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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770095861 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Jacana Media |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2008 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Antony Osler is a meditation instructor, an advocate for human rights, and the coauthor of Quiet Food: A Recipe for Sanity.
Read an Excerpt
Stoep Zen
By Antony Osler
Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Anthony OslerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77009-586-1
CHAPTER 1
Summer
Poplar Grove is not a big farm – at least not by Karoo standards. No great mountains, no grand view. The house sits with its back to a vast plain, looking into a rocky kloof where the baboons shout and where a small stream whispers through the poplars. It sits here through summers so hot that the bathroom candles melt and through winters so cold that the bedside water freezes in its glass, through spring winds that rip gutters from the roof and through the gentle drift of autumn leaves in the grove. All under the great blue sky.
The old house was built sometime around 1849; we still sleep inside the original mud-brick walls and the old vine still winds itself along the eastern windows. We don't know the men and women who first lived here but we know they were migrant stock farmers – trekboers – moving north from the Cape in extended family groups. Sometimes we pick up old pieces of pottery or ammunition and once we found a rolled-up page from a Dutch bible inside a thick glass medicine bottle. Before the trekboers, the bushmen lived here. Near the sheep kraal we can see their tool site littered with stone chips, scrapers and broken arrowheads. I sometimes wonder with what foreboding they sat on the hills to watch the tiny wagons creep across the veld, wagons carrying white people who would soon take all the land and water but never share it with them. And long before the bushmen, even before the continent of Africa split away from Gondwana, plants grew here in swamps along the edge of an inland sea. Last year, in a far corner of the farm, we found a fossilised tree that had fallen into the mineral-rich mud before the great mass extinction at the end of the Permian Age over 250 million years ago.
The trees in the grove were here before us and they will be here after we have gone, together with the ironstone rocks, the slow tortoises and the herds of springbok flicking their tails in the sun. One day there will be little sign of us. In the meantime, we do what we can to show our respect. We take care of the lambs, we line the erosion with stones, and we play with children in the shade of the shearing shed.
I live in the main house on Poplar Grove with my wife Margie and my two daughters Emma and Sarah. Emma was born one Easter just as the sun came up; she was called Lindiwe because her parents had waited a long time for her. Sarah was the last white child to be born in the segregated wards of the old Colesberg hospital. When she was born it rained for three days so she was called Nomvula, the one who brings the rain; we got stuck in the mud bringing her home and had to push the bakkie while she slept in the cab under her blankets like a queen. The girls are young adults now but many of these stories are about them when they were young and carefree. Nothing has made my life richer, more wonderful or exasperating, than these two affectionate girls; they have taught me more than any Zen master and made me fuller than the moon. Margie took responsibility for the girls' home schooling when they were young and now she takes care of the farm. She supports me at all times and gives me hell when I am getting complicated, unruly or pretentious; each evening, if we can, we sit beside each other on the stoep and watch the sun go down.
The farm is also home to other people, some who live and work here, others who stay a while and move on. The stockman Tongo January and his wife Angelina used to live in a cart on the road until they stopped off at Poplar Grove one day and never left; they still refuse to have anything in their house that they can't carry with them – just in case. They are surrounded by a group of children with exotic names like Dassie, Riempie, Zompie, Hammertjie and Elvis, as well as others with names that come from the Afrikaans soapie 7de Laan, which is famous here even though there is no television on the farm.
Of course Poplar Grove is not an island. We also live in a country that has experienced one of the most riveting, frightening and inspiring political revolutions in history. Real radical change is in our face every day. How do we dance with this? How do we reach down through the swirling emotions and opinions that this insecurity brings into a quieter space, a space where we can see a little further, love a little deeper, laugh a little louder? We have a wonderful and strong opportunity for spiritual practice here – whatever our particular tradition. The clouds come and go but behind them the sky is always blue.
Next to the house is an old stone barn. The old earth roof had collapsed so we sawed poplar logs for beams and put corrugated iron sheets on top of them. Then we cut reeds from the Oorlogspoort River and made a ceiling. Now we use it as our meditation room – it's not as insulated as it used to be but at least we don't get covered in dust.
Tongo used to call it the kerkie – the little church – but when we explained that nobody was being worshipped there he changed it to the Buddhaplekkie – the little Buddha place – which was next to the slangskuur, the snake barn where the cobras live. These days we all call it the 'Zendo' – the traditional Zen word for a place of meditation. Its name is not important but it is a place of quietness that anyone can use. We like to spend time there together as a family or on our own. Sometimes friends come and join us, sometimes we have Zen retreats there. At Christmas and Easter the farm workers from the district get together in the Zendo to hold a church service and to sing their hearts out. And last year we had a double wedding there – Tongo's son Attie married Siena from Soetfontein and Dirk married Tongo's daughter Makkie; they were told by the dominee that they had to get married if they wanted a church burial so the two couples did it together and brought all their children along – it was a happy moment except that Dirk's father fell off his bicycle and never made it to the ceremony.
The Karoo Mobile Law Clinic opened in Colesberg in 1989 as a free legal service for those who couldn't afford lawyers and who had no access to the channels of power or influence. Predictably, our clients were almost all black and poor.
In the early days of the Law Clinic, Mandela was still in jail and democracy still a dream. The security police used to ride up and down the road in a van with blackened windows and they raided us every week, banging on the door and shouting, 'Openup Openup!' That was until they realised that they could just come in and talk to us, that we had no subversive political agenda, and that we made a good cup of tea. We tried never to take sides and we understood that everybody had their own dreams and fears. Our job was to listen and to make things better where we could.
There was one policeman who came to visit us regularly, his name was Fof Krater. One day he found out that I had once sung on an album of Afrikaans songs that he was very fond of: 'We have our sources,' he said. After that he didn't talk about politics; instead, he liked to listen to stories about celebrity Afrikaans musicians whom I knew and he once brought a copy of the long-playing disc for me to sign. 'Aan my goeie vriend Foffie Krater,' I wrote. 'Die band speel maar die land brand.' (To my good friend Foffie Krater, the band plays while the country burns.) 'No man, meneer,' he said when he read it. 'How can you make a joke like that?' When I last saw him, it was after the 1994 elections and he was on a team appointed to guard the new black provincial premier – a man he once hunted. Krater was leaning back in a sofa outside a locked door and his eyes were closed. I could have sworn he was smiling.
The windmill at the house is an old Aermotor. The 'Rolls-Royce' is what Lollie Windpomp calls it. He says if he had to fix Rolls-Royces for a living he'd be bankrupt because they never break down. Well, ours broke the other day so we had no water in the house and it was down to the stream with buckets. Next Wednesday Lollie arrives to fix it so we go to the stoep for a midmorning coffee. He tells me the police raided the bar in town and found his daughter sitting on the lap of the coloured electricity inspector from Venterstad and now he doesn't know what to do. 'I'll probably break his neck,' he says, but he's actually not a bad man so I'll be sorry. Then we try to start the generator so that Lollie can make electricity for his welding machine. It won't run so he goes back to town for a spark plug. When he comes back it's time for afternoon tea so we sit on the stoep again but we don't say anything about his daughter. Then Lollie gets the generator to go and he welds a rod to the bracket under the machine head. Now they're ready to test it and someone releases the brake. Young Dirk is up on the platform to loosen the windmill wheel when a gust of wind blows up, the tail arm swings around at him and he grabs it and now he's hanging there kicking fresh air. Everybody opens their mouth to shout but no sound comes. Then the wind passes, Dirk clambers back to the platform and we all clap our hands, we laugh and tell each other what we just saw. 'Sjoe!' says Dirk, grinning all over. But the windmill is our life. We treat it with respect and give thanks each day for the clanking heartbeat of it.
When it's hot like this
We wait all day for nightfall.
Then we take our seats in the Zendo
And give thanks for the softening light
Buddhism is a way of experience, a way of living our lives as profoundly and as simply as we can. It is not a system of beliefs and so it does not compete with conventional religions. Where it does act as a religion, it is marked by the depth of a life rather than by adherence to a creed. So, wherever people care deeply about things, this way is open to them. The tradition has always travelled lightly, unburdened by dogma or any sense of having an exclusive hold on the truth – don't attach to anything, not even to your own religion. As the Zen tradition puts it, 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!' The Buddha himself spoke of the teachings as a raft to get across a river; when you get to the other side the raft has served its purpose – don't carry it around on your shoulders, send it back to the far bank where someone else can use it. For the old way to find itself on a vast dry plain in central South Africa is not threatening but exhilarating. It is for us to make it fresh in our lives, moment by moment, wherever we may find ourselves.
The windmill throws its shadow across the earth and the blades spin over the gravel.
MEDITATION
One day Joju asked Zen master Nansen, 'What is the true way?'
Nansen replied, 'Everyday mind is the true way.'
Zen doesn't do much in the way of preaching. Most of its insights are given in stories. This is a very famous Zen teaching, presented as a conversation between a monk and his teacher. So what is your everyday mind? Everyday mind is what happens when you give yourself completely to whatever you are doing. It is you when you have given yourself away – when you stop thinking and just do it.
The sheep dog barks at the baboon, the men on the stoep throw back their heads and laugh.
Last summer I was down at the windmill near the Oorlogspoort road, wrapping a tube round a leaky pipe and tying it with wire. Oom Andries stops by in his truck and we talk about the new manager at the co-op with his ginger moustache. 'I used to do that kind of work just like you,' he says, 'but not any more. Now I'm rich enough to pay someone else to do it so I just drive up and down the road looking for somebody to speak to. And when I meet that somebody all I've got to talk about now is money. Just money and things. And what can you say about money anyway? It comes and it goes, like everything it comes and it goes. And if you're lucky for a while the pipe going into the dam will be bigger than the pipe going out.'
Oom Andries really didn't care that much about his money, either. 'There's only one thing I want now,' he said. 'I want to be buried in the shade of that old cypress tree near the prickly pears. It's such a beautiful tree and it took so long to grow.'
In the Zen tradition, meditation retreats are held a few times a year. They give students a chance to refresh their lives and to rediscover what is truly important for them. Usually, the retreat is led by a teacher and conducted in silence and each day is divided into periods of meditation, chanting, work and interviews with the teacher.
Zen master Su Bong used to come from South Korea each year to lead a Zen retreat at the farm. Actually, Su Bong was not Korean himself but Chinese-Hawaiian, a strong man with a big laugh and tattoos down his left arm; before he became a monk he had been a carpenter, a surfer, a married father of two sons and a general rumpus-raiser. 'Here's a place I'd stop being a monk for,' he said when he first came to Poplar Grove. 'Any day you want me here you just call.' But he died of a heart attack so now it's too late and we made him a corner in the garden instead.
Su Bong always stopped off in town before coming out to the farm so that he could buy tinned fish and cigarettes as a gift. Sometimes during a retreat we'd go looking for him and find him standing up at Tongo's house, smoking with the men after work and drinking coffee out of tin mugs. 'What's with this country?' he said once. 'If you can make coffee as good as this then you can choose your own government.' That was before Mandela was released from jail. Su Bong never came back after the first democratic election but the men still speak of him when they go to vote.
Evening –
The meerkats catch the last of the sun
The geese fly home to the grove.
Margie and I sit on the stoep
And watch the day melt away
As a South African, a white South African, I need to talk about race. I really don't want to but I must. For it is race that has defined our lives here in every detail. It has been used to divide us, the awful bedrock of government policy and social attitudes. It has poisoned our blood. How I deal with this is as important to me as breathing. If Zen doesn't help me with this then what use is it in my life?
There is an old Zen saying that mountains are mountains, then mountains are no longer mountains, then they are mountains again.
Mountains are mountains is the world of attachment, where difference rules. I am a man, you are a woman; I am right, you are wrong. This is the world of fear, prejudice and political correctness. Black is black, white is white.
Mountains are no longer mountains is where the differences fall away. When the conductor raises his baton and the orchestra waits; at that moment there is no sense of black or white, Xhosa or Sotho, man or woman – there is only the waiting. Thandi tells Margie a joke and they laugh until they cry. This is the world of oneness, the world of completeness. No white no black.
But nothing stays as it is. The orchestra must play and the baton comes down. We can't attach anywhere. We see the differences for what they are, we see how we can go beyond them into the world of completeness – not as a theory or an aspiration but in our very own experience. And when we see all this for ourselves we can move freely between those worlds. Black is black and white is white again – but this time without sticking, lightly – because it's not race itself that is the problem but how we look at it. This is very simple but it is not always easy. So we try, try and try again as long as we live.
Margie can't speak Xhosa; Zompie can't speak English. But when the little boy runs up to her she picks him up and swings him in the air like her own son.
In Zen master Su Bong's last retreat at Poplar Grove, Margie was having difficulty getting to the meditations because one of the girls was sick. 'Don't worry about meditating,' Su Bong tells her. 'Just be with your children and they will show you the way.' That night, Margie went in to say good night to the children and found them in bed on each side of the Zen monk, all three of them fast asleep. Dr Seuss's ABC rose and fell on Su Bong's stomach as he breathed. A is for love.
The Buddha tells me to love the flies of the earth. But the truth is this – When they mate on my bald head and climb up my nostrils I fetch the fly swatter and get ready to kill. Fly Samurai. I just never got to hit one yet
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stoep Zen by Antony Osler. Copyright © 2008 Anthony Osler. Excerpted by permission of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Dedication,
THANKS,
PROLOGUE,
Summer,
Autumn,
Winter,
Spring,
Stoep Zen glossary,