I have just returned home, and it seems sensible to write the report before the memories of the retreat begin to slip away. Yet even by writing about it, the events seem so strange and wonderful that words alone cannot express the sheer depth and vast space that has at times punctuated the practise; the clarity of perception, the long silences that can only be likened to the desert, not a silence that is threatening, but the clear silence that you get at high altitude in the mountains, or the space far out at sea in a small boat. Yet to get there is like treading a maze, a labyrinth of one's own illusions, the tricks of one's own mind, the beliefs and structures that slowly but surely have to be worn down, the conditioning, the expectations, the pain, the deception of one's own ego, the clouding over of events and their true origin, the shunning of responsibility for ones own actions, the lack of humility, respect and repentance. All these are obstacles to the path, the human mind like an otter swimming under water seeking the big fish in a large pool.
Even getting to the retreat had its problems. It seems that I am always the last owner of cars, there is nobody else down the line but the scrapper! Well, the garage took the head off the engine to replace the rings two or three days before the retreat, and even now, ten days later, the head is still off and the piston rings still on some shelf in Swindon. And so I had to get a lift, a bus, a taxi, a train, another taxi and then two lifts.... but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Such amazing conversations with complete strangers talking about themselves, their wives, about cremation, death and what to do with ashes, talking to the dead - and all this within half an hour of leaving home.
Of course, when I got to the Maenllwyd I slept in the barn. I love old barns. For the last eight weeks I had been night lambing. This meant that I had had ample opportunity to meditate in the early hours in the sheep pens or beneath the stars. Sometimes forty minutes passed in a twinkling, but I did arrive very tired, not only had I worked a twelve hour shift for all that time seven days a week but I had been sleeping in the day which meant that on arrival at Maenllwyd my internal clock was not adjusted very well and I was rather "jet lagged".
Day one was hell... not so much the pain of sitting but the dozing off in every session. Drowsiness set in in a big way. The Zendo was really crowded, the air was close and I was next to the woodburner. Normally I love woodburners, it is the only heat I have at home, but somehow, being sat next to one all day made dozing off a temptation I could not resist. Normally I sit in barns, but they are half open and the wind swirls around; claustrophobia began to get at me a bit. I live alone and had spent the last eight weeks seeing virtually nobody so being stuck in a Zendo with more than thirty other people was a bit of a shock - rather like being in a tube train stopped between stations. Irritation began to set in.
Yet I had been in the army. I recognised the authority of Shifu immediately; and promptly resisted it for at least the first two days. I had never met him before and he struck me as a small wiry bird, a Shanghai sparrow. It felt as if we were all prisoners, no time to yourself at all, and the discipline total, like prisoners of war being indoctrinated. At first, I even resisted the chants. I felt almost like a Tibetan in a Chinese labour camp and thus the Chinese language grated in my throat for a while. There was vast resentment, it felt like being back at school or enduring the basic army training where you are stripped of all illusions and ground down to dust in a matter of weeks.
Only afterwards did I find out that Shifu had himself been in the army and even Guo Yen Hsi had been in the South Vietnamese Navy. Somehow the military leaves its traces everywhere and it is instantly recognised by those who have been through the same mill. Yet it is not all bad, there are extraordinary things about being in a tight discipline, close to other human beings, that simply do not occur in ordinary life except in times of disaster or calamity. Guo Yen Hsi was sergeant, major and adjutant; timekeeper, chanter, disciplinarian and above all, example to us all. Only on day three did I feel compassion for his discipline.
The first interview with Shifu was basic in the extreme. He simply identified which method I was using, which considering I wasn't quite sure myself, was just as well.
Normally, on John's Western Zen Retreats I work on Koans and indeed have been doing so for the last fourteen years on and off. The last retreat had been in January this year and the koan had been "What is beyond?" What indeed? I knew that in a sense the retreat had started then and lambing had been an intermediary continuation. I had at times experienced quite long stretches of emptiness, usually looking at dried grass blowing in the wind, either in the farmyard or on river banks or at my favourite spot beside a weir and old lock on the River Parrett with the constant roar of water in the background. But as for practice, my mind was scattered and tired.
I started with nothing and then tried "What is beyond?" but that seemed too ambitious at this stage so I reverted to a simpler koan, "Who am I now?" just to clear the air of uncertainty. This worked and for the whole of the third day I used it. The first moment of great clarity came during tea and I could have sat there for ever. Tears came and I was sitting next to Eddy.
Sometimes on retreats you keep meeting people over the years to whom you never really speak but you just know that there is a great common link. I was very glad that Eddy was there. I mean he's a great lump of a bloke and looks as if he has come out of one of the mines in Merthyr. There is that feeling of great warmth about him that the Welsh certainly have and it's to do with the mines, the danger, the comradeship. I've never talked to Eddy about this but I have been down mines and the feeling between the men is very much the same as the feeling between men in the army, only it's underground and it's Welsh and it's to do with coal. The feeling is unspoken but you know instinctively that you are in the same boat. The image that came up was one from several years ago when Eddy took a group photograph after a retreat. There was something about the way he took the photograph and got everybody together, yet he himself wasn't there. Somehow the combination of his rough and ready exterior and the care with which he took the photograph was very moving and it came back to me several times on the retreat. Often it seems these past experiences act as a trigger for emotions of compassion, and yet they only come out of that clear space.
What I found extraordinary about this retreat was the way in which past events came thick and fast and interlinked on ever deeper levels, until every single experience of emptiness I have ever had was linked like a chain. I could move along it from one event to another like an eagle circling or like an otter just gliding under water, each event like a glimpse working deeper and deeper. I began counting breaths.
The meditation became easier and the walking outside was very helpful as was the direct contemplation, something which, during lambing, I have perfected over the last twelve years. Shepherds do it all the time, and are even paid for it... you observe but do not label, and working with 1500 sheep you have to be able to spot the smallest problem long before it emerges. As far as work was concerned I was sent to the woodshed, which I loved and spent most of the time perfecting the art of splitting large logs, some nearly three feet long, cleaving them deftly, "and not a jot does the eye's grasp wander."
The food was extraordinary, though in the early stages I got a little worried about the quantities. I am used to a fairly hefty diet doing long hours and manual work. Here I was down to 1000 calories a day, if not less. I started licking my plate... I had even looked forward to the food as I always have to do my own cooking... luckily the quantities increased gradually and my stomach heaved a sigh of relief! The food was brilliant thanks to the cooks. Then Shifu's informal talks at the meal table sank home. The translation from Mandarin to English via Paul Kennedy had its own beautiful rhythm and ripples which are hard to describe. Paul was having a hard time sleeping and sitting and yet it never once seemed to affect his translation which had a directness and a humour which I think affected us all. I shall never forget him trying to explain to Shifu what the term "spaced out" meant or "Celtic Twilight". Thankyou Paul. Somehow listening to the Chinese and then to the English gave time for what Shifu had said to sink in, also there was a quality about the talks and their relaxed nature which allowed the mind to relax. More than once I found myself in a very clear space whilst he was talking. And the same with washing up. Very often the work was done in the Zendo, but the fruit appeared either outside or in the quiet moments where the mind was not doing a simple job. Often I have noticed this in my work, either shearing, lambing, chainsawing, sawbenching, cider making or scything. All these quite skilled, indeed very skilled jobs require a high degree of awareness. Yet when the mind is at peace with itself, it lets go and the job takes over. Indeed some of the older people I have worked with have a Zen presence and attitude precisely for this very reason. Their whole lives have been spent perfecting one or two very skilled jobs and they can often let themselves go... in the middle of the task.
Day 4. Events kept coming up, even my first glimpse of emptiness at the tender age of 13 whilst fagging at school, one lunchtime. I was so involved with serving out food and being ordered around, I remember sitting down and then quite inexplicably being in a space where the din of 600 voices and 1200 knives and forks and 30 trollies suddenly disappeared and for thirty seconds or so I saw everything very clearly but heard nothing. I sat there until someone nudged me and I had to do another job. A year later I was left at home for a weekend and suddenly burst out crying for hours. It was the first time in my life I had been left alone. It was extraordinary. The crying was not sadness, but joy and love at just being alive as I moved from room to room.
I was fourteen at the time and had already started writing poetry. Often I would go up onto Dartmoor and walk alone all day. Indeed solitude became a necessity, a way of life. My first poem was about the homecoming of Sir Francis Chichester and the dialogue between him and Sir Francis Drake whose statue stands on Plymouth Hoe. I was 13 and the whole school was there all day peering into the distance trying to make out his small boat, for he had just sailed singlehanded around the world. We did not realise it, but we were in a very meditative mood, thousands of people just looking. "Immanence without hope". The vast horizon of open sea and he harbour below. The feeling was extraordinary, as if in slow motion the small, frail boat was escorted in. Often I had watched boats coming and going from Plymouth for my father was in the Navy, but never a small boat this size. Everybody was deeply moved and there was a strange and beautiful silence as each kept their feelings to themselves.
What, you might say, has all this to do with a retreat in Wales? I am now 38 and yet all the events of every retreat and quite a few other events that occurred before I was ever interested in Buddhism came to the surface. One was in the Afghan Desert between Herat and Khandahar. The bus broke down and there was a three or four hour delay in the middle of nowhere. I went off into the desert. I had been travelling hard for two weeks or more and then suddenly in a wadi, away from everyone else, the stillness of the desert hit me and I cried again. It had happened once or twice before in Turkey and Iran on long bus journeys, usually in the desert looking out of the window day after day, just looking half in focus, meditating in fact, and then it comes. The whole ground of ones being moving up through the body and out through the eyes until there is nothing left except this wonderful feeling of peace and acceptance.
A year or two later I met John and he taught me about meditation. Yet I had been doing it without thinking for a number of years, and the very act of formally sitting down to do it seemed at first to be somewhat artificial. It took several retreats before I answered the first koan "Who am I?" and I realised how small I am and how vast the Universe. There was a branch just swaying gently in the breeze in front of me, one flower and one blade of grass just moving backwards and forwards. It was a very powerful and deep experience and none has been as deep since then, but rather like echoes they keep coming back... and that was what kept happening on this retreat until there were at least a dozen images interlinked. The clear space and then the tears, not streams, just a few trickling down as each image returned. One in particular that kept coming up was that of Monet's garden at Giverny on the Seine. Monet, who not only made the pond in Japanese style, but made the whole garden. He spent thirty six years painting the pond.
When I visited it with my wife several years ago I wandered around as everyone else did just casually looking, sitting down, reflecting. Everyone was happy. There were bus loads of French tourists, probably out from Paris for the day, maybe they came every year, maybe they came several times a year, there was an extraordinary feeling, but it did not hit me until a year or two later when the image came up on retreat and I sensed, not so much Monet's painting, but his presence, or rather what was left of his contemplation. What was once his retreat and isolation was now thrown open to the public, and yet I sensed, not only that he had had many experiences looking at the pond, but that somehow he was very happy that at long last everyone could enjoy what he had enjoyed. The last twenty years of his life, after his wife died, were spent alone.
What I felt was not only the direct experience but somehow his happiness that so many people wanted to come and see the garden. And in the house, many Japanese prints... and this led on to another experience linked to the Hokusai Exhibition recently in London. That atmosphere that you get in art exhibitions rather than galleries, where everyone is peering over each other's shoulders, direct contemplation again, broken only by quiet voices and peering at the catalogue. It was not so much the prints and drawings that affected me, but the effect they had on other people, and then I over heard an attendant talking to another attendant saying that they had just had one ex prime minister of Italy and the President of Lithuania through that afternoon. Somehow it seemed extraordinary, so many people from all walks of life drawn from so many countries just to look at the work of one man. I felt as if Hokusai's wave was about to break over me.
The wave lasted for the whole of the last two days of the retreat. It was on the point of breaking many times. At one point I was standing at the end of the garden looking at wool blowing on the fence, then down at the daffodils, when the image of Eddy and his camera came back and then I suddenly realised for the first time the true significance of "There is no time." The words ran through me like the stream and I cried again. I did not know it but Shifu was watching me through the window of his room some way off. I went and sat in the woodshed and pondered these things. Then came in and we had to talk about our experiences. I found that I could not say anything except that how extraordinary it was that we were all here and that I had learnt the true meaning of not just silence but keeping silent. I who love words, accepted that to say most one must say least.
Of course there were many other things about my personal life that I could add which were very revealing, but as Shifu said "Once you start to talk about that, it goes on for ever."
I ended the retreat with a strange sense of failure. I realised how much I had to learn, how much more there was to accept, to repent, to respect, the whole spectrum of Buddhist vows and precepts, the real thing, and not just the self indulgent introspection. Sleepiness and lack of concentration in the first two days had been a major problem and not having a wall to look at was, I think, an important point. The sense of failure dogged me slightly because I knew how close I was to catching the big fish, the feather on the fan, and yet I had caught and re-caught many minnows. I know now I was not quite ready for it. I still have much to sort out in my own life, and to accept my failures and to look more deeply at things in myself that I do not like... Great Doubt?
Perhaps one of the most moving things on the retreat was Guo Yen Hsi's smile on the last day when he and Shifu came in to deliver the last lecture. Normally he only smiled in response to a joke, but here, for the first time, he was smiling of his own accord and so was Shifu. They were like gardeners come to view the fruit in the orchard. Then Guo Yen Hsi took out his camera and started taking pictures as Shifu talked. Eddy was behind me and it felt really good.
Without John none of this would have happened. Without the Korean war when the West was actually fighting the Chinese, none of this would have happened, without Mao Tse Tung, Shifu would not have fled to Taiwan and the Teaching would not have reached the West... rather like the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism for the same reasons. It felt good chanting in Chinese in the early morning with the kerosene lamps dangling from the wooden ceiling, the Buddha from Hong Kong, the feeling of touching on something that had nearly been wiped out, like planting a seed.
Even now words seem too long, and yet, sitting beside the stream such clarity, first the sound, clear and ringing, then the small world in the palm of one's hand, dew drops on the end of small blades of grass above the rushing water so small and yet so perfect in their inner beauty just as they are, the Universe in one small drop.
Out of silence the stream flows
The sound of chanting in the early morning.
Dried grass blowing in the wind
The axe descending.
The small leaves of chestnut unfurled
Like Shifu's words after the meal.
Postscript: Imagery on Retreat
There is something else which is not strictly part of the retreat, yet I want to tell it. On the last Western Zen Retreat I had an extraordinary sequence of images. For many years I have had Buddhist images come up whilst in deep meditation. Some of these I had recognised as from paintings in Karsha monastery, Zanskar. This imagery could easily be explained by the large number of slides that I have and my interest in Tibetan art in general. I even managed to identify at least one of the pictures. This I took to be a perfectly normal event and paid no attention to it.
What occurred on that retreat was this. After a long evening chant of AH OH HUM I felt like a vase, and indeed my hands formed an empty vessel in front of me. The image of Tara came up and was very clear and vivid. Then a completely new shift... an old Chinese Taoist painter with a long beard. Then followed what I can only describe as an extraordinary sequence of Chinese paintings, maybe one a second for five or ten minutes. They went through the four elements and were all simple peasant scenes. Earth, water, wind and fire. Very beautiful and none of them I have ever seen before. They were quite the most beautiful array of paintings I have ever seen. Simple and yet filled with meaning, and then at the end, flames, as if they were all burnt up, as if this old man was showing me hundreds of years of work that was destroyed in the cultural revolution... and then the scene changed to a party of people fleeing over barren wastes as if over the Tibetan plateau, yaks and yak-hair tents, snow and ice, and then over a pass into what looked like Breughel's winter scene but it was modern and in the West.
For a large number of years I have also seen scenes of monks in monasteries that I have never visited. Shaven heads bowed and at least on one occasion the sight of a Buddhist monk being burned alive in the meditation posture. This I agree could have been triggered by the picture of self immolation of a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam war. These images, in whole or part, also came up during the Chan retreat and I am fairly certain that the monks were Chinese. If they were Tibetan I would have recognised them by their robes and their looks. I know one shouldn't pay attention to these sorts of images but they formed an important message; the transfer of a deep and beautiful knowledge to a frozen West. Also, during the Chan retreat, the images of monks became part of a larger assembly and parts of the monasteries became apparent.
As no one else seemed to mention the arising of images I thought I would include this as an example of what can arise in the mind during meditation. I simply treated them as wandering thoughts, letting them through and then forgetting them. Even so, it would be nice to know if the paintings ever existed, and if they did not, where did they come from? It is possible that they were the complete work of one man, and that man was the one I met before the images started.
Maybe the whole thing is just an allegory for the transfer of Chan to the West and the man is Shifu himself. Who knows? Just to be shown them was an extraordinary privilege and a wonder I shall probably never again witness.
Ah well! I must tend to the soup and get some more logs in. Sheep shearing starts soon.
