In a dharma talk given July 15th for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (as part of their Summer 2024 Commit to Sit program), Zen teacher Norman Fischer said something quite interesting and profound. He was discussing the viewpoint and attitude toward life of Zen master Tongen Harada Roshi, who although Japanese was of the same generation as Norman’s father (and my father, as well) born in the late 1920s. He observed that each generation, each culture, each country, has their own unique way of defining and understanding what it means to be human – and that once everyone from that generation is dead, there is no one who really understands that point of view and how it affected and influenced the lives those people led, the choices they made, or the way they looked at relationships, religion, spirituality, friendship, love, conflict, or any other profound lens for the human experience. Norman, now in his late 70s, also noted that his own generation, those who grew up in the 1960s and experienced that whole counter-culture, e.g., hippies, free love, exposure to Eastern religions, the anti-war movement, the Kennedy assassination, the “birth” of television, etc., would soon suffer the same fate. Likewise, each of us living now – my own Generation X, across continents, countries, and cultures, for example. It made me think that ultimately, that inability to really understand another generation’s “definition of human” was the real failing of the “hard” sciences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. After all, the truth of my humanity is not defined in what I write down, or the long-lasting artifacts I create. It’s something much more ephemeral: a feeling, a notion, a sense of ennui, angst, fear or hope that pervades how I think, who I think I am, what I think is important, and who I include or exclude. To think that we understand the “mind” of Julius Caesar by reading his battle journals, or Sigmund Freud by his technical interpretation of dreams, is an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but given that it’s filtered through our own judgment and definition of humanity, hardly a “true” and “accurate” grokking of reality. Makes you wonder. We THINK we know so much. We BELIEVE the world is the way we think it is. We have no idea, really. And the more fractured we become in our own time and place, the more that bucket of water you draw from the ocean that you believe to be the wholeness of everything and true representation of the sea, seems so small, separate, distinct, and alien to the bucket of water I draw from the shore just a few miles further down the coast. Neither is the whole ocean.
18 JUL 2024