Yudo Seeking Mind
Yudo’s Jukai 2018
Yudo Seeking Mind
By Kevin Yudo Mahoney
Hello Zen community. My name given to me at birth is Kevin Mahoney. My name given to me by Sensei Shinzan Jose Palma is Yudo (Courageous Way).
I was born the 6th child in a family that would eventually grow to 10 children. My parents were devout Catholics. We were raised in the City of Detroit during an explosive period of extreme violence, murders, and major riot that flaired up on almost a weekly basis for over 8 years. It is often spoke of as the most violent time in the most violent city in the US. This background to my young life gave raise to tremendous confusion but also a relentless resolve to understand the world and the people who occupy it.
The highlights of the many experiences of violence I encountered were probably being beaten over the head by angry African American kids with fists and a baseball bat while protecting my sister on a Detroit City bus; and my brother and I being shot with a sawed off shotgun after being jumped outside a bar by young men we were playing pool with in a “white” bar. In Detroit, at the time, all neighborhood bars were either “white” or “black”, so by default, if we wanted to shoot pool a “white” bar was a safer choice. My brother, Thomas, aka Tomcat, was wounded far worse than I and he never recovered from the psychological scares and it ultimately sent him into a spiral of drug and alcohol addiction costing him his life. You can’t imagine the emotional/psychological destruction of fellow human beings actively trying to kill you, especially after an afternoon of playing pool, joking around, having fun in a neighborhood pub. Although these events were traumatic, a few isolated events doesn’t really paint the picture of a life of constant danger, fear, anger and hatred, day in and day , year after year. That being said, I am acutely aware of the millions of people living under these conditions all over the world who never get the opportunity to get out.
Over those years my mind changed many times about whose fault the hatred and violence was. Where did all this suffering and anger come from and what do we do to make it go away? It was finally through Zazen that I found the answer – well, actually Kung fu, the TV show about a wandering Buddhist monk who always had a question instead of an answer.
There was something about this philosophy and discipline that opened doors of insight about why humans seemingly need to suffer.
As my new interest grew I explored books that touched on Eastern philosophy, and we especially taken my the works of Herman Hesse, starting with THE GLASS BEAD GAME, NARCISSIS AND GOLD, and then SIDDARTHA. I didn’t know it at the time but I was already a Buddhist in the making. At times I was a very serious Catholic, but my choices and direction always seem to point East.
I started studying marital arts (earning black belts in Taekwondo and TangSooDo), eventually leading me to a Master Hirabayashi, a Taoist who -- after getting to know me -- thought I might the book ZEN MIND BEGINNERS MIND. For some reason he thought Zen was my direction.
At this time, I was also working on becoming a serious actor and was introduced to the work of Constantin Stanislavsky. His hints about the far east and this practice (zen) for developing profound focus and concentration which can lead to a better understanding of the universal nature of human beings was of particular interest for both the actor and fledging Buddhist I was becoming.
So it seems that I lot of different forces were leading toward this practice Shunryu Suzuki talked about in ZEN MIND BEGINNERS MIND. At first the ideas and practice in the book left me feeling off balance and initially I resisted and rejected the idea as being unclear and purposefully vague to seem like something it wasn’t – why all this beating around the fucking the bush! But for unexplained reasons I was COMPELLED to read it again and again and again. And began sitting for longer periods of time.
So here I am 30 something years later.profoundly believing in zazen and the true dharma. Through calming of the mind and spirit I intuit life outside the delusional matrix and can occasionally rest there. It’s not a question of whether it’s true or real any more than breathing is necessary for life. And I feel sure that all sentient beings are capable of being in the dharma if we can simply drop away the chains of delusion.
We have so little time – a blink of an eye – to grow dharma realization.
Only the cultivation of true awareness can bring the change we claim to seek.
Why do we suffer? Because we love and we need to be loved. They are the same. The delusion is the story of love and family and friends. It takes to see love in a new light and reject the ties that hold us to all we cherish. We suffer because the alterative is just too damn terrifying.
So, as I started life confused, I remain confused, but perhaps in a tunnel that sometimes reveals the light.
Yudo.
