No self, no roots, no problem
By Richard Collins
What is your original face before you parents were born?
-Zen koan
I never understood some people’s intense interest in genealogy. Or maybe I should say that while I can understand a mild curiosity about the coincidences of lives lived over time in the shadow of history and in the structured chaos of biology, I don’t share the sense that this is where we will find the meaning we are searching for.
The Zen koan about identifying one’s original face before one’s parents were born has nothing to do with genealogy (genealogy: that hybrid belief—I would even venture to call it superstition—in the collusion of biology, history, and destiny); for our original face is not a matter of bloodlines or even familial alignments, much less ethnic or racial alliances. What the koan addresses is not biological, it is not historical. It is ontological.
When Zen teachers ask, Where do you come from? they are not referring to a place or to your people. They are asking about the abyss, the void, sunyata.
Where did my preternatural mistrust of genealogy come from? I suspect that it has something to do with growing up in Southern California, where almost everyone’s roots are as shallow as tumbleweeds on the valley floor, easily uprooted and easily moved along by the winds of chance and circumstance.
Perhaps, too, it has something to do with my family’s sketchy past. They were country people from what is called the Four-State area–Arkansas, Kansas, and especially Oklahoma and the Missouri Ozarks. My parents came to California with the Great Depression migration so realistically depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. Ours is a heritage of poverty best forgotten, the family history a crazy quilt of liaisons and leavings, affairs and adoptions, child-bearing and hell-raising, betrayals and borrowings, infidelities and occasional incest. Who knows, finally, who is whose true descendent? And the deeper we dig into those gnarled roots, the more suspect the pedigree becomes, considering the possible transplants, grafts, and hybrids of the authentic, original DNA.
It is no different, of course, in the genealogical tree of the kechimyaku (Japanese, literally, the bloodline), the piece of paper one receives upon ordination as a Zen Buddhist layperson or monk, which spells out the lineage of teachers and students, all the way back, theoretically, to Shakyamuni Buddha. I am equally suspicious about that Zen lineage once it gets beyond a few generations. Who knows what skeletons lie in those monastic closets? Who knows what ghosts are mere ignes fatui leading us astray in the graveyards of religion?
What I do know are my own teachers: Robert Reibin Livingston and to a certain extent his teacher, Taisen Deshimaru, whose writings I have edited and translated, as well as Deshimaru’s teacher, the great maverick “Homeless” Kodo Sawaki. These are the ancestors I am curious about. The documents they left behind are the ones I trust; the legacy they left behind, the one that I treasure—not, however, without a healthy dose of doubt.
Similarly, I don’t have much knowledge of, or much desire to know more about, my biological great grandparents on either side of the family. What I know of them is sketchy, only that, for example, my gentle grandfather Jesse Henry Tannehill never cared for his father, never spoke of him beyond saying that he never wanted to have anything to do with him or his memory. That tells me everything I need to know about his forebears, and all I need to know about his here-and-now wisdom.
I know even less of my rakish grandfather on the other side of the family, Efraim Adam “Ed” Collins, or his father. Big Ed, as he was called, when he got to California, put his kids to work in the fields while he went off to “work” gambling and planning or playing some new con. At the end of the day, he’d pick up their earnings. Perhaps Big Ed’s silence about his own father was a way of erasing (or castrating) his own progenitor the way Zeus cut the root of his father Cronus, and Cronus cut the root of his father Uranus.
Most of our roots are, after all, mythological. Everyone I know who has tested their DNA has had their illusions shattered by science: the family stories about their origins—at least the ones that lie hidden in the mists of the distant past—turn out to be bunk. Finding out the truth can be transformative. Romantics who cherished old family stories about their Cherokee and Choctaw blood discover that they have no claims to Native American ancestry after all.
Racists who cherished the “purity” of their bloodline discover that their forefathers and mothers were not immune to the attractions of the other races (race itself being a myth, the biology and chemistry of attraction being the promiscuous pillars of procreation) and sometimes other genders. When we examine the genetic coils of our mortal flesh, we see that our fine pedigrees are forgeries; we are all mutts and rescue dogs.
Still, one must make meaning of those roots before disposing of them; we should try to understand how our genetic mythologies burrow and crop up unexpectedly like weeds in the form of neuroses, complexes, and curses—our family heritage, our karma.
That is the role of therapy and analysis and most jokes and storytelling. But Zen takes another path on the road to recovery from the traumas of family—not cognitive acknowledgement but rather erasure. Problems that are difficult to solve can sometimes more or less easily be dissolved.
Remembering is important, but so is forgetting. A root canal for memory to remove the source of the pain, the nerves that transmit the suffering.
We discover that identity is a construction, useful in its way, until it’s not. Such constructions can be constricting, locking us into mythologies of identity—race, ethnicity, gender, politics, land, class, faith, family, human nature, and so on; these tribal constituencies, we find, are no longer useful for survival and can actually do harm to us and those around us, causing us to cling to narrow-minded ledges where we imagine ourselves safe but still fearful.
Southern literature in particular thrives on its attachment to these identities, describing in great detail the sadomasochism and downward spiral of characters obsessed with their origins.
The iconic Southern Gothic image is that of a man or woman of great potential being dragged down by their predatory roots, like Laocoön being pulled into the sea by giant serpents. Their antagonists, although dressed up in the allegorical guise of neighbors and kin, are the three poisons of Buddhism: ignorance, greed, and anger. Readers lap up these stories because everyone loves a train wreck or a nature-show, slow-motion, carnivorous devouring, red in tooth and claw. The Grit Lit of Harry Crews is a prime example of this genre, especially in his own work of searching for his true home, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, whose episodic horrors are lightened only by his picturesque coinages of quaint country sayings and more or less accurately reconstructed dialect.
What we need instead is real salvation—not the kind offered by a chorus of shout country church snakehandlers and prejudiced prigs, nor by literary symbols such as shotgun weddings and baptisms of new babies, rising suns and springtime reawakenings—but the kind we offer ourselves when we are free of such crude representations of salvation. What we need is to meet our self-image’s origin in the unconstructed abyss, and subsequently to find a way to embrace the erasure of our constructed selves and to bask in the air of possibility, the freedom of non-attachment to any identity.
This is what Buddhists call liberation. This is true freedom—another word for nothing left to lose, nothing left to gain or regain.
These days when I look in the mirror, I'm not surprised to see no resemblance to my father, whom I never really knew anyway. Instead, I see my late Zen teacher staring back at me with nothing to say, his eyes calm and blue.