"Thornley, Kerry - Zenarchy v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thornley Kerry)
I liked that one. For the most part, though, Carl resembled nearly all other Atlanta radicals - guns appealed to him more than flowers and humor. I wasn't that angry yet.
As a journalistic celebrity, Ho Chi Zen was now much in demand at the Bird. So I followed "Mind Fucking Zen" with a number of similar contributions from the Zenarchist Arsenal.
One was a story I borrowed from the arguments of the anarchists and clothed in the legend of the Robber Cheh, a favorite character used by Chuang Tzu for making points about thieves.
Once an apprentice to the Robber Cheh got word that the village of Yin lost favor with the Duke, falling behind on taxes; the royal constables were withdrawn. Meanwhile, the neighboring village of Yang remained under guard day and night. Which village to steal from was the subject of discussion.
For while the apprentice wanted to attack Yin, the Robber Cheh insisted it would be safer to commit robberies in Yang. Since the residents of Yin knew they were without protection, they would guard their property with fierce dogs, dig pits around their homes, alert their neighbors to keep an eye out, and moreover, few residents of Yin would not be armed. Whereas Yang, reasoned the Robber Cheh, would be easy pickings. All his band had to fear was the police, who could be watched on their rounds until they passed through a neighborhood, and then the thieves could strike.
Another piece celebrated Timothy Leary's jailbreak, drawing parallels between Leary and the Mexican revolutionary, Emil Zapata, who used to retire to the mountains and ingest psychedelic mushrooms.
When curiosity as to the identity of Ho Chi Zen reached an intolerable level, I dispatched a fictitious reporter to Atlanta's nonexistent Chinatown to interview my inscrutable Oriental. My object was to satirize Western stereotypes about Asians. Found living behind a Chinese red door in an opium den, cloaked in every possible cliche associated with Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, with a gong on his front porch bearing the seal of the Illuminati, his ornate home scented unmistakably with fumes of Peking Proletarian Incense, Ho delivered an interview that was characteristically surprising - though not nearly as surprising to me as that the Bird possessed enough humor to publish it.
Therein, Ho explained that the State is a figment of its own imagination and that the Zenarchist Revolution is inevitable; "In fact, it just took place as I was speaking that sentence! Now that you have your freedom, how will you hide it from robbers?"
Another time he was quoted from a speech he didn't actually deliver in Piedmont Park on "the dope problem", that being the problem of what to do about the dopes who thought marijuana and LSD should remain illegal.
Thereafter, dedicated Bird writers began returning from the far-flung barricades and Ho Chi Zen faded into the ornate Oriental woodwork - with parting tips about how guerilla warriors could survive in the wilderness, gleaned from my research about dropping out.
Among Ho Chi Zen's contributions that summer had also been a five-step program for social change, called Yin Revolution, that utilized drop-out skills in conjunction with political action. More about that in the pages to follow.
Predictably, many Marxists regarded Ho Chi Zen as a deviationist with pronounced petty bourgeois tendencies. That is a charge I would not deny, since in the view of anarchism the petty bourgeois is a natural revolutionary ally of the worker, something to which even Mao Tse-Tung gave significant recognition in planning the Chinese revolution. For Mao had read Kropotkin and Bakunin along with his Marx.
When I wrote a letter to the Bird a year or two later recommending the flags of all nations be burned, as well as the red flag of revolution, the black flag of anarchy and the white flag of peace, in order to assert that human lives were more valuable than rags, signing it Ho Chi Zen, I was brought to task. I had included in my list the Viet Cong flag which, unlike all the other examples mentioned, was not a rag, but a symbol for which thousands of revolutionary soldiers had given their lives.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote me to say that I was wrong and the Bird was right in repudiating my letter, "For while the flags of most nations are made only of cloth and hence are simply rags, the flags of the socialist nations are made one-hundred-percent of gossamer and angel feathers."
Soon a San Francisco printing collective joined the fray when called upon to reprint certain of Ho Chi Zen's Bird articles in Saint John's Wednesday Bread Messenger. In a rider on which they insisted, they accused Ho of racism for resembling Fu Manchu, missing the point of the satire. Moreover, this Marxist printing collective went on to point out, with no little outrage, that there was no evidence that Ho Chi Minh was into Zen, a possibility that never occurred to me in the first place. (Chairman Mao, on the other hand, possessed a profound grasp of Taoism and often resorted to Taoist concepts to explain Marxism to the Chinese people.)
So to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, I bumped Ho Chi Zen off and wrote him an epitaph. Since Ho Chi Mihn was affectionately known to his people as Uncle Ho, the Atlanta high schoolers who also read the Bird had taken to calling Ho Chi Zen by the nickname, Nephew Ho. Called "Obit, for Nephew Ho", the poem began with the lines: "When Lester Maddox raised all Hell/Ho Chi Zen would break the spell/Lampooning every racist myth/Yankees napalmed Asians with..." Ho proved irrepressible, however, and it turned out soon enough that my report of his death was, in Mark Twain's famous words, "greatly exaggerated." Nonetheless it was, belatedly, the only reply I ever made to the sober-sided charge that Ho Chi Zen was just a modern-day version of the Yellow Kid.
Many an artist has tried to capture the elusive Ho Chi Zen with pen and ink. Nothing quite presents him as I imagine he looks, as the picture in Zen Without Zen Masters that accompanies the story, "Ho Chi Zen's School". There he is shown waiting to pounce on any student who puts money in his donation bowl three times in a row, in order to expel that unfortunate for excessive gullibility.
Times are, though, when Ho Chi Zen is just too cute for the serious business of Zenarchy. That is why I tried to kill him. Too much the gimmick and not enough the funky human being I'm trying to give permission to exist in everyone. He gets in the way. But he is as wily as Bokonon in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Just when I think I am rid of him, he pops up somewhere new. Rasputin's assassins had it easier. Nephew Ho is as immortal in his own way - and sometimes as detested by his creator - as was Sherlock Holmes. I seem stuck with him.
As the Chinese Buddhist Layman P'ang Jung used to say of too-clever a Zen antic, "Bungled it trying to be smart."
Toward the final, desperate days of the Nixon regime, though, Ho Chi Zen made a return appearance in The Great Speckled Bird that was neither too facile nor the least bit offensive to my sincere Marxist comrades. Done up on the front page like an album cover, the lyrics to Nephew Ho's "Watergate Rock" began with: "I want to make one thing perfectly clear:/I've nothing to hide and nothing to fear..." Repeated at the beginning of each stanza, this couplet was followed at the song's end with, "...but angry women of all ages,/Buddhist monks in tiger cages,..." and continued with a list of who Nixon had to fear, of people whose pain and heartbreak had made possible Richard Nixon's sorry career as President of the United States of America.
That time Ho Chi Zen was what they call "right on". And I guess that, more than anything else, is why I still let the little rascal monkey around in my written work. When his country and the rest of the world needed him, Ho Chi Zen was there.
Chapter 4
No one complains more loudly and sincerely about hippie games than hipsters. Zen masters object likewise to something they call "the stink of Zen".
A famous roshi once said to his inquiring monks: "All this talk about Zen is making me sick to my stomach!"
If you like to eat with chopsticks and fan yourself with imported Japanese fans, that's lovely. Just don't get the idea it has a tinker's dam to do with Zen.
In every society ridden with class distinctions there is a tendency to turn everything into games of one-upsmanship. Japan is no more an exception than the United States. Zen literature is replete with transcripts of quarrels among masters about which of them is most enlightened. Such arguments frequently begin and end as jokes, however, for Zen people try to remember what they are about. Once a drunken monk wandered into the room where two Zen masters were ferociously contending and both of them collapsed in laughter, never to cross wits again.
Yet as Alan Watts points out in "Hip Zen, Square Zen", even in Japan there is a trend to formalize Zen schools that tends over the centuries to rob them of much of their spontaneous appeal.
Slapping his master was how the great Zen lunatic, Rinzai, signified his awakening. (Only fair to note: his master had been hitting him with a stick whenever he asked a question.) Said Rinzai of his master: "There is not so much to the Buddhism of Huang Po after all!" Nevertheless, today the school founded in Rinzai's name issues certificates to students who attain satori.
In America, the hip counter-culture has not even fared that well, but was co-opted in a matter of years, instead of generations.
What to do? What to do? For you cannot make rules to preserve liveliness and originality. A Zenarchist answer is to keep destroying old forms - or abandoning them - including the habit of destroying old forms when it gets in the way. For the practice of Zen or Zenarchy or psychological nakedness or whatever you want to call it says with Bob Dylan: "I got nothing, Ma, to live up to." In fact, a popular Zen saying goes, "If you meet the Buddha on the path to enlightenment - kill him!"
As Alan Watts says in The Way of Zen, "There must be no confusion between Zen masters and theosophical 'mahatmas' - the glamorous 'Masters of Wisdom' who live in the mountain vastness of Tibet and practice the arts of occultism. Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die; they know joy and sorrow; they have bad tempers or other little 'weaknesses' of character just like everyone else, and they are not above falling in love and entering into a fully human relationship with the opposite sex. The perfection of Zen is to be perfectly and simply human. The difference of the adept in Zen from the ordinary run of men is that the latter are, in one way or another, at odds with their own humanity, and are attempting to be angels or demons."
To invent ego games wherein the points to be scored are for egolessness is, therefore, to miss the spirit of what we are talking about. Having nothing to do with hierarchies, mundane or spiritual, we are not out to prove anything - except that status is nonsense, as when we lightly bestow lofty titles on one another and ordain each other Zenarchs. Our purpose is, rather, to understand ourselves, our whole beings, and to "remember" something so simple that it tends to elude classification and satisfactory definition. For that reason, it is hard to remember. Captured in this or that string of words, unconditioned and unconditional mind tends soon to become confused in our thoughts of it with the words or sentences that only indicate its possibility. Thus one day we repeat to ourselves words that may once have awakened us, only to find them hollow. Then we find ourselves no longer dealing with the miracle of ordinary existence, but with an abstraction about it - a nervous twitch enshrined idolatrously somewhere in the frontal lobe of the brain! Rote learning is impossible when what we want to remember is spontaneity in living.
Words are useful tools of reference. Clinging too desperately to them is like grasping our lives in fear. We shut out our perceptions that made the thing worthwhile in the first place. We become like lovers who get into a spiteful fight over which of them loves the other the most.
All human activity is this way. Outward forms of religious reverence become so much more important than what religion is trying to teach, that devotees kill for them. Jesus would have to arise in every generation to denounce the scribes and Pharisees of every age for it to be any different. That was the point of the saying about new wine in old skins. Over and over, any such prophet would be crucified or stoned or lynched, besides. Objects of art suffer much the same fate. Pointing beyond the uptight concerns of the market place, they wind up objects of its calculations, investment speculations and status seeking.
In Psychotherapy East and West, Watts recommends dealing with this frantic compulsion to compete. What he calls for is a counter-game. More than a game against games, a counter-game is any activity selected because it is by nature more exciting than status games. At that point, however, all comparisons must end. For the counter-game is played outside the context of direct competition.
When missionaries or school teachers taught young Hopi Indians the game of basketball, the latter steadfastly refused to keep score. With their strong taboos on competition, the Hopi turned basketball into a counter-game!
Usually, though, a counter-game is something going on over to one side. Gradually, individuals become curious about it and, when it is successful, they forget all about what they were doing previously. No such course of action is without pitfalls. There is no getting around that a counter-game is in part trying to be more fascinating than other games and is therefore in competition with them, indirectly.
Watts insists the counter-game must be soft and sexy and invitational, rather than imperative in tone. When everything not forbidden - no matter how desirable - becomes compulsory, then we are back where we started. Like good lovers we must let the matter go when our seductions fail. To become bitter and resort to intimidation or guilt as a means of persuasion would be to lose the spirit of the counter-game.
Here the dictum of karma yoga is useful: devotion to our activity for its own sake with detachment from the results. Or, as Jesus phrased it, what your hand finds to do, do it with a whole heart.
Precisely because these things are too simple for words, it has been necessary to develop a whole literature about them! We could say, for example, that if you want to step out of Zen games and into Zenarchy, then throw away your rice bowl and begin drinking coffee instead of green tea. Every now and then some serious student of Zen would find liberation upon reading those words. "Trees are trees again and mountains are again mountains" is the way one Zen master summed up that feeling. Or, as Robert Anton Wilson once said, "God is dead: you are all absolutely free!" Taken too literally or not literally enough, though, such words are nonsense at best. Not only do words mean slightly different things to different people, an action taken in the context of one person's life produces different results in another's. For that reason Zen monks are exposed to whole barrages of stories and sayings that are all windows into the same reality. Hopefully, sooner or later one statement or another clicks. When that happens an intuitive perception makes clear that every object is a thing in itself, and all our grand ideas are simply distractions: visitors "look at these flowers as if in a dream." They were not seeing flowers at all; a thousand and one ideas about the flowers and about everything else cluttered their minds - as their conversations must have revealed.
Conceptions help us locate things and they tell us something about their natures. Unfortunately, they are also frequently preconceptions that screen out any direct awareness of what we perceive. Many optical illusions result from this phenomena, and it is chiefly for that reason that Gestalt psychology examines them in so much detail. When we miss the beauty of a flower because of our mental activity, that is sad. When for the same reason we miss the shape of a form or the nature of a diagram, that is puzzling. When we miss the unique character of a human being, that is tragic. What we call prejudice is a result of stereotyping, and yet stereotyping is only an exaggerated and crude form of something that occurs even among the most liberal individuals in almost every human encounter.
With enlightened, or naked minds (the no-mind of Zen) we enjoy the flowers. What's more, we avoid the depersonalization of individual human beings.
When the reality of what I'm talking about is brought home to us with traumatic force by some remark or event, those with understanding say we are enlightened, or hip, or aware. That makes us in their eyes desirable company. We don't bring them down. Beyond that much, though, there is no badge of status.
In the words of the Lankavatra Sutra, this is a "turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness." Perhaps because our culture is not Buddhist and because it stresses belief more than what D.T. Suzuki called the noetic aspect of conversion, such a once-and-for-all realization is rare. Instead, we experience something when we are not grasping for it at all and then, when we try to hold onto it, it eludes us. After that we know the sneaky thing is there, somewhere. Like a wild bird, it comes into view only if we learn to be patient and wait for it - never when we try to summon it forth by beating a drum.
So there is not so much to the Zenarchy of Ho Chi Zen after all. When a priest boasted to Bankei that the founder of his sect could perform miracles, Bankei replied, "My miracle is that I eat when I'm hungry and drink when I'm thirsty!"
In a like spirit, Chaung Tzu wrote: "What I call good at hearing is not hearing others but hearing oneself. What I call good at vision is not seeing others but seeing oneself. For those who see others but not themselves, or take not possession of themselves but of others, possess only what others possess. In thus failing to possess themselves, they do what pleases others instead of what pleases their own natures."
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