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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 Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
Hogen:I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. And, as most of you know, those are the names that we give in this tradition for the transcendental values of all the teachings that lead to liberation, the fundamental truth of the unity and oneness of all things, and the community, the living presence of all those. So, we take refuge in the transcendental values that are expressed by us.
Hogen:Welcome to spring. Glad you're all here. I people told me this morning it was Easter today, and I didn't realize that. I'm in a different world. But the the thing that is true about it is that every year spring comes.
Hogen:Every year the flowers arise. Every year, regardless of how terrible the winter was, regardless of whether there's earthquakes or forest fires or regardless of what disaster, what political regime, whatever. Every year, spring comes. And in a way, Christ arising from the dead is that same resurrection every year. And the foundation of faith in ourselves and our practice is recognizing that we are partaking of this spring.
Hogen:That spring is not something that happens out there in this spinning ball. Spring is something that happens right here. It can happen right here. Doesn't matter how disastrous. Doesn't matter what the things that we encounter.
Hogen:Doesn't matter. Spring still comes. Spring still comes. I unless I'm mistaken, could be. So, the foundations of faith, the foundations of practice are the the trust that spring is going to come.
Hogen:It'll be it'll be succeeded by all kinds of other things as we all as we all know. But So in our life, in our practice, it doesn't matter what we hit. It doesn't matter how cold the winter is. It doesn't matter how hot the summer is. There was always always a renewal of life, a freshness, a a grace that comes forward.
Hogen:Now, climatically, we we have kind of a sense of that rhythm, but internally, not necessarily it doesn't necessarily sync with the climate that we can go through a crushing frozen winter and then we could have spring to come up at any time. And spring in this sense, there's two senses of spring. One is that we're alive. Look how that happened. We're alive.
Hogen:We're still alive. How did that happen? How did we end up in this body, in this place in time? That's that's one kind of spring. It's just the awareness of wow.
Hogen:This particular thing has happened. The other spring though is that when we watch the the psychological and we watch the the spiritual ebbing and flowing, we have trust. We have faith that I can learn from whatever I'm encountering and spring will come. And that flowering on one hand seems like it's the same every year but there are different flowers. Every year if you're at the monastery, have different emphasis on different flowers, wild flowers one year, and squash flowers one year, and you know, dahlias one year.
Hogen:And the flowering is constantly evolving. The flowering of our lives is constantly evolving. When we have faith in the flowering of our life, when we have faith, there is a renewal of possibility. There is a renewal of awareness. A renewal that could come.
Hogen:Somehow, it gives us some freedom. It gives us a sense of, oh, we can we can interact with the world without fear. And even fear has its seasons, know, become frozen, become unfrozen. So in the spring is a really good time to to look at this this foundation of faith. And we just did our workshop this weekend, which, you know, I always like to do something during the during the year.
Hogen:We had different videos and different slides and But the the essence of the workshop is to turn your attention to that which has always been alive in you. It's just as alive right now as it was when you were 12, or 14, or 18, or 20, or 26, or 28, or some of our cases 75, know, or older. Same life. Same life is there. And that same life has over and over every situation given animated, given movement to, has possibility.
Hogen:That life, the foundation of that life, we could say is compassion, is loving kindness. That the loving kindness that is inherent in each thing coming forward, each spring, each breath coming forward is a gift, is a loving kindness, is the generosity of the universe. Mean, what do we do to do to deserve, you know, nice clothes and houses and, you know, living in a place of peace right now? What do we do to deserve that? Not much.
Hogen:It's a gift. It's a gift. So I think in the in the spring, when we to to really reflect upon this this boundless gift always keeps coming, always keeps coming, always keeps coming. We're never stuck, always keeps coming. Doesn't matter how far down we go, spring always comes.
Hogen:Wisdom always has the possibility of arising. And from my vantage point, that's one of the the messages of this season of the year. It's why it's celebrated in different traditions. Is that what was dormant, what was frozen, dark, broken, has a renewed life. And how do we find that renewed life?
Hogen:First off, number one requisite is attention. It's all even going on of course, but when we're so caught, when our our awareness is so surrounded by the turban of of of dystopic dystopian confusion, we can't really appreciate it. So, we come to a place like this, we go to the monastery, we do a retreat. So we can reduce the stimuli, the incessant bombarding stimuli, we reduce it enough so that we can pay attention and we can begin to look. And after we're convinced that, oh yeah, the tingling aliveness is always present, the spring is always going to arrive.
Hogen:Then we go back and we do whatever crazy work we have to do. We go and enter the world with helping hands. But we come to a retreat. We have to do Zazen because our habitual mind does not lend itself to this direct realization. We're all smart people.
Hogen:We can think it easily, you know. But to actually know it for yourself requires time, patience, attention, breathing. And the simple foundation is we have to have respect for this particular body, this particular shape that we somehow found ourselves inhabiting. It's not the shape we had five, ten years ago, and it's definitely not the shape we're gonna have in ten years from now. Sorry.
Hogen:It is definitely not. And yet, here it is. How wonderful. How wonderful. So spring is a time to really assess faith.
Hogen:Now, we all are people of faith. Know? As I was saying sometime, babies are ultimate faith. You know, they can't do anything. They can't hold anything.
Hogen:They can't feed. They can't walk. They can't do anything. It's all total. Their life is totally resting on faith.
Hogen:They're being taken care of. Just resting on the universe and some mysterious being will pick them up and some mysterious being will feed them and some mysterious being will change them. Just total faith. But that that kind of faith is a a baseline And as we mature, we have our faith has to also mature. It does not mean that we negate the fundamental kind of faith, but our faith begins to to expand.
Hogen:We we learn to have faith in the pleasure of toys. We learn to have faith in our parents' home. We learn to have faith in, you know, and eventually we get to learn to have faith in plastic cards, you know, and bitcoins. You know, Something that's so abstract, such an abstract thing that But to have faith with these plastic cards that we carry around, I used to say green green pieces of paper, nobody uses those anymore. Hardly.
Hogen:We have faith in these plastic cards. And what happens is we start off with this innate touching the, being touched by and being lived through the fundamental faith. And as we grow, and as entropy of course happens, and as we expand, and as we become more inclusive, we get confused. And instead of including the necessitates and the challenges of the world, instead of including the the bitcoins and other things of the world, we start forgetting our root. Forget the root and we begin grasping at what's out there, what's out there.
Hogen:And the more we forget our root, the more stronger we grasp. We forget our root, we grasp even stronger. And we forget our root, we grasp even stronger. We begin to have arguments, we begin to go to war, and we begin to We've we've forgotten our root and suddenly the world is at itself. The world is at war with itself.
Hogen:Like we are at war with ourselves because we've forgotten our root. The root is inclusive. The root is always alive. The root is always present. So we come back to a place like this.
Hogen:We go to a session. We go to a retreat. To call the mind that is just saying more and more, I gotta get this, I gotta have that, I gotta have people to come back. What is the root? What is the root?
Hogen:What is the foundation? That's a place we carry with us everywhere. That's a place that is alive and that we can begin to trust. We can't trust governments and money. We can't trust forests that will burn up, but we can trust this root of aliveness that is in us.
Hogen:That's the foundation. And of course, everybody knows it. You all know you're alive. You all know that. Guarantee it.
Hogen:If you don't, there's a different level of problem. But you all know you're sitting right here. We all know we're sitting right here. Right? We all know that.
Hogen:But, the shape could be very different. But, we know we're alive. We know. And so, I've been emphasizing this weekend just just that, that's the foundation of faith that we have to keep coming back to. Yeah.
Hogen:I was Jogan and I were doing a retreat sometime, and we were just talking about, well, why do we have an hour long Dharma talk? When you could say one thing really essential and pithy, everybody could just practice with that. You don't need you don't need to say it over and over and over again like I'm doing. Why don't you just say it once? Maybe that should be enough.
Hogen:So, I've said this this essential piece right now. I've said it three or four times. Have deep faith. Have deep confidence in what you know, which is not what you think. What you know, which is not where you live.
Hogen:What you know at the bottom of your being. Have confidence, have faith. So, to me, that's sort of complete Dharma talk right there.
Jomon: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 zendest.org. Your support supports us.