Book Review: One Blade of Grass

The search for enlightenment is perhaps the single most important human endeavor.

One Blade of Grass is good progress in this direction.

The first time I heard Henry Shukman speak I was struck by how warm and clear his conception of Zen was. Two things not usually associated with this flavor of Buddhism.

I read One Blade of Grass soon after and it quickly became my favorite book of the year.

OBoG is Henry’s story. He grew up in an intelligent atmosphere (both his parents were professors at Oxford) high in rationality but lacking any spiritual frameworks.

When he was nineteen, working a summer job on a farm in Mexico, he has an awakening experience (kenshō) on a deserted beach while staring into the sunset on the waves.

With little spiritual (or religious) background he has no conceptual framework with which to understand this experience.

OBoG is the story journey he embarked upon to remedy this.

What is Zen?

Zen the adjective evokes a sense of stillness, ineffable purity of spirit, a centerdness, a mystical, mysterious wholeness of spirit.

On the other hand Zen the flavor of Buddhist practice feels colder, more austere, disciplined, perhaps even impenetrable. To me it has felt both useful and impractical.

One Blade of Grass shows the warmth that is possible (although often missing) at the lively beating heart of Zen.

While Zen itself is almost tautologically indefinable, OBoG does a phenomenal job of sketching in broad strokes, bringing light to areas that have been murky such as how koans can be used, and providing a rigorous, approachable framework for understanding the flavors of awakening experiences from beginning to end.

OBoG

Reading OBoG felt like a mini-awakening experience itself. The world blossomed. I felt more connected to things. I noticed at times that I was a living breathing animal, and every breath seemed strange and wondrous. Music felt alive. I danced more.

Henry's writing has the quality of poetry. It somehow makes you see the beauty in everyday things. OBoG was a joy to read.

I also especially loved how lucidly and rationally Henry writes about the qualities of various awakening experiences—retaining an inner logic without while still conveying the deep beauty and power these experiences can represent.

The journey from complete spiritual novice to an awakened being(?)¹ is portrayed in a way that is lucid, woo-free, and accessible.

It’s especially remarkable that he does this with Zen, a school not normally known for its legibility. Before reading OBoG my (uninformed) conception of Zen was just a sort of tangled Gordian knot where you had to put effort in without really ever expecting to get anything out.

Now my (slightly less uninformed?) view is that Zen attacks the root of conception itself, which is why it’s normally so hard to speak about. IE the conceptual mind itself—the part of your brain that takes in random photons and sound waves and smells and converts/simplifies them into a framework—is itself the core thing standing in the way of true equanimity.

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Selected Passages

Kenshō As Anti-Trauma

One particularly fascinating bit of OBoG was the conception of kenshō as a kind of "anti-trauma".

Kenshō are awakening experiences—paradigm shifting moments of completely different way of relating to the world. Often love and/or oneness will have complete primacy in these experiences.

Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kenshō. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone.

If trauma is a deeply negative experience that becomes embedded in one's psyche and subsequently colors all future experiences in a negative light, then kenshō—experiencing deeply a moment of love, interconnectedness, oneness—can be the opposite, a beautiful experience which indelibly makes everything a little bit brighter.

Henry’s first awakening experience

On his first awakening experience at age 19 on a beach in Mexico (written in third person)

He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always.

A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes.

A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water.

And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matte black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing?

As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field of sparks. A fire kindled in his chest, his fingers tingled, in fact everything tingled. The fire was not just in his chest but everywhere. Everything was made of drifting sparks. The whole universe turned to fire. He was made of one and the same fabric as the whole universe. It wasn’t enough to say he belonged in it. It was him. He was it. The beginning and end of time were right here, so close his nose seemed to press against them.

Suddenly he knew why he had been born: it was to find this. This reality. His life was resolved, the purpose of his birth fulfilled, and now he could die happy. He could die that very night and all would be well.

Two arms of black lava enclosed the little beach. They lay like lazy iguanas with their noses to the water, and they too were implicit in this truth. That it was true he knew beyond doubt. It was more true than anything else. This was the way things always had been and always would be.

…

Back in my cabana, I lay on my bunk in the gloom with the wooden ceiling just overhead while a flame burned in my chest like the flame of my kerosene camping stove, which was fierce but ghostly. It was a fire of love, and it kept pouring out of me. I’d never known anything like it. Yet somehow it was familiar, as if it had been with me all my life, just unnoticed.

The walls of weathered plywood gleamed in the dark. I lay listening to the rustle and murmur of water outside. Previously there had always been a limit to beauty, but now it was everywhere. Nothing was left out. All I had to do was lie here, with love pouring out of my breast in a swift, silent stream, like a Roman candle. I felt like I’d been claimed by immemorial love.

That night I lay awake a long time, the watch fire in the heart burning long into the night. It seemed I would never need to sleep again. I’d found something larger than the world, and didn’t need to.

On meditation

Often while meditating, after a few minutes of restlessness a sense of soothing would come on, as if I were being salved inside and out. In neurophysiological terms, this was the parasympathetic nervous system engaging, turning down the dial on the stress response. I had lived with a dysregulated nervous system for so long that I hadn’t considered the possibility that maybe the anxiety I ordinarily felt wasn’t 100 percent necessary.

The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life? On top of that, in fits and starts, my skin was getting better.

Zazen (Zen sitting meditation)

It was a nice room. It hit you immediately: a peace about it. It was pretty much square, made out of thick adobe, like most of Santa Fe, and was cool and quiet. There was no furniture, the whole space bare except for a row of black mats lined up around the walls, about a dozen of them, each with a small black cushion in the middle.

The room ought to have felt spartan. Instead it felt thick with peace, with restfulness.

A small Buddha made of wood sat on an altar with a candle. As Robert lit the candle and made a bow to the altar, I noticed a shaving nick on the back of his scalp. Then he pulled out two of the black cushions.

There wasn’t much to zazen. He showed me different possible positions for the legs, and I settled on what he called “quarter lotus.” He taught me the correct alignment of the spine, and the way to hold my hands in my lap, and told me to start counting my breaths in sequences of ten. And that was it.

“Nothing else?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “That’s about it.”

As I walked away down the path into the trees and down a drop into the little gulch of the stream along which ran the track where I had left my bike, it came to me that what I had just tasted was the reality of being alive. It was frightening, as it should be. Normally, I realized, I pulled away from the bare fact of being alive. I didn’t know how not to. But now I did. It was zazen. Meditation in the Zen style. It somehow was no surprise that the other form of meditation I had been doing did not offer this kind of taste. The TM was restorative, ameliorative, medicinal almost. It helped you relax and sleep and restore. But this zazen—it didn’t seem to be interested in those things. Instead, without any deliberation on its part, it simply let you know what it was to be alive.

I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on. Zen was done with the eyes open, which made one’s sense of the world while meditating more vivid. I’d feel a warmth, a pressure in my chest. Sometimes, for no reason, I’d start crying. Sometimes a strange wind seemed to riffle through me and through the surroundings as I sat, reminding me of Sappho’s famous line about love shaking her the way the wind shakes the oak trees on the mountainside.

Zen in the art of writing

Her approach came from Zen. She called it “writing practice.” Zen was popular in American letters. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen—many writers made no secret of their affiliation with Zen. Natalie was another. “First thought, best thought” was the maxim. Get the page covered, outrun the internal censor. There was something about her—a stillness, a quiet radiance. I’d never known anything exactly like it. As if some kind of jewel shone inside her.

Koans

The first koan Henry hears

Natalie opened up a book on Zen and read aloud from it. It was a passage by Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen master from the thirteenth century. In her slow, Jewish New Yorkese (a “Lorne Guyland” accent, as Martin Amis called it), she read:

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.

She put the book down and looked around, a little dazed, and said, “Wow,” shaking her head. “Isn’t he mind-blowing?”

I hummed noncommittally. I couldn’t make head or tail of what I’d just heard. Was it supposed to be nonsense, like Edward Lear or something? Mountains walking?

I asked her for the book and took a look myself. The chapter was called “The Mountains and Rivers Sutra.” Whatever that meant. I reread the paragraph to myself. Then she asked me to read it out loud, so I did.

I couldn’t understand it at all, and said so. She said she couldn’t, either, but loved it anyway.

“What was your original face before your parents were born?” This is a famous “barrier” koan in Zen, the teacher explained: a question given to novices that may help precipitate a breakthrough.

THERE WERE SEVERAL “FIRST KOANS” to work through. One of them was about a “distant temple bell.” I don’t want to give too much away—koan training is an intimate thing, not to be bandied about in loose talk—but I can say a little.

The koan about the distant bell is pivotal, in that it’s the first of the major “presentation” koans, meaning a koan where no amount of discussion will help. The student has to come up with a wordless “presentation” of the koan, to show it, embody it, be it. It’s no use talking about it. The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language. The great silence of all things opens up, where words are just flotsam and jetsam.

I sat with the koan about the bell for quite a few weeks. Already the recent experience was turning itself into a metaphysical understanding in my mind, and that held me up with the new koan. Had John not been there, had he not known so instinctively how to work with me, it would probably have gone the way of the other experiences and become a troubling memory. But here he was, and he’d given me the strange koan about the bell.

“Stop the sound of the distant temple bell,” it runs. How on earth do you do that? “There’s no place for discussion,” John kept telling me. “We have to do it. Trust the experience you had. Let it show you how.”

After several dokusan, with John probing and prodding me, finally one evening in the dokusan room, after I thought I’d exhausted every imaginable possibility, an urge came and I randomly trusted it. As soon as I did, I fell into a groove of centuries of practice worn smooth by others. I no longer cared if I was making the “right” presentation. The koan disappeared, a great expansiveness opened up, as I did what I did.

Mu koan

Mu is traditionally the first koan. The student uses mu as a kind of mantra. On every out-breath, while sitting, they silently voice the sound mu. The student is encouraged not to think about its meaning. The koan has work to do. Its work cannot be done by the conscious mind. Only mu itself can work on the practitioner, releasing them from a kind of prison they didn’t realize they had been caught in. While the conscious mind is kept busy attending to the sound “mu,” the “real” mu can slip in unnoticed through the back door.

Sante Fe

I fell in love with the hills around Santa Fe, hills of chunky red earth, fragrant with small pines and juniper. I fell in love with the town too, its ocher mud buildings sitting squat and hunched under the sky, fragrant with the woodsmoke that began to be burned as autumn rolled in, overseen every day by sunsets that were apocalyptic, with pillars of cloud smoking over the city, and late sunlight flooding the streets. Thick as concentrated orange juice, it was light you could have scooped up in your fingers. It was palpable, you could feel it in your chest, it enveloped you.

On self-love

“It’s okay to take care of yourself, you know.”

Frankly, I didn’t. I lived in fear of being self-indulgent, and was confused about where to draw the line between that and self-care.

On Zen

The Japanese word zen derived from the Chinese ch’an, which in turn came from the Sanskrit dhyana and meant “meditative absorption.” But unlike other kinds of meditation, it was short on detailed instructions. The advice Robert the Zen priest had first given me—to count breaths in sets of ten—was about as elaborate as it got.

Zen had “lineages” of masters who had “confirmed” one another down through the ages. What they had confirmed was that the student had had the same insights into the nature of consciousness or reality that the master had, and had learned to live by them in daily life.

It was weird: it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.

I had heard that sesshin retreats were the heart of Zen training. The word—ses-shin—literally meant “encountering or touching the heart.” Natalie explained that in Japanese the word shin meant both “heart” and “mind.” That right there was the difference between East and West, she said. We cut off the heart from the mind. Not so the East. And according to Zen, our true heart-mind was infinite, knowing no bounds or limits, and included everything.

ZEN IS NOT EASY. ZEN is baffling. Zen is impossible to pin down. On the one hand, it’s easy to pin down: it’s about sitting on a cushion every day. You try to be aware of what is going on. Breathing, mostly, and thoughts that come and, you hope, go. It’s nice when they go. You can find yourself in a state of exhilarating peace. Zen is a journey back to radical simplicity. No mantras, no “sacred syllables,” no sacred anything.

ZEN CALLED ITSELF THE “SUDDEN school,” George explained. You didn’t have to go through a gradual process, through stages of practice. Instead, in one sudden leap, you could find all you were looking for. Bodhidharma said the practice wasn’t based on scripture or words, but rather “directly pointed to the human mind.” “Sudden teaching.” You didn’t have to travel by stages. Some how, in spite of the torment, I recognized that too. The answer to life was right here already.

On the other hand, a principle of Zen, George had told us, was the discovery that we had been wrong about everything. There was great relief in that, he assured us.

According to George, Zen’s view was that we were busy being wrong all the time in ways we didn’t realize. “Awakening” was nothing other than to see this.

Not only that, but without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure.

The rest of that day I was in bliss. Peace suffused everything. A love burned in my chest like a watch fire. I could hear the grass growing, a faint high singing sound, like the sibilance of a new snowfall coming down. I remembered the Jewish saying: “No blade of grass but has an angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’” Every blade of grass deserved that. Each blade was an angel. I cried. My heart was mush. Somehow it felt as though the grass were growing in my own chest. Every object contained an inner lamp, and now I could see it.

More kenshō

Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kenshō. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone.

John gave me my first koan there and then, the original ur-koan described by Zen master Mumon in the thirteenth century as “the Gateless Barrier of the Zen sect”:

A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?”

Joshu answered, “Mu.”

I’d heard about this koan in talks given by various teachers in other centers. Literally, mu means “not.” But the real meaning of the koan is something else, something unspeakable.

I’ve been making supper for my wife and myself. The boys ate earlier. I carry two plates of food upstairs. In the little bedroom, Clare lies sprawled on the bed with the boys, watching the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The room is suffused with the last of the sunlight. I bend down to give her a plate, fork balanced on the rim.

“Thank you,” she says.

I stand up straight for a moment, my own plate in hand. I’m about to sit down but get arrested by a scene in the movie where Roger Rabbit’s tail is singed on a stove, and he proceeds to accelerate faster and faster round a kitchen, trying to outrun his flaming rear, turning the kitchen cabinets into a centrifuge, like a biker on the Wall of Death.

I remember loving this scene years ago when the movie first came out. I start laughing. Something happens. A tingling, a whirring inside me. I notice how malleable the apparently solid surfaces in the cartoon are. The tingle becomes a flywheel in my belly, spinning faster and faster, until it is almost unbearable, a sweet agony. It’s in my chest now, and at once my heart just about breaks and the sensation whips itself into a cyclone, a dust devil, a whirlwind, and spins up the throat into the skull.

My head explodes. A thunderbolt hits the room. I black out—except I don’t; I’m still standing. Everything else blacks out. All the circuitry that keeps the world going snaps off. A fuse blows. I find I’m not standing on anything. Below, a chasm; above, a void; all around, in every direction, nothing. Dark, radiant nothing.

I let out a whoop and start laughing.

Clare looks up from the bed. “Oh, God,” she groans, “it’s not that Zen again.”

IN THE ROOM, EVERYTHING IS bathed in rich light, a dark, lucent limpidity drenching the bed, the window, the TV, the three other people sprawled on it.

Giddy, dizzy, I totter downstairs with my untouched plate, delirious with joy, feeling like any moment I might topple into the abyss and not caring. How is it even possible to take a step, to be suspended on this imaginary surface called the floor? It’s all a dream, a floating illusion, a mirage-like reflection, a ghost of something on nothing.

The food looks magnificent on my plate, like a still life from a seventeenth-century master. I can’t imagine what to do except admire it. I can’t imagine what to do at all. Everything is one glorious abyss of peace that fizzes with energy.

I pull a cushion off the sofa, fold it in half, and sit down in zazen. I can’t think what else to do. At the end of twenty minutes, the carpet, sofa, and cushions are all still alive with energy.

A flicker of alarm: Am I going mad? Will this never end?

I let myself out and go for a walk around the dusky neighborhood. Billows of smoky energy seethe everywhere. The houses hang still and quiet in the gray-blue dusk. They, too, are smoky and alive, poised between being there and not being there. The mind is a wisp of smoke, the remains of a blown-out candle. Not just the houses but the seeing of the houses is the same: there and not there. I could go up and knock on their doors, tap on their windows, but “being there” isn’t what it seems. The world “out there” is a reflection quivering on nothing, even when you rap on a door.

ONCE AGAIN, EVERYTHING ANSWERED AND fulfilled. I still can’t put into words what it was—indeed, words were one of the principal devices for screening this reality—but when you saw it, when it appeared, it folded up everyday reality like a piece of paper and dropped it in a furnace. This reality, unbearably real, loved us fiercely, it loved all things—it was like discovering that the whole world was one heart. Yet at the same time it wasn’t anything.

I had no answers. Only what I felt. Which was that, by some miraculous power, I had just been granted a glimpse into reality, into the true fabric of the universe—into its DNA, as it were, and what I had seen there implicated me too, so that it was clear that, like everything else, I was a child of the universe. I wasn’t separate from it.

“Not one speck of cloud to mar the view,” an old Zen saying has it. Not one thought in the whole universe. Nothing exists! All this earnest training of the mind that we did in Zen—or thought we did—and there was no mind!

On needing a teacher

But a few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology (though the practice itself should help with that), and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide.

I used to think I shouldn’t need a teacher. I should be able to handle things myself. Wasn’t that the measure of a competent, responsible adult? To the extent you didn’t handle it, life would knock you around until you did. It would teach you the lessons you needed to learn. But it was between you and life. It was a long time before it occurred to me that one of the lessons life had been trying to teach me was that sometimes you needed a teacher.

On the benefits of Zen

Zen’s demands were few: daily sitting, occasional retreats, being open to what life brought in each moment. It had benefits for others: It made me more attentive, less fretful. It opened up more love, and I’d return from the retreats with vivid eagerness to be with the family.

Miscellany

After a week in the refugee camps, then another driving around in the back of a stripped-down Land Rover with a squad of guerrillas, sleeping under the stars, spying on enemy positions with binoculars, drinking tiny glasses of strong tea, smoking fierce tobacco out of small bronze pipes, eating strange stews cooked over open fires, and coming under occasional artillery fire—we’d hear a pair of thuds somewhere in the distance, followed a few seconds later by two crashes or booms, depending on how far away the shells landed—I came back to life.

I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of its symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at the symptoms—the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular. But the new cognitive-behavioral approach was actually helping. I never knew what diabolical habits of mind I’d had. It turned out that as long as I could remember, I’d been thinking myself into misery. I beat myself up, put myself down, shoulded myself to death, catastrophized and awfulized. I was an inveterate musturbator: I must do this, that must work out, et cetera. As I exposed and gave up these habitual cognitions, to be alive became stranger and more interesting.

THE FOURTH DAY WAS WARM, and in the afternoon George decided to have us sit outside in the long grass. “Let the wind give us a dharma talk,” he said.

1. At one point he seems to admit that he is “enlightened”.