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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.
Speaker 2:Good afternoon. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in Sangha. I'll start with a poem this afternoon. Have you ever have you ever sat down with a tree and said hello as if greeting a friend and then listened to her story.
Speaker 2:Have you ever gazed into the face of a flower with wonder and delight and asked, how are you today? Have you ever laid down on the earth and kissed her dry grasses or soggy soils and let her kiss and hug you in 10,000 different ways. Have you ever held open your heart to the sky in astonishment of their vastness? And then let them fill you with their roaring absence. Have you ever quieted your mind and listened to the birds song, how it accompanies the wind as the grasses, leaves, flowers, and trees all add their music.
Speaker 2:The natural world speaks in a voice before human words. It is our native tongue. Listen. And you can almost remember how to hear it. This Sensei and I would say all of dharma practice is an invitation to remember.
Speaker 2:Is an invitation to remember. To remember who we really are. We get confused. That's the nature of human beings. It's confusion.
Speaker 2:We get confused in this world of ideas and other people's dreams and goals for us. We get confused in the pressures to succeed and the various standards for what that even means. We get confused by various impulses that arise seemingly out of nowhere, and so we forget. We forget who we are, truly who we are. We forget what we are.
Speaker 2:We forget or we overlook this silent interconnected life. This life that's always right here. This life of breath, body, earth, aliveness, this life of song, plant, tree, wind. It's a world of being, interbeing. A world rooted in the roaring silence of ancient stones and the 50 shades of green.
Speaker 2:The founder of the Sotho school in Zen is often attributed to Zen master Dongshan and one of his students. And this was in early Tang dynasty in China. And Dongshan so this is our lineage. This is at least one stream of our lineage, the Sotho school. So the founder of our school of Zen is Dongshan.
Speaker 2:And Dongshan was really curious about this kind of listening, the listening of to the natural world, the listening from our being to all being. And when he was a student one of the Dharma inquiries, of the teachings that really caught his attention was this question about hearing the insentient beings preach the Dharma. So there is a teaching in the Avatamsaka Sutra one of the Mahayana Sutras that says the earth expounds Dharma. The earth expounds Dharma then it says living beings expound it throughout the three times which is past, present, and future everything expounds it. So the earth expounds Dharma, living beings expound it, throughout the three times everything expounds it.
Speaker 2:And that was one of the teachings about the insentient or the earth speaking, preaching the Dharma. Dongshan, what we know of him as a student, we know a few interactions that he had with various teachers through his life before he became a teacher. Which we don't know that about like all the teachers in our lineage. So it's precious I find to know who a teacher is when they were a student to to kinda get a sense for their mind, the things they struggled with, the ways they engaged with Dharma practice. Oftentimes we have like the recorded teachings of a teacher after they become a teacher, so we don't know as much about who they were before that.
Speaker 2:But we do with Dongshan. So Dongshan as a student he seemed to be the kind of person based on the couple of accounts that we have that he heard a teaching and then he would look at his own experience. And his questions often came from the teaching says this and this is my experience and they don't seem to match. What's going on here? So the first recorded question that we have of him as a student is he was young, probably a teenager maybe even younger, and he was receiving a teaching on the Heart Sutra.
Speaker 2:And the Heart Sutra is the chant that we chanted during morning service. We'll chant it in Sino Japanese tomorrow, but we always chant the Heart Sutra in the morning. So the very primary Mahayana teaching. And they got to the part where the teacher was talking about there's no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. And Deng Shan was like, Why does it say there's no eye, no ear?
Speaker 2:I have an eye, I have ears, like right here. What does that mean? So that's part of Deng Shan's kind of questioning. Like okay the teaching says this, but this is my experience. And so he was you know he was curious about this teaching of emptiness.
Speaker 2:Well that's he didn't know what that meant yet. What does it mean? No eye, no ear, no nose. Maybe you have that question. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, what is that referring to? What is this mind? This prajna paramita mind that's before we identify these organs of the senses, before we identify anything. So he has this question and I don't know how that one got resolved, But later in his life when he's now going around and studying with different teachers which is often in the teachings of our Chan lineage teachers they often would travel from time to time and ask different teachers questions or study with different teachers at different times. So he started asking teachers another question.
Speaker 2:He said, I heard this teaching from the Avatamsaka and other teachers talk about how insentient beings speak the Dharma. How the natural world speaks the Dharma, how stones and rocks and rivers speak the Dharma. And then he's like, But I can't hear it. Why can't I hear it? There's again it's that, okay there's the teaching and here's my experience.
Speaker 2:And he's looking into that, he's wrestling with the teaching. So it's part of practice is we hit these teachings whether there's something that you're chanting or something that you've heard in the Dharma or just some question about the nature of reality. It's like okay this is the teaching or this is what people are saying and here's my experience. And I wanna understand. So that's the kind of mind he's in.
Speaker 2:I wanna understand why can't I hear it? So he's asking teachers this and he's also asking, am I the only one who can't hear it? Like can you hear it? And there was a teaching at that time that said, will all sages hear it? So he was like, it says all sages hear it.
Speaker 2:Hey teacher, one of his teachers was Guishan. Hey Guishan, can you hear it if all teachers hear it? And why can't I? And Guishan answered him, Well you can't because you were born to a mother and a father. And Dengshaw said though this question kind of like seemed like a deflection, it actually deepened his understanding of what he was asking.
Speaker 2:So because you were born to a mother and a father, sounds a little dismissive maybe, but what is he pointing to? Oh maybe because you are identified with this separate self you're separating yourself from the insentient world. You think you're here with your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind and you're gonna hear that river speak the dharma. You're gonna hear that bird if you put in the right effort or you do the right thing. And he's saying in a kind of subtle way, there might be another way.
Speaker 2:There might be another you who can listen to the insentient beings. Who is the you that wasn't born to your mother or your father? What if you listened with your unborn Buddha mind? What if you listened from the mind or heart of interconnection? So this opened a door for Dengshan he said and yet he still didn't feel like he understood.
Speaker 2:He still felt like he couldn't quite hear it and so he continued to ask And he came to his his root teacher who became his root teacher, Yun Yan, and they have a back and forth. And Yun Yan eventually answers him, well if if I heard it, so he's asking him again, well can you hear it? Like they say that the insentient beings speak the Dharma, all sages can hear it, can you hear it? And Yun Yan says, well if I heard it then you couldn't hear me teach the Dharma. He kinda turns it around on him.
Speaker 2:But Dongshan who's a little sharper now, maybe a little more immersed in or has tasted this world of emptiness, of openness, the unborn Buddha mind. He responds, well I don't hear you. And then that's the opening Yun Nyeon says, well if you don't hear me then how could you hear the Dharma of rocks, grasses, trees, and the great earth. And so for Deng Shan those were the turning words. Those were the turning words.
Speaker 2:And he replies in poem which we sometimes have in the Zen tradition that a teacher has an insight and then they write a poem to express that, to express that understanding. This is one of my favorite poems. Dengshan says, How splendid, how splendid, how wondrous, inconceivable in sentient beings speak the Dharma. The ears never hear it, it's the eyes that hear it. So he gives us a little taste of how he understood and maybe even a way to practice this, In sentient beings speak the Dharma.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons I love that poem is I just appreciate Dongshan's delight. He takes three or two stanzas just to like celebrate. This question that has been with him that he's carrying around that he's sincerely asking, how splendid, how wondrous. There is a delight in this practice. How splendid, how wondrous these shifts in perspective, these openings that we have in the Dharma, these wrestlings and then seeing what's on the other side, getting a glimpse of our true nature, Getting a glimpse of ease, or even on the first day of Sashin getting a glimpse of what it's like to sit in a body and breathe.
Speaker 2:Ah, how wondrous for a moment maybe. Ah how wondrous. How wondrous. Inconceivable. It is inconceivable.
Speaker 2:We can't make it happen. It just happens. A body relaxing on the exhale. These shifts in perception and understanding, these openings into the mystery of life, they are wondrous. They are inconceivable.
Speaker 2:Now I think maybe in modern times we might not have this same kind of question, maybe. But I I think we wouldn't necessarily say that the grasses, trees, rocks, bamboo, wind, and sky are insentient. Which means like without consciousness, not alive. Maybe, and that's you know part of perhaps question as well. Like is there really this distinction between sentient and insentient beings?
Speaker 2:And I think that's part of what the teachers responses are too. Why are you dividing the world that way? Why do you think you're wiser than a rock or a river? They're much more ancient than you. They probably know something about the Buddha way, about this mind, a silent open heart mind.
Speaker 2:But here we are indoors so that's a place we can make the distinction. Like, oh well we were outside listening to the life speak the Dharma, listening to the birds and the feeling the sun and the grasses and the whole world alive and now we're inside. Do the walls and floorboards, electric lights, do they speak the Dharma? Are they sentient or insentient? And if so, if this life which the Dharma says is one life inside, outside, in between one life, How can we perceive the teachings of the natural world?
Speaker 2:How can we perceive the teachings of the insentient beings in this room? The walls, the floor. Dongshan says listen with your eyes. Listen with your eyes. Listen with your whole body.
Speaker 2:Listen with your breath. Listen from that place before identification. Before label, thought. Even if thoughts are happening we can listen before we get caught in them. Listen with your no ears from your unborn awareness.
Speaker 2:Another way you might say that or he might have said that is listen or enter the mind of the flower or the tree or the earth, and listen from there. Listen from here. So this is also something that we can cultivate, intentionally practice. One of the things about the Dharma teachings is that they're subtle and we can get into habits around practice really quickly or just we bring our habit mind to practice and so it's all tangled up always. And so you know we can sit and be practicing with the breath but we can be like subtly following the breath from some idea of our self in our heads or kind of from a disembodied number that we're counting.
Speaker 2:This invitation to listen with your eyes just invites us to play a little with perception. So we can explore that, like you can take a moment and just let your eyes rest on the floor in front of you. And just notice what your ordinary way of seeing is. And then imagine that you can listen to the floor or just like bring that sense in. Included in your looking at the floor, also listening.
Speaker 2:As if you might really hear something, if you listen with a close enough attention. You could even include the heart in your listening continuing to gaze in the floor but also becoming aware of the heart space. And just noticing, without expecting anything radical to happen, just noticing if there's any shift in how you're normally engaging with the sense of seeing, just by adding that invitation to listen. That can be a really interesting practice as we start going outside and breaking up into solo sits. If you sit with a being, you can sit and look and take them in in a receptive awareness and then also imagine that you can really hear them.
Speaker 2:Bring in that sense of hearing or listening. That's beyond the ears, but sometimes like bringing in that sense of hearing allows us to open to another kind of receptive awareness. Oh, it's as we all know the first full day of sashin and I just want to name it always takes time to settle. You know many of you have done many sashin. For some of you it's your first.
Speaker 2:And even if you've done many, even if you're a resident here, it often takes time to settle, to really arrive here. We're used to thinking, being pulled around by the thinking mind, doing, engaging, exerting our will on things, attending to the various demands and responsibilities of our life. And so, you know, always when we come to Sashin, it takes time to arrive, to find our seat again, to let the body relax and breathe. So Myo Yu's been emphasizing that the body naturally relaxes on the exhale. And you might be like Dongshan and be like, well I don't feel that.
Speaker 2:But it's something to investigate. Oh does that what would that feel like? What does that feel like in your body if you stay with the breath? Stay with the exhalation. Are there subtle ways that the body relaxes each exhale?
Speaker 2:What happens in your body? And even a simple teaching like that, we may not have a lot of experience with it at first, but if we stay with it, it will open up. And that's what happens during a session. We come, we're like distracted and restless, and we're trying to get our spot and figure out the schedule, and it's a different schedule, and how do you get from your tent to the Zendo in time. And then you start to find the practice or you have moments of finding the practice and moments of forgetting.
Speaker 2:And so the first day of Sashin, this just invitation to start to simplify, to start to come home to yourself. Now sometimes people find that when they arrive at Sashin they're tired. And so the first day of Sashin may feel like, Ugh, just keep falling asleep. That's okay. That's part of the settling process.
Speaker 2:Some of us feel restless. Some of us feel tired. Some of us feel bored. Some of us wanna get out of here. What?
Speaker 2:Just part of the rhythm of this first few days of Sashin. So as we continue to arrive here in Sashin, I wanna offer another invitation to support us in settling. And that is to notice contentment, to notice ease. Though it's similar to that allowing the body to relax on the exhalation, we can start to tune into the natural ease or joy or contentment of being present, of really being here. So whatever practice method you've been using, whether that's the breath or listening to sound, just see in your experience can you notice contentment or pleasure?
Speaker 2:Is there a joy in simply hearing and simply opening your awareness to the sounds of wind, bird, song, or just to feel the body in its seat? Is there an ease to being still? Simply being aware. Even if the mind is restless, is there an ease too? And how do you experience it?
Speaker 2:One of the aspects of contentment or ease or pleasure or joy is that we actually can only experience it now. So it helps us presence. We can't experience contentment ten minutes from now. Now, we can have some idea of like, oh if I only had, and then I will do this, and then I will get said contentment, usually that doesn't work. So this practice of Dharma is inviting us to open to the resource of well-being, of contentment, of ease, that actually is foundational to who we are.
Speaker 2:To start to recognize it. Because we can recognize a lot of other things and really focus on those things. And the Buddha said depending on what we decide to really focus on that is the cause of suffering. Right? The mind has this tendency and we know this, and it frustrates us, I'm gonna say it again.
Speaker 2:The mind has this tendency to focus on what's not working, to notice discontentment. Oh, the pain of Sashin, the pain of the body, Or the bad feelings that are arising, the emotions, or it's too hot, or it's too windy, or the food isn't the food I want to be eating. Food's great by the way. But you know that's what we do, that's what the mind does. It can always think of something else.
Speaker 2:It can always find what is quite not right and focus on it and focus on it and focus on it and that causes suffering. That is how we feed dissatisfaction. And then that can turn into blaming others, blaming ourselves, blaming the conditions, scheming, planning, and then we're pretty far away from contentment. Seemingly, but it's actually still right here. Even in the midst of those dissatisfaction spirals, blaming spirals, trying to get it all right spirals.
Speaker 2:If we catch the mind going down those thought streams, which for many of us are well worn ruts, so it will happen, probably a lot during Sashin, that the mind will start to find things it doesn't like. We can remember, Oh yeah, is there contentment here too? Where can I look? Breath. It's the method, it's the practice method.
Speaker 2:Where can I look? Right where you return to. Right here in this sense world, which is also always in the present moment. So that's one of the real, I think, boons of being outside. Yes, there are many things that maybe we want to try to control or change, but also being outside there's like endless sources of contentment, beauty, pleasure, ease.
Speaker 2:Oh, the sound of the bird, the sound of the wind. Can you feel the ease of these natural sounds, the air just so gently caressing your body or moving the abdomen up and down. I want to introduce another ancestor practitioner. Her name is Da Hong, Da Hong Suneem. She's a contemporary, although she's no longer alive, but a more recent Zen, Korean Zen teacher.
Speaker 2:And part of why I want to talk about her is that she really her practice took place outside, and she discovered an affinity with the natural world. Actually the natural world was a huge refuge for her when she was growing up. So when she was a child, when she was born her father worked for the government and they were pretty well-to-do, and then later in her life when she was about seven or eight her father lost his job. There was a change in the government and he was let go of and actually sent into a kind of exile. So they were they left their home, their beautiful home in the city and live now in the country.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately for Da Hong Soonim, her father really like became quite angry and resentful and took a lot of that anger out on her. So she didn't feel safe most of the time to be at home, and she would start to, or she started to escape into the forest near their house and spend most of her days in the forest. And while she was in the forest she's a young child unfamiliar with the wilderness and so she developed practices, what we would call practices, for her it was probably somewhat of a gamesurvival strategy, to work with her fear while she was in the forest. So she developed ways of sitting with it and staying. Even though she was afraid, she was more comfortable in the forest than going home, so she kept staying with the fear that would arise while she was in the wilderness.
Speaker 2:And at some point, through that staying with discomfort, so it sounds very much like practice, through her staying with discomfort and staying with fear she had what we would call a spiritual opening. You know, so she's seven, she didn't really have that language, but she came to recognize the what we would call equanimity or the peace, the one who is not disturbed, the one who is not afraid. She came to recognize what we call the ground of being or her true nature, and she felt held by this being. Like, wow, like all this fear I was feeling is suddenly like released into this stable presence where everything is okay. And so she called it daddy, which is so sweet.
Speaker 2:It felt like love, that coming home to herself. So throughout her life because she had that experience and it was so powerful and it became such a refuge for her, she was really practicing the Dharma from a very young age. Because after that experience she was just continuing to come back to that foundation, come back to daddy as she says in her biography. But she developed this deep faith in her true nature, in the imperturbability of mind. That everything's okayness.
Speaker 2:And since she had experiences before she ordained and like got immersed in the Buddhist tradition. She has different language that she uses. So she calls it your center or her center or the foundation or the great pillar of mind's nature which you know has a Zen flavor to it. But she continued practicing. So her life, you know, she lived during the Korean War and was really moved by the suffering that she witnessed during that time.
Speaker 2:And she had this deep question of why do we suffer? Why do we suffer? And so she spent a lot of her practice life walking and sitting in the forest with this question, and with this faith in the nature of her mind, with this faith in the practice. And her insight deepened. So I wanna read a little from her.
Speaker 2:Again like I told the story of her more as a student and here's her now as a teacher. So here's how she, you know, how she teaches her her students or how she used to teach her students. This is from a book that's called Like Lions Learning to Roar, which is all of us. We're like lions learning to roar, finding our voice, finding our true source of power. And this one's called Hold On to Your Center and Let Everything Flow.
Speaker 2:She says, People tend to make all kinds of judgments based on what they see or hear but you really shouldn't tie yourself up in fixed views like this. When Shakyamuni Buddha wanted to save an insect sometimes he became that insect. He had to first become one with that creatures mind and then it wouldn't resist his help. Years ago when I was walking through a forest I came across a crawfish sitting in the middle of the trail. It had ended up quite a ways from the nearby stream, so I bent down intending to pick it up and carry it back to the water.
Speaker 2:But as I reached for the crawfish it held up its claws waving them at me as if to fight me off. As soon as I saw this I knew what the Buddha had meant. In order to save a crawfish you have to become one with it. Even a crawfish. Although we ourselves now have a human shape we're filled with consciousnesses of every kind of level.
Speaker 2:These unenlightened consciousnesses give rise to every kind of feeling and thought. Sometimes they make us happy, at other times they cause us to feel miserable, and at still other times they cause us to feel angry. But they're deceiving us. Those thoughts are arising from inside us so we mistake them for me, thinking they are my feelings. We act on them and make choices based on them and this is how life becomes suffering.
Speaker 2:Yet the Dharma says there is no suffering. This is because every single thing you do and experience keeps transforming every instant. So that's something we can also notice during Sensei. Is that true in your experience? Is every experience that happens transforming moment to moment?
Speaker 2:She says, it's all flowing like water, or like clouds gathering and then drifting away. So those are great analogies to investigate. Is experience flowing like water or like clouds gathering and then flowing away? You know, sometimes clouds can be dark and stormy and kinda hang around for a while, but then eventually they flow away. But here we are insisting that things should be like this or people should be doing that as if we had any control over any of it.
Speaker 2:As if we could catch the clouds and grab water in our fists. How could trying to grab hold of such things lead anywhere other than to suffering? If you're wise enough to just let these things flow past you can avoid so much unnecessary suffering. There's not a single thing anywhere that's fixed or stationary. All of it is ceaselessly changing and transforming and flowing away.
Speaker 2:Thus it's called empty. So that's what we mean by empty. We can't hold onto it. Even the I doesn't exist. Within your body I is a collection of cells and lives that are ceaselessly flowing and changing.
Speaker 2:Outside your body this I is also part of a ceaselessly changing whole. So this body mind that we call I, me, ceaselessly changing within the space of the whole world that's also ceaselessly changing. Now that's an expression of interconnection. Each aspect is flowing and transforming with nothing stationary that can separate that we can separate out and label. It's all empty.
Speaker 2:Thus there is no stationary place for illness to stick to nor any place for suffering to stick to. There's no place for karma, no place for sadness, no place for even joy to remain. So she's not saying that there's no place that these things shouldn't arise, she's saying there's no place for them to stick to forever. They arise, we feel sad sometimes. They arise, we feel joy sometimes.
Speaker 2:It's wonderful. That's one of the wonderful things about being alive, right? That we get to feel all these different waves of experience. But that's something that we can really come to notice during this sashin, how experience changes. It's so ordinary, it's so much a part of our moment to moment experience that we overlook it.
Speaker 2:But it's actually quite liberating to notice. Oh. Like, you remember what you were feeling when we started this Dharma talk? And then she uses the analogy, it's like going to a movie. It plays for a couple of hours and then it's over and the curtain comes down and then before long the next movie starts.
Speaker 2:Our lives too are like this. So regardless of what kind of role you're playing, go forward holding fast to your own upright center. All you truly need to do is just hold on to this. So we could say that what she's pointing to is all we need to do is hold to our practice. Hold to our practice.
Speaker 2:Everything else is flowing. Thoughts are coming, they're going to grab us, but all we need to do is come back to that practice. Come back to our method. Body, breath, sound. And that's centering.
Speaker 2:Come back to our center right here. So please entrust yourself to this to this practice. And before we end, maybe notice is there contentment right here? How do you know? 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 zendust.org. Your support supports us.