Then, one particular Saturday, all that’s Holy said “HIS NAME IS HANUMAN DASS.” Without fanfare, bells and whistles, or sound—the God of gods had renamed my friend Leo, bestowing the name from "beyond the beyond."
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| The Brothers left to right: Me, Hanuman Dass, Sepehr |
I had no reason to doubt it. The process of explaining why will involve back tracking a bit.
I owe my love for koans to Sepehr. I’d come to the monastery because of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” but Sepehr’s was the first life in which I’d seen the Dharma actually working. With his own practice, and without intending to, Sepehr taught me a thing or three. Much of what it affirmed in me was rather shallow. The Indian holy man Shirdi Sai Baba, in regard to his miracles, said “I give people what they want so that they’ll want what I give.” As great acts appeal to egos, so Sepehr's affirmations did a lot of good work on my Ego in our first years as friends. Eventually I’d learn that Ego had to go out the window with everything else (baby, bathwater, and the tub itself, for Christ’s sake) but Sepehr planted important seeds. Especially later, when I became allergic to the Eucharist, I would understand what the Jesus of John's gospel meant when he said “I have food to eat that you do not know.” The Eucharist nourished my knowing. Koans fed my unknowing. And koans would become my abiding sustenance.
By way of example: One day I asked Sepehr how he was doing. He said “I feel so dead. I was up way too late last night. How are you?” I replied, “I’m dead too. The trouble is, I keep thinking I’m alive, and I keep trying to get back there. I wish I’d just cut that out.”
Sepehr smiled, and his eyes widened, the way he does when he’s involuntarily nerding out about something. “That’s Buddhist as hell, man. Shakyamuni would love you so much right now.” I hadn’t planned to “sound buddhist.” But something in me stirred at his praise.
It happened again, once while we we were doing dishes. We were supposed to be doing them silently. Thoughtfulness had claimed Sepehr’s facial expression, though. I knew he was on the cusp of speaking. When he did, all he said was “Every time you open your mouth, you’re wrong.” I paused for a moment, then silently opened my cake-hole as wide as it would go.
Again, with the wide eyed fascination. "That,” Sepehr exclaimed, “was a perfect buddhist response.”
In retrospect, my imperfections are glaring. My insecurity latched on to being told buddha would love me. My self importance roused from sleep at the word “perfect.” But I also learned a few other important lessons, which I later presented to my students as part of “The steps to solving Koans.” Koans involve admitting your fear of being wrong. Koans involve making a non-verbal response. In the end, I’d learn that Koans involve a death to self, but remember how self absorbed I was back then, how self absorbed I still am if I don’t cultivate letting go, even of the one who does the letting go. That piece would take years to become actionable wisdom.
In the coming years, I’d come to some other conclusions. Koans, I thought, do certain kinds of work. I added a host of them to my list, and, of course, that list later became “Kairos, Koans and Conversion One.” It’s a stand-alone post, but I’ll mention one of its points. In short: koans collapse “process." They render all goals realized, they actualize potential.
Fast forward with me a bit. My other best friend (whose baptismal name was Leo) had, in the meantime, become a practitioner of bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga, as I understand it, is devotional yoga. It makes two assumptions: first, that the gods one worships are mere manifestations of the godhead. Ram, the highest God, is merely a manifestation of the Brahman, and he knows it. There are sections of the Ramayana, (the Ramayana is a hindu holy book) in which Ram takes a guru. As God, he doesn’t need to, but as a manifestation, he does what manifestations do. Bhakti yoga’s second assumption is that dualism is, up to a certain point, helpful. According to Bhakti yoga, having something over there toward which to strive—well, it helps folks progress.
In bhakti yoga, my friend had become devoted to Hanuman. Along with Ganesha, Hanuman is one of the two Hindu Gods with the body of a human and the head of an animal. Ganesha has an elephant's head. Hanuman, for his part, is a monkey. Ram Dass, the second teacher through whom I’ve learned what I know about hinduism, is fond of quoting Hanuman’s words to Ram: roughly paraphrased, Hanuman said “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you, when I know who I am, I am you.”
Since well before his first marriage fell apart, my friend had been talking about service. He is a consummate family man: in that milieu, service is, for him, as natural as breathing. In “Messiahs and Monkey Gods: A Mapping of Me” I said that Hanuman gave me a positive framework for “distance from God.” It’s a framework that my friend and I began talking about a lot. In short, I'd been taught that service and separateness was a consequence of sin. In Hinduism, service is divine play, or “Lila.” I found, (and I feel like my friend and I would agree on this,) that shouldering my cross, serving, or separateness from God is a lighter thing—apologies for the impending pun-- when it’s a matter of “monkeying around.”
For me, self-will is too pervasive in devotion to be a totally comfortable. But I found Lila an important corrective. It's drawn my friend in, though, hook, line and sinker. He’s a big, mushy bhakti: if spiritual paths were television, he’d be the Hallmark channel. I kid, but whatever he's got is better than my perpetual 3 a.m. static.
The strength of his devotion was in the background on the day he called me with news. He had finally convinced his first wife to sign divorce papers (by now they'd been separated for years) and he’d had proposed to his present girlfriend. Her name was Mallary, and “Girlfriend” was too light a term for the role she played in his life. To give an example: I’d known Mallary, at least on the level of acquaintance, since Leo and I were monks together. She’d already known him for years, and would sometimes come to visit him. She had relatives in Illinois. In my post-monastery days, then, between her travels to the burbs of Chicago and my travels to South Carolina, I became a “fly on the wall” as the two of them grew closer. My friend Leo had been saying, for years that he “loved Mallary” and spent many years qualifying the words to within an inch of meaninglessness. Mallary and I would meet for breakfast and inevitably talk about Leo. With her too, it was “love love love: backpedal, nuance and qualify.” Fine. I wondered, though, how long it would be before the two allowed themselves the reality of their affections.
At the right time, in the right way, they’d admitted their affections. On the surface, my inner fly-on-the-wall was screaming “IT’S ABOUT TIME.” On a deeper level, Leo and Mal were being formed, just as Jackie and I were, on a timeline not their own. Their timing was absolutely perfect. When Leo told me, I made plans to travel down for their wedding.
I’d been reading everything I could by Ram Dass ever since I’d acquired a desire to see God from the standpoint of non-dual consciousness. For his part, Ram Dass was given his name by his guru, Maharaji. Of the name, Ram Dass said “Often Maharaji would call me 'Ram Dass' and I’d think he was speaking to someone over my shoulder. He was speaking, though, to who I would be when I stopped being who I think I am.”
Bear with me, here: when a practitioner is first given a Koan, freaking out at its contradictory, illogical nature is the typical, first response. Like laughter at a horror film, humor is often involved in handling the discomfort. Recall the post “One Hand Clapping: A Round of Applause from a Teacher who became a Student”: in that process, when I gave my students the "one hand clapping” koan to play with, many of them held up their right hands, snapping their fingers shut on the heel of their hands. “It makes a sound!” they said. “Cool,” I replied, “but you’re not dealing with the discomfort of contradiction.”
Given Leo’s devotion to Hanuman, given our common love of Ram Dass, I’d been kidding around with name changes for months. I grinned and tastelessly faked Indian accents as, in my head, I alternated between calling him “Leo Dass Baba” or “Hanuman Leo Dass.” At some point, it occurred to me that this was just the verbal version of a glib response to “one hand clapping”: too goofy, too rational, not slow enough. Putting the effort aside, like all bad jokes, I began, again, to deny the egotism in my own spiritual work, so I could really get down, for Christsakes, to the business of taking myself too seriously.
I’ve been working on a project I call “Second Didache” for almost as long as Under the Influence has existed. “Second Didache” is a collection of scripturally based Christian stories that do the same kind of work the Koans of the Zen collection Momunkan. I eventually plan to do the same with the other two collections of Zen, the Hekiganroku and the Pi Yen Lu. The intuitive mode of teaching therein, that relies on realization rather than reason, is an ancient one known to Judaism's prophetic schools. It has been lost since the rise of dualistic rationalism, and needs to be restored—or gifted in the first place—to Christianity.
I was sitting at this work when it happened. In the moment, mental noise was quieted, mental debate was stilled, and there was only the Truth. After the fact, I pieced the following explanation together: Imagine a cross. At the top of the dichotomy, imagine that you have Hanuman and Ram, at the bottom, my friend Leo. On the right side of the cross, imagine that you have service and distance from God. On the left side of the cross, imagine you have union and rest in God. I had been, for months, busying myself with the respective ends of the two dichotomies.
This was the moment of resolution: At the expense of the Koan I was “supposed to be working on” I saw my friend’s face in my head. And then the words “HANUMAN DASS.” Hanuman Dass. The words went with the image, as naturally as the word “chopsticks” goes with that infuriating thing westerners suck at eating rice with. The word isn’t a name given to the object. It’s less spacious than that. The word is the object.
If the Koan of my friend's name was a Cross, I was now centered on it, hanging quite still. The renaming was "one hand clapping" again. The dichotomies were tense, but I had stopped snapping my fingers against my hand to audibly resolve them. I put the question to rest, next to my hands in my lap. By and by, I had heard the absence of sound. I knew I could be wrong. I was ok with that. I texted my divinely-renamed friend. I told him that, in a totally serious way, I had a feeling he needed to be renamed. I called him Hanuman Dass for the first time. As "one hand clapping" goes, this is the moment when the practitioner risks response, holding up an open palm for his questioners to see, regardless of rightness or wrongness, of words or silence, of form or of formlessness.
My friend wrote back. “In a totally serious way, I accept being renamed. I told Mallary about it. She likes it too.” With that, the koan that my best friend embodied found a solution. I did all the silly things, like change his name in my phone.
About a week after that Saturday koan-sitting, I rose at midnight. I’d taken some cough syrup at 4, so as to get some decent sleep before the 13 hour drive that witnessing Hanuman Dass’ marriage would require. My Jackie, the consummate night owl, was still awake. Before I left, we hugged long and hard. I planted a smooch on the tip of her nose, a disgustingly cute gesture I’d been doing since our earliest days of dating.
“Please tell Leo and Mallary I’m sorry I couldn’t take the time off work.” I said I would, but there was a flicker of discontinuity. First, Who’s Leo? Then, Oh, yeah. I told my sweet girl I loved her, then walked through the dark to the car.
In a gesture of total down-to-earthness, Hanuman Dass and Mallary were married in the living room of his parents' house. Mallary suggested we facetime my Jackie, so that she could watch the ceremony. Hanuman Dass, normally a colossal goofball, whispered his vows with the low tones of completely selfless honesty. I don’t even particularly recall what he said—and like the name of God, the words aren’t mine to repeat—I only know that, in all my life, I’d never seen him this vulnerable.
The gathering taught me something. I suppose I’m learning that my relationship with Hanuman Dass is, itself, a koan. In South Carolina, I am part of his family. In the small context of the wedding itself, he invited me into family pictures, and introduced me as his brother, even though we knew we’d get questions from Mallary’s family. The next day, during what formally counted as the wedding reception, we temporarily reassumed our separate roles: he became Leo again, and I was just his good friend. After all, the names are reminders, not mandates, and our identities are, in large part, illusory anyway. We didn’t want to explain dozens of times why the term 'brothers' was true of us, despite his obvious Filipino heritage, and my Irishness. When I first met Hanuman Dass, my name had been Dismas. I was comfortable becoming Josh, the family friend, again, and he reassumed Leo, because we didn’t want to explain that, in truth, his name was Hanuman Dass. Polite conversation has no words with which to explain that I, for my part, was too cuddly with my non-entity to know who I am anyway.
In the early morning, before I left, we embraced. “Hanuman Dass, tell Mal I love her when she wakes.” He promised he would. “My Jackie and I will be back down this summer. I love you.” Then I stepped out into the dewy pre-dawn dark.
Initially I knew that, from koan to koan, God has nothing but patience. I'm learning that, from embrace to embrace, there's nothing but love. Slowly, I'm learning to let myself arise and rest, to let myself come and go on God’s schedule. Nowadays, from darkness to darkness, there’s nothing but warmth.
My friend wrote back. “In a totally serious way, I accept being renamed. I told Mallary about it. She likes it too.” With that, the koan that my best friend embodied found a solution. I did all the silly things, like change his name in my phone.
About a week after that Saturday koan-sitting, I rose at midnight. I’d taken some cough syrup at 4, so as to get some decent sleep before the 13 hour drive that witnessing Hanuman Dass’ marriage would require. My Jackie, the consummate night owl, was still awake. Before I left, we hugged long and hard. I planted a smooch on the tip of her nose, a disgustingly cute gesture I’d been doing since our earliest days of dating.
“Please tell Leo and Mallary I’m sorry I couldn’t take the time off work.” I said I would, but there was a flicker of discontinuity. First, Who’s Leo? Then, Oh, yeah. I told my sweet girl I loved her, then walked through the dark to the car.
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| Photo Credit: Tiffany Kuechenmeister, fraukuech@blogspot.com twitter: @fraukuech, instagram: hellotiffanyanne |
The gathering taught me something. I suppose I’m learning that my relationship with Hanuman Dass is, itself, a koan. In South Carolina, I am part of his family. In the small context of the wedding itself, he invited me into family pictures, and introduced me as his brother, even though we knew we’d get questions from Mallary’s family. The next day, during what formally counted as the wedding reception, we temporarily reassumed our separate roles: he became Leo again, and I was just his good friend. After all, the names are reminders, not mandates, and our identities are, in large part, illusory anyway. We didn’t want to explain dozens of times why the term 'brothers' was true of us, despite his obvious Filipino heritage, and my Irishness. When I first met Hanuman Dass, my name had been Dismas. I was comfortable becoming Josh, the family friend, again, and he reassumed Leo, because we didn’t want to explain that, in truth, his name was Hanuman Dass. Polite conversation has no words with which to explain that I, for my part, was too cuddly with my non-entity to know who I am anyway.
In the early morning, before I left, we embraced. “Hanuman Dass, tell Mal I love her when she wakes.” He promised he would. “My Jackie and I will be back down this summer. I love you.” Then I stepped out into the dewy pre-dawn dark.
Initially I knew that, from koan to koan, God has nothing but patience. I'm learning that, from embrace to embrace, there's nothing but love. Slowly, I'm learning to let myself arise and rest, to let myself come and go on God’s schedule. Nowadays, from darkness to darkness, there’s nothing but warmth.
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