27 August 2024 Tuesday night and 31 August 2024 Saturday day at Little Flower Zendo , Perumal malai
Brother Thay getting ready to cook his meal… Photo courtesy : Plum Village site.
It was quite a cold, but pleasant Tuesday evening at the Kanzeon Zendo, Perumal malai. Most of the evenings here are pleasant ( mornings , days and nights too !) (. Only the degree of pleasantness and joy varies ) . Sky was covered with dark rain clouds and thick bed sheets of fog enveloped everything else beneath the sky. Fog in the blue mountains can blind anyone including an advanced manmade machine. Tragic chopper accident which killed many including our ex-Defense Chief happened during daytime near Ooty.
And to add to it, it was kind of pitch dark. One can say Carbon black dark. It was time to go to sleep for all sentient beings. The sounds of crickets and the roar of Kanzeon Zendo waterfall together made a bad symphony. The recent rains, seems to have helped the Waterfall to regain her mojo and the reclaiming roar overwhelmed any other sounds in the nature. Whenever I look at that waterfall (Since the waterfall is just across my window, where I sit and work, that is most of my waking or working time) what comes to mind is immortal punch dialogue on Bruce Lee on Water. "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water”.
Zen Master Fr AMA Samy was just back at the Zendo from his month-long European tour , where he led Zen Sesshins in Germany, Sweden and Vienna. He is 89 years young. He had a stop over at Dubai and quite a bit of long wait in Chennai airport and a long drive from Madurai to Kodaikanal. ( Usually it takes around 3- 3.5 hrs and since there is some road work is going on , guess it took a bit longer.) He joined us for tea and said he feels quite exhausted and tired. Then he asked me about which Koan I am working on. I was at Mumonkan 12 Zuigan calls himself “Master”. I was hedging that since he will be tired, there wont be any Dokusan that day. Typical Mgmt Consultat way I suggested to him, we can do the next day since he will be tired. AMA smiled at me knowingly and compassionately and retired to his room and I too happily signed off for the day.
Jio net internet signals were still holding strong. I logged into the teaser (marketing) session of Ontology in Leadership Coaching. I was kind of looking forward to it. I did have a 1 minute “elevator pitch” knowledge in Ontology. ( Am a 1-minute expert on almost all the things under the Sun including Zen, which means can deliver a punch and opening line for a minute and then move on to the next topic. 😊 ) Though I had taken courses in Phenomenology , Hermeneutics and Epistemology at Azim Premji Uty, somehow did not have any traction with the subject Ontology. As the facilitator was holding up the card, in which bold letters it was written OA-> R ( which meant the way of being precedes action and result), there was a LinkedIn alert on the computer screen about an article Jayanth had posted.
Jayanth, was an ex -senior colleague in the Business Change management practice at Wipro consulting and he had done well for himself in that area. Currently, he is a partner for Culture and Change with a leading global organizational consulting firm in the world. He is quite a thought leader in that area. I thought I will glance at that article and get back to the session. The article was written by his CEO. The opening lines were interesting, and I chose to read the article and that triggered writing this blog. Then that is how life is. Life is what happens to you, when you plan for other things.
The summary of the article read , “ In today’s work culture, transforming mandatory tasks into fulfilling activities is crucial for motivation. This article explores how shifting from "have to" to "want to" can enhance job satisfaction and productivity. Discover strategies to make this shift and share these insights with your network.” The marketing byline of the solution from that article was “ how leaders can help find meaning—and sometimes excitement—in their work. “
What came to mind as a flash was a very old interview of K.V. Kamath in Rediff. For the uninitiated, K.V. Kamath was a legendary banker and corporate leader who succeeded another ( more ?) legendary banker and corporate leader N Vaghul at ICICI. And Rediff was the only URL many of us ( Netizens of my gen) used to access some time back. Now defunct. ☹ That interview was dated 09 Feb 2005 and Mr. Kamath was talking about motivation or lack of motivation amongst the brightest of Indian talent he had recruited from then leading Indian B Schools. Let me quote from the article.
It is worth reading, in his own words.
“KV Kamath: ICICI had a problem of atrophy, and we had to break out of it if we were to survive. In 1996-1997, we had this wonderful situation where youngsters would come and atrophy within a year. They were a small group of twenty, all from the top 10 per cent of the four major B-schools. One day I asked one of these youngsters to mail merge 25 letters. Two days later I asked what happened to those letters. He made some excuse. I went back to my room and in twenty minutes I did the mail merge, printed out the letters, signed them, and left them on his table.
My colleague, (Executive Director) Nachiket Mor, threw up his hands in frustration. His question was, 'What has changed these youngsters?' They were bright and bubbly, top of the class people. Yet within six to eight months of working at ICICI, they had atrophied, lost their motivation. The atrophy ran deep.”
So what Jayanth’s CEO was talking about (or writing about) is a problem from time immemorial. It was rather surprising, regardless of the advancement we had made in our life , in computer science, internet technologies, Neuroscience, Psychology etc. from 1996-2024, still one of the management problems was same. ! And the moot point was how Kamath could/would have helped that “great talent” from premier B School to find meaning ( WHY ! ) , leave along finding excitement in a mundane task.
I won’t be wrong if I write , one of the most researched topics in Management is “methods to boost employee motivation and productivity. “
Two cliched ways I am intending to avoid. One, don’t want to list down the reasons why we do ( or don’t do) what do or don’t do. Second, not going to give a laundry list of 1, 2, 3… of Quick fix on the solution. Ever since Stephen Covey wrote that classic book of personal transformation, it is fashionable or even a must to list down a few solutions !
Also, I am not going the way of finding purpose route. As I understood from my own life, my purpose of life is not divinely ordained. Rather I am the one who defines/ projects meaning and purpose in my day-to-day life. That is because, God or Nature or Mu or Essence or Emptiness, is not only, “not a Dictator, but S/he/it is the master change or transformation manager and knew very well that it is better to give that choice to us. Or why would all of us would have been endowed with Free will or agency to decide what we want from this world or what we want to give to the world and what we want to become.
Even otherwise, just imagine, finding our purpose for cleaning a full basket of dirty dishes, or mopping the floor, cleaning up our cupboard, dusting our book shelf or as Kamath wrote, create a mail bulletin to share with customers ……..
As I learnt from AMA Samy, in Zen there is no Why ! From moment to moment, you are called by life and you respond to that call. You become yourself only in this call and response.
Again, it is worthwhile asking, do we need to get inspired and pumped up all the times to get by our day-to-day life! What people don’t realize, depending on adrenaline and dopamine to motivate us, takes us on a slippery slope. They work like psychedelic drugs . Our bodily easily builds up tolerance to such chemicals and motivators , whether that is intrinsic to our body or mind or external to us.
Next day as I was lighting the lamp at the Zendo in preparation for the morning Zazen at 530 am, AMA was there . I was leading the sesshin as Zendo leader and was in charge of bells and recitals etc. Zen bells are a bit complicated. We have different types of bells for different intents and a different way of holding etc. As usual I did make my quota of mistakes. And I was happy when I thought no one else noticed it except for me. After breakfast, AMA called me into the Zendo again. And then asked me to sit on the meditation cushion, Sat in front of me on the floor in vajrasana and taught me how to do it properly. He did it so slowly and in a measured way and so patiently and in such a compassionate way, for a moment I knew what Zen is. He added before he left that in Zen nothing is more holy than any other thing. And nothing is unholy. In our ordinary life all ordinary moments are extraordinary and it important to be present to anything we do in life. And that is Zen. Nothing more ..Nothing less.
When he was teaching me so patiently about it, I was thinking about my blog on Zen and the fine art of dish washing. Was wondering what really motivates a Zen master.
Then what I am writing about is what motivates an ordinary human with an ordinary mind and ordinary life like me. I learnt it when I was saving myself from Deep depression and padding to bat for second innings of my life. Rather than digging again the skeletons of reasons that landed me in that terrible state , which I had buried long ago in deep grave within my psyche, I would write about what got me out that well of a hell…
It is almost a boot strap process. In Computers, a bootstrap program is the first line of code which runs and loads the operating system. The entire Operating system depends on the correct way of working of the bootstrap program. In my case, it was the compassion of my dear and near and mentors which worked as Bootstrap code for me. More on that later.
The insight I got from the whole trauma is, we lose our mind, when we get stuck between the heaviness of our past and the fear and concerns of the future. To paraphrase that immortal sentence of Viktor Frankl ( which was made very famous by Stephen Covey), “Between past and the future, there is a small sliver of moment which we call present. In that moment, lies our freedom to be. And in that being lies our joy and peace. “ We lose our mind when past meets the future, and the sliver of moment disappears with our wellness and joy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote “Because time is fear and if the mind of a human being is to be totally free of fear psychologically, completely, absolutely to be free of fear, he must understand time. Time as the movement of thought. And is there an action which is without time? That is: time ends, action begins. “
The moment we understand that Fear is a product of our thought, and it does not have an independent existence from our thought, it dissolves into nothingness. He goes to add with the example of a mountain and a microphone. A mountain is not created by thought. It exists independent of thought. But a microphone ( a computer or an ipad ) is created by our thought. It too exists independent of thought. Likewise, fear too is created by thought like the concept of “Me / I”. But our mind tends to think, that Fear , Me /I also exist independent of thought. All our misery and suffering start from this.
It is also interesting that we think about the present moment as the current second, we are aware of. Krishnamurti spends a lifetime trying to teach his audience that psychological time is not the same as Chronological time . Have you read that wonderful poem “Time is” by Henry Van Dyke.
“Time is too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice.
But for those who Love,
Time is not. “
As we stop living in the past and future, the space between them expands and our living in the present can stretch to an eon.
Again Value ( the value we put on things ) is also a creation of our thought. Not long ago. Just in mid-19th Century, Napoleon III served his most honored guests’ meals on aluminum plates, while the lesser privileged were forced to have their meals on gold or silver plates.
Value we assign to things are subjective and contextual. It is just a property we assign to a thing- a product, a service, a person, an experience. Nothing more. When Adam Smith and Capitalism won over Marx and Marxism, it also affected the way our brain part ventral striatum. As we progressed across generations, what is priced in the Market space ended up of being more value to us. Market does not reward the process or journey… Or what you gain in the process of journey personal are of little interest to the marketplace. So the focus is always on the destination or product. Again, we hardly realize the carrot dangling in front of the donkey is always in the future.
How does all these adds up in the fine art of dish washing ???
We tend to pick and choose what we want to do or pursue or avoid menial tasks , because hardcoded preprogrammed way our mind, which made us a slave of our own past memories and projections of the future with respect to value or misery from it.
When we become aware of it, we start living in the present moment. Anything that we do with awareness, becomes a joyful activity. Samu (Service) is not different from Zazen in Zen. Even making a cup of Tea and serving is of value: of spiritual in nature. We hardly understand that it just opens up our creative mind. And we will be quite amazed to realise that our own mind, when it is empty of thoughts and is still, is not just limited within our cranium. IT frees us from the heavy baggage of memory of the past and fear and paranoia about the uncertain future.
Let me quote one of my favorite paras from Pirsig’s Zen and art of motor cycle maintenance.
This is about an incident, when Pirsig was teaching Creative writing university students at Montana.
He had been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn't think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
He had already discussed her with her previous instructors, and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight. She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.”
In a Zendo, the Master teaches his disciples this, by assigning us work. We call it Samu. Over the past 13 years, I used to get assigned to all kind of work, sweeping the inner court yard to outer areas, mopping, gardening, taking care of the sand garden, cutting vegetables , dish washing and cleaning rest rooms. Most of the Zen students rush to see the notice board to see what they are allotted and either gets elated or completely disheartened. I remember the day I was assigned to wash dishes after lunch. The kitchen staff cooks for some 35 students + 10 staff. I almost fainted when I saw the sink and huge side table with all those vessels, cutting boards etc. A much older German gentleman with whom I was supposed to do the task, looked at my face and asked me , is it the first time I am getting this samu. When I answered yes, he took out his phone and in the youtube showed me a short video clip of Alan watts talking about dish washing. And it changed the way I looked at dish washing forever.
Alan Watts is one of the best raconteurs of Zen. In my view, no one ever comes near , leave alone at par with Alan Watts on prose or delivery of it. Hence, I would request you to watch that video. In that he just teaches us again what is taught in Zazen meditation. We get disheartened by our memories of the past and future expectations. The moment we focus on the present, anything becomes a joyous activity. Even dish washing.
There is a wonderful movie named. The Karate Kid made in 1984. There is another newer version where Jackie Chan stars. But still the original where Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi is a class apart. Worth watching, if you have not seen that movie. I had shown that a few times to Manu and Rishi. In fact, it is a semi-autobiographical story based on the life of its screen writer Robert Mark Kamen. When Robert was 17 years old, he did face a similar situation in New York.
In that movie Daniel who gets bullied and beaten up asks Miyagi to teach him Karate. And Miyagi starts his training by instructing the boy to do menial tasks like cleaning. One of the cult scenes of that movie, “wax on, wax off” reshaped the simple motion of polishing a car into the action of martial arts. And Daniel initially don’t want to do the menial tasks. He calls it quits. And when Miyagi makes him understand how those menial tasks shapes into beautiful karate actions, Daniel’s transformation begins. As the old quote from Websters, “"Nothing is profane that serveth to holy things.” Most probably K.V. Kamath knew that and that understudy / intern from IIMs did not.
If you think, living in the present moment, is all spiritual balderdash, let me give you an examples from the arena of competitive sports. Nothing is played with more high stakes than competitive spectator sports in this world now.
This is Roger Fedrer talking about focusing on the moment and current point. While addressing graduates of Dartmouth college , Fedex said , "When you're playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it's behind you, it's behind you." That is regardless of where it is played, whether it is the first round of an obscure tournament, or the final of Wimbledon.
That is Zen way of being in the current moment. You don’t worry about the past wins or loses, neither you are concerned about the future, you are with the current point. If one must be in that state, one got to rewire his brain, to get out of the prison of value and fear.
In a way it does not matter whether you are playing in a competitive sport, or just preparing a routine mail to be posted to a few clients, ringing shokei or mokygyo, cutting vegetables or cleaning dishes, it is all exercises to empty our mind and be aware of our true self. That is the only lesson one got learn from Zen. But that lesson takes a lifetime to learn.
(With due apologies to Robert Pirsig the author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance” . I had read, read and reread that book, while the second book he wrote Lila stayed untouched in my bookshelf over some 25 years. When I started getting quotes, punch lines etc. from that book on the tip of my tongue, I had realized it is kind of etched in my mind. This blog, in a sense is a catharsis for me to empty my mind 😊. Again, this is a long litany of ideas, hopping from one to another, like a butterfly in the garden of ideas. Hope u had the intrinsic motivation to be there on the way till the last word. Pls do drop in a comment . Peace and Joy to you. Thanks. )
