Study Hall

Study Hall will suffer in July, with the competing after-breakfast attraction of the Tour de France, especially with the British interest this year. Here is one I prepared earlier, though, from Beating the Cloth Drum, showing Hakuin in full flow to a student of his:
"I could never understand why you had to run off by yourself to a remote province thousands of leagues from here. Never tying up with a single good companion or teacher. Never acquiring the slightest spiritual benefit from it [a first enlightenment experience] whatsoever. Just wasting your time - your most precious asset - and for what? People tell me, 'He just shifts from one beautiful spot to another', 'He's well settled, has plenty of food and good lodgings', 'He's looking for a place where he can live out the rest of his days', 'He goes and performs devotions at temples and shrines'. If that is indeed is the full extent of your religious aspiration, you are a truly doubtful sort of monk. They also say that what you really want is to spend three, five, maybe seven years ensconced quietly in some solitary retreat where you can devote yourself freely to nurturing and maturing your attainment. If that is your intention, it is equally misguided. For someone in your present situation, now is the time to make sure the seedling is nurtured and brought fully into flower. Why would you want to cling mulishly to this 'withered sitting' style of Zen, hunkered dubiously down in some hinterland, turning your mind to ash, extinguishing thoughts and feelings, blinding your wisdom, blundering your life away? Time, you will find, passes by at great speed. And you go on ludicrously wasting your time, like a young girl sewing up piles of diapers and buying mortars and pestles and other kitchen equipment before she's even found a husband. What a terrible, shameful waste."
It makes me wonder what he said to his poor students, and it is also worth noticing that he is largely contradicting earlier writings of his, which I referred to last week.

Snippets

Not having anything coherent to say myself right now, a couple of little things that have caught my eye:
"If you accumulate money for your heirs, they will only fritter it away. If you build a library of books for them, they will never read them. Far better to secretly increase your virtue and create a lasting legacy for your descendants" - Chinese family precept, quoted in Beating the Cloth Drum.

"And yet Subhuti, those sons and daughter of good family, who will take up these Sutras, and will bear them in mind, recite and study them, they will be humbled - well humbled they will be! And why? The impure deeds which these beings have done in their former lives, and which are liable to lead them into states of woe - in this very life they will, by means of that humiliation, annul the impure deeds of their former lives, and they will reach the enlightenment of a Buddha...
If moreover, Subhuti, I were to teach the merit of those sons and daughters of good family, and how great a heap of merit they will at that time beget and acquire, beings would become frantic and confused. Since, however, Subhuti, the Tathagatha has taught this discourse on Dharma as unthinkable, so just an unthinkable karma-result should be expected from it" - The Diamond Sutra.

Tuesday's skies

Fog burning off after breakfast this morning

Study Hall

Having reluctantly returned the Katagiri Roshi book to the library, I have been able to turn to the book of Hakuin letters, Beating the Cloth Drum, that Robert very kindly gave me a while ago. So far it is filled with typically bracing language, some of which I would hesitate to post here. This is a tamer paragraph: "The ocean of true reality is boundless and profoundly deep. The Buddha Way is immeasurably vast. Some priests do nothing but seek fame and success until their dying day, never showing the slightest interest in the path of Zen or the Buddha's Dharma. Others become enthralled in literary pursuits or become addicted to sake or women, oblivious of the hell fires flaming up under their very noses. Some, relying on insignificant bits of knowledge they pick up, shamelessly try to deny the law of cause and effect, though woefully lacking any grasp of its working. Some find ways to attract large numbers of people to their temples, believing to the end of their days that this is proof of a successful teaching career."
I noticed a slight tinge as I was typing out "enthralled in literary pursuits", which was followed by the attempted deflection of thinking that Hakuin himself was obviously not averse to writing down his understanding...

Study Hall and the Newcomers' Table

In the midst of reading Albert Low's commentary on 'Hakuin on Kensho', I was a little perturbed to read this:
"At the Montreal Zen Center, before a member is accepted as a student, he or she must answer three questions. First, do I want to see my true nature, or am I simply 'practicing zen', wanting to find peace and comfort or whatever? Second, am I prepared to do the work that is necessary, and to go on doing it until I have penetrated to the root? Finally, do I have faith in the teacher, and will I be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt when necessary? If the student can answer 'yes' to all three, then he or she is accepted as a student".
I have been trying to figure out for a few days how to resolve what seems like a tension between this approach and what happens here at Zen Center, and I haven't really figured it out yet. Mostly I wonder how long a student has to be at the center before they are subjected to these questions...

Recently we have been offering a newcomers' table on Saturday for the lunch at the end of our busiest public program; for the last two weeks I have been there fielding enquiries from people as we eat, some of whom are completely new, some who have been coming for a few weeks, and are just figuring out their direction and need help with the next steps. I have found it very energising to meet people in this kind of process, and I hope that I am encouraging them to continue and progress.
We often chant 'dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them', as one of our Bodhisattva vows, and I take it to mean that there are many ways to come to Buddhism, and many possibilities for practice. And not everyone is ready to enter the gate when it presents itself, sometimes the time isn't right, and a person might circle around for years before finally deciding to commit themselves. I hope at Zen Center that people feel free to come and go for as long as they need, and to disengage if it doesn't seem right for them. After all, there was a large group of people who left the assembly when the Buddha started to preach the Lotus Sutra.
I suppose the common ground here is that it is our job is to make the practice freely available. I would write more, but I have to put on my robes for afternoon zazen...

Study Hall and the Golden Gate Bridge

Study Hall has been severely impacted by the Tour de France since I got back from England, but I have managed to sit down with a book from time to time, and currently it is 'Hakuin on Kensho - the Four Ways of Knowing'. It is fun to be reading of something that is treated so differently in the Rinzai line; in the Soto School, we tend to stay relatively coy about the subject of kensho, although if you press a teacher about it, they will say that ultimately the practice is about waking up. At any rate, Hakuin is always entertainingly challenging. Here is a typical exhortation:
'After great will, faith and determination are aroused, you should then constantly ask, "who is the host of seeing and hearing?" Walking, standing, sitting, lying down, active or silent, whether in favorable or unfavorable circumstances, throw your mind into the question of what is it that sees everything here and now. What hears?'

I am not going to hazard an answer to this, but I will go so far as to assert that who I am is not who I think I am.  My sense is that seeing the life force of everything, in everything, is part of the picture.
When I go riding on a Sunday, I like to be out early enough to catch the sun rising as I cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Something about being out there on my bike as the sun comes over the Berkeley hills, illuminates the ocean and starts to hit the Marin Headlands is a sure way to feel the life force of the universe manifesting itself. Of course at this time of year, the chances of the sun coming out from behind the fog are quite slim, and you can't always see the mountains or the ocean, so this Sunday I was wondering about the life force of the bridge itself. In the end I carried on pedaling without finding an answer. I expect Hakuin would say I wasn't trying hard enough.