree. it was unintelligible. she spoke a different tongue from the cottonwood- sort of like chinese vs. japanese both unintelligible but differentiable from one another. or maybe my mind was trying to make it all up. it was just the wind blowing. as if in response, the wind picked up and a flurry of needles in bunches of five landed on me. the doan (time keeper) struck the wooden board twice- ten minutes left for the next zazen period. i wonder what lin-chi would have said if i had told him about this. three blows with a stick. probably well deserved.

evanescence

reminds me of dogen's classic waka

to what shall
i liken the world ?
moon light reflected,
in dew drops
shaken from a crane's bill.

fall is just two weeks old, officially. strange that humans have to invent dates and clocks and calendars and even make spring and fall official as if mother's day and veterans' day are not enough. the tree tops are already baring their desolate brown branches, shivering with nothing but rags of remaining leaves against the cold rain. soon even that will be gone replaced by a stillness that only snow can produce.

llaf

was at hokyoji wed-sun (3-7) for the fall sesshin led by tim burkett. looking forward to moon viewing, which was beautiful but far from full. hokyoji means catching-the-moon, the moon being a favourite subject zen masters and zen poets return to again and again. tim in his first dharma talk spoke about the moon. it does not matter whether it is full, half or even new, it continues to shine . almost like the story of the two monks arguing about the waving flag- what moves- the flag or the wind? or the mind as the master told them.


amid autumn leaves
and sesshin's silence
how i long for the full moon !