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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.
Chozen:Good afternoon. This is Rohatsu Sashin, 2025. I believe it's day five. It always makes me smile, that line from the Gotham opening the sutra as we see it, hear it. We're constantly seeing it and hearing it.
Chozen:The question is what's blocking us from understanding what it's saying to us all the time, all the time. I've been talking about awakening, the awakening experience, because people are very curious about that. And it isn't talked about, it's not considered modest, shall we say, to talk about your awakening experiences. And it also gives people the wrong idea, sets an idea in their mind about what they're aiming for, which can be very confusing and a block. So at ZCLA, when we were studying at ZCLA, only two books that taught you how to practice were Three Pillars of Zen and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Chozen:And Three Pillars of Zen I probably shouldn't tell you this if you haven't read the book but it has a whole chapter on people's awakening experiences, including P. K. Rochester Businessman, who was Philip Kaplow, his own experience. But in the library at ZCLA, if you pull that book off the shelf it would automatically open to all the enlightenment experiences because that's what people read all the time. But it can help us to know that awakening is possible as human beings, as imperfect as we are in our lifetime.
Chozen:We can have, everyone, everyone can have awakening experiences. The Buddha once had a disciple who was considered kind of dull minded, not too bright, and didn't comprehend what the Buddha was teaching, just like we're not comprehending what the frogs are telling us right now about our enlightenment. And so the Buddha gave that man a piece of white cloth and just told him to handle the piece of white cloth. And as the man handled it over days and weeks it got quite dirty And he had an opening. He realized that's what was happening with his mind, with the pure mind, with the original mind, that it dirties what's actually there, so we can't see what's there.
Chozen:It covers it over. And that's what the Tanha Sutta is all about that we've been chanting. And we're working on it to make it more accessible to people in modern life, because it had fairly, maybe kind of stilted language from the Pali Canon. But once we've changed it a bit and changed it again, will keep modifying it. But now you can see how relevant it is.
Chozen:I am this way because of my parents. And actually one of my siblings who is now in her 70s still talks about being left at church because my parents would take, old people who didn't have transportation, we would gather them in our car and we would take them home or to our house to eat and then home. And once in all that rush, we were driving away, we were maybe a block away, and I looked around and I said, Where's so and so, my sister? We realized that we had left her there, but it went back right away. And she was with people from the Church, you know, she was fine, she was being cared for.
Chozen:But that has stuck in her mind for over seventy years. So earlier I talked about the importance of developing a concentrated mind, And then the next step of cultivating a mind that becomes quieter and quieter and eventually can become silent. Silent at first for short periods, but then longer and longer, and then we are able to access it. When we can feel the mind closing down, I say, When I can feel myself getting crabby, then we can access this original mind through opening into silence and then wide open awareness. And when our practice matures, it becomes the undercurrent of our life, of a life lived in equanimity within the problems of the world, within the problems of the world.
Chozen:So sometimes I say it's like, as practice matures, there's a chant like the left foot and the right foot in walking. And I say, Yeah, it's exactly like that. The left foot is whatever size shoe you wear, moving ahead, and the right foot is enormous, it has no boundary. And so it takes a while to learn to walk like step. And then this foot, you know, the human foot trips up or hesitates, and then we have to call on the large mind to pull us back into perspective.
Chozen:To be able to go to this mysterious source frees us from all entanglements, the entanglements that are caused by our limited self centered mind. So concentration and cultivating silent mind are all very important, but there's one other essential aspect that's related to these two. It has to do with what we might call personality. Personality? Sorry, it's hard not to laugh because it calls to mind a certain government official in The U.
Chozen:S. Who got enchanted with the word groceries because he didn't know what they were, so he was saying, Groceries, what an interesting word! Personality, what an interesting word. And we're vaguely aware that we have a personality. People tell us we have a personality, but we really don't realize what it's like until we leave it behind in an awakening experience, and then we come back and see the personality or when it gets us in trouble.
Chozen:So we construct a personality in order not to suffer and to be safe. Fuha mentioned personality yesterday, which was a great lead in. We construct a personality as things happen to us in life and a personality is filled with strategies to deal with distress or potential distress, potential suffering. So, we can have a constructive personality that's cheerful and laughs a lot, that is quiet and depressed, the know it all. We used to call one of our sons, He who knows everything about the world.
Chozen:You know there's an age when kids just like think they know everything. The studious and deep thinker, the one who is charming and seductive, the rebel, the strong and silent, the eternal spiritual seeker, the daredevil, so many different kinds of personalities. But in deep Samadhi the constructed personality disappears. And then when we emerge, have a choice. Once we've seen the pieces, the dance of the pieces, We can let go of the pieces or we can begin to let go of the pieces that don't work well.
Chozen:Sometimes it takes getting into trouble to realize that piece does not work well. Maybe it helped me get through a problematic childhood, but it doesn't serve me now. Now we can keep the bits that work well and use them according to circumstance. The personality really has to become optional, and it's our practice that helps us see that it is optional, that we can live in life in the realm of no personality, in the realm of awareness and pure awareness, and then call forth what's needed for the circumstance. So our personality has to become optional, at least pieces of it, and serve the Bodhisattva Vow.
Chozen:So that's maybe a good way to discern as we're sorting out the pieces that aren't serving us or other people very well anymore. Does it serve the Bodhisattva Vow? Once when Hogan and I would do sashin with Hirateroshi, we would say goodbye to each other at the beginning of sashin and then do sashin. So we could go deep in sashin, so we weren't thinking about each other, noticing each other, worrying about each other. Actually one sashin, Hovind started coughing and one of the older Japanese men came to me a quiet moment and said, I think your husband needs to go to the hospital.
Chozen:I said, No, no, he coughs all the time. Like that, don't worry about it. But it turned out he had pneumonia, so. But he lived through the So we would say goodbye to each other and then we would just dive in. And then after seshine we would come together and for a while I would say, Do you still want to be married to me?
Chozen:Because we would change, we would change. So once after Sashin was at Radaroshi up on Whidbey Island, which is a little more informal, Sachin ended and we all gathered and we hadn't had time to talk. And then they had sharing time, sort of like our sharing circle but less formal, where everybody could stand up and say something. And I stood up and I said, I haven't told Hogan yet that I realized that I have to let go of my personality. Everybody laughed, and then somebody stood up and shouted, Can I have it then?
Chozen:So in an odd way aspects of our personality can become more obvious when the aspects that don't serve us are let go of. Back to Silent Mind, I want to read from Sun Sun I'm, who was a Korean Zen master who taught in The U. S. Sun Sun I'm was born in 1927 in what is now North Korea, and his parents, interestingly, were Presbyterian, not Buddhist. And when he was 17, he was put in prison because Japanese forces were occupying Korea and created a lot of suffering during that time.
Chozen:And he had been in part of an underground resistance group as a teenager and he was caught and put in prison. He avoided being killed in prison, and when he was released he went to University, and a friend lent him the Diamond Sutra, and he was so struck by reading the Diamond Sutra that he decided to ordain, and so he ordained at 21. And he went into a one hundred day solitary retreat in the mountains of Korea, and he lived on a diet of only pine needles and rainwater for one hundred days. This diet was sometimes adopted by people who knew they were going to die, Zen Masters who knew they were going to die, because it filled your body with resin and then when you were cremated it was easy for everyone to burn your body. But I don't know why he did it, but he did it.
Chozen:And again, he doesn't talk about what happened, but people think that he had an enlightenment experience on this retreat. So I hope Sohtan is not listening to this part, because he loves extreme practices. So if you're listening, so then you're forbidden to go on that diet. And actually the diet during his one hundred day retreat probably led to his later diabetes and heart conditions and the kidney failure that led to his death. So he was seeking out a teacher who could confirm the experiences he had on his retreat, he found a teacher named Kongbo who told him to keep a not knowing mind, a not knowing mind.
Chozen:So this is exactly what the verses of Faith Mind tell us over and over and over and over and over again: a not knowing mind. The mind of awakening is a mind of just marvelling at what's going on in the world. It's amazing. Frogs, did you hear them last night? They were having a conversation, the two of them.
Chozen:Amazing. So he received dharma transmission both from Congo and then two other Sun, which the Korean Zen masters. And then he went for three years in silence, lived in silence. Then he was drafted into the Korean Army, so you can see his life goes this way and that way. And he served as a Korean Army chaplain and as a captain for almost five years, and then he was called back to succeed his teacher, Kongbo, as abbot of Hwanggaesa, which is in the main school of Sun Buddhism in Korea.
Chozen:And he was only 30 years old. And then he taught and traveled and founded other temples in Korea and in Hong Kong and Japan, and then he came to The U. S. In 1972. And he did what Maizumi Roshi did.
Chozen:He took a very humble job. Maizumi Roshi worked as a yard boy, essentially, and a houseboy while he learned English and practiced at Zhen Shuji to a Japanese congregation and eventually an American congregation because people were interested in meditation. Phun San I'm worked as a repairman at a laundromat in Providence, Rhode Island, but he established a sitting group which became the Providence Zen Center. And when there weren't many Zen teachers or Sun teachers in The U. S, we would have meetings of the senior disciples.
Chozen:Hogan and I met a number of his disciples. And even as his health began to deteriorate, Sen Sanyam traveled to Russia on the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev and then to Israel. And in Russia later his student opened the Novgorod Center of Zen Meditation and in Israel the Tel Aviv Zen Center. So it's interesting, in Wikipedia I looked at Master Sonsanyam's lineage and it's the same as ours. It's the same as ours through Bodhidharma and then it follows the Rinzai lineage which we chanted this morning, which we chant as Shudoharadaroshi's lineage.
Chozen:So it follows the Rinzai lineage down through Niso, Eka, Daishi, Sansho, Kanshi, Zenji, etc, for 29 Japanese ancestors. And then it branches off into the Korean ancestors. So it's very interesting that we have that connection. I didn't know. But he had a center in LA, not far from CCLA, and when he would visit that center he would come over to CCLA and he and Maisumi Roshi became friends.
Chozen:He was very dynamic. We actually have a movie, which maybe the residents would like to watch after the scene of him. Very dynamic, but his English wasn't very good. And so he taught in these very pithy phrases which are wonderful to hold. So just do mind was one of it.
Chozen:Just do mind. Just do mind. Just go straight, you know, don't get confused, don't get all up in your head about what to do and not to do, just go straight. And don't know mine. Don't know mine was one of the favorites.
Chozen:And if you hear a teacher saying don't know mine, probably one of his students or grandchildren or great grandchildren. So Dono Mind is not being asleep, it's holding a bright silent mind awareness without thinking. It's Dono Mind. And you know we touched on this in the work we did with Byron Katie about your mind says blah blah blah, and then you say, Is that really true? As a way to enter a domino mind.
Chozen:To go to this mysterious source frees us from all entanglements. Entanglements are caused by the limited thinking mind. So when we can realize our mind is getting tangled and go into silent, vast, pure awareness, it frees us from those entanglements. And if we have an entanglement that we're worried about, I have realized in my life it's pointless to just keep chewing on it. The thing to do is sit until the mind is quiet and then drop the situation into the mind and let it sink down, down, down, down to where Prajnaparamita is flowing all the time and can respond.
Chozen:And then you go, Oh, oh, okay, yeah, that's a good idea. But it's not your idea. It comes from dharma, which is deep truth, it's always true. When the mind is silent and open and alert, we're sitting at the door, we could call it the dharma gate, to awakening. Without constant outflow of thought and emotions, the mysterious pivot can turn, and our life of awakening can flow in.
Chozen:When the outflows stop, then the door, which is not a door or a pivot, can open and the life of awakening can flow in and enliven us. It flows in via the body. Awakening experiences always enter through the body. It's like a physical, sort of like a physical sensation. It's like being turned inside out.
Chozen:So there's a figure ground reversal from a small, defective, striving little human being who's trying so hard to get awakened into the infinity of being. And we sit in that for a while and then the mind realizes, Hey, something happened. Something's changed here, and it begins to search around within infinity to think about how to think about it. How should we think about this? That's a joke.
Chozen:Eckhart Tolle describes it this way. I enjoy Eckhart Tolle because he is a modern person who is accessible, and we're fortunate in one way that we have modern people talking about awakening, their own awakening, and so we can learn from that. The disadvantage is that we have a lot of people talking about their own way. Eckhart Tolle describes it this way. He says, For many years I had been deeply identified with thinking and the painful, heavy emotions that had accumulated inside.
Chozen:My thought activity was mostly negative and my sense of identity was also mostly negative, although I tried hard to prove to myself and to the world that I was good enough by working very hard academically. But even after I had achieved academic success, I was happy for two weeks or three, and then the depression and anxiety came back. So even though he had, you know, boosted his personality by getting good grades and academic success, it didn't work. On that night there was a disidentification from this unpleasant dream of thinking and the painful emotions. I thought I cannot live with myself anymore.
Chozen:Then his mind stepped back and realized that there were two parts: the myself and the consciousness that was witnessing this unhappy person, the mind made, thought made entity. The nightmare had become so unbearable that it triggered the separation of consciousness, of pure awareness, pure consciousness, from its identification with form. And I've seen that happen with other students, that the pain of living as a separate human being and being miserable is so deep that somehow a door opens. And Eckhart Tolle continues, I woke up and suddenly realized myself as the I AM, capital I, capital A, I AM. And that was deeply peaceful.
Chozen:Thinking disappeared and I was at peace. Then he says it took him several years. He kind of wandered around in awe for quite a while, sat on park benches for hours just in awe of this new way of being. And then he says it took him several years to kind of understand why he was at peace. It was because I wasn't thinking most of the time.
Chozen:Just awareness, pure consciousness, which I called peace. Consciousness had been imprisoned by thought, absorbed by thought, and then it stepped out. So remember these words: trigger the separation of consciousness from its identification with form. This is relevant to the koan I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. Triggered the separation of consciousness from its identification with form.
Chozen:Just think about the implications for you. If you could not identify with this form, take care of it, of course, take good care of it because it is our only body for this lifetime and our vehicle for awakening. But not identify with it. It is perfect as it is. It is always trying to care for us.
Chozen:One thing I love to do during oryoke is just watch my hands caring for me. They know what to do and they're constantly just caring for me. So that's that kind of separation that Eckhart Tolle was talking about. He says, Most people confuse their life situation, their work, fulfilling or not, relationships, good or not, success or failure, sick or not, tired or not, enough money or not, LIFE with a capital L. When we're so focused on solving these perpetual problems, success is only temporarily satisfying.
Chozen:When we awaken, life is evident all around us. You walk down the monastery sidewalk here and you experience true life as it takes form in every leaf, every worm, every raindrop on a flower petal, every crack on the sidewalk, every touch of the wind on your cheek, the deep hooting of the ships and the dense fog in the early morning on the flowing river. Maisamir Rosha used to say, It is so obvious. It is so obvious. But it's only obvious when we're not pushing everything away with thoughts.
Chozen:We are here because the Buddha had the koan. Why do people suffer? Is there a path that can lead us out of suffering? He was compelled by a deep necessity to answer this question, so deep that he left the palace. Someone once told me that they felt that the Buddha, that they didn't need a teacher because the Buddha didn't have a teacher, but that's not true at all.
Chozen:Actually, Buddha spent a number of years with different teachers, among them Malara Kalama and Uddhaka Ramaputta, two that we know of, and we know their teachings. Under their care and teaching they said, You've reached the extent of what I can teach you. How about you join me and teach with me? And he said, No, I'm still not satisfied, so we have to know when we're not satisfied. And yes, you need a teacher.
Chozen:If you don't have a teacher, then the fox is in charge of the henhouse. So finally, as we know, he sat down under the Bodhi tree, recalled the pleasant state he had entered as a young boy sitting under the rose apple tree, and the striving ceased. His inner vision was very clear, his mind was very clear, and he shone that light of clarity onto his own mind. And he saw that ignorance, and what arose from ignorance, was suffering, jealousy, craving, and the personality, the constructed personality, that was the jailer. And he said, With my concentrated mind, thus purified, bright, unblemished, and rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, able to be lifted and put down where we want it to be put down, and attain to imperturbability, which is the quality of the awakened mind, imperturbability.
Chozen:I directed it to how beings come to be born and die. I turned my mind towards the unborn, the unaging, the deathless, the sorrowless, and freedom from bondage. So once his mind had been clear, as I described, then he could bring in these things he'd been contemplating for years, and he could see clearly what the source was, and he called that awakening. So it's said that he uttered this poem: Seeking but not finding the housebuilder, I traveled through the round of countless painful births and lives. Housebuilder, you have now been seen.
Chozen:You shall not build the house again. Your rafters have been broken down. Your ridgepole is demolished too. My mind has attained to be rid of the conceit. I am is the greatest happiness of all.
Chozen:And seeing greed, anger, and ignorance, he actually said, Ignorance is the source of our suffering. And once we know that there's a way, then our ignorance can be relieved. So the kovan I wanted to talk about because it's relevant to another essential part of long term deep practice. Oh, I was going to read first. Forgot to do this from Sonsonim, just so you can get a little taste of his teachings.
Chozen:And we have books in the library on his teachings. When you are thinking, your mind and my mind is different. When you cut off all attachments to thinking, then your mind and my mind are the same. If you only go straight, that's one of his sayings, only go straight, don't know, then your don't know mind and my don't know mind and somebody else's don't know mind are the same mind. The same don't know mind.
Chozen:This is because experiencing don't know mind already cuts off all the thinking, which means that there is no thinking. Not thinking is an empty mind. Empty mind is before thinking. Another name for this is your true self. So the mind before thinking, that's why we sometimes use the koan, Who were you before your parents were born?
Chozen:Before thinking began. That is your substance. Your before thinking mind is your substance. My before thinking mind is my substance. Then your substance, my substance, this Sticks substance, universal substance, everything's substance is the same substance.
Chozen:When you keep a don't know mind, 100%. Only go straight. Don't know. You and the Universe already become one. You are the Universe.
Chozen:The Universe is you. For teaching purposes we sometimes call this the primary point, and then usually you would whap with a stick. So, he has a lot of little sermons on don't know mind, which is non thinking mind. So now to the Japanese koan. This is case 40 in the moo wankan tipping over a water bottle.
Chozen:When Isan was with Yakujo, he was the tenzo or head cook of the monastery. So all previous tenzos, listen up! Yakujo wanted to choose a master for Mount Daiye, so he called together all the monks and told them that anyone who could answer his question in an outstanding manner would be chosen. So the backstory is that Master Hyakkujou, who's famous because of Hyakujo's fox, the second Pohan in the Mumankang, Master Hyakujo had a senior monk who had returned from traveling around China and said that he found the perfect place for a new monastery in the Daiyi Mountains. But the question was who would be the abbot?
Chozen:And Hakajo said, Well, I can go. But the senior students said, No, no, you have over a thousand monks here, but this future monastery will grow to over 2,000. Let's go check out the monks who are here. So they walked through the halls of this, what must have been an enormous monastery, and every time they passed someone that Hyakujo thought might be a good candidate to found a new monastery, he would cough and then his senior monk would look and see. They got to the kitchen and they passed Isan, who was the Tenzo, and Yakujo coughed, and the senior said, That's the one.
Chozen:But the most senior monk, who was, you know, we have these things in our mind, where we're going next, thought he was going to be the abbot next, he objected. So they devised a contest. And this Koan tells us about the contest and also about another essential ingredient for awakening. So they devised this contest. They took a water bottle, which probably wasn't shiny aluminum, was probably claypotteryand it was a Yakujo's water bottle handy in the room and put it on the floor with everyone assembled.
Chozen:So all the monks were called to this contest. Shyakujo said, You may not call this a water bottle. May not call this a water bottle. What do you call it? And the head monk said, It cannot be called a stump.
Chozen:So that was his answer. Then Hyakuzhou looked around and realized that Ihsan wasn't there. Anybody who's done the Tenzo knows why, because meetings are always being called and you have to make lunch, in this case, for a thousand people. So they called Isan out of the kitchen, Isan Yakujo said, You may not call this a water bottle, what do you call it? And Isan walked up to it and knocked it over with his foot and left.
Chozen:Yakujo laughed and said, The head monk loses, and Isan became the founder of the new monastery. So that's also interesting because Issan stayed with Yakujo for twenty more years, and he was 43 when Yakujo died, Yakujo was 94, and then he went west to that mountain that the other monk had picked out, and he lived as a hermit for seven or eight years, so that was preparing himself for this new job. Then monks began assembling and eventually it became a big monastery. So here is Master Mumon's comment: Isan displayed great spirit in his action, but he could not cut himself free from Hyakujo's apron strings. He preferred the heavier task to the lighter one.
Chozen:So think about what that means. Why was he like that, He took off his headband because in Japan, and Onshin did this when he came back from Toshoji, you wear like a sweatband tied around your head. He took off his headband to bear the iron yoke. Muman's verse: Tossing bamboo baskets and ladles away, he made a glorious dash and swept all before him. Yakujo's barrier could not stop his advance.
Chozen:Thousands of Buddhas come forth from the tips of his feet. So, I leave this koan with you, tipping over the water bottle. What does that mean to you in your practice? Tipping over the water bottle.
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.