Mythic Musings

“The Citadel Military College of South Carolina (simply known as The Citadel) is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Established in 1842, it is the third oldest of the six senior military colleges in the United States.”
—Wikipedia

A few months ago, I was really into Columbo, and one night, while watching the show on Pluto TV, I was hit over the head by some seriously dreadful deja vu.

A cannon had backfired at a military academy ceremony, killing its headmaster, foul play was suspected, so up drives Columbo in his busted-up 1959 Peugeot convertible, shaking and backfiring and billowing smoke like crazy. He parks, gets out, bumbles through an open portcullis into the courtyard of a massive three-story barracks, floor a checkerboard pattern of red and white, walls smooth and white and taller than the eye can see. It’s all very orderly and intimidating and familiar somehow. And I’m sitting on my couch, overcome by this dreadful sense of profound deja vu, as if I had stood there before, right in the middle of that checkerboard courtyard, but I couldn’t place the when, where, or even the why. So up Columbo walks in his wrinkly old trench coat with that signature drunken-penguin gait of his, and there are dozens of young military cadets performing drills in the courtyard, and their drill instructor, a Colonel Lyle C. Rumford, played by Patrick McGoohan, who plays a villain in like every other episode of Columbo for some reason, instructs his cadets to continue their drills before turning to talk to the aloof hobo detective, at which point Columbo asks a few seemingly innocuous questions before going wait wait just one more thing, then asking a few more questions, and then wait wait just one more thing, and yet more questions before the Colonel reveals, in an overly calm and conspicuous way, that the now-deceased headmaster was planning to allow girls to join the academy, which of course makes Columbo instantly suspect the Colonel as the murderer, and so now Columbo is determined to figure out how the Colonel did it, how the Colonel murdered the headmaster while making it look like an accident done by one of the young cadets. And throughout this scene, shots of the barracks from every angle are shown, the three stories of white-cement archways, the rounded castle-like stairwells at each corner of the rectangular courtyard, the countless dark blue doors lining each identical floor, and of course the cadets with buzz cuts and fatigues all looking both stoic and miserable at the same time somehow. And all this is just making my deja vu more dreadful and profound. So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I have been here before, I know I have, but where, where is this place, and it’s bothering me a little bit, so I whip out my phone and search up the episode, and that’s when it all comes flooding back.

This is the place my dad sent me for summer camp when I was like twelve. This is the Military College of South Carolina. The Citadel. How could I have forgotten?

“The Citadel was initially established as two schools to educate young men from around the state, while simultaneously protecting the South Carolina State Arsenals in both Columbia and Charleston.”
—Wikipedia

Back then, I played a lot of video games and shopped at Hot Topic and listened to 80s music on repeat. My youth was typified by a yin-yang dichotomy of apathy toward anything that didn’t interest me and hyperfocus toward things that did interest me, those things being Zelda, The Cure, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam Wing, but never school. I was the type of kid who would literally use dog-ate-my-paper type excuses when teachers asked why I didn’t complete my homework. So my grades were terrible and I was put in special-ed classes. I always had the feeling that people thought I was dumb and detached, but looking back, I now realize this is only half true, although for people looking at me from the outside, this was not obvious, understandably so.

My parents divorced when I was like ten, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, as outlined in their court-ordered custody agreement. My dad was a hardass, while my mom basically let me do whatever I wanted. This parental yin-yang colored my entire childhood. My mom’s favorite phrase was “yes, honey.” She indulged my every whim, either because she loved me and wanted to make me happy regardless of the consequences, or because she didn’t want to deal with my tantrums, or maybe a mixture of both. My dad was the opposite. He was all about hard work and personal responsibility, and he didn’t take no shit, and he was the only person who would tell me no. He was also very stubborn, so he could wait out my tantrums no matter how long it took. My dad had an old-school conservative upbringing typified by rulers and staring at walls, and he incorporated a watered-down version of this into his parenting technique. He was never abusive, but I grew to be afraid of my father, and this fear brought about a certain level of obedience. But after my parents got divorced, it was like I lived in two different galaxies, one with a warm bright star and another with a cold dark star. When I was living with my mom, I did whatever I wanted. I would come home from school, tell her I didn’t have any homework, drink soda and play video games all day, spend all night on my Dell PC just chatting away with strangers in the Yahoo! chatrooms while Adult Swim played repeats of Home Movies and Cowboy Bebop in my periphery. There, I lived a life of no responsibility and maximum comfort, courtesy of my new wealthy stepdad. I remember my bedroom only vaguely. It was on the second floor of a mansion, and you had to walk across something like an indoor bridge to get to it, so my mom never bothered to check on me at night as long as I kept quiet. My room was a decent size but felt small because of the king-size bed pushed against the middle wall. My computer desk was on the right side of the bed, with a bookshelf and stereo to the left, and there was a low-standing dresser with my television and Nintendo 64 to the right. A big dresser containing all my band shirts and tripp pants was situated on the left side of the bed, with only a small walking space between the bed and the dresser. I had stuck band stickers all over the dresser itself, which was something my stepdad hated because the dresser was an expensive antique, much like everything else in the lavish house, none of which I appreciated, because back then I never once thought about how privileged I was, because frankly I was a spoiled fucking brat, and my dad knew this better than anyone, because when I came to live with him, I had always gained like ten pounds since the last time he had seen me, and I was tired all the time, and so of course he blamed all my apathy and weight gain and bad grades and inability to focus on my mom.

Living with my dad was like orbiting a whole other star. From the moment I walked through the front door of his square brick house, party time was over. It was all about chores and schoolwork and playing on local church sports teams of which he was the coach. To this day, my old room is decorated with photos of the teams I played on, everyone looking bright and happy except me, wearing a huge scowl in every picture. At my dad’s, there was little time for doing the things I actually wanted to do. The Nintendo 64 was in the basement, and the basement was locked until I completed all my chores and schoolwork or whatever. When I came home from school, the first thing he would have me do was sit at the kitchen table and do my homework until it was perfect, often coming in and checking over my shoulder. But I would sit there in silent protest, in that uncomfortable metal chair, just using my pencil to poke little holes in the apples in the decorative bowl at the center of the table, pretending like I was stuck on a math problem or something. I was stubborn in a very dumb way, because I knew that if I completed my homework, then Dad would let me play video games, but I still didn’t complete my homework for some reason, so I never got to play video games. In this way, my dad’s parenting method didn’t really work to improve my grades, but it did work in preventing me from throwing tantrums like I would with my mom, because I was truly afraid of my dad, not because he was abusive or anything like that, but because he was firm and would take my stuff away and do all the other normal stuff normal parents would do when trying to raise their kids to be fine, upstanding citizens.

At some point, however, my dad got sick of it all, and realizing that my apathy was not fading and that I was not improving, he decided to send me to a summer camp for troubled youth, although he didn’t frame it that way at the time, positioning it as just a normal summer camp that normal kids went to, so it wasn’t until I walked through that open portcullis and onto that red and white checkerboard flooring that I realized that this was not a normal summer camp at all, this was actually a fucking military camp. I remember standing there, frozen, staring up at the castle-like compound, watching kids wearing buzz cuts and fatigues march in the courtyard, realizing that I was a long, long way from home, in a place that might as well have been hell, and that’s the first time I ever felt true dread.

“A lawsuit contends that The Citadel knew one of its counselors was abusing summer campers in the mid-1990s but didn’t fire him and did nothing to stop it, yet another in a string of sexual-abuse accusations that have been made against two men who worked at the military college’s summer camp.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

The next thing I remember is my dad was gone, and I was being shouted at by some older man in full uniform. He directed me to get into marching formation with the other kids, but I was frozen in terror. I remember I was wearing my Cure t-shirt and tripp pants, and I was sweating profusely in the harsh summer sun. So when I didn’t immediately comply, the man shouted something like, “C’MON PIGGY, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY,” which kicked my ass into gear, and I immediately fell in line. We marched out of the portcullis, through the sports field, and into another huge white castle-like building. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the other kids were in civilian clothing, some were in fatigues. The ones in civilian clothing were separated from the fatigues-wearing ones and ordered to march down a thin hallway, where we stood silently outside a blue door. Kids entered this door one by one. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but after the first kid entered with shaggy hair and exited with a buzz cut, my eyes grew wide, and I knew. They were cutting my hair. Back then, I was serious about my hair. I liked it long and messy, like Robert Smith from The Cure. So as the line and average length of hair for the regiment grew shorter, the pit in my stomach grew larger. Until eventually, I entered the barber’s room and was pushed into the chair. The clippers went BRRRRRR and just like that my hair was gone. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. This was one of many hammers used by The Citadel to pound individuality and ego out of children.

Later that day, they assigned us our quarters. Mine was on the second floor. There’s a scene in that Columbo episode where the titular detective enters one of these rooms to question the cadet accused of accidentally backfiring the cannon. My room looked just like the one shown in the episode, indicating that The Citadel has not changed in a long long time. The walls of the room were white brick. There was a single barred window. It felt like one of those insane asylum rooms. There was a sink in the corner, a single dresser with two cabinets pushed against the right wall, and a bunk bed against the left wall. The mattresses were thin, and the blankets ratty and torn. I was paired with another kid. I forget his name, but he was strange and kind of horrific. I remember he was tall and lanky and acne-ridden and would make a lot of weird sex jokes. I slept on the bottom bunk in a perpetual state of psychic terror. On the first night, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to the bathroom, my bunkmate took a shit in his underwear, wrapped it up in a ball, and then put it in my cabinet dresser for me to find the next morning, like some sort of weird animalistic dominance thing. I was too afraid to report him, thinking he would hurt me or something, so I just cleaned it up and didn’t say a word about it. I remember, night after night, after they would ring the bell and scream “LIGHTS OUT” at 8 p.m., I would just lie in my bunk, frozen, staring up at the wire mesh above me, fantasizing about ways to escape. Occasionally, a camp counselor would creak open the door and peek their head in, checking on us. One time, at night, I remember a counselor entered my quarters, stopped in the middle of the room, and stared at the bunks for what felt like an hour. I was wide awake but holding my breath and keeping my eyes shut real tight, frozen with fear, thinking the guy was going to get me out of bed and beat the shit out of me or something. Nothing happened, but I learned how to play dead that night.

“The suit was filed in federal court in Charleston earlier this week by a now-25-year-old alleged victim who claimed to have been abused on 21 different occasions by Michael Arpaio. The Citadel ultimately closed its summer camp in 2005 after reaching a $3.8 million settlement with five campers who said the former Marine captain had abused them between 1995 and 2001.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

Every day was the same. I would wake up at five in the morning to the sound of a loud whistle, put on my fatigues, hustle down the stairwell, and line up with the rest of the kids. Then we’d march to the mess hall, where they’d serve us the worst-tasting breakfast you have ever tasted, so bad that I hardly ever ate anything, only drinking some milk most mornings. Then we’d march out to the field, do push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and burpees and laps for a few hours. Then we’d play soccer for some reason. Then we’d march back to the mess hall and eat the worst-tasting lunch ever. Then there’d be a thirty-minute block of free time, where we could socialize or whatever, but being so out of shape and practically starving myself, I was pretty much half-dead by this point, so I would just go back to my quarters and sprawl out on the bottom bunk and pretend I was in another place, pretend I was in the world of Hyrule, and this was a brief respite, my little form of escape.

They wouldn’t let us bring anything personal into the camp with us, but we were allowed paper and pencil for writing letters to family, and I remember one time, during the break period, I wrote a short letter to my grandma, Susu, because her address was the only one I could remember, and the letter went something like this: WHAT DID I FUCKING DO TO DESERVE THIS? I AM GOING TO DIE IN HERE. I WANT TO GO HOME. PLEASE. I’M SORRY FOR WHATEVER I DID. TELL MOM TO GET ME OUT EARLY. PLEASE. I CANNOT DO A WHOLE MONTH IN HERE. SAVE ME. PLEASE. This text is almost verbatim because Susu kept the note and still has it to this day, along with the newspaper clipping she found years later outlining why The Citadel summer camp was closed down permanently.

“Arpaio pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2003 following a military court-martial and served 15 months at the Charleston Naval Brig. According to the lawsuit, Arpaio was indicted in 2009 on federal charges including conspiracy to commit murder and disposing of a cadaver and is in federal prison.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

When it was all over, I had lost about thirty pounds and was mute for an entire week. I remember, when I got home, the first thing I did was fold all my clothes and arrange them neatly in my dresser, then I put all my Gundam models and Nintendo 64 games and Dragon Ball Z VHSs in the closet, hiding all the things I loved, then I straightened out my sports team photos on the dresser, organizing everything real nice, because I thought that if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be sent back there, back to hell. And then I sprawled out on my king-size bed, imagined myself in Hyrule, and passed out.

But it must have been midday or something, because I remember my dad woke me up. He was looking around my room with this astonished look on his face, and he said something like, “Wow, you really cleaned up, I guess your time at The Citadel taught you a thing or two, huh?”

And I remember rolling over in bed, looking up at him with this blank expression on my face, and nodding, then I went back to sleep, dreaming of Hyrule.

Then, the following year, around my thirteenth birthday, when the judge gave me the option to pick which parent I wanted to live with, I picked Mom, and then, just like that, I was back in Hyrule, for real this time.

“Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. ‘You’ means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and ‘I’ means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors.”
—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Driving north on Interstate 675, around the Dekalb County area, past the JESUS SAVES and BEEN HURT IN AN ACCIDENT? and WENDY’S SPICY CHICKEN NEXT EXIT, you'll pass a break in the thick wall of billboards and trees, and there you’ll notice a temple on a hill. This temple is fashioned in the old Laotian style, bright reds, sea greens, a brick staircase flanked by wavy three-headed dragons, big ornate double doors, a line of great golden Buddhas out front. This is the Wat Lao Buddha Phothisaram. And just a few yards before this, towering right in front of the temple itself, there's this massive billboard that reads ARE YOU COVERED? 1-800-GET-LIFE.

This is the kind of dualism we are so accustomed to seeing here in the United States of America. On one side, we have a calm place of quiet meditation, on the other, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SOON BE AFRAID BUY NOW. It’s a striking, ironic juxtaposition, almost uniquely American, because only corporatism run amok could produce such a thing by accident. It takes a certain lack of awareness and fucks given to erect a massive life insurance billboard right in front of a Buddhist monastery. I mean, think about it, they’re trying to sell something that Buddhism is just giving away for free. And they’re trying to sell it in a flash, in a small break in the wall of trees, while we’re driving like 90 mph down busy Interstate 675, when the atoms are all blurry and smeared together. This ironic image is there, then it’s not there, but it’s still there, because it was always there. It’s there and not there at the same time, because, as the Buddhists would say, these things are the same, or something like that.

Within the last year, after reading some of Salinger’s lesser-talked-about short stories, I have developed a sort of tourist interest in Buddhism, specifically the Zen school of Buddhism, specifically the one that says “Kill the Buddha,” which sounds cool as shit and is essentially a comment on hero worship, and talks about doing things “with no gaining idea,” which means to practice something without a goal, without the intent to achieve something, as this desire to achieve something is itself a taint, as Buddhism seeks to eliminate desire as a path to Enlightenment. This “no-gain” idea is itself paradoxical because, first, it’s sort of an idea itself, and second, because why would anyone practice anything if not to achieve some sort of outcome? Doesn’t one need to desire a thing to even seek it out in the first place? Doesn’t motivation sort of hinge on the very idea of wanting the thing you are motivated for? Wouldn’t you be, like, not motivated to pursue the thing if you didn’t want the thing? Why would anyone do something if they didn't want to do it on some level? This is what drew me to Zen, the no-gain idea. I wanted to understand no-gain because it was so opposed to my first-world understanding of human psychology and ego. It made no sense to me, but in some ways, it also made perfect sense because my own desire to achieve something, be someone, has always felt a little gross to me, like a thin film of slime over my psyche. On the one hand, no-gain is a paradox, it doesn't make any logical sense, but on the other hand, it’s obvious to me that the desire to achieve something is, at its core, a selfish, egotistical desire, and selfish desires lead to angst and discontent, be it through comparison, envy, self-pity, doubt, or whatever. So it makes sense to me that stripping away desire, even stripping away the desire to strip away the desire, would lead to something like contentment, like washing away the slime, so to speak. Because when we desire something, we look at things through the lens of “have” and “have not,” and this is a destructive, dualistic path. Take, for example, in my case, “I have written a novel” and “I have not written a novel.” This is a dualistic perspective. “Have written a novel” and “Have not written a novel.” This perspective is harmful because, naturally, I start to look at writers as “those who have written a novel” and “those who have not written a novel,” and by doing this, I am bucketing people into a hierarchy of value, where writers who have written a novel are seen as more accomplished than those who have not written a novel, myself included somewhere in this value hierarchy, when really everyone is of equal value because we’re all just humans living together on this here planet in this here galaxy in this here universe, and who cares if a writer has actually written a novel or not, right? You could say, “Well, why does it have to be a value hierarchy, can't it just be a descriptive observation about the writer?” And that's fair, but if there is no value, that also means there is no value in calling it out. It is meaningless. Why even mention it? When we engage in dualistic thinking, even if our intentions are good, we are inadvertently assigning some sort of value, some sort of “have” and “have not,” some sort of “this” and “that,” some sort of “good” and “bad,” some sort of thing to achieve, and this leads down a destructive path. I don’t think I’m explaining this well, so let me just drop a rhetorical nuke bomb to make my point, that being, when we engage in dualistic thinking, we get “us” and “them,” we get “boy” and “girl,” we get “black” and “white,” we get “Aryan” and “Jew,” we get the fucking Holocaust.

So, when I first saw the Buddhist Temple Life Insurance Landmark, it sort of put me in a weird, dualistic funk. I was driving to my dad’s up Interstate 675, and I passed the break in the trees, and in that brief flash, I saw the temple and the billboard, and so I turned to my wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat reading a book, and I said, in a kind of flabbergasted tone, “Did you just see that?” And, looking up from her book, she said, “No, sorry, I missed it, what was it?” So I said, “Never mind, don’t worry about it,” and kept driving. At first, I didn’t think much of the temple and billboard, just that it was sort of darkly humorous, but over time, it started to taunt me, mock me almost, that grayscale close-up face of the solemn-looking old woman with the ARE YOU COVERED? juxtaposed against that magnificent Buddhist temple, it kept popping into my head like an intrusive thought, and I kept thinking to myself, how could a Buddhist temple exist in a place so antithetical to Buddhism? How could someone even practice Buddhism in a culture that places so much value on materialism, greed, and self-advancement? In this corporate world, isn’t Buddhism just kind of doomed to fail? Isn’t it pointless to even try? Is Buddhism even compatible with our society?

We are indoctrinated with dualism from birth. Some doctor looks at our junk and checks some sort of box. We are male or female. We are Caucasian or Hispanic or something else. Right when we pop out of the womb, some health insurance company sees us as rich or poor, and our coverage options warp around this nexus of poverty. As we grow older, our parents buy us all sorts of cool or cute toys, depending on which box was checked. Our rooms fill up with colorful plastic. We hold Daddy’s hand down the aisle at Walmart, and we pitch fits when he tells us that we can only pick one thing. He makes lists of all the other things so that he can buy them, wrap them, and place them under a big glowing tree once a year, and in this way, the whole family celebrates avarice and greed. Then we go to school the next week and brag to all our friends about all the cool or cute shit we got for Christmas, depending on which box was checked. We stare into the glow of our television sets and fantasize about being those people. Our parents tell us that we need to do well in school so that we can make a lot of money one day. We see money as a source of comfort from a young age. We look at big houses and think, “Wow, that’s a nice house,” so we grow up thinking that success is a big house. We start seeing people as big-house people and small-house people. Our teachers and parents tell us we are unique and special, so we grow up thinking we are different from everyone else. We believe our choice of clothing says something deep about who we are on the inside. Nike or Adidas. Old Navy or American Eagle. Mario or Sonic. Pepsi or Coke. Sony or Nintendo. Apple or Android. Pokemon or Digimon. Visa or Mastercard. Google or Bing. Star Wars or Star Trek. Buddhism or Corporate America. We feel strongly about these preferences. We collect things related to these preferences. Our identities become an accumulation of stuff and things. And eventually, we have kids of our own and impart these values onto them, and thus the cycle of materialism continues.

Surely, Buddhism has no place in this society. How could it? If Buddhism were like a flower, it wouldn’t even grow in this dark place.

But this wasn't all that bothered me about the temple and the billboard. What really bothered me was the fact that I myself had a problem with the juxtaposition of these things at all, because it revealed something about myself that, while I was aware of it to some extent, I hadn't really dived too deeply into. It revealed that I myself am deeply entrenched in dualism. The very fact that I notice irony stems from the fact that I am dualistic. I see things in terms of “good” and “bad,” and when a good thing is coupled with a bad thing, I see this as ironic in some way, whereas if I had no dualistic thoughts, I probably wouldn’t see the irony at all, because there wouldn’t be any. The temple and the billboard revealed that there is a darkness inside me that is conjuring all sorts of deeply ironic, sardonic observations, and I started questioning the usefulness of this. Like, would I be happier or something if I didn’t think this way? What is scoffing at the temple and the billboard actually accomplishing? Is it all some sort of weird flex, like “look how smart I am, I can point out the dark irony in situations,” and this somehow makes me feel superior or morally righteous in some way, while I myself don’t actually do anything to correct the perceived “good” and “bad” things that make up this irony I am observing? The temple and the billboard made me realize that I’m just as caught up in the same dualistic thinking as everyone else, the same dualistic thinking that drives people to put corporate billboards in front of Buddhist temples to begin with, and this realization did not sit well with me. It disturbed me, frankly. So I decided to read up on Zen Buddhism, thinking that maybe that would alleviate some of the dualistic angst I was feeling.

A couple of months ago, I ordered this book from eBay, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and it never arrived. It was marked delivered, but it never got here. I contacted the seller, and they said that that was their only copy, so they gave me a refund, even though I didn't ask for one, and I didn't actually check if it got refunded. It was like ten bucks. It wasn't that important to me. I figured it was just not the right time. The universe said no, this book is not for you, please wait a little while longer. I started reading something else and forgot. That is, until a few weeks ago, on Interstate 675, when I passed the break in the trees, saw the temple and the billboard, and the questions kept piling up. Is Buddhism doomed to fail? Is Enlightenment even possible in this corporate hellscape? If I practiced Buddhist teachings, like conditioning myself not to care about materialistic things, living frugally, ditching the rat race, so to speak, wouldn’t I be harming my family, who depend on me for food and shelter and all these other things, and wouldn’t that be selfish in some way? Wouldn’t that ultimately produce bad outcomes not only for me but also for the people around me? Is Buddhism even realistic in this society, or is it just some pretentious philosophy that dudes with man-buns pretend to practice after they drink their Starbucks Mocha Choca Frapes or whatever? Should I just move on, look into some other philosophy that might be more compatible with the modern world? I wanted answers. I desired them, needed them. So I downloaded the book, put it on my Amazon-branded corporate eReader, and started reading it electronically and with great vigor.

The book was written by Shunryū Suzuki, a Buddhist monk who helped spread Zen Buddhism to the United States in the 60s, and it was published in 1970, right before Suzuki’s death in 1971. The text, as you might imagine, is full of confusing, paradoxical stuff. Stuff like, “Zen is not important. Thinking things are important is dualistic thinking. But actually, Zen is very important.” And, “Kill the Buddha. Thinking someone or something is the Buddha is not the Zen way. But actually, you are the Buddha.” And, “Thinking things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not so good. These are dualistic misconceptions. You will have a bad time if you think of things as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” Of course, I’m sort of paraphrasing these quotes from large walls of text which expand on these ideas in way more depth, but that’s sort of the gist of the entire book. It’s a paradoxical adventure of the mind in which nearly every other sentence contradicts itself in some uniquely Buddhist way. But, out of all this paradoxical, confusing stuff, one quote stood out to me in particular and helped me grapple with the dualistic angst I had been feeling ever since bearing witness to the temple and the billboard on Interstate 675.

“Tozan, a famous Zen master, said, ‘The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.’ This is a pure, clear interpretation of life. There may be many things like the white cloud and blue mountain: man and woman, teacher and disciple. They depend on each other. But the white cloud should not be bothered by the blue mountain. The blue mountain should not be bothered by the white cloud. They are quite independent, but yet dependent. This is how we live, and how we practice zazen.”
—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

And now I think that maybe corporate America needs Buddhism just as much as Buddhism needs corporate America. These things are different but the same. They depend on each other but are also entirely independent. If there were no desire and materialism, there would be no Buddhism, and if there were no Buddhism, there would be no desire and materialism. This is just the way things are. These things are in perfect harmony with each other because all things are in perfect harmony with each other.

This is what I have come to learn, with my beginner’s mind, and it all started on Interstate 675, which, fun fact, is actually connected to every other road in mainland America, so it’s not really Interstate 675, it’s actually just one long, winding road that connects everyone to everyone else. Literally every road in mainland America is connected, isn’t that interesting?

This is what I have come to learn, with my beginner’s mind.