The Tao Of Joe

blazing hot

asphalt

holds firm

beneath my feet

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I haven’t much

to give

just this body

one posture

zazen

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My teachers’ teacher, Uchiyama Roshi, practiced Takuhatsu as a mendicant monk. In his book “Takuhatsu: Laughter Through the Tears”, Uchiyama Roshi says, “I thought there might be a crucial relationship between takuhatsu and religion that I could never really know. If there were some intrinsic reason why a person aspiring to live out a religious life should do takuhatsu, what could it be? While I was thinking about this, ten years passed.”

This is exactly the same question and spirit of inquiry that I have had concerning takuhatsu for, surprisingly, the past ten years. Beginning sometime during 1998, I had started to wonder whether or not takuhatsu might have a role as a spiritual component of genuine relinquishment here in America. I wondered about this because I had often heard that “Takuhatsu was not possible in America.” My own teacher at that time made this statement over and over again it seemed. He and the sangha I practiced together with were in the midst of fund raising activities to purchase a property so that “Zen might have a more visible and recognizable structure in the community we lived in”. At the time, our temple was a residential home in an older neighborhood of Denver and had been in this location for some fifteen to twenty years already. It functioned quite well for a sangha of twenty or so members but from the outside was not recognizable with regard to it’s function and purpose to the passer-by. Our teacher felt that was appropriate for the time and place when the sangha had first formed during the early to mid-eighties but now it was time to join the community-at-large and participate in a manner expected of any mainstream church in America.

I believed then that he was correct in his vision for a greater role in the community through a recognizable temple structure. During the early to mid-nineties, the sangha had matured and a number of students were capable of supporting his vision and ready to enter the marketplace with a functioning understanding and actualization of bodhisattva principles. These individuals were coming of age in their personal lives and professions as well and it was time to reach out and do what needed to be done at a local level. It was also at this time that I first began to notice homeless persons begging on a few of the street corners in downtown Denver.

By the millennium celebration’s of 1999-2000, a homeless population was beginning to emerge and I began to wonder what it would be like to live alongside these individuals as peers rather than “people in need of assistance.” Begging seemed to be fast becoming a forced lifestyle for a few of our fellow citizens and I wondered even more earnestly about takuhatsu as a spiritual discipline of the bodhisattva ideal. It seemed to me that it was too easy to summarily dismiss takuhatsu as legitimate practice.

Today, 15 May, 2008, the homeless have become a fixed part of the American landscape. In every major and minor American city the homeless beg for a hand-up. Here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I am living now, there are people begging on corners near or at the I-40 off ramps coming into and out of town. I do not recall them when I first arrived here in 2006. It was noticeable to me because it was the first time in a long while I had not seen people begging on corners for money or food. Back home in Denver there were thousands of individual’s begging all across the metropolitan area up and down the Front Range corridor.

Yes, ten years have passed since I first began to wonder if “…there might be a crucial relationship between takuhatsu and religion that I could never really know. If there were some intrinsic reason why a person aspiring to live out a religious life should do takuhatsu, what could it be?” It is time I found out.

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