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Magnolias and Kitchen Knives
By Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
“How do I express compassion when I sit behind a desk 10 hours a day?” “Is it that one must be part of a social action group, volunteer to work in a soup kitchen and that sort of thing in order to be compassionate?”
“With the suffering I see all around me, in the faces of people I pass, in the newspaper headlines I read, how am I to understand my place in it all”? “If I practice Zen, how will my sitting on a zafu help anything?”
“If I practice mindfulness, will I just tidy up my own stuff and in so doing, lose my ability to feel the need of others, respond to them appropriately because I am really only concerned about looking after myself?”
These are questions that I am sometimes asked by Zen students.
When I have asked them, “What does the word ‘compassion’ actually mean to you?”, they most often will describe it as having a certain feeling towards oneself or others. To explain that compassion is not a feeling, but is an activity of recognition, I often quote from a teisho presented by my teacher, Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, entitled, “Compassion is the Activity of Wisdom.” He says,
To practice compassion we must have a tender heart, an open heart. We must have removed many layers of armour, but also of skin. We must have peeled ourselves away so thoroughly that we are not only transparent to our experience and to each other, but we are completely intimate. So that when ‘Zhang drinks sake, Lee gets drunk; when Lee drinks sake, Zhang gets drunk.’
A compassion that does not spring forth from insight, from wisdom, is unfortunately usually an attempt to try to manipulate oneself and manipulate others so that one can arrange one’s world in a way that consoles one. Either for the love that one feels that one always deserved but never had or for the sake of the power of it, the power of having people love you and depend upon you and be grateful to you. This is very scary, very frightening.
Compassion must be manifest in the simplest of actions: Listening to someone; reaching out and taking a hand; slowing your steps to keep pace with someone. All of these simple actions, moment after moment, day after day, are compassion.
So how can we practice compassion when we sit behind a desk all day?
Everything is a gathering together of small details and so if we practice recognition in how we pick up a cup and set it down, how we hand another person an object, how we take care of the things around us, then small details or large become simply a matter of recognizing the details rather than trying to feel any particular way about them. And responding appropriately from recognition. But when I say “recognition” I do not mean generating another, “special” feeling about things. I mean, just letting the seeing see, hearing hear, the hands feel the hands. Something that reminds me of this is the following story:
A few years ago there was an ice storm in Canada. During the night it had rained and the rain froze, encasing everything in a thick, heavy blanket of ice, downing trees that were hundreds of years old and felling power lines, leaving thousands without light or heat in the dead of winter. The next morning at 4:00 a.m., a student woke up to this and despite treacherous driving conditions, decided that he would come to the monastery, Dainen-ji, to attend the formal sitting at 6:00 a.m.
When he left his home it was still dark out. He closed the front door and stood on his porch for a moment looking at the ice crusting his world, lit by the moon. It was both terrifying and beautiful. Trees were bent under the weight of shining ice. Power lines were bowed. As he stood looking, he began to realize the awesome implications of what he was seeing. Unable to process it all, he practised: he felt the breath, the body, opened to seeing and hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.
As he walked down the steps and onto the slippery sidewalk, because he was practising mindfulness and his peripheral vision was open, he noticed in the darkness a branch lying on the ground, severed from a tree by the weight of the ice. He walked over to it and stood looking at the magnolia tree it had fallen from, wondering if it would recover and at the branch lying on the ground, with tiny ice-encrusted buds that would never flower.
Without thinking about it he picked up the branch and carried it to his car. When he arrived at the monastery he brought the branch into the building and it was taken to the Roshi. It was a very large branch and so Roshi cut it into sections, arranged them in four black vases and placed them in various areas of the building, including the Hatto or Dharma Hall. We delayed beginning the sitting so that this could be done. There was nothing said about any of this and I only found out where the branch had come from because I asked why the sitting had been delayed.
Over the next while, the branches sat in their vases and weren't particularly notable except that they were nicely arranged and were of interesting shape. We passed the arrangement in the Hatto again and again and again during samu (caretaking practice) and kinhin (mindful walking). But after two weeks or so, they began to change. The buds became larger. It was deep, deep winter, so I remember all of this vividly. The buds swelled and then broke open. The branches literally exploded into blossoms; incredibly beautiful magnolia blossoms.
What more can you do with something that is severed from its life-source, but nonetheless continues to exert itself than arrange it in the most beautiful vase you have and place it where as many people as possible can see it?
Taking care of whatever we encounter as fully as we can is what compassion means to me. I have worked with students dying of brain cancer, worked to help people in danger of execution by the government of their countries. But this is the same as how one holds a toothbrush.
Compassion is an activity that can be practised by allowing ourselves to open seeing, hearing and feeling, and is no further away than the intimacy of the sensations in our fingertips in this moment. When we feel into the sensations, the hand that reaches out for a pen or the hand that strokes the forehead of one who is dying is felt honestly and directly. This is transmitted through the fingertips, embodied in our actions. Moment to moment we have opportunities to be exposed openly to the world, to have a tender heart and to actualize the compassion of the Buddhas.
I, and other monks at Dainen-ji, have the great good fortune of learning directly what Dharma is from Anzan Roshi whilst doing what would seem to be the most ordinary of things. Although Roshi does not eat the food he prepares for our evening meals because his main meal is at noon, he designs and prepares the menu and does much of the misé en place (having “everything in its place”). This itself is very moving to me: a Zen Master caring for his students so much that he cooks their meals for them. In my training as tenzo or chief cook of the monastery, this gives me many opportunities to train not only in how to use a kitchen knife but use my life.
During kitchen work Roshi conveys meticulous instruction to each of us concerning our practice, as well as teaching us how to handle, prepare and cook food. I have often wondered how I would go about showing others what a few minutes of this is really like. But even with the use of several video cameras, there is too much going on simultaneously to capture it accurately on film and the editing would be a nightmare. But I will try to give a small example in writing of the seamless instruction given.
Roshi stood at the stove stirring a soup with his back turned to me. He usually does not taste what he cooks because he finds the fragrances already convey the flavours. I stood at a stainless steel island across from him, cutting red peppers on a wooden cutting board. Behind me, a monk stood at the sink washing bok choy. As I cut the peppers, the memory of an incident that occurred earlier that morning came into my mind and along with it, a flash of irritation. Roshi stopped stirring the soup, turned to face me and asked, “What?” When he says, “What?” this means, loosely translated, “What do you believe about who you are and what the world is, and can it stand up to the openness of your experience as it actually is beyond your state?” One has perhaps three seconds to respond in some way and recognize that there is no benefit to be had through regurgitating old memories while cutting peppers. So I let go of it, came back to my practice and the cutting of peppers. Roshi resumed stirring the soup and adding herbs.
A moment later, Roshi turned slightly and asked a question of the monk washing the bok choy. He’d been lost in thought, staring out the window, and the question called him back to involvement with what is going on around him. I looked at the monk, curious about what was going on. Roshi gave me a briefly thunderous look, indicating that it was none of my business, then took the knife from my hand and demonstrated how the peppers should be cut while also keeping an eye on what the monk was doing. Then he began to chop a pile of Spanish onion, and his eyes overflowed. Wiping a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand, he said, “You know, I love you guys,” in the sappiest voice imaginable, whereupon we dissolved into gales of laughter.
This took place in the space of perhaps fifteen seconds. The rapidity of the instruction is such that it has taken myself and others who participate in kitchen work with Roshi some five years to develop the ability to recover and move on to the next task quickly.
Compassion is the actualization of who we are. We can do this with flowers, knives, eyes, ears, and fingertips. It is not something extraordinary. We can begin here.
 
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White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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