ONE CONTINUOUS MISTAKE

I just finished reading the book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire by Colleen Morton Busch. It's about the 2008 California wildfire that swept through the Tassajara zen center (one of three properties operated by the San Francisco zen center, founded by Suzuki roshi). I have never been to Tassajara, although I know people who have, and I also spent a week at Green Gulch Farm, the third property of the zen center last August for a tea intensive. Green Gulch is a bit more "relaxed" than Tassajara, but the gist of life there is the same, and having been there three times now (only that once did I stay in residence though) I feel a certain closeness to the places and events narrated in the book. Green Gulch is also located deep down a winding, narrow road on protected land. Green Gulch is also a collection of buildings of various provenances, many heavily geared toward outdoor work and subsistence. There are also a mix of people, some who stay for years, others--like me--who rotate in and out more rapidly.

The meat of the book is about how the people who are attached to Tassajara (haha, that's a zen joke!) debated and decided how to balance protecting the property with guarding the lives and health of the people, in the face of the fire services' refusal to make the place a priority for saving. It is always interesting, although ike zen itself, I sometimes felt like the book consisted of a massive, endless amount of waiting and preparing only for the actual event to arrive and disappear like a thunderclap. KATSU!

​ 喝 !

Okay, but I'm not writing this to give a review. I'm writing this to talk about a phrase that came up in the book. At one point, Busch brings up a phrase from the Eihei Dogen that Suzuki roshi favored and wrote about himself: shoshaku jushaku -- "one continuous mistake" (將錯就錯) A zen master's life, he explained, could be shoshaku jushaku. "This means so many years of one single-minded effort" (Busch 181). As you know, since you're reading my tea blog that is entitled "Fail Better," my ears pricked up at this phrase. What a wonderful and depressing notion.

It requires more to make sense. A few pages later, in the beginning of the next chapter, Busch is describing the fire fighter's code--the rules and precepts that fire fighters are supposed to work by--and she quotes an expert who calls the rules "ideally possible but practically unattainable" in describing how such abstract rules can and can't work in the overwhelming simultaneity of actual wildfire.

Busch continues, "Ideally possible but practically unattainable sounds a lot like the vow to save all beings that residents at Tassajara (and Buddhists everywhere) make on a daily basis. That the vow cannot be upheld does not mean that it's not worth making" (184). And that, I thought, is what one continuous mistake is all about. To vow to attempt the impossible because it is what should be done, over and over again, every day. Continuously. That's a mistake I can get behind. That IS the mistake I try to get behind. That's failing again and failing better.

And, that's what, in its best moments, I think Tea gives me. As you probably know, if this is the kind of blog you're interested in reading, there's another famous phrase for tea people "Chazen ichimi" --The taste of tea and zen are one. Busch's book is very much about how the taste of zen and "fighting" wildfire (obviously a zen person balks at the term 'fighting') are the same. And so, it may be less absurd than it sounds, that while I was reading the katsu chapter about what the five monks actually did in the 5 or so hours of the wildfire's passing through Tassajara, I was reminded of how it feels to put on a chaji. Especially the chaji that weren't run with the help of our Midorikai teachers, but the ones in which four of us (or two or three, sometimes) found that we had decided to launch ourselves into an intricately timed and organized event like that with things to be carried out inside, outside, in the guests' presence and without their knowledge, in the kitchen, with burning coal, in the mizuya, with food, with precious objects, with sake, with water, with rags and brooms. Some hilarious mishaps have occurred and some mortifying ones. Often with those bonus chaji we were in unfamiliar spaces, or had had comically little time to plan and prepare.

Busch describes in those hours when the fire came to Tassajara how years of training (not training for wildfire, although being in the mountains, many of those who stayed had that too) had rendered the five able to simply meet each task as it came, where it was, doing it wholeheartedly, trusting each other and work together and separately as had to be done to protect such a sprawling complex. There were small mishaps; a cabin burned, some small sheds and fences were burned or damaged. But overall, when the crisis came and they were surrounded with fires that needed attention everywhere at once, they were able to meet them all, not resting, not eating, barely drinking, with a few close calls.

That is how a chaji feels to me in the moment. First it's too early to do most of the things--timing is everything--and then the clock ticks down close enough to the guests' arrival and there's a moment of what have I done?! Why did I think this was a good idea?!?! and then there's no more waiting, no time to second guess, just tasks wildly disparate all requiring your attention everywhere at once. And especially in the chaji that the four of us did extra-curricularly in Midorikai, we four seemed to fall into an unspoken rhythm, coming together and diverging in an intricate, improvised choreography,

getting

stuff

done

because we had to.

And usually, mostly, they turned out okay. Even wonderful. Maybe even all of them did. Maybe they were one continuous, glorious mistake.

My tabi after our graduation chaji for teachers, July 2013.

Maybe it's irreverent to equate a "tea party" with fighting a forest fire. Maybe it isn't. I suppose the point isn't whether we were facing death or embarrassment, but how we were able to face the things that come at us and how we were able to work with one another to do that.