Something of Ulysses in July

Near countless power plants and vacant apartments, the monastery was considered  “out in nature.”

It’s now Day 4 of the Silent Retreat. We sit with the blinds open on Long Quan Monastery and its simple gardens. There are birds chirping in another morning. Rain falls dimly over the flowers and rooftops and walks of the yard, and all is empty anyway, so be glad of moments like this.

I feel a great deal of promise today. While yesterday I meditated three stubborn hours through the morning, today I am in tip-top mood and have not felt this happy yet in China.

There’s a mud slide in the road outside the diamond-clear window. The monks put a walkway of splintered boards across the way. My shoes got muddy as I ferried laundry above the boards. My clothes are soaking wet after two days on a rainy line. The air is fog or smoggy water that dries nothing.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day. We did taiji in the drizzle at 5:30. My favorite move is the one punch in our sequence. Breathing through my dong tien (in Japanese, hara) has built my immune system into a stronger beast, in the sulfurous dew of the mornings. My acupuncturist friend, Rob, diagnosed me with low yang energy, and this subtle condition makes it hard to thrive in damp places, like Seattle. This tradition Chinese diagnosis was a loaded bowl of greens I hit every day and will continue on. More to come once meditation’s done.

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Night has come. 8 hours in meditations today. Another profound morning, as I sat 2hrs 30 min. Feeling the good chi rolling in my hara as I prep for dinner.

It was a tough day. As many or all of them are here. I carry a great contradiction in me. In one part, a burgeoning zen pirate who’s bound to love every robin that lays an egg, and gorge on the sunset over rum. In another port, a pious layman, nonchalant and anonymous, contemplating the dharma with his jasmine tea. In yet a third, further round the bay, a monk of flesh and bone, who travels the road west transmuting jing into all the higher faculties while meditating his winters away. It is but all three in me. Or not, for who is me, you cry on a rooftop in Taiyuan.

Meditation Retreat Writings

Hey, everyone. I was re-reading the journal I logged on silent retreat week at Long Quan Monastery.

It lasted about 6 days and we had a vow of silence all day & all night. We did not speak during meals, during afternoon breaks. The only words we spoke in were Chinese sutras. We’d recite the heart sutra at the feet of three gold Buddhas–Amitabha, Sakyamuni, and Bhaisajyaguru–and go to sleep. We did not speak for 6 days and had only our mind for a companion. Make friends, or falter!

Here I’ll publish the few daily entries that lend value to you.

This was on Day 1, when I felt very, very good about my practice and the retreat.

Empty Cloud (above) was enlightened when he dropped a cup of tea after burning himself, and it shattered

Day 1

I realize the writings of my monastery stay amount to very little on the pages of this adept collection of scribbles. For one thing the sun is always shining or the rain is coming down in a deluge, so either way I’m free to love the moment and get lost in the world. We are now ½ way through our program at Long Quan Monastery. The immersion has been so thorough and overwrought that any consideration for the world outside this monastery and my conditions therein have slid by the wayside. Our days are packed to the rafters. It’s 12:30 PM in Taiyuan, China.

I realize now that what’s been keeping me from the present moment for so long is myself. I realize now it was no one but me suffering my own catharsis of time and its developments through its passing.

I’m about to venture into the sunlight of the ordinary days here. The ordinary mind. We—Alex, Me, Alex, Andrew, and Matthew (5 people / 3 names / 1 Love) are talking the Diamond Sutra in a great circle of yin discoveries in the grass. The Diamond Sutra is my favorite sutra and made me burst into tears one night on the stark summit of our apartment building in Seattle. It was March, and I was newly single. The sutra hit me so deep it washed these marrows in my bones.

It rained hard as ever in China today. I watched it come down. We sat patient in half-lotus darkness through the brood of the storm while it waged war on the plants and plain red walls of Long Quan.

My meditations have improved and declined in the same degrees. I can sink less deeply to the Samadhi swamps of luminous concentration and yet I walk the temple paths of my everyday thinking like they are freshly groomed in the first spring inside my mind of mildew. The morose nature of deep stillness is gone, and the utter spinnin in mud of letting-the-mind-go to thinking has really chilled out. I find these two in combination makes for a real balanced middle way for now.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Every single flash of an instant, flash of a second, and abhidharma, is meaningful. All this living ought to teach us that living is good. All aught ought to do is be aught. This painful shredding of my earthen world ought to be for a purpose. What I mean to say is the worlds of darkness I leave in my wake was all me running around in circles about the candle of truth with a fresh new candle made May 28, 1993 in my hand. What I mean to say is this whole world that is my life is self-created. What you think you are you are. What you believe on the topic of this stunted world of change is the world of yourself, too. What I mean to say is let life love you. You should go home to it. It’s waiting to hold you in the warm light of its arms.