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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:Gosh, thanks everybody for your patience. Let's take refuge. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.
Speaker 2:Yes. I appreciate Esho figuring it all out and making it all happen. I so appreciate everybody. I missed you all so much. I've been gone for like the whole month of June and really missed Plum Blossom, Zen Do, and I'm really just so heartened that you all just kept going and you just kept making this happen and kept offering it to whoever came and offering it to each other, that's really beautiful and really precious, really wonderful.
Speaker 2:So I'm so grateful that you all take your own practice seriously and honor the practice of the other people who are coming here. And I want to yeah, the clock is slightly obscured for me, so I'm going to pull out my phone just so I can keep Oh, that's even better. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay.
Speaker 2:So I wanna start by just letting you know that this talk will be a little bit about what I have been up to in the past month, and I'm calling it Dharma Travels. Really this talk is about lineage, about our Buddhist lineage, which is like a family. It is very much like a family. And this talk is also about Vow, and the people that I got to meet in various stations of Buddhism or different ways that they're leading communities or doing things. I was just so struck by the fact that there's this larger extended family to come to know and to meet and that we share something with.
Speaker 2:And that's called the Maha Sangha. Maha means great, the big Sangha. And the Sangha is the community, historically the community of practitioners, so this is our Sangha, we're part of the Zen Community of Oregon Sangha, but we're also part of the Maha Sangha, that's all the Buddhists everywhere. And here in this country, we're a minority religion, but it was really heartening to see how many people are devoting their lives to this and expressing Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha and sharing them. You do not have to devote your life to this practice, that's not an expectation, but it is available.
Speaker 2:So that's one way I wanna start. The other way I wanna start is with a little reading from Appreciate Your Life. It is by Taizan Maizumi Roshi. He is my Dharma grandfather, if we're gonna do the family metaphor. And so he was Chosin Bay's teacher, and she's my teacher, she and Hogan Bay's.
Speaker 2:He was also Hogan's teacher for a while. He says, When you become a Buddhist, you receive the blood lineage chart. What is the most important implication of the blood lineage? The blood lineage is the lineage of the Buddha, the awakened one. Of course, the lineage has been handed down from the, he says the patriarchs, not my favorite word, we use ancestors usually.
Speaker 2:This lineage has been handed down from the ancestors to us, and for this reason the teacher is crucially important. At the same time, all of you are as equal in importance as the teacher. All of you are as equal in importance as the teacher. We should not forget this. So when he talks about blood lineage, when you become a Buddhist, and for us it's taking Ju Kai, it's the people who are wearing the little bibs.
Speaker 2:Part of what you do is you write basically the family tree 88 generations from the Buddha all the way down to your teacher who's giving you Ju Kai and your own name and it's a continuous circle, it's kind of a circuitous circle, but it's a circle that goes all the way back to the Buddha. So then you join that family. This blood lineage or the life of the Buddha stems from Shakyamuni Buddha. Shakyamuni Buddha is not only a historical figure who lived some two thousand five hundred years ago, but also all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, so people who have really become awakened. All became Shakyamuni Buddha upon his attainment of Buddhahood.
Speaker 2:This Shakyamuni Buddha is called the eternal Shakyamuni Buddha. Dogen Zen Teacher writes, now Dogen is our first ancestor from Japan and really the founder of our tradition, Dogen Zen Teacher, he lived in the December. Dogen Zen Teacher writes that all the Buddhas become Shakyamuni Buddha, and that Shakyamuni Buddha becomes this very mind is the Buddha. That's a phrase he's referring to, this very mind is the Buddha. So Dogen will go back and forth between talking about the absolute and the relative, so these very two different ways of seeing life, seeing the world, he kind of mixes them up so it can be a little confusing.
Speaker 2:All Buddhas become this original Buddha, Shakyamuni, and then Shakyamuni Buddha becomes this very mind is the Buddha, which is not our brain, it's our mind. This refers to the famous case of the gateless gait. A monk asks Master Basso, What is Buddha? Master Basso replies, This very mind is Buddha. That's what he's referring to.
Speaker 2:This very mind is Buddha. Even this mind that's like raking over what you did at work today or the thing somebody said or the stupid thing you said that you wish you had, even this, even this very mind is Buddha. Understand this well, what is it? Who is it? Needless to say, all of you are that.
Speaker 2:This very mind is the Buddha. This very body is the Buddha. When you realize Buddhahood, you yourself are identified with Shakyamuni Buddha, then your life literally is the same as that of the whole universe. This is the insight of awakening. I will tell a story about Maizumi Roshi and his teaching to one of the teachers I met in The Netherlands who got to study with Maizumi directly, relates to that reading.
Speaker 2:This very mind is the Buddha. So just a little overview. Here are some of the places that were visited. And are the Zoomers, is this working? I can't see you, but I'm gonna just ask for a little check-in with Zoom.
Speaker 2:Everything is good and you can see? Okay. Yes, we do. Alright. Alright.
Speaker 2:So at the beginning of June, I visited Virginia, the state of Virginia for the Generation X Dharma Teachers Conference, and then to Vermont for the American Zen Teacher's Association meeting, the AZTA. And because the fourth thing, the white plum Asanga, that's the lineage of Miyazumi Roshi. Because it was being held in The Netherlands, and because I was on the East Coast already, I just left from there and there was about twelve days in between that my husband Boncho and I who's a teacher here in the Zen Community, we visited London, Paris and Amsterdam a few days in each place so I'll touch on that. And this statue is a Buddha who is in the Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands and then back behind him are these Dharma Guardians that used to live in Japan at many temples in Asia. You will see these Dharma Guardians and they're huge, they're like eight feet tall, these guys.
Speaker 2:Very beautiful, very impressive and they lived outside and so I think that they'll have a much longer life in the Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands. I hope so. So I just wanna go through and give you an overview of some of these things. The Gen X Dharma Teachers, it's a very interesting group. In order to qualify you have to be born between the years of 1960 and 1981, so that's a pretty wide swath of humans, but it's actually, I think population wise, it is a little bit of an X because there's all the boomers and then all the millennials behind us, so there's just less of us, less of us Gen X people in general, and so there's not so many Dharma teachers as there are teachers that are in the baby boomer age.
Speaker 2:This group started around 2014 or so and is the next generation of leadership after the boomers who many of the So when I'm speaking about, mostly what I'm speaking about, let's clarify is convert Buddhism, westernized Buddhism. Buddhism has been in this country since the mid eighteen hundreds. The Chinese laborers brought Buddhism with them when they were building the railroad here and there were Zen practitioners on the sugar plantations in Hawaii in the eighteen hundred's. But what we're talking about is sort of this more westernized culture, people who may have grown up Christian, but then converted to Buddhism. And so there were a lot of Asian teachers who came over in the 50s, 60s and then the Western Caucasian mostly people who inherited those practices and started sanghas in that way.
Speaker 2:That's kind of what I'm talking about here. Most of the people in this generation are leading sanghas and this thing occurs every couple of years. The neat thing about it is that it's multi lineage, so it's not just Zen people, although it's a little bit weighted heavily towards Zen, there's a lot of Zen people, but this picture is of a couple of Theravadan monks, so they are wearing the robes, this what, this is all they wear and they follow the same rules, the same two sixty some rules that the Buddha followed, so they don't touch money. Those of you who saw Azan who was here, Azan Fa follows those rules to whatever extent that he can. And so we had a couple, a few of those guys at this retreat.
Speaker 2:Theravadin is the one way to talk about the kind of original teachings, the kind of practice that Theravadins do, there's those monks, but also insight meditation is derived from the more scholarly approach going directly to the Buddhist teachings, the Pali Canon is what that's called, and then teaching from that. So there are also people practicing in the Mahayana tradition, means great vehicle. It is seen as kind of a more expansive way of practicing, a way of seeing Buddhism that in Mahayana we have the Bodhisattva ideal, and a Bodhisattva is someone who could be enlightened, just go into Nirvana, but they choose to stay back and help all the other beings. And so that awakening is available to everyone. This is where the tradition of Zen or Chan in China or Korean Zen, this is where you'll find those practices and there were representatives from those traditions here.
Speaker 2:Vajrayana is seen as the diamond vehicle, so there's some insider jokes about these vehicles or boats that there's a sort of offensive term that Theravadin is referred to called Hinayana, which is the small boat. You don't want to call people Hinayana, it's nice. Mahayana, great vehicle, and Vajrayana, diamond vehicle, although I have heard it called that Vajrayana is the rocket to enlightenment. You know, why bother with just a big boat when you can have a rocket? So there were some folks who practiced in the Tibetan tradition there too.
Speaker 2:And then Ekayana, the one vehicle, we had representatives from a couple of different traditions, Tri Ratna and Tendai teachers. Let's see, I'll get into that a little bit later, but just to give you the overview. Lots of different kinds of Buddhism. Lots of different people who have just really gone deeply into different kinds of Buddhism, so that's very interesting. Here's our group.
Speaker 2:This is the Gen X Dharma teachers and it was at Seven Oaks, this nice retreat center in Virginia. Warm and humid, that's for sure. And you you walk out on this lawn and it's like, oh my god, is there a tick? Is there a tick on me? Have I got a tick?
Speaker 2:I have to check. I have to check my socks. I have to check every day. It's a totally different thing on the East Coast with the ticks, and you know, that's coming for us just to let you know. It was a cool building, this this round building had an acoustic system that enabled each person, you could hear the person sitting across from you without any sort of microphone.
Speaker 2:The sound like goes up into the ceiling and then bounces down the walls somehow. I don't know how they did it, but it really worked. It was fantastic. This cool building built for people talking to each other. And that's me talking to one of the Tendai monks or Tendai priests, he's not a monk, Tendai priest.
Speaker 2:So what is Tendai anyway? So this is my friend Shingaku and I'll show you pictures of her place. We went to her place in Springfield, Massachusetts and got to experience a couple of Tendai services. Tendai Buddhism is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition and it emphasizes the integration of lots of different Buddhist practices And they study the Lotus Sutra primarily and talks about how all beings can attain enlightenment. And so it seems like a very practical, in many ways it's very similar, but maybe there's some differences in that they do chanting, they do a little bit of meditation, she offered a Dharma talk, there's some very specific, esoteric practices are also part of Tendai in that she would do of whispering chants up at the altar and do different hand mudras and light incense and have these very specific procedures that she was doing.
Speaker 2:That's different really than what we do. But all of it is to facilitate awakening and whoever comes and whatever their practice, whatever draws them, so they're open to all these different practices. And I've been friends with Shingaku for a few years. I met her at Gen X and we were on the planning committee when Gen X was at Great Vow, and so that's a nice way to get to know somebody, and she and I zoom once a month. And her temple, which I'll show you a picture of in a minute, also Jizo is the primary image on the altar for her, so that's another thing that we share.
Speaker 2:What is Triratna? Triratna, my friend Upiety is in the white Wagesa there, that's an indicator that they're a teacher in that tradition. I think this guy may be a Zen guy the way he's wearing black and stuff, but I thought it was such a cute picture of Upayati. So Trieratana is a very much worldwide Buddhist community. It's international founded in 1967 so pretty modern aims to make the teachings accessible and relevant and fosters friendship and support among its members.
Speaker 2:That's one of its real strengths is spiritual friendship. Now, like many Buddhist traditions, and we talk about this openly, there was a scandal with their founding teacher, and so that community has been really cleaning that up for quite a few years. My friend Upiety here says that the Gen X is the clean up crew. Maybe that's true. It certainly has been for their community and she's part of that, really bringing in the clarity of ethical behavior and healthy boundaries for Buddhist teachers.
Speaker 2:That is really important and there's more to be said on that in a minute. Here's a meeting that we had with all the Zen people, so it's fun to do a selfie down a big long table. And so that's a bunch of Zen people. Some of them are local. You don't get to see my I don't have an arrow to point out people, but the tall guy right there, that's Kakumio.
Speaker 2:He is the abbot of Dharma Rain Zen Center here in Portland. And next to him is Rebecca Lee. She is a Chan teacher. I think she's on the East Coast, but she comes to Great Vow from time to time. Hard to see too many people beyond them, but there's a couple of the abbots from San Francisco's Zen Center, the woman with the sunglasses, she was just having some eye trouble, she and the guy with the beard, they're a married couple and they run a center in Ohio and guy with the glasses over there, he's doing Korean Zen these days.
Speaker 2:This set of pictures, if you look down there three of the Theravadan monks, the fellow in brown his name was Vonte Rahula and he's from Mexico. He has built a very large monastery in Guadalajara. I don't know that it is for people to go retreat. I'm not so familiar, but it definitely is to continue the practice of monastic practice in that Theravadan tradition. So if you're ever in Guadalajara, look him up, he's a hoot.
Speaker 2:But this set of photographs was something that he carried with him when he did basically a hermitage retreat for a few years, and there's not a lot of interaction with anybody, so it's pictures of all of his loved ones, all of his monk brothers and nun sisters and beloved people, and you can turn it over and there's you know more of them on the other side, his mother, his sisters, everybody who was important to him, he would so he could have them with him. And we all put something meaningful on the altar, and that was what he put on the altar, and it was just so moving for everybody to see. This is my friend Shingaku's temple, Winding Path Temple in Springfield, it's part of her house and so you see these long mats, you basically would put a zabuton on there and people would sit there and she's up at the altar facing away and doing her esoteric practices and you know smokes coming out and it's all very very interesting and sweet the whole process bells and all that. But it was very welcoming and she gave a nice talk, it's a nice hybrid thing, you could check out her situation online, attend one of her things, she gave a talk on mindful eating which was really nice.
Speaker 2:So then we were off to Vermont, we stopped off at Montpellier, I guess that's how you pronounce it, and we went to the coffee shop and said we were from Portland, and they said, Oh, we just did a naked bike ride last night. We were like, how many people? And they were like, oh, about 25, which I think is a lot braver, frankly. I mean, you know, kinda tucked into 500 people. We also, we were walking down the street and there was a No Kings rally.
Speaker 2:So it just, we felt right at home. It was just like being in Portland basically. We also, it was the flag day celebration so we got lunch and we said, let's go over to the Capitol, there's a park there, let's sit and eat our lunch. Well it turned out there was a celebration, a United States celebration and they had an Elvis impersonator and a bouncy house and like a smattering of people. It was kind of surreal.
Speaker 2:So then we ended up at the American Zen Teacher's Association. This group is forty or so years going or is full of these basically baby boomers who have been meeting year after year together to offer each other support. This is Zen Teachers and this was the first year that Bancho and I were not the youngest ones there. There's one guy in here who's in his late 40s so we're no longer the youngest, but the point of it is to foster dialogue among Zen Buddhist teachers and provide access to information about Zen Buddhist practice and teaching. So there's a website for it.
Speaker 2:You can see who all the teachers are and it's for ordained or lay people. You don't have to be a priest to be part of the AZTA. You can be a lay teacher and it's from any of the lineages of Zen Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. So we have some representatives from all of those here. Some of the Gen X people also traveled here.
Speaker 2:You can see Rebecca Lee and David Zimmerman from San Francisco Zen Center. And this took place at the Vermont Zen Center. If you're ever in the neighborhood you should totally go because it's beautiful. Sinyana Graf is the abbot and Roshi there. And it is, There's another connection with her in our lineage because she studied with Roshi Philip Caplow in Rochester.
Speaker 2:That is where Hogan Roshi, another one of my teachers, started his Zen practice, that's a monastery in Rochester, residential practice. He went there when he was 19 years old, and he's been a hardcore Zen practitioner since then, now he's in his 70s. And so she was part of that cohort there at Rochester. So I don't want to get too complicated, but it's an intense kind of a practice. So Keploroshi trained in what's called the Harada Yasutani tradition.
Speaker 2:This is like, again, family tree stuff, but it's kind of important because it says a lot about how we practice. So the Harada Yasutani tradition is called that because there was a teacher who in like the eighteen hundreds who got transmission in both a So to and a Rinzai lineage, two lineages. Usually those two lineages are very different, but here's this one guy that became an official teacher in each one. That's Hirata Dayun Sogaku. And so his Dharma heir, his student is called his name is Hakun Yasutani, so it's called the Harada Yasutani lineage for those two teachers that merged So to and Rinzai Zen.
Speaker 2:They're very different flavors, but there's a blending of them. So So to Zen is very kind of slower, refined, all about, and they're both about bringing deep awareness to whatever you're doing. They don't typically study koans, that might be the main difference, whereas in Renzai Buddhism, that's where the koan practice tradition has lived for quite some time, and it's also a much more robust so you could say gradual and sudden awakening is one sort of difference. Rinzai can be very instantaneous and no gaps and so there's just a different flavor. So these two things got blended back in the day and so Roshi Kaplow studied with Hakun Yasutani and so did Maizumi Roshi also.
Speaker 2:So this is why we have this blended lineage of So to and Rinzai. You don't have to understand any of that right now. If it's meaningful to you that's great, but it is notable because of the way we practice. So I just and you'll notice that this is a little Jizo garden that she has there. That's what these statues are of Jizo Bodhisattva which is really the primary energy for Great Vow and very much a part of our teaching at ZCO.
Speaker 2:So that was a very familiar element. I want to show you this beautiful building. This is their Zen Do. The structures that you sit on, there's like a, you sit up on the structure it's called a Tan and that is a traditional Japanese Zen Zen Do. The little chairs are not so traditional and usually you'd be sitting facing the wall on one of these things and there's a statue in the middle and you do the walking around.
Speaker 2:There's on the upper right is the dining area and the lower right is the front door with all the shoes. Here is a view of the chanting hall which is different than the Zen Do. They've built onto this farmhouse basically over the course of years and it's all just so beautiful. It's pretty seamless. Looks like it's always been there.
Speaker 2:This is where they go to chant and receive talks and they have a wonderful, also they have a wonderful hybrid system too. So here's the Buddha on the altar and then just outside the Zen Do is this line of Kuan Yin statues, Kanseion statues, the goddess of or Bodhisattva of compassion and that's in a place called the Gaitan and again in a traditional Zenoan, we have one at Heart of Wisdom, it's like the it's like a little room before you go in and so if you're late, you're supposed to sit there, or if you can't sit still, you're supposed to sit there. We don't have one here and that's totally fine. And this is basically the front porch which is called a Sanmon, and I want you to notice that the columns are made of trees that still have bark on them, is very beautiful. There was lots of gorgeous flower arranging and the gardens were just incredible and beautiful and it was peak peony season and it was just gorgeous.
Speaker 2:This is a table that had all of the deceased previous members of AZTA who had ever been members. So it spanned from a long time ago, everyone. So this was the first year that they had this table to honor all the previous deceased AZTA members and so I think this will be a tradition that will carry forward and be you know only added to. So then my husband Bancho and I did travel in the heat dome. I want to say that like a thousand people died in France during this thing and it was you know, whatever little inconveniences we had were nothing compared to you know, there's not a lot of air conditioning there, it didn't cool down at night and there was just very little relief for people when we were there.
Speaker 2:But we had a good time nonetheless. There we are at Big Ben, this is London. Just a couple things, Westminster Abbey at the Victoria And Albert Annex, there's the David Bowie Center, all of his writings, all of his notes. Got to see behind the glass, there's his notes of the lyrics to the song Heroes. You can just see his handwriting, which is you know, pretty close to as cool as the Rosetta Stone which is just right there.
Speaker 2:You can see that at the British Museum too and lots of other things that they probably shouldn't have there. Then here's Paris, know we just did a lot of the standard things although it was so hot, we just went down to the Seine River and sat there and realized well that's what people do. They had brought picnics there, it was like date night for a lot of the Parisians on Friday night. You just go down there and they like there was this one couple that literally had glass wine glasses with their picnic. Amazing.
Speaker 2:This is Notre Dame and the Musee d'Orsay that has a lot of the impressionist artists. We got to see a lot of art. Here is Amsterdam, the canals, and I want to say that these little mini pancakes are called poffertjes, poffertjes, pauferches or something. Anyway, they're great. And we went to the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijks Museum so you can see lots of really beautiful art.
Speaker 2:And what was interesting is here's this beautiful Van Gogh picture of wheat fields and that is what surrounds Zen River, the place where we had the White Plum Asanga meeting surrounded by wheat fields. So the White Plum is the organization of our lineage and that's Maizumi Roshi and it's all of his heirs, there were 12 and then they make heirs and so it is this, yeah, ever expanding family tree. So here were our hosts, ten ks Coppins and his wife Tammy Myoho. She goes by Tammy. She's been the cook there for twenty five years.
Speaker 2:That's usually a rotating job, but for her to be the cook for that long is amazing. They have a very kind of like Great Vow. They have like a musical component. They like to mix it up and add a little bit of music. He'll do a accordion with some of the chants.
Speaker 2:Like, that's pretty cool. You'll see the front altar has a picture of Maizumi Roshi on it and that that hammer is to hit the wooden block called the Han. That's the call everybody to meditation. So here they too have a traditional Zen Do with a Tan and does anybody know who the figure is on the altar in the Zen Do here, in a traditional Zen Do? Does anybody have any guess about that?
Speaker 2:About who that figure is? It's kind of a trick question because you're like, is it Buddha? If it's not Buddha, I don't know too many other characters. It's It's Manjushri. How do you know that?
Speaker 2:To some temples. He usually carries a sword. Yeah, he's not carrying a sword in this particular depiction, but he is riding a lion. Yeah, one of the zoomers know? Go ahead and say it again.
Speaker 2:Correct. Samachabhadra sits on an elephant and Manjushri sits on a lion. Yeah, so that's the hint. And why isn't there a Buddha in the Zen Do? It's because all the Buddhas are already sitting in the Zen Do.
Speaker 2:So this is the building of Zen River and just the very, you know, kind of humble, it used to be a facility to retrain people in their careers in The Netherlands, farmers to retrain them and so it had this residential capacity and so they use it for retreats. I just want to tell you about some people if you ever find yourself in Los Angeles, you could go to the Zen Center of Los Angeles. These are a couple of adorable people that we got to hang out with. Dharma Joy is an abbot at ZCLA and Rioto, Holly is a teacher there, he also is a professional guitarist and we had a no talent show and he threw down, I had no idea the guy can scat, I mean that was amazing. We met these women who are from Greyherrin, Zen in Dublin, Ireland.
Speaker 2:Their teacher their transmitted teacher is Father Robert Kennedy, not the Robert Kennedy we might be familiar with right now in this country, very different Robert Kennedy. Father Robert Kennedy is a Jesuit priest and one of Maizumi's heirs and these teachers are descended from his lineage. The woman on the left is Geno Roshi and on the right is Amy Hallowell. They're both in Paris. Geno is actually 80, I couldn't find a more recent picture of her.
Speaker 2:Her hair is all white now and she also had studied with Mizumi but her teacher was Genpo Mursal, Also big scandal in his lineage in 2011 or so. It came out that he was having affairs, he was asked to disrobe and stop teaching Zen. He said he would and then he started doing it again without doing any of the things he agreed to do, counseling or any of those things. So his lineage is a little bit fraught, but he was the one who went to France and to The Netherlands and taught a lot of people and transmitted some people. It was like meeting a long lost part of the family, seeing all these European members of the lineage, including Tenkei Roshi, Gempo was his teacher, the host of this thing.
Speaker 2:So a lot of them do really acknowledge that aspect and have learned from it and learned how important it is again for for Dharma teachers to have good boundaries and to take care of those relationships. Amy Hollowell is a teacher of our Buddhist Healthy Boundaries class and so that's important to know and then this wonderful interaction, something that Geno talked about, one of her interactions with Maizumi Roshi, she was talking about how he, coming from Japan told all his students like you're gonna have to do it differently. I can't you know take this I can only take this so far here. I'm Japanese and this is you know you're American and you're gonna have to do it differently. So his heirs were like, well, how are we gonna know what to change and what not to change?
Speaker 2:What apparently he said was, don't lose the point. Don't lose the point. And so that was kind of our basis of discussion. What does that mean? And so we would get in these small groups and say, okay, well what is the point?
Speaker 2:Ask ourselves this for the whole weekend basically. But one of the things that Geno shared about her experience with Maizumi that I wanted to really offer to you all, and so many of the people who studied with him directly, and there's fewer of them all the time, they all talked about how much confidence he had in each person. How much, how just total confidence he had in every person's ability to awaken, to see the truth, to realize the truth. And so Geno is this very powerful Dharma teacher. She has a very powerful presence.
Speaker 2:She's also just like the impossibly elegant French woman. Like, you know, she can wear a scarf like effortlessly and just has a just a coolness also, but real presence. And so she shared about this interaction she had with Maizumi and he told her, your life is the life of the Buddha, your life is the life of the Dharma, your life is the life of the Sangha. And she said, Roshi, I I don't understand. And he said, you will.
Speaker 2:I thought that was so beautiful. The other thing he would say to people is little by little, and they would get frustrated, little by little, just understand. Another Gen X teacher is Sensei Joao Setbon. He's French. He's just starting a new practice place in Arles, France, and I wanna bring him up because what is he?
Speaker 2:He's He's a fifth, fourth generation from Mizumi. So Mizumi, Genpoh, Geno, Amy Hollowell, and then this guy. So it's really flowing on, isn't it? But if you're ever in France, look him up, he's part of the fam. He's a very sweet guy, ended up being in a lot of small groups with him, very very genuine.
Speaker 2:Oh speaking of genuine, this person too is another teacher of the Buddhist Healthy Boundaries class. His teacher again Amy Hollowell and Genpoh to some degree he practiced with Genpoh and is part of the Buddhist Healthy Boundaries faculty. He's a therapist and if you're in The Hague, go sit with him. Alright, that's really it. Here we are with a bunch of plum blossoms, and you know, I just So travel is interesting probably mostly to the person who did it, but I knew that folks would have questions and I just wanted to give you a taste, a little flavor of what has been going on for the past month and what I bring back here, what I hope to be bringing back here is this sense of much larger practice than just right here.
Speaker 2:We are connected. We are not just connected in sort of a theoretical sense. Like it is a real sense, a a true connection with these actual people and people who are walking down the same path that you may be, forming a relationship with a teacher and really just seeing what this is about. And if it works, to keep going and to maintain a sangha or to really endeavor to have a opportunity together to really look deeply and to see what's really true beyond what we who we think we are, and beyond all of our stories that we keep telling ourselves and driving ourselves nuts with, what if we could put those down? What would we then see?
Speaker 2:What would we then know?
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 zendust.org. Your support supports us.