Brad Warner, Dana and Dogen

Dogen: "Earning a living and doing productive work are originally nothing other than free giving."

Brad Warner on Dogen: "Working for a living is ... a means of giving freely of ourselves for the sake of others."

Sei-in on Brad on Dogen: "Receiving is a means of giving, while giving is a means of receiving."

I have to say that at the last Dana meeting, I was feeling kind of fed up. The VZC didn't actually need any more money right now and I felt it was unreasonable for Eshu to have a Dana meeting and ask for money when we didn't need any money to run the organization. To top it off, I was just getting back from a couple of days in Vancouver, which left me feeling cranky and tired.

So that was my state of mind when I arrived. We all met, shared dinner and the started the form of council. This is a form that I first experienced on the street retreats. I find it an extremely powerful way for a group to come together and collectively process their experience.

We went around the circle a couple of times. On my first turn to talk, I felt cranky (and I think my words were cranky). I was able to share my feelings without judgment and then listened to the others. As the evening progressed, I came back to a place that I have been before - a feeling that there is no giving and no receiving. If I investigate what is happening when I am giving, then I can see that I am also receiving. Similarly if I look into when I am receiving, I can see that I am giving as well.

In the end, Mitra and I were pleased to make another donation to the VZC. I left the evening in a very good mood (a big change from when I arrived).

As Dogen says, which Brad Warner comments on and then I interpret:
"Receiving is a means of giving, while giving is a means of receiving."

The Dream - Why I am a Vegetarian

I used to eat a fair amount of fast food. I would eat at McDonald's at least once a week.

One night, about eight years ago Mitra, baby Darius and I had taken the evening ferry to Vancouver. On the ferry, I had eaten a particularly gross hamburger and later that night, I had "The Dream".

In my dream, I walked into a McDonalds. It was strangely quiet and I was the only customer. This made sense in the dream. I went up to the counter and ordered my usual: a Big Mac, a regular hamburger and a vanilla milkshake.

The server handed me my food. Instead of a usual bag, the server handed me a big black garbage bag (the kind that have a hint of green in the plastic, if you hold it up to the light). The garbage bag was rolled down.

I opened up the bag and looked inside. The bottom of the bag was filled with dirty sawdust - like sawdust that had been thrown on a shop floor to soak up spilt oil. The bag also contained old black dress shoes of many different sizes.

I remember thinking in the dream, "This is odd". Another voice said in my head, "This is always what you have been getting. You just never saw it this way."

I looked closer at the shoes and was struck in horror by the realization that the shoes were mismatched. Remember the image of those huge piles of shoes in Auschwitz? It was as if someone had taken a shovel full of shoes from this massive pile and put these mismatched shoes in my bag. I could feel this whole machine turning away and cranking out my meal.

I awoke in a sweat. I lay there in bed in the early morning and felt the impact of the dream wash over me.

I made many changes in how I eat as a result of that dream. The first change was to stop eating at McDonalds. After many years of eating regularly at McDonalds, I stopped the day after my dream and haven’t eaten there once in the eight years since this dream.

A few months later, I stopped drinking coffee. I was never a big coffee drinker, but I would consistently have a cup of coffee in the morning. I noticed that within a week of not drinking coffee, my stomach stopped hurting in the evening.

About six months later, I stopped eating refined sugar for about four years. I used to eat a lot of sweet food! It was really hard to not eat candy bars, white chocolate and the like, but I did for four years. After we sold the company, I started having some sugar again. Now I eat some refined sugar, but far less than I ever had in the past. I am much more balanced in my consumption of sugar.

Then about a year after I had The Dream, I stopped eating meat. It seemed to me that not eating meat just made sense. It is not that I have any issues with killing my food. I just didn't want to participate in the industrial production of meat anymore. It was like coming full circle back to the original moment of the dream.

I find it interesting that one short dream could change so much in my life. No other dream has had such an impact on my life.


Postscript 1 - Mitra’s Reaction

A funny story...

When I came home and told Mitra that I wasn't going to eat meat any more, she just laughed at me.

"What are you going to eat? All you eat is meat!"

She was right. My diet used to be very unbalanced (lots of meat and carbs, no fruit and veggies). Becoming a vegetarian has meant that I had to eat way more fruit and veggies. After six years of no meat, I have started eating a little meat in the past six months.

It seems to me that I had been so unbalanced in one direction that I needed to go far in the other direction for some time before I could find a healthy balance (lots of fruit and veggies with a little meat once in a while).


Postscript 2 - Keeping It Quiet

When I made the other changes to my diet, I never told anyone. I just wanted to keep them to myself. However, when I stopped eating meat I found it impossible to not mention.

The day after I made the decision, I was at lunch with a business friend. I ordered a veggie pizza and he asked me if I was vegetarian. A week or two later, I was traveling for business in the US. We stopped somewhere to eat dinner and every item on the menu involved meat (even the salads!).

I often attend business lunches and dinners. Every time I do this, I always have ask the server for a vegetarian meal. Not only does this announce to everyone at the table that I am vegetarian, but it invariably means that I am served at a different time than other folks at my table.

I tried being a closet vegetarian, but found it impossible.


Postscript 3 - Part of the Family Story

Darius refuses to ever eat at McDonalds. He happily eats meat, but is adamant that he will never eat at McDonalds because McDonalds is bad.

I once asked him why he has such strong feelings about McDonalds (especially because he has never eaten there). He told me all about my dream in McDonalds. It was an odd moment for me because I had never directly talked to him about my dream. However, he had overheard me tell the story enough times that he could recite it from memory. It was surprising.

I realized in that moment that the story of my dream had become part of the fabric of our family story. The kids know the story by heart and it informs how they live their lives.

"Seeing is Believing" Tour of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver

I had the opportunity to join a "Seeing is Believing" tour of the downtown East-side of Vancouver on June 30, 2009. “Seeing is Believing” tours started in England and have been very successful at providing a way for people to understand more about life in places like the downtown East-side.

As most folks know, I have previously participated in two street retreats (one in the DTES). I figured that this tour would provide a different view into a world I had briefly experienced previously. On the street retreat, we only used a few services (like for food) and the Seeing is Believing tour gave me the opportunity to learn more about services that I had not experienced.

We started off at the Potluck Café. This is a social enterprise. It is a business which makes meaning in the world through training staff, providing meals to those who need them as well as running a restaurant and providing catering to business functions.

At the restaurant, there was an overview of the tour, the Street to Home foundation and the Potluck Cafe. The information was very well put together and the presentation was very professional.

Next we went to RainCity Housing which provides long-term and transitional housing. We got an overview by the Executive Director. The comment he made that stuck out in my mind was when he said, "Initially we would try to tell people how best they should proceed in their lives. That didn't work. When we realized that each of the people we were working with were experts in their own lives, then we could be much more helpful. These people had survived through some horrible situations and the fact that they are alive is an accomplishment to be proud of. We needed to understand that they are the experts. We are the most helpful when we ask them what they would like to achieve next and work with them to that goal."

We then divided into two groups (depending on whether you had a "1" or a "2" on your name badge). My group went for a tour of the housing first. They showed us a room. It was reasonably clean and very small. There were hotplates in the room and a shared kitchen down the hall.

They explained that their policy was to allow most things to happen as long as it didn't bother other people and it wasn't selling drugs.

Then my group went to chat with some of the folks that were staying in the place. We divided into smaller groups and 3-5 people each chatted with one tenant. My group spoke with an aboriginal man. He had been placed in the foster care system when he was a baby and had spent his entire childhood in that system. He didn't like it. When he was 16, he committed some crime (he didn't say what) and he went to jail. He had just gotten out a few months ago.

He was about the same age as me and he had never been outside of a rigidly structured system (foster care and then prison). It was striking.

Next we went to Covenant House. They provide service to street youth including a drop in centre, addictions counseling and housing. The Executive Director was very eloquent in her comments. For her it all boiled down to providing three things: support, structure and love.

She talked about how important it was to have clear structure for these kids. She was also the only person who mentioned the importance of emotions (in particular, love) in providing services.

After her talk, we once again divided into two groups. My group stayed and broke into smaller groups to chat with folks who work at Covenant House. At our table was a woman who had been working there for several years. One thing that she said really struck me: Every single kid who she has worked with at Covenant House was abused before arriving, regardless of their gender. Sometimes the abuse is recent (for example, "you can have free rent if you…") and sometimes not, but all the kids have been abused.

Next my group went and chatted with some of the kids who had gone through Covenant House. There were four kids who were all on their early twenties. One had turned his life around and was now working at Starbucks. Another had fought with the structure of Covenant House and talked about realizing that the structure was there to help her.

Another kid talked about needing money and working as a stripper to earn cash. Now she was on a path that she preferred.

The one kid who stood out in my mind the most was the oldest one. She was in her mid-twenties. Her mother was a sex worker and she was raised in the foster care system. She said that she had been through twenty six different Elementary schools.

Twenty-six schools!

Assuming that the Elementary school system went to grade 7 when she was attending (unlike now, when it goes to grade 5), then she would have averaged about four different schools a year for seven years!

She was obviously a bright woman, but she talked about how she hadn't been able to learn anything because her schooling had been so broken up. If my memory is correct, she only learned to read after turning eighteen.

She talked about how hard it was to grow up with everyone around you thinking that you would grow up to work in the sex trade.

She talked about how the foster care system paid for her bills until she turned eighteen. She turned eighteen in the middle of the month and the system wouldn't even pay for her last two weeks of rent. She was out on the street. Luckily, several kids said that the folks at Covenant House were good people. She went there and they provide what she needed: support, structure and love. She learned the skills that she needed, finished school and now is hoping to go to university to study to be a teacher.

I was really touched by her story.

The next location was the Coast Mental Health Resource Centre. Once again we had the overview briefing by the ED. We then talked to some residents and finally went on a tour.

What struck me about this final stop was seeing this one guy who looked a lot like one of my friends from university. It wasn't my friend, but he looked so much like him. It reminded me of my connection to everyone there.

Afterwards, the tour group gathered to discuss the experience and provide feedback. A few people commented that they felt the tour had been somewhat sanitized. The organizers agreed with this point. They felt it would be too dangerous to bring such a large group (30
people) to some of the more dangerous locations. However they indicated that they would be happy to arrange a tour with a plain clothes police officer.

Two of us indicated our interest in participating. Subsequently, we arranged confirmed a date with the police officer for late August.

All in all, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to attend the Seeing is Believing tour. The tour validated a lot of impressions I had from my street retreat (such as the importance of emotional connection). It also helped me to learn new things (such as the role of the foster care system in homelessness).

I look forward to seeing where this knowledge will take me.

A Moment of Change

I am standing on a dirt road in Cambodia. It is hot. I feel connected to the sky above my head and to the ground underneath my feet. I feel that I am where I should be, doing what I should be doing.

I have just finished giving out packages of school supplies to lots of children. The kids have gone off to look at what they have received and I am speaking with an old Cambodian woman. We are talking about how the Khmer Rouge killed her husband. She asked if I could give her any money and I have quietly pushed a US twenty dollar bill into her hands. She asks me why I am doing this.

"Because I am a Buddhist." I reply.

At this point, I had been practicing Buddhism for almost exactly 2 years, but that was the first time I told almost anyone that I was Buddhist.

I had just spent 6 months in Southeast Asia visiting a variety of Buddhist countries. I was keeping my head shaved at that time (looking a lot like a Buddhist monk). Folks kept asking me if I was Buddhist. I would side-step the question and just say that, "it was a good way to keep cool."

I didn't want to say that I was Buddhist.

For 18 months previously, I was in Victoria (before we left on the trip) and I didn't mention my involvement in Buddhism to anyone except a few close people.

For 24 months, I was worried about what people would think if I said that I was Buddhist. I was worried that people would think I was flaky. I was worried about how this would change what it was to be Eric. Would this change my identity (both in my own eyes and in the eyes of others)? I was worried that I was pretending and somehow a fake. Perhaps I wasn't as sincere as others? Somehow Buddhism belonged to someone else and I was intruding.

In that moment on the hot dirt road in Cambodia, I acted differently.

In that moment in Cambodia, the most truthful, deepest, honest and authentic answer that I could give to the old Cambodian woman was, "I am giving these things because I am Buddhist."

That was a turning point for me. Since then, I have been very open about my involvement with Buddhism. I had feared that I would find rejection, concern and disagreement. Instead, I have found interest, curiosity and so much more acceptance than I would have thought possible. What a wonderful surprise!

The acceptance started in this important moment with the old woman in Cambodia. When I told her, she nodded. There was no scolding or anger. There was only happiness, warm acceptance and understanding. She replied to me, "Of course you are. I am Buddhist as well."

She held my hands tight, smiled and her eyes beamed. Then she walked with me out of the sun, to sit with a dozen or so mothers and their children. We enjoy fresh coconut milk while the room filled with smiles and laughter.

Names, Names and More Names

I Want A Cool Buddhist Name!

So when I first got involved with Buddhism, I thought it was so cool to have a Buddhist name. What a great thing! To have some cool sounding Japanese name that I could use. I wanted one!


Name? I Don't Want A Buddhist Name!

I practiced with the VZC for a few years and then had the chance to attend my first sesshin. During that sesshin, I had my first clear memories of my abuse as a child. It was a very overwhelming experience. Part way through the sesshin I lost my interest in getting a Buddhist name. I asked myself, "Why would I want that? I feel so f**ked up. I am just going to focus on meditating."


Don't Think About It Too Much...

After another year and a half, I met the requirements for Jukai. I wasn’t working towards this, but it happened anyways. Eshu asked me if I wanted to do the ceremony. The idea rolled around in my head and when Eshu asked for the second time, I said yes.

The night before the ceremony Alizeh was sick all night. I stayed up with her, thinking that if I stayed up, then at least Mitra will have rested and I could get some sleep the next day after the ceremony.

So, the ceremony was very surreal on account of my exhaustion. During the ceremony, I received my Buddhist name. I hadn't really thought too much about the idea of a new name since my first sesshin almost two years earlier. I found when I had the new name, I wanted to use it. I like being called Sei-in.


There Can Be Only One!

However, I liked Sei-in so much that I wanted to get rid of Eric. I wanted to fix on Sei-in. Out with the old and in with the new.

I figures that I would try out my new name and give myself until after my third sesshin to make a decision. I really wanted to go one way or the other.

I did the sesshin in May and was confused when I came back. I wanted a decision about by name. I wanted one name. But that is not what happened for me. It felt like I was forcing it. So, I took some time and space just to let things settle.


Two Names Are Better Than One

I am not sure what I will do in the future, but for now I am using both names almost equally.

In the confusion that comes from using two names I have found the constant reminder that I am both of these names and neither of these names. I am other names too: Dad, Brother, Sweetie...

Without fixing on one name reminds me on a daily basis that I have the freedom to be all of those names and none of them. It is like the saying, “The person with one clock always knows the time, while the person with two clocks is never sure.”

I have found both fear and freedom in doubt.

How Our Family Connected to Buddhism

In 2006, we had the opportunity to pack up our life and travel in Southeast Asia for 6.5 months. When we left in late January, 2006, the kids were all very young. Kiran was only 11 months old, Alizeh was 3.5 and Darius seemed old at 6 years old.

When we left, we left as a family of five people with one person practicing Buddhism. By the time we returned, Buddhism was something we shared as a family.

Each of us came to Buddhism in our own way. My path led to Buddhism before we left. Mitra found her connection through some very strong nuns in Vietnam. In spending time with these nuns, she saw an example of well educated and powerful women practicing Zen (in stark contrast to what she had seen in Thailand).

Alizeh developed a relationship to Buddhism through visiting temples.
She really enjoyed the ritual of the temples. When I took her to a temple, she asked me what we did there. I explained that we respectfully watched what happened while the locals went through their rituals. She challenged me: "Those people are doing something. I want to do something, not just watch them do something!" And so Alizeh learned the local rituals and made offerings at many temples across Southeast Asia.

Darius visited some temples, but didn't connect as much to the form as Alizeh. For him, it just slowly became a more visible backdrop of his life. I would typically put the older two kids to bed. I would read them a story and then sit in the room with them to meditate while they went to sleep. We had a lot less space when we were traveling than we have at home. The result of this was that it pushed my meditation practice to be more visible for the kids. Soon they were asking what I was doing and asking if they could do it too. Seeing his Dad meditate on a daily basis was important in building Darius’ connection to Buddhism.

Now for Kiran, it was different. He was quite young for the whole trip. He was only 1.5 years old when we returned home. By this point, everyone else in the family had found some connection to Buddhism and Buddhism became the water that he was swimming in.

As I write this, it is almost three years after we arrived home from our trip. Buddhism has stayed with our family, while each person has developed a different relationship to it.

I continue practicing with the Victoria Zen Centre. Mitra’s focus has been on getting her Masters’ degree for the past three years. Buddhism and the community stay close to her heart, even if she has had little time to go out to the VZC. Darius likes having a Buddha statue in his room, when he is feeling scared at night. Alizeh leaves letters for Kwan Yin (a female Buddha) behind the Kwan Yin figure in her room. In the morning, she enjoys reading Kwan Yin’s replies. Kiran likes to light incense, meditate and do prostrations. As a family, we enjoy going to the VZC Sangha Sundays and Buddha’s Birthday Celebration each year.

"If he discovers religion, he will become a TV evangelist!"

I grew up in a family without any formal religion. My mother was certainly a spiritual person, but we didn't belong to any religious group. I think that mom was skeptical of any organized religion. Dad wasn't spiritual at all. What spirituality came to us as kids, came from my mom.

So, I wasn't really exposed to any organized religion growing up, even though I was exposed to spirituality. I had only been to 2 church services in my life (not including weddings or funerals) before I started practicing Buddhism.

When I was a kid, my folks took this picture of me in my grandparent’s backyard in California. I am dressed in a corduroy suit (all the rage back then!) with a stern look on my face and my hands clasped in front of me. The photo became a defining part of our family's story. The story went like this: "In this photo, Eric looks like either a preacher or a gangster. We don't want him to be a gangster and if he gets into religion he will be insufferable. He will be like a TV evangelist. So Eric should never get into the mob or organized religion."

This story went on for years. I guess the photo was taken when I was 4 or so and the story was part of our family until I got involved with Buddhism and didn't become a TV evangelist.

Any time I would express interest in religion the story would come out: "well, you know what mom always said about you and religion..."

Fast forward to 2004… by this time, my mother had passed away, Mitra and I were married with 2 kids and I was very involved with the company that I had co-founded, PureEdge. I came home one hot day. I thought that something may be up as soon as my mother-in-law told me that she would look after the kids, while I should go upstairs to chat with Mitra.

I went up to our bedroom and Mitra told me to sit down. I sat down and Mitra told me that she was pregnant with our third child. This was not the plan! We had a boy and a girl. We were done. Or so I thought. The idea of another child scared me.

Mitra and I saw a counselor together who helped us to take a broader perspective on the child. She asked us to think about ourselves in the future and what we would tell ourselves to do now. The answer was clear to me - the future me would tell the present me to have the child. Yes, it would be hard, but it would be worth it. I would live to regret it if we didn't have the child (I have to add that I am very thankful for this advice. It was just what I needed. Also, I am very thankful to have Kiran in my life).

I could clearly see that I wanted to have the child, but I was still scared. In the moments between sleeping and waking, I would feel this horrible fear sitting on my chest.

I went to see a different counselor whom I had seen previously about my mother's death and various work-related stresses. She said that she thought that my fear was not to do with having a third child, but to do with something greater. The pregnancy was just the "straw that broke the camels back".

We talked about how I could figure out what the greater issue was. She mentioned a variety of approaches to figure it out. She mentioned hypnosis and I knew that was what I wanted to try. Further, I wanted to be hypnotized in my painting studio at home (otherwise known as my garage), instead of in her office.

The next Saturday I found myself in my art studio, settled in comfortably on a chair next to my counselor. She led me to relax and go to a safe place within myself. There I was greeted by two visitors - two parts of myself that needed expression. One was a child of me and the other was an older figure. It was kind of like a dream. At one point, this figure put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me. In a voice that you would use to talk to a child who just isn't listening, he said, "Find a teacher." His voice was frustrated as if he had said this to me a thousand times and if I would only listen, I would be so much happier.

I returned to my normal state, guided out of the hypnosis by my counselor. I knew that I needed to find a religious teacher. I felt that while I felt deeply spiritual, I needed to be involved with some group. It occurred to me for the first time that the spiritual struggles that I had were not unique to me. Many other people had gone through these before. I could either re-invent the wheel while repeating the mistakes of others or I could learn from them. I could learn from their mistakes and once I learned their path, I could then forget it.

I felt like my approach to spirituality had been one of forgetting all of the rules to have a direct experience with spirituality. However, I had never learned the rules in the first place, so it was hard to forget them.

I decided to learn the path of an organized religion. The question was which one?

I made two lists in my head. One list was all of the world’s major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.). The other was a list of things which I felt spiritually spoke to me. It included all sorts of random things including the original Star Wars movies (especially Yoda), the book Siddhartha by Hesse and some obscure sci-fi books. When I stepped back and compared the lists in my head, I quickly saw that 80% of the things that I considered spiritual had a Buddhist theme. This was a big surprise to me, but not to those around me.

Frankly, the fact that I read the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse almost every year since I was a teenage should have been a clear signal to me, but I had missed it all of those years.

Any ways, I went online and looked to find a good beginners book on Buddhism. I read several reviews and settled on "Buddhism for Dummies". I bought it and read it cover to cover. It was a great book to introduce me to Buddhism.

It was like a door opening for me. The first chapter explained the reasons that Buddhism is a religion and the reasons that it isn't a religion. I found the reasons for it to not be a religion very compelling:

- there is no god(s),
- the main dude (Buddha) said that he was just a person and he wasn't trying to teach a religion, but just a way to me happy
- there is no set of ways in which you have to act, otherwise you will go to hell. There are ways to act, but they are only suggestions and the intent isn't to avoid hell, but just to be happier. So if you want to be happy, then killing people probably isn't going to help.
- if something in Buddhism doesn't work, then don't do it.

The end of the first chapter concluded with the idea that it didn't matter whether or not Buddhism was a religion or not.

The next thing that got me was the description of the first teaching that Buddha gave. He talked about something called The Four Noble Truths. I was completely struck by these as deeply familiar. These were themes which I had been painting over and over again for the previous four years.

As I worked through the book one of the things that it suggested was to try meditating. Regardless of which form of Buddhism you practice, there is always a lot of meditation. So if you don't like meditation, then this path is not for you.

The book described a simple counting breath meditation. I tried it for 15 minutes (which is what was suggested). I found myself far more relaxed afterwards. I had tried many things over the years to relax and nothing had worked as well. Meditation had helped me to relax a lot, in only 15 minutes, didn't involve appointments or other people and was free.

Next, the book suggested that I find a teacher and a community. I went through the phone book and searched online for places to practice Buddhism in Victoria. Eshu from the Victoria Zen Centre answered my email.

Eshu and I got together for a tea. I was very nervous at the thought of meeting a real Zen monk, but I was quickly at ease. Eshu and I became fast friends. I went to listen to Eshu speak and met Ben. He seemed like a pretty good guy and I thought if the community was made up of folks like Ben, then it must be a good group.

In the summer of 2004, about two months after finding out the Mitra was pregnant, I started practicing Buddhism with the Victoria Zen Centre.

A few months later, Eshu, Niki and the kids came over for dinner. In the middle of dinner, Eshu turns to Mitra and says, "Eric is really into Zen. What do you think of that?"

I was immediately worried. I knew that I was enjoying my time with the VZC, but what did Mitra think? In that moment it occurred to me that I didn't know what she thought.

Mitra turned to Eshu and said, "It is great! Eric is so much more relaxed. He is easier with the kids. He is easier with me. He admits when he is wrong so much sooner. It has made a big, positive change in him."

Wow, I thought. I knew that I felt better, but I didn't know that I was acting so differently. I didn't know that Mitra thought it was so positive for me.

That was five years ago now. Buddhism has continued to be a very powerful and positive influence on my life. I am thankful for it, but probably not as grateful as those who would have to interact with me if I wasn't practicing.