Words At Play

Dear Friends,

Conversations about cooking? Green Eggs and Ham? Gerard Manley Hopkins? A wooden floor? Yes, they are all here, in this talk I gave during winter retreat.

As you’ll see, I continue to turn around the wonderful essay “Instructions for the Cook” by the 13th century Zen teacher, Eihei Dogen, and spend time in Dogen’s questions about words and how they work

Also, if you’ve been looking for a way to help those in Los Angeles and Gaza, one of the places I’ve been giving to is World Central Kitchen.

— Sal (aka Gessho)

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Video & Audio: Words At Play

Video and podcast audio here.

(Check out the podcast version if the sound on the video feels too low — honestly this talk is better when you can hear it!)

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Words At Play

(This transcript has been lightly edited.)

Conversation with a Cook

As we pick up the story, a young Eihei Dogen arrives from Japan to China on a boat in the year 1233. He’s searching for the heart of Zen, and for his own heart.

While he is still in the harbor, on the boat, he meets a cook, a tenzo from a nearby monastery and they have a conversation, one which is electrifying to Dogen.We've all had those conversations sometimes, when we meet a person and something lights up in us.

Dogen wanted to keep talking all night, but the cook said, “No, I have to go and walk the 14 miles back to the monastery and make the meal with these mushrooms.”

Dogen said, “But you're 68 years old, why don't you leave that hard work to somebody else? And you could just sit zazen and study the words of the ancestors.

And the tenzo said, “My friend, it seems you don't really understand practice or the words of the ancestors.”

Dogen said, “Whoa! What is practice? What are words?”

The tenzo said, “Keep asking, keep asking and penetrate this question.”

Many months passed and Dogen was studying in a monastery. This tenzo happened to be traveling near the monastery, and he heard that Dogen was there, so he went to visit.

Dogen was overjoyed. He said, “When I brought up our discussion on the ship about words and practice, you said, ‘If you want to understand words, you must look into what words are. If you want to practice, you must understand what practice is.’”

Dogen asked, “What are words?”

The tenzo said, “One, two, three, four, five”.

Dogen asked, “What is practice?

The tenzo said, “Everywhere. Nothing is hidden.”

Or in a different translation, Dogen’s question is, “what is the pursuit of the way?” and the tenzo’s answer: “In the whole world, it can never be hidden.”

I remember a talk that Ryotan Roshi gave some years ago, and he was talking about students who were in a seeking state, a somewhat frustrated seeking state. And at some point in the talk, Ryo quoted this. But the way I remember him saying it is:

“Nothing has ever been hidden.”

Nothing can possibly be hidden from you, even though we often might feel it is.

What Are Words?

Yesterday, Shinryu investigated “what is practice,” which I think is probably the more important question, but I’m going to investigate “what are words,” because I think language is really strange.

On the way up to the retreat, I heard two talks, one by Daishi and one by Jiryu, both touching on language. Daishi was talking about the strange paradox, where, on the one hand, here is this teaching beyond words and speaking, this practice that's anything but about language.

And over there, on the other hand, are the inconceivable mountains of words that have been written about this. And they're not primarily words from the outside. They're not people describing it who aren't practitioners. They are words from the deepest practitioners that we know.

So, why are they doing that? What are they doing?

I think reality is quite peculiar and unfathomable.

Language is definitely a part of ordinary reality. If I say the word “floor,” sound waves pass through the air, and your nerve endings pick them up, and there's a little language area in the brain, it gets tickled by that. So, all kinds of ordinary real phenomenon happen when I say the word “floor.” We can't say the word doesn't exist, but its relation to this [touches the floor] is quite distant, I would say.

Childhood Games

I've been thinking about our childhood relationship to language, when language is still so fresh, and its strangeness is apparent to us.

There was a game that I played, and I suspect many of you did, where you just say a word over and over and over, until the meaning kind of drains out, and it feels like a little itchy or something, it's a little disconcerting.

Floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor.

Pretty soon, you're in some weird territory.

And the word “floor” has many kin in the world of language that are different from the kin of this [touches floor]. So the word floor has a friend, door, it has a friend bore, it has roar and core and store, but it also has friends like flower and flow and flood and fool.

We could map a sonic chart, and there are other kinds of charts connecting the word in the fields of language. But floor’s relation to the world is quite different from this thing's [touches floor] relationship to the world.

Green Eggs and Ham

My favorite book as a very small child was Green Eggs and Ham, which probably most of you are familiar with. But if you're not, there's a story to it.

There's a kind of curmudgeonly character who doesn't really have a name, and another character named Sam who wants to make friends. So Sam comes along, and he wants to make friends by offering his favorite food, green eggs and ham.

The curmudgeonly character is like, I do not like this. So he refuses again and again, and the refusals get more and more broken and crazy. That's the fun of the book. And then it does have a sort of story arc where just to keep Sam from pestering him, he finally is like, okay, I'll taste this thing and lo and behold, delicious!

And so there's a kind of moral about friendship or unfamiliarity, but that's not what makes a kid love this book. What made me love this book is the kind of weird way in which it inhabits language: rhyme and rhythm.

Sam is, is constantly asking things like, could you, would you, with a goat? Could you, would you, on a boat? And our main character refuses with:

I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain, 
not in the dark, not in a tree, 
not in a car, you let me be. 
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox. 
I will not eat them in a house. 
I will not eat them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there. 
I do not like them anywhere. 
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them. Sam, I am!

So there's just some kind joy in language at play there.

Llamas and Panthers

Our registrar, MyoGetsu, reminded me recently of the poems of Edward Lear and Ogden Nash. And so I'm going to read you a couple of poems by Ogden Nash.

One of my favorites, which will also be familiar to many of you is called “Lama:”

The one-l lama,
He's a priest;
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.

There's another one, “The Panther.”

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.

Why is that so satisfying? It just really is.

Or to lift us up to something more serious, I want to share a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is also a very famous poem, probably familiar to many of you. It's called “Pied Beauty.”

Pied is an unusual word, but it means things that are multicolored or two-toned. And I will warn you, the word “God” is used in this poem, in the male sense. So just gird your loins or forgive him as best you can.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him. 

Words at Play

I think in all of these, whether they're funny or exalted, we do see language, words, at play.

These are poems that couldn't possibly be paraphrased. You could try, but you wouldn't have anything like the same thing. So these are poems that embody something in their language. They do mean what they say, but they mean something that they're also not saying, in a way that's worth investigating.

Now I want to come back to the floor, and I hope you'll all forgive me who happened to have heard me at the last retreat talk about the carpet. You might think I have a strange obsession with flooring, and I think you wouldn't be entirely wrong, but I'm going to try to vow not to keep talking only about floors. But today, please forgive and indulge.

I want to come back to the floor, because similarly to the summer, we've been spending some time gazing in relation to it, gazing at it.

Exercise of the Floor

I'd like to invite everybody now to indulge me for a moment and gaze at the floor. Use that as-if-you're-in-Zazen sort of gaze, so your eyes might just be only partially open, very soft, receptive. You're not looking, you're just letting the seeing happen. Let the field of color and texture of whatever is in front of you just exist there and forget you know anything about it.

Put aside any words that come to mind. And in that space that you're creating in your awareness, let all of your senses come alive, and let your whole self come into that awareness. So everything you might be feeling in this moment—bored, or happy, or sad, or ecstatic, or uncomfortable—whatever it is, just let it all be there. Let's just take a breath or two in that.

[pause]

Thank you.

Inexhaustible

I'm going to go out a little bit on a limb here and say that if all of us spent the rest of our time here writing about this [touches floor] floor thing, floor non-thing, we still could not begin to exhaust it.

To go a little bit Mahayana, if we were as many as all of the grains of sand in the Ganges, and we had as much time as eons or kalpas, we could write and write and write and write poems and stories and plays and songs and screeds, and we still would not be able to exhaust this. [touches floor]

That reality is in some sense inexhaustible.

And also, with our language, we would never really be able to reach or touch this.

Alienation and Vagueness

There are a couple of koans that I've been sitting with. I feel like I've been sitting in this muddy word-place for a few months. In one of them, Master Fengxue is asked by a monk, “speech and silence involve alienation and vagueness. How does one get through without transgression?”

That monk is quoting a much older philosophical text. So he's pulling out this little bit of philosophy from his bag. It's a real question, but he also, he wants his teacher to pin it down for him, explain this, sort it out for me.

And Fengxue says, “I always remember the south of the lake in springtime, the hundred flowers fragrant where the partridges call.”

That's a famous Chinese poem. So he's answering this question with a poem, which I'm curious about. Why a poem?

In a way, we can see he's deflecting the question. He's telling this monk, who has the question, that he's in a sense asking the wrong question, or he's off the trail. So partly he's offering a kind of a non-answer in that way. But as we were thinking about with some of the poems we just conjured, the poem can't be collapsed into a discussion of spring or an allusion to an ancient Chinese poem. It just can't. It just holds this space.

So when the monk is trying to say speech and silence involve alienation and vagueness, speech or words are—just as we were thinking about the floor—they can't touch, they can't touch. So they can keep us separate, they can make us feel separate from things. That's the alienation.

But if we don't say anything, if we don't express anything to each other, there's this vagueness or this inability to function in the world. So you can't say, Gessho, please get the broom and sweep the floor, which we need to be able to say.

So we can't collapse into the sort of bliss of perception or the absolute, sometimes people say, and we can't collapse into just, oh yeah, floor means that. (touches floor) Neither one works.

So what Fengxue conjures is a kind of speech, which is also not speech. It's neither speech nor silence.

It's something else entirely.

It Can Never be Hidden

There's another koan that functions in a similar way, where Yunmen says, “The ancient Buddhas are merged with the open pillars. What order of operation is this?”

The ancient Buddhas are exactly the same as what holds up our temple.

But nobody could respond, in the assembly. And so he answered for them.And what he said was: “On the southern mountains rising clouds, on the northern mountains falling rain.”

I think this is similar in its evocation of something that is neither speech nor silence.

It's neither an answer nor not an answer. It holds a space.

All of the koan collections are filled with poetic commentaries. As poets or anyone who works with words knows, you can't actually say what you mean. It's just completely impossible. Yet, when you want to talk about something that can't be talked about, poems are a way of doing something in that space.

The poem that accompanies this particular koan about the pillar begins, “one path of spiritual light has never been concealed from the first.”

This is just right where we were with Dogen and the tenzo a few hundred years later.

What is the pursuit of the way Dogen urgently wants to know? And the tenzo answers, in the whole world, it can never be hidden.

Thusness

In a few few minutes, we'll be rising up and having some kinhin (walking meditation). Afterwards, in the midday service, we're going to all chant a poem together called “The Song of the Jewel Mirror Awareness” that begins with the line, “the dharma of thusness has been intimately conveyed by Buddhas and ancestors.”

That means person to person, right there in the interactions, in the dokusan room, something is being given to us, which from the point of view of this particular poet, the central thing is thusness. [touches floor]

So I invite you, when we're in kinhin, to see if you can access a little bit of the thusness of this floor and especially to listen to its very, very beautiful song. Its squeaky, squeaky beautiful song.

Moon, Moon

When I was in high school, my mother was very interested in Chinese furniture, and she was particularly interested in moon viewing chairs. These are chairs where you could lay back and look at the moon. And in China and Japan, there were these parties, especially in the autumn, whenever there was a full moon, where people would gather and drink and write poems to the moon. Inexhaustible moon.

There are a bajillion poems to the moon in Chinese and Japanese culture. And when I was in high school, I was curious about this practice and I read some of them. I came across this one poem that I've now lost. So I don't have the original text and I don't know who wrote it, and I don't exactly know when it's from. But it goes something like this:

Moon, moon, oh moon, oh moon, moon, moon, oh moon, oh moon, moon, moon.

You can see why I love it.

I'm going to close by singing a song to the floor. It's really a song about rain that I'm adapting. It's an incredibly beautiful song that I can't do justice to, but I'm just going to sing a little bit of it for our floor.

Floor, beautiful floor! Floor, floor, floor, floor beautiful floor!

Oh, beautiful floor! Floor, floor, floor, floor, beautiful floor!

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How do you think about words and language? I’d love to hear from you.

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How to Cook Your Life

How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment includes a translation of Dogen’s Tenzo kyôkun (Instructions for the Cook) and a commentary by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi. It is available from Shambhala Publications.

If you need to read it right away, a PDF can be found on Terebess.

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Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss is available from Penguin/Random House.

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“Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo

“Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain” can be found on Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s album Shaka Zulu.

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