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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.
Good evening, everybody. Tonight, I'm gonna continue commenting on the inscribing trust in the heart poem, sometimes translated as affirming faith in mind. It's the text that the teachers chose for the Autumn Ongo. And you could study study it along with the sangha. You could recite it in the morning before you sit.
Jogen:In a way, is that kind of a teaching. It's not really giving you too much to contemplate. With your cognitive faculty, it's more to inscribe trust in the heart, like the title says. But there are also some good commentaries about it, if that sort of thing helps you really weave the dharmic way of thinking into your into your life. This talk arose from my experience this morning.
Jogen:I was having a deep autumn infused sit. In fact, I was just gonna write a talk about meditating with the rain, but I didn't have anything to say. It's like enough said, the rain. That's And so I had this deep autumn sit in my little practice room, and then I had breakfast and read the news, and then I went back to write some thoughts for this talk. And maybe your life is just like that, that kind of rhythm, but it was interesting for me to come to a core text like this, and this is not a new insight for me, but just really struck about how different these teachings are, especially the core lineage teachings and the common ways of seeing things.
Jogen:Right? The the mind state that we swim in, being people in society, and what is being said in these teachings and in the lineage. In a way, the the cultural home base, with a few exceptions, seems very far off from the message of this lineage we're participating in. In a way, right? You also could probably find all of it if you looked in the right places or had the the mind to see it, but this where I'm picking up in this chant, the poem says, the way, the Tao, is perfect like vast space where there is no lack and no excess.
Jogen:The Tao is perfect like vast space where there is no lack and no excess. If I were to reword that, I might say, perfect spacious way, mind of not enough, mind of too much faded into silence. The way is perfect like vast space where there's no lack and no excess. So this is a realization that arises out of decisive Zazen, decisive meditation practice. And, a little bit of a brief side tangent.
Jogen:Decisive is one of the most important qualities in our practice. It means that when we do it to really do it, and that's not trying hard, and that's not even doing a lot, it means you're doing it, but are you 80% doing it? Are you 70% doing it? It's the 100%, or if that's even possible, it's the 99% doing it that the deeper realizations come. And this is one of them, the perfect spacious way.
Jogen:Mind of not enough, mind of too much faded into silence. Again, probably better just to listen to the rain, but I'm gonna talk some more. This word, perfection. Often in teachings, you know, there's a whole marvelous lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes translated as the great perfection teachings. But we hear perfection, and we go, oh, perfection.
Jogen:I know what that feels like. It's 78 degrees out. It's sunny. I had a really good falafel wrap. The cat didn't pee on the rug.
Jogen:We think perfect is a set of conditions in our lives that match our desire for the way things to be. And in some sense, that is what we are presented as the road to happiness in contemporary life. You can manage your conditions such that you get them lined up and then, ah, it's gonna be so good. And then you will, relax and be content, but it doesn't work that way, as you know, because conditions change. What you want changes.
Jogen:You get what you want and then you decide you actually didn't want what you got. That's kind of dharma one zero one, but worth hearing. So, perfection, the way is perfect like vast space, it evokes this sense of perfect versus imperfect. Right? And for some aspect of the mind, it's just, kind of profane to say the way is perfect, that my life is perfect.
Jogen:That there is a perfection to be known because we think, well, no. This is what's wrong, and this is what's wrong, and this is what's wrong. But perfect versus imperfect is not this realization. It's not what's meant here. In a way, there just simply is no word.
Jogen:The way is where there's no lack and no excess. It's perfect that there is the personal and collective heart mind that cannot help but look out at this world and see many problems, see deep brokenness, terrible wrong things. It's perfect that there's a sense of could be betterness all the time that haunts us or haunts many people. Right? Who could argue against that given what we know of the world?
Jogen:If someone said, I read about such and such today. It's terrible. I don't think you would say, oh, darling, but the world is perfect. Can't you see? You just need to meditate.
Jogen:You just need to read the right books. But again, this is not perfect versus imperfect. That is the reflexive mode of consciousness, ours, is to pit this versus that. They are like that, but I'm like this. They are like this, but I'm like that.
Jogen:This versus that. This versus that. It's reflexive. You could say instinctive. It is said nowadays that we're, divided and don't have common agreement.
Jogen:Everybody lives in their own little pockets of reality. When I first, heard that, you know, it kind of made sense. I in the last few years, I've lived in four different places, and I have not been able to connect with any of my neighbors. Despite really trying, everybody is just like, I'm in my bubble and I don't know what bubble you exist in. Or maybe we're just not that interesting or kind of creepy.
Jogen:I don't know. We talk to our cats a lot with the windows open, so But we get siloed in our own algorithms. We shout virtuously at our own friends in social media. So it really seems like we don't have agreement, but actually, it's exceedingly rare to find someone who doesn't pretty continually see lack or deep brokenness or could be betterness in their life or others. How many people do you know whose life is not organized around some dimension of it getting better?
Jogen:Can you get the house better, the career better, the health better, the relationships better, the spiritual practice better, the instrument playing better. It's exceedingly rare to find someone who, if you gave them the space, wouldn't complain about the way things are for them. Does that seem true? I think that's true. So actually, I think we're all pretty much in agreement.
Jogen:It's not that we disagree. We all pretty much agree that we are displeased with the configuration of our worlds. Completely united in that. We have the most basic thing in common. We think that something is wrong all the time.
Jogen:We disagree about what is wrong, but we are displeased with the configuration of our worlds or other people's worlds. We mind other people's business very easily. From the petty to the very significant, that's pretty interesting. We're all the same like that. The way is perfect like vast space where there's no lack and no excess.
Jogen:You contrast that with the continual sense that things are broken or lacking or imperfect. Right? That could be a world situation. That could be a home situation. That could be a feeling in you.
Jogen:That could be a relationship state. Continual sense. The teachings, the value of them is to point out that this is weird, or to point out that you could you could experience this as kind of weird. Right? Most of us, I would assume in this room are have meals every day.
Jogen:We have good things in our lives. We have reasonable stability compared to most of human history. We're safer than people have ever been, healthier than people have ever been. And there's rarely a moment when we don't go, what do I need? How can I fix that thing or that person or that country?
Jogen:It's why it's so difficult to sit and stop fixing improving plotting and nexting. Nexting is a term I like. I've heard about sexting. I've never received a sext. Come on.
Jogen:I've never received a sext, I've received a next all the time. What's next? What are we doing next? Everybody's into nexting. And then we try to practice these teachings, and we've been doing this fixing, improving, plotting, nexting as our basic way of being, and then the way is perfect like vast space.
Jogen:My meditation is related to this somehow? Yeah. Continual a continual sense that things are not perfect. And yet even this cannot shut out the way. Right?
Jogen:Beauty interrupts this. Sometimes I think that the purpose of beauty is some deep divine principle in life that is just to interrupt human beings' fixation on imperfection. Why should the leaves become so beautiful? Somebody could tell me some chemical thing about why, but they could be turning like putrid green, or they could be ugly. Beauty interrupts this.
Jogen:Kindness interrupts this connection. Even perfection, even in this trance of nexting, trance of things aren't quite right, inner, outer, that gets interrupted. We can't perfectly sustain that. So in a way, beauty, connection, perfection, these are words for the ways that we are touched, that we deviate from the track of lack and excess. Some of the, Zen teachings are a little bit like, in jokes, or they're like, commentaries on the Buddha's original teachings.
Jogen:So people are familiar with the Buddha saying that this world we're in of conditions is, for the untrained mind, pretty rough, pretty difficult. It's not that this isn't a world of suffering. The Buddha said that that is going to be the experience of embodied selves that don't see they lack self nature. It's gonna be hard, and sometimes it's gonna be really hard. K?
Jogen:Some anyone have aging parents? And you really take that in, how hard it is at times. I know there are different different conditions. It's not that this isn't a world of suffering, as Buddha points out, it's that one finds it difficult to completely sustain the view and experience that it is. That's why sometimes we're like, I don't know about Buddhism.
Jogen:It seems kind of pessimistic. You like that voice? That's the voice. Buddhism's a little pessimistic. I I sometimes think that.
Jogen:People tell me that's a very pessimistic religion. But you can't completely sustain the view and even experience of your own that it's entirely suffering unless you work really hard. A moment of practice is a moment of disrupting or interrupting our view that things should or shouldn't be otherwise. It's like there's this thing that's going and all of a sudden, we we interrupt it. We stop.
Jogen:We interrupt it with the vertical truth. Right? Because this is all pasting and nexting. And whenever we look from our vantage point, the mind is going to find something wrong or something that could be better, but then we intersect it. What is here now if you let go of right, wrong, should and shouldn't be?
Jogen:Maybe you're thinking this should be a little bit more interesting. It should be a little more this, that. I should feel a little bit more. What is this experience if you just put that aside? Can you bear the experience of no evaluation, no categorization?
Jogen:Or is there something raw about that, something confronting about that? What is here when there is no view that this right now is right or wrong? The boring binary game. In that moment, whatever appears is the way appearing. The way that is perfect like vast space doesn't need our confirmation or even our realization of it to be so.
Jogen:It's an interesting thing. You can if you find a good seat in practice and you really touch this through decisive Zazen, this so called perfection, you can fall into, let's call it suffering, and yet you could come right back to this truth and slide right into it as if nothing ever happened. A way that is perfect like fast paced doesn't even need us to know it to be so for it to be so. But unless we confirm it, it remains an idea. It doesn't it doesn't bless our lives.
Jogen:So ideas, I sometimes, debate, contemplate in myself about whether the dharma should give people hope. That is a function of religion. Right? In fact, lot of religions say it kinda sucks now, but later if you do the right thing, it's gonna be super good. It's gonna be so good.
Jogen:And so they give you hope. See, ideas can give us hope or ideas can make us despair, but ideas can't free us from those twins of hope and despair. And in a way, that's what we're sitting into. The poem continues, our choice to choose and to reject prevents our seeing this simple truth. Both striving for the outer world, I think you could unpack that as both striving for status and and, you know, ultimate well-being and all of those things, striving for the outer world as well as for the inner void, trying to escape, condemn us to entangled lives.
Jogen:Just calmly see that all is one, and by themselves, false views will go. That's what the poem says.