One Blade of Grass

Henry Shukman's is the second 'dharma autobiography' that I've read (counting Adyashanti's The End of Your World in this genre).  As befits a guy who was a professional writer before he became the main teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center, Shukman's book is a true memoir, not merely the collection of personal stories and anecdotes that he uses in his teaching.  Likewise befitting a writer, it is not only exceptionally literate, but often downright poetic.  

It's also immensely encouraging.  Shukman paints himself as just your basic neurotic Englishman.  His life was that unremarkable mix of privilege and suffering that characterize most of our lives in the gods realm.  The implicit (and even explicit) message is that if he can do it, anyone can.  What exactly he did, of course, remains a bit of a mystery.  He gives poetic expression to a series of mystical experiences that he interprets as glimpses of some true reality.  However, after 20 years of practice, these seem to culminate in a profound and abiding awakening experience that no longer makes any distinction between true and apparent reality.  While his description of the 'endpoint' does little to clear up what 'enlightenment' (a term Shukman pointedly denies knowing anything about) might be like, it is nevertheless fascinating to hear him try to match words to his experiences.  

Probably even more interesting than the endpoint is Shukman's description of the path that led him there.  Even though I had understood his Sanbo Zen lineage to be a combination of Soto and Rinzai Zen his practice seems to have focused mostly on koan training.  Since this is the first account I've read that includes a complete description of how koan training works, I found it fascinating.  While I can hardly claim to really understand what's going on, what struck me most about his account of the process was the sense that the important thing in a koan was observing the way your mind moves in search of a 'solution'.  It's as if the koan is a sort of force that pushes on you, and the method is to observe your own reaction to this force.  In this light, the interview with the teacher that Shukman insists is a core component of koan training becomes an interesting variation on our normal idea of communication.  Instead of transmitting fixed knowledge from student to teacher, perhaps the 'presentation' shows the teacher whether the student has followed the movement of the koan, has seen how it operates on their self.  The exact 'solution' would then be irrelevant, and the answer could only come in the form of another koan that manifests the same movement.  

Zen Words for the Heart

Hakuin's commentary on the Heart Sutra is another of those classic Zen texts that it's difficult to say anything useful about.  It has the same irreverent and acerbic tone that seems to increasingly characterize later Zen writings (eg. it's much less marked in The Platform Sutra).  Hakuin spends a lot of his time making fun of Kanjizai/Kannon/Kuanyin/Avalokitesvara (Bodhisattva of compassion) who preaches the "Great Wisdom Perfection Heart Sutra".  He also lays into the Buddha's right hand man, Sariputra.  Naturally, his point, the point of all Zen literature as far as I can see, is basically to shock your brain into stopping.  Stop holding even something like the wisdom of the Heart Sutra to be the final word.  Go out there and experience it for yourself.

Team of Rivals

It's possible that I am the last person in 'merica to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's mammoth biography of Lincoln.  And no, I didn't see the movie either.  I think I first heard of the book years ago at some industry conference where a CEO (Rich Kinder if memory serves) suggested that it made for a good lesson in leadership.  This is actually a pretty good summary of what the book depicts.  While it's enormously sympathetic to Lincoln, it manages to avoid becoming a hagiography because Goodwin convincingly shows us just what exactly made Lincoln so great.  He was, in short, an extraordinary leader.  Today this term has been debased through its appropriation by a parade of petulant tyrants.  Many now lauded for their visionary leadership are nothing more than stopped watches who, inevitably, find themselves in perfect alignment with the public or media or market fashion clock.  They only know how to get their own, uniquely correct way.  Lincoln was a leader in the profound sense of someone who draws more from the people around him than they are capable of on their own.  Someone who enables cooperation amongst a group that would have been unable to cooperate without a leader.  Most fundamentally, a leader is not someone who unilaterally steers the ship (for this we have Dear Leader) but someone who enables the ship to both move and be steered.  This is real power, a power that creates capability.

The biography shows us Lincoln's leadership primarily through the way he handled the other candidates for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.  Lincoln was able to secure the nomination simply because he had fewer enemies that any of the other candidates at the nomination convention.  He was everyone's second choice, the candidate of compromise.  Initially dismissed as a lucky country bumpkin by his opponents Seward, Chase, Cameron, and Bates, Lincoln was able to overcome both their disappointment at losing to someone they considered inferior, as well as their infighting with one another that threatened to rupture the new and fragile Republican party.  He did this by naming all of them to important positions in his Cabinet, which then became an important force for holding the North together throughout the Civil War.  According to Goodwin's Lincoln's political genius lay in this talent for getting rivals to cooperate as a part of a team, in this case, rivals even to their leader.  It's an inspiring story of what true leadership can accomplish when the focus is less on the leader than the team.

The other thing that was particularly interesting about the book was the way that it depicts Lincoln leading public opinion on the meaning of the war.  This reveals a somewhat different sense of leadership that it closer to "shepherding along".  While Lincoln had definite principals he remained true to throughout his political career, as a politician, he was also careful never to get too far out in front of public opinion on an issue.  This resulted in a shifting justification for the war on the part of the North.  At first, it was more of a "police action" aimed at restoring the Constitutional Union as it stood before the illegal Southern secession.  As the war progressed, however, the justification slid gradually in a more moral direction.  The Emancipation Proclamation serves as a sort of hinge between the original, narrow, desire to return the South to the Union with slavery intact (though with the prospect of its expansion eliminated) and the later ratification of the thirteenth amendment that abolished the "Southern Way of Life" forever.  This change of heart was of course made possible by the war itself.  The North needed the help of black soldiers and the South was using their slave labor force to build fortifications.  What Unionist wouldn't have support the emancipation of Confederate slaves under those circumstances.  Lincoln never liked slavery.  And some of his best friends were even black, as the saying goes.  But his stance was never that of visionary abolitionist pursuing a moral crusade.   At least at the beginning of the war, this would never have unified and mobilized the North to fight for the Union. So part of his larger political genius lay in staying just one step ahead of public opinion.  A leader never, it seems, operates in a vacuum.