I want John Tarrant, Roshi to be my cool Uncle that I can call up and have lunch with from time to time. John Tarrant currently teaches at the
Pacific Zen Institute in the San Francisco Bay area. He's had lots of incarnations -- Jungian analyst, accomplished poet, lobbyist for Aboriginal rights in Australia (he's from Tasmania), factory worker, industrial fisherman, and on and on. He has written a couple books, one of which is called
Bring Me the Rhinoceros & Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy.
I went to see a talk he gave, and a workshop at the
Unitarian Church, who sponsored him to come to Portland. It was a wonderful introduction to koan practice, which had been totally mysterious to me -- well, it still is. But now it's just slightly less scary, because I can now hear the koans in his warm Tasmanian accent.
He has an earlier book called
The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life. This book brings a lot of his Jungian influence, and is easy to open at any page to just enjoy a painting with words, really, that blends archetype and Zen, human experience and light.
Here is one of my favorite parts of his book. That rumbling underground you hear is my Puritan ancestors spinning in their graves.
Doing Nothing
We often forget the value of allowing the night and the day to flow in and out of the house while, on the hillside, the grass grows by itself. In general we are not lazy enough, and struggle too hard. Anyone can achieve things but to do nothing requires resolve. To become one with sitting is to become one with walking, with working, with jumping about, with being sad, with falling in love. The world goes its way, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and we are at home. What our integrity leads us to do then is what the old Chinese teachers called "the things of Buddha" -- eating, drinking, laughing, feeding the children, weeping, burying the dead.
The man whose aorta split open at sea said that when he was recovering after surgery, he noticed something: "The habit body, the opinions and thoughts that I normally carry around was quiet. Usually they make a kind of veil, or a buffer over things. But they were silent. And that was very nice."
When we let drop the veils of our usual preconceptions, we are closer to our lives, sustained without knowing why. When we cannot see how healing or the next step in our lives will appear, and no longer know what we can expect, the step we must take just emerges out of nothingness, like the grass. What rises to meet our need comes from a domain deeper than the realm of custom, more ancient, beneath our feet and our awareness, thousand armed, beyond our control. To live without veils, in modesty and unknowing, is to trust the abyss, as a swimmer trusts to the ocean, and gently moves both hands and feet; it is to flow through the day like boys on a raft down the Mississippi. The old Chinese teachers called such activity "doing nothing," or "not-doing." This doing nothing is an inner event that can take place in strenuous action or utter stillness. To do nothing is always harder than we imagine.
Not-doing, in which we lounge around and loaf at our ease, is a kind of falling out of our lives, the way when his aorta split the man fell through and beyond his habits. Visible and invisible hands reach out and we find that we have always been supported by much that is unknown ans beyond our plans. Just as Alice, in the surprising, uncontrollable moment of dropping down the rabbit hole, found a marmalade jar on a shelf, we meet common things in a field of wonder. The orderly progress of breakfast, lunch, and dinner catches us and there is the beauty of work, tea, jam on toast, the body's cabinet of pains, the quick feet of rain scratching toward us over dry leaves.
Unlike ordinary laziness, in which we merely avoid something we think we ought to be doing, the laziness of not-doing has a refined and charged quality. By comparison, ordinary laziness is hard work, and requires distraction. When we truly do nothing, a fertile, widening silence appears. Close to the mystery, we drift along. There is no resistance to delusion, yet delusion can find no ground to cling to. In the midst of action we rely on the stillness that is everywhere present. If the world is imagining itself without our existence, why then, we let it do so. When we truly do nothing, we allow that falling can be good, that arms might catch us when we do fall, that the world may sustain and surprise us at the same time. We respond naturally, witnessing the web of life of which we are a part, just as water runs downhill and the white clouds run before a breeze.
After a certain point, knowing and effort don't bring us into closer harmony with eternity; our love for fragile creatures provides a route. Francis of Assisi spoke with the birds. The Japanese poet Issa was concerned for the little forms of life:
Don't worry spiders,
I keep house
casually.
Not-doing, having no urgent plans, we dawdle in the intimate while, like a child jumping puddles on the way home from school. The world comes to us then, and we belong in it, in the morning light at equinox, with the hawks swinging on the updrafts over the headlands and, in the afternoon, with the fog rising out of the ocean to fling itself, kraken-like, onto the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. At last we are at home in this fleeting life.
The Wise Fool, the Sacred Fool, does not shrink back from the edge of the precipice.
