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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 Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
Speaker 2:I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in Sangha. The great way is difficult. I wanna store start with a short story that involves a famous Zen family called the Pong family. This is eighth century Chan, China.
Speaker 2:And at the time they studied with different Zen teachers. Said they lived mostly a simple life of poverty. And there is a book of recorded sayings by lay Lehman Pong. That's what they called him, Lehman Pong. So once someone asked Lehman Pong, is Zen practice difficult or easy?
Speaker 2:Pong replied, difficult, difficult. Like trying to touch the moon with a stick. Another time he said, difficult difficult like trying to cover a tree in sesame seeds. Put the sesame seeds on the tree and it doesn't stay. Dissatisfied the questioner went to Pong's wife and asked the same question.
Speaker 2:Is Zen practice difficult or easy? Easy. Easy. Like getting out of bed, your feet naturally touch the floor. So that's her answer.
Speaker 2:Still dissatisfied the questioner went to Pong's son and asked the same question. Is Zen practice difficult or easy? Pong's son said, it's difficult when you think it's difficult. It's easy when you think it's easy. We laugh but usually that's true.
Speaker 2:Right? So I'm just sitting there and Sachin like, this is so hard. It's a lot harder. So she sucks. Well, the questioner was still dissatisfied.
Speaker 2:So he went to Ling Zhao, who is one of the women ancestors and Peng's daughter who's considered the most enlightened of the family, I should mention. I don't know if the questioner knew this, but he asks the same question to Peng's daughter, Ling Zhao, is Zen practice difficult or easy? And she said, Neither difficult nor easy. And then she said, The ancestors' teachings shine on the 100 grass tips. The Zen ancestors teachings shine on the 100 grass tips.
Speaker 2:What would you say? Depends on what moment of sashin, Is Zen practice difficult or easy? Is sashin difficult or easy? And Chozan would sometimes draw a diagram of Sichin in that in that vein of like, is it difficult or easy? And she's like, oh, it goes like this.
Speaker 2:It's nonlinear for sure. You know, there's some there's some rhythm of deepening, but that doesn't necessarily mean, and I think sometimes we wish, even if we've done seshing hundreds of times, that it would get easier. But sometimes it we actually go deeper and deeper into our sense of stuckness, our sense of self, our fixed beliefs. And sometimes we do that over and over and over again until we really see through them. We can talk like, oh yeah, it's just so easy, but it's hard.
Speaker 2:This is hard work we're doing. There's no on off switch, I haven't found it yet, for the body mind. It just keeps surging. Karma keeps rising. Sometimes it seems to speed up as we practice.
Speaker 2:There's no way to hold on to positive states. The more we try, the more difficult Sachin is. There's no way to hold on to insights. Everything that arises, changes, passes. Doesn't mean practice doesn't mature, but we don't get to keep anything.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe that's an investigation. Does anything remain? All these hours of sasheen where we sat and sat and all the mind states that have gone through and all the feelings of body and all the tangled emotions. What remains? What remains?
Speaker 2:Can you name it? Can you put your finger on it? Does anything remain? Let's let's stay with Lehman Pong's answer. Sachin is difficult.
Speaker 2:Zen is difficult. We have bodies that hurt, minds that run around, lifetimes of habit energy. Partnered with, we have great aspiration. We have sincere hearts. We want to wake up.
Speaker 2:We want to realize compassion, clarity, wisdom, and we can't make anything happen. Difficult. Lehman Pong wasn't the only ancestor to say that the way is difficult. Dogenzhengji writes paragraphs in his Ode to the Ancestors entitled Continuous Practice describing the different hardships and challenges the ancestors faced and moved through. Anyone who's ever done sashin or attempted to even sit twenty minutes of zazen knows that this practice is difficult.
Speaker 2:To encounter our life intimately can be difficult. To truly see the habits of mind, to really honestly see what we tell ourselves, how we react to different situations. That can be very difficult to see, humbling, but difficult. To really feel the legacy of twisted karma that we have inherited, either from ancestors or from our own past, can be difficult. The ancestors talk about zazen as purifying karma.
Speaker 2:You may have experienced this, maybe you didn't use those words. I'm just purifying karma right now. And sometimes it feels like the body is getting reset from the inside. Energetic phenomena arise that are quite intense to feel. Sometimes different difficult memories or feeling states or thought patterns bubble up.
Speaker 2:Often that's part of days of sitting in Sechin. And sometimes often old familiar ways of avoiding intensity or being in the unknown also emerge strongly and take hold of us. And those can appear in so many different ways. And each of you, during this session and throughout your life of practice, will encounter those different ways that we resist experience, whether it's through the intellect or the I don't like it, this shouldn't be happening mind, or going off into planning or anger or concluding as Bonsho was talking about yesterday. So I wanted to share a teaching from Dahweh about working with the sense of being obstructed.
Speaker 2:So if you've never felt obstructed, you don't need to pay attention. This is a really great little book here. So Dao Hui corresponded with his students via letter writing. He had many lay students, and he lived at a time in Song Dynasty China where there was political uprising, and he was the teacher of students who were on the side of the revolutionary government, and they got exiled. His students got exiled and he got exiled as well.
Speaker 2:Probably horrible living conditions he was in, but in order to stay in touch with his students and dedicated to his own practice, he wrote letters. And then after he died, one of his students collected the letters, as many as he could. And now we have this wonderful translation. So it's very, very intimate teaching. A lot of the Zen teachings that we have from from this long ago, so Song Dynasty China, he was a contemporary of Hongzhi who Bansha was teaching from yesterday.
Speaker 2:Hongzhi's Cultivating the Empty Field. Bansha read Romp and Play and Samadhi and some other teachings from him. So they were friends, and they also kept in touch via letter writing. So this is a letter, he is responding to a student who the student has spelled out a challenge that he's having and Adahweh is going to address that. Thank you for your letter.
Speaker 2:You say that from childhood you have had faith in the way, but that in your later years hindered by discriminatory thought, you have yet to experience the slightest awakening. From dawn to dusk you desire to know how to embody the way. Having recognized your deep sincerity, I will not refrain from presenting my views in order to best guide you in accordance with your appeal. Your desire to experience awakening is itself the discriminatory thought that hinders you in the way. Your desire to experience awakening itself is the discriminatory thought that hinders you in the way.
Speaker 2:Apart from this, what other discriminatory thought is there that obstructs you? Ultimately though, what is it that you call discriminatory thought? Where does such thought come from? Who is it that is being obstructed? Your statement reflects three confused views.
Speaker 2:The first is for you yourself to say that you are obstructed by discriminatory thought. The second is for you yourself to regard yourself as not yet awakened thereby accepting an identity as a deluded being. The third is for you yourself to wait expectantly in this deluded state for awakening. These three confused views are none other than the root of Samsara. We do this all the time.
Speaker 2:I'm confused. I'm believing my thoughts, and it's hindering me from awakening. This very and so now he's going to address, well, how do we work with this? This just seems like natural. Right?
Speaker 2:This very moment just ceased to entertain thought, putting an end to the confused mind. Then you will know that there is no delusion to be destroyed, no awakening to be aspired to, and no discriminatory thought to be cut off. With time erroneous views will disappear of themselves and you will be like a person drinking water and knowing for themselves whether it is hot or cold. The mind that is clearly aware of discriminatory thought taking place, how can that mind possibly be obstructed? How can there possibly be any other kind of mind than this one?
Speaker 2:Since time of old the wise ones have taken discriminatory thought like dragons to water and tigers to mountains. They regard discriminatory thought as a companion employing such a thought as upaya or skillful means. And on the basis of discriminatory thought practice universal compassion and carry out all sorts of Buddha deeds. For them discriminatory thought is never a source of suffering because they understand its source. Once the source of discriminatory thought is fathomed it becomes the locus of liberation and of release from Samsara.
Speaker 2:So I want to unpack this a little bit. What he's saying is actually quite profound. So what is discriminatory thought? It's all thought. It's the thinking mind.
Speaker 2:That includes plans, judgments, the inner critic, comparison, self pity. It includes those not quite thought thoughts. So he's asking, one, first to identify discriminatory thought and then also to notice how we get hooked in. Notice in your experience when do you go from having a thought to entertaining one. That's the distinction he's making.
Speaker 2:And that's the distinction he's making of how thoughts can be liberation and they can also be the source of our suffering. And that simple so, that simple yet so subtle a thought arises and when does it become entertained or believed, we sometimes say that in this tradition. And what, this is subtle, it's so intimate, and it's worth exploring. I would say it's worth exploring at this point in a sasheen where we have more subtlety of mind and awareness. When does thought change from being sensation, or sound, or feeling movement, to having meaning, to being something that you're invested in.
Speaker 2:How do you know when you're believing thought? How do you know when you're entertaining thought? What happens in body or mind? So we can explore this together a little bit. First, just notice that you're aware.
Speaker 2:Establish a sense of awareness. Maybe tune into the breath or open to sound. Just know for yourself right now that you're aware. And you might notice the content of awareness is the sense world. You might also notice that your awareness is actually unobstructed by thought.
Speaker 2:It's just right here. You can hear these words, you're aware. You can hear the wind, you're aware. Can feel your hands, you're aware. Now, become aware of the thinking mind.
Speaker 2:That in and of itself can be interesting. Where do you how do you experience the thinking mind? And sometimes when we turn to look for the thinking mind, suddenly we don't have any thoughts. That's interesting, then what are you aware of? What is that space where there's no thought?
Speaker 2:And then maybe there are some fragments of thoughts or feeling of a thought about to arise. Just notice that. If you're having trouble generating thoughts you can think a thought, maybe think luminosity is unobstructed in impermanence. It's a nice thought. Or just luminosity.
Speaker 2:It's also interesting to notice, so that's a line from our chant, Luminosity is unobstructed and impermanence. If you think that thought, do associations arise as well? This is all part of the thinking mind. Is it image? Is it feeling tone?
Speaker 2:Touch sensation? Do you actually see the words? Is it mostly sound? There's no right answer. It's just an invitation to notice.
Speaker 2:How do you experience thought? Where do you experience thought? Is it somewhere back here, behind the eyes, in the head? Or do you feel thoughts in different parts of the body? Or outside the body.
Speaker 2:And then Dahweh invites us to look into the source of thought. So if you think a thought like luminosity, where does it arise from? Does it have a source? Where does it go? These questions are really foundational questions.
Speaker 2:Know this exercise might seem a little cute, but it's quite profound. Like, does anything come from? Suddenly, we're aware, we feel obstructed. What's the source of that? Apparent obstruction.
Speaker 2:We're so quick to believe our thoughts as true. Do they have a source? Do they have a beginning, middle, and end? Do thoughts abide somewhere? If you follow a thought to its end, what remains when the thought disappears?
Speaker 2:Does Da Hui's teaching and this little investigation we're doing right now is inviting inquiry. It's inviting curiosity. Thoughts can have so much power over us. And just to to start to notice, what are they? What what is this function of thinking?
Speaker 2:We can get so pulled into the content so quickly. What is it to observe thought as just thought? Do they move? Do they change? We can do this kind of investigation with any experience that arises of body, heart, or mind.
Speaker 2:We can take any obstacle as the path and meet it with this kind of curiosity. Oh, what is my actual experience of this reactivity, sensation? What if I stayed with it with the non concluding mind of awareness? Now I just wanna name that I'll do this and then I'll get the state I want is just another thought. We can sometimes learn these practices and, yeah, okay I'm going to apply that and then I'll have no thought and that's what I want.
Speaker 2:Those are all thoughts. You can apply this kind of investigation to you know, all the thoughts that start to generate as you do an inquiry like this. This way of practice invites us to stay curious, to continue to open the hand of thought, to notice when we've cr grabbed a thought and it has become real, and just see, Oh, what is this? Dharma Talks is inviting us to realize thoughts as empty. But it's an inquiry so we need to really investigate that ourselves.
Speaker 2:Are thoughts empty of inherent existence? Do they have a beginning, middle, and end? Do they flash in and out of experience? He invites that as we do this kind of investigation, this kind of inquiry, thoughts can become companions. Meaning we don't have to be afraid of our experience.
Speaker 2:So anything that we're intimate with, that we're really willing to look into can become companion on this path. It's our life. It's our life, all of it, whatever's arising. That's one analogy in the Tibetan tradition they have for the thinking mind. It's like meeting an old friend in the market.
Speaker 2:Hello, thoughts. That's how the Buddha came to regard Mara. Mara is the personification in the stories of the Buddha of the inner critic or the doubt voice. And the Buddha says over and over again in the suttas, Mara, I see you. I see you.
Speaker 2:This kind of investigation is also an invitation to look to turn the light to shine within. We're reading that teaching about Zazen in the Fukazan Zenki. And yesterday Bancho was talking about sitting with question or sitting in the mystery, the intimacy of not knowing. This too can be difficult. It can be difficult to stay in the fire of a question.
Speaker 2:We want to have the answer. We want to figure it out. We want to say, Well just tell me, Bancho. It doesn't work like that. The art of Zazen is this art of inquiry, of being willing to look, to stay curious, to stay in the not knowing.
Speaker 2:Turning the light to shine within, looking into the source of thought, looking into the source of awareness. Does awareness have the source? Whatever question has been alive for you in this sashin, you can bring this inquiry to Sansan tonight. So Lehman Pong's wife said the great way is easy. Easy.
Speaker 2:Like getting out of bed, your feet touch the ground. Because the mind can get so complicated, and our bodies can feel so much intensity, we sometimes think that practice needs to be elaborate, or we need to do some great thing to wake up, or that waking up is something other than what's happening right now. So this teaching the great way is easy. What if we didn't have to go into the story of difficulty? What if you allowed ease to be here too?
Speaker 2:Can you feel that right now? Or gratitude? Sitting with a question or sitting in physical discomfort doesn't have to equal difficult. It can be easy, too. We often talk about meditation as the natural state.
Speaker 2:It often actually, and we learn this maybe through difficulty, but it often feels better to just feel our experience, to just be with the pain or the discomfort or the intensity, then to go into all the elaborate habits we've developed to avoid or manage them. It's like getting out of bed and feeling the floor, like opening the eyes and seeing. Naguma said, it's so simple we miss it. The ease of practice or we don't believe it. I feel like that's like, okay, come on, I'm doing this intense thing.
Speaker 2:It can't just be as simple as come back to the breath. See the floor. Hear the sounds. It really is that simple. Maybe we need to go through all of this intensity to finally be able to be like, oh, Right.
Speaker 2:I do know how to breathe. I can hear the wind. Trust the simplicity of bare attention. Come back to just this. Just this.
Speaker 2:And then Ling Zhao says, Neither difficult nor easy. The ancestors teachings shine on a 100 grass tips. This world is immaculate and shining. A 100 grass tips are each moment of our lives. This is the great ancestor Samadhi.
Speaker 2:This is her life. Shining floorboards and zabutans and the light of each and every person in this room. This is the gift of the ancestors right here. I'm going share another koan. This is called Bodhidharma's Flesh.
Speaker 2:It's from The Hidden Lamp, the stories of 25 centuries of awakened women. Master Bodhidharma had four senior students, three monks and the nun, Zhongzhir. When the time came for him to return to India, he gathered them together. He said to them, the time has come. Please express your understanding.
Speaker 2:This is his transmission of the light. It's a little different than Mahakashapa and the Buddha. Dharma Talks that's one of his disciples. Dharma Talks said, The path transcends language and words and yet is not separated from language and words. Bodhidharma said, You have attained my skin.
Speaker 2:The nun, Zangjir said, it's like the joy of seeing Buddha's paradise just once and not again. You have attained my flesh, said Bodhidharma. Tao Yu said, the four elements are originally empty and the five aggregates are nonexistent. I see nothing to be attained. You have attained my bone, said Bodhidharma.
Speaker 2:Finally, Wei Kha made a bow to the teacher and stood in silence. Bodhidharma said, You have attained my marrow. Skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. Bodhidharma gave away his body to his disciples. And in our bodies, we contain the hopes, the kindnesses, the love, the wisdom, the sincerity of our ancestors.
Speaker 2:All their awakened qualities, their vows. And not just our flesh and blood ancestors but our spiritual ancestors also live in us. All the kindness and love we have received, all the guidance and wisdom, it's in us. Even all the kindness and love we have received during this tashin. From the ancestors who you may have been asking for help or connecting to, from the ancestors of earth and sky.
Speaker 2:They're all here, a part of us, a part of this great life. And maybe the most important thing that we receive from our spiritual ancestors or teachers is their vows. And Zen we call it bodhichitta, the vow for awakening. Or maybe I would say it like the confidence in our awakened nature. That's what we receive from our teachers, the lineage.
Speaker 2:They have confidence that we are Buddha. That yeah, okay, we manifest as deluded beatings, and we have all our karma, and thoughts, and our particular ways of doing things, and our resistances, but they see the Buddha. They see the Buddha. They see the Buddha. Even when we're like, no, there's no Buddha here.
Speaker 2:They see the Buddha. And they just keep trying to show us. They hold up the mirror, hold up the mirror, see, see, this is your nature. This is your nature. Sachin, too, can put us in touch with our vows and aspirations.
Speaker 2:We're asked in Sachin to actualize our vow over and over and over again, moment to moment. Do you remember your intention for this, sashin? I know it was like a 100,000 ago when we started. Has it matured? Has it clarified?
Speaker 2:Refined? Maybe it's become more wordless than when you first arrived. I feel like Sashim puts me in touch with what I call my no matter what vows. Or maybe we could say your primary vow or unconditioned vow. A vow that's not dependent on if this and this happens and then I'll get.
Speaker 2:But the vow that we can rely on no matter what, that we turn to, that we take refuge in again and again and again. Even if we're not saying I vow to free all beings, we're connecting to something that sustained you breath after breath, sitting period after sitting period, day after day, wake up bell after wake up bell. When other parts of you are like, no, I'm not going to the Zen Do. Yes, I'm going to leave screaming right now. Something kept you in your
Speaker 1:seat. Something
Speaker 2:had you returned from the bathroom every kin hin. Not just d kai. I think it's a miracle. Often, if you do remember your aspiration that brought you here, you could take a moment and just connect to it again. Maybe there's an image, maybe it's words.
Speaker 2:And just check out for yourself, is is your aspiration rooted in compassion? Find often when I hear people articulate their intention, it's some form of relief from suffering or pain, some form of connection to other people, some form of wanting to manifest or cultivate beautiful qualities of awakening. It's all expressions of compassion. Maybe they're very specific to your life, to something that you're working on meeting, to relationships in your life. But our vows are rooted in compassion.
Speaker 2:This is bodhicitta. This is the vow for awakening. So just take a moment and reflect on what has sustained you through this sashin, Where you have found refuge. What you have discovered about the nature of your mind, the nature of thought, the nature of your heart. What curiosities have opened up as you've deepened into not knowing Samadhi or into intimacy with this life?
Speaker 2:And again, this might be wordless, but it's worth remembering what our resources are, what motivates us, what we're learning. I have witnessed so much sincerity during this sashin. You all are such sincere humans and practitioners. I hope you know that about yourself. I also feel so deeply grateful for each of you.
Speaker 2:We can't do this practice alone. This sashin would be a different sashin if one of us weren't here. We need each other. Thank you for your practice. Thank you for your awakening.
Speaker 2:I know you might not see it, but you're manifesting it a 100%. We see it. Let's continue practicing together. Let's continue awakening together. We need each other and the world needs our practice.
Speaker 2:Number
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.