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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.
Kisei:I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in dharma, and I take refuge in sangha. What would mountain do? What would mountain do? Dogan says, mountains have been the abode of great sages from the limitless past to the limitless present. Wise people and sages all have mountains in their inner chamber, as their body and mind.
Kisei:You may think that in mountains many wise people and great sages are assembled, but after entering the mountains, not a single person meets another. There is just the activity of mountains. There is no trace of anyone having entered the mountains. Although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to people who love them. You should know that mountains are fond of wise people and sages.
Kisei:Mountain mind has been the abode of great sages from the limitless past to the limitless present. Mountain mind. This mountain mind is what we've been practicing during Sashin, learning to make mountain mind our abode, Just as it has been the home of great sages, it too is our home. And we're learning to recognize it as such. We've all had glimpses, maybe moments of immersion, tastes of this true home, this true abode, mountain mind.
Kisei:So right now, tune into your mountain mind. Human mind might be grumpy or sleepy or thinking about something else. But what is mountain mind doing? Be letting the stability of your body, your connection to the earth, Be an access road into mountain mind. And as you tune into the stillness and silence of mountain awareness.
Kisei:For a moment, let self consciousness or self referencing drop out of the body. Let the sense of self dis identify with body sensation. For a moment, don't grasp at the sensations of body. Just let them be. Let whatever experience you usually call my body have the same weight as the ZenDo floor or the space in the room or the distant sounds.
Kisei:And do the same thing with thought. Let the sense of self drop out of mind. Don't identify with thought. Let thoughts have the same weight, the same significance as the Zeno floor. The color purple, the space in the room, the distant sounds.
Kisei:Rest in mountain awareness. Not identified for right now with anything. Be nobody. Nobody in particular. Let whatever is happening, happen.
Kisei:Just don't take it personally. Even the thoughts of I can't do this. Not personal. Not yours. Just sound happening.
Kisei:And from mountain mind, mountain heart, silent, spacious awareness. From this space of non attachment, non identification, look at this being sitting here that you normally call me. Look and see this being's life. And notice what you see. Staying rooted in mountain awareness, grounded, spacious.
Kisei:What do you see when you look back at this person sitting here wearing the clothes that you put on earlier today, sitting in the seat that had your name on the magnetic board, What do you see? What does Mountain think about this human being? How does mountain regard the way this human seems to suffer or tie themselves up in knots. How does mountain experience or know your pain? What does Mountain know about belonging?
Kisei:About love? What does mountain know about being enough? What does mountain think about your practice? Coming back if you've gotten distracted to the stability of your own seat, spacious, silent awareness. During this sashin we've been connecting with mountain awareness.
Kisei:So much about sashin is that steadiness of returning. The conditions of sashin allow us to keep trying it on. Inevitably we forget or something else arises and we attend to that. But we're learning how to recognize this mountain mind, spacious, open awareness, and then how to function from it. We are practicing recognizing mountain as our inner chamber, as Dogenzhengji says, Each being here, everyone you encounter has a mountain as their inner chamber, as their body and mind.
Kisei:Many people don't even think about that. But we might be able to, when we leave Sashin, to meet people and see the mountain that they are, see their Buddha nature. So we picked up this practice of mountain. And as many of you have realized, mountain isn't very concerned about what we look like, what roles we play. It's really not concerned about what we post about ourselves on social media or how we talk about sashin or experience or how concentrated we are.
Kisei:Mountain stability is all inclusive. It's a kind of love that has no opposite. Mountain doesn't really understand why we collapse around certain sensations or tell ourselves untrue things and then believe them and suffer them or replay past pains and suffer them or worry too much about who will be in the future. And that's awesome to know that your inner chamber just goes on mountaining. As thoughts cascade and crumble, Mountain goes on mountaining, steady and aware, letting us tell whatever story we want about ourselves, about mountain, letting us call it whatever name we do.
Kisei:And so we do like mountain ocean of awareness, the light of awareness, Buddha nature, the thing that cannot be named. And mountain mind is just here, silent and aware. The mind of Jisobhurisattva shining from all beings. And maybe it's easier for us to recognize this silent aware mind shining through the beings of the natural world more than our neighbors or family members or our friends even. Many of you have noticed aspects of true nature as you've gone into nature.
Kisei:Notice that the trees, the grasses, the ferns, the blackberries don't suffer self image in the way that we seem to or even have a self-concept. They don't seem to care what we call them. And although we might say you're an oak tree, they just go on. They don't feel separate or question whether or not they belong. There's a Rumi poem and there's just a few lines within that poem and he says, some call the wide eyed flower Jasmine.
Kisei:Some call the wide eyed flower thorn. The wide eyed flower doesn't care what we call them. I bow to such freedom. Some call the wide eyed flower Jasmine. Some call the wide eyed flower Thorn.
Kisei:The wide eyed flower doesn't care what we call them. I bow to such freedom. We've been doing that bowing to the freedom of the natural world, recognizing that freedom. The natural world doesn't seem as attached to life and death in the ways that we are as humans. We go outside and we witness so many stages of this cycle of life.
Kisei:This cycle of dying and being born, bodies turning to compost, bodies returning to the great elements. Each stage of the process part of this rich expression of the earth body. It's simply the way of life. The natural world seems to want to welcome us back into this way of being or at least lets us witness it lay on the earth, become part of the earth. It seems to say put down the weight of your aloneness.
Kisei:You're part of this too. Part of this rich cycle of being born and dying. Part of this body of earth, mountain, sky. This is all one life. Mountain mind isn't born.
Kisei:Mountain mind doesn't die. In this sashin, we're merging our activity with the great activity of mountain mind. This is something to keep practicing, especially this last day of Sashin. Know for yourself mountains walking as your own walking, Mountains eating as your own eating. Mountain movement as your own movement.
Kisei:Keep familiarizing yourself with this stability, with this silence, with the space of your own mind. As we do that it becomes more and more reliable. And so we can practice it not just in meditation but throughout the day of sashin. Can you tune into the unperturbability of mind's nature in the midst of a busy wash up? Can you tune into silence even when there's a lot of thought?
Kisei:Can you open to spaciousness as you walk around the grounds, moving inside and outside? Does the space of mind change when you shift from being in the zendo to the hallway to the great outside? And how do you return if it does seem to collapse? If you notice, those are my shoes. No.
Kisei:Someone just took them. Can we feel the ever present stillness while we're eating? And you can ask us about any activity that you do as you're falling asleep, as you're waking up. What happens? What gets in the way?
Kisei:That's also interesting. How does awareness collapse? What does it collapse around? What beliefs are still strong in you, in us? This is the ever going work of continuous practice.
Kisei:Mountain mind connects us to the aspect of reality that is always okay. We sometimes call this sameness or one taste. And from mountain awareness, all experience sensation, every being that we encounter shines forth in their uniqueness, unobstructed, part of this great body of mountain. And it's interesting for me that even though we are all in silence, we're all doing the same forms, we each do them uniquely. And it's almost like as Sachin deepens and we deepen into the forms, our uniqueness shines through even more clearly.
Kisei:Not as like an obstruction, but as this beautiful offering. Each of our voices joined together, each of our voices is our unique voice. Each person's bow is unique. Each person's posture of course we have different bodies. Each kin hen and therefore as well and this is the part that maybe we don't contemplate so deeply each person's practice is unique so we can't compare it doesn't even make sense.
Kisei:Each person's karma is unique There's a unique set of myriad, myriad causes and conditions that came together to form this life, this life, this body mind, this heart. And we each have unique challenges and joys and gifts that probably brought us right here to this practice. And of course, our expression of practice, how we practice is going to be different. No two people do breath practice the same. No two people articulate their vow in exactly the same way.
Kisei:No two people even hear sound the same. So we share this one mind, and we all express and experience it uniquely. It seems like a paradox, but mountain mind is all inclusive so it allows for this kind of diversity. And as we settle into mountain mind, as we really familiarize ourselves with our nature, it makes complete sense. Of course.
Kisei:Of course, we're all expressions of one mind. Of course we're all completely different. What a miracle. And we see this too in nature. You sit with the cosmos or a sunflower, those sunflowers that have like 20 sunflowers on one stalk, and not a single one of them is the same.
Kisei:They come from the same stalk. Another aspect of this is when we sit with the natural world, when we do sansen with a being from the natural world, our true nature is mirrored back to us. But we see and this is just such a beautiful aspect of this practice we see the aspect that we need to see. So we all might sit with a tree maybe even the same tree through this machine probably like 10 people have sat with the same tree. But you all may have had a really different experience of that tree.
Kisei:For some you may have seen, and this is similar to what Dogen says in the beginning of the Mountains and Rivers Sutra where he's like some being sea mountains as seven shining treasures, some being sea mountains as all the Buddhism ancestors. Know, somebody sits with a tree and they feel or sense the stability of the tree. Someone else sits with the tree and gets a teaching of generosity. Someone else sits with the tree and is reminded of the patience that's needed in practice. These are all aspects of awakened We were Thank you
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Kisei:And this it's the same with us. Without trying, we're mirroring true nature to others. It can be so interesting to hear what people see in us. Sometimes people have said to me, you sat so stably I was such a refuge and I was like wow that was like the hardest Hashim for me. And I was just thinking the whole time.
Kisei:But I sat there and someone felt that faith maybe that I didn't even feel. But we catch wind of true nature in sangha, in everything. Sometimes we see or feel the determination of someone else or what we perceive as determination and it can ignite our own determination. Or we sense someone's stability or we see the way someone interacts with a flower and it feels like this kindness or this joy or this sense of wonder and that ripples out and touches us. We don't know the effect that we're having on the other people in this machine.
Kisei:We might not even know that this gesture looked like kindness or generosity, but someone else felt that. That's one of the great privileges of the role I get to play during this sasheen is just meeting you person after person arriving in San Zen, bowing in your unique way, sitting in your unique way, meeting the conditions that you're meeting. And I see courage, I see wisdom, I see love, I see determination, I see faith, I see Buddha, Buddha, Buddha. Buddha recognizes Buddha. Buddha bows to Buddha.
Kisei:This practice lets our Buddha nature shine through. Each person is more themselves. We don't become like the stone Buddha. We don't have like this inner Buddha inside of us that looks like the guy sitting on the altar. Our Buddha nature is this body, this space.
Kisei:It comes out through our laughter, through our joy, through our heartache, whatever is expressing through us. We don't have to do anything to be Buddha. That is the mysterious work of this practice of this practice of sashin. We keep practicing sashin and we get simpler. The habits of self protection, self image, self identification loosen and we shine through more and more.
Kisei:I often wish that I could take pictures of everyone as they come into Sansan because you're so beautiful, but I'm not sure if you would see that because we have so many habits of seeing our face and reacting to it with all those habits of mind but we're each of us is lighter. There's just more like honesty in the face. And we're incomparable Beyond compare, it doesn't make sense. Like, doesn't make sense to compare a noble fir to an oak tree or a daisy to a crocosmia. They're different trees.
Kisei:They're different flowers, each with its own beauty, each with its own presence and functioning. The same too with us, same too with our practice. The flower of your life is incomparable. The tree of your practice is immeasurable. You can't compare it to any of the other trees here or any of the other flowers here.
Kisei:So please trust the path that's opening for you. Walk it. Live it. It isn't your neighbor's path. It isn't my path.
Kisei:It's your path. You get to walk it, and we walk it together. Each our own paths, each facing our own particular karma, each learning from the challenges and blessings of our particular life, each expressing what only we can express. And yet we do it together. We need each other.
Kisei:Sangha in whatever form it takes is the heart of the path. This sashin couldn't have happened without you. It would have been a different sashin. Each and every one of you made this sashin, the one we're all doing together. It couldn't have happened without the monastery, without the rain, without the sun, without the great earth, the forest creatures, the mountains and each one of us.
Kisei:These conditions came together for this unique form of practice in this unique practice container. And each of us made the effort we needed to make to contribute to its functioning. This is the mystery of interdependence. We are each other. We need each other.
Kisei:And yet we're also utterly ourselves, whole universes unfathomable. I marvel at this and so many other aspects of this practice. Like why do we have to strive so hard to recognize what we aren't? Shouldn't it be more obvious or easier to let go of a hundred years and relax completely? Why does spiritual maturation take so long?
Kisei:The tastes of mountain minds take but an instant, always available, always right here. And we have been living with our conditioned habits and beliefs for most our lives. Some of these beliefs we don't even remember starting to believe. It's as if they've always been here, a part of us unquestioned the way things are. So to begin to recognize some of these deeply seated beliefs, sometimes it takes years of seshing practice, years of zazen to uncover.
Kisei:So it's not like, oh, I'm backsliding if you find yourself suddenly confronted with a very fixed belief that you have about the nature of yourself or reality. And sometimes we encounter our beliefs first sashin, right there they are staring back at us. That sense of not belonging or not being good enough or that we must be doing it wrong. To truly recognize a belief as a belief in it of itself is liberating. To truly recognize a belief as a thought that we don't have to invest in or attach to, That we actually don't have to base our life on.
Kisei:It's a huge step towards freedom. And often, especially with particularly fixed beliefs that we may have inherited or been believing, basing our life on for decades, It takes a lot of seeing through a lot of returning to mountain mind. A lot of trying on who would I be if I didn't live from this belief but lived instead from my spacious complete nature? What would it be like to speak from the wholeness that I am instead of this fragmented thought? The good thing, and I think we've all tasted this as well during Sashin, is that mountains and the great earth still love and accept us even when we forget about them.
Kisei:Even when we forget that our life is one life. Even when we get identified with our inner demons. Mountain mind, earth body, sky heart are always calling us to remember. They'll continue calling. What we can do is keep practicing.
Kisei:Keep returning to breath. Keep opening to the field of sound. Keep returning to this body, Earth. Mountain awareness is our awareness. Still, silent, spacious, all pervasive.
Kisei:Here, now. What would mountain do? How would mountain react to this thought? How would mountain respond to this situation? As we practice this last day of sashim, keep practicing mountain awareness.
Kisei:Keep resting in present moment experience with the supports that you have when you need them. We are together developing trust in mind, in mountain. And something in particular that arises at this stage in Sechin is sometimes we think we need to figure out how to integrate the experiences of Sechin into our life outside of Sechin, and we think we need to figure that out while we're still in Sechin. But really, I've come to learn from many, I've done hundreds of Sechin, that that is really more thinking. That's thinking mind trying to re exert its power over our lives.
Kisei:That's thinking mind not trusting in mind, capital m Mind, not trusting in mountain awareness. Practice awakening is practicing living from mountain awareness all the time. Not just in Sashin, and then I'll think about how I can do this later while I maintain thinking for the rest of my life as the ground of my mind. But it's hard to do, of course. Of course, like, there are parts of us that really don't trust that this is gonna work outside of the machine.
Kisei:So we get we do little tastes. This is actually the ground of our mind. Spacious awareness. We can be the activity of mountain. The activity of mountain can be the activity of our living.
Kisei:So much of our lives actually function quite well without the overlay of thought. The thinking mind is so tricky. It's like we need to think in order to respond well to different situations. So instead of actually doing the thing that we're doing, we need to think about something else, which doesn't make any sense. So while I'm walking, I need to think about what I'm gonna say to the person that I might never meet.
Kisei:But just in case I do, I need to be prepared. Meanwhile, I'm tripping over something because I'm not actually walking. So that's where it starts. Can we trust walking? What is it like to walk from mountain mind?
Kisei:What is it like to wash dishes from mountain awareness? What is it like to talk or listen to somebody? And we'll have the opportunity to practice that in group Sansan. While we're still in Sashin practice speaking and listening from mountain awareness. And we're practicing mountain awareness and we're also practicing noticing when planning comes in and when shame comes in and when we feel like we don't belong or that somebody else's practice is better than ours.
Kisei:All of that is part of our human condition and from mountain awareness we can be aware of oh yeah those are the thoughts I have and I often believe them and suffer them and what if I don't have to? That's called freedom. I love that line, lust when somebody calls we immediately answer. That's the functioning of mountain mind. When someone calls we answer we don't have to plan for anyone who might call and what we might say.
Kisei:If that person called or that person called. Responsiveness comes from the stable presence of mountain mind. We are more able to respond when we're present, when we're actually here. So practice being here while we're here. And you're always here.
Kisei:Here just might not be the Zendo. And it's precious to be here, it's really precious, it's really precious to be here and know you're here. Maybe the most precious thing. I've been really feeling connected to Jizo during this sasheen. I'm looking at Kashiti Garba who's still shining, luminous.
Kisei:Jiso is an expression of mountain mind and it's having this concept of a bodhisattva is a skillful means for us in our practice. Because sometimes we really forget who we are. Sometimes we feel really far away from our vows. And Jiso is this expression of true nature in the form of a being who's available to help us remember, to help walk with us when we really don't know what to do. We really don't know the next step.
Kisei:So we have these vows that we recited today during the Keshiti Garba ceremony remembering Jesus' great benevolence. May I welcome everything that comes toward me with a warm and undefended heart. Recognizing Jiso's great determination, may I walk the path of enlightenment, dissolving all obstructions and never turning back. Recognizing the great optimism of Jisobodhisattva, may I see and nourish the seeds of awakening in everyone I meet. Recognizing the great fearlessness of Keshiti Garbha, may I know that all demons arise from ignorance.
Kisei:And that's like the basic ignorance that we don't recognize thought for thought, story for story. And may I take refuge in the one bright mind. And recognizing the great vow of Kishiti garbha, may I gladly enter every hell realm, which you never really think you would put those two words together, gladly with hell realm, entering hell realm. But that's Jiso's vow guiding myself and everyone to liberation. That's Jiso's vow.
Kisei:So when we find ourselves in states that feel hellish, or when we find ourselves contending with our inner demons, you know, whatever that is for us, whether that's the thick cloud of thoughts or the thick cloud of dissociation or a trauma response or fear to call on Jizzo to sit with us, to hold our hand, to walk with us, to help us find that determination to really face that courage to really face our lives. To see that this life, whatever it's presenting, is the awakened life. That's Jesus' vow. And it can be our vow too. And these vows, they come from our true nature.
Kisei:They come from the one bright mind. They come from mountain mind. Jiso Bodhisattva and the other bodhisattva that we evoke aren't do gooders. They're not just like these beings that have some self sacrificing complex or self image. They're the expressions of the awake mind.
Kisei:So that determination is our determination. That courage is our courage. Sometimes we can't quite feel it, and so we personify it in Jizo Bodhisattva. We make Jizo statues and put them everywhere as a reminder for everyone. Oh this aspect of your nature wants you to wake up.
Kisei:It's fearless. You're fearless. Even when you're afraid. Practicing with Jiso is a lot like having sansen with a tree or a blackberry bush or a blackberry or a sunflower or the sky. It's connecting with the wisdom and compassion that is innate in this universe.
Kisei:It's everywhere.