On Enlightenment - Part II

Meditation. Panic. Raindrops. Nabokov. A four-part series, 12/3/2024 - 12/6/2024.

Dec 04, 2024

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The most powerful Zen book on meditation I ever bought was the first one. I have scores of them now. They are gathered together near a Zen coffee cup with some very special sand in it I gathered from a beach near the house. I’ve also assembled some incense hardware and the free candles that came with a dusty black meditation mat. Beautiful things are surrounded by nonsense everywhere you look, and the Zen bookshelf temple and library on my office shelf is no exception.

My Zen Buddhism books have enigmatic thoughts and tantalizing descriptions of enlightenment experiences. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have brought them home. They are the spiritual equivalent of one-night stands and two-week flame-out romances. Every new book is magical for a brief season and then exhausted. I’m a spiritual playa. That’s not a Hindu word.

I have fancy Tibetan, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean people. I have enlightened guys in Minneapolis (?!) monasteries and women Buddhas with bald heads that make you kind of go whoa! I have people who became Buddhas by accident in the depths of despair, crawling across darkened bedroom floors, who flopped down in their dirty underwear onto pizza boxes – when suddenly their vestigial selves fell away and It All became simple and clear.

I have a Zen Master who blindfolds himself at the end of his true story and shoots an arrow through the heart of a flame on the other side of the room. I have monks who tear each other apart with retorts I can’t even pretend to understand. I have disciples dangling from a branch at a cliff’s edge, hanging on by their teeth. I have a thousand fingers pointing at the moon. I have Buddhas slowly twirling flowers.

I have wheelbarrows of ah-so! The gates of my heaven are dog-eared. They are underlined. They have margin notes. But no matter how much I turn the pages this way and that, the gates will not open.

Certainly, I have koans.

But the first book, the one that got me into Buddhism, or at least up to its grand front door, was called Zen Guitar, an unpromising, unoriginal title, sort of like its color. It was brown.

Brown.

Who wants a brown book?

Nobody. That’s who.

I’m not even sure it talked about the practice of meditation directly. Nothing about sitting on a mat and clearing the mind or 1 to 10 or forming a lovely ostrich egg-shaped mudra with your fingertips or keeping your back straight like the granite cliffs of Mt. Fuji.

I’m not even sure why I picked it up. The guitars probably. The book didn’t even seem to be very interested in spiritual experience per se. It treated how you played guitar as meditation without getting into anything fancier than that. It had a lot of quotes of famous guitar players saying thoughtful, tangentially Zen things. I don’t remember the prose being exceptional. It wasn’t written by anybody who seemed all that spiritually credentialed.

It was just a simple, basic little book with modest ambitions. The book was like being shown around the monastery by the cook, somebody humble in the ranks, the guy who has to answer the door when it’s raining. I got the impression from the writer that the big, important stuff was somebody else’s to explain, but that this guy would get you set up with your room and find you somebody’s old zafu cushion and make sure you were good to go. I might even have had the irreverent thought that he wasn’t all that much further ahead of me, and I might pass him in a little while with some focused effort.

Everything you do is how you play guitar, he told me, and I thought, “oh that’s nice” dismissively, and I remember he mentioned from the door, in passing, that whatever you play on your guitar, just try playing it again a little more slowly afterwards, and then, after that, maybe still more slowly again.

That’s all. Just keep that up until somebody comes for you. Sit on your mat and work on that. Yes, that should be fine, he said, as if to himself. Somebody will come along, by and by, and size you for your brown robe.

I pulled my guitar carefully from my case that first night, the mindful novice with the beginner’s mind, paying attention to everything I did and how I did it and at what tempo. Everything I do is how I play guitar I reminded myself. Now, surprisingly, I could feel him watching me, but, of course, I could see within moments what an excellent beginner’s mind I had, and how good I was already becoming, and so quickly!

So, even before I started to play my guitar and make special Zen sounds, I noticed that the wires on the tuning pegs weren’t trimmed or coiled consistently. They were poking out in every direction. That wasn’t in the right Zen spirit of the thing, and I decided to fix it. Then I noticed that there were built up finger-grime dirt marks around each of the frets which said something not so right either.

Then the strings were dull and dirty and really could be, well probably should be changed, and I’d been putting that off. And the guitar case was a mess. There were sheet music pages bent in half at weird angles in there, crushed under the guitar. I should straighten those. Lots of sloppiness. Lots of hurry.

Actually, everywhere I looked it was a mess, and I could feel the engine racing inside to ignore all of that and play, play, play, play, play, play, play the Zen Guitar Way already. I could feel the boiler firing up down below, red flames racing in waves across the burners. I noticed my hands were trembling trying to slow down enough to just do the simplest things carefully.

I had a sudden, panicky anxiety that if I did everything like I was Zen-Supposed-To I might never even get to play guitar. It would be an eternity of preparation. That can’t possibly be the point something cried out inside of me.

I was sitting on the couch in our bonus room and watching all of this unfolding,

and I couldn’t believe my mind.

The Zen Guitar fellow in the brown robe watched me quietly for a moment without further expression. Then he went off to the kitchen or to pull up weeds or whatever the worker bee monks busy themselves with.

Of course, now that I’ve read all the much fancier books – and, like I say, I have half a shelf of them – I’ve learned that it is just like the Buddha to show up in brown disguise when you’re not even looking for him, tell you the thing you most need to hear, and then slip away again, possibly forever.

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