Image of a morning sunrise over trees

Manu Myōshin Bazzano – The tears of things

The car radio on the way to the station after sesshin on this early April morning is playing Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” A tender tune, strangely attuned to where I find myself after one of the most intense sesshins in 30 years of practice. A vale of tears, a place where hope, that fair deceiver, urged me in vain to shed the ghosts of self-inflicted pain. First, I give credit where credit is due: three full bows to the makers of sleeping tablets and those fellow practitioners who gave them to me. Three full bows to the new friends I made. Is there anything more precious in the world than true friendship in the Dharma? Three bows to the wisdom-that-knows-emptiness and that shows up late,  or so it seems when anguish has already begun to dissolve. Three full bows to that admirable man I went to see in daisan. “There is so much pain in the world,” was his response to what I brought. We spent the next ten minutes crying together. A meeting beyond the scriptures.

I found that personal pain can open me up to the suffering around me, even when the pain one experiences is small beer compared to the global tragedies of the present, even if it’s, for instance (I’m thinking of clients I see in my counselling work) the perceived betrayal of friendship. Or the post-breakup pain that goes well beyond the number of tears a particular relationship deserves and makes us forget that loss is also freedom—something I remember Genpo Roshi saying to me once. Yet even small beer shatters the heart, and even seemingly trivial matters may give us a first-hand taste of the Buddha’s first noble truth.

There is a saying in our tradition: a broken heart is an open heart. It has become a cliché, parroted by every Tom, Dick, and Susie in the land—a cliché I repeat at times without thinking. But it still carries some weight, I think. I first heard it mentioned by Genno Roshi at Browfoot, in the Lake District, during the rohatsu sesshin of 1997. For me, the saying neatly describes the Buddha’s first noble truth, usually rendered as ‘life is suffering.’  To affirm that a broken heart is an open heart turns the first noble truth from a metaphysical statement into what my friend and teacher Stephen Batchelor used to call a task and an ennobling task at that. It turns a belief about the nature of existence into a practice, something I decide to do. To be willing to feel the full force of my heart breaking—be it in relation to personal loss or separation or the ever-present reality of pain on a collective and global scale. Coming close to owning that my life’s journey is dukkha, a bumpy ride on a vehicle with a faulty wheel on a rough terrain, as Keizan Roshi reminded us in his teisho—is to embark on a path of active acceptance. Easier said! It is an act of faith, I guess—trust without an object, trust in life and deathlife itself. A counterintuitive act. An idiotic act, even, as my teacher Genpo Roshi cheekily used to say.  Who on earth would want to open up to pain in this way rather than simply strive for contentment?

As it happens, this counterintuitive stance is not found in Zen alone. In his epic poem Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil (80–19 BCE) wrote of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things, the inherently tragic nature of existence. Virgil’s notion was dear to Jack Kerouac, an author who, back in the day, brought me close to Zen and one whom I remember Tenshin Roshi being fond of quoting. In Book 1 of the Aeneid, the protagonist Aeneas is washed up on the shores of an alien land. Defeated in Troy and pounded by sea storms, he is far from home. He finds a moment of seclusion and contemplation while scavenging for food for himself and his small crew of survivors. He comes upon a temple to the goddess Juno, and on the walls, he notices murals depicting the Trojan War and images of his friends, many of them dead. One of his crew finds him standing there, crying, overwhelmed by pain and saying out loud: sunt lacrimae rerum: there are tears of things. Not just humans but things themselves are infused with the suffering of the world. It has been said that Virgil, in many ways, anticipated the pietas or compassion, which was to be, at least in theory, the hallmark of the religion to come, Christianity.

In Christianity, the deep sorrow of Good Friday comes before the joy of Easter, something I felt deeply when Sarita and I went to the Good Friday ceremony in our local Unitarian Church in Hampstead. A surprising, powerful experience. We were invited to look with an unflinching gaze at the terrible reality of suffering at present, from genocides to authoritarianism to the plight of migrants. In the course of the ceremony, all the personal anguish I had felt in the last few months came to a head and merged with the tale of the passion of the Christ, a young man who wailed from the cross those inconsolable, desperate words, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”—something many of us can relate to at some point in our life, both as the forsaken ones and as those who have forsaken others.  The joy that Sarita and I experienced at Easter wouldn’t have been possible, perhaps, without the sorrow symbolised so vividly by the Good  Friday ceremony. This turn of events surprised me, as it swept away some of my preconceptions about religion, and Christianity in particular. Could it be that Zen practice helps me be more open to unexpected things?

I treasure the sense of relief we both felt when, exhausted by moving into our new home, having trudged for days through dozens of boxes, paused for a glorious cup of coffee and enjoyed a glimpse of the evening sun through the trees outside the window. Then, the surplus joy of making the flat ready for the treat of having Roshi and Lorena stay over before the Zen and the Unconscious workshop in London, which I had the pleasure and honour to co-facilitate with Roshi.

For Spinoza (a true heretic, if there ever was one) any intense feeling and emotion, no matter how ‘negative’ or painful, when lived through truthfully, opens the path to joy. He wrote of the ethics of joy, grounded on active acceptance of our human condition and a sense of solidarity with others.
What I am trying to say here may sound a little too neat. Yet after the sleepless dark nights of the soul, after the blurry-eyed half-wakefulness which felt like being trapped inside a bad trip, after the dawning realisation that the worst nightmares can come true, after all that, the fact that I somehow found in me during sesshin the strength to head to the zendo with others, follow the schedule, sit, walk, bow, chant with others; to find a smile somewhere in the folds of my being, even the hint of a laugh, is a testimonial to the power of the sangha.

Sitting in the cab after sesshin on a beautiful morning in the spring, I listen attentively to Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” as I would listen to an oracle. Does it happen to you, too, paying greater attention to just about everything after a sesshin? And if so, why do you think that is? Does it have simply to do with the fact, as Roshi suggested, that managing to come to the end of sesshin is in itself a breakthrough?

I’m thinking of the third bodhisattva vow—the dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them. I was talking to Shinro Sensei about it. We were saying, “Could dharmas be seen as phenomena rather than the more traditional spin that interprets them as religious teachings?” The third bodhisattva vow may be understood as encouraging me to take a better look at everything as a sign of respect: re-spect literally means looking again. Does that mean that everything becomes an oracle, even a pop song on the car radio on the way to the station? It sounds disturbingly new-age, but there may be something to it.

Take the so-called magic realism of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (obligatory as a toothbrush in the backpacks of many of my generation). Some would say that the magic is not about the levitating priests and other oddities in the novel but about paying attention. It seems that things appear in a different light when I’m willing to do that.  Things appear strange and infused with mystery. Appreciating this life—lending eye, ear, tongue, nose, body, and mind to the terrifying beauty of phenomena. I could certainly do with paying more attention to the world around me. When out on a walk with Sarita, she notices every bird and tree and flower and person and the horizon and the way the light appears through the branches walking up a slope before a clearing. Meanwhile, I am busy with some train of thought, breezily traversing my hairless skull.

I know, I’m supposed to keep a strong back and wield Manjushri’s sword and so on. And what’s the big deal about tears anyway? Isn’t that self-pity, restoring this thing called me (me, me, me; I cry; therefore, I exist) at the centre of experience, painting dewy eyes on chaos? Isn’t that a bit, well, pathetic? Yes, and. Yes, but. Yes, it is self-centred: my pain, my sorrow, my tears. And. It can also open me up to the infinite sorrow of the world.

On that crisp spring morning after sesshin, a blackbird sang its heart out while I was waiting for the cab. And on the train along Merseyside the view of the magnificent blue river. Just to be alive on a morning like this is more than I can ever ask for.

A good friend, after a heart-to-heart walk on a morning during sesshin, handed me a poem he transcribed by hand, a poem by Hugo Williams, titled “In the Blindfold Hours”:

In the blindfold hours,
in the memory wars,
don’t fool yourself it never happened,
that you never loved her.
Don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
Go to the window. Listen to the trees.
It is only air we live in.
There is nothing to be frightened of.

Handing it to me, he said: “When those difficult sleepless nights come, we tend to want to curl up and disappear. Going to the window and listening to the trees could be a good thing. Remembering that we are at all times part of this vast world.”

For details of workshops and retreats with Manu email manubazzano3@gmail.com