Every Day Is A Good Day

It happened that yesterday was my birthday. I would have wished for better weather had I known it was going to be so dreary and wet all day, and there was a distinct torpor in the morning schedule that may have been attributable to the change in the weather after such a sunny weekend, but apart from that it was a fine day.
Most likely, if people here know it is your birthday, you will have 'Happy Birthday' sung to you at work meeting, and this was the case yesterday (we also sang for Anna whose birthday was the day before). I had several visits from the chocolate fairy with offerings left on my desk, in the office, outside my room, and even under my cushion in the zendo when I went to sit in the afternoon - and I guess I am okay with being type-cast as a chocolate lover -  as well as flowers, cards, phone calls, emails and messages from friends and family, and a good number of hugs.
I did try to get some work done in the morning, and then it was my turn, with Bernd, to do lunch dishes. Many people commented along the lines of 'they made you do dishes on your birthday?', but I was fine with it - apart from giving me occasion to interact with everyone who was having lunch, it didn't feel like much of a chore.
And anyway I had an appointment to go to Kabuki baths afterwards, courtesy of a recent benefactor, which made for a nice indulgent stretch of the afternoon. I enjoyed noticing how different my gait was on the way back compared to the way there, and tried to carry that feeling through the rest of the day.
To wrap things up, being Monday, we had our Young Urban Zen meeting - for which I am now even further past the age range of course. I had thought that the wet weather might keep a few people away, but on the contrary, we had the biggest meeting yet, with thirty people showing up. About half the group came along to the Orbit Room afterwards, as some of us had for Hannah's birthday a few weeks ago, to expand our practice together beyond the cushion. It turned into a slightly later night than I had anticipated, mainly because we were having fun. I am happy to report that all the residents in attendance made it safely to the zendo this morning, as did one or two others, who were perhaps wanting to show their determination. I confess that I was not feeling at my freshest, and that during second period my concentration was more than haphazard; a fine demonstration of how intimately cause and effect are linked.

Entertainment

One of the great things about living at Zen Center is that often the entertainment happens at home, be it a movie, a reading, an ice cream social, or as on Saturday, a whole big happening. I was sitting in the dining room during the Bold Italic event, listening to Barn Owl, in almost exactly the same spot as I had sat on Friday night listening to Zenju reading from and discussing her new book, but while that offering was a very typical Zen Center offering, quiet and intimate, Barn Owl were possibly the loudest thing ever to happen in this building. I loved them, something about the pure intensity of the sound that reminded me of going to see the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, after which I would feel like I had been standing under a waterfall for a couple of hours - a little battered but completely invigorated. I had heard them during their sound check in the afternoon, as we set everything up for the evening, and on the basis of that, recommended to Keith, our resident who is now deaf, that he come and sit in to feel them playing (you can read his impressions here).
There was much more happening during the evening as well: two other sets of music, well chosen to match the space, from Danny Paul Grody and Date Palms, who were in the chilly courtyard; an art installation managed by David Wilson, tea tasting, chocolate, the listening booth with Bernd, and meditation with Lien followed by a showing of movies featuring Suzuki Roshi. I really enjoyed the feeling of the evening, people free to roam the ground floor to find something to give their attention to, and having the space mixed between our usual activities and these new creations and new visitors was really energising.

Artists at work

The installation

Danny Paul Grody

Foot traffic

Barn Owl

Trying to represent the Barn Owl sound pictorially

Date Palms in the coutyard

Gregg from Date Palms and his array of instruments

Danny Paul Grody and the moon

Think Different

I started getting enquiries yesterday about whether we were going to mark Steve Jobs' death, and I did what I usually do when I can't think what the appropriate response should be, which is move the question up to Paul and Rosalie. Paul was in favour of doing a memorial service, on account of Jobs having been a student of Kobun Chino, who had long associations with Zen Center, so we are going to do one this evening - just the same service as we do when we are asked to mark the passing of a sangha member or someone close to a sangha member. This morning there have been a flurry of emails circulating among various staff members as we field the media interest in this; people seem keen to explore the 'zen of Steve Jobs' angle. We are trying not to make this more of an occasion than it needs to be, but of course anyone reading this who can make it is welcome to attend as part of the usual evening schedule.

Written on a MacBook Pro

Living The Precepts

During last weekend's jukai, a line that stood out for me was right at the beginning, in the invocation: "In faith that we are Buddha, we enter Buddha's way". As someone asked me to write about what it meant to receive the precepts, I thought this might be a good place to start.
Any teacher will give you instruction in their understanding of how to approach the precepts, and there are usually classes here at Zen Center as well - Tova is teaching one this practice period. Of the books on the subject, the two most widely recommended here are Being Upright by Reb Anderson, and The Mind of Clover by Robert Aitken.
I was a bit of a late developer when it came to the precepts. I lived here at City Center for two years, with Paul as my teacher, and took classes studying them, but did not feel ready to ask to sew my rakusu. It was only when I went to Tassajara and met Gaelyn that I felt the urge to take that step; she said yes, but I still ended up waiting two years before I did the ceremony, mainly as she had not had dharma transmission when I asked, so she was not able to perform the ceremony herself.
When I did finally have my jukai, in the spring of 2004, coming at the end of four practice periods at Tassajara, I found that I was seriously thinking about becoming a priest, and I remember speaking about this with Gaelyn on the day of the ceremony. As it happened, with causes and conditions and dealing with things happening in my life rather unskillfully, that took another five years to come to fruition, and by then I had returned to being Paul's student.
In that sense, my notions of what it means to take the precepts and receive a lay ordination are a little coloured by my desire to be priest ordained, so that my blue rakusu seemed like a marker on the way somewhere else, though of course the precepts you receive at lay ordination and priest ordination are exactly the same.
I think when practice starts to make sense to us in a certain way, when it starts to integrate into our lives, and we want to articulate this in a committed way, it follows that we make the precepts a foundation of that, and our receiving the precepts a recognition of that. As I have heard many teachers say over the years, the undertaking is an intention to make this effort, and not just a rod to beat ourselves up with if we start to think we are not doing well enough; the precepts are guides more than rules. We are just saying that we care enough about how we live to explicitly make this our path. As a priest I am just taking this further by making practice the central element of my life, by vowing to uphold forms and ceremonies, as one version of one of the Pure Precepts has it, and by endeavouring to help others find their way.

Rain and blue sky after breakfast this morning

Coming Attractions

If you pay close attention to the Zen Center calendar, you may have noticed an upcoming event in conjunction with The Bold Italic, which you can now read all about here - it is sold out though, so if you haven't already got tickets, sorry. I have been curious about how this event will unfold since Michael B. proposed it many months ago, and have been happy to be a part of planning it. There is a continual debate here, as there needs to be, as to how we keep Zen Center vital and interesting to the wider community without losing sight of the fundamental reasons why we do this (which is why I was keen to help Young Urban Zen happen), and while I tend to scepticism around the whole notion of 'Zen and ...' that sometimes seems to happen here and at Tassajara as a way to entice people, the angle proposed here definitely got me enthused. Imagining as we have that this event will reach a very different crowd than usual, I look forward to seeing how such an influx of people will affect the building, and vice versa.

Training

There's a pretty steep learning curve when you move into the building. Apart from the practical things of any new place you live like where all the bathrooms are, where does the recycling go, where is the milk kept, there is the whole spiritual side as well, with its wealth of forms: what time do I have to get to the zendo in the morning, how does kinhin work, how do I get in and out of the Buddha Hall without standing out too much, finding the chants in the chant book and so forth. And then you are expected to take on different jobs on top of that: kitchen prep jobs, dish shifts, house jobs - taking care of different aspects of the practical running of the temple - desk duty, night-watch, bathroom jobs and doan jobs. Obviously my realm is the latter, and we have been working hard to get all the new people stitched into the doanryo. Yesterday I showed a group of people how to be cleaning chidens, the people who take care of each altar so that it looks immaculate at the beginning of each day, and we have also been doing noon service trainings, where new people get the opportunity to try out as doan, kokyo, shoten or jiko. Last night we had an energetic and laughter-filled run through the forms of service, even if we didn't have time for everyone who came to try each position they wanted to.
I have noticed over the last eighteen months that I have often had a fair amount of resistance at the idea of doing trainings, and I think it has to do with feeling the responsibility that I have to transmit all the forms correctly so that everything is done right afterwards, even though I know that hardly ever happens, and that the whole thing is really a process of noticing how things go, pointing out the mistakes that happen and trying to correct them gently, as we do in the morning service review. Of course not everyone has an in-built aptitude for all these jobs, and not everyone is receptive to feedback, so dealing with those issues is one thing I have to keep learning.

After the rain this morning

Study Hall

A last excerpt from Returning to Silence for the time being: "The moment between before and after is called Truth or Buddha's world. We don't know what this is but we are there. Our life is completely embraced by this. We are present from moment to moment right there. That is what we call buddha, Buddha's world or Buddha-nature. That Truth is not something objective; it is the original nature of the self. Original nature of the self is not something different from the Truth. They are one.
The source of energy that helps the growth of our original nature is not in the conscious conceptual world. We are just going, so there is no room to say it is anywhere. It is continuous dynamic working and it is there we must stand up. Life is the full manifestation of total dynamic working. There is no room to conceptualize. It is just working. If we want to taste this, it is practice. We have to be right there, be present right there. We have to be in harmony with our original nature. If we are there, very naturally seeds of our energy grow, the source of our energy, our life, grows. But it is not an idea of 'right there'; it is more than that; it is nothing but dynamic energy, energy in motion. It is going on eternally, regardless of whether the world is born or not."

Three New Bodhisattvas

I had been angling to write about Saturday being one of those non-stop-twelve-hour days, but in the end it didn't quite feel like that. Having missed out on the one-day sitting last weekend, I did feel a bit rusty about doing a morning with oryoki, and there was a certain feeling of one thing after another - zazen, service, breakfast, doshi for zazen, lecture, setting up the Buddha Hall, kokyo for nenju, a silent lunch with the ordainees, rehearsal, jukai ceremony, photographs, reception - but I also had time, after Paul had run us through the rehearsal very efficiently, to take a bath so I could shave my head before the ceremony.
Michael in his talk had spoken of how ceremonies never go the way you think they are going to, and this jukai was a fine example of that, as our newly minted bodhisattvas needed to be nudged on the forms a few times, but it was also a very sweet and emotional occasion. As usual, the photographs say more:

Preceptors Paul and Cynthia and Lucy the jisha

Virginia receives her kechimyaku

Caren shows off the back of her rakusu

Cynthia and Cynthia

Virginia Paul and Caren

You're never too old to be a Bodhisattva

Envelopes, chant cards, serene name cards and kechimyakus