Kobun Chino Roshi on Karma: Part Two

Or Frost’s Revelation

I currently work part-time at a used bookstore, which includes a mostly plant-based café. The space is also shared by two other vendors. One sells vintage clothing, art, and various knick-knacks. The other sells vintage vinyl. It’s a funky place and I’m continually grateful for its existence—and that I get to spend so much time there. You never know who or what will show up on any given day. The space is called Webster’s; you can check it out here.

Last year, we started acquiring a beautiful library from a local resident. I set aside for personal purchase a well-made, hardback volume of Robert Frost’s poems, replacing a worn paperback that I fetched for a few dollars at the year’s beginning. As I was thumbing through the collection, I came across a poem titled Revelation. It reads:

We make ourselves a place apart
     Behind light words that tease and flout,
But, oh, the agitated heart
     Till someone really finds us out.

’Tis pity if the case require
     (Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
     The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
     At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away,
     Must speak and tell us where they are.

I won’t pretend some insight into what inspired Frost or the poem’s intended message, if any. Also, it doesn’t matter. What does is the way in which Frost draws our attention to the peculiar dance of some living beings—not just human beings but, apparently, God as well. And now I will set God aside; I need not incur his wrath this early in the New Year by saying something untrue.

Part of this dance is the creation of separation. “We make ourselves a place apart,” Frost writes. The suggestion is that originally we were not separate, at least not in the way brought about by “light words that tease and flout.”

Sometimes we read in Buddhist poetry, sutras, and other scriptures that “one is all, all are one”—in Hsin Hsin Ming (Song of Trusting Mind), for instance. But what does that mean?

It doesn’t mean, as my Guiding Teacher says with force, that through practice we’ll eventually dissolve into the One or the All, a lava lamp-esque blob co-extensive with its container. It doesn’t mean, that is, that at some point there will be (or always was) a relatively uniform mass of which we are all a part, but where difference and distinction are absent. We’re all connected—that is just the other side of impermanence. So, in a sense, I am the entire universe because I am not separate from anything. Yet I am the universe as it manifests in this particular spot. Interconnection doesn’t preclude individuality. Rather, interconnection informs it.

Kobun Chino Roshi in his talk on Karma, part of the collection of his talks on the Heart Sutra, says

In the twentieth century we seek perfect freedom, and there is perfect freedom, but we still think we are not free. That is a very strange thing. We see someone suffering, from the outside, so we feel we are not free. Actually, our karma consciousness is not free. When you see a dying person, they are not different from you, so you are not free from them. But if they die, they are freed from your karma consciousness.

I imagine that I am witnessing another person suffering. (You can fill in the details if you’re imagining too.) And immediately, intuitively, and intimately I understand that I am not separate from that person. “Understand” may not be the most accurate word here; “reminded” feels better suited to capture the experience—I am reminded in an immediate, intuitive, and intimate way that I am not separate from that person. That’s in part why bearing witness to another’s suffering is all at once shocking yet familiar, and painful.

While this is all familiar, Kobun invites us to focus on the particular way we suffer through what we witness. When we meet with a dying person, for example, we are immediately reminded of our own mortality. Then our learned way of interpreting the relation between separate events is activated—our “karma consciousness”—and, suddenly, we start calculating probabilities or estimating the likelihoods of various outcomes: car crash, gun shot, cancer. There follows a plan to forestall the inevitable, coupled with bargaining, on the one hand, and self-reassurance that we need not meet with the exact same end, on the other. That’s how intimate our connection with each other is.

It’s no wonder, then, that though we desire so very much connection with others—the heart does become agitated in its absence—we nevertheless manufacture separation. Connection can be uncomfortable, frightening even. For connection requires vulnerability and vulnerability necessitates opening ourselves to suffering—and in a particular way. We open ourselves to meeting the suffering that arises directly, instead of trying to going around it, over it, or under it. We meet it face-to-face and allow it to inform the direction of our practice.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Late last year I commented on a shift I observed in Joan Didion’s relationship with words. Near the end of Didion’s well-known essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she states explicitly the (in her view) absolute importance of mastering language, that we only need the words with which to express ourselves. Didion writes in 1967, concluding her reflections on the youth in San Francisco, that she is

still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Much later, 4 October 2004 in fact, following the sudden death of her husband, during a prolonged hospitalization of her daughter, Didion would share that a mastery of language enabled a technique “for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” This time, however, she needed to not hide behind her words. Didion wished that she had

a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Yet she did not have (so far as I am aware) and we are not given an Avid after the paragraph is read and the page turned. Instead, we are given more words. Words which Didion often used to “hide too well away” now become the means by which she “speak[s] and tells us where [she is].” Words can build walls, ways in which we keep others from getting too close and protect ourselves from all that is uncertain or fearful. Words and a seemingly unshakable reliance on them can obstruct meeting things as it is. Can—that is the operative word here. For as Didion shows us and Frost writes, “We [can also] speak the literal to inspire / The understanding of a friend.”

That is the other part of our peculiar dance. We create separation in the pursuit of protection and foster intimacy from an inborn awareness that we are not and cannot ever be separate in the first place. And the whole dance is conducted by way of language, in any one of its myriad forms. The dance supports an enduring illusion that we are not free and, at the same time, reminds us of the perfect freedom that is always present. Kobun was right—that is a very strange thing.

The second quotation from Joan Didion is taken from “A Year Of Magical Thinking.”