On the Road to Somewhere

On the Road to Somewhere

easthamptonstar.com | Mar 14th 2011

  (March 10, 2011)  The common subject of three new books by writers from our East End is Eastern spiritualities and disciplines brought to the West. Each focuses on journeys of the heart and mind with geographic grounding. The difference: Ram Dass’s “Be Love Now” opens from within Hindu yoga, the other two from within Zen Buddhism.

The book by Ram Dass is written with Rameshwar Das, whose foreword introduces the reader to his time and place, beginning when he was a student at Wesleyan University in 1967. It was a heady time, and in that counterculture of change Rameshwar Das met Ram Dass and his pilgrimage began, as Ram Dass’s had already commenced in relation to the guru Maharaj-ji.

“Be Love Now” (HarperOne, $27.99), the third in a trilogy by Ram Dass, is based on an unfinished manuscript he and Rameshwar Das, who lives in Amagansett, worked on 35 years previously. It thus contains some of the freshness of that revolutionary time, bringing it to the present following Ram Dass’s devastating stroke in 1997.

The relationship between Ram Dass and Maharaj-ji is described unabashedly as love, the soul of it, unconditional. The chapter titles are suggestive: “The Path of the Heart,” “Excess Baggage,” “Guides,” “Remover of Darkness.” One of the guides is the Brazilian healer Joao, in English called John of God. The chapter “The Way of Grace” touches on the relationship between karma and grace.

“One in My Heart” is about a succession of “realized beings” who illuminate the heart. In the profound, altering experience of darshan, the devotee’s point of view shifts to a place of the spirit through one of the souls in a higher plane. It is a meeting of hearts and soul, undivided.

    I can only suggest what Ram Dass has to say, shared here with Rameshwar Das. It is rich with experiences from their literal journeys between India and the United States as well as those of the spirit.

    “Be Love Now” is illustrated with photographs identified at the end of the book and notes throughout the text. Quotations from Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist sources augment the insights. The discipline presented and the writing are warmly appealing.

    Rameshwar Das titles his foreword “Getting Here From There,” in reference to past awakenings leading to the present moment. In the same spirit but coming from another direction is Peter Matthiessen’s “Are We There Yet? A Zen Journey Through Space and Time” with photography by Peter Cunningham (Counterpoint, $29.95).

    The introduction is written by Bernie Glassman. The major portion of the book consists of excerpts from Mr. Matthiessen’s 1982 journals, published in “Nine-Headed Dragon River.” They focus on the journey he took to Japan at the invitation of Mr. Glassman. He later became Mr. Glassman’s first dharma successor. Both had studied with Maezumi-roshi (1931-1995).

    “Are We There Yet?” is a history of the Soto Zen lineage with passing reference to Rinzai practice and other branches of Zen historically considered. A lineage under the heading “The Ancestors” helps the reader see the larger history within Buddhism, from India to China to Japan and the U.S.

    I will not summarize each person and place Bernie Tetsugen Glassman visited with Peter Muryo Matthiessen. The book is a valuable commentary on that journey. I found it of interest in large measure because it was new information to me. The account is well written and clear, and the photographs help bring it to life.

    The purpose of the journey was to make a pilgrimage to the Japanese Zen ancestors, living and dead, and the places where they had flourished. The experience also illuminates the transition from Japanese leadership to newer generations of Soto Zen teachers in the West, in particular in this country. In that succession, following Mr. Glassman and Mr. Matthiessen, is Sensei Michel Engu Dobbs, who wrote the afterword, in which he notes how American Zen has changed since the writing of “Nine-Headed Dragon River.”

    Mr. Matthiessen presents himself in his meditative discipline and in the journey. The meditation is in the journey, and the journey is of the meditation. Language divides one from the other. Being is one in the experience. The book embodies Mr. Matthiessen’s space and time and might well be read in association with his personal account in “The Snow Leopard.” “Are We There Yet?” can serve as an introduction to Zen. The reader may also feel drawn beyond the book’s times and places to a place of spirit beyond time. The question, in the seeking as in the journey, will be, Are we there yet?

    One of the Zen ancestors Mr. Matthiessen and Mr. Glassman visited was Soen Nakagawa-roshi (1907-1984). It was he, along with others such as Hakuun Yasutani and Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, who brought Japanese Zen to America. I sense a purity of mind in this lineage, refined through the historical permutations.

    In the flowering of Zen Buddhism in America, Lee Carlson has written “Passage to Nirvana” (Harry Chapin and Sons, $17.95). He acknowledges his indebtedness to Soen Roshi, to his poetry, letters, and calligraphy. Mr. Carlson’s passage is a poetic journey as well as a literal one sailing out from Greenport. Before personal tragedies in his life piled on in 1991 and 1992, he had already sought out Mr. Matthiessen at his home and zendo in Sagaponack.

    Mr. Carlson’s tragedies were a traumatic brain injury when he was struck by a car, his mother’s similar injury from a fall just months earlier, his divorce, the deaths of an aunt and a brother-in-law, each to cancer, and his loss of work as a writer because of his brain injury. “Passage to Nirvana” is his way into recovery and health, and, as he suggests in the preface, the words become “a poetry of living” for the reader.

    The book is in three parts. “Prologue: A Journey Begins” lays the foundation as though building a boat to sail and introduces the necessary charts and rules. “The Book of Po” is the log of the voyage. The third part is the “fine adornment,” or the enhancements that add pleasure to the voyage.

    Mr. Carlson is playful with words, which is part of the enchantment of his po-etics, or short poems, called po. With titles like “Passage to Nirvana” and “The Book of Po,” they made me think of “Passage to India” and “Life of Pi.” The references lead by imagination to the land of origin for Buddhism, or so I take it. Mr. Carlson’s journey is graced with whimsy, like a good south wind with the sail in a reach and spray in your face. The book, however, is an intentional passage to Nirvana for the author; it is an unfolding epiphany, an opening into healing.

    The po is a short poem. It says as much as it can in the fewest words and refers beyond itself to a greater meaning. Mr. Carlson began writing po because, recovering from his brain injury, he could focus on short sequences of words, not sequences of length or complexity. The po is simplicity. As in Zen meditation (and also for Ram Dass), each po focuses on the immediately present.

    Toward the end of the book, Mr. Carlson includes rules for writing the po and concludes that the po has po-ssibilities. Each po in the book comes with a reflection on it in prose, comparable to reflections on the koan from Zen. Each reflection can stand on its own, and the reflections do not follow chronologically, but taken together they provide a cohesive narrative of Mr. Carlson’s interior reach in his journey. The writing here is lucid, with a light touch — light of heart and light cast into confusion. He reflects on his journey on the ground and on the water, in Zen meditation resting in the hum of creation, with associations in art, medicine, sailing, family, love, pain, and the quirks of memory.

    One example of po is the first one in the book under the heading “Nirvana”: “Our boat / floats.” It literally refers to the boat named Nirvana floating when first launched from its berth in St. Martin. The abstract reference is to Mr. Carlson and his partner, Meg, in a state in which their “personal boat — our body, life and soul — floats freely.”

    One po is written in tribute to Mr. Matthiessen. Under the heading “Core Koan,” Mr. Carlson says this is the koan given him by Matthiessen Roshi: “Be / Lee.” It comes from the time in Mr. Carlson’s life when his personal losses were great and he wondered, Who am I? Mr. Matthiessen said, “Be Lee.”

    Some of the po will crack a smile. “Philosophy I” reads “Disregard / Kierkegaard.” In his reflection on it, Mr. Carlson emphasizes joy, bliss, and peace over existentialist angst.

    The last section of the book has the adornment, the “Bricolage,” as Mr. Carlson puts it. These are short essays and include the eulogy he gave for his mother, Ann Carlson, in which he refers briefly to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of bardo, where the soul rests between death and life. The service for her was held in Westminster Presbyterian Church in Buffalo.

    That brings this review around to me as Presbyterian clergy. Responding to Mr. Carlson’s invitation, I write a po. Dare / Say Where. The dare in all spiritualities, including my own, is to seek truth. The question is where, and then — are we there yet? If I may stretch a reference from a 17th-century English text, it is for each of us a pilgrim’s progress. In passing, we bear witness to one another.

    The Rev. Robert Stuart is pastor emeritus of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church. He lives in Springs.



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