Crossing Nebraska

If you’re a spiritual practitioner, I hope you’re “blessed” from time to time with an encouraging sign that you’re on the right path. Whether it be with an insight, observation, opening, understanding, felt sense, embodied knowing, or what have you I wish for you assurance that you’re moving toward whatever wholeness and authenticity mean for you. We Zen practitioners are not inclined to speak much about such experiences. We’re warned against putting too much stock in them, becoming attached to them, striving to repeat them, or thinking they result from our specialness. That notwithstanding, for the sake of this two-part series, I’d like to relate how certain practice-related experiences have prompted me to toward activism. Arrest of the Buddha In the first post of this two-part series , I stated: “The emptiness [ sunyata ] of all phenomena does not mean they are illusory. The emptiness of all phenomena merely means that all “things” are without any separate and abiding existence.” ...

  It’s been over twenty years now since we gathered with our signs on a busy street in downtown St. Louis in an attempt to keep the Iraq War from beginning. In those days, if enough people gathered in one place to protest something, local reporters would likely show up and cover it for the nightly news. Notwithstanding that possibility, we hoped at least to get the attention of the many motorists making their way to and from the Grand Center Arts District for their evening of entertainment.  “Where are all the Buddhists?” I recall the protest leader enquiring over his megaphone in between the antiwar chants of the day. He was a Catholic activist in the mold of Dorothy Day , and I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t expecting anyone to answer. Nevertheless, we did. “We’re over here!” three of us Zen Buddhists called out from halfway down the block, although noble silence would have been a very Zen response! Arrest of the Buddha I’m surmising that the protest leader wa...