I Bow Back

When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer.  Shambhala.  336 pp.  $16.97. *****

I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the Dharma.  Fischer began as a poet—and has published widely—attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he grew up on the Jewish faith, which he never really rejected and eventually returned to.  But early on he was searching for something more and began sitting zazen with Mel Weitsman in Berkeley (he tells a wonderful anecdote about how, the first time he went to the center, he took Weitsman for the gardener and asked where the roshi was; Weitsman said that there was no roshi but they sat zazen every morning.  That moment was actually formative in Fischer’s understanding).  He’s continued that practice ever since.

He moved on eventually to monastic practice and spent years at Tassajara, ordaining as a priest along with his wife Kathie.  He held various important positions in the umbrella organization of the San Francisco Zen Center.  But his real dedication has always been to writing and sitting, so at some point he drifted away from monastic life and created the Everyday Zen Foundation, which isn’t located in a physical space but is a confederation of people who live a Zen life out in the world, sitting together and gathering periodically for retreats, but not living monastically.  In contrast to his teacher Mel Weitsman—who founded the Berkeley Zen Center and stayed there until his death this year, at age 91—Fischer has taught as much by writing as he has by giving lectures at a center.

This isn’t a dharma book, one that will teach you how to practice zazen and lead a Zen life (though Fischer has written such a book, What Is Zen? along with his longtime collaborator Susan Moon).  It is mostly a collection of magazine pieces that Fischer has written on a variety of subjects, because people commissioned them or he felt a need to take up a subject.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time searching for his essays on line, so I’m glad to have the pieces easily accessible under a single cover.  But it doesn’t read like a random collection of pieces, more like reflections through the years of a person who has approached spiritual practice in an open-hearted way.

I can’t praise this book enough for its intelligence, its breadth, and its willingness to face the issues of religious life.

Take, for instance, the title essay, which I read on a whim late on the evening when I first got the book.  I tend to think of Buddhism as a solitary endeavor, Bodhidharma sitting in a cave for nine years staring at a wall, but Fischer’s essay pulled me up short by saying that, actually, Zen is about relationship.  The anecdote from which he gets his title concerns a young man named Longtan who left his job making rice cakes to follow the priest Tianhuang, who said if Longtan would be his attendant he would teach him the “essential dharma gate.”  After a year, however, Longtan complained that the teaching hadn’t begun.  Tianhuang insisted he’d been teaching all along.  “When you greet me I bow.  When I sit you stand beside me.  When you bring tea I receive it from you.”  We don’t learn just from what people say, but by the way they carry themselves in the world.

Fischer elaborates on that theme in his second essay, with the famous anecdote of Huangbo storming into the meditation hall and saying, “Don’t you know that in all of China, there are no teachers of Zen?”  When someone suggests that many people have formed centers, including Huangbo, he replies, “I don’t say there is no Zen, only that there are no teachers.”

It’s the same thing Mel Weitsman told Fischer that first morning: there’s no roshi, but we sit together every morning.

I seem to remember that when Fischer first published this essay, or maybe made the casual remark somewhere that Zen is not taught, there was an uproar on the Internet, a bunch of self-important Zen teachers erupting as if the man had insulted them (not noticing, apparently, that he himself been Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center).  But what he is saying is that no one can teach Zen (just as no one can teaching writing, another activity people have probably asked Fischer to do), but that we can learn it, we can all learn it, by practicing together and being around more experienced people.  Mel Weitsman learned by being around Suzuki Roshi, as Fischer and my teacher, Josho Pat Phelan, learned from being around Weitsman.  But we don’t learn just from our teachers; we learn from everyone.

That’s what left me sitting there staring at the book on the night I read that first essay, its last sentence: “To be alive with others—nothing could be more basic, yet there is no greater spiritual practice.”

Fischer divides his essays into four sections, best explained by their subtitles: Notes on the Joy and Catastrophe of Relationship; Notes on Thinking, Writing, and Emptiness; Notes on Cultural Encounter; and Notes on Social Engagement.  There are gems in all four sections, some of which are titles we might have skipped over, like “Why Do We Bow” (“The so-called meaning of it is extra.  It’s not a conceptual act.”).  Despite his work as a priest, Fischer has spent a huge amount of his time writing (I actually don’t know where he’s found the time to do all he’s done).  He also, along with his great friend Alan Lew, rediscovered the Judaism of his youth.  Lew actually became a rabbi, and the two of them founded a center for Jewish meditation, called Makor Or.  One of the most moving essays concerns Lew’s sudden death, which came as a great shock to Fischer and all who knew him.  I also loved the piece about Shunryu Suzuki’s wife, Fischer’s essay about the Psalms (preface to his book of new versions of Psalms), and his answers to questions about God from Susan Moon (part of the God issue of Inquiring Mind, a brilliant idea on her part).

I’m tempted to say that the fourth section is the weakest, but probably what I mean is that it’s the most difficult, or that it makes me the most uncomfortable.  Fischer deals here with a wide array of social justice issues that any teacher faces nowadays, but that are dizzying for anyone our age.  I must say that when I saw that the final essay was “The Problem of Evil,” I thought he had stretched too far—I can’t remember the number of distinguished thinkers who have taken that topic on—but that’s the most memorable piece I’ve read on that subject, and the most sensible, without ignoring any of the difficulties.  There is an absolute sense in which there are no dualities, including good and evil, and in a way all Buddhists are striving all their lives to achieve that state.  But even if you do that, even if you see that, from the absolute perspective, no one has a right to judge good and evil, we have to live in the world, and living in the world involves such judgments.  It’s the ultimate Zen paradox.

Fischer credits Cynthia Schrager with the initial selection and groupings, and she did a marvelous job, and writes a helpful forward.  I often think that collections of a writer’s miscellaneous essays are an indulgence, but these don’t read that way at all; this reads like a new book and the summing up of a life’s work.[1]  I expect to read this book again, and to dip into it as long as I’m studying Zen.

[1] I don’t meant to suggest that Fischer’s career is over.  Somerset Maugham published The Summing Up when he was 64.  He lived to be 91.