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New podcasts every Tues, Thurs and Sat. Here you can find talks from various teachers involved with the Zen Community of Oregon. We share talks from our retreats, as well as our different weekly offerings between Great Vow Zen Monastery and Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple.
Zen Community of Oregon's purpose is to express and make accessible the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s teachings, as transmitted through an authentic, historical lineage. To support and maintain Zen Buddhist practice in order to realize and actualize our Buddha nature in everyday life.
For more information, please visit zendust.org.
Hello, and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
Speaker 2:I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha, the transcendental wisdoms of the universe. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for being here tonight.
Speaker 2:I think we'll start talking about the Mangala Sutta. Mangala Sutta is the Sutta that they chant I think you chanted at the beginning of the evening. Right? Yes. Right.
Speaker 2:Good. So, and I, that's one of my favorite, favorite sutras. So, let's highest blessings. So this is part of the Pali Canon. As you know, Buddhism has its its archival origins in ancient India, twenty five hundred years or so ago, and the Shakyamuni Buddha taught for forty five years, and his teachings were remembered by the monks who were around him.
Speaker 2:And those memories, those stories, those chants were passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years. And they were written down finally in about the first century CE, somewhere in BCE, somewhere in that area. And they were written down because the monks who had specialty, each per each monk had a specialty of you're you're supposed to remember this section of the of the canon. And there were plagues going on, and one of the kings in Sri Lanka realized that, oh, if the plague killed off too many monks, then the Dharma would be unavailable. So he started having people write it down, and he actually had a whole whole festival, so the story goes, around the first century CE, somewhere in there.
Speaker 2:And the the Dharma that they wrote down is has kind of become there were several versions of it, but the version that we have is the Pali Canon, which is the teachings of the elders that was maintained primarily Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and it is a collection of teachings that were are purportedly from the Buddha, but they've been refined. They've been sieved through. They've been looked at by generations, by millennia of people, And so what the Pali Canon is, it's in a way the essence of the Buddhist teaching. Now the essence changed in form and changed in shape the way it was presented as it went into China, a very different culture, as it went into Tibet, a very different culture, as it went into Japan. But the Pali Canon is really about the nature of the mind, really about the nature of the mind and the nature of the heart.
Speaker 2:And so the fundamental teachings of the Pali Canon are, I feel, are universal. Because we come, this Zen tradition comes from, you know, my teachers were in Japan, and they're in, you know, and ancestral, their teachers came from China, and before that, their teachers came from Sri Lanka and India. So, the the the drama that we have has a different kind of flavor spin than the traditional Pali, Pali. And one of the big differences is in the Pali Canon, in order to really be a senior person, in order to really practice deeply, in order to really become awakened, you have to be a solid monk. You have to join the the order of the Dharma order.
Speaker 2:And in a way, it's interesting because that is the longest running human institution in the world. It is the order of Buddhist monks. You know, it's twenty five hundred years. There's no other human activity that has been continued for so long. So, from generation after generation after generation through country after country after country.
Speaker 2:Well, in China, that basic attitude where you have to become an ordained monk in order to have liberation began to shift, and they said everybody has a Buddha nature. Everybody has an awakened mind. Everybody has the capacity for wisdom. You know, and of course it gets expressed in different ways and different lives. The people who have devoted their life to that were still, there still was a cadre of people in China, Korea, Japan, and here who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding the Dharma.
Speaker 2:But the Mangala Sutta is part of that refined teaching, and in that teaching is really everything. We we teach the same thing, we just teach it from different angles. So, this particular community, we had the very good fortune of twenty five, thirty years ago, a friend of ours named Aja Namaro, who is one of the senior people in the Thai forest tradition, Chosin met him in India, he and Aja and Sumedh in India and Dharma Talks when they were visiting the Dalai Lama, and she was so impressed with him and liked him so much and we got along so well we used to invite him to come come and do retreats here. Here meaning at Great Vow. And so for, I don't know, five or six years before he got transferred to England, he was a regular at Great Vow.
Speaker 2:He influenced us a lot. Influenced my practice a lot. Influenced our community a lot. One of the ways that he influenced the community is that we chant the Metasutta, for example. Metasutta is part of the chant book.
Speaker 2:We chant it pretty regularly everywhere you go. And another one is the Mangala Sutta. Now the Meta and Mangala Sutta come from the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon is divided into five baskets, it's divided into three baskets, one basket's got five aspects to it. So the Pali Canon has a whole basket of sutra teachings.
Speaker 2:Teachings on the nature of mind, teaching on how we live and work and think together. It is a whole collection of how do monks live. What's the responsibility? How do monks behave? How do monks hold themselves?
Speaker 2:How do they care for their robes? How do they deal with food? We sleep. The whole section of the Vinaya, called the Vinaya. And there's a third section, which is the Abhidhamma, which is a whole section where people took and extracted kind of the essential points from the Sutta collection, put in the Abhidhamma, and it can be pretty dense, and a little bit, lots of less.
Speaker 2:The section that we have a lot of connection with is the Sutra section, And the Sutra section has five five parts, the Digi Nikaya, the Sumyata Nikaya, the the help me out here. Kundra Nikaya, the Samira Nikaya, Digi Nikaya, Angutra Nikaya, Kunar Nikaya, one of the Nikaya. It's five baskets. And they all have different levels of teaching, different kinds of teachings in them, you know, wonderful. Some of them, because they were an oral tradition, was passed down.
Speaker 2:If you try to read the whole canon, or even listen to an audio book, there's a lot of redundancies, lots of repetition. So, if you're interested in that text, the best book I think is the a book by B. Kubodi called called something. In the Buddha's words, I think, by B. Kubodi.
Speaker 2:Great great, he's a great he's a great fantastic translator, great practitioner, a great monk, and a wonderful wonderful person. So, the Medasutta and the Mangala Sutta come from the Kundra Nakaya, which is one of the five baskets of the Sutras. And there are a number of other things that come out of that. These are kind of the the extra teachings, the the the what's left over. And and in a way, they're some of the most accessible and positive of the Sutras.
Speaker 2:So we started chanting the Mangala Sutta, a number of years ago, and I felt it was just so important that we look at how are we blessed? What are what are the good things in life? What are the things that we can cultivate? Mangala Sutta is translated as the highest blessings. So that's what this particular chant is about.
Speaker 2:It's about, well, what are the both the blessings that we receive, the blessings that we give, the blessings in the world. And the the story, and it must be apocryphal because if you imagine there was nobody sitting there writing it out. The story is that the Buddha is meditating out in the forest somewhere in India, back in a time when it was had lots of greenery. And a Deva came. Now, this was in the dark of the night, a radiant Deva illuminated all of Jethys Grove.
Speaker 2:What's a Deva mean? You know, an angel, another being, perhaps it was just a beautiful person that showed up and everything was radiant, but somehow this question, whether it came in his mind, whether it came from the outside, it's kind of moot. But, somehow, this question came, what is the highest blessing? Now, that's a wonderful thing to contemplate. Know, what are the highest blessings that we've received?
Speaker 2:We are so richly endowed. We are we are recipients of so much in our lives that if we had to sit in and ask ourselves, what are the highest, what are the most propitious blessings that I have received? What are the greatest blessings that I have received? What are the things that I have been given, probably almost free, in my life? You know, my parents took care of me.
Speaker 2:I was born. I can see. I can hear. I mean, there are people who can't do that. I often think about people who are in war zones or who are homeless.
Speaker 2:And, if I were in that place, what would I wish for? I would wish for being a place of peace. I wish for having a place where I I've I've had food, shelter, safety, company, and I'd wish for this. Yeah. So, in a way, the life that we have is such a blessed life.
Speaker 2:Such a blessed life. So I think it's worth worthwhile not just thinking, yes, somebody asked the Buddha and here's what he said, but if somebody asks you, what have you been blessed with? Well, what are what are you grateful for? Then it becomes a real personal practice. What are we grateful for?
Speaker 2:In this particular Sutta, the Buddha says, thus I heard a sing at Savati, Jetha's Grove, and Athapaddeka's Park. There's all stories about all those. Darker than night, a radiant deva illuminated all Jetha's Grove. She bowed low, low before the blessed one, and standing to one side. In this tradition, and in other religious traditions, bowing is a sign of touching the earth.
Speaker 2:That's the way Thich Nhat Hanh always used to talk about it. He said, touching the earth. That our, in our arrogance, we somehow feel that we're often above the earth, that we're we're somehow separate and special. But the act of bowing is is touching the earth. We are one with the earth.
Speaker 2:We we connect with the earth. I always think about bowing as the yoga posture of humility. You know, the antithesis of our arrogance, the antithesis of I am right and the rest of the world should follow my directions. That the bowing is the yoga posture of humility. That I bow to reality.
Speaker 2:I bow to the to the greater wisdom. I bow to to the the miracle of life. I bow to I bow to the earth. I bow to to reality. So in our tradition, bowing is a is a sign of respect.
Speaker 2:It's a personal practice. A lot of times when people are doing repentance practice, they have something that's weighing on their hearts, something that's been undone that was unskillful bowing and chanting, bowing and offering is a way of cleaning up, cleaning up the heart. Those of you who come to San Zen know we don't do bowels to the teachers in this tradition. We always say, okay, you're bowing over here to the side. You're bowing to your true nature.
Speaker 2:You're bowing to to the wisdom body. You're bowing to your own deepest heart. And, we don't actually bow to to people. They do it in lots of other traditions. But here, we we try to say, well, it's not about me.
Speaker 2:It had nothing to do with me. It has to do with this this bigger truth of your own life. So so bowing is a is a lovely practice. Lovely practice. And, you know, it means bow and bow and bow and bow and bow.
Speaker 2:There are, in the Vipassana, no, excuse me, in the Vajrayana tradition, they do Nundra practices, which are preliminary practices. We often teach kind of the deepest, highest teachings of impermanence, no self, oneness, right off the bat. But in there they say, no, no, no. Nobody can hear those teachings. Nobody understands those until they've cultivated the right mind, until they've cultivated, purified, cleaned up their act.
Speaker 2:And one of the ways of doing that is by doing the Nundra practices. And the Nundra practices, you might do a 100,000 bows. You might recite larger sattva practices or offering practices. You might do sets of 100,003 or four times even. And sometimes it takes years to do that.
Speaker 2:So as you bow, bowing as a practice, you can't think so much. You have to let go of your of your fixed ideas about the world. You have to let go of whatever else is going on somewhere else, and it's a way of becoming centered and present and soft and grateful and humble and open. So, this deva comes and bows to the Buddha, and then standing to one side, she said, in all the sutras, not all, many of the sutras, they talk about people coming and kind of saying hello, greeting people directly, and then kind of stepping a little bit to the side, kind of joining the joining the circle, and then asking their question from the side. Devas are concerned for happiness and ever long for peace.
Speaker 2:Same is true for humankind. So, you wonder, do people really long for peace? I'm one of the things I'm reading or listening to right now is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. And, Abraham Lincoln in the '18, you know, eighteen thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, up to the civil war, and he was killed in 1865. He's filled with fighting.
Speaker 2:People, every politician, every group that he went to, just like today, people were saying this way, that way, this way, that way, no, this way, no, that way. And then it got so so acrimonious and so fiery that they ended up with a whole civil war. You know, 750, 800,000 people were killed in that civil war. So I wonder sometimes if if people ever really longed for peace. But I think that if we look at all of the acrimony, we look at all of the the anger that's there, it's somehow we hope that everybody hopes when we get angry, we get angry hoping that things will turn out in a way that is satisfying, healthier, better.
Speaker 2:That underneath the anger is often fear. Underneath the fear is the fear of inadequacy. I'll be hurt. I'll be harmed. My family will be hurt.
Speaker 2:I'll be And I think from that vantage point, we all want peace. From that vantage point. And certainly, if we are people of practice, if we're certainly people who understand the joys and the pleasures of a connected, interconnected modern life, I mean peace is the foundation. So, from that vantage point, we can say we're all concerned with happiness and peace. Now, from this vantage point, the vantage point of spiritual practice, the number one place that we have to have peace is in our own mind.
Speaker 2:Most fighting starts right here. The inner critic and the par blamer and the one that's judging and one that's striving and the one that feels inadequate. And we have all these voices and beliefs that are in conflict. So, the first aspect of practice is how do we sit down, breathe deeply, be present, and find a place of inner peace, inner stability, inner clarity? And that can be found regardless of whether the world is falling apart or not.
Speaker 2:That can be found wherever we sit, wherever we stand, wherever we walk, wherever we lie down. That can be found. And in a way, that that investigation, that discovery is part of what brings us all together in a place like this. How can I discover a place that is clear, reliable, that has some space in it, that has a warmth of loving kindness? How can I discover it for myself right here?
Speaker 2:Some weeks I spend time talking about verifying. That, you know, it's so easy to be in spiritual realms in any tradition, and all these grandiose things are said about, you know, the truths and the lots. But, in this tradition, especially, we say, you gotta verify it. You gotta you gotta see, is that really true? You know, because is that really true?
Speaker 2:And by by inquiry and by investigation, we can verify things for ourselves. And that, as I often say, is the foundation of faith. So then, this David said, well, what are the highest blessings? And then he had, we have the Buddha's list. List of the highest blessings.
Speaker 2:I don't know whether that's congruent with yours or not. So, what are the highest blessings? What are the highest blessings that you have received? Rink Rink Rinkin is is on his feet with a microphone ready to bring it over to anybody. Just real quick.
Speaker 2:Blessings you receive. There's audience participation. Okay. Give it to Chawan. We'll just go right down the road.
Speaker 2:That's Chawan. Blessings.
Speaker 3:Chawan, the absolute highest blessings I have received are people trusting me to sit and listen and witness with them.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you. Joe. We're not going do everybody. Don't get nervous.
Speaker 2:But I want to just get this started. I would say having good friends. Okay, great. Please pass it to somebody else. Say your name and then some blessings.
Speaker 2:I'm Vivek. Think I the blessings of all the elements that we have access to as humans. Thank you.
Speaker 3:My name's Ruth and I've always been encouraged to be curious and question.
Speaker 2:Great. Cross the aisle, Ruth. Somebody on the other side of the aisle there. The near aisle or the far aisle. I don't care.
Speaker 3:My name's Alex. One of the highest blessings I've received is unconditional love.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you. I'm proud of you, even anybody. Three, no, four more people. Quick, quick, quick, quick.
Speaker 2:This is not a complicated.
Speaker 3:My name is Maureen and the delight and shining spark of my son's eyes.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. I'm going give it to Jisan. Give it to Jisan, then. Hi, everyone. My name is Jisan, and highest blessing I've received is knowing that there is no separate self and that we're all united by this one universal consciousness.
Speaker 2:That is a blessing given to Scott. My name is Scott. Community supporting my sobriety. Great. How about right in front of you?
Speaker 1:My name is Rebecca and I think just being born into where we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We are a blessing. Two two more people right down the right down the line there. My name's Colby. Just being able to be alive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And one last. Bruce.
Speaker 3:I would say love. Love. Love is the highest best.
Speaker 2:Great. Okay. So hopefully, we we we all have some connection here. And in in our if things get dark and they're they're already, you know, it's in the in the Buddha, this particular thing, the Buddha's the dark of the night. You know?
Speaker 2:The the the gloom of the news. The gloom of everything else. But, to say, reflect. It doesn't matter how dark things are. We are still we are still blessed.
Speaker 2:We still have blessings. And so, part of part of the importance of practice is to to remember that. Sometimes we say, you wanna boil all practice down, boil it down to gratitude. Just boil it all down to gratitude. Or, you know, if if if you don't feel love, you could still feel gratitude.
Speaker 2:If you can boil gratitude down, then maybe love is the best thing. But, you know, whatever whatever is down there at that level, it does not matter if the world is falling apart. It does not matter. So so being able to say, okay, I have access to these all these amazing blessings. Now, the Buddha has his own answers, you know, they may or may not be congruent with ours, But we are so blessed.
Speaker 2:So, I feel like when we're practicing, if we don't pay attention, if we don't really see, if we don't really savor those blessings, it's hard to go deep. It's hard to go deep. Now, sometimes people are in agony and they just have no other choice but to go deep. That's one very difficult path. But sometimes, the path of I am blessed.
Speaker 2:I am blessed. The inner critic can relax. I am blessed. All the the unhealthy striving can relax. All the competition can relax.
Speaker 2:I am blessed. I am blessed. I am blessed. And from there, for that sense of ease that comes recognizing the blessings that we have, the pool can get very, very deep. Very, very still.
Speaker 2:The Buddha said, avoiding those of foolish ways and associating with the wise. Honoring those worthy of honor is one sentence. Avoiding those of foolish Why would he say avoiding those of foolish ways? Yeah. We're so affected by everybody who's around us.
Speaker 2:We are so affected. And so, we're affected, when we're we're hanging out with people who have good hearts, we're hanging out with people who have aspirations, then that wakes up the aspiration in us. You know, my my experience of being in this seat for for a while is everybody comes with a particular intention. You don't show up at a a place like this without that intention. So somehow I have to resonate with all that intention.
Speaker 2:And somehow, you know, I hope that I'm the one that benefits. You know, you may benefit. I know I benefit. So so when we are associating with with the wise, you know, the wise benefit from our wisdom. Everybody benefits from our wisdom.
Speaker 2:Just like everybody benefits from the blessings when we share the blessings that we have, everybody benefits. So, is not something that you can put in a box and think, oh yes. It's a kind of state of being. Now, it makes sense, think, as somebody said, that if you're hanging out with a bunch of people who are interested in drugs and alcohol, you will become interested in drugs and alcohol. You're hanging out with people who think, what's a cool way of of stealing?
Speaker 2:You will be interested. Your mind will be filled with whatever thoughts are going on around you. If we're sitting there watching the news all the time and it's dystopian and the world is falling apart and everybody is cruel and unhappy and stupid, then that's how we think the world is. You know? Whatever we fill our our minds with, hanging out with with doom scrolling is probably the most foolish foolish ways.
Speaker 2:But somehow it's kind of slips in under the radar. We think, oh, this is reality. This is news. Know? Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Doom scrolling. That's telling me the truth about the universe. It is not. It's propaganda. You know, the world has has been crazy ever since the beginning.
Speaker 2:Know, samsara is still samsara. But, when we're hanging out with people who are have got that kind of dystopian mind, we think the same way. We're hanging out with people who say, it is spring. The blossoms are amazing. We can plant.
Speaker 2:We can grow. We can offer something. We can do something with our own hands and our own life. And, we become inspired. We become more invigorated in that.
Speaker 2:We're hanging out with people. And, of course, when we touch our wisdom, well then, of course, that's what radiates out. There's In this Sangha, we are so fortunate to have people who have done a lot of 12 step work, different areas and other kinds of work like that. And, when somebody has transformed suffering and delusion and confusion into wisdom, oh, what a blessing. It's a blessing.
Speaker 2:What a blessing. So, we have we have those kind of blessings in here. The highest blessings. So, I would encourage you as you're I would encourage you to practice this week. Sit down.
Speaker 2:Calm the mind. Find a place of stability. Open the heart. And just do a review. And some some traditions, some of the 12 step traditions, they do a complete moral inventory of all the failings of your whole life.
Speaker 2:All the places that you've slipped. But it's not bad to do the opposite. It's not bad to do a a blessing inventory. What have I been blessed with? How many blessings do I have?
Speaker 2:It begins to change our view of our history. You know, of my parents dumped me on my head and then all that stuff, we begin to think, oh my goodness, they took care of me, they fed me, they loved me, they they got me educated. Oh my goodness. And suddenly, seeing them through the eyes of blessings changes our relationship. And, seeing through the eyes of shoulds and odds.
Speaker 2:So, I would this is a great a great little sutra. We're gonna talk about it in this kind of informal way for the next few weeks. It's in the chant book on page 89, and I encourage you to do a complete moral inventory of your blessings. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendesk.org. Your support supports us.