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Master Yin Zhao Shakya's Autobiography
A personal message from Dharma Master Yin Zhao:
Most of us go through life thinking there will never come a day when we'll have to decide whether we're going to take control of our lives or continue on a path to destruction. The reason for this is that most of us don't ever realize that we're on a path to destruction. The day sneaks up on us. We thought we were the masters of fate and woke up to discover that we were its servants.
It's that day and that decision that I'd like to discuss. I'll tell you about my "day of reckoning" and hope that you can recognize some of the events that led up to it and make a few good decisions of your own.
I was eighteen when I enlisted in the Air Force. For the first three years of service I was stationed in England. I played my part in the usual drug scene, smoking a lot of hashish and dabbling in a few other illegal drugs. Church was not on my agenda, and I can honestly say I don't know why I never attended Mass anymore. None of my friends went to church. The consensus was that church was for hypocrites; and we didn't spend much time worrying about hypocrites.
I had two distinct personas during those three years in England. At work, I was dependable, quick to learn, easy to get along with, and generally liked by my fellow enlisted men and superiors. I made a profession out of maintenance work; and for the most part, I enjoyed it. I operated a forklift moving things from place to place and drove a truck around to make deliveries. Nothing exciting ever happened at work; and since I didn't let it interfere with my social life, I stayed out of trouble and even earned a reputation for being reliable and reasonably intelligent.
After work, I used the other persona. I suppose that for a young man who's between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, it's not unusual to be normally insane - to take risks and do things no mature man would do - and to do those things with really close friends. Male Bonding. By night, Darren, Fred and I were a trio of craziness, less like the Three Musketeers than the Three Stooges.
Darren was married and let Fred live with him because splitting the rent was a good way to save on expenses. The three of us regarded the place as a kind of private-property safe-house.
Darren was a few years older than I. He was the leader of the pack, not only of our small group but of the buddies we hung around with at work. He had a way of telling a story that never failed to get a laugh no matter how often he told it. One night, for example, he was driving home from a party, stoned and transporting some drugs. He flipped his car, and without so much as a scratch managed to crawl out the window of the overturned car. He grabbed his drugs and hid under a bush while the police searched for the driver. He could hear everything they said as they poked the bushes. When the car was finally towed away, he walked home; and in the morning turned himself in before he could be arrested. Leaving the scene of an accident was a minor offense compared to driving while "under the influence" and carrying drugs. But he was clean and sober in the morning and when he said that he had obviously had a concussion and was confused when he left the scene, he got away with it.
So we laughed at his stories and he laughed at ours. They were heroic tales. Today I'd see all of us as dangerous, drug abusing fools, men who who were totally self-absorbed and irresponsible and who never gave anybody else's safety or well-being a second thought.
For us, society's rules just didn't exist. We continued in this undisciplined life until, a few months after Darren's escapade with the overturned car, he learned during a routine medical exam that he had a congenital hole in his heart. He was flown back to the states for major heart surgery. His wife went with him while Fred stayed behind in England to watch the house. When Darren awakened from the surgery he learned that the procedure had gone very well and that he would be going back to England to finish his tour.
After talking to the surgeon, his wife went to his room. Darren was expecting her to say how wonderful it was that everything was going to be fine. Instead, she asked for a divorce. She said that she and Fred had been having an affair for quite some time. She wasn't going to return to England and would wait for Fred to return when his tour was over.
Darren told me the story when he returned. "How could this be happening?" he asked. I didn't know what to say. Later, when I was alone with Fred, he gave me his side of the story. He didn't mean to hurt his best friend, he said. The relationship with Darren's wife began innocently enough; but then they fell in love; and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it. Again, I didn't know what to say.
All the things I thought I knew about friendship were wrong. My two best friends, who were the best of friends just a couple of months earlier, now couldn't stand the sight of each other. The trust was gone and so was everything else that was supposed to be good about friendship. I was in the middle and didn't have any advice for either of them. My social life collapsed; and all I could do was stand there alone, doubting my ability to judge the truth of anything.
When I got back to the states I married a great gal and had two kids. Later I returned to England for another three-year tour, but this time, older and with my family with me, I was a lot wiser. I had a good friend at work named Sam who was smart, easy-going, and interested in religion and philosophy. We took some college classes together. The friendship we developed was deeper and didn't depend on drugs and alcohol.
Life became even more pleasant when my brother Tim, who had also joined the service, was stationed in England a few hundred miles away. Growing up, Tim and I were close. I was three years older than he, but even though he had a fraternal twin; I looked more like his twin than his twin did. We even sounded alike on the phone. During all the years of childhood and adolescence, we'd spend hours together, just talking. We seemed to agree on everything.
Sam and Tim both came to my house for a barbecue just before I left England. I remember it as if it were yesterday. If someone would have told me that within a few years both of them would be dead, I wouldn't have believed it. They were both young and healthy and had no problems of any kind. Both looked forward to the future and were working hard to make that future successful.
We stayed in touch and when Sam got back to the states we often saw each other. Occasionally Tim would join us to complete the reunion. Sam got married and had a son; and life, especially since we were all moving up in rank, was looking good. I converted to Southern School Zen Buddhism and busied myself with Zen philosophy and meditation techniques.
And then I got orders to go to Korea for a single year - which meant I couldn't take my family; and Sam got orders to go to Germany. We said we'd write, and we did.
When I got to Korea I missed my wife and children and all my folks back home and couldn't reconcile myself with the cultural differences. I tried to fit in, but couldn't connect socially. I became a loner. I think at the root of this enforced isolation was a desire to learn how to meditate, to have nothing else to do but meditate. At home, I had tried many different techniques; and always I'd start out enthusiastically, but then, when I didn't get sustainable results, I'd switch techniques, telling myself that if I had had more time and less distraction, I'd have succeeded. Now I had ideal conditions, This was just an excuse; but it seemed reasonable to say that I had the motive and the means, but lacked the opportunity. Now, even though I gave myself the opportunity, I still wasn't getting anywhere.
As I look back now, I can see that I had been making two errors simultaneously. First, I had been trying to start at the end, not the beginning. There's a certain conceit that comes with starting a Zen program, a feeling that we already know what we're trying to learn. "Maintain a proper posture? Hey, I'm in the military. I know how to keep a proper posture." "A breathing exercise? Well, I know how to breathe." "Concentrate? What is that but just paying attention." We skip the inconvenient steps.
The second error I had committed was to apply a Hungry Ghost solution to every problem. "Well, this technique didn't work, so I'll scratch it off the list and try the next one."
I could read in the instructions that I had to "Clear the nadis (meridians)" but I couldn't see any sense in learning more than the approximate route of a meridian. I told myself that since I didn't want to do acupuncture, I didn't need to pay much attention to detail. I couldn't see that learning the meridians was a way of perfecting the ability to concentrate. The discipline didn't need a purpose beyond that. I couldn't see Dharana as an exercise at all. So instead of taking the time to learn "Dharana" on the meridians, I would do a quick run-through and commence trying to raise the Serpent Power or do the Microcosmic Orbit. I can look back and laugh now, but then I just could not understand the importance of learning how to concentrate.
There were many approaches to meditation and many different schemes to control Qi or Prana. When one technique stopped working, I'd get another book and learn another method. And when that one failed, I didn't blame myself. I blamed the lack of time and all the distractions.
And so, in Korea, I looked forward to being alone with time to devote to the practice. The last excuse I had for failure was gone. If I couldn't do it under these conditions, I couldn't do it.
"If you come to a fork in the road, take it," said Yogi Berra.
I had always thought of myself as a visual person and could visualize the meridian paths, but I had never achieved a true altered state of consciousness by trying to "clear the nadis." Now as I traced their lines, I could feel my mind settling into a kind of focus-groove.
My teacher had said that I also needed to cultivate the power to listen, to focus on sound. She suggested that I put a spiral sea shell up to my ear and listen intensely to hear if it would tell me something. Or, if I didn't have a shell just to make my mind "...a kind of tape recorder that recorded sound but didn't analyze it. The tape recorder doesn't judge a voice or even identify it," she said, "it just ‘notices' the sound."
My first significant success came quickly. I started by shining a desk lamp's light directly into my face, gently closing my eyes, and doing half a dozen cycles of the Healing Breath I carefully traced the meridian circuit; and then, suddenly, I noticed the sound of the dripping faucet in the bathroom. It caught my attention, and I focussed on the sound... drip, drip, drip, drip. I began to wrap my mind around the sound of the water hitting the sink and also around the silence between the drips. The more I listened, the louder the drips became. Each splash was like thunder in my ears. And then I made the mistake of letting my ego into the procedure. "Wow," I thought. "This is amazing." And that quickly I was out of the state. I was certain that only a few minutes had passed. I had to look at my watch a couple of times to verify that more than an hour had passed.
I learned several things that day: one was the importance of trained concentration, and the other was that eternal doesn't mean it goes on forever, it means that it is outside the measurement of time.
It occurred to me that the faucet had been dripping every minute of every day that I had stayed in that room; but that I had ignored the sound. I had never really heard it in the way I just heard it.
We always hear that the Path is beyond words. Yet, the teacher keeps talking; and we keep paying attention with our ordinary mind to the words, letting them skim over our consciousness in the same way that we listen to directions... "Go two blocks down and then turn right." As soon as we drive the two blocks and turn right, the words disappear from our mind. We have no use for them. In the same way, the instruction to "focus on sound" is used and forgotten. We listen to a sound for a moment and say, "OK, I did that," and then we discard the instruction. We never listen to the extent that the "seed of the drip" expands into the "thunder of the drip."
I had to accept the fact that my behavior had been, for the most part, mechanical. I was walking through life asleep, allowing myself to be pushed around by the dream that is karma. I wondered if this was what the Zen Master meant by "mindfulness?"
Does our mind become filled with something when we focus on the thing? Can we maintain that state of awareness not only on a single thing, but shift from one thing to another without losing any of the expansion or the intensity or the immediacy of it? I knew the drip sound of that water thoroughly. I knew it completely, with a certainty that can't be described. There ought to be nothing joyful about a dripping faucet, but I heard it as someone hears Gabriel's trumpet. (Later I would be able to identify this experience as having attained Tattva 5; but then it was only an non-calibrated but incredible experience of Reality.)
Concentration leads to Meditation and Meditation leads to Samadhi. That is the order Patanjali put them and that was the order I vowed to follow.
"The mind," say the Ancients, "is a drunken monkey." Sobering up the drunken monkey is the first step. This isn't easy because the monkey lives in the mind's liquor store. Everywhere he looks there is something else he can get into.
The first instruction: "Clear the Nadis!" (meridians) is not a simple direction like "Go two blocks down." The meridians require effort to learn. But if we don't want to put our time into the discipline of learning the basics, we might as well leave Zen and follow another Path. We wouldn't say, "I think I'll play baseball" and without ever having picked up a bat, ball or glove, show up at Yankee Stadium. It takes years of practice to make a good ball player. Yes, talent and luck help. But nobody gets anywhere without training and experience. Regardless of the use we intend to put that information to, we have to learn the meridian circuit. Not only is this discipline good Dharana training, but later, when we work with the Chakras, we will need to know it well.
We don't concern ourselves with the central sushumna or governor/conception channels. That is an end game and we have to start at the beginning. Clearing the meridian channels is our way of sobering up the drunken monkey. As long as the monkey is occupied with traversing the circuit of those 12 x 2 = 24 meridians, he can't stop for a Jack Daniels.
Once I had mastered concentration on visualizing the meridians and listening to ambient sounds, I began to train in concentration using music, which, for me, was the most rewarding of all the Dharana training methods. I moved quickly through Meditation and Samadhi, which, along with the Chakra disciplines, I'll discuss in the next chapters.
My year in Korea was finished, and I returned home.
On my very first day of work at a base in California, I received an official call from an officer in Mortuary Affairs. Sam was dead, and his wife had asked if I would escort his remains back to his hometown. I was stunned. How could this be? I had just received a letter from Sam the week before I left Korea. I had been so happy to see my wife and kids again, and there I was getting on a plane to fly from California to Delaware to pick up Sam's body that had been flown there from Germany. I would accompany it back to his home in Indiana. His wife had requested a military funeral, and I was to ensure that all the details were fully complied with.
His death was incomprehensible. He and his wife had been to a party; and one of the guests there had made some insulting sexual comments to Sam's wife. Sam objected naturally, and as he and his wife were trying to leave, an argument started. There were others involved; and the next thing anyone knew, someone had a gun and started shooting, and Sam was hit and died instantly. He was 28 years old.
I tried to make sense of the tragedy, but couldn't. None of the pieces came together. He was a quiet and thoughtful man and was never argumentative. In the military we're used to combat related deaths; or even barroom brawls. But this had been a party in a private home.
I got another shock when I met his family. Sam always seemed refined and quiet, very calm and thoughtful. For some reason I had associated these traits with genteel living. The poverty of his mother's home made the funeral experience even more surreal. Sam had never said a thing about his home life, nothing positive or negative. When I first saw the house I was sure that I had the wrong address. I learned later that when Sam was a kid his father had abandoned him and his mother and brother. He grew up in the welfare projects, a neighborhood so poor that you knew the rats were better fed than the people. His boyhood friends came to the viewing and I could tell how saddened they were by his death. A couple of them told me that he was the one that had "gotten out" and made something of himself, served his country, finished college, became "somebody." Sam had never told me about any of this. I remember wondering if I had ever truly known anyone. I certainly had never known him, Darren, or Fred - just as I hadn't known myself until a matter of months before. As I studied him lying there in the coffin, I understood where the idea of the soul came from. I felt like I was looking at a mannequin. I was looking at his body, but Sam was gone.
And then, weeks later, came the news about my brother Tim. He had learned that he was an insulin-dependent diabetic. His disease had been discovered when he collapsed during a military exercise. Despite all the efforts to manage his condition, he suffered an insulin induced coma, which led to a severe form of dementia. He could remember things from years earlier, but not what had happened the day before. His eyesight rapidly deteriorated and his skin turned a sickly yellow. He was discharged from the service after the coma and came home to South Dakota. I visited him immediately and then as often as I could, flying in from California. I planned to return to South Dakota to live as soon as I retired from the service in a few months. My twenty years were nearly up.
Sadly I watched Tim slide slowly into death. In his conscious moments he would talk about the trout fishing we did. The last time I saw him he wanted to go fishing with me again, and I said, Sure. I said goodbye and told him I'd be seeing him again in a few weeks. By the time I got home, the phone was ringing. My father called to tell me Tim had died of a heart attack. He was 35.
I hung up the phone and cried for hours. "Life is bitter and painful," said the Buddha. Tim's death was all the proof I needed.
When I finally got past my grief, I would sit and think, trying to understand the meaning of friendship, the blood ties of family love, and the tragedy of early death. A strange kind of peace came over me - a peace that would not have been possible without the spiritual experiences I had had in Korea. Soon the Four Noble Truths that I had previously recited from memory - but not from any deep understanding - became clear to me. The answers were all in the Eightfold Path, but they were not the elementary answers that are given to beginners, it was much more complicated. Concentration led to meditation and samadhi, but the need to purify existence, strengthen character, lose faults, and cultivate good qualities - as specified in the various chakras, was all contained in the Eightfold Path and in the various meditation disciplines.
When I resumed practice, I first listened to slow classical music, but very soon I returned to my former practice of using any kind of music as a means to concentrate, meditate, and proceed into samadhi.
I used headphones, and I recommend them. For me, the trick was simply to listen to the music without thinking about it, without letting my ego judge the music, but never to let my attention wander away from the music. Anyone who has trouble getting started with music can instead focus his attention on "white noise" which is the sound that comes out of the spirals of a conch shell. When a familiarity with the technique of nonjudgmental listening is gained, it is then possible to focus the attention on ambient sound and then, finally, on music.
Before beginning any exercise, it's necessary to complete at least six cycles of the Healing Breath, to trace the meridian circuit, and then to just sit there and listen, without thinking.
The practitioner is well advised not to get ahead of himself by trying to meditate without first mastering concentration. He may succeed immediately at meditating, but he will not be able to maintain his success. And, certainly, he will not be able to perform the complicated chakra meditations.
