About

 

Hello and Welcome. So what is BumbleBuddhist?

Welcome to the BumbleBuddhist website. You may be thinking, what on earth does that mean…bumblebuddhist? Sounds either catchy or ridiculous, depending on how you react.

You may assume the formal definition of ‘Bumble’, which is:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bumble

• bumbled; bumbling intransitive verb
• : blunder;  specifically : to speak ineptly in a stuttering and faltering manner
• proceed unsteadily : stumble

But Zen is like that (as is life, if you observe your life carefully)

Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto Zen School, who brought Zen from China to Japan said,

20 years of practice—One continuous mistake

Another Meaning of Bumble

This website is also a multi year travelogue. I came to Thailand in 2004. As a Tibetan monk once admonished, “If you want to become Enlightened, leave your country”. So this includes a chronical of my, in the tradition of bumble bees, moving about in an apparent unplanned and unpredictable way. Yet, there is an intuitive, though subtle and invisible logic to it all.

 

What’s My Story?

You see, I have always had a curious disposition. Here is my story:

When I was 9 years old, I was a typical liberal (meaning not dogmatic in this context) Jewish kid in a fairly typical middle class Jewish family. All I knew was that my grandparents had come from Eastern Europe. Nobody really talked about that much. My grandmother did tell me something that was foundational for me, but more on that later.

One day, I was watching PBS public television –this is the year 1957. At the time, there was a social movement called ‘The Beatniks’. They were in opposition to the dominant US American cultural norms, were often artists, musicians, mainly jazz, not classical. And they did weird illegal things like smoke marijuana. None of which I knew about or understood at the time.

So here is some guy at a dramatization of what was apparently a beatnik party….He had a beard, which in 1957 was unthinkable and unacceptable in polite society. He wore unusual clothes, and he was smoking some kind of funny looking cigarette. And he was talking about “Zen”.

And I’m thinking…”Zen….what’s ZEN?”

So that was that, and I didn’t give it any thought beyond that.

Close Encounter with Zen

Five years went by. I was on my way back from school. I went to Boston Latin School, the oldest high school in the USA, founded 1635. It gave a very good classical education, and a good foundation in English language and usage. Plus, classical history of Roman and the ancient world. Unlike a lot of modern education, it actually taught people to think.

I wandered into the local corner store, and noted a rack of paper back books. Dime novels, cheap romance, detective and cowboy stuff. And there it was…a small paper back book. Zen Flesh Zen Bones.

Wow! There’s that Word! Gee, I wonder what this is all about.

See what I mean? Curious. How could I have even remembered that fleeting moment of 5 years earlier? Our behavior, for better or for worse, is influenced by vast causes and conditions which we are only dimly aware of.  I lost my first copy but picked up this edition, a used discard from the Zen Center of San Franciso book store, for 25 cents. Notice the list price –95 Cents. You can buy a new later edition copy for about 20 bucks, or used for about $6. A bit of inflation over the past 40 years, maybe? Like 20X?

Here’s the first story:

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full and kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s overfull.  No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations.  How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

This story is so popular now, that I have seen the basic dialog in several movies since then. But it gave me an inking that ‘things aren’t what I think they are’.

Another great story was the one about the Indian monk, Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China, and the Chinese Emperor. I’ll tell the abbreviated version here.

Bodhidharma, an eminent monk, was invited to meet the Emperor of China..[Remember, not just anybody could have a personal meeting with an Emperor.]

Emperor Wu: I have establish many Buddhist temples, supported many monks. What is my merit?  [One of the most important teachings in Buddhism is accumulating merit through good deeds, such as charity and donation]

Bodhidharma: No merit

The Emperor was shocked, since he expected to hear how great he was, for so much generosity.

Emperor Wu: What is the essence of Buddhism?

Bodhidharma: Vast emptiness, no holiness.

Emperor Wu was shocked again and, frankly pretty angry, since this Bodhidharma guy was challenging everything he thought. So he gave it one last try.

Emperor Wu: Who are you (to challenge me, my generosity, my ideas, and indeed my authority)

Bodhidharma: I don’t know

Anybody else but Bodhidharma, for such ‘insolence’ would have had his head chopped off….Imagine..challenging the Emperor like that. This to me was my first introduction to the idea that ‘The Emperor has no clothes.’ Or as is said in more modern times, “Question Authority”.

How My College Experience Influenced Me

I was in college during the Vietnam War. As a teenager, I was always interested in the news, and every Sunday, I read the New York Times News of the Week in Review. I noticed how different stories, or narratives or writers were treating that war. It seem to me that a small country 12,000 miles away from me did not pose a threat. So why would I be expected to kill and be killed? Made no sense.  Yet, here is the ‘ever reliable’ [NOT!] New York Times giving weekly rationalizations for mass slaughter.

I’d majored in Chemistry, but in my sophomore year, had a very demanding schedule of Calculus, Chemistry, Biochemistry Lab, Physics and German. I also acted in a play called Woyzek. It was about a soldier, who was obviously being treated as expendable by his superiors. And I was asking myself, ‘Am I being trained to be a scientist making horrible weapons that kill people”? My grades fell and I was going through an existential crisis. I felt that I just could not participate in such a destructive system, and I just wanted to understand the Truth. Why did I feel so much inner turmoil, and what role did my society play in causing such vast suffering?

The Darker Side

Besides these large questions, I was coping with the aftermath of a pretty difficult childhood. My father died when I was 8, at the age of 35. My now single mom trying to raise two kids was anxious and depressed.  Although she remarried when I was 16, the family was very turbulent, constant arguments and fights. I was traumatized, and that only added to my questions. How to get out of this personal and social dystopia?

My ‘Savior’ Arrives

Just before my last semester, there was a month long interim period of new age workshops that featured new psychological approaches, such as biofeedback, encounter groups, and so on. And the organizer, who’d come from California had a girlfriend named Nelda. She and I hit it off especially since she had spent time at the first Zen monastery in the USA, Tassajara. So she encouraged me to go to California and follow my dream to study Zen. About 3 years later, I was staying at Tassajara, and she showed up with a group led by a famous teacher, Charlotte Selver, who taught Sensory Awareness, which is related to Zen. Nelda left when the workshop ended, and I never saw her again….

Continuing My Journey

Years passed, I left the Zen Center after 13 years, since that was all I knew. I needed to be independent of an institution, and find different experiences to develop as a person. I got a job, studied with a few different teachers, and to this day, continue my contact (though not formal study) with Nelson Foster of the Ring of Bone Zendo in the Sierra Foothills near Nevada City, California. If you have a chance, go there.

The wars continued, meanwhile, in the USA. The political situation deteriorated with questionable elections in 1980, nuclear arms race, and questionable (that is, based on lies) wars. With the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the climate in the USA turned darker. I was in the financial service business at the time. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, a law, the ‘socalled’ (and Orwellian) PATRIOT ACT passed.

What this law said, was that I, as a fiduciary, was required to report any ‘Suspicious Activity’ by my customers or clients, and not tell them. In other words, I was hired as an unpaid spy, and I was legally responsible!

At that point, along with the defeat of the peace candidate, Dennis Kucinich in the 2004 primary, I decided that there was not much I could do to turn the country around at that point. And I still had my own not fully resolved issues to take care of.

Life in Asia

First in Thailand, I could stay in temples and meditate for days, weeks or months to fully devote myself to sorting through all the unresolved issues.

A monk approached the Buddha and asked, “Inner tangle, outer tangle, this whole generation in a tangle. Who will untangle the tangle?”

The Buddha replied, “That person, ardent and sagacious, will untangle the tangle”.

What they are talking about is not a philosophical discussion. It’s about whether we can learn to fix our own inner conflicts as well as with others. So far, the thought process hasn’t changed.

Twenty-five hundred years later, and individually, and the entire world is teetering on catastrophe.  One of my  personal heroes, Einstein, had this to say:

 

Bumbling

So Bumble has a dual meaning here. The great Japanese Zen Master said, “20 years of practice…one continuous mistake”. I have various faults, hence, the bumbling. Fixing them is ‘our real lifes’ work’. And its a process.

Second, bumbling can also mean, like a bumble bee, going here and there. So, I’ll admit that I am on a life long pilgrimage, just seeking truth. I am now reading a chapter of a Buddhist text, called the Gandhavuha. It is about Sudhana, a young man who seeks Enlightenment, and he is sent on pilgrimage to inquire of various worthy teachers, gods, and goddesses just how to do that.

So, unlike many who follow the ‘prescribed’ path:

• Go to school
• Get a job
• Get married
• Save for retirement (maybe, if at all possible)
• Retire
• Die

This approach never seemed appealing to me. I’ve sought to ‘untangle the inner tangle’, while ‘Questioning the Authority’ which looks to me, to be come increasingly tangled. “Oh what a tangle web we weave, when we practice to deceive.”

However, Confucius said, “The beginning of Wisdom is to call things by their True Names”.

If you’d like to join me on my website as I endeavor to ‘Calm the Mind, and Discern the Real’, feel free to join me.