Richard Reishin Collins
Here’s a lighthearted poem of mine, “The Zen Monk to His Designer Dog,” published in Alien Buddha Zine 61 (April 2024). In this dramatic monologue in the mode of Robert Browning, the monk speaks directly to his canine companion and addresses (however obliquely) Joshu’s famous koan from The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan) about whether a dog has buddha nature.
THE ZEN MONK TO HIS DESIGNER DOG
I speak metaphorically of course but you have
the eyes of a philosopher with a fluffy face.
There was a time when I would only cuddle cats,
but there was always something missing —
their aloofness, I suppose, but also the hissing,
tarted up in their tuxedos, spats and white cravats.
Sometimes I wonder when I’m speaking to you
if you understand what I’m talking about.
You gaze with such sage curiosity and doubt
as though you get me, or at least would like to.
Then you nip at my knuckles like they’re your chew toys
or leap into bed and lave my ears with your velvet tongue,
something I confess I may enjoy too much.
Then we wrestle like a couple of buddha boys.
I speak metaphorically of course, but you have
the eyes of a philosopher with a fluffy face.
[A note on form. This would almost be a sonnet if not for the added repetition of the couplet that opens and closes the poem, acting as a frame or, as I like to think of it, the frame of a mirror: the two “buddha boys” rapt in their wrestling or gazing into each other’s eyes. This embrace is echoed in the enclosure of the quatrains’ ABBA rhyme scheme, rhyme being the formal equivalent of a dog’s (and a monk’s) reliance on predictability, ritual and routine.]
*
Ever since Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi complained that his attachments to his daughter Golden Bells and to poetry itself got in the way of his enlightenment, every Zen practitioner who is also a poet wrestles with the seeming conflict between one’s attachment to the sensuous and sentimental world and one’s striving for physical and emotional liberation. The poet, after all, deals in how sentiment inheres in the concrete particulars of our sensory life, those people and pleasures (pets included) that make life worth living, after all. Should these be dropped off like so many delusions?
*
In his new book, Zen Fragments: Teachings and Reflections of a Zen Monk in Paris (Hohm Press, 2024), Philippe Rei Ryu Coupey answers a question from a student during mondo about his attachment to his cat: “That a Zen master could be attached to his cat, that confuses me.” Philippe replies that he is as attached to the cat as the cat is attached to him: “But I am attached to all cats, all of them!” He notes that he has lugged this cat around for twenty-one years and longs to be freed of it by its death. “But when the time comes, I will certainly suffer. So where is this attachment located? It can only be found in nonattachment.” He goes on to describe his master Deshimaru’s grief at the death of his secretary and at his son’s rejection of him. Philippe’s answer, in other words, reminds us that monks don’t cease being human beings with all the emotions and obligations that come with that. Attachments are as unavoidable for us humans as they are for buddhas and pets, unless we are sociopaths. Even the Buddha was just a human being, Philippe emphasizes, not a god. The question is how do we live with these attachments? “One could say we live in nonattachment through attachment. Okay? Can you still consider me a Buddhist?”
*
My teacher, Robert Livingston Roshi, Philippe’s brother monk from his Paris years, was also attached to his cats. In 2011, I led a sesshin in Bakersfield in the Ablin House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s last projects. Robert flew in from New Orleans, but he spent most of his time in his room, howling from the sudden excruciating muscular cramps in his legs. No doubt the cramps were due to dehydration from his flight, but I wonder if the pain was aggravated by missing his beloved tortoise-shell cat Turtle. In the ensuing final decade of his life, Robert never again left Turtle for any length of time.
It was not that Robert preferred cats to dogs, although he did prefer them to children. He would often reminisce about the dogs he had owned. When he was ten years old, for example, he and his dog were packed into a Greyhound bus and sent away from his mother and her lover in Los Angeles, to live with his father and his new wife in Texas. However, when he got there, his father made it clear that the dog was not welcome, and by extension, neither was Robert. So he and his dog got back on the bus and continued east to upstate New York.
Photographs from the ‘70s show Robert in Paris with his then girlfriend Maïte in leather pants posing with their longhaired dachshund against the curvaceous fender of his white 1951 Daimler convertible. Other photos from the ‘80s in New Orleans include a beloved black Lab.
But it was cats who consoled him and with whom he consorted, especially in his final years.
Robert was seldom curious about what I was reading, but one day he asked about the book I was carrying. It was Natsume Sōseki’s novel, I Am a Cat. His eyes would no longer allow him to read, but he nodded approval and said, “So am I.”
*
I have a confession to make: for much of my life I was prejudiced against dogs. I preferred cats. It was my daughter Isabel, in her frequent role as a budding bodhisattva, who taught me the error of my bias. One day, when she was about five years old, she waited patiently as I went on about how dogs are servile creatures who lack self-respect. Then she replied simply with, “Dogs are people, too, Dad.”
Some background. A couple of years before Isabel’s lesson on compassion—it was 2005—we were at a July Fourth barbecue at Robert’s house in New Orleans. Isabel was three and toddling around the knees of the wine-drinking Zen practitioners, who kept commenting on her cuteness. These compliments seemed to rankle Robert, who, in his unfiltered way, stated flatly, “I prefer cats.”
Fair enough. I could almost identify. Everyone is entitled to their preferences, although it would seem that Zen teachers might remember the opening lines of the Shinjinmei, which declares that the first order of business is not to have preferences. It was, anyway, not a matter of preferring cats to dogs, which I would have been able to let pass without any sort of reaction at all. But to prefer cats to my daughter was almost unforgivable. Several weeks later Katrina struck New Orleans, many things changed, and it would be five years before I saw Robert again.
*
In Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) Forest Whitaker plays a modern-day samurai hitman who encounters several animals in the course of the film, notably a recurring black dog with whom Ghost Dog has staring contests (significantly, the dog always wins).
The animal motif in the film extends to other species, both living creatures and cartoons. In addition to the inscrutable black dog, Ghost Dog is also identified with a black bear that has been killed by a couple of redneck hunters, for which he exacts revenge. In the world of cartoons (representations like Dogen’s painted rice cakes) Ghost Dog’s exploits are echoed in the two-dimensional world of Woody Woodpecker and Felix the Cat, cartoons that are continually being watched by the movie’s comic mafiosi (an indication of the gangsters’ view of the world as something like painted rice cakes, both literal and figurative, real and unreal.
*
One day, near the end, Robert asked me to close the door at the end of the room. When I looked at the “door” he indicated, I had to explain to him that what he was pointing to was not a door at all but a mirror, beyond which was not another room but only the reflection of the one he was in. “I can’t close it, Robert, because it’s not a door,” I explained, “it’s a mirror.” We went back and forth in this way for a while: it’s a door; it’s a mirror; no, it’s a door; no, it’s a mirror. He was concerned that Turtle would get out, so his conclusion was clear if not his logic. Even if the mirror was not a door, he was adamant: “The cat doesn’t know that! Close it!”
*
I have two dogs now. We adopted Lily in 2011, and she is still with us after many moves thirteen years later. Lily is a black and silky and compliant border collie mix, a rescue dog who had a hard life before we met her. But it is Theo, white and velvety and assertive, of poodle and cocker spaniel parentage, who is the Designer Dog of the poem. Seldom apart, they meld and part like yin and yang. Lily: eager to please, her dark eyes pleading for affection. Theo: the young prince who has never had a tough day in his short life and takes love for granted, his black eyes full of “sage curiosity and doubt,” the karma of the pampered designer dog—not unlike the privileged prince Shakymuni himself, sheltered and well bred. I am attached to them both.
*
Some Zen poems are merely philosophical, like most of Dogen’s, and end up being essays in verse. Their didactic purpose and approach have their virtues, but they miss the drama and inner conflict that more suggestive poems refuse to spell out for us. This is why Dogen is not a great poet, however high his stature as a monk-philosopher.
Our mutual recognition, Theo’s and mine not Dogen’s, in the poem is not intellectual. It is visceral and instinctual, yet for all that not unphilosophical. We don’t discuss Dogen’s philosophy of Being-Time for instance. Instead, we practice it through staring contests (which Theo always wins), cuddling (when he is not attached to Lily), and wrestling “like a couple of buddha boys.” Thus this unabashed little love poem to a dog named “unto god.”
*****
References & LInks:
Collins, Richard. “The Zen Monk to His Designer Dog.” Alien Buddha Zen 61: https://alienbuddhapress.wordpress.com/
Coupey, Philippe Rei Ryu. Zen Fragments: Teachings and Reflections of a Zen Monk in Paris (2024). https://www.hohmpress.com/products/zen-fragments
Dogen. “Painted Rice Cakes.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kg9AmwQZG-MgEvVR-o2nzsMu_7oAdhRX/view
Jarmusch, Jim. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dog:_The_Way_of_the_Samurai
Sōseki, Natsume. I Am a Cat (1905-1906)..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Cat
Gina Yunen Barnes and Sugar. New Orleans Zen Temple. 2024. Photo by Jack Huynh.