The Story of Nyoho
This website is a collection of stories. Stories created long ago, some written down, some lost in verbal transmission. Today, we understand and weave them together anew with scraps, symbols, modernity, and transmission still emanating from that we have inherited.
The storytelling of Nyoho – the practice of making things according to the Dharma is akin to the Zen Arts. Nyoho surpasses utilitarian purposes, practiced as a Way of life that points to the ultimate nature of wholeness (the universal) through intimacy with seemingly singular activities of life (the particular).
A Lineage Received
In the middle of Winter 2023 I was formally recognized as a lineage holder in the art of hand sewing Dharma robes in the Zen tradition. The practice was in its third generation in the United States, and the Californian organization that had nurtured it, was experiencing devolution.
Around the world this is know as the cross-cultural phenomenon often referred to as the “third-generation curse” or the “three-generation rule”. Data suggests that roughly 70% can be lost by the second generation, and 90% by the third.
Wisdom teachings across cultures describe the mindset that creates as rarely being passed down, causing a predictable Three-Generation Cycle of accumulation, expansion, and destruction.
Generation 1 (The Creator): Builds
Generation 2 (The Steward/Expander): Witnesses the building, maintains the discipline, and often extends what was built.
Generation 3 (The Consumer): Born into privilege, often disconnected from the foundations of building the built practice, they may lack deep understanding of the forms and disciplines, leading to the rapid loss of the sustainable and generative nature of the practice.
The Zen By Nature offering is born in the third generation story and my personal practice as a syncretic, inter-denominational and inter-faith practitioner of the Dharma.
“Grief is love with nowhere to go. The valley of the shadow of death and the dark night of the soul are not historical myths. They are cycle phases of an authentic, chaotic, co-creative life.”
The Transmission
Buddhism has a rich 2500 year history and while many of these human lineages have run dry, many continue to thrive. Even so, their one-sided gender representation, and ongoing polemic “duel of ideas” that challenges positions rather than seeking equanimity, points to Buddhism being sustained and transmitted over the eons by much more than the exclusive human-centric stories we have inherited.
Acculturated by nature in rural Africa, my somewhat feral and undomesticated formative years made a deep impression on me. In six decades the only thing that has come close to the authenticity of the natural world is the human heart. Buddhism is steeped in nature, seen so often as only the exotic backdrop of many of the teachings by our modern day culture. We no longer see through the eyes of the agrarian culture that captured these stories and more closely understood their totally interdependent and co-creative teaching. Hand sewing invites me into intimate relationship with the more than human world as original lineage and enlightened teacher. Buddhas choice of a rice field as symbol for the Buddhist Dharma garments is not an aesthetic its a living representation of the Dharma whose teaching remain to be fully told. My practice today co-creates Dharma garments and tells their stories as those transmitted from more-than-human teachers. My vows growing out of ecological sustainability not human self-assertion.
An Invitation
None of the stories are absolutely true and exactly because of their mythopoetic creation, they offer simply to engage your religious imagination — a practice path of realization.
