Remembering Georg Feuerstein

In the past month three friends have had loved ones pass before their time.  Sitting with them in their grieving I have felt sturdy and present, like an Atlas with the world feeling completely light on my shoulders.  I was simply there to support; it was not my partner, my sibling, my friend who had passed on so young.  It was not my grief, so the burden was light.   But leaving them, I have felt fragile, felt the total weight of the world.  But leaving them, perhaps by their grief I was reminded of my own friends who have passed.  And other events in my life force me to recognize the fragility of the body on the one hand, and the complete lack of control I have over events in my own life on the other. 

Today I hear that Neil Armstrong passed.  Neil was actually somewhat mythic to me; I was born in DC, had family working in NASA, and as a history buff was aware of the political construction of his mythology as part of cold war strategy: America had taken "one giant step for mankind," not the USSR.  As Suzuki Roshi himself implied in his contemporaneous lectures recorded in "Not Always So," the actual importance of that step was wildly dubious.  Not only the spiritually minded understood this; a military mind as keen as Eisenhower's understood the space-race as pure politics.  Myths always shatter when we investigate them; but rather than losing meaning history allows mythology to become more rich and complex, deeply involved in social constructions and political strategies.  In my psyche, Armstrong held a rich and symbolic place in American history.  

Today I also heard of the passing of the great yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, whose work had a great impact on me.  The fact that the news came from a friend who knew and loved Georg heightened the affect.  These deaths, unlike watching my own loved ones grieve, simply reminded me: death is here.  It is here all the time.  People are dying, all the time.  Perhaps not the people we know, but if we think of all people, they are constantly drifting in and out of existence.  I recalled the first time visiting San Francisco after being in the Arizona desert for a long time.  I looked out over the city and thought to myself: "Wow: in that space I am looking at, someone is dying right now.  Someone is being born right now.  People are experiencing terrible suffering right now.  And others are experiencing the heights of bliss, in this very moment."  

As I rode my bike across the Fruitvale bridge from Alameda to Oakland, stopping to look at the channel, I suddenly felt at peace with death, as I have so often in the past.  This is part of being here, for this brief time.  Georg pursued the dharma and contributed to many lives while he was here.  Beyond that: he was a significant part of reshaping Western culture and may we continue his legacy in our own way by infusing our lives with the dharma and communicating the dharma as clearly and insightfully as possible.  His life was beautiful.  Life is transience and his transience was beautiful and so is our transience.  As I looked over the waters, instead of mourning his death, I felt increased inspiration to pursue and spread the dharma as he had.  Dark feelings were replaced by deep feelings of gratitude.    

What did Georg Feuerstein do?  I don't know much about his life.  But when I was young and in the desert and obsessed with Mircea Eliade (thanks, in fact, to James Bae who informed me of Georg's passing), Georg took me to a deeper level of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras than Eliade had done.  I don't refer to Patanjali much these days, and when I do, I use Edwin Bryant's commentary, but that doesn't matter: Bryant needed Feuerstein and maybe Feurestein needed Eliade.  There is a yogic-scholarly lineage.  And while it is brutally easy to criticize Eliade as a fascist these days - a real criticism which at the same time reveals an ineptitude at contemplating history - the fact remains that all three of these scholars practiced yoga with sincerity and communicated it to us with the utmost lucidity.  

Feuerstein was an incredible scholar and practitioner.  The practitioner side of him, the side of him that cared so much about spreading the yogic dharma in order to support all beings, allowed his scholarly side to be put to service and to communicate clear and concise histories to the broad yoga public.  Feurestein's "The Yoga Tradition" remains the best introduction to yoga for this public, and his "Encyclopedia of Yoga and Tantra" is the best way for general practitioners to familiarize themselves with the language of yoga.  His work lives on and will deeply inform the next generation of serious yoga practitioners.   

“May we not spend our days and nights in vain.”  I miss this chant; I miss those brief times in my life when I have chanted this daily with the sangha.  Recognizing the transience of life, with a community, is powerful, is a powerful way to sidestep delusion and be totally real with other people.  Together, may we not spend our days and nights in vain.  We do not know how long we will be here and that is okay.  In this moment we can cultivate the mind of enlightenment together and love each other. 

The meaning of not stealing

The thief

Left it behind

The moon at the window

Ryokan

In explaining the precept not to steal, Reb Anderson tells the story of an 18^th century monk and poet named Ryokan who lived in a small hut in the hills, possessing nothing: “One full moon night, a thief came to visit.  Ryokan was not at home, so the thief entered, but he found nothing to steal.  Ryokan returned and caught the thief and said, ‘I’m sorry that you came all this way and didn’t get anything.  Here, have my clothes.’  The thief was surprised, but he took the gift and stumbled off into the moonlit night.  After he had left, Ryokan, standing naked in the moonlight, cried out, ‘Poor fellow, he didn’t get much!  I wish I could give him this full moon, too.”    

Reb Anderson read this story before he was a Zen student.  Ryokan showed him a type of mind that he wanted to emulate, a mind that had perfected the attitude of not-stealing – that had perfected selflessness and generosity.  Ryokan had also perfected something else essential to not-stealing: the ability to be fulfilled by whatever he happens to have in the moment.  Ryokan does not need more, he does not need something else, be it different objects or different emotions or different events in his life.  

How does zazen cultivate not-stealing?  There is the mind that wants things, that seeks fulfillment by trying to get what it does not have.  Actually, there is the body that desires what it does not have, a body filled with energy driving it to seek fulfillment in delusory ways, in ways that will not actually lead to fulfillment, in ways that at best lead to transient satisfaction.  The mind may well understand that it will not be fulfilled so easily, but the energies in the body persist and overcome the mind.  This work with the body is at the core of Buddhism: learning to transcend our actions and thoughts that only lead to transient satisfaction means working with the body, and the way we do that is through meditation, by steadfastly facing, recognizing, and being compassionate with all the energies in the body.  So in zazen it may look like all we are doing is staring at a wall but really we are practicing deep honesty and love. 

Zazen perfects the precepts because zazen works on a body level; it forces us to sit with the energies in the body, gives those energies a chance to be seen and to settle down.  Zazen is a practice in finding fulfillment in this very moment; so zazen is actually the precept of not-stealing, of not trying to gain something, of not trying to seek fulfillment elsewhere.  But it goes both ways; the precepts also facilitate zazen, the active practices, visualizations, and contemplations of selflessness and generosity and fulfillment alter and calm the organism and facilitate the deepening of zazen.

Returning: Care is the Source of My Practice

I have, after contemplating it for months, returned to sewing my rakusu.  Sewing is an act of devotion and commitment and faith.  While sewing we chant, internally, the refuges in Japanese.  The refuges in Japanese translate something like this:  I plunge headfirst, with absolutely no hesitation, into the Buddha, dharma, and sangha.  I feel ready for my practice to embody this faith; for my body, speech, and mind to embody this faith.  Even in moments when I do not actually feel ready, after a great deal of thought and feeling I desire this and believe in this. So the blog is actually partly about learning to embody and to express this faith and the rest of the dharma as I slowly come to understand it.  As a form of speech I hope it in some way manifests my sincere attempt to explore the precept of speaking in a beneficial way, speaking in a way that in itself manifests the precepts to whatever degree I am able. 

And so it feels like the right time for me to restart the blog.  I would like to devote this new beginning to caring deeply, to recognizing that the desire to care is the source of my practice, and to recognizing that the practice makes the deepest forms of care possible.  

I have recently been making a practice of reflecting on the six perfections, or paramitas.  The one that comes to mind this evening is danaparamita, the perfection of generosity.  This is because, right now I am experiencing great difficulty in terms of being generous to myself, which is the major prerequisite of loving and caring for other beings.  I hope I can find a way to explore why it is that it is so much easier to be generous to others than it is to myself, and to give myself all the nourishment and comfort that would allow me to fully be so much more deeply generous to others.  Every moment is an opportunity for self-generosity: so in this moment, as I prepare to go to sleep, I can be generous and nourishing to myself.  In this moment I can allow my body to fully feel my breath.  In this moment I can light candles, I can sit, I can let go of tensions.  Even as I dream, I can dream of warmth, of the clarity of love, of realization. 

My old teacher Baba Hari Dass used to say that as sadhana or daily spiritual practice begins to reform our organism, our organism naturally begins to practice sadhana even in sleep.  This is my experience too; if we shape ourselves through the constant focus on love and on cultivating the mind of enlightenment, then even in dreams we may pursue that greatest act of generosity possibility – the gift to all being, even to plants and rocks, of becoming enlightened to whatever capacity we can muster. 

So with that thought I’m off to bed; and moving forward, hope to keep this blog rolling and devoted to, above and beyond anything else, exploring how practice – including the paramitas, the precepts, Dogen, ritual, etc – facilitates deep care and love.  Because at the heart of it, that’s all that matters to me, and I’m only deepening my practice because I believe more than ever before that this practice is a solid and profound way to love very, very deeply.