Seeing green: Moss temple and kiwi ice cream

We went to the Moss temple today, an amazing place with an ancient tea house. It's still hot and humid (though the weather promises to be cooler tomorrow). The adventures of the crew are here. I'm hoping to get a chance to post some photos here and there and perhaps write a bit for this blog on the bus trip to Osaka tomorrow.

Jesuit bells and Zen abbots

My class is in Japan, exploring Zen Buddhism and contemplation, but not forgetting the work we are doing on Western contemplation and on psychology and neuroscience. I'm way too tired to blog twice (we were up at 5 am today for services up the hill), but you can read the adventures of my crew here. Find out what Jesuits, bells and a Zen temple have in common.

Into great silence

It might be the modern day equivalent of a medieval monastic enclosure. Everyone sleeps in a common dormer; we sit in our assigned places, as if in choir; once the doors are closed, you can't leave; you eat what is served, when it is served; we have made temporary promises of obedience; bells rings and we tighten our belts. There are no cell phones, no landlines, no wi-fi. It is a remarkably silent place, and I imagine not a few of us are praying.

No, I'm not on retreat, I'm on a China Air 747 somewhere between New York and Osaka, traveling with my students and two colleagues to Japan. We're off to see and experience Buddhist practices of mindfullness and meditation in particular, but we are also keeping our eyes open to the ways in which silent spaces are constructed. What constitutes a sacred architecture of silence? of solitude? of stillness? How many of these constructs, physical and metaphorical, cross traditions?

I watched Into Great Silence during the night, preparing to watch it with my students when we are back. This time, I was struck by the sheer physicality of the monks' lives, not only in the quotidian chopping of wood and hauling of water, but in prayer. The young monk lifted off his feet by the bell, the monk prostrate on the floor in his cell, the elderly monk with his canes hurrying to the church.

And I wondered if the monastery I long for is right under my nose.

Extravagance in the desert

I am reading Stones laid before the Lord, a history of monastic architecture written by a French Trappist monk in the 1960s (which thanks to Cistercian studies is translated into English). He opens with a brief history of the growth of monasticism from its desert roots in which he mentions the competitions between ascetics to see who could fast or go without sleep the longest. This notion of competitive or heroic acestism has been showing up occasionally in the readings/discussions from the other two courses. How much of the current (or even the past) interest in meditation and contemplation is fueled by curiousity about the physiological external effects, and less about the internal landscape? How long can you go without sleep? Who can dry their wet cloak fastest? more completely? Your pulse during meditation is what?! Can learning to meditate make your psoraisis better? (We read a paper by Jon Kabat-Zinn and co-workers on MBSR as a co-adjuvant to phototherapy for psoraisis.)

The author of is wary of these heroics and sees them as extragavances which were rightly curbed by monastic rules of life. Only a Cistercian of the Strict Observance would call the desert fathers "extravagant."

I'm less intrigued by the physiological side effects than I am by the sheer extravagance of it all. There is an extravagance, a sort of luxury, to the desert ascetics who threw themselves, for the most part without the protection a community affords, into the torrents of prayer, into the fire of God. It's like setting sail for England from Gloucester, MA in a rowboat — alone.

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I have a memory of a small fishing dory in the musueum at Gloucester that I visited on one of the days of repose during the Exercises that made the trip, but can recall none of the details!

Schrodinger's cat

Fluffy double checks my marking of the quantum mechanics assignment. But no, she's not substituting for mPublish Poste while I'm away. I've got a real quantum chemist doing that for me. (Thanks, Dr. Lisa!)

I'm off to Japan on Monday with my contemplative students. The Boy is having separation anxiety, Crash wonders how many essay drafts I can read on the road, I'm in denial about packing, Math Man is watching football. A regular Saturday evening....