Non-Buddhism

By Henry Blanke

“What you call past does not exist. What you call future does not exist. Only present. Now.”

I bowed and left his room. As I rejoined the others in zazen, I pondered the meaning of his words. I had heard this Zen truism many times, but this was different. There was something about Roshi’s speech and hearing that uncannily embodied being in the present. Earlier he had given me meditation instructions which were odd and seemed contrary to what I been taught in the past. 

“Sit with anus closed. Many thought come in through anus. If you think, sleep no problem. Thinking, fantasy, sleep, dream all zazen.”

“But shouldn’t I try not to think or doze off?”

“No. Mind think. Body sleep. These things normal, natural. Mind not contaminated by thought. Dreaming good. It give symbols of practice.”

Now in the zendo I noticed a few students either in deep samadhi or sound asleep. I could not tell which. In fact, Roshi himself appeared to be in such a state. Then he opened his eyes and said, “the deeper the drop, the higher the moon.”

Then the chanting began. 

“Caught in a self centered dream, only

Suffering

Waking to a dream within a dream

This moment, life as it is, only teacher

Being just this moment,

Compassion’s Way.”

The chanting was perfectly in unison and without inflection or  emphasis. I tried to put my chanting in synch with Roshi’s.

After, I chatted with some of the other students, but noticed something strange about their conversational style. None of them ever made reference to past events or persons. And they only spoke of things directly within their frames of perception. If I asked about things that had happened in the past or people they had known, they would say things like “He went out of experience” or “rain went out of experience.” When I asked about a former student who had died, I was told, “my brother saw him.” When I asked if anyone had read Dogen’s Shobogenzo, no one understood since none of them had or anyone they knew had ever met him. When the alter candle was lit it was in experience and when it was snuffed out, it was out of experience. Any talk of Buddhist oneness was avoided and verbal expressions of non-duality were complex since “one” could mean a small number and “two” could mean more than one. They did not speak in abstractions and did not refer to Buddhist myths or origin stories.

When I went home that night, my head was reeling. Who were these people? They seemed like other Zen students I had known, but they talked so fucking weird. Was this a cult or a deeply eccentric form of Buddhism? And what about Roshi? I had heard that his father was born near the Amazon in northeastern Brazil and made his way to Sao Paolo when he was a teenager and became a professor there. His dissertation had been on how renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and it’s challenged to Chomsky’s Universal  Grammar. While teaching, Roshi’s father fell in love and married a Japanese exchange student in his department. Roshi was home schooled, studied Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and emigrated to the United States when he was 24. In the U.S. he discovered Zen and became a close student of the legendary and highly eccentric teacher Ne-on Makagowza Roshi. After Han Pira’s profound kensho experience was recognized by Ne-on, he received Dharma transmission and permission to found his own meditation center. He named it Ordinary Language Zendo.

When I went back to the zendo the next day, I had dokusan again with Roshi. He asked what I thought of the place and I told him that I found the way people talked to be odd and a bit unsettling.

“That whole point. To shock you out of routine use of words. It kind of therapy to see world as it is.”

I told him that I didn’t really understand. 

“It simple. Is past real? Is future real? No. They only exist in mind. So we talk like they don’t exist to correct faulty thinking.”

I asked him if the Buddha existed and what came before him. 

“Buddha? Have you met this man? If you see him, kill him!”

When I rejoined the other students, one of the senior monks filled me in a bit about Roshi. He told me that he had an excessive fondness for English gin and that he was rumored to have had affairs with several female students. Right now he was involved with a non-binary Japanese disciple named Kukai who when I met her some time later, seemed to exhibit something called metropholia. This is sexual arousal by the syntax of rhetoric. It was believed that he was grooming them to be his Dharma heir. I found out that they had belonged to the Shingon school of esoteric Japanese Buddhism for thirty years. They had met Roshi in the U.S. and together they developed a form of tantric practice. When I asked if any of Roshi’s current students were involved, he said that he could not because of his vows, but that a few couples here had been initiated.

I especially enjoyed Thursday nights at the zendo when they had liturgical service. The style of chanting used was a kind of lyrical prosody. One of the chants was called Buddha Nature is Impermanence and I found it very beautiful. 

“The body, a living, breathing body….No past or future only now. 

Desires, appetites, need for love and attachment….Here right now.”

And on it went sounding musical and hypnotic. 

When I walked home that day, I tried out some of the language therapy I had learned. In addition no references to past or future person or events unless they had been directly seen by you or someone you knew, Roshi had told me to avoid first person singular pronouns. When I went to my local bodega for cigarettes, I greeted the counter guy Gurpal with, “how are you? Need cigs.” He responded as usual and asked how I was doing. “Came from me meditation place. Headache.” When he asked what kind of meditation I did, my answer was, “sit straight silent belly breath. It calming.” Gurpal knew me well enough to know there was something off with me, but he just smiled quizzically and I left. Outside I ran into Steve walking his golden retriever. Steve worked as a truck driver and was a no nonsense kind of guy. He asked me if I had seen the Mets game last night. I said to him, “you have told me about Mets. What is it?” 

“What the fuck, Henry? Why are you talking like that?”

“Just something I learned. See you.”

Next up was my friend Andreas who was a linguistic anthropologist so I knew his reaction to my strange conversation would be different from the others. Sure enough, he asked what I was up to. 

“I have been going to this guy Han Pira’s meditation place and he does this interesting stuff with language.”

Andreas asked where he was from and I told him, “Brazil, the  northeast, I think.” 

“You know I did fieldwork in Brazil. There is a sizable Japanese Brazilian community and many practice Buddhism including Zen. I have friends who are into Candoble and the newer syncretic forms of Afro Brazilian religion.”

“Well, Han Pira grew up in Brazil and now teaches Zen. But I don’t think he’s involved with Candoble or anything.”

“Whatever, but the way you just spoke to me is curious and  vaguely familiar. What else did Pira tell you?”

“He just told me to not speak of the past or future and not to use first person singular pronouns. He said this way of talking would shape how I see the world.”

“The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Aside from a few renegade linguists, this has been largely discredited. Chomsky theories are widely accepted now.”

“I doubt that Pira knows about this stuff, but I will ask him.”

“Did you try your little experiment with anyone outside your Zen place?”

“Just with a couple of guys. They looked at me like I had had a mini-stroke or something.”

“Asshole, what did you expect?”

The next time I went to the zendo, Roshi was not there. I was told he was with Kukai in semi-seclusion. He had been vague about the reason, but it had something to do with the new teachings he was working on. The word was that he was leaving the zendo. The next time I saw Roshi was about two months later at his farewell party. His appearance had changed dramatically. Instead of his brown robes, he wore a tailored suit (maybe Saville Row). He had grown his hair long and wore in a ponytail. He also sported a styled goatee. Kukai was with him and it was the first time I met them. Their head was shaved and they had large almond shaped eyes. When I shook hands with Kukai I felt a kind of electric charge and immediate sexual arousal. Roshi was drinking glass after glass of gin and was in a jocular mood. 

“So Henry, have you been practicing your ordinary language therapy on outside of here?”

“Just a bit. It didn’t go over well.”

Roshi laughed, I will bring teachings to world! Soon all will know. It will change world view for all!”

He told me that he and Kukai were writing a book on the theory and practice of Ordinary Language Therapy. And that he had accepted a few clients on the Manhattan Upper West Side where the zendo was located. Roshi’s students were saddened by the departure of their teacher, but his ebullient spirits buoyed them and they all danced, sang and made music late into the night. At the center of it all was Roshi improvising samba moves and calling out, “thank you, thank you, thank you!” Kukai accompanied him by playing the Brazilian flute while perched on one leg. 

It was 3 AM when the party started breaking up and I a few moments alone with Roshi. I told him about my friend Andreas and asked him if he knew about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He just smiled and said that his ideas were new and that the old theories about language no longer existed. Soon after, he and Kukai left. As I bowed to them he looked over his shoulder and said, “the world beautiful place to those who speak / only here now we know / I come to show language that will make it so.”

About two years later I saw Han Pira at his new place in the Hamptons for the last time. His therapeutic practice had grown and his influence had spread to avant-garde therapists around the world. His book Speak Now: On the Theory and Practice of Ordinary Language had been published in two volumes. On the beach together we looked out on the ocean and I told him that I liked to follow waves into the shore. Roshi looked at me with a sad smile and said, “you not learn but it OK. No such think as wave. Look.” He pointed to the ocean and said, “multiple waving occurs. How wonderful.”

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Henry Blanke is a Soto Zen Buddhist and Marxian socialist. He had a nearly 30 year career as a Bataille inspired academic librarian and now counsels those struggling with substance abuse. He has written on Herbert Marcuse, the politics of information and most recently on the possible intersections between Zen practice and socialism. He lives in New York City and fancies himself a bohemian cosmopolite, a flaneur and a passionate jazz lover, poet, and home cook. See also, “A Thought Experiment for X-Buddhists,” and “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”