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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.
Jogen:Well, good evening, everybody. Good evening at home. Thank you for taking a chance on us, those who are here for the first time. We appreciate you dropping in. I just came from a meditation retreat up at the monastery where a good chunk of the community is practicing.
Jogen:It's a retreat called Sashin. It's a particular session celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment. And probably seven or eight people from this evening are there right now. And they're going to wake up at 03:50 tomorrow morning, and I'm not. So that's one of the perks of leaving a meditation retreat.
Jogen:I had done a talk maybe two weeks ago about working with depression, sadness, these textures, and somebody said, It would be great if you talked about cultivating joy. So that's what I'm going to talk about tonight. And it prompted some reflection in that I think in Zen Buddhism in particular, we don't necessarily cultivate joy. We have some practices, but I can't really teach them because I don't do them that often. They exist.
Jogen:I mean, I have spent time with gratitude practice and loving kindness practice and things like that. But I think that our this lineage is interested in joys that arise from the ground of immediacy. In other words, what joy is there when we stop getting in the way? So I'm going to talk about these different joys, and you can see them as spontaneous qualities that just arise when you're available to them. In a way when you get out of the way and let it come through.
Jogen:And they can also be practiced and emphasized individually. So, these are not in any particular order. I'm just going to jump in here. So, the first is the joy of sensory vividness. So, let me start with this one instead, actually.
Jogen:I just realized my order is a little off. The joy of nowness. We are training on living on the spot. We are training on being totally here such that this moment can bloom in its fullness. We're training in a mind that is not always having the backlog of the past be crowding our experience of the present.
Jogen:That's what we mean by nowness. Sometimes we talk about this as non attachment. In a way, it's two sides of one coin. I remember Chosen Roshi. She would often give this instruction that you could imagine as you went through your day that you had an eraser at your back, and that each moment, the previous moment, just vaporized.
Jogen:So that you wouldn't go from situation to situation, moment to moment, and have these echoing traces in your mind that crowd out what is actually happening here and now. So the joy of now ness is letting the past be the past when it's time to let the past be the past. Right? How much chewing on it is actually helpful to us? It's interesting.
Jogen:We often feel that we resolve many of our problems by thinking and thinking and cogitating on them. But actually, so many so called problems, we gain a new perspective when we let go of doing that. That's actually when the new perspective comes in, or that's when we might discover we didn't actually have a problem to begin with. So training in nowness is really monitoring how the mind carries forward echoing traces in a way that is no longer helpful. I'm still thinking about the bad breakfast or the person that cut me off or worse.
Jogen:Right? Catching that, in a way, cutting it off, letting it go. But we let it go by coming into what's happening with vivid open senses. Now, many of you have tasted in Za Zhen, when you really settle in nowness, there's a brightness that begins to arise. Your senses become clear.
Jogen:There's a quality of luminosity. And even deeper, when we really let the body and mind just be as they are, Just let body and mind float in their own space. There's a real transparency. Past, future, those become things that you can't even quite cognize. What does that mean at that moment?
Jogen:Because there's just this so vividly. And a consequence of practicing nowness like this is sensory vividness. I have a fancy phrase here. It seems a little too fancy now that I read it. The bright suchness of phenomena.
Jogen:That is the flowers, the rain, the sound of a vibraphone, the taste of a cookie shimmering in your mouth, the feeling of your cat's purr as you run your hand over her body, the feeling of your feet. Right? When we are now ness, a footstep is vibrant with richness. A single sensory perception becomes vibrant with richness. It's a beautiful world that we exist in, but our mind has to be on level with it.
Jogen:So much of the beauty of the world, we coast right past it or we're not available to it because we're so occupied with our thoughts about what already happened or might happen. The bright suchness of phenomena. There are times where maybe we spend a long time in nature, getting a digital detox, or after a long time in silence, I'll often come back from retreat even one day, and the art in my own home just strikes me. Wow, I stopped seeing how interesting that was. Some of the old teachers would talk about purifying the senses.
Jogen:There's one tradition that I practiced in that you just listen to, for example, the sound of a fire consuming oxygen. You meditate on that sound, or on the sound of rushing water, and you just listen so attentively. Just this subtle sound that over time, especially if you have the opportunity to do it over days, your consciousness becomes kind of cleaned. I remember a long time ago, someone came to the monastery and they said, I wanted to bring my mother, but she wouldn't come because she thinks meditation is brainwashing. I don't know exactly what tradition they were coming from.
Jogen:And then I thought, You know what? It kind of that's We shouldn't use that term. Don't tell your conservative relatives that you go get a brainwashing, but you might just wash your brain. I'm talking about an experience that we can all have if we do maybe even one period of meditation, we get a taste of that, especially when it's sustained over time. Now, in a way, a different aspect of something similar is the joy of what we call samadhi.
Jogen:This is the joy of realizing that you, in your own heart, have built in peace. Peace is built into the nature of your heart and mind. It's like we have a spacious mind that is usually still in the box. We just haven't taken the time to put it together. We do the work.
Jogen:We do the practice. Then we begin to realize there is a dimension of your mind, of my mind, that in the midst of movement, thought, sensation, image, even emotional disturbance, in the midst of that, there is something unmoving. In the midst of disturbance, there is a dimension to us that is undisturbed. The joy of that Now, I'm using this word joy. I don't know what your reference is for joy.
Jogen:It's just like the word happiness. I don't use it very often because I'm not sure what you think happiness is. So, you know, you might think happiness is an espresso and a Bon Jovi album. I know some of you have confessed that. Joy of Samadhi is a little bit tricky because it's not exciting.
Jogen:It's kind of like this is the joy of being undisturbed when you know it could be otherwise. In a way, this is what we are empowering ourselves through this practice. We have a contrast. As we do this over time. We have these, I think, important moments when we go, the previous me used to freak out when that thing would happen.
Jogen:Or the previous me would still be thinking about, I got cut off so bad on I five a couple weeks ago that I almost had to slam on my brakes and it was rush hour. Right? The previous me would have brought that to meditation for sure. There's a certain joy in entering into a situation that used to really knock us off balance, and then we really have balance. So the joy of samadhi and tranquility, there's bliss involved if we build the skill.
Jogen:There's clarity involved. But I think the joy is that that which used to knock us off center and put us kind of in our little, I don't know if you ever go on divergences. You're in a groove and then something in life happens, and it doesn't have to, but it does send you down a sour mood or a kind of loop of self doubt or whatever for a while. In a way, a joy of Samadhi is a deep enough groove that when life's, let's say, low to mid level challenges come our way, we just we're not moved around by it so much. There is the joy of non separation.
Jogen:There's a fancy term, non duality. Right? When we have nowness and samadhi, that is when the mind is relaxed and here, our faculty of othering softens. There is a dimension to the mind or a habit of the mind that is often making things separate from me, nearly continually. It starts raining and the experience and the thought, and they rise almost instantaneously together, is, I hear that ring.
Jogen:Or a feeling happens in the body, and if we like it, we kind of tend to go, Oh. If we don't like it, we go, Oh. But when there is a certain relaxed, you could say almost a no fear of feeling, no fear of me being impinged on by life, then things are experienced very intimately. Things are experienced without a gap. Hirata Roshi, the person who painted this Zen circle here, he talks about when our mind is at rest, we see a flower and we become that flower.
Jogen:We hear a sound and we become that sound. I first started noticing this, and I think it helps. Probably you'll find that the first place you'll taste this is with phenomena that you find beautiful, experiences that are already kind of heart opening to you. For me, it began to dawn when I would hear music after having meditated for a while. The sense that there's no distinction between me and what I'm hearing.
Jogen:It's almost as if you're inside the notes as they appear and evaporate. Through all our senses, this kind of experience. And sometimes this pierces our heart to the point where we could just weep, and sometimes it's very subtle. I've recommended to people this is a great season to meditate and just listen to the rain. It's actually an old, an ancient venerated dharma gate in the Zen tradition.
Jogen:And here in Portland, it's the perfect thing to take up. And just listen to the rain. Open yourself to the sound of the rain until there's no difference between that which hears and the rain. It's an intimate joy. Now, the next joys are less directly the result of nowness in meditation, though we can't really separate them from it.
Jogen:This is the joy of a clean conscience. We can call it burdenlessness. Actually, the Buddha had a word for a certain fruit of spiritual practice that he called blamelessness. And the idea with blamelessness is that one is living in integrity. One is living in such alignment with the heart that we don't have regrets about the actions that we take on a moment to moment and day to day basis.
Jogen:In the Zen tradition, they would say things like, A day of thorough practice and one sleeps soundly. Think about many of the things that keep us up at night. So the joy of clean conscience, we First of all, it's a whole series of talks on the precepts. I'll be doing a series on the precepts later in actually, year. But the precepts are basically saying, for example, don't steal, but be generous.
Jogen:Don't gossip about others, but reflect on one's own limitations. Don't kill. Don't kill vibes. Don't kill time. Don't kill people.
Jogen:But honor life. There ways of cutting off the kinds of actions that disturb the heart. Right? So the joy of clean conscience may be something that comes as a result of becoming intimate enough with ourselves that we start to see more and more subtle actions that set tremors in motion. We set our own tremors in motion that end up disturbing us.
Jogen:In a way, it's a kind of mindfulness. I notice that I say less unskillful things. In fact, I came home from retreat today, and I was working on this talk, and my partner from the other room was like, Jogan, can you do the cat box? Or, Are you gonna do the cat box? And my I could feel the thought kind of proto forming, Of course, I'm going to do the cat box.
Jogen:I've done it every day for the last three years in this house. But I caught the proto thought because I had enough mindfulness. And like a kind of, it swelled and I just let it go. I said, Yes, babe. Yes, I will.
Jogen:So we begin to be awake at the threshold of regrettable action. When often we skate right over it. Often we go, Oops, I shouldn't have done that. But by the time we realize we shouldn't have done it, we already did it. So you can see how your meditation and this kind of thing coincide.
Jogen:From a quieter mind, we more naturally do what we should do, and we less do what we shouldn't do. It's actually hard to not do stupid things. It's actually hard not to be unskillful. In a way, I think living with people is a constant practice of humility. It's constant bowing.
Jogen:If you've never lived in community, never had roommates, you might not know what I'm talking about. I think, for example, I think of relationship as a continual practice of apology. Right? That resonates, right? Yeah.
Jogen:It's either a continual practice of apology or it's not a very good relationship. So this is very hard to do if we don't have any kind of presence of mind because the brain is frothing all the time. And we don't even notice that we do things that we didn't have to do. So the joy of a clean conscience is, I think it definitely helps with relationships in general. But in a way, it's a kind of settledness of the heart where we are not worried about, Did I do that wrong?
Jogen:Did I hurt so and so? Right? We get more and more attuned to what might be the right thing to do or not do. And I don't know anybody who does it perfectly, so I'm not talking about perfectionism. So then, related is from this practice, I think there's the joy of a warm heart and how our relationships improve from doing this.
Jogen:So, I don't know if this is true for you in maybe just doing one period of practice or one evening, but for me, my heart is a little bit more open. I'm a little bit less defensive after I practice. And I think over time that starts to have an effect where our character baseline shifts a little bit. Part of it is we are less fooled by the ego. There's less to defend.
Jogen:My heart is closed often because I'm defending something. I'm hiding, or I'm afraid that I'm going to get honest feedback, or there's many reasons that the heart could be closed. In a way, you've to check it out. Why is my heart closed? What is that about?
Jogen:Sometimes it's competition. Sometimes it's fear of being seen. There's lots of reasons. But again, as the mind clears and we therefore can accept who we are a little bit more, there's less armor. So one of the things that makes us a joy is we discover that our stance of heart is not faded.
Jogen:Our stance of heart is not faded. What I mean by that is sometimes we're like, Oh, so and so at work is a jerk and I just hate them. And we believe that that somehow is like something that's etched in stone. It's etched in our being that that's just the way it's going to be. But that is not how it looks when you're in touch with your being as happening.
Jogen:That's not how it looks when you watch how something like dislike is created moment by moment. Check that out. The dislike of a person or, let's say, a closed heart in particular. It's something that is unconsciously enacted over and over. We go into the office and there's a particular bodily contraction and a particular thought, and then a thought about that thought, and we say, So and so is just like I think they are.
Jogen:And before we know it, our mood, our emotion, our body, it's all kind of co happening together and we renew that sense of, I really hate so and so. But it is possible to walk into that very same situation. And if you don't let all of that just happen, you might have a different experience. In fact, you might find that you could just stay open with the experience. What actually comes up for me with Janice in the audience, in the office?
Jogen:Oh, I walk in the door and I feel a little insecure. And I don't like how it feels to feel insecure, so I start judging her. And I don't like how And then it just goes from there. Whatever it may be. There's lots of examples.
Jogen:Anyways, the joy of the warm heart is, again, that we can choose it as a stance of being. Before practice, the world is divided into, These are the people I like, these are the people I don't like, and it's final. And then we practice and things get a little more fluid than that. Things open up. There are possibilities.
Jogen:I'm not saying there aren't affinities. We all have kind of energetic affinities with different kinds of people. But we might be able to surprise ourselves. Now, for a lot of people, the closed heart closes around me. I don't like who I am, or I don't like that aspect of myself, and I I really kind of make a final judgment about who I am.
Jogen:Right? I am so and so, and therefore. So for many people, it's starting to see that I can actually shift and open my heart to my heart. I can love this being. I don't have to wait for someone else to do that.
Jogen:That's my I'm empowered to do that. The last joy on my list, and this is just something I made up, this isn't official, if you haven't noticed, is the joy of generosity. Now this one is, for example, it's top on the list of the Paramitas in classic Buddhist training. The Paramitas are basically like Buddhist virtues to be practiced, Generosity is considered number one. Our culture backwardsly celebrates becoming me centered.
Jogen:It celebrates my, my, my, my, my, my. It is true that for some people, they have been socialized or taught to not take care of this person, to neglect this person, to always focus on others. And that is, in those times, an act of self respect and empowerment. That is a form of self love. But for some people, my, my, my, my, my, orienting in that way, my needs, my boundaries, my time, it actually is a recipe for deep loneliness.
Jogen:It doesn't actually work. I challenge you to find somebody who's taken the my, my, my, my needs, my boundaries advice and only practiced that for six months, I challenge you to find someone who's genuinely joyful, who genuinely feels that they have loving connections. By generosity in the dharma, we don't necessarily mean give money. Right? Doesn't necessarily mean even give time.
Jogen:Generosity is very big. We could think creatively about it. My teachers often talk about a Zen practitioner gives life to life. We're in a situation and we try to make the best of that situation in any given moment. We have ingredients.
Jogen:We have these people. We have this state of mind. We have these things we need to do. How can we actually give life to this situation? How can we raise the vibe?
Jogen:How can we make an offering? To think about the situations in our life not as how can I get through this with maximum pleasure and minimal disturbance, which is basically human default, But think instead, how can I make an offering to the situation? How can I give life to it? It's a very different state of mind. The pleasure still happens.
Jogen:You still get pleasure. You still actually, and probably even more so, you still meet your needs. The joy of generosity, you could say essentially, is to share what moves through our life because if we don't share what moves through our life, we'll experience it getting stagnant. I realized that when I was younger, for as long as I had had paychecks, I bought records and tapes and things. I've been a kind of music lover, felt this compulsion to possess music.
Jogen:And the best thing I ever did about that was when I became a DJ. Right? And I learned this lesson in a deep in a deep way that I love this thing, and the purpose of loving it and gathering it is not so I can have a big pile of records that I can never get to listening to. Because how many records can you actually listen to in one year? Purpose was to share it.
Jogen:So much more happiness when we, the things that bring us to life, we somehow open it up and invite others in. And I think things stagnate if we don't do that. So let me go through these joys again. I know this is kind of a smorgasbord style of talk. There's the joy of sensory vividness.
Jogen:There's the joy of samadhi and tranquility, the joy of nowness, the joy of non separation, the joy of a clean conscience, the joy of a warm heart, and the joy of generosity.
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 zendust.org. Your support supports us.