Heart of Perfect Wisdom

In choosing koans for sharing through writing or speaking, I usually search for something in my life that has an alive quality to it, and then fit a koan to that story. Usually the process is not as simple as finding a dog koan for a dog problem, like Yunmen’s Sickness and Medicine Correspond for when I have a cold. Though I have written about it recently, what has remained alive for me is my recent return visit to the location in the Chugach Range of Alaska, called Sheep Mountain, where I lived for a winter 43 years ago.

My plan was to use the story in a talk at the Pacific Zen Heart of Perfect Wisdom retreat (which we are still in), a gathering focusing on the pre-eminent Zen classic, The Heart Sutra. The seminal lines in that sutra, which serve as a koan, are Form is Emptiness/Emptiness is Form. Though I felt I came to understand those lines some years ago, as a reflection of my Alaska story, they now seemed dry and intellectual. They simply did not fit. Casting about and becoming a bit desperate as the retreat approached, I came upon the simple lines on the Pacific Zen website introducing the retreat: “The Heart Sutra is about our own heart, and about the nature of the reality that’s right here in front of you and also in you.” Suddenly, for me, the sutra was not about ideas and concepts of form and emptiness, but about my own heart. Intuitively, immediately, I knew I now had a fit.

My return to Sheep Mountain was a journey of the heart. It was about showing my own 19-year old girls, who are the age I was when I lived there, and who will soon enter full-adulthood, metaphorically how to put on their own snowshoes, chop their own firewood, and feed their own sled dogs. But I also knew they must learn that themselves, and in the most fundamental way, I wanted them to experience it all, including the gales and white-out snow storms. Also in my heart, my return to Sheep Mountain was a personal inquiry for me: Who am I? In Zen, our answers seldom, if ever, come from the direction we expect. The answer to that question came back: I am who. I am the guy who has paleo dreams at night of large antlered mammals lying deep in the ancient woods. For in Zen, the answer to the most sincere inquiry is not in the explaining but in the doing. In the returning to Sheep Mountain.

My return to Sheep Mountain was a journey of the heart. It was about showing my own 19-year old girls, who are the age I was when I lived there, and who are on the verge of full-adulthood, metaphorically how to put on their own snowshoes, chop their own firewood, and feed their own sled dogs. But I also knew they must learn that themselves, and in the most fundamental way, I wanted them to experience it all, including the gales and white-out snow storms. Also in my heart, my return to Sheep Mountain was a personal inquiry for me: Who am I? In Zen, our answers seldom, if ever, come from the direction we expect. The answer to that question came back: I am who. I am the guy who has paleo dreams at night of large antlered mammals lying deep in the ancient woods. For in Zen, the answer to the most sincere inquiry is not in the explaining but in the doing. In the returning to Sheep Mountain.