I'm home from AIT (advanced individual training) to become a Chaplain Assistant. I explained Army training like this to my wife: It's a cross between a boy-scout jamboree and a medium-security detention facility.
During WTC and AIT, certain questions come up in conversation - "Why did you join the Army? Why did you come back in? Why did you choose this MOS?"
Naturally, during an intense Unique Shared Experience (see prior post "the 5 minute self-help seminar") a certain amount of Self-Disclosure is expected. I told people that I'm a stay-at-home dad, and joined the Army to get a vacation. Glib, and incomplete, but true.
Now I'm home from vacation. Another part of the price I pay for freedom: I came home to a yard overrun with weeds. Time to get ugly with the RoundUp.
The first thing to know about Chaplain Assistants is that we're not assistant Chaplains. Our job is to carry a weapon, since the Chaplain can't. That's almost the first thing they teach.
Predictably, the class was full of church-going Christians. One Jewish guy. And me.
I became more and more comfortable telling people "I'm Buddhist." It made them comfortable to be able to label me.
I couldn't say: "I'm deeply agnostic, almost atheist, and think religion is a tool for the powered elites to control the masses, and a method for people to avoid taking personal responsibility f0r their lives."
So I said "I'm Buddhist," and pretty soon I came to believe it too. OK, keep in mind here, I took a small stack of books with me to AIT: A Bible I've had since I was 8 (I've never read the whole thing - have you? Every word of it?); The Teaching of Buddha; Zen Mind Beginner's Mind; and Brad Warner's books, Sit Down and Shut Up and Hardcore Zen. So I'm not exactly going out on a limb here. I've been studying Buddhism for about 10 years, and somewhat deeply for maybe three.
Dogen (1200 - 1253 CE) said: "To be free from the idea of the self means not to be attached to the self" so any "I am" statement is suspect.
Just as an aside, I've found that it's harder for me to explain Buddhism now than it was several years ago. I guess it's a sign of progress. Someday, when someone asks me what Buddhism is all about, maybe I'll be able to honestly answer "three pounds of flax," and really mean it, and help the listener understand what that means. In the meantime, I just confuse people. Probably because I'm confused right now. So when people ask me "Buddha is like Jesus, right?" I don't have a good answer. "Three pounds of flax" isn't gonna help them.
It's hard to tell people that sitting in a corner staring at paint is the answer.
I talked to my dad while I was there. He's an old pacifist hippy. He didn't let me have toy guns as a kid. He got drafted back in 1967, and managed to non-cooperate long enough for the Army to give up on trying to indoctrinate him after about 4 months. So needless to say, he's not really thrilled about the current war, and VERY unhappy by the idea of me going to Iraq at some point.
What does it mean to be "against" war? I don't like war, and I think this war is a bad idea badly done. I can't change the fact that there IS a war, though. I'm not the President, I'm not running for President, and I don't have any way of affecting this or any other President directly. So what the hell can I do? Being "against" war is easy. Even the Army is "against" war. Doing something to make a change in the world is the hard part.
Standing on a street corner with a picket sign is useless at best. It doesn't affect policy, it doesn't help those who are suffering from the war, and I doubt it changes the minds of anyone driving by. "Oh, look, it's those leftists peace-nics again, telling us to let the terrorists win."
I live in a county were people still write (or call) the newspaper to inform us that Iraq had "something" to do with 9/11. The protesters aren't gonna change that person's mind. But they feel like they're doing something, so they get that little kick of accomplishment. But they haven't accomplished anything. They could have used that time to collect and mail care packages to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of standing of a corner jerking their emotions off.
I tried to explain some of this to my dad. Like all of us, he has perceptual filters. So I tried to explain my actions in terms of Compassion, "wanting others to be free from suffering." But you can't just live your life being empathetic to all the suffering in the world - that just makes you an emotional doormat. You have to balance Compassion with Wisdom. He wasn't understanding what I was getting at. As I said, I'm at a point of confusing people a lot these days.
Some Buddhists are vegetarians. They are driven to avoid eating meat, by having compassion for the living beings that are killed for food. Never mind that a zucchini is a living being, and that we poison microbes by the billions in order to flush our toilets with drinking water.
I eat meat.
I have compassion for the animals, and I take emotional responsibility for their deaths. If I could keep chickens in my yard, I would, and I would chop their heads off myself. I have meat-eating teeth and digestive tract. When I eat meat, I remember that it's an animal, not just a shrink-wrapped package of protein-rich food.
I have compassion for the cattle ranchers, too, and the chicken farmers, and the people employed across the nation who kill and dismember those animals for me, so I don't have to. Vegetarian diet makes sense in an economy where meat is a luxury, but in America organically grown vegetables, tofu and grain-burgers are the luxury. Vegetarianism is a bourgeois privilege.
Likewise, some Buddhists are pacifists, against warfare and aggression of all kinds. Nonviolence, understanding and sharing the suffering of other living beings, not killing other living beings. . . sounds pretty good, and probably seems easy when you sit on your ass on a clean zafu in a nice quiet monastery.
Meanwhile, the real world is a messy and dangerous place. Jesus told people to "turn the other cheek," a difficult task when you're head has been blown off by an exploding Toyota.
Can we even consider suicide bombers to be living beings? Or have they already demoted themselves?
"Pacifism is a privilege of the protected." Bumper sticker I saw a while back, and liked the thought. It's easy to be a pacifist, here in America, where we can go buy organic vegetables without bombs going off. In Iraq, people die just because they were driving past a police station 
at the wrong time. I'm not buying the rhetoric that we "fight terror there so we don't have to fight it here." The longer the "war on terror" continues, the greater the chance that you or I will experience it directly. In the meantime, American soldiers are over there, and we can't change that with all the picket signs in the world. But we can help the soldiers come home ready to rejoin our comfortable low-conflict society.
My job, as a Chaplain Assistant, is simply to look out for the "morals and morale" of the soldiers in my unit. The job of the Unit Ministry Team is to "nurture the living, care for the dying, honor the dead." We all have a right, in this country, to believe what we want about God, and have whatever relationship with God works best for us.
War is an awful environment, and psychologically unhealthy for the participants. Every soldier that comes home, risks coming home damaged. Some just a little, some a lot. I've met a few already that were just that little bit damaged. This is my country, and those are my countrymen. Can I use my compassion to help them come home healthier?
I'm not an Iraqi or Afghan. I'm an American, here in America. I don't worship any imaginary abstractions. But the collection of people, systems and dirt that we call America deserves my worship. It feeds and protects me. It nurtures and clothes me. It houses and holds me and gives me opportunities to raise a family, have jobs and hobbies, and allows me the freedom to move anywhere within it. How can I not love that?
My compassion cannot include the Iraqis who torture and dismember one another. I must protect myself from that pain with the wisdom that I cannot change them, or help them understand the amount of pain they are causing the planet. But I can understand the pain they are causing.
This is MY planet. I have to take care of it in any way I can. I don't have much to offer, and I don't have very many resources to muster. But I have what compassion and wisdom I've accumulated thus far. I chose to enlist in the US Army during wartime, that I might make a little bit of difference.
Zen meditation includes two forms, sitting and walking.
Brad Warner is a bit fundamentalist in his approach to meditation, and he doesn't believe that you can sit Zazen in a chair - you MUST sit on a cushion, in the perfect posture, in a quiet room... or you're not doing Zen medition you're just spacing out. Whatever. I meditate standing in formation. Maintain perfect Parade Rest posture. I meditate at traffic lights. Sit upright, focus on breathing, and maintain awareness of all the vehicles, pedestrians and lights. In WTC we pulled fireguard duty at night, in a darkened barracks full of snoring and farting soldiers. To stay awake, I did walking meditation. What mudra did I hold my hands in? I held my rifle at a perfect Low Ready.
But when you sit, you do have to use proper posture in order to sit comfortably, to maintain focus for as long as possible. Discomfort is a distraction. The cushion is just a tool.
There are similarities between a military barracks and a monastery. You live with your own gender only, you're not supposed to be having sex with anyone, and you can't have beer or liquor in your room. There are duties to perform, but the environment is controlled and orderly and your responsbilities are minimal.
Here's how to meditate in a barracks. You don't need a Zafu and Zabuton. You don't need a brass Buddha. You don't need an altar with candles, incense, and offerings of fruit and rice. All you need to do is sit. This is Hardcore Zen. Put a brown Army towel (or two) folded in half on the ground to pad your knees. That's your zabuton. Fold a wool Army blanket in fourths lengthwise, then fourths the other way. If that's too high or not high enough, do it differently next time.
What is Hardcore Zen? Just sit. That's it. What's hardcore about it is rejecting all expectations, all delusions. No ornamentation. No philosophy. No enlightenment. No reincarnation. No Nirvana. Just sit.
