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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.
Jogen:Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here. I hope you feel welcome, and I hope those who are new with us tonight have felt welcomed. I am, in a way, this is part two of a talk on what, how, why to bring this practice off of the cushion, as we say, into our lives. Zen practice.
Jogen:What is that? Why would you want to do it, and what would you do? And last week, I think I really emphasized the mind aspect of it, that we can very much work with our minds and reduce our suffering and maybe the suffering of others. Essentially, our meditation can come with us. Right?
Jogen:This quality of awareness can permeate our day more and more, and perhaps in ways that we don't really think are possible when we first start, but then our practice gets more robust. But so this side is more, maybe more about the heart, about behavior. I think about what does it mean to be a lay practitioner? How do we do that? I have done them.
Jogen:Still is the bulk of my own practice was done in a Zen temple environment where you have so many supports in showing up in a particular way. You're constantly reminded and invited into the teaching and alignment with that over and over. So speaking of alignment, I'll start there. How do we feel about how we show up in life? If you have a quiet, reflective moment and you consider the life you're living, how do you feel about it?
Jogen:Are you aligned? Do you find you have regrets? Do you have a motivation to align? Are you aligned with your truth? Do you feel that's true?
Jogen:Do you feel like you're aligned with the truth that is greater than yourself? Does that even make sense at all? The, the word dharma, we use that word a lot. The dharma sometimes is a term for teachings that the Buddha gave, or the teachings of the traditions, like Zen. And it also means something like truth, that there is ways of being that are aligned.
Jogen:Not everything that human beings do, not everything we do with body, speech, and mind is aligned with dharma. And this is more than cultural. It's more than Asian ideas of goodness or even spiritual ideas of goodness. There is such a thing as alignment, and that is bigger than the individual. One of the ways that alignment is talked about in this tradition is to be a bodhisattva.
Jogen:And bodhisattva, the term is used in different ways depending on where you're looking and what you're kind of teaching or receiving. Sometimes bodhisattva is talking about a being who lives in the world, and interestingly, almost all of them in the traditional teachings were laypeople. They were not monastics. They were not monks or nuns. There are exceptions to that.
Jogen:A bodhisattva is someone who lives in the world and is free within the world. That's contrasted with the image, which is a little bit like a kind of, orthodox monastic stance that the monk is looking out at the people in the world and going, Boy, you all are so entangled in things. Your life is Sometimes the Buddha would describe the householder's life as cramped and dusty. It's interesting because everybody in India kind of is dealing with dustiness, but the cramped and dusty householder life. And the image of the bodhisattva was somebody who didn't reject the world, but was aligned and free.
Jogen:And more important even than that, or as the consequence of that, they were helpful. They were positively helpful. They didn't say, Nah, this world is kind of Just let me get out of here to nirvana. They looked around continually. They lived in a state of how can I not only add to the suffering of the world, how can I make it a little bit more beautiful?
Jogen:How can I make life a little bit easier for even one person? This is, not the same as deciding I'm not a good person, and now I should just start acting like a good person. Because a bodhisattva, which you may be, that state of mind is arising out of the clarity of meditation. There is space in the heart, in the mind. There is enough space around behavior that there's something we might call choice.
Jogen:There's the ability to be aligned with something other than our instinctual and territorial minds, our judgmental minds. So, from the loosening of identity that comes with consistent meditation, it's possible for the Bodhisattva mind to flow forth. And in a way, it's just like, how do live beautifully and freely? How do I move through my day without so much friction, without despair, without giving up on this place? And there's the side of working with the mind so it doesn't get snagged by things like despair and all of the other unhelpful mindsets.
Jogen:But then there's, well, what can we do? And a lot of a lot of this is social, but not all of it. Right? It's interesting. This there's an interesting, seeming paradox here.
Jogen:The deeper we go into our meditation, we see, two things, kind of two sides of one truth. First of all, we see that everything is wholly perfection. Everything at some level is totally, perfectly okay. It's not a rational insight. You can't turn on the news and discover that truth.
Jogen:We discover that on a deep level, everything is totally perfectly okay and that coincides with seeing that I don't have a fixed nature as a person. Most of what's inside is space and energy. From that realization that everything is already wholly perfection, it's not that people don't do anything. From that, generosity flows forth. There's somebody in our lineage named Bernie Glassman.
Jogen:How many people have heard about Bernie Glassman? Bernie Glassman was Maizumi Roshi's first Dharma heir. He's a complicated human, like all humans are. But Bernie was interesting. He did fairly traditional Zen training for about a decade.
Jogen:And then he noticed in New York that there was homeless folks and he thought, How can I help them? So, started a bakery. And he started not only serving bread, but making jobs to help those folks have meaningful work. And then he thought, Well, I want to help even more. And he started something called the Zen Peacemaker's Order, right, which is worth checking out.
Jogen:And these are people who go to One of the things they do is they go to places of atrocities and they sit meditation and they bear witness with the foundational principle being not knowing. So, they've for decades taken people to places like Auschwitz or Nagasaki Hiroshima And they sit and they bear witness to the suffering with an open mind and see how their hearts are moved. He didn't decide he was gonna do all this stuff. It flew it flowed forth from his realization, from his realizing everything is wholly perfection. Inside of me is space and energy, and there's lots of examples of this.
Jogen:So sometimes that's just happening spontaneously, and sometimes the teachings kind of nudge us and say, Hey, you're space and energy, and you're not fixed, and you have more to give than you believe, right? So there's something called the perfections, the paramitas. And the first perfection, and apparently it's very intentional, that's the first perfection, In a way, the first training for the bodhisattva is generosity, Madhana Paramita, right? And generosity is a word. Some other words words might be open handedness, right?
Jogen:Or magnanimity or flexibility or a kind of internal frictionlessness, right? Now, it's interesting if you have the good fortune to be around people who are very mature practitioners, who have done this practice for a long, long time. And it's poignant to say most of those people are dying off. We're losing the generation of boomers that have now done forty, fifty, and there's some that have done sixty years of spiritual practice. They are spontaneously helpful people, more or less.
Jogen:They say things that are spontaneously helpful to you. Sometimes they hurt, but they're spontaneously helpful. Ideas come to mind of how to be resourceful and generative in different ways. And generally, the laziness that I have about being of benefit, it seems to have kind of evaporated in them. And somehow there's always the energy to do something good for somebody.
Jogen:And as a result of that, most of them are very bright and very energized. So I don't think anyone in this room has practiced Buddhism for forty or fifty years. I haven't. And so we're not at that place yet, but that's why something like generosity as the Paramita exists, to kind of spark it in us, to just spark the idea that to be aligned with dharma, one of the things that means is to intend generosity, to intend a giving heart. Now, in our society, I think that often gets reduced to who should I send money to?
Jogen:I send money to lots of places, and that's meaningful to me, But that act generally is not all that there's not all that much. A piece of me is not there's no self sacrifice involved in that. I'm not gonna donate teachers I've observed, from the lineage, from my own, when I have a quiet mind and an undefended heart, what just happens naturally. But really, the experiment for us to take on is first of all, what happens when we hold the intention to be generous? How does it feel to give?
Jogen:Who do we become when we have that state of mind during our day? And what are the ways we can do that? Because there are many, many, many ways. So there's no order here or no hierarchy. Again, I just want to, spark some thought about this.
Jogen:A form of generosity is to appreciate out loud the beauty you encounter in the world. Truly pay attention to what flows, works, is beautiful, is virtuous, and be somebody who counteracts the tendency of people just to say what's wrong out loud and say what's beautiful as much as possible. Right? You think about when is it not skillful to do it. There might be some instances when it's not.
Jogen:But generally, in the tradition, this is called, praising virtue. Right? People are encouraged to really praise the virtues of others. It's said that if you celebrate the good qualities in people, you will deepen them in yourself, and you will help deepen them in others. So I have friends that I go on walks with and I'm kind of caught up in my head about what I'm gonna order at the restaurant.
Jogen:And they're like, Did you see how beautiful that flower is? Or, Did you see how cute that dog was? Or whatever it might be. These are meaningful acts to appreciate out loud beauty. To look people in the eye and thank people who support you.
Jogen:A variation of this I'm trying to practice is some older, more than one older person has told me that when you get older, you start becoming invisible. Somehow people feel like you're not relevant to their life anymore. You're not dangerous. You're not dangerous, sexy, or, you know, relevant to my climbing the social ladder so older people become invisible, especially to younger people. So my partner and I, we have a practice.
Jogen:We walk around our neighborhood and make sure that we stop and greet older people and look them in the eye and just acknowledge that they exist. It's an act of generosity. One you've heard many times before, but bears repeating is to share the things we have. To share. Now, some of the people who I know who've trained in Japan have taken this to a very far level.
Jogen:So I had this friend of mine named Tenku, and was ordained in Japan and trained for many years, and she really embodied a generous spirit. And I was in her apartment many years ago, and I was admiring this actual Zen artifact that she had on her wall. I was like, I love that. It's so beautiful. And she's like, Oh, here.
Jogen:She gave it to me. Right? It was beautiful. She must have thought so too. It was on her wall.
Jogen:And yet she had been trained that what you do when somebody really admires something, to practice your own non attachment, she didn't give me her big screen TV, right? It wasn't an essential to practice her own non attachment and to demonstrate generosity. She just gave the thing to me, Right? So to share the things we have, that's actually really important. For us, it might be helpful to break the attachment, to see that I'm okay if I let go of this thing actually.
Jogen:For them, it's a real demonstration of the power of the practice. Another thing in Japanese temples, I know this has context, but you're really careful with resource use. It's a loving way of being to not use things that don't belong to us. It's an awake way of being to like turn the stereo off when you're not using it. Turn off the lights you don't need.
Jogen:And I'm not saying be green. That's actually not what I'm saying. It's more about the state of mind that notices and says, Who am I to just eat up things that are basically just piped into my house? Although I don't know if your water bill was anything like ours in the last three months, but I feel like I own that water now. That was very expensive water.
Jogen:I'm just gonna keep going. Another thing that is, for some people, a real shift in thinking is that you develop your capacities, whatever you are good at, get better at it for other people. Whatever proclivities and skills you have, you refine them with other people in mind so that you can offer them. What you're okay at, get good at it if it interests you, and let offering and sharing that be a motivator. In the moment, do what you're doing when you're doing it.
Jogen:And this, in a way, is what embodied mindfulness is, but I feel that's an act of generosity. And it's hard for me to explain why that's generous. Why is it generous when you're eating a meal to just 100% eat that meal? Or why is it generous to do something as ordinary as cleaning up a meal with full mindfulness? It has something to do, I think, with meeting the generosity of the universe that you exist at all, that you can take an act at all, that you have the ability to move in space and make noise and rearrange phenomena, this very field of being, to be in a divided state, which is so common for us to be in a divided state onto the next thing, in a way is an undervaluing of the gift of life.
Jogen:To do what you're doing when you're doing it. So Chosen Roshi would talk about my Zumie Roshi opening a letter and she said, It was just so weird. It was like opening that letter was the most important thing in the universe. And she still has memories now, that was fifty something years ago of how he would open the letter, how carefully he would do that. People who practice for a long time, I can only really speak of in the Zen and Tibetan tradition.
Jogen:No, I can speak of other. I think this is true generally. Without taking it on conceptually, you become somewhat animist. You start to lose the sense that the things around you are just dead, inert matter, but somehow you begin feeling that phenomena are worthy of some respect. So I was exercising earlier today and just tossed my t shirt on the floor, a t shirt I love, and I just thought, how rude I am.
Jogen:That's so rude. That doesn't make sense rationally, but something I can feel. I remember once, I did a really high dose of mushrooms and I was just so freaked out about how much interiority the trees around me had. The subjectivity of the trees freaked me out, but I never forgot that. Part of a generous thing is to appreciate the interior of nonhuman beings.
Jogen:Right? Things have a life that they're not like us necessarily. They don't make noise with their mouthes. Mouthes? Thankfully, they don't well, do I some of them do make lots of noise with their mouth is.
Jogen:But So to appreciate the interior or to respect the life of nonhuman beings is a generous thing. So we've lost a custom in ZCO that's too bad is that when I first came here, if you tossed a meditation cushion around mindlessly, someone would bark at you. Treat that with respect. You moved everything in the zendo as if it was alive, as if it was precious. That is an interesting practice to take on.
Jogen:Of course, it's a generous thing to appreciate and imagine the interior of other human beings, that is something that easily gets put by the wayside. It's so easy to just one dimensionalize somebody based on their political affiliation, what they're wearing, their gender. It's so easy to just one dimensionalize. And, you know, some people say, Oh, I feel what people are feeling. And maybe they do, but for most of us, we have to imagine the interior of others.
Jogen:We have to it's an aspect of imagination to consider that other people have feelings, thoughts, concerns just like me. When we're mindless, that's so easy for that to go by the wayside. Everyone's an enemy or an inconvenience when we're in a bad mood. Here are some, here's a subtle one. Don't add fuel to a fire.
Jogen:So when someone has a negative mind state that is not going anywhere good, don't make it worse. How do we do that? We develop our sensitivity to cause and effect, first of all. As I was saying last week, people think things that are harmful to them that they don't have to think. People's attention goes to things that are harmful or drags their energy down and they don't need to be doing that.
Jogen:And we're in that boat too. So this is Bodhisattva in social situations. Don't add fuel to a fire. Know know when you can say the thing that could actually make someone's state of mind worse. Of course, the opposite of that is being willing to light a fire and speak up even if you risk being disliked.
Jogen:Has something to do with being aligned. When I was younger, if I had a criticism to offer somebody, sometimes I would be nervous about it. I would feel quivery. And I learned two things about that quiveriness about giving people feedback. One was that I was more hooked into them liking me than I needed to be.
Jogen:I had to work with that. And two was the thing I was gonna criticize the person about, I hadn't yet cleaned it up fully in myself. And so it was actually a form of hypocrisy. Right? And so when we work with those two things, when we're willing to be disliked because we're in our integrity and we don't actually do the thing that we wanna give feedback about or we give it very humbly, like I do this too, it's a lot cleaner.
Jogen:People clearly reflecting ourselves to us is a bodhisattva act. You get my gist here where I'm going with this. These are just ideas or things that I have witnessed or taken on. Letting go of being right in the many petty situations. Try not to leave messes for others to clean up.
Jogen:A big thing that you're trained in in Zen temples is you're always considering the next person who's gonna use the bathroom, the next person who's gonna come in the house. I've let a lot of that slide, unfortunately. And that was one of the ways of living is that you're always considering how is this going to impact the other person, or at least you would try. And you might have heard this one before, and it's easier said than done, but good to do, is a bodhisattva carries some degree of inner silence into the clamor of the world. And maybe people don't notice or maybe they do, right?
Jogen:Or you carry some degree of not being reactive into a world that is so reactive. Just the kind of ready, we're like cocked and loaded to fly off into rage or dismay with very little sort of, groundedness is not the word I'm looking for, sense of resilience. This is just a sparking. And the main thing is to consider this tradition, which I think is a very beautiful and powerful tradition, has said that the mind of generosity and considering how one can practice generosity is the first thing a Bodhisattva does. It comes before meditation even.
Jogen:It's the first thing. It's an essential thing. The kind of project doesn't fully get off the ground until we incorporate this. And it doesn't have to be perfect. We just start somewhere.
Jogen:We just start somewhere. Anywhere we start is meaningful.
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 zendest.org. Your support supports us.