Drumming and Singing Spring Forth Together

Once during a sesshin with Katagiri-roshi, we performed a memorial service for a member who had died a year or two previously. As the chant leader, I intoned the dedication, asking the bodhisattvas for their true compassion for the dead person and for all of us. I sang the words according to the way I had been taught, but I didn’t feel it.

That evening in dokusan, I asked Roshi with a confrontational tone, “Isn’t praying for help from outside like in the dedication for today’s service slipping off the bulls-eye of zazen?”

“Uhhg,” he said, “you really don’t understand the human heart.” He then rang the bell ending the interview. I was not enlightened.

Roshi often spoke quite roughly to me, so that didn’t bother me much. At least he didn’t tell me this time that I was stupid or his more common, “That is just your thinking again always.”

It took lots of repetition of daily services and regular memorial services, along with the heart breaks that come from living, for me to have some sense of what Roshi was talking about. Especially why he said, “Uhhg.”

Two points (and another Katagiri story just came to mind but that I’ll save for another day). First, in the potato-cleaner of birth and death, the human heart just cries out. “Help!” “Please!”

Stoic Zen just isn’t normal or healthy.

So we have a form for that deep cry in Zen in “The Ten Line Kannon” and “The Universal Gateway of Avalokiteshvara,” for example (and zazen but that point too will have to wait).

Zen liturgy is simply the expression of the human heart in agony and compassion while the fires burn in California, while a dear friend suffers from cancer, and all the billion other specific sufferings of this life.

In my present view, to repress (or ignore) the cry is not only to not understand the human heart but to completely miss the point of Zen as well.

Another important aspect here is the realization that drumming and singing spring forth together – that these are not just nice poetic words, but a way to really live, to actualize the buddhadharma.

From here, the cry for compassion is the cry of compassion. Drumming and singing, cause and effect, me and you … spring forth together.

Here’s Katagiri-roshi making this point:

“‘Avalokitshvara‘ means seeing the world very deeply, hearing the sound, very deep sound. When you see the world very deeply you don’t know exactly what it is but there is some sound, something there. That sound of the world is something you are always looking for. You want to get it, but you cannot get it exactly through your experience so finally that is suffering, very direct cause of suffering.

“Finally you say ‘Please. Please. Please make me simple. Please make me free.’ We call upon something toward the sky saying ‘Please.’

“The moment when you say like this it is called Avalokiteshvara. The object is simultaneously what you, the subject, are looking for. At that time, no object, no subject. Subject and object are just the one-mind. So if you look upon like this, and if you call upon like this, simultaneously, immediately that is Avalokiteshvara. That is the reason we call it Avalokiteshvara.”