Aitken Robert - Zen master raven: the teachings of a wise old bird

For Tom AitkenA MODERN CLASSICMarvelous. Gerry Shishin Wick, author of The Book of EquanimityWonderful and profound. Deborah Schoberlein David, author of Mindful Teaching and Teaching MindfulnessAmusing, delightful, and terrifically readable. Dick Allen, author of Zen Master Poems A treasure. Kathleen Dowling Singh, author of The Grace in Aging FOREWORD The Ravens Sources Z en Master Raven belongs, in a quirky sort of way, to a thousand-year-old literary tradition within the immense archives of Chan and Zen writings. Called y-lu in Chinese or goroku in Japanese, such texts present themselves as life histories of great masters but ignore virtually all that contemporary biographies emphasize, reporting nothing of their subjects childhood traumas, mature personalities, family conflicts, social stature, tastes, politics, or peccadilloes and seldom even describing their looks or habits. Instead, these accounts confine themselves almost exclusively to brief, freestanding dialogues (thus the term y-lu, discourse records) that the masters are purported to have had in the course of their careers. I say purported since scholarship shows that, with very rare exceptions, few of the early records appeared until decades, often centuries, after their subjects had died and bear telltale signs of being cobbled together, if not altogether invented, in order to buff up the reputations of the ancestral teachers and boost the fortunes of their living successors. Nonetheless, generation upon generation of practitioners have held those y-lu in the highest esteem, as documents truly exemplifying the masters teachings and as standards of awakening. From them, especially the ones attributed to famous figures like Ma-tsu (Baso), Tung-shan (Tzan), Yun-men (Unmon), Huang-po (baku), Chao-chou (Jsh), and Lin-chi (Rinzai), come virtually all the classical kans studied in Zen circles and now known far and wide.

In adopting the y-lu format for his book, Robert Aitken Aitken Rshi, as he was fondly known to his students laid unequivocal claim to this heritage, yet by setting it in the forest and assigning its dialogues to birds and beasts, at the same time he opened up an ironic and humorous distance from Zen tradition. Clearly he wanted it both ways, and I advise you to read it both ways: simultaneously as a serious record of his six decades practicing and eventually teaching Zen and as a lark, a merry improvisation by an old man living in retirement, entertaining himself and fully intending to entertain others as he set forth the path of liberation. The subtitle he gave the first edition neatly suited and signaled his thoroughly and happily mixed purposes: Sayings and Doings of a Wise Bird. See the gleam in his eye? As a collaborator in the books preparation, I know for certain that Aitken Rshi incorporated into its pages exchanges (J., mond, questions-and-answers) that hed had with others over the years. Certainly he edited the repartee as he transferred it from lips to beak or muzzle, masking the participants identities and exercising poetic license to sharpen a point or improve phrasing. Some of Ravens snappy comebacks undoubtedly qualify as afterthoughts, too, and Aitken Rshi may have dreamt up whole dialogues on his own.

All the same, Zen Master Raven unquestionably deserves classification as a true discourse record. While obviously forgoing any pretense of strict factuality, it faithfully presents the substance of Aitken Rshis teaching and preserves the kind of direct give-and-take that he achieved with students at his best and that he considered crucial to Zen tradition. At the least, since every word of it came from his own hand, its origins are far more certifiable than the origins of records attributed to foundational Chinese masters. As fresh and cohesive as its prose became, the book had a complex, two-decade-long process of gestation and development. Raven Rshi himself didnt spring to life fully fledged; in fact he didnt even begin life as bird. Initially, Aitken Rshi tried out wily Coyote as his animal alter ego, writing under the inspiration of Native American tales hed heard during visits to Ring of Bone Zendo in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The first five dialogues to appear in print he billed as Excerpts from Coyote Rshi Goroku and published in a 1982 issue of the San Francisco literary magazine Coyotes Journal. But these carry not a whiff of wild dog. Coyote seems merely to have lent his name to a two-legged Zen master easily identifiable as the author: Everybody knows how Coyote Rshi loves to collect Buddhist images. Once a disciple of Rajneesh wrote to him, saying, You are always looking for wooden Buddhas. You should come to India and meet a living Buddha. Coyote mentioned this letter to his students and remarked, Living Buddhas are all over the place, but a good wooden Buddha is hard to find.

The other four exchanges in this sequence are similarly spare, lacking details to situate them in the forest and naming no animals besides Coyote. People close to Aitken Rshi recognized some of the humans represented, including the former member of the Maui Zendo community whod urged him to go to India and meet Rajneesh. Seventeen years later, retired to an airy, oceanside home on the island of Hawaii, Aitken Rshi returned to the idea of writing up his record in Coyote-ized form, thinking it might plausibly expand to book length. As the work progressed, he began to introduce a few additional animal characters, notably a certain Dingo Rshi, playing the important part of Coyotes principal teacher. In August 1999, debuting a selection of the dialogues in a quarterly miscellany of his recent news and writings, Aitken Rshi described it as a whimsy and called it Sayings and Doings of Zen Master Coyote. (When the book came out, a further revision made him Yogi Rhino.) Meanwhile, Aitken Rshi had sent the full manuscript to Gary Snyder, celebrated writer and founder of Ring of Bone Zendo, hoping that hed provide an introduction for this new book, as he had for the earlier Taking the Path of Zen. (When the book came out, a further revision made him Yogi Rhino.) Meanwhile, Aitken Rshi had sent the full manuscript to Gary Snyder, celebrated writer and founder of Ring of Bone Zendo, hoping that hed provide an introduction for this new book, as he had for the earlier Taking the Path of Zen.

In a postcard, declining, Snyder remarked, Good luck with Coyote hes tricky. Failing to register this caution or at least to heed it, for several more months Aitken Rshi continued to circulate cases that featured Coyote as his stand-in. It became clear that hed identified with just one aspect of Coyotes multifaceted persona his knack for sly, often hilarious subversion of human preoccupations while overlooking other qualities that made him a problematic proxy in the Zen woods. Coyote might have been an apt choice for a forthrightly unconventional figure like the fifteenth-century master Ikky, but for a proper gentleman like Aitken Rshi, he made a poor fit. In early 2000, abandoning Coyote as his mouthpiece, Aitken Rshi picked Raven from a list of possible alternatives and set to work, with swiftly growing enthusiasm, to develop his personality and conjure other members of what soon became the Tallspruce Community. Here the record gained a further sort of authenticity, as the creative process stimulated Aitken Rshis memory of talking creatures hed come to know over his many years of ardent reading.

Aesops fables, the Grimms fairy tales, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Uncle Remus stories, Charlottes Web, the rollicking Chinese Buddhist novel