Plumbing, Flutes, and Dead Bodies

I just discovered that there’ll be enough people here on Saturday for a dharma talk. If the group is really small, we just have tea and chat. But not this week. The little group of regulars will be mostly here. Studying together like this is very different from a church or a Zen Center. We know each other pretty well, in a practice sense, and so it is more like a gathering of friends than a public event. That’s how it is for me. One of the regulars, however, recently told me that he feels very nervous in this situation because his practice is so exposed.

For times like this Saturday, I’ve been talking about a Soto Zen collection of koans, The Iron Flute. The whole name is something like Playing the Iron Flute Upside-down. Chew on that! Or blow through that if you can!

The picture above popped up when I searched for “iron flute.” Like “schwag” (see the previous post), I don’t really get it. Who can plumb the depths of this one? However, it is available from Kohler starting at $299. I’m sure this one would be hard to play upside-down too. Please don’t try this at home.

In The Iron Flute talks, I’m now on “Yun-Men’s Feast in the Joss House” (that’s a joss house above – a small place that people would pray to various deities or ancestors, usually with joss incense).

Anyway, there is a nice bit of serendipity with the case for this week and the last blog – On Spiritual Schwagging (again, see below). Here is part of Nyogen Senzaki’s commentary:

Any faker who mentions the reincarnations of masters becomes so popular he makes a fortune. Thousands of people in this country alone are being cheated every day by charlatans, who encourage the most unreasonable and fantastic products of the imagination. But this would not be possible if it were not that some people, who believe in a religion or study a philosophy, are unsatisfied with the true feast. They are like the Chinese idols of a joss house; the fragrance of enlightenment floats around them but they have no sense of smell. Books in libraries, scriptures in temples, hundreds of thousands of them, are offering the true feast in vain to flesh-and-blood idols!

I’m suspicious of what sounds like self-righteousness here … and I think there are more people pedaling a self-created fusion of pop-Buddhism and pseudo-psychology now than “reincarnation of masters” but it might well make a comeback. Apparently, “reincarnation of masters” was hot 6o years ago when Senzaki wrote the above. However, the core question Senzaki raises is quite to the point.

Jerry Garcia put it this way: “I live in a silver mine but I call it beggar’s tomb.”

How can an idol (that’s the dead-horse self) really smell the incense or the coffee?