Monday, March 11, 2024 is my 83rd birthday, and coincidentally the deadline for this segment of UnMind, in order to drop on Wednesday the 13th. I did an exercise in visualizing my personal timeline this last year, and will share it with you in this installment. You will have to visit the website to see the illustrations (link), but for now, as we say in professional design circles — when a design board presentation got lost in checked baggage — “Picture this, guys!” Been there, done that.

I began by laying out my life in decades, starting in 1940 when I was conceived around July, born 9 months later in 1941, and — incidentally, not coincidentally — the year that Matsuoka-roshi arrived in America.

Picture a spreadsheet 10 columns across, headed 1940,1950,1960,etc. up to 2030; by 6 rows down, with categories: Geographical, Societal, Marital/Familial, Educational, Formal Zen, and Professional. You get the idea. Then fill in the blanks with locations like Centralia, IL (my home town), Chicago (where I did my advanced schooling), Atlanta, GA (my adopted home town), Europe and Japan, traveling on design and Zen business — my lifetime “ecological sweepout,” as Bucky Fuller calls it. Big events like WWII, Korea and Vietnam; the end of the Cold War; Covid, etc.; and lesser ones such as “Born 3/11/41,” 1st & 2nd Marriages, Father & Mother dying; BS & MS degrees, etc., populate the cells. Plus Zen turning points such as meeting Matsuoka-roshi, Lay Ordination, ASZC & STO Incorporation, publish date of my first major book, “The Original Frontier”; and finally, career benchmarks such as teaching at U of I & the School of the Art Institute, various corporate ventures, and my current art dealer, Kai Lin Art Gallery, complete the exercise to date. I recommend you try something similar, to get an overview of your life.  

By the way, that expression, “conceived,” is interesting from a professional design perspective. We have what we call “concept design,” the initial stage of ideation, wherein few to none of the details of a design solution to a problem have been worked out. The spit-balling, brainstorming phase. Which seems to apply pretty aptly to that embryo in the womb — an inchoate mass of tissue that will, some nine months hence, come popping out into the world — if not “fully-formed,” as Buddha, in his miraculous birth, was said to have been. Not only that, but he immediately took seven steps in each of the cardinal directions; and, pointing one forefinger to the heavens above, the other to the earth below, declared: “Above the heavens and below the heavens, I alone am the most honored one!” If, indeed, this story is true, then, indeed, he would have had to have been. Or at least one of the most highly-honored ones.

But of course, we take this tale with a huge grain of salt, perhaps even a saltlick block, like we used to put out in the pasture for our horses, on the farm where I grew up. My only claim to fame regarding an unusual birth came to light when my mother later confessed that she had tried to abort me by jumping off the back porch, which was what passed for birth control in those days, today referred to as “reproductive health.” Mom and dad already had “a boy for you and a girl for me,” in the persons of my older brother and sister — one darkly handsome, the other blond and beautiful, respectively — and the budget from the newspaper route they ran was already strained. I got my revenge by being born with an enormous head, which, because I was upside-down in the womb, I attribute to all that jumping.

For some reason, my life seems to have morphed through the various “times-of-life” cycles — used to sort demographics in social research — in near synchronicity with the decades, as measured by an admittedly arbitrary calendar, called the Gregorian, which, according to the wizards of Wikipedia:

The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.

Glad we got that cleared up. Now, we can see clearly the absolute degree of arbitrariness inherent in our concept of measured time. We can’t even measure the time of day, the calendar year, or the planet’s revolution around the sun, without resorting to infinitely endless decimal places. So much better than that antiquated Julian thing, though. And, “close enough for jazz,” to most intents and purposes.

As you can see by looking at the first chart, my geographical sweepout was rather limited to my home state of Illinois in my 20s, other than a couple of junkets to California, until I moved to Atlanta in my 30s, then finally went abroad on business in my 40s, and to the Far East in my 50s, on behalf of Zen. My family did not have the kind of resources that would have financed a “grand tour” of Europe in my formative years. This charting of your life on a single sheet of paper turns out to be an exercise in humility, when you realize how little you have done, and how brief your lifespan really is. We will return to this subject in the context of the “lifespan chapter” of the Lotus Sutra.

In the second spreadsheet, I extend the timescale to 80-year spans — extending back to 1460, and forward through 1540, 1620, 1700, etc., and finally my own era of 1940 through 2020 — shrinking my personal timeline down to two columns out of ten, roughly 20% of the larger span of five centuries or so. Visualizing only one row, encompassing the societal level, a distinct pattern emerges: major events, especially in the USA, seem to happen in 80-year cycles, going back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War and including World War II, which was just heating up when I came on the scene. Sure enough, when I Googled it, I found that this pattern of 80-year cycles is a known phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the “Strauss-Howe” theory, derived from critical events in the history of America, as well as the rest of the globe.

The Strauss-Howe generation theory describes a recurrent cycle of same-aged groups with specific behavior patterns that change every 20 years. According to this theory, an 80-year cycle is crucial, when every four generations is associated to a crisis that impacts the ongoing social order and creates a new one.

A startling personal finding popped out like a sore thumb: at 80 years old, I was 1/3 the age of my native country, the good old USA. A person 80 years old at my birth would have been born around 1860, the Civil War; one 80 years old at that time would have been born around 1780, the time of the Revolution. The reference to Armageddon in the final column, finally coming to pass within 80 years from now, is only partially, and hopefully, tongue-in-cheek.

Expanding the timescale even further, the third spreadsheet encompasses twenty-five centuries since the advent of Buddha in 500 BCE, to the current 2000’s, again shrinking my personal tenure to a vanishingly small portion, less than ten percent of the total, if I live to be 100. Which is unlikely. Although, as Matsuoka-roshi would often say, “Zen keeps the men younger, and the women more beautiful.” I can’t really explain my relatively good health and wellbeing in any other way.

To close this segment, let us consider some of the statements attributed to Buddha at the end of his life, in the Lifespan Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, ostensibly uttered as he was about to enter Pari Nirvana:

To the deluded and unenlightened I say that I have entered nirvana

            although in fact I am really here.

For the sake of these sentient beings I teach that

            the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable.

The light of my wisdom illuminates immeasurably

            and my lifespan is of innumerable kalpas.

            This has been achieved through long practice.

You wise ones do not give in to doubt! Banish all doubt forever!

            The Buddha’s words are true never false.

Here, we find one of the most controversial of all claims in Buddhism, which begs credulity — similar to the resurrection of Jesus — along with that of his virgin birth. Even the idea of Pari Nirvana smacks of “woo-woo,” given our skeptical scientific setting:

In Buddhism, parinirvana is commonly used to refer to nirvana-after-death, which occurs upon the death of someone who has attained nirvana during their lifetime. It implies a release from Saṃsāra, karma and rebirth as well as the dissolution of the skandhas.

Bows to our fellow travelers at Wikipedia, once again. But while we can readily embrace the dissolution of the skandhas — or aggregated form, sensation, perception, intention and consciousness, upon the onset of death, it seems mere speculation that anyone might find total release from the ocean of Samsara, the cycles of karmic consequence and rebirth, that Buddhism teaches as theories of the laws governing sentient existence.

But Buddha seems to be pointing at something else, a kind of permanent existence that is not limited to the form of our present, impermanent body-mind. Like the timeworn analogy of the ocean and the waves, the eternal lifespan of Buddha implies that whatever is here has always been here, and will always be here, if in different form. A wave returns to the ocean, but does not, cannot, drown; being of one and the same substance.

I will leave it to you, as usual, to “thoroughly examine this in practice,” as Master Dogen kindly advises. This is not a cop-out. If reality could be explained in words, it would have become commonplace knowledge long before 2500 years ago. The original language of our original mind is still in place. All we have to do is develop “the eyes to hear and the ears to see” it. The method for developing this transcendent, trans-perceptual wisdom is stunningly simple: just sit still enough — and straight enough — for long enough. And listen up — to the “sermon of no words.”

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Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”

UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to [email protected]. Gassho.

Producer: Shinjin Larry Little