Into Great Silence

The first time I went back to London after I moved to San Francisco, I was staying with my best friend and his girlfriend, and hearing about their stressful, over-filled lives, and how that impacted their time together. With all the zeal of a new convert, I suggested to them, unlikely as they were to develop a meditation practice, that they try just sharing an evening in silence: cooking together, which they loved to do, eating, cleaning up, reading, just hanging out, without conversation, and no TV or radio as a constant backdrop, which was the norm there. They both looked at me like I was crazy.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the last three weeks, for me, was this extended shared silence. Many people here at City Center have commented on it, how widely it was upheld and how refreshing and relaxing it was to be immersed like that for that length of time. Green Gulch during sesshin was the same, with of course the added backdrop of the mostly silent grounds. Yesterday I was noticing how jarring it felt to be walking around City Center and hearing loud conversations everywhere.
There is a couple who have recently been showing up regularly to afternoon zazen, and I was happy to see them when they appeared. I know nothing about them; I have a story in my head that they might be Russian, just from appearances, but they used to come pretty often when I was first ino, and then I didn't see them for a long time. I have never talked to them, so I don't know why they stopped coming, but I was just glad that they were sitting again and that we have the opportunity to spend time in silence together. I have similar stories and feelings about other people who come in the afternoons, or on Saturdays, with whom I have also never exchanged more than smiles. As I have said before, when you live at Tassajara, and most of your time is spent together in silence, social bonds are formed in different ways, as energy and intention become your cues to other people.
Simon, Tim and I were having one of our regular chats about Young Urban Zen over lunch yesterday, and Tim said he wanted to try having the group end and leave in silence some time. The energy shifts during the meetings are always fun to observe - the crescendo of chat as people arrive (we had more than fifty again last night), the rapid settling into quiet as we sit together, and then the hum of conversations as we discuss the text we are studying. At the end, a more intimate but also louder arena of socialising - I had some lovely conversations myself last night during the 'after party'. The three of us could definitely also see the value in having a short sit at the end of the meeting to bring everyone back to that shared silent intimacy that we create during the period of zazen, and having everybody carry that out into the night by themselves.
I had to do more talking myself than usual yesterday, as I sat down with Valorie and started the transition process. The first stop was the computer, and we worked through the ino's storehouse of folders, the electronic version of which I am happy to say is more organised than the actual cupboards in the office. But it was also clear, in response to several questions, that there is also a lot of stuff that just resides in my head, which we will have to find ways to unearth and pass on.

Transitions

As the days went by in the retreat, I appreciated the silence more and more; eventually the notes and requests slowed down some, and the after-breakfast schedule of sitting, study, and extended open sitting felt very settling to me. There was something about being able to flow right from one activity to the next that reminded me of being at Tassajara, and was deeply rewarding.
I was still struggling with my own suffering, and this meant that patience, kindness and compassion were in short supply. For anyone from the retreat who was on the receiving end of a sharp glare or a snappy response, I can only belatedly apologise.
Having long been a fan of the format, I had some time ago requested to be allowed to take off for the Genzo-e sesshin at Green Gulch; Teah was kind enough to encourage me to go, even though it would inevitably have an impact on the retreat, and Rosalie and Christina worked to make it happen. Djinn was brave enough to volunteer to sit in the ino's seat, which I will have to make up to her somehow. This meant I had to prepare everything for the City Center sesshin, happening simultaneously, a few days ahead of time before I left - of course there were people who I didn't have in any of my lists who I happened to hear from other sources were intending to come, so I had to do most of the logistics twice. The end of the week before last was filled with sorting out: all the Saturday sitting paperwork, Saturday lecture announcements for two weeks, a sound system guide, the sesshin admonitions, sesshin announcements, sesshin services, sesshin paperwork - schedules, jobs list, participant list, seating charts (some marked for meals), doanryo schedule - as well as full instructions for the other things that were going to be happening during the week: a leaving ceremony, memorial ceremonies, the full moon ceremony, the Suzuki Roshi Memorial ceremony, and not least, a day-by-day checklist of things that would need to be taken care of.
Which was more stressful than to be doing the sesshin myself. Nevertheless, on Saturday morning, for the first time since I came back from Tassajara four years ago, I stayed in my room and let the morning schedule go on without me, and at the end of the morning, rode over to Green Gulch. Once I got over the bridge, I could feel myself relaxing.
Now, I have only really sat at Green Gulch on Sunday mornings occasionally, and been to a few ceremonies, so I was bringing some beginner's mind with me. Carolyn, my counterpart there, was surprised to see me come for the zendo forms introduction, but I had no idea what the form for kinhin was like, or for leaving, and I had never seen a service or done oryoki there. Of course, it was mostly familiar and easily deduceable, but there were lots of little things just different enough to keep me on my toes.
Having spent two weeks getting close to silence, this was another smooth transition from one activity to another. There was just a little bit more sitting through the day, about as much as a regular winter day at Tassajara, which was no problem for my legs. And after two weeks' of study time and Teah's classes, I was already attuned to reading and thinking about Dogen. Now, Teah's style and Shohaku's could hardly be more different: in the city we screened a PBS show from The Fabric of the Universe that illustrated the illusory nature of time, to go with Uji, which we were studying there; Shohaku is more likely to pull out an old Chinese waka to demonstrate how two kanji made their way into a phrase by Dogen, and not by accident, and also give deep contextual meanings to the kanji themselves. Both were completely enlivening - when I was able to focus.
After I had got used to the novelty of sitting facing the wall again, I found myself very tired on the second and third days, and swamped with difficult thoughts again; it was less 'dropping off body and mind' than body and mind falling apart, and on the third day I felt barely functional. In the zendo I made myself focus on three things: the weight of my body on the cushion, the air filling my upper body, and my eyes resting on the richly coloured wood of the tan. A couple of days later, on the last full day, I was back in focus again; I told myself I was not defined by the thoughts, and they receded accordingly; I was fully absorbing the teaching, and feeling energised by it.
My work assignment was the farm; a group of us spent about forty minutes each afternoon variously weeding, hoeing and digging up potatoes, which was very refreshing to do; on Thursday, as I started to feel better, several of us noticed an owl in the trees above the field where we met for work.  Some crows were trying to shoo it away, but it remained unperturbed; horses and bicycles were also ignored. I was happy to keep looking up at it as we worked, and it kept its gaze on us, and the surroundings, right through the work period. That may have been the best moment of the sesshin, for being so unexpected.
This morning once again, back in the city, I heard the morning schedule going on around me, and kept a low profile so as not to be in the way of the sesshin's final hours, which gives me a longer weekend than usual. On Monday the plan is to start training Valorie as my replacement, which will go on through the month before that transition takes place, and that seems a little closer now.

Greens in the fields

Starts in the greenhouse

Lavender with many bees

Watchful owl

Jizo in the zendo

Retreat

It was kindly suggested to me that I suspend the blog while the retreat is on, as part of moving towards silence, and I have no problem saying yes to that suggestion. Normal service will be resumed after August 4th. Until then, please read some Dogen.

Study Hall

It's nice to have an hour of study built into the retreat schedule, especially as it does not clash with Tour de France watching time. Appositely, I have just bought Dogen's Genjo Koan, Three Commentaries from the bookstore, so aside from chanting Uji, I am getting another fix of Dogenthink.
Here are a few of the simpler paragraphs from Nishiari Bokusan's deep commentary. He is Suzuki Roshi's dharma grand-father in a manner of speaking, in that he taught Kishizawa Ian, with whom Suzuki Roshi studied extensively - Kishizawa is not in the transmission lineage that we chant, but we have his picture in the kaisando.
"Practice is not limited to one form. Sometimes we need to go onto high peaks; sometimes we need to go into the deep ocean. It's no use to say, 'Originally, there is no one thing,' or 'not obtainable,' jumping before your feet are settled. On the other hand it is foolish to be stuck under the ladder for a lifetime by being bound by cause and effect and not knowing how to get through it.
So in practice we need to go to that place, look back at this place, go to the absolute, look back at the relative and continue taking years and years to examine by asking, 'What? What?'
Now each of these pursuits in your practice will become integral to the self. There is no way to practice without the self. This is the guide post for practice in our school. this is the point...
Practice always requires two separate dharmas, which are subject and object. But as long as there are dualistic views of subject and object, that is not Buddha dharma. When the subject and object disappear and have no affairs to attend to, the self is the self and myriad dharmas are myriad dharmas, and nothing gets in the way. We need this today. Being free from subject and object, when we meet people, even hundreds and thousands of people, we have no hindrance and have freedom within the self. Whether we  meet people who are disturbing or attractive, it doesn't matter. When this is not practiced, it is difficult to enter the paths of various beings and save them."

Time Being

Today's offering from the second half of Uji:
''The time-being of all beings throughout the world in water and on land is just the actualization of your complete effort right now. All beings of all kinds in the visible and invisible realms are the time-being actualized by your complete effort, flowing due to your complete effort. Closely examine this flowing; without your complete effort right now, nothing would be actualized, nothing would flow. Do not think flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west. The entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows."

Time Being

We are underway with the retreat, easing our way into an unfamiliar schedule. People have been asking me lots of questions about what is happening, and I don't always have the answer. Great time for everyone to practise with don't-know mind.
For noon service, we are chanting half of Uji per day (throwing in the Loving Kindness Meditation a couple of times during the week as well). This is an ambitious thing to do, given its length and legendary impenetrability, but today I found that parts of it leapt out in an unexpectedly clear way. Following on from the extract the other day, I might lift a few more sentences out, as and when. Here is a little something for you to chew on today:

"Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand the time-being is that you think of time only as passing. In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being."

Head Space

Usually I don't mind a logistical challenge, and I am well served right now with the upcoming summer retreat (which I will still tag as the intensive, as it has been known in years past). Yesterday I was busy setting up a list of participants for the one-day sitting on Saturday, along with their various requirements, alongside a similar but subtly different list of the retreat participants and their commitment levels, which I categorised as 'full', 'fullish', 'morning and evening', 'morning' and 'limited', followed by their prospects for the sesshin at the end. This I enjoyed. What got my blood temporarily boiling was trying to reformat a previous schedule - a Word document - to reflect the schedules we are going to be following. Some combination of table and column quirks on Word which, even with all the formatting marks shown, I could still not understand, made the whole thing take four times longer than it needed, and is the kind of thing that has often brought about the wish to throw the computer out of the window (if anyone has the knowledge and patience to instruct me on this at a time when I am less busy, I would be most grateful). If you look back through all the times I have written about working on one-day sittings, my mood levels on the day have depended largely on the co-operation of the technology at hand.
In the midst of this, I do find it hard to switch my attention whole-heartedly to something else - even in zazen I am often unravelling little related puzzles and remembering that we needed a doorwatch for this morning, that I should email Teah to see what she wants to do for noon service, and whether we should do the meal chants for our silent meals. Nonetheless, I also spent a couple of hours this afternoon at a meeting planning for the Soundwave concert on August 25th, which promises to be every bit as fabulous as the Bold Italic event last year.
Today I will be wrapping up the lists, and also trying to find some space to think about the ceremonies involved in the August 13th anniversary celebration, for which I might be wearing many hats - ino, photographer, sound recorder.
I was typing this before going to bed, and then the power went out in the whole block. Luckily it was not quite dark out, and a few residents were milling about downstairs wondering if there was aything we could do. Typing the end of this by the glow of my bicycle light, it seemed that going to bed was the most sensible idea.

Marking Time

There had been some discussion about what format the 21st day memorial ceremony for David was going to take. After the first iteration, last week we did a short service in the zendo as it was the fourth, and we also had the Suzuki Roshi memorial to do. In the end Paul wanted us to continue having the ceremony in the morning, so we had the first half of the regular Thursday service, and then chanted the Dai Hi Shin Dharani, followed by the special dedication.
Even though attendance in the zendo has been quite low this week, the Dai Hi Shin Dharani sounded very strong, suitably grave. Perhaps I am just used to doing it in the afternoons now, when there are even fewer people, most of whom are not so familiar with it.
Because I was in sesshin, I did not get to attend the cremation ceremony last week, and I am noticing in myself that a sense of finality is missing around David: I am aware of his absence in different ways and in various circumstances, but then this week I am also aware of the absence of all the participants in the intensive, who had formed such an integral part of the community in the preceding weeks. I suppose this is why so many cultures have a tradition of sitting with the body, so that you can get used to the idea that the person really is gone. Even doing the ceremony we did on the afternoon before sesshin, Paul purifying his room with wisdom water while a group of us circumambulated it chanting the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo, moving as it was, did not quite bring it home to me.

Reflections

At last night's Young Urban Zen meeting, after a little gentle prodding, and perhaps in the interest of gaining a few more readers, Shannon acquiesced to my outing her blog, which I had happened across after she left a comment on one of these posts. As with the Zen Beginner, I find it enormously helpful to have other people's perspectives not only on what I do, since I play a bit part in some of the entries, but on what I take for granted, as they figure out their steps on the path to being Buddhists.
At more than one Way-seeking Mind talk, I have heard people from more traditional religious backgrounds describe the relative difficulty of outing themselves to their parents as gay and outing themselves to their parents as Buddhists. For me the question "Am I a buddhist?" was less contentious than "Am I a monk?" - I think the only person who ever asked me if I considered myself a Buddhist was my sister-in-law who is more inclined to ask questions than anyone in my more immediate family.
I don't think I have told the story here about how I spent my tangaryo at Tassajara composing haiku in my head about the very limited number of things that were happening and the many reactions I was having to them. I thought of this again after sesshin as one participant recited for us a haiku she had come up with. One of the better tangaryo haiku was around the observation I had had during oryoki - the servers would approach the tan, and in the curving reflection of their silver pot, I could see a line of people in robes, who sure looked like monks. And so I started thinking that maybe I was a monk - or at least going through the process of becoming one. Obviously the haiku version is shorter than that.
One important part of this equation though, was that I was living in a monastery. It followed that I was a monk. Here in the city, I don't describe myself as a monk, and I find it a little dissonant to read of the residents as monks, or to read about this temple as a monastery as I just did elsewhere. I could just be leaning on semantics, but I think it has a lot to do with what City Center is about. We are here to offer the teaching to everybody, in a formal setting; we are not so internally focused as we would be at Tassajara in the winter, although it may seem that way to the visitor. Having just emerged from the Tassajara-style schedule of the intensive to our more usual spacious and work-oriented days, I am certainly noticing the difference.

Give Over

When I was sixteen, a couple of school friends of mine declared, after, I imagine, much thought, that the meaning of life was that everything was a container. I thought then, and still do, for why else would it have stuck in my mind for thirty years, that the idea has some merit, while perhaps not being the definitive answer.
Here at Zen Center we are fond of using the word in its more abstract forms, especially the container of practice and the container of community, and both of these have been particularly to the fore this past week. As this second week of the intensive has got underway, I can feel myself settling into the schedule, as I hoped I would be able to, and giving over to what comes next.
This morning during service I looked at the candle on the altar, and saw that Gretchen had taken care of it, in the way that she described recently, and words from Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun came to mind: "Day and night things come to mind, and the mind attends to them". I have always liked this sentence, for its utter simplicity, and when I was tenzo, and we chanted from the Tenzo Kyokun every day, I would get to reflect on it frequently. This morning I realised that I hadn't thought about that line for a long time, and that my feeling of late is that while I have been attending to things as best I can, the doing has been accompanied by the sense that these things are a chore and are taking something out of me. With the nice number of hours we are getting to sit during the intensive, feeling my body relax and release tensions, it feels much more like I can just attend to things, be nourished by the attending, and keep moving forward to the next thing. This is how I understand the idea of being held by the container of practice.

Sitting and Talking

This morning's intensive class turned into a chance for us all to reflect and to express ourselves, our grief, our understanding, our lack of understanding. One thing that was said by several people was that David didn't know, or couldn't properly take in, how much he was loved, and I know how this was true; he would deflect such talk, and perhaps laugh nervously. He was loved because he had such a big and genuine heart, as many people have said today, along with the sharp brain that caused him to suffer. One person followed this up with a wish that we all allow ourselves to believe this of ourselves, that we are loved, just for who we are, no matter what we may think.
I was glad that we got to go back to the zendo at the end of the morning and in the afternoon, allowing ourselves to settle on the cushion. Other than that, my day involved giving lots of hugs, which I found easier to do, and perhaps more mutually beneficial, than trying to give voice to my feelings.
This evening, a community meeting in the dining room. We formed a circle of chairs like we do for residents' meeting, only there were maybe eighty of us, and we made an unwieldy shape filling the room. Which did not stop it being a very intimate ninety minutes, sharing our presence and holding our experiences together. We do intimacy very well here, but as was pointed out, this does not prevent us sometimes being too busy to stop and connect with each other in a meaningful way, ways that can make a huge difference to the person on the receiving end.
For me the most touching moment was when Ren read out the wonderful benji poem that David had written for her, which someone had printed out; I was in the zendo at Tassajara when David read it, three and a half years ago, and I heard his voice and saw his mannerisms. Paul spoke last, more personally than abbatially, and reiterated what he said at service: isn't this what we do - sit, be open and raw? We ended with a refrain from Leonard Cohen, a big favourite of David's, and then of course the Refuges, deep and sonorous in the circle.

The old Birdhouse, where David lived at Tassajara

Work Period

While I am sitting in my office waiting for the hours of audio to process, down in the side courtyard zafus are being stuffed. I went up onto the roof to take this picture:

Abiding In This Phenomenal World

Once, as kokyo for breakfast at Tassajara, I mischanted the first line of the final chant, which normally goes, "Abiding in this ephemeral world, like a lotus in muddy water, the mind is pure and goes beyond; thus we bow to Buddha". It was probably the most exciting thing that happened at Tassajara that day, and I had several good-natured comments about it. The funny thing was that, not long afterwards, another kokyo made the same mistake, and then, in the same time frame, I did it again myself. There was agreement that it was a nice mistake, and a not inappropriate one to make.
So on Sunday evening as I was settling in for evening zazen, I saw a phenomenon in the zendo that I had never seen before - a patch of sunlight near the doshi door. I resolved to investigate further; Monday turned foggy, but last night, there it was again at seven thirty, and as surmised, the sun was reflecting off a window on Laguna Street, through the last upper window on Lily Alley, and reaching diagonally across the entire zendo…it probably only happens for one week every year.

More direct sunlight when I came upstairs from breakfast just now - it is a beautiful summer day here:

Study Hall - Shobogenzo

It seems like a treat to have an hour scheduled for study every day during the intensive, even if I usually do that by myself anyway. There is something about going to the dining room with a simple purpose, to sit quietly and read - except that most of the intensive participants did not know what was involved in study hall, and I sent them away to get dharma books to read. It also seems like I will get to the end of the Shobogenzo in the next couple of weeks, and I wonder what I will pick up after that. Today's fascicle is 'Four Horses', 'Shime', which of course has a resonance with my dharma name, though frankly, given how I came to Buddhism, I feel more like the last kind of horse than the first kind. And in case you are wondering, it felt disruptive to bring my laptop downstairs, so I am back in my room typing.
"Ancestor Nagarjuna said, 'When a phrase of guidance is spoken, an excellent horse sees a shadow of the whip and gets to the right path'.
To encounter various situations and hear the dharma of birth and beyond birth, and the teaching on the Three Vehicles and the One Vehicle is to see a shadow of the whip and get to the right path, instead of the common tendency to follow the wrong path.
When you follow a master and encounter a true person, there is no place a guiding phrase is not presented; there is no moment when you don't see a shadow of the whip. Whether you see a shadow of the whip right away, or after innumerable eons, you are able to enter the right path".

Swings and Roundabouts

It turned out that the answer to the question 'Who can I get to ring the wake-up bell on Sunday?' was 'me', since the person who had kindly agreed to do it did not materialise in time. As I have mentioned before, if I end up ringing the wake-up bell it usually puts me in a bad mood for two reasons: first that things are not happening the way they are supposed to, and we are inevitably running behind schedule, though I wasn't so concerned about that part this morning, and second, that I will spend the rest of the morning schedule feeling sweaty and clammy, with Sod's Law dictating, as it did today, that I will have put on a clean jubon especially for the occasion. But, when I caught up with the person later, and they apologised, I said, 'Well, the rest of it went well'.
The whole weekend has been like that, good or bad depending on what kind of spin I choose to put on it: yesterday could be said to have gone pretty smoothly considering the numbers involved. I became aware of a number of mistakes I had made in the planning, a consequence of feeling overloaded during the latter part of the week, but we worked around them. Things mostly happened without drama. I didn't really get to settle into sitting, and I felt very tired and more sore than usual, which put me in a slightly odd mood by the time we got to the opening ceremony for the intensive after dinner, after which I wasn't good for much of anything apart from staring into space.
I still woke up at four this morning, as I have all week, which is not helping. Apart from the wake-up bell, the morning sitting and service were nice, and the tenzo had put out a lovely breakfast. Mark Cavendish won another stage at the Tour; I was starting to feel relaxed. I had planned to go off to Mount Diablo, and found I had a flat tyre just as I was leaving for the BART, and then, once that was fixed and I was on a later train, we were delayed by engineering works. None of that mattered once I was on the mountain, though - as always in such a place, life boils down to finding a rhythm for climbing and then seeing if I can keep the rhythm all the way to the summit  (you can add your own analogies here).
I am not sure that I feel fully rested yet, but I have made enough plans that we should be able to get through the first couple of days of the intensive, and then we shall see what happens after that.

Intensive

I will own to feeling rather tired and stressed this week. This is largely due to anticipation of the one-day sitting on Saturday which heralds the three-week intensive. There is a lot to organise, and there are many unknowns. I woke up much earlier than I needed to this morning and my first thought was 'Who can I get to ring the wake-up bell on Sunday?'
I know that, once we get into the intensive, I will enjoy being on that schedule, having a lot of sitting and study time (after the Tour de France finishes each day... and, by the way, I am very happy that a Manxman and a Welshman are making headlines), but in the meantime I am finding it hard to settle. Apart from full days, taking care of the usual details, rehearsing for tomorrow's Full Moon Ceremony, I have activities on each evening this week - Young Urban Zen on Monday (which I did find hugely energising again), a meeting about the Five Wishes document on Tuesday, the talk last night, the reading for Fire Monks tonight (this will be the first time we have run the new sound system in the dining room, and we have spent quite some time working on the video live-stream set-up, and haven't even sorted out the projection part of it yet), and on Friday night we will be into the intensive. After that I don't have a free evening for another three weeks...
After the talk last night I decided to go up on the roof for a moment, and found Tanya there, relaxing with a cigarette; we looked at the almost full moon together and chatted, and I could feel myself unwinding as well. I remembered the quote from Uchiyama Roshi which I have posted before: "Only when I look up at the sky does it preach that there is a world in which we do not need to be excited". Everything is alright as it is. Even the stressful stuff.