Sweating pipe to draw water
Have you ever sweat pipe? Sweating pipe is an enlightening experience which, if done correctly, will lead to nirvana. It has yet to lead me to nirvana, but that’s what Sensei Tony once told me, and I have no reason to doubt him.
I met Sensei Tony in New Jersey many years ago on a construction site in Newark. He was a big affable man with a heart of gold and immense knowledge in the practice of plumbing –an unappreciated zen technique that teaches patience and humility. Tony was a true adept who taught, “With a little heat, flux, solder, and an imperturbable will you can join the essential elements of mind together in the simplest way. Sweating a gate valve to a 3/4″ line is equivalent to 30 minutes in the lotus position, and just as essential. If soldering pipe is not done with right action the water will not get to the tap. And, if the water can’t get to the tap we’ve got a problem. As everyone knows, without an effective water supply there can be no body, and if there is no body there is no mind –and I hope we agree that you can’t meditate without a mind. Not only that, but without mind there goes a huge chunk of the psychic development business.”
This was a truth I’d never grasped before and found hard to believe. I argued with Sensei about it often. “Sensei,” I’d say, “I always thought mind and body were sort of separate constituencies of a whole, but that mind superintended body. I thought that mind, although mysteriously associated with body, actually transcended the physical realm and that it directed physical action without being coexistent with it.”
“Why? Why would you think that? Have you ever experienced mind without body,” he asked?
“Uh… well no, but I’ve been told this by adults since I was very young,” I said. “Priests and nuns taught me as much. Philosophy books suggest it too. And aren’t most great religions based upon the idea of the duality of body and mind? Are all of these people wrong?”
“Let’s find out,” Tony said. ”Hand me that 1/2″ tee, the flux, and that roll of solder there. And fire up the torch.”
It was this that I was thinking about this past weekend in the basement of the Now or Never, smashing my head on heating ducts, getting cobwebs in my hair, and cursing freshly sweated solder joints that chronically sprung leaks as soon as I turned the water back on –and, finally, cursing the universe that made this all so. If Sensei Tony had seen me on Saturday afternoon after my 5oth trip to The Home Depot for supplies, he would have said, “Breathe, Grasshopper, Breathe. Don’t be distracted by cobwebs. Focus the flame on the fitting. Remember solder flows to heat. Soon, soon all connections will be perfectly realized. Enlightenment lies just beyond the next 90 degree el. Attend, attend.”
Sorry friends, but even gurus backslide on occasion.
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