Above is a link to a summary, recording and AI transcription of our conversation.
The transcript, being AI generated, is somewhat messy, so I have cleaned it up and posted it at the end of the thread.
This, the first episode of a regular Sunday feature, 15 Minute Philosophy, is about Zen Buddhism. (On this occasion, it’s slighty more than 15 minutes because it includes an introduction to Manu Bazzano’s life and work.)
As someone who has suffered mental challenges, primarily through ADHD and clinical depression, I searched for many years for a therapist who made sense to me and therefore could help me.
It wasn’t until I was nearly 60 years old that I found one.
( Or perhaps he found me, since - although I didn’t know it - it turned out that, in a city of 8 million people, his home and practice was directly across the street from where I was living at the time)
This was Manu. He wasn’t just a psychotherapist. He was also trained as a Zen monk and a Zen priest.
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This series of conversations with Manu will explore both Zen and psychotherapy.
This thread over the coming weeks will address questions such as ‘What is Zen?’, ‘What is spiritual awakening’?, ‘How important is mediation’? ‘What is it to be a Self?’ and ‘What’s good about death?’.
Other questions we will explore together are more in the therapeutic arena. They include ‘What is the unconscious mind?’, What is ‘transference’? ‘What is ‘projection’? ‘How useful is denial?’ and ‘Is it possible to really know oneself - or anybody else?’
Any questions you yourself want to post on the thread, Manu will attempt to address.
Both the world of Zen and psychotherapy will be explored in an informal, accessible and joyful way.
If you can afford make a contribution to this project and help fund the continuation of Boot Camp, and this thread in particular, please hit the button below ( this first week the post is free).
VIEW RECORDING - 21 mins (No highlights)
Edited Transcript:
Tim Lott
So, welcome everyone to 15-minute philosophy with me, Tim Lott, and the Zen practitioner and therapist, Manu Bazzano. I first met Manu 10 years ago when I discovered him as a therapist with a training and background in Zen, and we had many sessions together, which for me at least were enjoyable, helpful and fascinating.
Now, I've enticed him out of his role as a therapist into being a partner in conversation with me on Bootcamp.
We'll be discussing a variety of fascinating subjects, such as happiness, God, karma, or anything that comes in our heads.
Possibly the only thing the talks will have in common is that they interest us both, and they will never last for more than roughly 15 minutes. .
Manu, you wanted to call this thread ‘Wisdom While You Wait’. I thought it was bit flippant, if probably reasonably accurate in another way, but you actually have some kind of objection to the kind of pop wisdom that is all around us at the moment, don't you?
@1:24 - Manu Bazzano
Yeah, it's a kind of ironic remark pinched from James Joyce. And in my case, it means resisting this compulsion to quantify and adapt and make everything into packages that can be then used for getting a life we want, getting perhaps wealthier, happier, without really honoring and respecting the wisdom traditions and their complexity and in the process bypassing their deep ambivalence. It's the neoliberal, you could say, compulsion to quantify everything and turn it into a product.
So ‘while you wait’ in that sense, it sometimes diminishes the effectiveness of these things. It also cheapens them.
@2:31 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
Very good. I couldn't agree more. Today we're going to talk, I think, about Zen and wisdom traditions of which Zen is certainly a part.
Before we do, Manu, perhaps you could tell us - since this is the first session for 15-minute philosophy - a little bit about your journey, how you came to be where you are.
Manu
Well, I will concentrate only on the things that will be relevant for our discussion, even though the discussion is freewheeling.
So, what comes to mind is, I had an early bereavement, I lost my mother at 19 and I went on a ‘grand quest’.
So, the first port of call was a Tibetan monastery in Tuscany. I was born in southern Italy, and I started in the Tibetan monastery, understanding little or nothing, from a wonderful teacher called Lama Yeshe.
I understood little or nothing cognitively, but I think on a deeper level, I was very moved and inspired by the presence of this teacher, the apparent simplicity of the teachings and so forth. Then to India, for many years with a teacher, the famous, or perhaps infamous, Osho ( subject of the Netflix documentary ‘Wild Wild Country’ - TL), a great adventure to kick out of my system my Catholicism, essentially, and my sort of paleo Leninism that I had when I was a young man.
Zoom forward into moving, I mean traveling, and living in different places, Germany, Munich, in particular, India, for several years, the US, and I found my home in London. 1990. By the mid-90s, I came across a Zen retreat.
I went there with the desire to sort myself out, Zen has the sort of aura of sternness and quirkiness and ways to tackle the indulgence, the indulgent behavior and so forth.
And before I know that, I felt deeply deeply involved, and one retreat after another various trainings that took me to different parts of the world including an an island of the coast of Holland called Amalund, where I received in 2004 ordination as a Zen monk.
But in 2006, having done 10 years of this, I left. I kind of fell out of my teacher, you could say, but I left for various reasons because, maybe we'll go into this, but just to keep it short went on another journey, as you know, to became a psychotherapist. I went back to my old love, philosophy, graduated in 1980, in what is called here disparagingly ‘continental philosophy, which somebody could say, well, if that is continental philosophy then the philosophy in England is what? Insular philosophy?
But anyway, it was French philosophy that I was interested in and studied, and eventually, cut a long story short, I went back to traditional Zen, the same Japanese lineage, Soto and Rinsai schools, recently this year, met with all dear old friends, who welcomed me very warmly, and the result of that this further training I was given now permission to begin to teach in this tradition to hold a retreat, to give Dharma talks, accept students and so forth.
That's it in a nutshell.
@7:18 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
.I think I hope you don't mind me mentioning that you also an accomplished musician. Very charismatic you are too.
So we're gonna start this series off with a simple but also very complicated question. What is Zen?
I kind of think of it in my mind as a kind of punk Buddhism. It's kind of reaction against early Indian Buddhism.
I'm speaking as if I know anything about it. I don't know much about it, but I know a little, early Buddhism was very, very sort of ‘sitting under the Bodhi tree and trying to find enlightenment endlessly.
Zen Buddhism, I think, developed out of China. I think it was in the fifth century AD. I haven't got the figures in front of me . Then it was called Cha’n, and that became Zen when it went to Japan, and it ended up, I think, in the west coast of America in the 60s and 70s, even the 50s.
So it's evolved all this time. So that's my very superficial take on the history of Zen, which I only discovered maybe, I don't know, 20 years ago I discovered Zen and was very taken with it, and I've been trying to really get to grips with it ever since.
What do you think it is, Manu? How would you, I mean, it doesn't really emphasize things like language. and logic Zen does it, so it makes it quite hard to talk about.
@9:03 - Manu Bazzano
The straight forward honest answer would be, I don't know. I don't know what Zen is, and that would be the end of the conversation - or the beginning, I guess.
Really, I don't know, I don't know what Zen is, and I've been practicing now. Every day, intensely permeates my life for now, 30 years, almost.
And I don't know, it could also be understood as Zen is the practice 24-7 practice. that would invite the practitioner, me, and allow me to become more and more comfortable with my not-known.
And there is a well-known metaphor, by a teacher of my lineage. He often spoke of degrees of blindness.
(That is blindness as in ignorance.)
There is ordinary ignorance, or let's say blindness to use his language, or the person who truly believes if I go to the shopping mall, if I find a gadget then I would be really happy, or if I find a woman of my dreams, find the lovely house, whatever, the car, or the job that would do it for me.
So that kind of degree of ignorance. And then it progresses where the ignorance becomes slowly learned. Texts from the western tradition, the eastern tradition. So I can quote this and that, but I'm still blind. And then it gradually moves to a position where the person through practice begins to shed all this garbage, all this learned or, let's say, marketplace garbage.
And then comes to a kind of a breakthrough, a realization, a kind of a awakening, and that's the most insidious because then the person starts to believe, I start to believe, actually you know what, I know something.
Now I know something, I can go around and dress myself in funny clothes and become a mini guru and start having my disciples or write the clever books and so forth.
And then the final stage, the fifth stage in the Zen practice will be you sincerely, thoroughly, all heartedly know that you know zero, that you know nothing.
But you are trusting and confident that that particular state and it's not really a state of mind but that particular understanding.
It doesn't make you confused, it doesn't make you into somebody just bumbling along, but there is a confidence about this is, you know, I don't know what this is, in Korean Zen, an equivalent question of koan, I mean, what is Zen? It’s a koan, it's enigmatic, insoluble and in Korean Zen, the question is, ‘what is this?’
What is this? We have been thrown into this world, if I'm really honest, my eyes are open, my senses are open, my perception is open, the answer is, I don't know, not a clue. It’s a sort of a depressing thought, like, wow, this is very scary, but also magnificent in its unknowability and so forth.
@14:00 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
This is kind of rather like Socrates, isn't it? The beginning of Western thought. The idea that he was said to be the wisest man in Athens, because he knew that he knew nothing.
Is there an analogy there?
@14:47 - Manu Bazzano
Not, not for me, not for me. I think Socrates is still, is still too attached to the notion of knowledge. The Socratic phrase. ‘I know that I know nothing’. It's more like a trick. In fact, the guy's knows too much. And he's a little, and he's keen, you know, the midwife.
I think it's strategic in some of this case. I think in the case of Zen it is something else. But that would be my first take.
I think Socrates really knows, and that's his strategy to get the other person to come forward, to talk. then in the end, he says, no, this is how it is.
But you do (claim to) know then.
@15:53 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
I'm going to throw a few, definitions at you. These are taken from a variety of sources, but a lot of them are Alan Watts, one of my favourite philosophers, and he tried to sum up Zen.
Let's have a couple of quotes here, bear with me.
‘Zen is life, to trace after Zen is like chasing after one's own shadow, and all the time one is running away from the sun.’
Here's another one.
‘Zen is untranslatable. It means roughly one pointedness of mind or total presence among you. It's the opposite of being not all thereIt's to be completely here, totally and absolutely now. ‘
Here's another definition.
‘Zen is like an improvising comedian, thinking very fast on your feet.’Thinking quickly and spontaneously.
I think Zen also famously emphasizes the nowness of events. We don't move from past to present, there is no past, there is only present.
‘We don't have to try and live in the present, we only have to understand there is no other place to live, thus with a huge part of dishes you only have one dish to wash ever.’
That is Zen. And one more quote which is from the Zen Master Te Shan, which I think is also interesting and I like because it goes against the kind of popular view of Buddhism.
‘Nirvana and Bodhi are dead stumps to tie your donkeys to. The 12 divisions of the scriptures are only ghosts and sheets of paper fit to wipe the dirt from your skin and all your four merits and ten stages a mere ghosts lingering over your decaying graves . Can these have anything to do with salvation’?
So did you have anything to say about those?
@19:01 - Manu Bazzano
I like the one about the comedian thinking on his feet and I'm a little more dubious about the other ones but in a sort of benevolent way because I like the spirit of Alan Watts very much and as for the ‘now’ - well one one foremost and study could be ‘well bring me now, what is now? Show it to me.’
And now, when we say ‘now’, it's already gone. So, yes, why is this helpful to not look at the past and not look at the future? But then what we are left with is ineffable, is not even now. And also, you know, a popular spirituality has made a big deal, you know, ‘;the power of now.’ Everybody is reading and quoting and buying the power of now. And I think it's a little, it's too easy.
It's too easy.to say, what is now? The other things, I try to remember the other quotes or something else.
Yes, it's, of course, there is a…you can't express it. But you have to say something. And in the process then, for a tradition that has been against letters, has produced mountain of books. But I think it's also nice thing, because I can't tell the experience, but I have to try, like I'm doing now.
And trying is worthwhile. it engages us in conversation, maybe some people would cite Alan Watts,who wrote his books and inspired many people.
That's the paradox. And even when studying with the teacher, the experience might be difficult to communicate, but the task is to come up with something.
And if it's not in words, it would be gestures in songs that would be in other forms that bypass the right brain, as we like to call it nowadays.
@21:00 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
Well, I could carry on on this on this tack and it's something we might go back to, but now 15 minutes is up and I found it fascinating and as ever you were intriguing in your answers.
Likewise, thank you in trying to explain something quite inexplicable in so many ways.