Kaohsiung, Taiwan

My cousin, her husband, and her two babies.


Mostly I'm just hanging out with my cousin and her kids. When you have kids, everything is centered on the kids. Here we were taking care of the kids while having lunch. Later, we abandoned taking care of the kids at the museum, opting for taking care of the kids in the park.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

I'm still getting over jetlag, I think. I'm sleeping normal local hours, but I hit walls during the day when my energy just plunges. And going to sleep around 10:00 P.M. is after about two hours of herculean effort to stay awake. And I'm starting to worry about my coffee addiction.

What I mentioned about the purpose of my wearing Deer Park monastic clothing over here is valid to me, but it does have twists in this culturally Chinese society. One of my cousin's friends asked about what I was wearing, and as soon as my cousin told her I was a monastic aspirant, she understood. Understanding the monastic part, she then asked if I had some sort of problem I was trying to get away from! Mainstream Chinese culture is very practical and worldly, so the immediate thought about someone entering a monastery is that they are trying to get away from something. My cousin had to reassure her that some people sincerely want to enter monasteries to develop themselves internally. I think that's along the lines of what my cousin told her.

I think Zen is a bit player in the mainstream Chinese cultural understanding of Buddhism, which makes sense since mainstream Chinese culture is very practical, and even spiritual understanding is tied into material benefits. Perhaps to most Chinese, Zen is just about sitting (and when you're sitting, you're meditating, and when you're not sitting, you're not meditating), and the nitty-gritty philosophical aspects of it are just kinda way out there. So it’s better to stick to the tangible aspects of what sitting’s about using metaphors for what sitting trains our minds to do.

My stock description for sitting is imagining a stream or a brook, and thoughts are like leaves floating by on the surface. We tend to pick up the leaves and think about them concretely, analyzing them, developing feelings regarding them. Maybe an incident with someone, maybe something you did or said that you’re reinforcing or regretting, maybe something you read about or saw. Maybe you feel bad, angry, nervous, or anxious because of the thought. While sitting, we try not to pick the leaves out of the water, but sometimes it just happens in the course of brain activity, the flowing stream. It happens, it’s normal, but while sitting, once we realize we’ve picked a leaf out of the water, we recognize it and put it back in and let it go and flow away. It’s a skill to develop, and maybe the next few leaves flow by without incident, but eventually another one comes by that gets our brain’s attention and we pick it up until we realize we’ve picked it up, and then we consciously recognize it and let it go. Over and over it happens, and that’s OK, that’s part of the process to eventually get the mind to a point where it’s in different states. You don’t do anything to get to those states, it happens naturally sooner or later, and you only recognize it once you’ve come out of it. What it means to an individual is subjective, though. Some people might be ‘so what?’ about it while others find it relaxing. Some people find it revelatory. I just think it’s neat.

It’s good to come up with new metaphors to keep things fresh, and they’re pretty easy to find in the things you do. These descriptions are to distinguish a proper meditative state of mind to be in from our ordinary linear, analytical thinking minds. Another one is a bike coasting along, and that’s sitting. When a thought comes along and I attach to it and think about it, that’s hitting a hill and having to pedal and crank and put effort into it. The visualization is to put the bike into a downhill coast again to stop the active thinking. The cranks and the chain should not be moving as thoughts come and go.

A more specialized metaphor is of electric basses with active or passive pickups. Electric guitars and basses don’t need electricity to work. Pickups are just magnets that read the string vibrations and send them via wires to an amplifier, which does need electricity to transform the vibrations into sound waves. But more and more common in the electric bass market are active electronics which require an onboard battery to power the pickups and/or a preamp. The benefit is boosting the bass signal at its source so that it cuts through mixes more easily, and is arguably more controllable. Thinking linear, concrete thoughts is like active pickups, and you want to turn the electronics off so that the signal is passive, no boost. The string vibrates in the electromagnetic field and sends one frequency through to the amp, play another note and another frequency is played.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Right, so what am I doing here? I'm loving the tropical weather. Something just always feels very much like home whenever I'm in it, and in late January it's really, really pleasant. 70 degree temps in the daytime, in the 60s in the morning and nights; just a touch of ubiquitous humidity.

New Jersey is very distant. Deer Park is very distant, but the monastics are just a time zone away in Vietnam. I don't think I'll be able to make it over there to join the monastics for any part of their speaking tour, though. I also brought my two monastic shirt/robes that I'm wearing all the time to remind me of my practice and what I'm doing here. I don't know. When I took the Five Mindfulness Trainings, I didn't ask for a Dharma name to aid me in my practice because I didn't understand what receiving a Dharma name had to do with receiving the trainings. But on this hiatus from the monastery, overseas in Taiwan, wearing monastic clothing is definitely helping keep my focus. It's that identity-defined-by-outside-perception thing. I'm wearing this thing that isn't normal, so when people see me, they may be like, "why the hell is he wearing that?" Why, indeed, and the answer is mine for myself. It helps define my behavior. There are behaviors that are simply inappropriate while I'm wearing this.

At the monastery it doesn't matter what I wear. Even in the U.S. it doesn't matter because the clothing doesn't mean anything to anyone there. But here, even though people might not definitely identify this as monastic clothing, my perception of them is that they might get that sense since this is a culturaly Buddhist society. So it's my perception of their perception of me. Hm, why can't I just say it's my perception of myself then?

Anyway, as long as I'm here I'll be visiting temples and monasteries just to have a broader perspective of this religious institution, even though the institutional aspect doesn't interest me at all. The broader perspective of it may be important. There are a lot of resources online, and once I look more into them, my uncle and cousin can help with suggestions on how to visit them. Maybe even stay at some if they have retreats.

My cousin's husband is a computer geek and so their house is wireless. I'm telling you, this wireless thing is totally rad!

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

So where in the story was I? Oh, right. Two weeks in New Jersey. What a drag. Bitter cold winter temps, culminating in a huge blizzard in which me and my brother made the genius-worthy decision to drive down to Philadelphia to visit our other brother. Can you say “driving down the NJ Turnpike at 35 miles an hour”? I did all the driving, too, since whenever we went into New York, my brother did the driving (and parking, which I still have a neurosis about even though parking in NYC is much easier and saner than my experience in San Francisco ever was).

We only went into New York once this time to see the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” at Studio 54. It wasn’t great, but it’s always heart-warming seeing an all Asian/Asian American cast. “Pacific Overtures” originally ran in 1976. It boggles the mind trying to imagine what prompted Sondheim to put on a historical musical about the opening of Japan to the West using an all Asian/Asian American male cast. I’m sure he didn’t pitch the idea saying, “It’s a guaranteed hit!” But it had a healthy run back then. The current limited engagement features the delectable and talented B.D. Wong, but was otherwise lackluster. It didn’t deliver emotionally and it seemed the cast couldn’t handle the complexity of Sondheim triple-quadruple(-quintuple?) counterpoint. Unlike the original, this production included women in the cast which I found distracting, since the original mimicked traditional kabuki theater where all roles are played by men. The humor in the scene with geishas fell flat because they weren’t all men playing the parts. This production also missed by not completely changing the finale, which was supposed to be a commentary on Japan today, but Japan in 2005 is very different from Japan in 1976. They had the opportunity to comment on Japanese militarism and how it was sourced in the West, but then bring it back around to subtly comment on American militarism today. Now that would’ve been brilliant.

But now I’m in Taiwan, after an arduous flight which left Monday, and arrived today, Wednesday, completely losing Tuesday somewhere along the way. My uncle picked me up from the airport around noon and I’ve spent the last several hours battling jet lag and hanging out with my wonderful cousin and her wonderful daughters (aged 2 and 7 months). There’s such a big difference in the way these children are being raised and the way my brother’s kid is being raised. I’m not criticizing anyone, I just see the benefit of raising children within a family community, and I don't think my crazy parents (not to mention the possibly equally crazy parents on the mother's side) qualifies.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ
For having no reason to go to Taiwan, I can't well say I'm not ready to go. Not knowing what I'm going to do there, I have no packing list. After two weeks in New Jersey being distracted and goofing off, going to Taiwan will be an opportunity to quiet down and focus and be more disciplined, um, with the monastic practice thingie.

Not that I've been way off on the practice. It's true that I haven't been particularly disciplined about sitting or walking, or other setting specific times for . . . practicing the practice, but the practice has always been right here. Or not, but when it hasn't, I've been aware of that, too.

There's a difference between the practice - the practice of mindful awareness and mindful being, and practicing for it. Sitting in the morning and the evening, bookending each day, is practicing mindfulness, which is what we're trying to maintain at all times - what we call the practice. But you knew all this.

Actually, a lot of what it has been lately is noticing when I do something without some degree of full awareness. It's particularly egregious with the smaller things, so I'll notice immediately after the fact if I walk across the kitchen somewhat mindlessly. There's no chastisement, just noticing it and doing my best at it.

Furthermore, it's been really cold in New Jersey, so there have been times when I've been outside and would think, "I am mindful that it's too friggin' cold to walk mindfully" and allow myself to rush to get out of the cold. Mindfulness of not being mindful, I think, is oonsonant with the practice, but that's a whole sticky, easily misapplied, philosophical conundrum that I won't get into.

I don't know if any of this practice is really being tested. Relations with my family are pretty benign at this point, and with our contentious history, I don't know if my keeping quiet when they say something that bugs me is a result of my practicing or if it's just me not dealing with it. Probably both at this point.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

It's like for the past two months, I've been a balloon getting blown up. These past few days back in New Jersey have been like all the air escaping out of the balloon, flying around the room and landing precariously on the edge of a lamp shade. Now it's time to re-attach, re-connect, re-engage, and go deeper. Deeper in life if not the practice, but yes, need to get back to the practice. The practice is life. Life is breathing, walking, being - not what all these people on the outside are doing. Whoops, I guess that means what you all are doing. But it's all the same, I could be doing that. There's an attraction to going back to secular life and using the practice to live it more deeply. That's what all those visitors to the monastery were doing, I suppose.

And I suppose much of the purpose of spending these few months away from the monastery is to make sure I can do that to some extent. Not being attached to the monastery, the practice there, or running away from something to be there. There shouldn't be a separation between the basic practice there and the basic practice out here. If I can't maintain the practice out here, that means I'm attached to the practice there or I'm running away from something. If I can't go deeper out here, then I would doubt my ability to really go deeper as a monastic.

The reason for entering the monastery is to remove myself from distractions and stimulus that lead to a direct engagement of desire and worldly concerns, and by doing so being able to go deeper into the monastic practice - sitting, breathing, being.

Going deeper in secular life means using the practice techniques to engage life in the present moment. If I'm working, really working. If I'm drinking coffee, really drinking coffee. Being aware of all those moments by concentrating on breathing which is the reminder of the moment since we're breathing at every moment of our lives. It's harder on the outside because you're constantly bombarded by stimulus, your desire is preyed upon by corporate advertising, and worldly pressures are constantly at your heels to one degree or another.

It wasn't clear to me what I was doing until I left the monastery, but there is a purpose in these next few months before I ostensibly return to Deer Park. The purpose is to go deeper. Perhaps the purpose of the purpose is to remove any remaining doubts about heading down the monastic path.

Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

My last day at the monastery. The monastics leave for Vietnam in the late afternoon. I'm hoping to catch a ride with one of the laypeople into Escondido town where I'm staying at a motel tonight so that I can get to the bus station on time to catch a bus to San Diego airport in time to catch my early flight to New Jersey.

Looking back, I don't think this weblog has been all that successful in describing my experience at the monastery. Specifically, I think of all the things that I've left out. I think positive stuff has largely been left out and almost all specifics. Everything is in terms of generalities. If I were a better writer, I could have included more description, but that's a talent I don't have. If I were a writer, I think I'd be better at writing technical manuals :p

Look! When I wrote "specifically", I still generalized in broad strokes.

Boy, do I hope laypeople come up to bid the monastics farewell so I can bum a ride into town. It is raining as it has been raining nonstop for the last two days, and if I don't get a ride into town, I have to walk for almost an hour to get to the nearest (unsheltered) bus stop to get to town.

I admit now that one of the things I have to deal with in this community is living in close quarters with other people. Bleah! Too general!

I had a problem when other guests were placed in my room. That's better. But strangely, it was better when more than one other guest was placed in my room. Go fig. I won't go into detail (bleah, avoiding the specifics again), but it's something I will want to face and deal with when I come back in April. I had the luxury these past two months of frequently not having guests placed in my room, but when I come back, I will tell Norman to put short-term guests in with me on a more regular basis. Challenge this attachment to privacy and see how I deal with it, because breaking the attachment would be requisite for joining this community and will be good for me anyway even if I don't.

I don't know if that was the least of my problems or the most. I hope it was the most. I'll have several months of hiatus now to work things out.

Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

I don’t think I would have a problem with the community aspect of this monastery. I don’t think I would have a problem with the conformity aspect of this monastery. I think the problem I would have is keeping up my guard in respect to the community and conformity aspects of this monastery. In any community I join, I would insist on keeping my own views and interpretations.

It strikes me as eerie when I listen to one of the monks repeating the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh to a layperson or a guest. It’s like someone placed these ideas in their heads, and given the right trigger, they start spouting the teaching with very little variation or personal input, interpretation, or expression. The cultometer starts reacting whenever I hear, “Our teacher says…”.

Hm, I feel I’m being legitimately critical about this, but I also think negativity is seeping into the observation.

I think I’m right about this in general – that’s the critical part. But I think I have specific people in mind when I say all this – that’s the negative part. I have to separate the critical part from the negative part, even though it was things people said that sparked the critical part. That’s hard, but I think it’s possible. I think the thought is right, but the feeling is wrong.

It’s the difference between being critical and criticizing, and I don’t want to criticize people. But what if I can’t express something critical without the background or context which is criticizing?

What I mean is that I don’t mind becoming part of the community-body as long as that doesn’t mean losing my individuality or being expected to think how everyone else thinks, or to expound on the teacher’s teachings only as he intended them. I don’t ever want to repeat anything I like of what Thich Nhat Hanh has said just for the sake of it. I’d only do it if I can offer what it means to me, as if it was coming from me. Otherwise, they can just go read his books or buy his CD/DVDs.

I am sure, though, that lots of time my interpretation deviates from the intended teaching. Then what?

Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

Dogma:
I need to be able to balance my critical mind with negativity. The critical mind is a good thing to have, the negativity is not. And if anyone told me that my critical mind is not a good thing to have, the cult-behavior red alerts should go off like smoke detectors any time I cook.

Exhortations that practitioners need to practice with a community is right at the doorstep of cult-like behavior. If they say you should practice with a community, that’s a little better, but not by a whole lot. First of all, I don’t like anyone telling me what I need. I also don’t like the suggestion that someone who practices alone is somehow inferior to people who find, have, and practice with a community. There definitely are benefits of practicing with a community, but I reject those value judgments. Besides, why should an individual need a community if the community doesn’t need the individual? I’ll need this community when it needs me, otherwise where’s the equanimity? I’m complete without a community, and anyone who tells me different is trying to sell me truth and love through tofu.

There is also a danger in the Five Mindfulness Trainings becoming dogmatic if not viewed critically. As I’ve mentioned, the Five Mindfulness Trainings are like precepts, but they aren’t proscriptions on behavior or commandments. They aren’t meant to be strictly “followed” and they are not “broken” if they aren’t followed. They are trainings in mindfulness, being mindful about life and living beings, the way we use speech, our consumption, sexual relations, and possessions and exploitation/social injustice. Actually, I think the Five Mindfulness Trainings are trainings in being critical, and the value in developing that critical mind is more important than the substance of the trainings which can easily fall into dogma.

There’s also a requirement that the Five Mindfulness Trainings be read or recited once a month, preferably with a community. That encouragement of a community I think is reasonable, because for the Five Mindfulness Trainings, it’s a matter of support or there being a witness to impress the responsibility needed to take the trainings seriously and diligently (already the danger of falling into dogma). And the trainings absolutely must be read or recited once in three months or the transmission “is lost”. These requirements are about being mindful, more so than any ephemeral, ethereal, mystic “transmission”. Without this requirement nagging at you once a month or within three months, it’s easy to let them slip and forget about them. The substance in the transmission is more a skillful means to get people to treat them seriously.

I think once people have taken the Five Mindfulness Trainings and developed a critical mind about them and their function, they should be encouraged to refine the trainings to apply specifically to themselves and what they know about themselves that needs work. I even think much of the substance of the core mindfulness trainings can be ejected, as most people couldn’t follow them strictly anyway. Coming back to them every month or within three is more symbolic and ritualistic to re-energize the practice and training. Not to suggest they should totally be ejected except for symbolic, ritual value. They still have great substantive points which I think can help people if they can be mindful of them.

I’ve mentioned before that there’s an explicit training against alcohol in the one about consumption. I haven’t had a drink in the two months I’ve been at the monastery, I might go away for the three coming months and not have a drink, but I’m not going to say that I’m not going to. As I’ve mentioned, I take issue at that singling out of alcohol when unmindful fossil fuel consumption is a much bigger problem.

Now negativity is my specific issue that I need to train myself to be mindful about. To catch my negative trains of thought and not allowing them to harm others or myself. I could probably use the Five Mindfulness Trainings as a template to write out a whole mindfulness training on negative thinking and thoughts.

Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA
Thich Nhat Hanh has written quite a lot of books and gives many Dharma talks, maybe at least once a week. Most of the time, they are variations on core central themes, which are quite expansive and allow him to give talks so often without constantly repeating himself. But he does repeat certain ideas over and over again.

A recurring teaching that his followers seem to enjoy repeating and relating is that when you have a negative thought or feeling that your natural reaction is to push away or run away from, you should instead embrace it like a baby, imagine cradling it and saying to it, "There, there little negative emotion, I will pay attention to you and attend to you". Then they hold their arms like they're holding a baby, and caress an imaginary negative emotion. It's enough to making me scream. They don't explain it any further than that, they just repeat the teaching. And cradle their arms and caress. Cult.

Maybe they get it. I think I get it in my own way which might be different from theirs. But if I ever did relate this teaching to someone else, like you, I would make sure I explained my interpretation of the teaching.

Explanation of my Interpretation of the Teaching:
It actually hit me yesterday what it meant to me. Taking something negative or painful and embracing it (without the arm gestures, thank you) means bringing it close and being intimate with it, first and foremost to detach it from anything outside of you that you might blame for causing the feeling. You take ownership and responsibility for your own feelings, and if you're too busy blaming someone else for causing them, you can't effectively process them in a healthy, productive way. Just concentrate on the feeling itself that you're causing, you're generating and don't think that something apart from you is causing the feeling.

That's just the starting point. It's not meant to solve the problem. That's how you start dealing with the real source of the negative feeling. Maybe you can meditate on the emotion, focus on it and concentrate on it and transform it. Maybe you can analyze it psychologically to understand it or yourself better. Maybe you can think about it practically to formulate some sort of solution. Maybe it doesn't do anything and goes no where and sits there for a year like fruitcake, at least you're not exacerbating and perpetuating it by blaming someone else for your feeling (I seem to enjoy bolding that word).

Embracing the negative feeling is a meditation right away because it takes effort to rein it in and not go reacting to it, expressing anger or blame. You have to concentrate to calm down, maintaining mindful breathing, and bringing it close to you and refuse to blame someone else for your feeling. I don't know, it all may seem theoretical. Most people can't be bothered, I suppose.

Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

It's official, I'm leaving the monastery to go back to New Jersey before traveling in Taiwan. My head is spinning because the plan happened so fast, thanks to my psycho-freaky mother. Another analysis of mother's ulterior motive in pushing me to go to Taiwan before starting monastic training is simple control, even randomly exercised. That's why when I mentioned I might be up for traveling in Taiwan, just to call her bluff, she jumped on it and had my flight reservations within a few days. I didn't have to lift a finger, not even a glance at orbitz.com.

I'm not sure what to think of leaving, which I'm doing on January 10, the day after the monastics leave for Vietnam. Suddenly it's just a little over a week away. Suddenly I'm just another guest here with days counting down until my departure. On one hand I'm looking forward to leaving because of all the frustrations that have come up, and traveling in Taiwan might allow me to look at other practices just to get things in perspective about how good this practice is. On the other hand, I'm feeling I shouldn't leave because of how scattered these frustrations are leaving me, and I'm not sure it has anything to do with the practice. It might just be me. I might just be running away.

I'm afraid of losing the foothold I have with the community now, the comfort zone I've reached. I'm expecting to come back, I've told them to expect me to come back, but I'm sure they've seen this all before, and they know if a person is not here practicing or training, all that means is that they are not here practicing or training. It's just as easily possible that they'll never see me again. On the other hand, one of the brothers suggested that as long as I'm in Taiwan, it might be easy for me to fly over to Vietnam and meet up with them on their tour for a week. He also mentioned there are practitioners and contacts in Taiwan that I might get in touch with, so they seem interested in keeping my interest.

I'm just going with the flow. I'm making headway in my practice while having frustrations and disillusionment festering. That's the way it's supposed to be, because this is me, and that's the reality I create out of my life.

I'm doing well with the New Years Retreat crowd, keeping my anti-social at bay. I did another Rotation of the Earth Sutra on New Years Eve with posting New Years around the world on the board in the dining hall. Every hour I would write where in the world it was midnight, starting with Tokyo at like 7 in the morning, courtesy of my world time watch. People were amused, but I don't think they got the part where I was trying to get people to think about the world turning, and this progression of midnights leading into the new year. It ended at Caracas at 8:00 P.M., before New York City, because that's when we began our own excrutiatingly long ceremony and candlelight procession.