‘Fighting cancer’
I discovered recently that my prostate cancer has come back. When my prostate was removed in 2021, they said they’d got all of it. But apparently some escaped. I did big mind with the cancer before that operation, and it said, “I’ll get you if I can”. When I thought I was cancer-free I thought that was the end of it, because that was what the surgeon said. But it obviously hung in there somehow. The usual talk about humans and cancer is about ‘fighting cancer’ or ‘they lost the struggle with cancer’. Something about that doesn’t sit well with me. Cancer’s just doing its cancer thing. When my daughter was very little, she had very curly hair, and when we had the inevitable nit business from school, I would spend ages with the nit comb trying to get the creatures out of her hair at bath time. Being the sort of person she is, she was upset when I flushed them down the toilet. “Everybody’s just trying to get their dinner” she explained. That’s right, and now I am cancer’s dinner. Not that I intend to be passive about it, and I will of course continue with my medical treatment – the oncologist says it’s not curable but it is controllable. But I see it more as a kind of dance, and cancer is my dance partner.
For most of my adult life, I have practiced at the softer end of the martial arts. For eleven years, that took the form of aikido. Actually, it was aikido that got me into Zen, although I had read a bit before. After I had been training quite enthusiastically for about a year, our teacher, Kanetsuka Sensei said, “If you want to be good at aikido, you must have strong tanden (the energy centre located in the lower belly)! To have strong tanden, you must sit zazen. My house, Tuesday mornings!” “Yes, Sensei!” we chorused…
I sat regularly, and when I moved to London, a few years later, I joined a sitting group linked to Genpo Roshi (then Sensei).
Aikido means literally ‘harmony’ (ai) ‘energy’ (ki) ‘way’ (do). I have heard two versions of what this means, which don’t exclude each other. One is that you harmonise yourself with your opponent or partner, so that, connected with their energy, you can feel what they’re up to, so to speak. The other is that you harmonise yourself with the universe, what the Chinese call wu-wei ‘empty action’. How could you be defeated, if one with the universe?
Actually the two versions are connected in a story about the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba’s enlightenment experience. In the 1930s, he used to hang out with military people. Apparently, according to the version I heard, he unwittingly offended an admiral, who challenged him to a duel with swords. When the time came, Ueshiba found that he could see what the admiral was going to do before he did it, so simply stepped aside, not making any strike of his own. Eventually, having struck repeatedly without making contact, and meeting no resistance, the admiral threw down his sword and stomped off. Ueshiba was apparently also surprised by what had happened, and went into a garden to process it. The name for martial arts in Japan is budo. The insight that came to Ueshiba was ‘the true budo is the way of love’.
So while regarding my cancer as a dance partner is perhaps a little too friendly, I can at least think of it as my opponent or even partner in an aikido style. We will both be making moves to counter the other. I intend to do it without struggling and in as graceful a manner as I can.
Many of you will be familiar with the work of David Hinton, whose main claim is that Chan (Chinese Zen) is really Daoist, and not really Buddhist at all. As with most authors who have axes to grind or bees in their bonnets, I think he’s missing the point, even as he describes it. But he has certainly made a contribution in revealing how many pre-existing Daoist concepts were used as translations for slightly different Buddhist ones. For example, the epithet of the Buddha, tathagata (Sanskrit), which literally means tatha = thus, in such a way, plus gata meaning gone, so ‘thus gone’ or ‘thus come’ gets translated as ‘existence-tissue arrival’. But to be relieved of the illusion of a separate self, and hence plugged in, seems to me to be talking about the same thing.
Another concept that Hinton describes as ‘Absence’ from the Chinese word ‘Wu’ (Japanese Mu) comes from Daoist cosmology: the world is constantly changing from Absence into Presence (‘the ten thousand things’) and back again. But Presence is Absence, or if you like, ‘Buddha nature pervades all things existing right here now’.
One interesting passage from Hinton (from ‘The Way of Ch’an’) touches on the nature of the mystic experience:
‘Ch’an’s central project is the reintegration of consciousness with that source-tissue…(which) is also our deepest form of love, a kindred love at primordial levels for the loom’s ten thousand things in their vast transformations…Although Ch’an insight and awakening is famously Bodhidharma’s “a separate transmission outside all teaching,” the nature of that wordless insight and awakening is determined by the conceptual world within which it operates… even empty mind… is defined by its conceptual context. Christian mystics cultivated that same state of consciousness, but they understood it entirely differently based on religious ideology. They imagined that state was a direct experience of God’s overwhelming grace or love…’
To that I want to add a slight amendment – the insight and awakening is not determined by the cultural context, but of course the cultural context will affect how it is interpreted.
One of Hinton’s claims is that much of the Daoism was stripped away from Japanese Zen. Yet if we compare his translation of Buddha as ‘man’ plus ‘loom-of-origins’ – loom-of-origins being a Daoist description of that from which all things come – it is not so different from this passage from the Transmission of Light, chapter 1:
‘While the seasons come and go, and the mountains, rivers, and land change with the times, you should know that this is Buddha raising his eyebrows and blinking his eyes – so it is the “unique body revealed in myriad forms”. But in case we reify this, immediately following is ‘It is “effacing myriad forms” and “not effacing myriad forms.” The ancient master Fayan said, “What effacing or not effacing can you talk about?” And Dizang said, “What do you call myriad forms?”’ Because of course we humans tend to latch onto concepts to try and fix it all in our heads. And this is the problem with using the word love to describe the plugged-in-ness that comes with openings, though how could that not open one’s heart?
Which for me goes right back to Buddhism. The second noble truth is that suffering has a cause: craving or ‘thirst’ tanha. Feeling that we lack, we try to get something to fill that hole. But somehow it can never be filled up by the ‘grab-it’ mentality. Not that there aren’t times when the grab-it mentality is necessary – if you’re drowning and a bodhisattva throws you a rope, please grab it! On all levels… This parallels the distinction between seeking and non-seeking mind, as Genpo Roshi showed in Big Mind. It is seeking mind that gets you to the zendo, but once you’re there, non-seeking mind is more beneficial. If we’re plugged in, whether we feel it or not, there is really no need to grab. And especially in attempting to live in such a way that we cause minimum harm to the environment (which after all is what we’re plugged into), a ‘give-it’ rather than ‘grab-it’ attitude seems more helpful.
So when we think about love, is this trying to get some nice sensation to plug the lack, or is it melting into ‘it’? In a big mind workshop I attended once, one of the voices that came up was Great Intimacy. One participant described it as ‘the connective tissue of the universe’. Someone else volunteered, “I’m what people are looking for in sex”. “Do they find you?” someone else asked. “Rarely” said the first speaker. “But are you there?” continued the questioner. “Always!” was the answer.
I have suspected for some time, and am increasingly sure now, that love is actually the motive power of the universe. Energy work with plants confirms this. So perhaps when we read in the Heart Sutra that there is no (separate) ‘eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind…’ and we ask what is there, then I am happy with love… so if that, as the loom-of origins, is what I will be reabsorbed into when the time comes, I am OK with that too.