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 - Extensive Record

Keeping things interlinked, in one of the dinner conversations I had last week, the other person expressed an interest in Dogen's poetry. She declined to take a copy of Dogen's Extensive Record, even though the last two volumes comprise over a hundred pages of poetry, on the entirely understandable grounds that it was too big, and was happier to go with a slim volume that contained just poems.
This nevertheless prompted me to open again my copy of the Extensive Record, and it happened that the page I opened to resonated with the conversation we had been having:
"The great way originally has no names or words. Recognizing this principle, still we are compelled to call it the great way. Buddhas and ancestors appear one after another. The wooden man and the iron bull follow on each other's heels, ascending and descending. However, they leave no traces to appear before us. But assuredly [the great way] does not depart from this very place, but is always deep and calm. We should know that when we seek we cannot see it.
A long time ago, a monk asked Zen Master Guizong [Zhichang], 'What is the way?'
Guizong answered, 'You are it.'
Also a monk asked Mazu [Guizong's teacher], 'What is the way?'
Mazu said, 'Ordinary mind is the way.'
Also there was a monk who asked an [unknown] ancient worthy, 'What is the way?'
The person said, 'What you have been going through is it.'
Are these three venerable masters' sayings ultimately the same or different? If you say they are the same, ten are just five pairs. If you say they are different, eight ounces are half a pound. Ha!" (Volume 8, 2).

Nourishment

Continuing the thread of the last post, the one way that you can easily communicate with people at Tassajara is a good, old-fashioned, hand-written letter. Two days a week in the winter, Keith comes in from Jamesburg with produce and mail, and it is always nice to receive something.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to get two such pieces of mail here in the city, both blog-related, and this post is partly to say thank you to Peggy in Oahu, and to my pen-pal in Scotland who sent me a huge box of delicious-looking locally-made chocolates, including some that are Marmite-flavoured, and whom I have no other way of thanking except publicly (for the record, I am pro-Marmite, but still on the fence about Marmite chocolate until I try some, intriguing concept that it is). This is the same the person who sent me the card of a Tunnock's tea-cake, which prompted much musing back in January, not to mention a subsequent delivery of actual tea-cakes.
I would also like to thank yesterday's anonymous commenter for this link to an article about Britain's Buddhist police officers, which contained within it a link to another story about the growing numbers of Buddhists in Britain's jails, both of which are subjects I would definitely want to explore further if I move back to England in due course.
Naturally, I was perked up by all these offerings, and, tired as I was for much of the day, I was also enlivened, as so often, by last night's Young Urban Zen meeting, where Mike, one of our original cast, offered his way-seeking mind talk with a series of anecdotes, including his thoughts about mindful eating, which, I realised, would make a great subject for us to go into - I heard that there was a small group meeting at the Green Gulch retreat about this topic as well.
As sometimes happens, a number of us took off to the Orbit Room afterwards to say goodbye - hopefully temporarily - to Collin, who has been a mainstay of the group for the past few months, and one of the people there took the opportunity to remind me that I had promised to give her my way-seeking mind talk if she bought me a beer. Even though I had already bought my own beer, I still found myself, not for the first time at the Orbit Room, holding forth to a tableful of people about some of the events that brought me to where I am today.
All of which makes me think of the very fluid and inter-related nature of teaching and learning. A friend was recently taking me to task for being somewhat recalcitrant at accepting gratitude for the teaching I offered, and it is true that being on the receiving end of such praise feels awkward to me. Partly this has to do with my own, family-generated karma around praise and blame; partly it is because I am not officially a teacher at Zen Center - being shuso is the first step to making that happen - even though, as Paul acknowledged recently, I kind of slipped under the wire with YUZ. Partly it is also to do with my sense that on many levels you cannot teach anyone anything; just the other day I was discussing this with a resident who had come to me for advice, and to whom I ended up lending the book of Hakuin letters, as I had just been reading him forcefully making the same point. That said, perhaps the exchange I had with the resident was useful for her, just as people find what I write here to be of some benefit, and perhaps 'teaching' can happen over a beer in a bar (as that friend pointed out), or sitting down to dinner with someone, as I did a couple of times last week, to hear what is going on for them. And, as Mike very nicely brought into his talk last night, all of us have something to offer and all of us feel we are lacking something (we broke into pairs to say what came up for us around those two notions). As I have said before, I have learned a lot from elders in this community just by watching them move through the day, just as much as I have from sitting in dharma talks. It is almost incidental learning, but not quite. It is always there if you are motivated to pay attention to it.
And with that, some sky pictures from the past few days.

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Saturday

Saturday

Clarifications

I am very grateful for all the messages of congratulation and support that I have received not just here, but also in person and by email, around the announcement that I will be the next shuso at Tassajara, but I feel the need to clear a few things up.
A shuso's term is for one practice period, and it is my firm intention, as the old saying goes, to be back by Christmas, and to resume living at City Center. During those three months, however, I am not going to be leaving the valley - unless there is an emergency - and I will not be blogging.
When I last lived at Tassajara, I had the strong opinion that practice periods and the internet were entirely antithetical; while I was prevailed upon to write a short piece for the Zen Center website once, I think it was mostly about the weather - I could not reconcile the enveloping intensity of being in the monastic schedule with the many-faceted and transient nature of being online. The focus of our time and attention in the valley is of necessity internal, not just in ourselves, but also within the group of monks, and little of that can be communicated outside in any meaningful way.
Beyond that, we are asked not to bring electronic devices,  and I am determined not to take my lap-top with me, assuming I have enough memory cards to store all the photographs I imagine I will be taking. Even if I did, these days it seems to be hard enough even to get a clear phone line out of Tassajara, as it used to be in the old days, and other means of communication are extremely limited. Just as they should be if we are to work hard inside the monastery walls.

Going Public

Abbot Steve came to work meeting yesterday morning and announced the changes in the Zen Center officer positions that had been ratified by the board the day before; unfortunately a new secretary has not yet been selected to replace Valorie, who has been patiently waiting to take over from me as ino. He followed this by asking if everyone knew that I was going to be the next shuso at Tassajara, for the fall practice period. Nobody did, mainly because the decision was only made at the weekend - which is what I was alluding to in my post after sesshin - so I was subsequently showered with congratulations.
It is a wonderful honour to be asked to be shuso. I had requested previously to have the chance to do it at Tassajara, and there had been a few conversations about how and when this was going to happen. Now that it is closer than expected, I feel very excited to have this opportunity, and to be able to study and practise down there again.

The Longest Day

Yesterday was the perfect day to head to the courtyard and have the summer solstice ceremony before dinner, with warm sun all day. The wind made an appearance as well, as is typical in the city, and we had some other visitors too: while people were coming up from the zendo I could hear some low flying helicopters, and I was worried we were all going to be drowned out, but fortuitously they seemed to find somewhere else to hover until we were taking everything down at the end, when they became very audible again. And during the offering of poems and song, a little thrush-sized bird (sorry not to be able to identify it, perhaps someone else knows) landed in the maple tree over my head, and then made for the fountain for a quick bath, whereupon it looked round to see a circle of people around it, and flew off again, perhaps feeling a little self-conscious.
I was down in the courtyard earlier in the afternoon to take pictures of the various flowers in bloom:

Zen Center is also full of colour out front, with our rainbow flag flying over the front steps. I was thinking about reproducing my previous picture, but ended up with some variations on the theme instead.

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...

Revealing Ourselves

Yesterday morning was understandably quiet in the zendo, as the residents who sat all weekend were not obliged to come to the morning schedule. Young Urban Zen, by way of a contrast, was packed to the gunwhales again last night, with I think fifty people in attendance.
We have been mixing it up a bit recently. Particularly, Simon, Tim and myself have been wanting to get more women's voices to the fore - when we were planning the group early last year, most of the organising group were women, but once we got underway, none of them ended up in regular attendance for different reasons. Last week Maggie facilitated our one-year restrospective, during which Stephanie had made a call for a different format; I invited her on the spot to lead the group this week, and she presented a series of exercises designed for us all to open up about ourselves. Towards the end of the evening, I could feel how warm and bubbly the energy was, and even with a larger than usual number of first-timers, everyone at the end, when we were asked in turn to express our appreciation, said that they felt included, and there was much gratitude for this safe and welcoming space that we offer. It was noticeable afterwards that many people were not in a hurry to leave; I was also happy to see that the people who had been at Green Gulch over the weekend were all greeting each other warmly, as I remember from last time.
I managed to take time off between morning zazen and afternoon zazen, and when I got back to business I heard that Katherine Thanas, a student of Suzuki Roshi's, and the long-time teacher at Santa Cruz Zen Center, was very ill. With Blanche's help we got a well-being service together for her. I asked Blanche if she wanted to be doshi - I was filling in for Lucy - but she said she wanted to be kokyo, and led us in chanting the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo. We all wish Katherine well.