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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 morning, everyone. Thank you for coming together to practice what is rare to practice. Morning to all of you here at Great Vow and also those of you online who are participating. We've been at the monastery, we've been exploring, an essential element in Zen practice, the cultivation of patience. A couple weeks ago talked a little bit about that here.
Speaker 2:So I'd like to continue unfolding different aspects of patients and ask you to consider your experience. Patience, Kashanti Paramita is the Sanskrit word. Kashanti is translated as patience or forbearance, endurance. And it's one of the six trainings of a Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva, what is that?
Speaker 2:So a Bodhisattva is an important figure in Mahayana Buddhism of which Zen is a part. Mahayana means great vehicle. And a bodhisattva traditionally is a figure, an awakening being, bodhisattva, an awakening being, traditionally is an awakening being who remains in the human realm to help other beings to awaken to their true nature, their awakened nature, their Buddha nature of which all beings, all of us are. So, Bodhisattvas have this prime directive, this mission, this purpose, this vow to help other beings see into their true nature and be free. So you can see them around here, different figures out in the Gizo Garden.
Speaker 2:The main, inspiration for the spirit of practice here is Gizo Bodhisattva. This monastery is named after Jizo Bodhisattva's Great Vow. Jizo is a little figure you'll see, looks like a little monk. See him all over inside and out. And this great vow of Jiso Bodhisattva is a solemn promise to delay entering final enlightenment until every single living being in all realms of existence is saved from suffering.
Speaker 2:In other words, Jezo will will is the spirit of just continuing to help beings noticing that they're suffering and need help. And anyone who endeavors to help others is a Bodhisattva. These Bodhisattvas are are not simply sort of celestial figures although they can be experienced in that way. Bodhisattvas are not simply archetypes although we can experience them that way. There's the Bodhisattva of compassion, Kannan or Kwan Yin, who has the qualities of of being with suffering beings.
Speaker 2:And we can experience that as our own ability. This is how we practice with Bodhisattvas as an archetype. There's a part of us. There's a an element of us which is compassionate and that can be woken up, that can be revealed, that can be seen, lived. And Jiso Bodhisattva has the great vow to help other beings no matter how long it takes.
Speaker 2:And there that that is present in us too. And it can be cultivated. Gizo has qualities of unflagging optimism, unflagging optimism, fearlessness, benevolence. And so we can, through the practice of Jiso Bodhisattva of Bodhisattva practice, can notice these aspects in ourselves and really develop them so that they can help. So anyone who endeavors to help others is a Bodhisattva.
Speaker 2:Awakening, it's said that awakening has two main aspects, wisdom and compassion. So as Bodhisattvas, all of us whether you know it or not, are Bodhisattvas. If you've come here, certainly. So some of us are more accustomed to the compassion side of the wisdom and compassion, that element helping others and relieving suffering. So this isn't the development of compassion isn't like, Oh, you're not doing it right.
Speaker 2:It's noticing that part of our heart that is called to help others. And some of us already, this is present and maybe it's been as present for as long as we can remember or got developed in some way. And that way the compassion function could be, this compassion side of helping others helping others can be as a parent, Helping a child grow up. It might be in a helping career as a nurse, teacher, doctor, firefighter, and those are obvious ones. But we can see helping others happen in a less heroic way.
Speaker 2:The unsung heroes of helping others, a plumber. You have a fountain of your of water coming out of your kitchen. Plumber is great bodhisattva. An accountant. An accountant.
Speaker 2:Pilot. Anyone. So you may already be helping other people and don't even realize that you're what you do or you forget we're helping other people. So for that person it might mean the person who comes to practice and has the compassionate side. It might be that one of the things that practice can bring out is more of the wisdom side, the wisdom part.
Speaker 2:So here the teachings and teachers might emphasize, how do I do this in a way that doesn't pull me into despair? How do I help in a way that doesn't cause myself or others more suffering? It might be realizing the teachings of impermanence, interconnection, And bringing those teachings, those aspects of reality into our compassion, compassion work, compassion action. It might be the aspect of karma. Things are as they are.
Speaker 2:One of the things when I was doing prior to my my Zen life or concurrent, they overlapped but my career was in social change, working with, in the labor movement. And there was a real, the inspiration to help others better their lives, those who didn't have health insurance, no no retirement, paying lot being paid less than minimum wage. And there's the part that says, it shouldn't be this way. It needs to change. And, so we respond.
Speaker 2:But one of the things I found over doing it for twenty years is that attitude, it shouldn't be this way, also can be a dirty fuel in the engine. That it shouldn't be this way, well it is this way. So now how do you respond? Because the it shouldn't be this way then the mind thinks about like here's what it should have been like. Here's decisions other people should have made.
Speaker 2:They should have done it this other way. You get totally caught and spun up in in that. And that's not a bad thing to consider systems, very important. Making systemic change, you think about systems. But, and there's somebody or somebody's people who need your help right now and they actually don't need me to be thinking about the way that the laws in Oregon were written in nineteen four thirteen.
Speaker 2:They don't need me to think about that right now. Right? So the seeing the wisdom side, the karma side is things are as they are, now what do we do? Some of us come to practice from the wisdom side you know, we're interested in seeing the and not that these are two, but it might be the side of the from the the aspect of emptiness of interconnection. Maybe having an experience or being in, inspired by the experience of the writing, writings of the great mystics, the writings of the Zen teachers.
Speaker 2:What does it all mean? What is the purpose of life? This aspect is also important to to develop. But in this case, if someone is really in the the so for the the one who's in the who's been the helper, that may be that the teachings and teachers and and teachers are really sort of, now let's look at the wisdom side. Let's look at karma impermanence and interconnection not as a way to negate one's experience or say that one is, too compassionate.
Speaker 2:But how can we be skillful? How can we have a broad mind? How can we have joy in our in our compassion? Sympathetic joy, how can we have loving kindness? How can we have equanimity in the midst of suffering and helping?
Speaker 2:So that's where the teachings and teachers might emphasize those aspect for somebody who's, you know what, I don't need to talk to you about compassion. You're helping. Then on the wisdom side, if we're if we're too far in the wisdom side then the teacher really pushes people into the helping side, the helping others part. The, one of the great Zen teachers, the first ancestor in Japan, the one who brought our particular flavor of Zen to Japan in twelve hundreds, Dogen Zenji, great teacher Ehei Dogen, first ancestor of Japan Ehei Dogen, we say. He would go on and on warning monks about falling into Hinayana Buddhism.
Speaker 2:Hinayana means small vehicle. And it's also that word Hinayana is used has been used as a pejorative for by Mahayana Buddhist chauvinists. Criticizing a certain kind of Buddhism of of of the small vehicle. This is And it's a And it's been used to, you know, it's used been used as a pejorative or in that way and so it's not really We don't use it very often but I'll use it in this case because Dogen wasn't isn't criticizing or critiquing or pushing his monks to watch out for Southeast Asian Buddhists, you know, who are practicing Theravada Buddhism. That's often the way that it's that word has been used, small vehicle.
Speaker 2:What Dogan is pointing to is he's warning his monks against falling into me practice, only me practice, My practice, me. Because it's so easy to fall into. He wouldn't be warning if he wasn't seeing it or if he wasn't worried about it. And neglecting the serving others part, really, that our our Zen practice has to is is important to function in the world. So, for his monks who are falling into the wisdom part, he wanted to pull them into the helping others part, back into Bodhisattva activity.
Speaker 2:So we want to we develop through practice a balanced view, a balanced practice. And sometimes we emphasize one more than the other and you know, it's not about getting it perfect because things are impermanent and always flowing, it's a it's dynamic. So the monastery here is good for this part of developing the helping others part. Everything we do here to support this place is is to support this place so it continue to be an offering. We want this place to be to be an offering for a thousand years.
Speaker 2:And sometimes we can lose sight of this and because you we live here. So we can lose sight of what we're doing is actually, that's the other thing. So we can lose sight of our helping. So we can lose sight of this that our activity here is to help. So we so we have teachers or teachings, teachers who point or poke us into noticing.
Speaker 2:So in a in a very practical way, we can do a certain activity and view it as a chore. We can view it as a chore. I gotta get this done. We're doing all this stuff so that we can then, gotta get the dishes done, gotta sweep, gotta and there's those all those things are important. And, we can view them as like in the way of, I do all this so that then I can go practice.
Speaker 2:And, or we can view our activity as a gift that we're giving. We can do the dishes with a spirit of kindness to the dishes, they're dirty, they need they need to go back to their shiny selves. Taking the, I wanna do this now so oatmeal doesn't harden on them. So we can view view doing the dishes in the spirit of kindness to the dishes. We can do this in view in view of kindness to the cook.
Speaker 2:So that they have clean cutting boards, clean knives, sharp knives, a clean kitchen so that their activity of feeding, it's it's not a chore of making, you know, but it's like this is an offering, a gift. We can make beds remembering that this is for the guests who come and rest their weary body after a day of sitting sashined. And you don't have to live in a monastery to live with the spirit. Even if you're leave, even even if you're by yourself doing the dishes for the future you. Offering offering a clean kitchen, a clean house to honor the house, to honor the future you who's is gonna live in the house.
Speaker 2:So this is the Bodhisattva spirit and the Zen spirit that all of it can be an offering when we just allow ourselves to see it that way. So Bodhisattvas need training, so we have the Paramitas or the perfections. So these are aspects of training our heart, mind, things that we can develop that help us in our own awakening and and helping others. So these are giving, being generous, being ethical, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and wisdom. Wisdom can be translated, can be also understanding, understanding.
Speaker 2:So we can look at these, as I've said before, we can look at these in a sequential way, they're often taught that way. Let's start with giving and that's a good way to begin the activity of offering. And so that's can can be inspired to give but also to notice our own giving. Giving loosens our habitual preoccupation with ourselves, we begin to think of others, notice others, act more ethically. So we notice others and how they suffer and how our actions affect them, We show up and try and be ethical in the world.
Speaker 2:We gain more, practice patience and meditation and so on. And there's a way, of course these are all happening all at once. In the moment of giving there's also being ethical. So we've, the past couple months we've been practicing, first we call, we were practicing, we've been practicing Kashanti One, we practiced it as, I'm trying to think of the word that we used, it's escaping me. They're both patients.
Speaker 2:Because once we begin actually practicing generosity, ethics, meditation, all the rest, we discover something very quickly that practice is difficult, other people are difficult, our own minds are difficult, life does not cooperate with our plans, so we need Keshanthi, patience. So there's, this patience is not waiting. Waiting in a way is like there's something that there's that, I'm kind of enduring until I get what I want, till I can, until the red light changes when I'm in a hurry, till the slow driver, until I can get to the passing lane when I'm behind the slow driver on a two lane road. So one of the things that you can do is reflect on our own experience of impatience and patience. Where am I impatient?
Speaker 2:What am I trying to hurry up? What am I trying to make go away? It's funny because I, in asking these questions a couple weeks ago for you to ponder, I revealed that one of the places I get impatient is printers. I think printers should always be working perfectly. Always available to me at all times providing exactly the copies that I want and right after the talk, right after the talk I went to print something and there was a paper jam.
Speaker 2:A big paper jam. So this is very very amusing to me. And, you know, one of the things that it's interesting, so I've been pondering this like why why am I in situation where how do I put myself in situations where well, one of the reasons why I end up in a situation where I'm impatient with a printer that's not working is that I'm trying to do it at the last minute and so I don't give this poor machine any leeway in terms of providing me what I am demanding of it. So that's my part, it's one of my parts is just noticing how I'm showing up it's like, oh well if you do things at the last minute that's what will happen. So that's an example of noticing when noticing our places of impatience.
Speaker 2:And so you might ponder what are your hooks for that? But the other thing that's another way to practice is noticing our patience that already, we already have. We can, in our in our meditation and in our practice, it's very interest, we we notice So two things, one is our mind is prone to, the negative. So it's like, what am I self am I trying to fix? Right?
Speaker 2:Or what is And it's also painful so it gets our impatience or whatever whatever it is gets our attention because there's suffering that's happened there. So that gets our attention. But when we're being patient, we really kinda don't know, we're just like, oh, I'm just I'm just living. But there's quality that's already existing, may be already existing. So it perhaps it's patience watching a child learn something new.
Speaker 2:Letting a child be themselves, letting them be their age, letting them learn how to tie their shoes, and just being with them. Grandparents are wonderful for this. They're totally enchanted with waiting a long time for a child to just do what it's doing. Notice that there may be some places like patients at the post office, Just listening to somebody tell you something important to them without thinking about what you're gonna say. So this is where we can get into, this is what, the kind of patience that, there's a Tibetan teacher, Tibetan Chodron calls the patience of definitely practicing the Dharma or I'd like to call this just Dharma patience.
Speaker 2:So one of the aspects of dharma patience is helping others. People don't always do what we think they ought to do. It's hard being a kid. So in the patience of helping others, people are not how we think they ought to be. They don't do what we think they ought to do.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes we can see how they're suffering and if they just saw things differently the way that we think that they we, they just saw things differently they wouldn't suffer. You know, we can see so clearly what they should be doing. They should be doing what we think they should be doing. But nobody likes to hear the words, you know what your problem is. Oh, do I have a workshop that you should go to?
Speaker 2:It's called the inner critic. It would really help you. You know what? You should really start meditating. Let me tell you about it.
Speaker 2:All about it. So patience is allowing people to have their own process. And of course, we have things that we can offer. The patience of helping others can we can help see our desire for recognition. I can't wait for this person to tell me thank you for all my helping.
Speaker 2:One of the Lojong, one of the slogans, the Lojong practice of the Tibetan Buddhism is, don't expect applause. Don't expect applause. And this points directly at this aspect of of how kind of waiting can seep into our our helping. And so we can let go of that. Oh, let go of my agenda for recognition and just show up.
Speaker 2:And we can help others. Dharma, Dharma patients is the deep practice of deep listening. And what is this person really needing right now? What can what can I offer them? Our our kind undistracted presence.
Speaker 2:What's underneath the words that they're saying? And finally, really really respecting people are on their own path and it may unfold differently and in its own time despite despite our ideas and our pushing. So Dharma patients of helping others and then the Dharma patients of being with challenging experiences. Thubden Chaudhren writing about this said, that he said about this aspect, Once I was reading a book by a psychologist discussing some of the things he found that made people most anxious. The first thing was death.
Speaker 2:The second was thinking about freedom and responsibility for your own life. Third was isolation and aloneness and fourth was thinking about the meaning of life. Well, what Zen spiritual practice is all about. So we come to practice and we come to find that we're having challenging experiences still. And in some ways, sometimes we feel like we're even more anxious than we were and part of that is by we're we're practicing less distraction.
Speaker 2:We're not using our old strategies and we're being with what arises. So two aspects of being with challenging experiences, one is allowing or letting be, allowing what's here to be here. Allowing whatever emotion is present to be here. Allowing whatever experience is happening to be here and not have it not be a problem. Allowing allowing yourself to be with what's here.
Speaker 2:Grief, confusion, our our shortcomings, a way we wanted to show up for someone in a certain way, we didn't do that and we have regret, just allowing that to be there rather than trying to get rid of it or seeing our experience as some kind of failure or short or or that it's learning rather than seeing it's learning. And the other is not knowing and this is we talked a little bit about this in this patience of helping others not knowing what this other person ought to do or be simply being present, intimate with the experience. And intimacy comes with, patience comes with intimacy with our experience because we're, we don't say, oh I got that, I understand it, and then move on to the next thing. We really go into it. That's why one of the great teachings in Zen is not knowing is most intimate.
Speaker 2:Having this spirit of not knowing and allowing it to really open up in our experience. So speaking of not knowing, I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about, a transition that we hear at the monastery that I'd like to talk about. So as many of you know, so over the past couple weeks we've been, doing a project here, we had a workshop that David who's a guest here, came in led about clarifying roles role here at the monastery. And part of that is clarifying, roles so to allow us to do a transition. So, yesterday, in the evening we had a brief ceremony here of transition where Chosen and Hogan had basically handed over the mantle of being the abbot of Great Vow from them to me.
Speaker 2:And we had to really clarify what does that mean. So I'll talk a little bit about that. Well, one is that there's lots of ways that we had to clarify because there's different ways that this kind of transition can happen and so we had to find what's our Great Vow Way. As I shared with the residents that some ways that this happens in history is that the abbot just takes off. And there was a teacher in Seattle, Japanese teachers from Seattle some years ago who basically came to the sangha and announced, you know what, I'm retiring, see you later.
Speaker 2:And he moved to Montana and became a potter. So that's one way that it can happen. So we had to look at clarifying what is, what's gonna happen. So Chosin and Hogan are gonna not, as far as I know they're not gonna leave and become potters although Chosin already does that and she can do that here. But they're gonna remain here so what is the moving from an Abbott to what they would call an Emeritus status, Abbott Emeritus.
Speaker 2:And so I asked, at one point in this world clarification, so we had to decide like what we haven't had an Abbott Emeritus before, we have to figure out what is that gonna be. So I I contacted, Edjo McMullen who's a teacher in Eugene and he's he's, has a lot of connections with Japan and he trained there and I asked him, so is there something in our tradition that that that has that? And he goes, oh yes, yes, yes. There's And he gave, there's a couple Japanese names. He says, there's called the Godo and the Seido and said, well what is their role?
Speaker 2:And he's like, well they're they're they teach when they're invited to, and they yank the Abbott's chain, and that's their job. Like, oh, okay. Joseon and Hogan are perfectly qualified for both of those things. So teaching and yanking the abbot's chain. So, Chosin and Hogan are going to remain present here, They're going to continue to offer teaching when they're invited to do so.
Speaker 2:Hogan is gonna lead a sasheen with me in October. Those of you who see Hogan as a teacher will continue to do that, as long as he wants to do that, which will be as long as he can as far as I can tell. And the hope is that Chosen and Hogan have had all this responsibility for 20 for decades, more than twenty years. And that they're relieved of responsibilities that they've carried for all these decades. And that they can do what they wanna do.
Speaker 2:And they don't have to worry about some of the things that they've worried about all this time. So that's part of the transition is that they don't have to they don't have to worry about that stuff. So that's what what what I am have been asked and said I am willing to do is to step into being responsible for those things. Get my chain yanked. So one of the So what are the next steps?
Speaker 2:So of this of this process, we had the ceremony, ceremony of entrustment. Joseph and Hogan asked me to do this. I said, yes. And then because we're part of a tradition that's not just great vow but is connected with the wider Zen world and in in Japan, we'll do a ceremony there, in the spring called Zuisei. And so this is the culmination of the aspect of the training that I went to Japan, I was there for six months over the last year and was at Toshoji Monastery and learned a lot about what Zen training is in Japan in that experience.
Speaker 2:And then, in order to kind of finish the certification, we go and do this ceremony at two monasteries in Japan. One is Dogen's monastery and called Eheji and the other is that's in the mountains north of Kyoto and then in Fukui Prefecture and then there's one in outside of Tokyo. And in that ceremony you basically are abbot for the day of that monastery. So I did a little research about about this ceremony called Zuisei and it says originally it it seemed to mean basically that word meant, Zui means auspicious and Zuisei means the world, Zuisei. And originally it seems that it meant the same as being promoted to an office and Wikipedia says maybe it can be interpreted as quote to make an auspicious announcement to the whole world or something along those lines.
Speaker 2:But some of the research says that, so why would you go and be abbot of the day of a monastery? Well, it seems that in ancient times, in medieval times, that it was hard to get people to do the job of an abbot. And so, they had a tradition basically, couldn't get people to become the head of monasteries. So, they would get permission to teach from their teaching, we call it Dharma Transmission. And, that ended up being, what they did was they said like, if you weren't didn't become abbot of a temple, they would basically revoke your teaching credential.
Speaker 2:So it says, Dharma transmission or permission to teach at the temple obliged one to serve at least one term as abbot at the main temple. And abbotship gave severe duties and financial burdens for which reason many tried to avoid the responsibility. And there's there's all these stories of of these Chinese abbots. Somebody would get elected the abbot and then they would disappear, climb over the wall in the night and go running. And there's some story about a teacher who like left like four times and all the monks are trying to track him down all over China, bring him back and make him do it.
Speaker 2:And so one of the stories is, so I don't know who these characters are but it says, Tsugen, Baisan, and Jochu each demanded that future generations excommunicate any Zen teacher who failed to fulfill the obligation to serve as abbot of the TED temple. Bison decreed that the obedient Zen successor should seize defiant ones and then burn the offender's successor certificate before his very eyes. Yeah. So now, as a holdover for this, they do say that you do the ceremony if you once you've received transmission as a teacher, have to do the ceremony within ten years or they don't recognize you in Japan. But then there's always a like, well, can all then you can fill out a form and get another ten years.
Speaker 2:So there it's like but it's a holdover. The ceremony is a holdover from that tradition of we gotta get the we gotta get them to do this. How can we make them do this? Okay. So and then we'll do a public ceremony here at Great Vow, next fall.
Speaker 2:It's called a mountain seat ceremony. And some of you who are around may have seen Chosen's ceremony that was 2023, I think, 2022. So that in that ceremony Chosen even though she had been abbot for and founded this place had an official ceremony. There's lots of tradition around that. She went up the mountain basically.
Speaker 2:So in this particular ceremony what'll happen is the abbot will descend the mountain and then the next abbot ascends the mountain. So and now it's gonna be in a year because we'll have bunches of people from Japan to come and we want the whole Songa to come etcetera etcetera. So so right now I would say I consider myself the acting abbot basically on on behalf of of Chosen and Hogan. That's how I think about it. That it will become solidified, at this mountain seat ceremony.
Speaker 2:So, then I really can't climb over the wall and run away. So but So I wanted to share that with all of you that this transition that happened, somebody asked, well, what what's what will change? And I I think that most of us, most of you won't notice any significant change, but there also is a change. That you kind of can't quite point to. I remember when Joe Mon and I got married, someone it's one of the things I noticed is, like we had been together for a very long time, when we got married and after we got married, I don't know what changed, but something changed.
Speaker 2:Don't know how to put it beyond that. So I kind of feel that way about this, that that I can't tell you what's changed, but something's changed. So, I would just wanted to share that with with all of you and see if it actually see if there's any questions about this.
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.