Theory to Practice: zen lessons learned in the navy

Slightly different style.  I wrote this as a general piece of reflection on some experiences over deployment and before and what I had learned about zen practice through these experiences, with an eye toward submitting it to Tricycle and Buddhadharma, but they both passed.  So I am putting it on my blog because I've been a lazy bum about writing on here as of late.  Enjoy.

When I decided to join the navy, I was fresh out of a summer of work practice at Tassajara Zen monastery in Northern California.  Having made it through that experience, I imagined that I could zen my way through any difficulty.  After five years working in reactor department on an aircraft carrier, I can safely say that I was wrong. In the nuclear propulsion community, we have a saying: Theory to practice. It means putting what is understood through contemplation into action. It also means recognizing that how things play out in the real world is not always how we imagined they would.

One of my favorite moments from deployment this year happened when a group of Japanese naval officers (and a few enlisted) came to join the buddhist group for meditation. I'm the lay leader. While I am honest with the group that my experience is almost entirely zen, I try to keep the group non-denominational. I avoid words like "zazen," substituting "meditation" in readings, for example. Or I say "flat cushion" and "round cushion" instead of "zabuton" and "zafu". It is important to me that other sailors interested in buddhism not feel forced to adopt a specific sect or school, and I felt like I ought to be able to practice non-attachment to zen forms and lingo with ease. But I do miss the shared experience of practicing with other zen students.  So I was tickled pink when the Japanese contingent arrived and one of them looked around at the setup and the posture we were in and went "Oh! Zazen!"  This is but one of many instances in which I was confronted by the gap between theory and practice as a zen student in the navy.

For me, zen practice encompasses much about that need both to verify with actual experience something I have read, for example, and also the notion that understanding something once, twice, a hundred times, isn't enough; I have to do the work, instance by instance, if my practice is to have meaning to my life.  I have felt many times like I understood some helpful aspect of zen teaching.  Those moments mean nothing, however, when it comes time to actually put it into action. I can draw on that understanding, but doing it is the meat and potatoes of zen practice, and that is the hard part.  Even writing this piece is all well and good, but I'd bet my paycheck that I'll still lose my shit the next time they run out of a dish I was really looking forward to in the chow line.  So it is nice to go up to the flight deck, look around at the horizon, and verify that, yes, as Dogen says, the world does look like one big circle when one is out on a boat far from shore.  But life in the navy has presented me with many difficulties through which I have not been able to zen my way. While I could conceive of an alternate reality in which I "did the work" and got myself through those struggles with the cool, breezy air of an adept monk, in this life I failed again and again, and I started to feel that this meant I was failing as a zen student.  Again, though, I was wrong.

Failing to maintain aloof composure isn't a failure to practice. Failing to act selflessly isn't a failure to practice.  The practice of zen (and this is one of those nuggets I have understood in the past and STILL forgot) is about coming back, coming back, coming back: to the cushion, to my breath, to the present moment.  It's about falling down and getting up.  As my teacher, Greg Fain, puts it, "be present for what arises."  When I was comparing my life to what I thought zen practice looks like, I felt like the gap between theory and practice was unacceptably big.  By dwelling in imagination, I was ignoring my life in practice.  But after bumblefucking my way through enough of these experiences, it eventually occurred to me that my ideas about zen were flawed, and I came to a new appreciation of zen theory.  I continue to encounter difficulties.  And I do try to be kind, compassionate, slow to anger, etc.  What I am working on more now is meeting my experience, whatever it is, and carrying on rather than falling into rumination and regret.  And that, theory to practice, is a lot healthier.

One last sea-story, I think, could well be put down as a genuine navy koan.  The case:  A sailor in reactor department (me) was tripping out in his head over time.  We measure distance with feet or meters, we measure weight with pounds or kilograms... What, exactly, is it we are measuring with seconds, minutes, or hours?  So the sailor went up to his chief and asked, "Seriously, chief: what IS time?"  The chief handed the sailor a fox tail (hand-held brush-broom) and said, "Go clean something and find out."  Commentary: What was I hoping to accomplish by using mind to answer a question I cooked up?  Field day goes for two hours, no matter what "hour" means in theory.

Ocean of Samsara

     Watching the sea, with its choppy water, I had the sense I was observing some alien form of society.  The way the crests and valleys would dance with each other, changing places, it seemed like the water was communicating with itself in a manner unintelligible to conscious thought.  I witnessed populations continuously manifesting and dissolving, imbued with a latent intelligence, carrying forth living and dying in a drama that was all their own.  This life was merely the result of energy, abundant and mysterious, on the surface of the ocean, the surface of the physical realm, not dissimilar to humanity in this respect.  We are intelligent, yes, but how much of this human drama is no more than the interplay of energy (karma?) in the medium that is sentient biological lifeforms? Scientists and mathematicians can describe the action of waves, outlandishly intricate and random though it may be, with vectors and calculus and algorithms.  Though there may be orders of magnitudes more variables involved, it seems that, by and large, a sufficiently smart, talented, and studious collective of scientists and mathematicians (perhaps a hyper-intelligent, non-human species) could describe our human drama with high math and vectors and algorithms as satisfactorily as we describe the movement of the sea.  Human fluid dynamics.  Then again, when it comes to nuclear physics, although scientists are able to predict with a very high degree of accuracy the time it takes for half of a sample of a given nuclide to decay away and what manner of decay it is likeliest to undergo, they are not (yet?) able to determine WHEN or WHY any given atom of said nuclide will decay or how.  Humanity may be like this, instead of like the ocean.

      I may be wrong about a couple points.  It may not be possible to completely account for all the variables involved in the interplay of energy in the sea.  And for all I know, some scientists may have already started to crack the code of individual atoms' fates.  But I am pretty sure that we will not ever arrive at an accurate, satisfactory explanation for human behavior.  Even if sociologists and psychologists can predict that one in ten people will steal the spare change from the dish at the convenience store, and even if they can further explain the indicators which made this action more likely in the tenth person and unlikely in the previous nine, I doubt very much we can ever know for certain WHY people do or do not do any particular thing.  Zazen, the spiritual life generally, can have a transformative effect on karma.  I think the impulse to seek the great self is universal, but listening to that small whisper inside is not.  Why do some people listen and some do not?  Why do some people keep following the trail of breadcrumbs and others walk away?  How revolutionary is the path that goes against the stream if a high degree of proclivity is the threshold for seeking it out to begin with?  Christians may answer these questions with "the grace of God", and I think more than a few Buddhists may answer with something similar.  More and more, I feel like I can count myself among them.  Because really, I don't fucking know.  And I don't think I can know.  I think subjects like these lie beyond some philosophical event horizon, past which the mechanisms for understanding just do not function.  Like atoms, like waves, humanity is to some degree predictable, and to some degree a baffling mystery.  I think most of the universe may be that way.  That's fine.

      As an afterthought, I recently had the opportunity to ask a zen teacher a question, and I asked "what is free will really like?"  His eventual answer was something to the effect of: you need to stop taking for granted the framework which gives rise to this question; as the relationship to this framework changes, the question can't continue to exist.  I feel like this is a modern form of "the question does not suit the case".  I'll square with you: I am bothered by the things I do, sometimes, and I don't really understand why I am the way I am, and this troubles me often.  This is one reason I have been trying to sort this issue out.  Another is my concern for human beings' future as a whole.  The concern is big.  I realize, though, that troubling myself over esoteric, philosophical conundrums does nothing but muddle me about.  Maybe I should instead try to make peace with the limits of reason and speculation and put my efforts into seeing beyond this framework or whatever.